“My Lord, I need you to sign these–”

“Walk and talk, Eddie, walk and talk.”

“Of course, My Lord, but I still need your signature for these personnel transfers. And, not to ruin your Sunday further, the Elysian ambassador has once again requested a meeting, regarding you-know-what.”

“I am perfectly aware, Eddie, and I think you are in turn perfectly aware of my plan of attack concerning the matter.”

“Stall for as long as possible?”

“Quite right.”

Admiral of the White, Earl Jeremiah Grantham of Hartcastle hasted around a bulkhead corner, his chief of staff Commodore Sir Edwin Doughty following close behind, and the two of them narrowly dodged bowling over a sensor tech carrying a stack of log books. The specialist almost dropped her logs as she snapped her arm up to salute one of the most senior officers in the entire Royal Navy, but Hartcastle simply winked at her and slapped her on the shoulder on the way by. Lord Hartcastle was almost like a walking Royal Navy recruitment poster. Tall, with sharp facial features, a stylish close-cropped dark brown beard, likewise coloured wavy slicked-back hair, shining hazel eyes and a charismatic presence that oozed authority; all of that was combined with about sixty years’ of service and experience, making him considered by many as the premier fleet commander in the Service, bar perhaps Sélincourt or New Acre. Unlike Sir Ryan Dumont, the admiral he had just succeeded as C-i-C Western Fleet, Hartcastle chose to make his flagship his home, whereas his predecessor had effectively spent his entire tenure on Jutland. This was why Hartcastle and his COS was basically speed walking down the hallways of HMS Resolute, instead of the more accommodating passageways of Jutland.

His Majesty’s Ship Resolute was a battlecruiser, not a regular light or heavy cruiser. When Carcharodon and the other escort vessels had lain along beside her, it had been like minnows gathering in the wake of a whale. The Resolute, a Repulse class ship, was 1,954 metres long, with a beam of six-hundred and forty, and a complement of five-thousand three-hundred and seventy officers and enlisted, one-hundred and four broadside railguns, and five massive triple-barrel twenty-four inch railcannon turrets; one on each elongated flank of the top hull, two in front of the bridge superstructure and one behind. Resolute alone had the firepower to completely destroy entire squadrons of smaller vessels, and Western Fleet had two entire squadrons of similar ships. The battlecruiser was a uniquely Auroran concept, adopted from the old water navies of the 20th century. The design concept was as simple as it was ingenious; the battlecruiser was to out-shoot anything it couldn’t out-run, and out-run anything it couldn’t out-shoot. Thus they formed a niche albeit important part of the Royal Navy’s line of battle, able to hold their own with the battleships, but also speedy enough to catch enemy cruisers or form advanced screens for their heavier battleship cousins. Battlecruiser crews regarded themselves the elite of the Royal Navy, and to a degree, they were. To be an officer in command of a battlecruiser or a squadron of them required aggressiveness and élan that would almost be considered reckless if commanding other types of ships. Hartcastle had been an advocate for the battlecruiser concept from the start, submitting large numbers of articles to the Royal Journal of Naval Studies and serving as commander of battlecruiser screens during inter-fleet wargames, and now with Donegal in office at Admiralty House, he was using all his pull to divert more of the sleek killers to Western Fleet, happily swapping out older and slower battleship squadrons for them.

“My Lord, the signature?”

“Oh, sorry Eddie, of course,” Hartcastle said, slightly embarrassed that he was caught wool-gathering. He jotted down his signature on the old-fashioned clipboard Doughty had with him, eyes skimming the content –most of it just boring housekeeping that came with the territory of being a fleet commander–, before handing the pen back to the commodore.

