Alien probe

Rye sat astride the alien satellite like some hero out of legends. All around, engineers and scientists ran scanners and angled torches as they worked to remove the outer heat plating - but the bunny girl paid them no mind. She’d cracked open what looked like a maintenance hatch, and was busily tracing connections on the instrument panel that’d been revealed.

“First of all, Dusty, good news. It’s not going to blow a hole in the bay or try and weave-jump. No drive, and the fusion reactor’s built for longevity not for power output - it couldn’t detonate if it tried.” She called out over the communicator, her vacsuit microphone only slightly muffling her words.

It’d been the Rabyth who’d insisted they work on the probe in a vacuum. Her rationale was simple enough - they had no idea what, if anything, it’d been exposed to - nor who it had been built by or what the planet of origin was like. The risk of anything from alien viruses to automated traps to just components combusting in the presence of oxygen was way too high for her liking, and so the team she and Meli had assembled worked in the silent void of space, the doors to Sola’s hull hanging open so that the stars could paint a backdrop to their work.

Dustin stood in one of the corridors that encircled the bay, watching the proceedings through the reinforced glass. He’d debated just leaving his partner to it while he captained the ship on it’s flight away from the moon; given they had no idea which jump point they were heading to next however he’d opted to be here, keeping an eye on things. Until they’d figured this probe out, they didn’t have a destination set which meant they were just guessing at their onward journey - although Emely and Defia were apparently working on some Velcan equations to try and figure out a list of potential next stops in the event that the probe refused to give up it’s secrets.

“Alright, I think I’ve gotten a handle on this. Gonna try…” Rye tapped a control. The probe gave a low hum, and part of one of the protrusions rippled like a mirage for a moment. “Yea. We bust up something when we netted it, but the control to toggle cloak is here. This thing wasn’t kicked through a weave-jump like our probes, Dusty. It was deployed from a ship, probably manually activated. Got an idea of a way we can track it back tho… gimmie like, a half-day to double check this thing for any easier options and then a hour or two if I have to go with the hard way.”

In the end, Rye’s hope for an easy option didn’t pan out. The Rabyth woman had emerged from the bay after seven hours, sweat slicking her fur to her skin with a frown on her face. “Gonna shower while Sola finishes melting down that chunk of alloy I just cut,” she said in passing, adding “and no I don’t want company. I’m pissed we gotta track it this way. Go head upstairs, I’ll meet you on the bridge when I don’t smell like something just died in my armpits.”

Dustin did as he was told, and was discussing the implications of cloaking technology on Sola’s defensive plans with Yril’k when the door to the bridge slid open and his bunny girl returned. “Alright, Dusty, Fi-oh, Meli, we need to get the scanners cranked. I don’t have a lead yet, but I’m gonna get ya one real soon,” Rye proclaimed, stomping over to the engineering terminal.

The others watched as she tapped the controls, then followed Rye’s gaze as the Rabyth gestured to the central screen where a molecular analysis was rapidly shifting into a set of distance calculations. “Alright, this is all about alloys. So, ya know… well, Meli probably does, a lot of alloys for stuff like probes are made outside of atmo, right? Makes for a cleaner blend if ya control the oxygen content, and that’s easier to do with free vacuum. But, that means exposure to stellar radiation.” The numbers danced as the bunny girl continued her explanation.

“It’s very, very faint - but we got top of the range sensors here. When the alloy cools, ya can see a trace of any big signals, any major spikes in tiny adjustments in the metal. Once it’s worked it’s harder to see, but if ya heat it back up to a big ol’ ball of molten metal like I just did to that sample, ya can get distance estimates to big enough nearby radiation sources. Like, pulsars, black holes, that kinda thing.” Rye leaned back and scratched behind an ear absent-mindedly. “At least, that’s what I was told when I was learning about metalworking back home. I’m not an expert on stellar math - but there’s your source frequencies and distances. Meli, can you turn that into a map of types? And then, Fi-oh, if you help, I can tweak the sensors to scan and give us a stellar location that’d match?”

The other women nodded, Defia flowing across to help Rye at her console while Meli glanced up at Dustin. “I said I’d be back down to look after the boys soon, husband. Naera’s watching them at the moment, but this should be fun and…” he cut her off before she could continue.

“Take as long as you need, love. I’ll go parent our babies and let Naera make a start on dinner…” glancing back at Rye, he grinned and added “…and I’ll tell her to make something you can eat while you work.”

Dustin was sat rocking Duv’an gently some time later, his younger son steadfastly refusing to join his brother and sister in slumber when the door to the nursery slid open and Aricia stepped in, flanked by Yaerwen and a slightly nervous looking Jaisyl. Trea’k glanced up at the approaching trio and smiled. “It looks like you have been sent people to relieve you, my mate. Go, see if our loves have found us a path to follow. Your offspring will be here once you have a course set.”

Reluctantly, he handed Duv’an over to Yaerwen who tickled the infant delicately under the chin with one of the three stocky digits on her free hand. The infant gurgled contentedly as his father smiled down at him before turning to leave. “Alright, let’s see what the team’s got figured out.”

The bridge was hectic when Dustin arrived, a far cry from the quiet order of the nursery. Junior officers scurried around, starcharts glittered on practically every terminal while the main screen showed a sweeping pattern radiating outward from their current position. “Any luck?” he asked Rye softly, the engineer leaning on one of the railings and biting her lip as she waited to see if her hunch would work out.

“Nothing yet…” she began, before frowning as the screen lit up yet another green dot in the vast spiral of nearby stars. “Which is to say, nothing concrete yet. We’ve found over a dozen possible matches; it’ll take a fair amount of flying to narrow it down. Trouble is, there’s a cluster of stars that are all roughly the right distance from the sources Meli and Defia think the readings line up with. We’re just double checking there’s no other options for the sources before we start trying to narrow it down within that group by using data from other readings.

Dustin frowned. “Other readings?”

From somewhere in front of them, Meli glanced up from her console, her eyes sparkling and her ears twitching into the excitement position. “Yes, husband. If we can narrow it down, we can look at scanner data for the planets in those systems, see which look most likely to support life. Maybe look at the historical data from the Velcan and Human space telescopes, see if we can spot any signal blips that might indicate technology. At least give us a better shot at getting it right first time rather than ‘lets fly to twelve systems and see if there’s anything there’ which could take months.”