YSS Kishū
Alpha Bay
"Miko? Like a shrine priestess?" she asked, her tone was a slow simmer. "Sound like a trustworthy pair, really. The commander of the reconnaissance wing surely has their work cut out for them with you two," she said with a tilt of her head so that hewhite and black bangs shifted into one another. "I hear she's flying in your squadron."
Within the launch bay, they could see the Teisatsu-patterned Super Kawarime fighters stacked at their berths. Forward of the ship where the berths ended was the launch bay whose open hangar door was huge. It was protected by a light blue force field whose energy ran in shimmering lines. In front of the force field between the lines of the launch bay, a group of pilots fouled the deck as they milled about in a grouping, ready to brief.
"Commander on deck!" said the pink-haired Taii that had been assigned to Zan and Miko as she looked directly at them.
"Here, here." The woman that had been chatting with them strode to the pilots and squatted down to rest on her heels. The pilots gathered around her, some noting Zanven and Miko like schoolchildren would the new kids with mild curiosity before their attention turned to the black and white-haired woman more fully.
"I'm Chusa Kamikaze, to those of you that don't know me. We're going into a highly unstable part of the galaxy. Navigating the Astral Cluster is so impossible for even its inhabitants that they had no information to give even on the region we'll be going, let alone on the rumors that have recently originated from there."
Pulling a communicator from the pouch on her belt, she set it to show a fairly odd section of space. Not all of it was mapped, the blank spots were fairly obvious amongst the chaotic topographical peaks and plateaus. The Kikyo sector's star charts didn't have anything like this.
"Unfortunately it's unlikely we'll be able to traverse this strange part of space in our craft," Kamikaze looked forlorn as the mapping shifted to a picture of a planet, hand drawn as if from an educational course and not an intelligence organization.
"We'll be going planetside. Our duty," she went on, "Is to investigate the planet here labeled Balcora. Little information on it is in our hands. It's a pretty southerly planet of the Astral Cluster- close to the Kikyo Sector. A number of groups that are unhappy with the annexation and integration by the Commonwealth -the Iromakuanhe Astral Commonwealth- have begun amassing resources on it. Some of them are unimportant while some... more meaningful. The rumors that have come from there have to do with refining the naturally occurring zesuaium on their planet."
She let those words sink in. Zesuaium was manufactured only by Ketsurui Zaibatsu and even they couldn't refine the Lor worlds made into solid hunks of zesu. But apparently some rogue Iromakuanhe could.
"Just rumors, right?" Kamikaze asked rhetorically. "Either way, the Commonwealth would look more like the bad guys the diaspora is making them out to be by sneaking a peak and Star Army isn't ready to have rogues in the neighborhood outfitted with impervious starships and such. We're coming out here to check it out. Oh, and... any involvement between us and the Iromakuanhe government is strictly off the books."
"Questions?" Taii Tsubei Kyoka asked with wide eyes as she looked between those gathered. "Questions before we start flight checks?"