* * *

"They're almost making it too easy," Pike said with a yawn as he looked over the latest dispatches. "They're calling each other by name, not bothering to rotate ciphers. There's trying to keep it simple, and then there's just stupid."

"You still going to attempt a counter-intel op using Trapp's codes?" Celesta asked.

"I don't think so," Pike said after a moment of thought. "The risk doesn't seem worth the potential reward. Right now, we're getting real-time access to their communications through our network. If we use improper syntax or some other clue we're not Trapp, we've killed this avenue of intel. It's also pretty clear they're fully committed to whatever it is they're about to try and pull off. It's not likely we can do much to affect the outcome by posing as one of their operatives."

"Makes sense," Celesta said.

She was an admiral now but well outside the CENTCOM chain of command. When she'd been drummed out of Starfleet for disobeying orders, the CIS snapped her up and put her in charge of their struggling Prowler Fleet. Celesta was able to apply the lessons she'd learned in the numbered fleets to get Prowler Fleet acting and flying like a real military branch. She's been so successful the CIS had dumped a ton of capital into her program, introducing three new classes of ships and expanding the Prowler mission from purely recon to some minor interdictions and tactical actions.

The program had once been a loose collection of specialized types of spy ships whose only purpose was to observe without being seen. They were uncomfortable, not especially safe, and crewed by people usually recruited out of the Merchant Marines and not Starfleet.

The problem was that Prowler duty was so undesirable, thanks to the ships and the long patrols, they weren't getting the best and brightest. The crews were usually those who had been kicked out of Starfleet or rejected outright. It had been an uphill battle against an entrenched culture, but Celesta had finally turned Prowler Fleet into a destination assignment able to recruit from the academies just like the regular Fleet. The herculean effort had left her satisfied but burned out.

She looked at Pike, an Agent also on the downhill side of an impressive career, and she saw the same exhaustion in the lines around his eyes. Maybe when this last fight was done, the two of them could walk away and leave the fate of humanity to the youngsters.

27

The equipment and personnel drop off at Arelius was quick and painless. The facility had once been used for heavy construction, then deep storage, so it was fully equipped with Starship docks that allowed all three of Jackson's ships that needed unloading to dock at once. The cargo would be offloaded onto the dock and transported down to the base later.

In order to make sure no critical pieces of military hardware fell into the wrong hands, Jackson took Aegis down to the surface personally with three shuttles, two of which were loaded with his Marines. The base commander, used to strange requests to stash classified material, vectored them directly to a hidden storage vault carved into the side of a granite mountain. The landing apron was disguised as just an outcropping and was large enough to easily land all three shuttles on.