Operation BaseRunner is the name given to the military recon operation launched by the government of Hiigara to investigate the Anomaly, a vast hyperspace-negation phenomenon on the anti-corewards edge of the Galaxy. The mission was undertaken by Lady Karan S'jet on her flagship, the Khar-Sajuuk and was concluded safely, returning large amounts of data about the phenomenon. However, it failed to find a solution or even identify the cause of the issue.
Preamble[]
At the conclusion of the Vaygr War in 115 AHL (9625 GSY), Karan gained control of the Three Hyperspace Cores and the Progenitor starship Sajuuk. She used the ship to discover and unlock the Eye of Aarran, which in turn activated the Great Network of Hyperspace Gates, a vast array of freestanding Far Jump hyperspace gates which had remained hidden in interstellar space or remote systems for all of recorded history. This began a golden age of peace, trade and exploration for the galaxy, optimistically dubbed the Age of S'jet.
However, ten years into this period, malfunctions in the Gate Network were uncovered, sometimes resulting in the losses of single ships. The Hiigaran government, the Daiamid, investigated and concluded that malfunctions were to be expected in an alien system more than 100,000 years old, utilising unknown technoagies and sciences. Karan S'jet was unimpressed by this dismissal of the problem and petitioned the Daiamid to undertake a closer analysis of the situation. The Daiamid refused. Instead, Kiith S'jet scientists began logging these malfunctions, which they referred to as "Gate Malfunction Events" (GMEs).
By 210 AHL (9720 GSY), the number of GMEs had risen to alarming levels, with a large swathe of the anti-coreward rim seeing massive gate malfunctions. Karan S'jet again petitioned the Daiamid to act, and this time they approved a reconnaissance operation.
Operation BaseRunner[]
Operation BaseRunner was named by Karan in honour of the Baserunner, an old reconnaissance vehicle used on Kharak in Karan's youth and before her birth. Famously, a Baserunner driven by Karan's ancestor Rachel S'jet discovered the wreck of the Khar-Toba in the Great Banded Desert, leading to the discovery of the Guidestone and the Second Hyperspace Core, paving the way for the return of the Hiigarans to their homeworld.
The operation was limited to the Khar-Sajuuk alone, to minimise casualties should the operation go wrong. The Daiamid also gave strict orders to avoid any confrontation with forces in the region. To explain the disappearance of one of Hiigara's most famous and prominent citizens for several months, a cover story was prepared that Karan was going on a diplomatic and goodwill tour of remote parts of the galaxy.
The ship jumped to the very edge of the Anomaly, taking up station some 1.5 light years from Terminus Gate, in the Kala System. The ship established sensor probes, communication receivers and scanners, and used powerful telescopes to visually observe the gate. It was discovered that pirate and raider forces seemed to have established strongholds around the gate. The gate had been somehow powered down. Probes and scans of the gate from that distance were inconclusive at working out how the gate had been disabled. A strange observation was that radio and standard communications within the Anomaly could not be detected.
The Khar-Sajuuk jumped to another gate and performed the same operations, and did the same for multiple gates for the next three months, to the same event. The only confrontation came when a scouting raider ship blundered into the Khar-Sajuuk and was immediately destroyed before it could signal for help.
After 120 days, Karan reluctantly concluded the mission and returned the Khar-Sajuuk to Hiigara.
Conclusion[]
The final operational report was submitted several months later. Both it and the subsequent Daiamid debate were inconclusive. The mission had confirmed that the gates were physically intact, just no longer operational. "Normal" hyperspace travel into the region via short jump technology seemed to have also been interdicted, although Karan was confident that the Three could safely transit into the region through their sheer power. Radio and other standard forms of communication could no longer be detected inside the Anomaly even through standard speed-of-light means.
Furthermore, Karan shared an analysis conducted through the Progenitor Overseer System, the computer system that controlled the Gate Network from the Eye of Aarran. The Overseer System no longer recognised the Anomaly-interdicted gates as ever having existed. They weren't registered as malfunctioning or destroyed, just as never having been part of the network in the first place. This greatly alarmed Karan, since Progenitor technology was normally infallible. She also claimed to have used the power of the Three to "probe" the Anomaly and sensed something dangerous and unusual about it which should be investigated further.
The Daiamid split into two camps, one supporting Karan and agreeing that a more aggressive operation was needed to investigate the Anomaly and neutralise it by any means necessary. The second believed that this was scaremongering and that the Anomaly was a natural consequence of using such an ancient system (ignoring that similarly ancient Progenitor systems, such as the Keepers and the Three Cores themselves, were still operating perfectly with no sign of age-related decline after 100,000 years), and sending a fleet into the Anomaly could antagonise the pirate and raider forces inside.
The debate was won by the conservatives, who successfully proposed that warning systems should be used to avoid the impacted star systems and long-range study could continue, but otherwise the Anomaly was to be left alone. Subsequent odd behaviour by Karan, who spoke of "The Other" and other Navigators, despite her being the only one left in the known galaxy, made some in the Daiamid wonder if the longest-lived Hiigaran was no longer in complete control of her faculties.
Four years later, this short-sightedness was exposed. The Hiigaran colony ship Faal Ferin was lost with all hands, over 20,000 people, during a transit of the gate at Gareth's Star, when the Anomaly suddenly expanded in space exponentially. This was the single largest loss of Hiigaran life in a single incident since the Kharakian Genocide. The public outcry was immense. The Daiamid ordered Karan to take the Khar-Sajuuk and the 5th Expeditionary Fleet into the heart of the Anomaly and neutralise it. This fleet set out in 9725 GSY (215 AH). Eighty-one days later, all communication with the fleet was lost.[1]