the things that you might like don't grow inside of me

201 hours post-Tallon incursion
T-minus ~1,080 hours to operation start
GS219 System

In all his years serving as an operative within the Department of Advanced Warfare, never once had Kevin Hansen pictured himself in command - much less captaining a ship. In general when people found their way to DAW it was either a result of being cherry picked from other branches of the Terran Confederation's military or applying directly for service within their intelligence department. The former were typically employed in a wide variety of roles, ranging from boots on the ground intelligence gathering to interpreting the intelligence gathered. It was beyond unusual for the latter to be deployed in such a role as this - although as the black and blue immaterial plane of slipspace suddenly shifted to star strewn black beyond the Point of Contrition's bridge viewport Captain Hansen found himself extremely grateful that he was intimately familiar with the ship he was now aboard, knowledge tempered by months of naval officer schooling and a handpicked crew that arguably knew their jobs better than anyone else in the fleet.

Good thing, too, as it was beyond difficult to hide what they were attempting to do here, a fact made all the more readily aware as their reactions to exiting slipspace were immediate as hands began flying over control consoles.

The GS219 system was nothing particularly special at a glance. Perhaps unusual in the number of rocky planets it contained relative to gas giants, but aside from that it was your usual G-type main sequence star, or at least as usual as you could get considering the sheer commonality of other, less habitable star types. But beyond that? The only other natural bodies in the system were an asteroid belt a relatively short distance beyond the orbit of the planet they were interested in... several million kilometers out from the point they'd exited slipspace from, the system's sole star directly behind them with the planet directly ahead. It was a carefully calculated exit point, picked for the sole purpose of hiding their cargo - for whatever reason, a particularly troublesome quirk of slipspace travel was that it became all but impossible to conceal fissile materials when exiting the realm thanks to the burst of Cherenkov radiation emitted by said objects. Harmless, but bright and impossible to really conceal... at least under normal circumstances.

The hope here, though, was that the local sun's luminosity and the sheer amount of background noise caused by the rogue chunks of rock in system would serve to drown out that brief flash, hiding it from local sensors. Not that it did anything to conceal the Point of Contrition as the ship itself was just over 280 meters in length and the passive ablative stealth coating stood out like a sore thumb against the bright yellow-orange backdrop of the sun behind them... but within seconds of entering realspace that problem would cease to exist, the ship's outline quickly shimmering as a more proactive stealth system came online and began bending light around the vessel to render it practically invisible to visual detection.

And in the blink of an eye the most stressful portion of their journey was over. It'd remain to be seen if their efforts had paid off but all that was left now was the sublight journey to Tallon IV, a trip that would take a week or two. A relatively safe period during which the main concern would be boredom and maintaining a strict rationing of their supplies - while the Prowler was designed for long deployments that didn't leave Hansen any less paranoid about their ability to last that long.

@tag