To say that Harald had been happy to get off this ill-equipped morgue with VTOL capabilities would have been an understatement as well. As soon as the intruder had gotten out of his gear and taken a shower, the next stop was the coffee machine. A very long stop one might add. The order had been to get some R&R, not to go to bed early. He knew he would not be able to sleep so soon after a mission anyway, let alone [i]this[/i] mission.

There was an email to write, one about the benefit of having body bags on board of vehicles already if sent on a mission that could potentially yield samples.

The fact that he even had to consider writing this kind of message felt quite disappointing, not to say even outright sad. These aliens had not made first contact with humans, just with Earth's lead. Yes, they had opened fire first and probably also killed the ship's crew so this course of action had been completely justified, but still it felt like such a waste of an opportunity they all were somewhat responsible for. And then there was the fact that these grays, out of all of the world's countless organisations, had happened to run straight into Minerva Force. Minerva Force was about as alien, separate and clandestine in relation to the rest of human society as aliens were to Earth. Quite the irony, wasn't it ?

While indeed trying to find some relaxation, Creep also spent some significant amount of his free time the next days on trying to dig into the story of the cargo vessel this had all been about. Online ship tracking websites were the first, completely harmless but also rather superficial source of information. Some let's say inofficial excavations in other people's databases were another, but of course he had to be very careful with that or he would at least invoke the commander's ire. Probably ?

Speaking of their boss, there was this rumor about this being some kind of 'probing attack' in the hallways and the cantine, but Harald found this to be complete bullshit. A probing attack on a cargo vessel to check how humanity would react to this ? Where should he even start to point out how idiotic this idea was...

First of all, in order to figure out how humans would react to one of their precious little ships being boarded by hostiles, one just had to sit back and watch the media. There were naval hostage situations, assaults, abductions and even good-old piracy on more than a weekly basis in these more unstable times, so why take the risk and stage anything oneself ? Then, when staging an attack, why stay on site with too few individuals to defend against the human forces expected to arrive in this kind of 'experiment' ? Either this had been a really bad organisational mistake on the alien side or this just had not been a probing attack with enemy forces expected to respond in the first place. And last but not least, why on Earth a cargo vessel ? There would have been so many less risky targets like remote research stations, villages, airplanes... Or didn't these guys have some sort of ship-mounted weapons on their flying saucers ? At least some makeshift ones so they didn't have to send people down for such an attack right away ? Hardly imagineable after having seen this impressive propulsion system.

Sure, this was pretty speculative as well, but unfortunately an essential piece of the puzzle was now situated firmly on the ocean floor. GPS coordinates revealed that this was far too deep to go without some advanced submarine and their boss wouldn't happen to have one of these around, would he ? At least Creep had not seen such a vehicle in any of the hangars yet.

This didn't stop Harald from sending another email straight towards Damirón’s account while he happened to have some free time though. It contained all of the intruder's thoughts about this attack not being some stupid probing shit and that it would be really handy if there was any way to investigate that freighter and its cargo down on the ocean floor. What if the aliens had been after something on that ship or at least had wanted to prevent it from reaching its destination ? Minerva Force should make use of its time instead of waiting for the next incident to happen.