The duo rounded another corner and entered a gravlift, the two first ratings and the Royal Marine private already in the lift stiffening, and found the polished lift walls immensely interesting after saluting the two officers, not daring to look in their general direction. Doughty handed Hartcastle another clipboard –this one regarding confirmation of transit orders for Maltese Navy support ships to resupply Royal Navy ships in the Augusta system– and he dutifully signed off on this one as well. The gravlift came to a halt, and the two officers stepped out, and the three enlisted in the back of the lift could finally relax their postures. It was only a short walk (and another damn paper to sign off on) down a causeway, through an extra thick set of bulkheads and past a few Royal Marine sentries in black combat gear with loaded carbines, before Hartcastle and Doughty could step through the hatch onto Resolute’s bridge. The bridge’s general design was like any other Royal Navy ship, with a slightly raised dais where the captain and the First Lieutenant had their command chairs, a huge 3D holographic plot, about two-thirds of the walls were given over to the reinforced mimicglass of the exposed bridge, and the consoles and stations of the bridge officers and technicians were layered in two tiers in a half-circle, some forty stations in total.

The exposed bridge of basically all modern warships could be construed as a throwback to nautical times of antiquity, elevated as they were on tall bridge superstructures that could at first glance look eerily similar to warships of the early 20th century CE. In reality, it had more to do with the nature of modern naval technology; electronic warfare had advanced to such a degree that even with judicious use of drones and advanced sensors, experience had taught warship designers that exposed bridges and simple high-definition telescopes were simply a necessity, regardless of the possible risks this entailed, although armour technology had advanced to such a degree that this had become less of an issue than what was immediately apparent. Capital ships like the Resolute also had a dedicated flag bridge, located at the very foot of the large bridge superstructure, crewed by the incumbent flag officer’s own staff, which could in an emergency take over for the main bridge, acting as a second bridge or Action Information Centre, but this was generally only staffed during training, operations, or actual combat. Regardless, a flag officer’s role was to lead his or her charge, be it division, squadron, or fleet, and as such really shouldn’t have to worry about minutiae like their flagship’s manoeuvring. As a rule, the captain of a flagship did not especially appreciate the presence of a flag officer on “his” or “her” bridge; it was seen as impolite meddling or a show of distrust in the captain’s abilities, but that was during manoeuvres or operations. When at port or at rest, like Resolute, no one batted an eyelid as Hartcastle stepped onto the dais and gave Post-captain Lady Caroline Ortiz, Baroness Sainte-Marie, a polite nod which she reciprocated.

“Calm waters?” Hartcastle asked, receiving the slightest of huffs in reply.

“Considering the fact that we’re at rest in geosynchronous orbit, I can’t imagine how it could be any more calm, it feels like the ship is slowly falling asleep. Can I, by chance, interest you in a cup of tea, My Lord?”

“Why not, if you have a fresh pot brewed.”

A steward’s mate, in the signature black and silver livery-esque uniform of the Steward’s Division, poured a porcelain cup of what Hartcastle suspected was roasted oolong judging by the aroma, added two cubes of sugar, before handing it to the admiral, who accepted it with a nod.

“Exquisite blend,” he said after a polite sip –roasted oolong indeed–, “I didn’t think you were a connoisseur of Eastern-style teas, Milady, I sort of assumed you were more of a coffee-drinker.”

“A noblewoman is required to wear many faces,” Baroness Sainte-Marie replied, the smallest of smiles on her lips. As she turned to look out the massive bridge window, however, it disappeared.

“This has to be the fourth time that bastard’s tried to dock unsuccessfully.”

Hartcastle took a look as well, and suppressed a cringe as he saw the angle of approach the Maltese replenishment ship had originally adhered to in her attempt to line up with Resolute; it was frantically veering off now, the chastising voice of the chief Flight Operations officer (located in a conning tower over the Boat Bay) ringing out over the bridge’s tannoy. Doughty, with a cup of tea in his hands as well, came up to them.

“Drunk behind the stick, you reckon?” he commented, humour colouring his tone, and Hartcastle smiled.

“Hopefully not, I don’t want half a million tonnes of fuel tanker slamming into my flagship, that would be, as my father quite euphemistically used to say, awfully troublesome.”

