Read Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum for Free Online

through CIC, killing all the senior officers and leaving a panicky lieutenant in command. This luckless lieutenant had neglected to properly dispose of Vistula’s IFF system, including her recognition codes and private signals. G-Staff’s ‘dirty tricks’ department (officially GS5.4, the misleadingly named the R&D Department) accepted the gift eagerly, but it did have a limited shelf life, as the Imperial Navy was known to recycle their IFF systems quarterly (by the Halith calendar), and GS5.4 was puzzled as to how best to make use of it.
    Coordination was not the rule between the dirty-tricks folks and the more doctrinaire Operations Department, so it fell to an intelligence officer—Huron’s friend, Commander Trin Wesselby, Director of Pleiades Sector Intelligence Group, who was charged with exploiting the captures—to put the pieces together, and she did. Armed with counterfeit IFF systems and legitimately-generated recognition codes, Colonel Yeager’s proposed strike could conceivably be delivered not against Syrdar, but against Haslar, the most vital of the Halith core systems after the prime world of Halith Evandor itself. It would still be no more than a hornet sting, but a hornet sting delivered to an exquisitely sensitive part of Halith's body politic.
    A select team led by Commander Wesselby was tasked with planning the operation, and this went forward under the deepest secrecy. The League’s Plenary Council was not informed beyond a carefully worded message from CNO regarding ‘potential new opportunities’ which was as much misdirection as a legally mandated notice. Even the Speaker of the Grand Senate was herself kept in the dark.
    The concept Trin Wesselby and her team came up with called for TF 34, which had been on loan to Seventh Fleet to shore up Cygnus Sector’s defenses, to be ‘recalled’ to its rightful home in the Pleiades. While GS5.4 was stage-managing this ‘transit’, TF 34 would travel to Karelia and rendezvous at Kalervo Station with members of the Karelian special forces who would have, in essence, smuggled the starclippers through their own territory.
    Leaving her fighters in the care of Karelian Special Operations Command, Trafalgar would then proceed to Tuonela and—as Kris had guessed—launch the starclippers on the dangerous thin transit route to Syrdar, through which they would pass on their way to Haslar. Where Colonel Yeager and her flight would go after conducting their strike, only they would know. Trin’s people would provide the colonel with all available intelligence on the various separatist movements in Halith’s territory that might be able to aid or shelter them, but how that info was used was up to the colonel.
    After weeks of close, hectic, coffee-and-dim-sum-fueled, round-the-clock work at Outbound Station, where security could be even more tightly controlled than at Pleiades Sector HQ on Nedaema, and supported by private sub rosa diplomacy on the part of the former Speaker and retired Terran grand senator, Rafael Huron IV, who enjoyed close ties with the Karelian government, a plan was submitted to CNO, sealed, in a gold-striped cover, consisting of untraceable hardcopy, two centimeters thick.
    A final meeting on the massive dreadnought LSS Ardennes , the flagship of Admiral Joss PrenTalien, Pleiades Sector’s commander in chief, lasted deep into the graveyard watch. In attendance were Colonel Yeager; Commander Wesselby; Admiral PrenTalien, whose forces would carry out the plan; Admiral Zahir, from whose sector the plan would be launched; and Fleet Admiral Westover, who was officially not within a hundred and fifty light-years.
    The plan was approved and life became, if anything, less enviable for all involved as the deadline imposed by the date Halith would rollover their IFF systems loomed large. Colonel Yeager picked her flight crews with special care. Most were colonials, four of whom had lost their families in the conquest of Crucis Sector. Three