Jigsaw

Posted on Sun Sep 28th, 2025 @ 1:12am by Captain Tesha Froyce

1,203 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Background/Behind the Scenes
Location: Courier ship Iris
Timeline: At the Beginning of On the Trail

In her cramped office, Captain (retired) Tasha Force paged through report after report as she sipped at the large mug of caf she’d been worrying at for the past two hours. Information always came in at a slow pace. And that had to be analyzed, poked at and then looked at from all angles before conclusions could be drawn.

Right now her ship, the Pwadel, an independent, Iris classed courier was in transit between Sodeskaya and Deep Space Nine via Wayfar. She was checking in with a variety of contacts personally and had just finished updating President Turgenev personally.

He wasn’t happy to say the least.

Unrest was growing within the Federation with another handful of member worlds making noises about leaving and small brush fires popping up everywhere, or so it seemed. The Ashen Hand had taken the center stage as trouble makers and piracy reports were on the rise throughout Federation territory.

They had access to ships and people. The people part they had figured out through the efforts of the Valiant…Federation penal colonists. Nearly five thousand of them by all counts had been liberated through an elaborate scheme. They’d also traced responsibility to several politicians within the Federation bureaucracy. Tesh herself had interviewed a handful of them and they’d all made the same claim: That the incarceration of beings, regardless of their crimes was basically the fault of the Federation. More of a failing, one woman had informed Tesh. Criminality was a sickness and should be treated.

Tesh had avoided pointing out that the Federation led known space in treating all sorts of illnesses, mental or otherwise. She’d needed information and that wouldn’t change as long as she breathed.

Sighing, she stared at her display. The President and Kor were convinced that someone other than the Ashen Hand was responsible for the trouble that was springing up. But they weren’t getting their hands dirty. Whoever was responsible (Tesh was keeping an open mind) was using domesticly recruited bad actors.

She got that. It held more punch to the peoples of the Federation, her allies and competitors. If the Federations own members were disillusioned, how strong were they? Dimitri claimed there was a wavering air within the Federation. Six member species were moving forward with leaving the Federation, with talk of forming their own League of Worlds or some such and there was talk of the area known as the Triangle along the Federation, Romulan and Klingon boarders forming it’s own Automatous Zone under a mining collective and handful of merchant houses.

The Romulans and the Klingons were less than happy about that and were blaming the Federation for allowing the entities involved to even suggest such foolish notions. Federation Intelligence operatives had gotten wind of trade delegates from the miners and merchants, that were waiting a rosy, profitable deal for the Klingons and Romulans.

She was trying to pin THAT rumor down herself. It didn’t bode well for Federation interests, since the President had informed her that the Federation council had decided it was a non-issue and had directed the BuDiplo to maintain business as normal…

That smacked of either ineptitude or conspiracy in Tesh’s book. The President had brought the matter to the Security Council and they’d told him he was paranoid.

Pushing her chair back moodily, she brought up a holo-board that she’d bullet pointed things they knew and stared at it.

The mass escape had to have been funded and planned by someone that knew the system. Pointedly, knew how to make a few thousand prisoners disappear over a few planets. Her intel specialists had found out that someone had arranged for around half the number of people known missing from incarceration had been transferred within the system to get them to places where the administrators had been in on it. Six administrators over six penal colonies had been compromised by someone into providing pirate crews and other specialists.

Tesh wasn’t ready to say they all had went to be pirates, but the people had disappeared and of the six administrators, they’d run down one. That woman had skeletons in her closet and had been blackmailed by persons unknown to her through cutouts and middle men.

The woman was currently under arrest on the world she’d formally administered and there was a Star Ship in orbit, keeping an eye on the place while techs took the security system apart and put it back together.

From her, Tesh’s agents had begun working backwards, but it was slow work and whoever had set the system up had been careful.

Valiant’s work with the pirates, capturing some of the escapee’s had helped. It had shed more light but there had been more questions too. From those prisoners, they’d learned someone was conducting transfers to cherry pick persons who would be sympathetic to the pirates cause and be willing to take the chance on escape.

After escaping, life for them was fairly tyrannical, with the escapee’s joining pirate crews who became their families and whom would brook no back sliding or second thoughts about their mission. Which was to give the Federation a black eye and form their own society.

That wasn’t, however, the agenda of whomever was bank rolling and organizing things.

Looking down her list, her gaze fell on the Ashen hand attacks at Empok Nor and other installations. She hesitated to call them terrorist attacks, though they were terrorizing in their way. Proving they could strike. Probably have killed a lot more people.

Instead, they’d plundered and kidnapped people. Then vanished without much of a sign. Empok Nor’s sensors had followed them out to the edges of their range, then the ships had likely did a half dozen micro jumps through areas of space that would dissipate any traces of their warp signatures before traveling to their base, wherever that was.

It’s what she would have done and the ships that had followed the pirate vessels hadn’t found much, which held up her theory.

Tyree was probably on the best trail they had, but he and his officers were now plodding along in a stolen…well borrowed freighter that should have went to the breakers years ago. She could only hope they were successful.

Looking at her list, she expanded the board and began making lists between the Federation members that were wavering and others that were inordinately vocal about how the Federation was crumbling and doomed under its current leadership.

A schism was building between the UFP and Star Fleet too. And that was another problem. It wasn’t necessarily hers, but she also believed it only to be a matter of time before the bad actors tried to exploit it. That’s what worried her most right now: Star Fleet and the UFP becoming estranged. She didn’t have orders yet and she wouldn’t go out on her own, but she could troll the info-streams that came in.

She could do that.
END

A solo post by:
Captain Tesha Froyce
Director
Department of Operational Analysis

 

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