"Try to keep me posted but don't put the information at undue risk trying to get it to me, if you take my meaning."

"Completely, sir."

"Good. Now, get out."

"Enjoy your meeting, PM," Pitt said. Marcum made noises somewhere between a growl and being strangled at the mention of the upcoming committee meeting.

6

"Ship secure from warp transition, defensive posture bravo, low-observability protocols engaged."

"The rest of the taskforce?"

"All five ships accounted for and signaling green, Captain."

"Admiral, Taskforce Wolfpack has arrived in star system B-1171and is standing by," Captain Ellsworth said.

"Thank you, Captain," Jackson said. "Helm, take us downhill and put us into a trailing heliocentric orbit behind the fifth planet. OPS, anything interesting happening here?"

"Normal com chatter, Admiral," Lieutenant Commander Stewart said. "The transponder codes in the system are also all squawking condition normal. The system looks clear, and CIC is beginning aggregate passive scan."

"Course laid in, sir."

"Take her down, all ahead full."

"All ahead full, aye!"

"Shall we announce ourselves, Admiral?" Captain Ellsworth asked.

"Negative. Stay silent until we're challenged, then broadcast our CIS beacon," Jackson said. "I want to stay incognito as long as possible since there are no guarantees we picked the right target the Alliance was after."

"Understood, sir. Relaying instructions to the taskforce over Bluebird."

The taskforce had arrived six days behind schedule because the Katana had developed a nasty misalignment between the forward and aft emitter arrays of her warp drive. Since they were in the middle of interstellar space, Jackson opted to drop all of his ships back into real-space until the ship could be repaired.

What had looked to be a simple alignment procedure that would take no more than twelve hours ended up being a replacement of a forward distortion ring field emitter. That was a job that took three days and included multiple EVAs onto the outer hull and removing two large sections of armor plating. Once it was all back together, the special coating that helped their stealth profile had to be repaired on the panel gaps.

Jackson had bristled at the delay, but he also marveled at the technological advances that allowed him to keep his taskforce together. In the old days, he wouldn't have known about the Katana's plight until it eventually caught back up or sent a com drone.

Jackson had also been both amazed and delighted at the gear installed in his quarters once he had said his goodbyes to his family and got the taskforce underway. Lieutenant Trapp had been bursting with excitement when he walked back into the suite so he knew something was up, but he hadn't been prepared for the Version 3 Bluebird system that had been installed.

Partly because he had no idea there was even a Version 2 out, but also because the geniuses at Fleet Research and Science had managed to squeeze some real bandwidth out of the system via parallel streaming over multiple entangled pairs and increasing the rate at which the entangled particles are observed.