Free The Synchronicity War Part 4 by Dietmar Wehr

the one mothership, I'm convinced there will eventually be
more. A working timeship could give us the ability to stop them at the source.
That would not only save us, but a whole bunch of other alien races out there.
The Friendlies would no longer have any reason to start this war to begin with.
The catch is that the Friendlies don't want to see any species wiped out,
including the damn Bugs! But if we can prove that they're not a naturally
occurring life form, in other words that some other agency created them and
then turned them loose, then the Friendlies will not object if we exterminate
them. They might even help us do it. They want to see proof, and the only way
we can give them that proof is to provide a Bug for the Friendlies to scan
temporally. If we send a ship to Omega77 to arrive just after the Bugs have
decimated that colony, I think we can bring back a dead Bug. I don't want to
tell the OC about the how and the why. We'll have to sneak that mission in
under their radar. I'm telling you about it now so that you're aware of what
has to be done, assuming that you buy into the idea of course, Sir."
     
    "As you know I've been in favor of
altering the timeline so that this war never happens. If bringing back a dead
Bug can help us achieve that, then I'm all for it. I'll leave the details to
you. Just keep me in the loop. Anything else, Shiloh?"
     
    "No, Sir. That's it."
     
    "Okay then, I won't keep you from what
you have to do."
     
    Shiloh stood up, saluted and left the
office.
     
     

Chapter 6
     
     
    Shiloh arrived at the Operations Center
within 15 minutes of Dietrich's call. It was almost dawn, and the Center still
had the skeleton crew typical of the night shift. Shiloh saw Dietrich standing
near one of the manned consoles and walked over to him. Shiloh had expected the
Oversight Committee to test the waters as far as reasserting their authority
over Space Force, but their meeting with Dietrich couldn't have been less
confrontational. Dietrich was 'confirmed' as the Acting Chief of Space
Operations which merely rubberstamped his automatic assumption of the senior
position as Howard's Deputy CSO.
     
    By the time that bit of political theater
was done, Kronos was on his way back to notify the Friendlies that Humans were
willing to play nice. He returned to Sol less than eight days later with a
message that the Friendlies would cooperate by sending a ship with their
temporal scanning device to the outskirts of the Omega77 system on the day the
VLO was due to show up. When the Space Force people had possession of the dead
Bug, they would send out an omni-directional signal, and the Friendly ship
would move into orbit around the colony planet.
     
    When Shiloh reached Dietrich, the ACSO
nodded to him and said, "Something's up with Reforger. No one's answering
the wakeup call. There should be alarms going off all over the ship by now, but
we're not hearing one word from that ship."
     
    Shiloh sighed. Reforger was the first
freighter to return from one of the colonies after Wolfman received his vision.
Dietrich had confirmed Howard's last order to quarantine every returning
freighter in orbit until more than 28 days had passed since the crew's last
contact with a colonist.
     
    "Is this the 28th day since they had
contact with the colony, Admiral?"
     
    Dietrich nodded. "Yup. Right on
schedule if it really is the bio-weapon. A medical team in full bio-gear is on
its way up to the ship as we speak." Turning to the Com technician seated
nearby Dietrich said, "Put Vice-Admiral Shiloh on the connection to that
shuttle, Lieutenant."
     
    Shiloh heard his implant activate with the
faint hiss of static. The main display showed the shuttle's progress as it
approached the orbiting freighter. As the shuttle slowed down in order to dock
with the ship, Shiloh heard the shuttle pilot speak.
     
    "We're approaching the docking
hatch...we've matched velocity with Reforger...contact with the docking hatch
in...three...two...