Priority: Moderate
Encryption: Full
Destination: Boadicea, Kansas + NTBS Belisarius, Kansas
Source: NTF Captain Robert Crompton
Subject: Report
Well, today was action packed. Firstly, Gresham found two DSM Hydras with plenty of conflicting opinions. By the time I arrived the Captain of the Perihelion and Gresham were questioning them, mostly about taxing some miners in the area.
The questioning was interrupted by the sudden, random appearance of a Corsair Praefect Cruiser, bearing the HAF tag. Apparantley a vendetta against the Joker justifies Corsairs bringing Cruisers as far as the southwestern Independent Worlds around Liberty. Not good enough justification for us, and most of us were sick of these random invasions by Corsair Capital ships, so we fried it.
And of course, destroying it resulted in the captain going into a frothing rage about entire Corsair fleets with battleships and impending doom for us all. Considering how easily he went down, it wasn't really that scary.
With the quick scrap over and done with, we began questioning the DSM Hydras again, as well as thwarting their attempts to flee the investigation. At around this time the Executive Commander appeared on the scene and the situation was resolved... for that moment.
I failed to mention this earlier, but here it is. Of special note during these proceedings was the presence of an Armoured Transport, the CS-E4[The Wave]. While you may be wondering why an Armoured Transport is so special, this is why: It is one of the only known vessels to have entered the Unknown Object in Kansas, and returned. It was recorded as doing such by the Hinton's scanners, which also recorded a transmission before it disappeared: "Beyond the barrier in space unseen, past the stars of blue and green, within the cloud that hides the light, trust not your sensors, only your sight." Disclosed is an image of the vessel as it was moored at Freeport 4.
Gresham, the Executive Commander and I proceeded on a more normal patrol into Kansas. Far from normal (or are our patrols so abnormal that abnormality is normal now?) We first picked up a Liberty Navy gunboat with a Captain who believed that his hunk of junk was all-powerful, giving him the godlike ability to take on anything. Boy did we prove him wrong, by tearing up his hull and letting him limp back to Magellan with minimal hull integrity.
Leading the patrol at this point, we proceeded into the cloud where we discovered the CS-E4[The Wave] within the depths of the cloud. It came across as a normal miner, but all it took was the magic words of the poem. This is what happened afterwards:
The detonation fried the communications systems of both the Executive Commander's Fighter and my own Bomber. Only a few K from Boadicea and the engines on board the Executive Commander's fighter exploded spectacularly, while my radio systems fried out completely.
Gresham towed the Executive Commander's ship back to Boadicea, while I managed to crash land on one of the few fighter bays. At that point a massive EMP shockwave blasted out from the Tuttle Creek Cloud, putting us in complete darkness for a few minutes.
Once our systems came back online I immediately hooked up my recordings to the Hinton's database and downloaded them. Further analysis of the two shockwaves revealed that what caused this was no ordinary EMP bomb; it had much more in common with that of a different kind of artifact or Power Cell, after referencing with the scans of a Power Cell I once had in my posession.
We could be on to a major discovery here, if we act quickly and can record the residual effects of the detonations before they disappear completely. I plan to return with the Hinton to conduct proper scans before it is too late.
