TBSO1

Chapter 1 - The Silent Black Ocean

Exodus Road
Unknown Star System
Deep Periphery
3165

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[Somewhere along the Exodus Road...]

The emergence wave was significant, and the satellites left in this system picked it up almost immediately. A Potemkin class transport cruiser  using a 'Ryan formation' with a Leviathan class dreadnought and several smaller ships kicks up quite the emergence wave.

Leviathan Class Dreadnought

Potemkin Class Troop Cruiser

What is a Ryan Formation?  In the early days of human colonization, the "Ryan Ice Cartel" used grouped jumpships to move massive ice-comets from outer solar systems inward to pirate points to supply terraforming efforts.  The formation itself largely became supernumerary and was eventually forgotten as development outpaced it and the acceptance of the risks of such operations declined in the years leading up to the Star League.

The method did enjoy a short revival of sorts. Which it was used as a tactic of terror by the Word of Blake in the Inner Sphere, and The Society during their uprising in the Clan Homeworlds.

These ships were escorting a massive hull, one packed to the gills with...something.

It is 3160 in late November, the Satellites are part of a network left behind by Comstar after Operation Serpent. The data is being reported to a receiver that has gone unmonitored and ignored since the 3080s.

Or rather had, until this year.

The resolution on the camera, which has spent the better part of the last eighty years without maintenance, isn't the best.  The small fusion core and solar panel supplemental power supplies are slightly out of adjustment and the Comstar monitoring spy satellite has seen better days-days when it was maintained...

But it still works.  The HPG transmitter in the core still works, and it's sending the alarms down a chain of relays and side-relays back to Terra.

The images will get there in a week or so. As the data worms its way through a network that is only just this year being brought back into service with the aid of the Wolf Empire and the surviving technical crews from the Federated Suns protectorate of Taussen.

A week before, and the signal would have been lost. A week later, and it would have been arriving at nearly real-time. The warning that the Homeworld Clans were coming...and this time, coming in force.

For the next 96 hours, in this system that is necessary only for recharging a jump core if you don't want to burn fuel,  transports and warships are erupting into being at both Zenith and Nadir.

Eventually, on the 97th hour, the camera catches sight of the fighter star that kills it.

Meanwhile, far from here, nearly a year's travel from this point and well anti-spinward of it, LCS Discovery, a Beagle Class Exploration cruiser, and her supporting formation of Cutters and Frigates which are overseeing the archaeological efforts to determine what killed an alien race and where that enemy came from.

Ironically, The fleeing Homeworlders could answer that question...

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