November 2941
Banu Merchantman - 'Domus Commercia'
Tohil System
The Steadfast Ascension had docked two hours ago to the Domus Commercia Merchantman. Matthius had sent the signal for the XSO fleet to enter the system as speed was paramount. After closer examination of the box, it was some form of communication device. High tech, unlike anything he'd seen before even in the deep coffers of R&D at Ballistic Logistics.
Saskia, Gedion and a host of technical personal had boarded Matthius' make shift command vessel to inspect the device. After nearly an hour of trying to get the device open, a break through finally occurred and the staff had the device hooked to a non-networked computing device. Fear of it dropping a virus or listening program on the ships systems made it SOP to isolate the device, but Matthius wanted extra precautions this time. Additional personnel were called in to watch the ship systems and look for hacking attempts while the device was on board. So far no issues.
Saskia pouring through the device's logs nearly screamed with excitement.
"It's broken!" She turned excitedly and turned to face Matthius and Gedion.
"And this is good how?" Gedion looked upon her perplexed.
"Oh, yeah." She took a deep breath and continued. "Had the device not been damaged it would have continued to send out information with no record of it's activities. Since it was damaged, the log" She motioned to the archaic monitor the team was using to connect to the device. "See here, it's been trying, once a week for nearly two months to try and send a message across the Perry line into the Pallas system."
"Who to?" Matthius asked, his hands pressed in a triangular shape as he looked intently at the monitor.
"I believe I can answer that Preceptor." A lab technician jumped into the conversation. "The Data we have recovered is encrypted, well beyond our current capabilities to de-crypt it." Saskia frowned. "The encryption method looks to be identical to files recovered by our special forces team on Spider."
Matthius smiled. The team that helped Gedion extract him from Ruiz' capture had been grabbing storage devices from high profile officials offices once the attack started. During the trip to Terra, they handed the devices over to Matthius as the events during extraction prevented them from destroying them which was SOP at the time for base invasion. A stroke of luck would have it, one of the devices had an odd encryption method that wasn't anything in the Ballistic Logistics arsenal.
"The Shadow Advocacy" Matthius and Gedion blurted almost in unison.
"Saskia, can you triangulate where this thing was sending the signal?"
"I'll do you one better Preceptor." A sly grin over her face. "I'll give you the exact coordinates. It's in the log."