TADJ51

==Chapter 51 - The Adjudicator==
Taussen System
Federated Suns Space
Mid 3160
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("...sometimes you will walk into a meeting with nothing.  It's important to have your reputation preceding you.")
A flash in the Taussen system, far too close to the planet for anyone's reasonable comfort. Close enough to blind and overwhelm the control-node station for the local SDS with the pulse of the arrival. This was the LCS Beagle, a unique, one of a kind vessel built to act as hub and command for a cutter fleet. The "Window" she came through, was barely wide enough for her bulk. The gravitationally neutral zone less than a kilometer across, leaving only a bare handful of meters clearance for the vessel to pass through.
The SDS had expected this ship, but they expected it as previously to arrive at a much larger transitory point somewhat further away. At one of the lagrange points near the gas-giant to be certain. Nothing like so close to the core of what they were arranged to defend, the inhabitable planet-moon known as Taussen itself.
As a statement of supreme skill, and as an implied threat this arrival did the job.  The statement was on its face obvious; The Lyran Commonwealth Navy can put a battleship-sized mass pretty much anywhere they choose to and you can't predict where that will be.
In spite of having a copy of Clarissa Ngo among the system's Intelligences, this move was unpredictable. This suggested that the Commonwealth's navy might have other surprises on-tap.  Evaluations flickered across the star system's networks, Defensive plans were reviewed and with something akin to panic, revisions began being analyzed.
Bringing a battleship through a ten second window meant no valuable point in the star system could be secured reliably without the ability to make jumps within the star system. That also meant, that the central cores of the SDS fleet defending Taussen, the core of the defenses for the Redoubt would have to be unshackled.
THAT, in turn, would require the consent of the Director-General, whom was at present experiencing a moment of deep and abiding wonder in a hospital room in Toyama City.
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