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Chapter 30 - The Adjudicator[]
Patrol Service Cartographic Lab
New Syrtis System
Federated Suns
December 22nd, 3159
"...There's a main-sequence star in that system, and AFFS does use it for stopovers."
"It has good traffic, then." Clarissa noted, "Which would actually be pretty important for keeping a covert place covert."
"How do you come to that conclusion?" Colonel Alan Noord asked. The AFFS military intelligence man seemed interested.
"How would you go about hiding something and still be able to use it?" Clarissa shot back, "Think it through, Colonel. how would you hide an indoctrination facility yet have it be accessible enough to make use of? Do you stick it where nobody has any business going, so that traffic can be noticed an tracked, or do you hide it on a shipping route somewhere not worth stopping at that still sees a lot of traffic?"
"Hidden in plain sight?" He asked, "It's a pretty solid strategy."
"Especially if you happen to control what's on the route map, like maybe transposing a couple of coordinates to send treasure hunters looking for dead worlds where there aren't any." Aneh said, "Which is absolutely a dead system and never was alive. BUT, if you use these coordinates, there's a main-sequence star three Lights away that you can see on AFFS mapping, but no record of a planet...unless it's Versailles, which is at almost the right position, just a few degrees negative x-axis on the galactic plane."
"Political pressure stopped Interstellar Expedition's search in that zone, from both the Federated Suns government and the Republic." Clarissa mused, "If it's there, and it's inhabited, it's probably going to be defended."
"Cela ressemble à une bonne excuse pour une reconaissance de flotte et un exercice de navigation." Aneh said, "oh right, you don't speak french-a Fleet Reconnaissance and Navigation Exercise. The system's supposed to be empty, oui?"
"Oui means 'yes', doesn't it? Yeah." Clarissa said, "A fleetex to recon it and survey the surrounding systems sounds like a thing to be doing, if you expect trouble."