“You think it’s troublesome,” Sainte-Marie snorted, “I will most likely be frothing at the mouth, it’s my bleeding ship after all. Where do these Maltese skippers learn their trade, watching bloody web-videos? New Maltese Navy auxiliary ships botching what is supposed to be one of the simplest manoeuvres in the book is becoming frightfully common, this has to be the third ship to come in at an awfully awkward angle of approach in the past two weeks alone. And that’s very impressive, on a dark and scary level, taking into account we’ve only been on station for twenty-two days. Thank God we have the Royal Fleet Auxiliary; those boys and girls actually know what they’re about!”

Since Hartcastle had decided to make his flagship his headquarters, instead of basing himself on Jutland, Resolute had become the busiest ship in Western Fleet by far. As Sainte-Marie had mentioned, Resolute, along with her squadron mates in the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron, nicknamed the Scorpions, was locked in an unpowered geosynchronous high orbit spin over New Malta, drifting to the pace of the planet’s rotation. Most of the capital ships of Western Fleet were deployed in this manner, since it would be extremely taxing for Jutland, despite its gargantuan size, to accommodate so many capital ships at the same time, not to mention the many tens of thousands of capital ship crews. Each Auroran battlecruiser and battleship had north of five-thousand people on board, and with twenty-seven of them in Western Fleet, this was considered much more efficient. Supply ships from Jutland and contracted freighters running errands from civilian stations went to and fro the parked capital ships of Western Fleet on a daily basis, delivering necessities such as H2O, victuals, fuel, but also personnel transfers, physical mail, luxury goods, replacement parts, seeds for the hydroponics bays, ammunition for the ship’s small arms, cloth for the ships’ automated tailors to fashion fresh uniforms out of, plastacene for the 3D printers, and a million other bits and pieces required for a highly advanced warship and its crew to operate at peak efficiency in the 29th century.

This particular support ship, the SNMS Il Vescovo Geroldo, was a relatively large replenishment tanker, nearly five hundred thousand tonnes in normal G, with most of that dedicated to its balloons of liquid hydrogen and tanking cranes and hoses. Nuclear fusion was, of course, much less dangerous than nuclear fission, and although hydrogen fuel was easily combustible, it was stored and loaded in a liquid state, at -240 Celsius, requiring significant energy to heat up. That said, if some inept helmsman plunged a fuel tanker into a warship, the result would be a fusion explosion measured in dozens of megatons. This was why Lady Sainte-Marie was understandably tense as she watched the Il Vescovo Geroldo angle off to try another vector for her fifth attempt to dock and deliver her cargo.

“By the by,” Edwin Doughty interrupted, noticing that Sainte-Marie would perhaps welcome a change of topic, “what did you do with our very own ‘boy who cried wolf’?”

Hartcastle half-snorted, half-laughed at that, sipping some tea while contemplating his response. Doughty was perfectly aware what had happened with the unfortunates of Carcharodon, he had been in Lord Hartcastle’s office on-board the Admiral’s Quarters on Resolute when he had ordered the cruiser’s redeployment, but it was a way of distracting Sainte-Marie (as well as provide the ever-listening bridge crew with some juicy gossip when next they convened in the wardroom).

“Well, I figured,” Hartcastle said after replacing his cup back onto the saucer with a muted clink, “that having a Canterbury class cruiser just sitting in the doghouse was a waste of resources, especially considering the Canterburies are among the best scout cruisers the Royal Navy has at its disposal, so I ordered them out to patrol the region around Hercules’ Hood and the associated ring system around that particular Super Jovian.”

Sainte-Marie looked at him and hiked up an eyebrow in surprise.

“Surely you do not trust that fellow Lysimachos with another patrol when he was the one who caused the Alliance diplomatic staff on New Malta to be constantly hounding you for explanations and apologies?”

