Earth Alliance Fleet Command
Dispatch order /
Released for general circulation. Redactions applied under
- A distress signal was logged from Tenk Prime ago. The timing was poor then. It is worse now.
- UES , corvette, was tasked to respond. Our record has her under way. It does not have her arriving. Nothing has been received from her, or from the surface, since.
- That is the whole of what we know. Treat every other figure in this order, including the ones we have removed, as .
- Reinforcement is unlikely, though we do not anticipate you will need any. Anyone still down there has managed this long without us.
- You are the nearest hull that can be spared, which is not the same as being spared. Scout the area as quickly as is reasonable and return to the front, ASAP.
Message ends
Hyperspace relay buoy . Packet of .
Everything below arrived in the same burst, after it was sent.
- War news
- Earth Alliance forces remain engaged in the sector with . Things are going ly. Casualty figures withheld pending .
- Fleet orders
- Standing instruction unchanged. Return to the front on completion. Any request for extension will be answered from , which is transits from where you are reading this.
- Two minutes of audio from someone who has not been told where you are. They ask whether you got the last one. You did not.
Buoy out of range for
Everything after that is yours to find out.
Discovery
A campaign is not a story handed to you to perform. It is something you work out while it is already happening. What is down there. Who wants it. What the signal actually was, and why nobody else answered it. You learn all of that late, in pieces, and usually from someone who had their own reason for telling you.
You are not the only one learning. The enemy is assembling a picture of its own, and so is whatever help you still have out here, and no two of you are looking at the same thing. A fact can reach you secondhand. A fact can reach you already wrong. And you can lose what you had: a ship goes down and takes its only reading with it, a contact stops answering, something you were certain of turns out to have been a guess with confidence attached.
Diplomacy
There are people on Tenk Prime and they were there before you arrived. Some of them will talk to you. Not all of them want the same thing, none of them are obliged to want what you want, and the ones who need you most are not necessarily the ones worth helping. You can trade, you can promise, you can lean on somebody who has fewer options than you do. What you agree to is remembered, and it is remembered by people who compare notes.
Strategy
You are one destroyer and the wing it carries, over a whole world. You cannot cover it. Every hour spent somewhere is an hour you are not somewhere else, and nothing down there waits politely while you decide. You choose what to look at, what to commit, and what you are willing to leave alone and find out about later, knowing that later is when it will cost more.
Victory
Nobody hands you a win condition. Your orders say scout and come home, and you can do exactly that, and that is a real way for it to end. Or you stay, because by then you have found a war of your own down there and the one you were sent back to has started to look like the wrong one. What counts as finished is something you settle yourself. It is not free either way.
By the end you will know what this campaign was. That is the last thing you learn, not the first.