"Admiral?" Pike asked, his voice sounding as if he had been awoken as the audio-only channel stabilized between the units.

"Taskforce Wolfpack has arrived in System B-1171," Jackson said. "I suspect a six-ship Alliance force will arrive here within two days so I moved my ships here to intercept them."

"Exeter Base?" Pike asked, now sounding fully awake. "Makes sense. If they take it out, they eliminate one of our most important technological advantages. I'll pass this on to Director Perez. I have a direct line to him as well."

"Is there any room for you to move in that little ship with all those Bluebird boxes crammed in there?"

"Just," Pike said. "I'm pulling up the intel on that strike group now. There hasn't been any more sightings since the initial report, but I'm inclined to agree with your assessment. Exeter has a lot of black projects either active or archived. Some you know about like your little science experiment from Project Prometheus. Others you probably don't."

"Such as?" Jackson asked, not expecting a straight answer.

"An orbital engineering lab was flown out from New Sierra to that system right after the Odmena fiasco. Fleet R&D took all the recovered Alliance starfighters out there to begin a forensic engineering analysis and to start developing countermeasures for them. That latest software upgrade to your ships' point-defense fire control computers was one of those."

"You sound like you actually know what you're talking about with this stuff," Jackson said.

"You sound surprised by that."

"You've no idea. Do you think the base commander here will have any idea about the Super Valkyries?"

"Possibly," Pike said. "But I'd still keep your distance and keep your disguise up for now. Keep me in the loop if the ESA ships show up. The fact they're sending such a small force worries me."

"You do the same," Jackson said. "I'm keying my comlink to give me an alert if you send a channel request to this unit. Wolfe out."

Jackson killed the channel and programmed automated alerts from the unit to his comlink before locking it out. The transceiver had a basic function that would allow it to set a flag on the ship's integrated network, which would let Jackson know he had an incoming message or channel request, but it couldn't be connected completely so he could just read the damn message at any terminal or on a dedicated tile. Fleet had so many intel leaks they were taking paranoia about unsecured Bluebird connections to new heights.

Next to the specialized unit Pike had brought him, his office also had two other Bluebird transceivers, both first generation and tied into the normal com network. These were allowed to send encrypted text-only messaged over the ship's network to his comlink and tile. It was this random line of thought that made him glance at the other two avionics boxes and notice one of them had the number two clearly displayed on the indicator that kept track of how many times the units had been accessed. Since they were both brand new systems, installed when he took command of the taskforce, they both should have read zero.