Chapter 639 Mission Possible


    Ayaka and Joon-ho looked over their orders, which were incredibly broad. Normally, military orders would provide detail after detail, along with multiple contingencies at every esction step up to and includingary destruction.


    Thanks to training in the simtion, they even knew what a looked like after being hit by one of the spinal-mountedkiller coilguns mounted on some of the TFS ships. And they also knew what would happen if even a TES exploration cruiser were to continuously bombard a with their spinal-mounted coilguns.


    It only took the two a few minutes before Ayaka began asking questions. “Who is going to be assigned to our task force, Admiral?” she asked.


    “Whoever you need, Captain. You have full authority and first priority to pick whomever you think you’ll need on your team.”


    “What about materiel, Sir? It simply says here that we’ll have ‘full ess to any and all necessary resources.’”


    “Full ess means full ess. You even have first priority on the protoster forge, and if a project is currently underway, depending on its level ofpletion, you can kick it out of the queue and take its ce.”


    The weight of the mission was growing heavier on Ayaka’s shoulders by the moment as she continued hearing the dreaded “full support” answers from the fleet admiral. “What about training, Sir? We don’t have many, if any, xenodiplomacy specialists in the task force.”


    “Let me put it to you this way, Ayaka. Full ess means full ess. As long as you can establish a permanent, beneficial connection with the trees, you can have whatever you want. I’ll even authorize a fleetwide connection and stand-down so you can train your personnel at the highest possible level of time dtion in VR. The only, and I stress ONLY, requirement being asked of you is that connection. Understood?”


    “Yes, Sir,” Ayaka and Joon-ho chorused.


    “Very well. Get to work,” Fleet Admiral Bianchi ordered.


    Ayaka and Joon-ho snapped to attention, then headed toward the door. But before they walked through it, the admiral’s voice drifted to them once more. “And one more thing, Captain. You and your team report directly to me.”


    Ayaka turned and saluted, then marched through the door, her spine ramrod straight and shoulders back.


    ......


    Orders in hand, Ayaka and Joon-ho immediately got to work. The admiral approved their request for three days of fleet stand-down and max-dtion VR training environments, using Joon-ho’s memories as the basis for the treefolk representatives. And while that environment was being built, they weren’t idle themselves; instead, they were sorting through the dossiers and records of every single member of Task Force Proxima.


    With the AI’s help, they had narrowed their candidate pool down to a thousand potential members, but the final goal was to only have five diplomats with two squads of marines providing both security and ceremonial details. After all, their negotiations with the trees would be a groundbreaking, epoch-making event in both societies’ history books... or whatever the trees used to record their history... if anything was recorded at all, at least.


    When they were notified of the training simtion’spletion, by unspoken agreement, they both took to their pods in order to continue their work there. Considering the vast number of ships in the fleet, they were able to achieve an 80:1 time dtion rate, which would give them about 8 months of subjective time to build their team and learn the ins and outs, such as they were, of dealing with the treefolk.


    Meanwhile, outside of the VR environment, the protoster forge ramped up to a hundred percent of its capacity, all projects that had yet to enter the pipeline dyed in favor of stocking up brick after brick of raw material.


    Something within her told Ayaka that she would soon need as much raw material as she could get her hands on.


    ……


    Three dayster.


    Ayaka and Joon-ho were in ander, preparing to head back to the surface of Proxima Centauri b. Opposite them were the three people they had finally settled on to join the diplomatic mission: Leigh Ayers-MacDougall, a tall brte from Australia with an olive tan; George Stefanopolous, a medium-height Greek man with dark, curly hair; and Boris Rustakovya, a tall Russian with blonde hair and blue eyes that looked like he had been chiseled out of a granite cliff, and could carry the rest of that cliff on his back if need be.


    Leigh was a botanist and had been poached from Dr. Standing Bear’s team, where she served as the head researcher’s right-hand woman. In her spare time, she just so happened to be a nyxian agent as well. She had been recruited by the NIS straight out of her master’s degree program after a disastrous marriage ended in a catastrophic divorce and was one of the intelligence branch’s finest twists... not that she’d found any use for that particr specialty as part of Task Force Proxima, of course, though her personal VR space had caused her ship’s AI to put a number of gs in her confidential record. n/?/vel/b//in dot c//om


    George had been awyer specializing in contractw before signing up to join ARES after his wife had gotten caught up in one of the cultist attacks on Mykonos, where they had been vacationing at the time. When he’d graduated his training, he had been ced as a bosun’s mate and worked his way up to the rank of BN2, or bosun’s mate second ss. Contrary to mostwyers, especially those that specialized in negotiations and contracts, he was a gruff, silent man who spoke little and listened much.


    But the oddest of an odd selection of diplomatic members was Boris. Standing well over six feet tall and being almost as wide in his shoulder circumference measurement, at first nce one would quite likely think that he would punch first, then punchter, then punch some more if the first two didn’t get his message across. However, that was absolutely not the case; Boris was a rather jovial, outgoing, pacifist vegan. He also held multiple Ph.D.s in specialist fields of psychology and was a practicing ship’s psychologist on the TFS Proxima herself. He had been added to the diplomatic mission as its xenodiplomacy specialist, at least insofar as anyone could be considered as such.


    Heading up their marine detachment, which the admiral had increased from two squads to a reinforcedpany of five squads, was Major Viktor Petrovich, seconded from his position as themanding officer of the marine contingent aboard the TES Farsight. Unlike the others in the diplomatic mission, he had volunteered for groundside duty instead of being poached from other positions in the fleet.


    The light in the passengerpartment of thender flickered from amber to red as the pilot received clearance tounch, and soon after, he executed a textbookbatunchplete with both manual and AI-controlled evasive maneuvers from the moment they left theparative safety of the TFS Proxima’s boat bay.