“Right,” Spectre said, his chin firming up. “Pilot, head for that battle. Stop at twenty AU out and then again at ten. This might just have zero to do with us. But I want to know who was fighting.”
Twenty AU hadn’t given them any information, nor were they learning much at ten AU. The spot where the battle had taken place was still just empty space as far as they could tell. There were still some emissions from the area, but they were faint. And nothing on the electrical band.
“Orders, sir?” the pilot asked.
“Heat levels?” the CO asked.
“We chilled on the outside stops,” the XO replied from damage control. “We’re good for about five hours.”
“Close the position under warp,” the CO said. “Stay away from the center. Pass by at Warp One, five light-seconds up in the elliptic. Tactical, stand by to scan the area visually. I want to see what we can see. Pilot, you laid in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Engage.”
“Aye, aye,” the NCO replied, hitting the warp drive.
The ship began hurtling forward, fast enough that the distant star could be seen to move. The viewer remained focused on the scene of the presumed battle as the ship flew “overhead” relative to the local solar system. They were approaching the system from just short of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, so anything left in the area had better be big.
“Conn, Tactical. Switching main viewer to thermal.”
“Go,” Spectre replied. They were approaching closest point of approach and tactical must have spotted something.
When the screen switched to false color thermal imagery, what Tactical had spotted was obvious. There were large chunks of material, much hotter than the background, floating in space. One looked as if it might have been part of a ship. A very odd ship, but probably about half of a hull.
“Maintain course and speed,” Spectre said. “Tactical, I want full spectrum analysis. Pilot, as soon as we reach one light-minute from the scene of the battle, go to full warp and park it sixty AUs out from the sun.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the pilot said.
“Tactical, Astro, I want a meeting with the full science and command group in the wardroom in one hour,” Spectre said. “It looks as if whatever happened here is over. XO, stand down from Condition One.”
“Does anyone have anything to input that’s not obvious?” the CO asked as soon as the full video was replayed.
The region of space where the presumed battle had taken place was a mess. Bits of ships were littered liberally through the area. But they were so fragmented, it was hard to tell what they really looked like. However, there did seem to be two broad types. Some of the debris had a “hard-edged” look, while other bits were uniformly smoothly curved. There also appeared to be two broad types of material, one based around metals and the other carbon fibers. That was drawn from spectral analysis of smoldering “fires” where material was converting chemically bonded oxygen in slow vacuum fires.
The largest chunk was a vaguely ovoid piece of what must have been a much larger ship. It was forty meters long and wide, more or less. There might be remaining sealed compartments. It was hard to determine in the low-resolution image. One side of the tumbling wreckage had clearly been hull. The other side was…spongy.
“Two species in a space battle,” Lieutenant Fey said. “I’d bet dollars to donuts that the smooth ones are Dreen ships. There’s just an… organic look to them that is what you’d expect from the Dreen. And the spectral numbers from them match the chemical composition of Dreen rhino-tank armor about right. Not perfectly, but very close.”
“I’ve been looking at the particle traces, sir,” Bill said, punching at his laptop. “I think I’ve detected a stream of materials headed outward from the system. There’s a higher level of monatomic oxygen as well as traces of water. I’d say it’s the track of a damaged ship or ships.”
“That’s new information,” the CO said, looking over at Tactical. “Did you get that?”
“I’m not even sure what readings he’s referring to, sir,” the TACO admitted.
“I’ll send it over to you in a minute,” Bill said, not looking up. “You’ve got the numbers; it’s knowing what they mean that matters. There’s always a small background of elements in space. Not much, but it’s there and it can be detected by the way that it interacts with the particles being shoved out by a sun. In this case, there’s a series of higher than normal readings, headed more or less in a line. It’s like the trail of oil left by a damaged ship. We’re going to need to write some code for the tactical computers to start looking for this sort of thing. Heck, it might not even be damage. We sure leak like mad. In fact, we should look for RF emissions from electron spin flips of water components like the hydrogen twenty-one centimeter wavelength line and the hydroxyl radical nineteen centimeter wavelength line. I’ll bet you we leave those behind all over the place. And, they’d be easy, very easy, to detect.” He manipulated the data for a moment, then nodded. “Yep, there they are. Wow. You know, we leave a trail a blind man could follow.”
“Great to hear,” Spectre said grumpily. “But in other news, where’s the damaged ship going?”
“In the general direction of HD 37355, sir,” Bill replied. “That’s a G5 star in the general direction of Earth. Not on a line, mind you, just headed for that general quadrant. It could be headed for Tycho 714-1500-1. The two stars are only about two light-years apart. They’re nearly a binary system. And both are main sequence stars.”
“Which means a higher likelihood of habitable planets,” the CO said, nodding. “Bunch of them around here I noticed.”
“Yes, sir,” Bill replied. “This is part of the Orion local group. It’s a very dense group. Lots of hot sequence stars as well. And more dwarfs than we’d realized. Basically, it’s crowded as hell. We’re not far, at all, from some of the stars of Orion’s Belt.”
“So this is probably a good area for the Dreen to colonize,” the XO pointed out.
“Uh, yes, sir,” Bill admitted.
“Which explains their presence,” the CO said. “But what about this other race? Lieutenant Fey? Any points?”
“Only a quote from the ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates,’ sir,” the lieutenant said. “ ’The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less.’ I’d love to find an ally against the Dreen, sir. But until we find out more about them, I would advise proceeding with caution.”
“And there’s only one way I can think of to find out more,” the CO said distastefully. “We’re going to have to go down there and do some sampling. Agreed?”
“Carefully, sir,” the XO said. “Get close, take a snapshot, closer…”
“Agreed,” the CO said. “Tell the SF guys they’re going to have to take point in this one. They’re the closest we have to a science team.”
“Sir,” Bill interjected. “I think a careful search for survivors, especially this other race, is in order. Keep an eye out for beacons.”
“Agreed,” the CO said. “Let’s get to it.”
“Bingo.”
Harold was happy to be back in the commo shack. Ground pounding was for Marines. He was just as happy to have the ship wrapped back around him. Not to mention being able to stretch out on a cot instead of on the ground.
“What you got, Hal?” the leading PO asked.
“I’m getting a radio signal,” the commo tech said. “Emanating from the area of the battle.”