“To summarize. The operation to return the heretics of Salvation to the Faith is scheduled for the end of January. Supported by a task group, the planetary assault vessels Kerouac and Mitsotaki will drop three marine brigades onto Salvation to secure the city of New Hope and its spaceport. Once they are secure, a DocSec brigade will round up and evacuate the heretics. We expect the operation to be completed in less than two days, enough time before the Federated Worlds can respond in force. That concludes my briefing, gentlemen. Does anyone have any questions?”
Fleet Admiral Jorge’s eyes flitted across the councillors seated around the Defense Council table. “No? Chief Councillor?”
“No, Admiral. That sounds good to me. Moving along,” Polk said. “Next item. Operations against the Feds. Admiral?”
“Thank you, sir. If you turn your attention to the holovid, you can see a summary of the week’s operations. It has been a successful week, I have to say, an outstanding week in fact. The Feds stayed quiet, continuing their focus on defensive operations. We were more active. Coordinated antishipping operations around the Paderborn, Xiang, and Vijati reefs successfully disrupted the Fed’s main trade route to Old Earth despite heavy Fed opposition. The routes to Szent-Gyogyi and Merritt’s were shut by offensive mining operations around West Kent Reef that claimed the lives of six Fed merships, the pinchcomm relay station on Gok-3 was destroyed, and Fed supplies of helium-3 from mines in the Clarion system have been disrupted by the destruction of two storage facilities.
“To conserve war stocks, antimatter missile operations were limited to attacks on two Fed deepspace forward operating bases in the Panguna and Lagerfeld sectors, both destroyed. Looking at each operation in more detail …”