The ship which never was

[LegendOfTheWolf]

The Plan

5 Hours until Rendezvous

It had been 31 Hours since the LSF squad left the hangar, 6 Avengers, 4 Upholders.
Alpha 126, Beta 103, Charlie 34, Eta 78, Foxtrot 90… Robinson tried to recall all of the squads call signs, but for the life of him he couldn’t. A captain should remember such things, he thought.
Robinson had been going through operation Naked Flame over and over in his head.
10 Pilots will attack a Order reconnaissance mission which the LSF had been tracking for sometime. Once the cruiser was down, the Squad will withdraw and return to Nebulus, if the fighters give chase, the Nebulus will supply cover fire while the squad docks, if fighter support is needed Nebulus will scramble their own fighters, not the Elite Agents.
The last part concerned Robinson, why would the LSF defend the Elite agents and risk their own patrol? Surely it would make sense if the squad finished the job, under the cover of Nebulus, it’ll take almost 4 minutes to dock all the pilots, and then another 2 to scramble all the fighters depending on how many Order vessels give chase.

Hopefully Robinson could get in contact with LSF High Command to request a repair ship to fix the systems, but that would mean going into open space near the Alaska JH to establish a channel secure enough.
Too risky, Robinson thought.
Suddenly a beep came from Robinsons door.
“Open” Robinson said before the doors swung open before revealing Sinclaire, with a wireless display under his arm.
“Captain, I have found something of interest”
Robinson looked up, twitched his finger indicating Sinclaire to enter. The security officer placed the screen in front of the captain, covering up files about Operation Naked Flame.
“Good news, I hope.” Robinson said, making room for the screen. Sinclaire didn't reply, his face showed doubt as he turned on the screen. The screen booted up and displayed a camera with a timestamps at the bottom right.
“Okay, so I reviewed about half of the footage within the last 48 hours. Everyone who entered the engine room had access, and no dodgy dealing were done, not on camera anyway. According to the reports from Engineering, the engines are now 100%, so I thought, if the engines are capable of 100% nothing was done to the systems, so I went to investigate the core room. Now, again everyone had access on camera. No foul play.”
Robinson nodded, smiling.
“Good, which means this is a software side issue, right?” Robinson looked up, but his smile was wiped clean when Sinclaire remained doubtful.
“No captain, the reason I didn’t see any foul play, because not all of the footage was there.”
Sinclaire explained.
“I went to check the motion monitor, but all the files relevant for this time frame are corrupted due to the crashes. I make it out, that in the last 20 hours, there have been two system glitches which are related to the time frame which some of the footage went missing. The latest one causing the firewall to fail.”

Robinson leaned back in his chair, sighing.
“So, two crashes, both of which lose footage around the core room and corridor.” Robinson says has he crosses his arms.
“What about the outages before these the lost footage?”
“My team are currently working through it all.”

Sinclaire turned off the screen and held it under his arm.
“Captain, if I may speak freely?” Sinclaire said, standing like a mountain over the captain.
Robinson nodded, somehow sensing Sinclaire wanted to share something.
“Do you honestly believe that someone on board has sabotaged Nebulus?”
Robinson looked down to his operation files, dossiers, call signs, estimated time of arrivals, supply drops.
“I think they’re still sabotaging Nebulus, all the crashes have been harmless untill the latest one, we’ve lost our firewall for now, and I wouldn’t be honest if I said I think that's the last system to be lost.”
The two of them remained silent, both of thinking why? Who? What would the saboteur gain from this?
“We’re on a clock, we have around 4 hours to solve this issue. I have a feeling if we don’t, Nebulus will fall…”

Sinclaire frowned.
“Really sir?
“Sinclare, we are open to hacks, if the Lane Hackers operated in the Omicrons they would have a field day with Nebulus, but that doesn’t mean the Order have their own code to corrupt ours.
Who ever is doing this, they have taken down our firewall, it’s only a matter of time until we lose our shields.” Robinson looked up to Sinclaire, you could see in Robinsons eyes they were full of worry, and concern.

“Dismissed Sinclaire, start from when the first crash occurred, see if you can find a suspect.”

Robinson didn’t know what else to do, it was obvious someone had access to the core room, and had access to security to erase footage.
Around 900 crew members, he thought. 900 lives lost in unpopulated space… Would the LSF notify the people of Liberty? Would they notify the families? Robinson knew the answer, and yet he still avoided it.

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My opinion is outdated