A group of Alliance commandos makes contact and a member of their team is discovered to be a defector from the Raknos incident, he briefs his uptime counterparts on the situation of earth and a reconnaissance operation is launched.
A heavily modified strategic strike ship arrives at the edge of the Sol system a month later and begins a long spiral into the inner system. A few days later it enters earth orbit having documented Imperial infrastructure and patrol patterns.
A NAVSPECWAR commando attaches a module to a Imperial communications satellite, introducing a UAS AI into the planetary network. It performs a 'scrape' before being extracted after being noticed by something in the network. The contents are transmitted via FTL COMs to Cascadium.