“Well,” Hartcastle replied, “I was thinking about sending the Carcharodon out there on her own, but I –or rather Sir Edwin here’s office– received a rather hostile mail from Lysimachos’ direct senior, Rear Admiral of the Black Freya Holland, who in no uncertain terms advised against deploying Carcharodon without some sort of backup. So I simply ordered Admiral Holland to deploy her Swiftsure alongside Carcharodon as tactical insurance.”

Lady Sainte-Marie almost choked on the tea she was sipping, so sudden was her burst of laughter, and her somewhat throaty tittering spread smiles among the rest of the bridge officers.

“Oh my,” she managed at length, “I can’t imagine Holland was all too pleased with that order. I’ve had the dubious pleasure of dining with the woman, and if that is how she acts when trying to amicable, I can only imagine how she’s when miffed.”

“You tell me,” Sir Edwin Doughty commented, his tone intentionally dry and measured, “she lobbed at least half a dozen complaints to my office within the first two hours of receiving her marching orders, and she is still sour that she has had to take her flotilla flagship out into the periphery of the St. John System, as she feels ‘her services could be much more gainfully employed elsewhere’, to quote her latest complaint verbatim.”

Both Hartcastle and Sainte-Marie chuckled at that. In truth, Sir Edwin Doughty, the bear of a man that he was, with a fierce and unkempt black beard, massive logs that did their best impressions of pretending to be arms and legs, was one of the best administrators in the entire Royal Auroran Navy. Upon receiving the formal and wax-sealed old fashioned letter from the Admiralty that told him to take up the command of Western Fleet, Hartcastle had known he wanted Doughty as his chief-of-staff; few were as capable of running an organization as large and complex as a modern fleet group, and Sir Edwin made it look easy by comparison. Hartcastle also knew that Sir Edwin was an accomplished dancer and gymnast, which belied his physique, but he had seen the man in action on the formal dance floor of Royal Navy dinners.

“At any rate,” Hartcastle said at length, “I assume it will be some time before we hear from the Carcharodon again, especially with their flotilla commander riding shotgun on their deployment. In the meantime, I want to start regular gunnery practices for the battle squadrons of Western Fleet, we have some twenty-seven capital ships, the largest collection of RN line of battle outside Home Fleet, and we owe it to our citizens and our allies in the Royal Union to be in the best shape we can –dear God, is the Geroldo coming in for another poorly aligned approach?”

“Okay, so, I’ve been thinking. I’m pretty sure I want to name this particular ice asteroid ‘Mikey’, which is orbiting somewhat close to this other particular ice asteroid that I’ve already named ‘Derek’. Now, I know previously said I wanted to name it ‘Mal’, but I feel like it’s giving off more of a ‘Mikey’ energy, now that I’ve had time to think about it.” Communications Officer Lieutenant Katherine MacKenzie was pretty down in the dumps, but she was at least trying her best to lighten up the mood of the bridge crew of the Carcharodon.

“I’ve also been thinking,” Lieutenant Commander Trevor Merryweather, the Tactical Officer, said, “I’m thinking I will go down two decks to the nearest small arms locker, sign off for a pistol, and blow my fucking brains out.”

“Yeesh, Mers,” Lieutenant Commander Leonetta Hazard, the soon-to-be-relieved officer of the watch, responded with a grimace, “that’s pretty damn grim.”

“I can’t help it,” Merryweather replied, “I’ve had it up to here with this assignment.”

He threw his hands up theatrically, and took off his white officer’s beret and scratched his head, before replacing his headgear.

“Look, we’ve been out here for three weeks because our master and commander quite possibly illegally detained a civilian ship just for going off course, and now both the C-i-C Fleet and our flotilla commander are riding our asses because of it…”

“You seemed to be in agreement when we came upon said civilian ship,” Lieutenant Anaya Chen commented, having just walked onto the bridge. “Do I need to remind you of your little allegory about lost lambs again?”

“Ugh, I rather you didn’t.”

