Warning klaxons sounded throughout the bridge, and Covigilent Meltor roused from his luxurious seat on the bridge of the STL Battleship Forgotten Memories.

“What is it?” he barked at the data operatives below him. One of them activated the main holo-display, where a visual of the area of space that had triggered the alert formed, info-icons appearing in several locations. To Meltor, it seemed to be the broken form of an Abraxas-class Cruiser. He pulled on the jacket that was on the ebony table in front of him, barking more orders as he did so; “Charge weapons, those Directorate types are tricky – this could well be a trap. Perform a deep scan of the ship.”

Crew members busied themselves, and the ship thrummed with energy as weapons systems – never far from activity – crackled into life, gunnery crews eager to despatch whatever prey awaited them. The holo display zoomed and rotated, icons and info-grabs dotted all over the broken form of the ship. From their readings, it was dead, the wreckage hadn’t been active for about a year from the isotope degradation patterns he was seeing. It looked like it had been forgotten. The computer AI then zoomed in to part of the ship, a glowing icon hovering over a section. It was some sort of low-level energy source – a beacon or transmitter maybe.

“Despatch a boarding party to check that out”, he pointed in the air to the softly glowing triangle, “Get Hessan and his lot to do it. Tell them I’ll be keeping an eye on them, and make sure they bring back that energy source to me – I don’t want it disappearing again like those gems on Farox-5….”, he ordered.

“Right on it, boss”, came the response from one of his junior officers.

Hessan and his crew of cut-throats and heavies took a little over two hours to retrieve the energy source, which was a standard Directorate secure data-core which had taken some heavy damage in whatever firefight had destroyed the cruiser. His men took care to avoid the data-locks and booby-traps, and downloaded the information. It took them another hour or so before they contacted him to say they had something for him. He made his way down to the conference suite where the hacked core was connected to an isolated portable AI unit, just in case there were any data-worms or virus traps they hadn’t been able to detect – you never knew with those corporate goons.

“Ok then, let’s hear it”, he casually waved a hand in the air.

The unit spoke in a soft, female voice, as did all of Meltors AIs – he found it amusing:

“Security ID: *TFG-375-AINBD-3775
Decoding protocol: KVS-567 Delta 4
Warning! Data integrity compromised…checksum error…
Warning! Message may be incomplete…”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it – the core got slagged, play the message already!” Meltor joked, and there was a rumble of chuckles around the table, “All right, quiet now, let’s hear it!”

What followed was a voice recording, poor quality, with drop outs and the sound of weapons impacts, fire and random screams in the background. Periodically the soft AI voice interrupted, indicating unrecoverable data in the transmission.

“This is the Directorate Cruiser Quantitive Pressure of Acquisition Fleet UHI-28356 – Mayday – repeat – Mayday. We have taken on heavy fire and have several uncontrolled hull breaches following…(DATA MISSING)…will help us. We are transmitting the following intelligence reports….(DATA MISSING)…several fleets in the Iridia sector…(DATA MISSING)…compositions should help in retributive…(DATA MISSING)

>

There were also dozens of data packets retrieved from the core, but only three survived intact – transcripts are available. These data packets have signature codes embedded, and appear to be from discrete informant sources.”

Meltor’s face cracked into a smile as he read the data transcripts – they were fleet composition lists, compiled (either knowingly or not) for the Directorate by commanders across the sector.

“Well boys, this is a true turn of fate – looks like the company forgot about these guys, and they’ve been waiting out there for their reward which never came…I think we can offer them an alternative to their original pay, and get some fresh recruits for our little operation, heh?

Power up the FSD core, let’s go find these guys!”

We hope you liked our little story. It was intended to poke a bit of fun at ourselves, lost data logs and all that. The reality of it is that we are terribly late announcing some competition winners, and we’re most apologetic to those concerned. For those that may remember, and you would be truly forgiven for not, we asked folk to come up with their ideas for some Firestorm Armada fleets, and tell us why they were cool and what sort of paint schemes would look good on them.

We picked three sizes of fleet and our winners, as chosen by the FA Team after they played the various fleets, are:

800 Point Fleet: Directorate / Works Raptor
Sebastian Hottinger
Germany

1200 Point Fleet: RSN
Adam Baker
Australia

2000 Point Fleet: Aquan Prime
Clément Drolez
France