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While you wanted to check in the ensigns, as they were almost all new crewmembers, you realized that now probably wasn’t the best time for one-to-one checkups. You were in hostile territory, so everyone was on high alert and would be focusing on their jobs. Distracting people by going around and individually checking up on them not only took them away from valuable work, but it could also give the impression that you didn’t trust them to do their jobs without oversight.
Besides, spending too long ambling around was making you feel a bit uneasy. You’re a commander for christ’s sake, your job is to command.
As such, you did a whistle-stop tour of the bridge, checking in with everyone individually, and simply asking if they were fine, and if they’d had a break already. Thankfully, everyone was fine, and had either just come back from their lunch breaks or were just about to go and take them.
At least, that was until you reached Lieutenant Helena, who was busy staring at a series of readouts on her display. She only reacted to your presence when you spoke from just over her shoulder. “How are you doing lieutenant?”
“I’m fine sir, thanks.” The lieutenant absently replied, paying your question only a tiny amount of attention as she focused on the readout in front of her. Instead, she kept her focus on the screen as she drew your attention to it. “Hey, sir. What do you make of this?”
“That’s a scan of a part of the system with passive sensors, it looks like a mix of optical captures and radiological readings. I think it may be the system’s oort cloud?” You described the readings and images on the sensor operator’s screen. The oort cloud -the cloud of leftover dust and debris from before the
system formed- was fairly thin and relatively barren. Of course, the lack of interest in the system by the UEG meant that there was little to no data on the cloud, but given how barren the rest of the system was it was estimated that there probably wasn’t anything larger than an asteroid out there.
“Ok, now have a look at these two readings.” Helena replied as she brought up two largely identical readings, taken a few nanoseconds apart. The first one was fairly benign, with nothing standing out, but the second one had two specific spikes that the lieutenant pointed out. “There’s a burst of alpha and beta radiation here and here, only a few nanoseconds apart.”
You connected the dots pretty quickly, as there were only a handful of things that could produce spikes like that, and only one that would make a sensor operator worried. “Do you think they’re from a slipspace translation?”
>Cont