“Regardless,” Hazard cut in, “we’re not in this alone. Admiral Holland and the Swiftsure is also ‘enjoying’ this extended yomp around this particular Super Jovian, and she’s sure to be practically seething considering she weren’t required to do this, as it is in a flag officer’s repertoire to refrain from such mundane tasks. However, according to Fleet scuttlebutt, Lord Hartcastle insisted on Holland deploying her flagship, and so here we are.”

Hazard got up from the 2-i-C command chair, and saluted Lieutenant Chen after the latter had skimmed through the log on the nearest available console and considered the holographic plot.

“I am ready to be relieved,” Hazard said and Chen saluted back.

“I relieve you, ma’am,” she replied formally.

Hazard nodded.

“I stand relieved, and Lieutenant Chen has the bridge. And now I am off to my bunk, so none of you chuckleheads rustle up any trouble while I get my beauty sleep.”

Sub-lieutenant Yuri Podkolzin also relieved Merryweather, and MacKenzie was relieved by her junior, Sub-lieutenant Anna Hikari, the same went for the few bridge technicians. It was shipboard time 07:00, and the night watch was officially at an end. In many ways, life on board starships was among the most artificial and least natural activities humanity had ever adopted. Every settled world had its own day-night cycle, its own gravity, and its own other peculiarities that differed from Old Earth. In the case of Aurora, it had a day cycle of almost twenty-seven hours, which was thankfully close enough to Earth’s that it had not proven difficult to adjust, but some worlds had either far longer or far shorter cycles. Of course, good old laws of physics dictated that this didn’t get too out of hand, since a planet simply wouldn’t be habitable if it rotated too slowly or too fast on its own axis; gravity would either be too high or too low for conditions for human settlement to evolve.

But the issue of gravity was a major problem for some. Aurora had a marked lower gravity than Earth’s even 1G, which had stretched out its inhabitants over the generations, but also made them frailer, and Amaranth had it even worse. Westernesse was on the opposite end of the scale, with a gravity of 1.28G, making Westernessans much stockier and more physically sturdy than their compatriots in the rest of the kingdom. This all tied back to the artificiality of spaceships, because shipboard time was kept to an even twenty-four hour cycle, and all warships kept its artificial gravity to 1G. That meant that Auroran naval personnel had to go through pretty hefty training regimens to simply not collapse from the sheer exhaustion of staying upright for sixteen hours. They also had to adjust to a different circadian rhythm, which was why it took several years before one became completely comfortable with life on a warship, and extended shore leave made people lose their “space legs” really quickly, and had to reacclimatize once back on board.

The new bridge watch crew took over the seats by their stations, ran through the logs and settled in for seven hours of looking at nothing but ice particles and the gigantic gas giant that filled the bridge window.

“Anyway,” Chen said after a short spell after Hazard the others had left (following a brief humorous comment to Merryweather to not take the causeway by the nearby small arms locker), “where is our great and glorious leader of men?”

“Down in the gym and exercising with Lieutenant Al-Jalal’s Royal Marines, I would think,” Hikari said as she put her legs up on the vacant seat on the station next to hers.

“My God,” Sub-lieutenant Kayden Blanchard, the junior ops officer, burst out from his seating next to the holographic plot, “does he have a fricking death wish, training with the bootnecks?”

“He does that all the time, Blankie,” Chen commented from the command dais, “and I don’t think even the bootnecks are stupid enough to blame him for the assignment we’ve been stuck with. We were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s not like Carrie is the first Western Fleet ship to come over Alliance ships snooping around where they weren’t supposed to be. And when reporting it, getting a reprimand instead of a polite slap on the back.”

Hikari blew air out of her nostrils as she tapped a few commands on her console, reminding the communications Smart Artificial Intelligence to be on the lookout for data packet dumps from elsewhere in the St. John System.

“But we might very well be the first to be overtly punished for it,” she commented, “because that’s just this ship’s luck.”

