((TAS Feer’hat, command area))

The Admiral sat staring stoically out of the viewport of the command tunnel of his flagship. He didnt move for several minutes, deep in thought, contemplating what he was about to do. This was their best chance to finally rid themselves of the silicon based corporatists. They had been a threat that had clung to the side of the Tholian Assembly ever since they had first encountered them several hundred years before.

The gravimetric, currents, etties and distortions could only mask so much though. Even the repetitive pulsar blasts from the second star wouldn’t be enough to block the Starfleet vessels or their pesky border net sensors from picking up his fleet moving into the system at some point. Unless they got very lucky.

The scientists on the covert research station at Rhontaka A(an uninhabited class D planet orbiting the main star in the binary system) had reported they had made progress but were still unable to establish an anomaly that would remain stable for the required 47 seconds they would need to arrive at the terminus. He hoped his presence would provide added impetus to the projects bothersome lead scientist.

“Drelas, signal the fleet, we depart for the Rhontaka system in 10 minutes. Have them initiate plan delta” he finally said.

Though the Admirals fleet only represented roughly 9% of the Tholian Assembly Navy, it was to be the main, consolidated effort in the attempt to end this simmering border crisis. It had been brewing, unbeknownst to all but a few in the upper echelons of the Federation, for a few years now.

Occasionally on the FNN nightly news, a reference to either the Shelliak or the Tholian in some tangential way, was the only evidence that anything had even happened along the border. The loss of the Kozlov and the crippling of the Shuswap were being quietly swept under the rug. An even greater travesty was that the Captains and crews of what would become known as ‘Provisional Border Flotilla 33′ had no idea that nearly 60 Tholian ships and their auxiliaries was bearing down on them. The 8 vessels of the adhoc force were about to be tested in ways they were not expecting.

The entire ensuing series of events had a single nexus point. One eccentric(some would say crazed) Tholian scientist who had come up with a unique process for forming semi-stable artificial wormholes through space that were just large enough to fit, say, a starship through. His ideas were known only to him, and the technology needed to accomplish the experiment existed on on his small research base in the Rhontaka system. If he had failed to form the wormhole, the Admirals orders were to use his fleet to invade the Shelliak through the Tri-Border area instead.

Starfleet would later discover the experiments to create a stable artificial, in the fashion the whacky Tholian scientist had pursued, were extremely dangerous and foolhardly to even attempt. Yet still, the experiments had yeilded results and had led some secret successes in that late summer of 2402. Sadly it would also lead to the face off with the ragtag set of Starfleet ships that would follow in the coming days and weeks.