[civ2buf]

Discipline rewards the Control Alliance

"Captain, we show an interlink formed on the outer edges of this solar system. Its not formatted according to any of our standards."

"Another ship. It isn't responding to any business hails." Any ship built by the Foundation and manned by anyone, politics aside, accepted business communication frequencies. Who would forsake a beneficial trade?

"Could it be a Fazrah ship? But we wouldn't know until we got too close."

"By then nothing would be left of us."

The communications officer interrupted, "The Fazrah are biological, its unlikely they could interlink. We only can interlink because the Creator built support for it. Whomever it is, I can't join their interlink. I tried adjusting the formats, its just universally rejecting my entry."

"Can you send some sort of message by any means?"

"We can send an interlink under their format, as much as we know of it."

"Well, just tell them a bit about the ship and our purpose, and offer trade and exchange, confidentiality. If they trust us, the rest of the Foundation will know nothing about it, and we can set up a nexus of ships in this territory. Its outside of anything the Foundation would want to parcel as well. We could even disable our business comm and change to their format, and build our industrial empire in a nebulae onboard ships."

"I sent your message captain, I've ensured them no one has to know about any transactions. They may only get a garbled message, or they could be uncooperative,..."

"Or they could lead to our alliance becoming its own industrial and military power."