“Surely,” Blanchard said, eyes and brows forming dubious slits, “you don’t believe in such superstition as ‘ship’s luck’? We were simply in a poor place at a poor time in the Royal Navy’s schedule to be nearly catching the blame for something that would potentially merely have rocked the relationship between the two largest star-nations in human history. And that is exaggerating thing tremendously, worst case scenario style.”

“And how is that not down to luck?” Hikari countered. “Are you some sort of divinely invested individual that believes one god or several gods has it all planned out perfectly on a spreadsheet? Okay, let’s see here,” Hikari licked her thumb and made a facsimile of leafing through several sheets of paper, “ah yes, according to Buddha, seems today that the poor idiots of Carcharodon will almost create an interstellar incident, because they were a bit wrung out after not getting proper shore leave, and adhering a bit too much to standard Royal Navy procedure. There is more here, you want me to continue? I have a report from Jesus, a couple from Olympos, and there’s, oh, one from Varuna if you can believe it!”

“Please, Anna,” Chen groaned, “you’ve belaboured the point way too much already, give it a damn rest.”

Sub-lieutenant Hikari simply shrugged and resumed her relaxed posture, barely bothering to look at her console and instruments. She was acting very nonchalant, but Chen and the rest of the bridge crew knew that even when pretending not to care and being intentionally annoying (which she thankfully wasn’t most of the time), she was wholly on top of her duties, actually being a consummate officer of the Royal Navy.

Petty Officer Daniel Sawyer, a bridge sensor technician with sixteen years in the Service at this point, more than every one of his superior officers currently hackling on the bridge deck (despite his obvious technical seniority, he acknowledged that there was a lot that they had learned over the course of their four years at King William’s Academy that was way over his head), was chuckling politely along with the officers’ banter when the weird feedback from the gravpulse sensors caught his attention.

Unlike the more simplistic LIDAR sensor arrays, which recorded the physical details of objects caught by a laser projector, and determined the time it took those signals to return and how the shape was formed (laser was only simply photons emitted at near-constant intervals from warships when their sensors were engaged, so speed of light was literally the only speed it could travel at, serving as a very useful benchmark), gravpulse sensors were able to pick up much more complicated readings, and this object caused said gravpulse arrays to react, which struck Sawyer as mighty odd.

Firstly, gravpulse was short for gravitational pulse energy, which was the bounceback energy of disturbances of spacetime being moved; so far so good, it simply meant that physical space was being manipulated by something moving through it at relativistic speeds or higher, or that its output went into those energy bands. However, how modern military-grade gravpulse technology worked, was to bounce said pulses against any and all objects both inside the physical dimension, and the Light Way, meaning gravpulse sensors were at any time also hooked up with the conductors which materialised the Lorentz force fields that also vigoursly drilled ships into the relativistic dimension of the Light Way. It had to be mentioned, just piercing non-observable bursts of energy into the dimension of non-relativistic physical energies, even constantly, was something else entirely for the Light Drives and Lorentz field generators when compared to thrusting a full ship through, hopefully with all its cargo, hull integrity, and its human crew even somewhat intact; trivial by comparison. Physics was a fickle bitch, it chose its favourites and subjugated everyone else to a very harsh set of rules.

That the gravitational pulses were also able to travel at the relativistic speed of light many times over upon entering the Light Way, meant they could exponentially speed up to the point of literally 99.99% of infinite speed, but that was a theorem that could never be effectively be proven, nor recorded by human-made instruments. Because, like with all sensors, they required something to register a bounceback from to return which whence the signal originally came, and when a gravitational pulse hit something, it could report back to its mother sensor with extreme accuracy, much more efficiently than any type of sensory system, despite the accuracy of LIDAR or the predictability of thermal or radar. It also served almost like a lighthouse for whoever employed it. Yes, it was effective, and it bounced extremely high-efficiency waves against its intended sensor targets at speeds that was literally incomprehensible for the human mind, but in order to do that, it also had to ‘expose itself’, in the terminology of the 29th century space navies, earning it the nickname of “smoke stacks”, because a ship could not maintain cloak and simultaneously pulse out gravitational waves without it being detected by other ships with even basic sensor capabilities.

