Captain Lindhurst sat, fingers drumming on the armrest. Abi could be fractious at the best of times, but if she thought he was going to blame this disaster on her she'd never be helpful at all. She may even quit, and he needed her to fix this!
"EM broadcast!" came the sharp call from Lieutenant Brant.
"What? Is the Wormhole still open a crack? Who is it, LFC?"
A pause followed, and the Captain swivelled his chair to face the Lieutenant.
"No Captain, it's not Lunar Fleet Command. The wormhole is definitely closed. Signal bearing is 46.7 by 72.3 on our current heading. I don't know the signal format, but I'm recording the message."
For a few moments the Captain was silent, face locked in thought.
"Very well, let me know if you get a fix on the format. I want to hear that message." then he turned back to front once more. "Sam, can you lock passive sensors on that heading. What's out there?"
Chief Engineer Sam Timmins' fingers flew across his panel. The bridge had been shrunk a little from the initial designs. This version only had four control seats rather the seven originally on the design plans. The only way that worked was that each station could do multiple jobs. Technically anyone could access any task from each station. Now Timmins switched from his normal engineering readouts to the sensor systems.
"First sweep shows one small world about five degrees off that heading sir, not enough data for distance and size yet, and... that's odd." for the next few seconds his fingers rattled the keys as he checked data. "Sir, we have a close object, moving laterally to us. I think it's a ship performing a course alteration. If you want my guess, I think it's matching speed with us. I'll have confirmation of that in about five minutes sir."
"Very well. Liliya, orientate the ship on that object, bring the ship to yellow alert.. and warm up the railguns, just in case."
Lieutenant Guzov frowned as she started the turret power-up sequence and alerted the gunner staff back at Tactical. Brandt should have done this, but as with everything else on this cut down ship you often had to do someone else's job when they were already busy. The LFC's rush job on this ship had a lot to answer for as far as Liliya was concerned!
Chief Timmins turned back to the Captain.
"Sir, I'm sure it's a ship, but I'm getting odd readings. I think that exhaust I'm reading is helium and hydrogen, helium-3 at that."
Lindhurst sat up straight at that.
"Helium? Are you saying that thing has a working fusion drive? Who in hell managed to.."
"SIR!" Brandt's sharp retort broke into the Captain's response. The fact that Brandt butted in alone got the Captain's attention, that was unheard of for him!
"Yes Lieutenant?"
"The signal, I got the coding worked out, it's odd but based on an old FM microwave code. It's an old UNSA code."
"UN Space Agency? But that's..." the Captain turned slowly to stare out the viewport to a barely discernable dot in the distance. "... that's from before the war? Who the hell are these guys?"
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