Tale: The Watchtower
Summary: At 0023, 13th July, in Foundation Orbital Research Compound 05, in the command and control center, The Foundation personnel receive a message from the invading Vladimir Vernadsky, leader of 2 unnamed GRU ships. He states that they are under orders to investigate FORC-5 for Earth's disappearance during the Departure. He elaborates that he knows that the investigation is useless but his volatile fellow crewmates have fired weapons at the space station out of his control. He tells them to save themselves while he tries to help within the ship. Director Cooper directs the personnel to activate the CIWS to shoot down the projectiles and send ships out of the station to counter the attack.
At 0035 in the hangar bay Colonel Leonard arranges the station's ships and head off to intercept the GRU ships.
At 0055 in High Earth Orbit, Colonel Leonard and his team are attacked by guiding missiles that are strangely accurate. This confuses him.
At the same time on the GRU ship, 8 light seconds from FROC-5, the friendly Vladimir Vernadsky that contacted FORC-5 attempts to stop the crew from firing at the station but can do nothing. He accepts that they will be stranded there since their energy reserve was depleting and their only power source, the Earth, was gone.
Again at the same time, 54,423 km from FORC-5 on the aforementioned guided missiles, it is revealed Vladimir clones are used to pilot the missiles. V-13 attempts to kill one of the ships.
At 0115, 52,679 km from FORC-5 in high earth orbit, Captain Ulner alerts Leonard of the ineffectiveness of their attempts to destroy the missiles. The crew are managing to escape the missiles, but it is revealed one is heading towards FORC-5.
At the same time, 34,502 km from FROC-5, V-13 is revealed to be the missile heading towards the station, but runs out of energy trying to escape Colonel Leonard and explodes into a hundred small missiles.
At 0125, 6 light seconds from FORC-5 on the GRU ship, the friendly Vladimir Vernadsky manages to fire at the 2nd GRU ship and turns off all other clones on the ship, decelerating it.
At the same time, 9,564km from FORC-5 at medium earth orbit, some of the ships have taken damage. While the initial clusters of guided missiles were taken down, Captain Ulner on the Jack of Hearts was killed.
On FORC-5 at 0922, Director Cooper talks to O5-10 over a computer regarding the incident. It is shown that Leonard sacrificed himself by cutting in front of the missile swarm made by V-13, and in the end only 2 missiles hit the station. Dr Marko, D-1153 and D-2045 died in the incident. Director Cooper promotes Captain Jackson to take the former role of Leonard and calls for a meeting at 1300 hours.
Additional Context: The three personnel who died in the incident were the 3 introductory characters in the previous tale "All Along" This is the 3rd tale regarding the "Straight on till morning" canon.