All of which was why Petty Officer Daniel Sawyer was suddenly very interested in the sensor reports flooding into his station. Sensor reports which made him sit up more straight in his chair and make ‘ho-hum’ noises, which didn’t go unnoticed by the rest of the bridge crew.

“Ma’am,” he said after running what his console told him three times over with the Action Information Centre Ops SAI, “I might have something on scope that you would be interested in.”

Lieutenant Anaya Chen looked over with a very confused expression on her face.

“Mr Sawyer,” she said, “what could even come close in importance to disturb this current discussion?”

Petty Officer Sawyer was not born yesterday, he could recognise sarcasm, and to that point he transferred what the sensors had told him up unto the main holographic plot.

“That,” he said, unbidden, pointing towards the blue-purple 3D holographic plot, “is how the LIDAR profile chooses to portray the Hercules’ Hood, and her ring belt.”

Sawyer’s hands ran across his keyboard like a maniac, and the 3D plot changed, turning into the confusing mess that was Hercules’ Hood’s ice-crystal ring belt.

“Please notice to look,” Sawyer continued, “when I run back the pings the gravpulse arrays Carrie received only half-minutes back.”

The whole bridge deck looked at the same holographic feedback they had been looking at for almost three weeks, irritation slightly rising, until Podkolzin noticed something odd.

“What,” he said in a tone that betrayed his sudden excitement, “is that burst of code? It looks like corrupted signals put out on a legit grav-channel.”

Sawyer nodded sagely towards the very youthful officer, who accepted it wholeheartedly while trying to avoid grinning.

“Did anyone else pick this one up?” Chen asked, now suddenly very serious.

Sawyer shook his head: “No, Ma’am, I think we’re the first one to come across this particular fucker.”

“I would,” Sub-lieutenant Hikari commented, “for the benefit of the log, ask what the hell we’re looking at.”

“That,” Chen said, “is something too small to be picked up by LIDAR, has too low of an emission to register on thermal, and I suspect…” her eyes drifting towards PO Sawyer, “probably way too well hidden for our active gravpulse unless our crew knew what to look for.”

“Pardon me for asking the, at least for me, obvious, but what is it, and what are we doing?” Sub-lieutenant Blanchard, effectively as Number Two Ops, was the 2-i-C whenever none of the capital officers were on deck, but he was still a twenty-two year old relatively fresh out of King William’s Academy. No one could actually in good conscience blame him for being insecure, especially considering what Carcharodon had been through the past Galactic standard month.

“That small…” Hikari said more to herself than anyone else, but Chen picked up upon it.

“That is really damn small, especially if it is supposed to be a system-wide reconnaissance drone, the only ones who actually has range and aren’t simple fire-and-forget ones...” Chen commented absentmindedly, crossing her legs in the 2-i-C chair.

“But it can somehow sample gravpulse signals passively, which means it also intrinsically has LIDAR systems, and a fusion power circuit; otherwise it would literally be a waste of space…”

“Ma’am,” Sub-lieutenant Hikari said, now actually sat up in her chair, “contact is not responding to meet-and-greet signals, nor standard IFF.”

“No, I didn’t expect it would,” Chen responded despondently.

“Well, boys and girls,” she said after short while, “I hope you’re up for another few weeks wasting time in the void.”

Lieutenant Anaya Chen, twenty-five years old, dressed in the black, gold and white of the junior officer’s uniform of the Royal Navy, picked up the mike of the 2-i-C station, and placed it over her head.

“All hands, Carcharodon, we’ve come across a very suspicious contact that does not respond to hails, IFF, nor meet-and-greets. As such, my only option is to call all hands action stations, this is not a drill. Royal Marines, beat to quarters, if you please.”