"Without mincing words, the Odmena operation was a complete and utter failure. But although we failed to secure the main objective, I suppose the end result of the planetary-scale destruction is we denied the Federation the asset as well. Odmena has now become a humanitarian aid anchor around their neck, and they're now obligated to spend resources they don't have aiding a planet no longer worth saving. Admiral Kohl also managed to take the Jericho off the line for the foreseeable future, albeit at the cost of two of our own battleships."

Kohl just ground his teeth at the second insult casually lobbed in his direction. He knew how the game was played, and he was well-aware Pak was simply establishing dominance in a domain that belonged entirely to Kohl. It was a performance for the other Councilmembers.

"Let's not overlook the loss of our starfighters and their carrier," a woman Kohl had never seen before spoke up. "The raw material cost alone was staggering, to say nothing of tipping our hand so early to the Federation about what we've been working on."

"Of course," Pak said, uncharacteristically calm after such an interruption. "Everyone, this is Ms. Ersk. She is our little group's liaison with Alliance Intelligence as well as our military industrial leaders. When she speaks, I suggest you listen. Please, Ella, the floor is yours." Eyebrows rose at Jin Pak's deference to this woman. It meant she was either incredibly dangerous, or there was some personal connection none of them knew about.

"First, the bad news," Ella Ersk said as she strode to the front of the room. "The Federation has indeed cracked the secret of superluminal communication. It's something they manufacture, and it's not just some left over alien relics as we'd been led to believe." She waited while there were the expected hisses of disbelief and moans of dismay.

"The system is new and, so far, not especially practical. Its code named Bluebird and, so far, they've only been able to make it work with individually paired receiver/transmitters. One box can only talk to its paired mate. The Fed's workaround for this shortcoming is to have all Bluebird-capable ships talk to its paired receiver in a dedicated com station, then manually route the message on to its ultimate destination. We've not been able to track down the locations of any of the routing stations, but this is their most obvious vulnerability."

"This is not good news," Kohl spoke up. "The more widespread this system becomes, the more difficult any operations behind Federation borders becomes."

"That's the obvious problem, yes," Ersk said. "Our intelligence operatives are working the problem on their end. We have infiltrated the power structure on New Sierra thoroughly enough that we have been given a backdoor into Bluebird. Those in this room will be briefed on how we will exploit this new capability, but for OPSEC reasons, we're not divulging the existence of Bluebird to the rest of the fleet or our ability to access it."