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“We have surfaced in normal space,” Ji-min Bin called.
Brooks rose from his chair, taking in the view of space around them as reality coalesced on the screens.
“Scanning for krahteon emissions . . .” Cenz said. “No krahteons detected.”
There was a slight exhalation of breath from many, Brooks included. “Keep up low-intensity scans – carefully. Just in case we have another sleeping giant.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Recording twelve minor impacts upon the frontal cone,” Bin called. “Very small pieces, likely debris.”
“Just a few new dents for the frontal armor,” Urle commented. “Nothing serious.”
“Automatic interception lasers are firing,” Jaya commented.
On the screen, brief, bright red lines appeared, the navigational lasers on the ship’s towers incinerating small objects flying at them.
“Filter infrared and find me our ship,” Brooks ordered.
A small speck highlighted on the screen, then magnified. It was the Maria’s Cog.
Glints of light from a million pieces of debris danced, glittering like fireflies on a summer’s night.
But the ship herself was a wreck.
She had broken up into at least three major pieces. Areas of the hull showed jagged damage, but other cuts appeared relatively straight, sliced cleanly.
“She definitely got hit by something with a lotta joules,” Ham Sulp messaged. He was not on the bridge, but he was observing all they saw. “Something deep into her.”
“It appears the impact came in through her nose shield and pierced at least seven kilometers through her superstructure,” Jaya said.
“If it pierced the nose cone then it was highly energetic, as Commander Sulp suggests,” Cenz said thoughtfully. “This would be consistent with a projectile launched from a heavy coilgun.”
“High-temperature plasma burns,” Urle noted, highlighting marks on the hull. “The reactor breaches released plasma rings and those are what ripped the ship apart. If not for that, she would have survived the impact, I bet.”
“But who attacked them?” Jaya said. “At the moment that is the most important thing to know. Every weapon leaves traces, and we must find them here. Other than directly IDing an enemy ship, that is our best bet to finding out who did this.”
“Do not jump to conclusions before further assessment of data,” Cutter said. “Deeper scans will reveal true cause of damage.”
Brooks found his eyes following the lines of the ship, feeling a hurt to see her so broken. Brooks knew her type well – the Maria’s Cog had never been a beautiful vessel in the traditional sense. But ships like her were the lifeblood of distant worlds and stations, the unrecognized heroes of a star-faring civilization.
Now cut apart like a carcass on a chopping block.
The glints of light from the debris hinted at the dangers lurking around her. They could be a piece of hull, radioactive waste, food, someone’s tablet. Or even a body itself, frozen solid in space. At high enough speed any one of those could cause catastrophic damage if it hit the right place.
They had to proceed with caution.
“What are our sensor sweeps finding?” Brooks asked.
“We are detecting no other large vessels,” Cenz said.
“Find all likely locations they could be hiding from our sensors,” Jaya said. “Behind astronomical objects, even in a star’s light.”
“This area contains seven long-term monitoring probes,” Cenz said. “I am querying them all, but the nearest two report that they have had no view of any vessel besides the Maria’s Cog in the last 248 days. Their view, while not complete, covers many nearby plausible objects that could be screening an enemy vessel. And to be quite honest; we are in interstellar space. There is not much around that could serve as cover.”
Jaya looked even more displeased by that; she did not speak, thinking.
Brooks understood why she’d be so disquieted. She had to view situations through the lens of how they might threaten the ship and her crew, and it did seem obvious that this was an intentional attack.
But the lack of enemy was strong evidence against. To hide from the sensors of the monitoring probes was not something that could be done easily; with the multiple reactors any zerospace-capable vessel must possess, the amount of IR they put out was like a beacon.
“Captain,” Cenz said. “There are nearly one hundred lifepods with active signals.”
“We need to begin recovery operations,” Kai said, turning her chair to face Brooks. “I have all Response Teams on standby. We await your orders, Captain.”
“Stars and rads, it’s going to be hard to extract them from that mess,” Sulp messaged.
“Begin deploying rescue drones first,” Brooks ordered.
Jaya frowned, but did not object. Prioritizing the rescue drones meant the Craton had much less protection or ability to detect incoming threats for a time. If an enemy had caused the destruction of the Maria’s Cog, they would be vulnerable.
But the evidence was still unclear, no enemy was near. If somehow they had learned to hide themselves so completely that they were not detectable by the probes or the Craton, then it hardly mattered what precautions they took. They would be outclassed to such a degree that resistance would be impossible.
Brooks continued. “Get signals on all lifepods and search for any that may have gone dark, just in case. Have secondary comm centers one and two begin actively pinging those that are signaling, I want to know their status so we can start rescue triage. And find out everything you can from them about what happened to the ship.”
He frowned, studying the separating parts of the Maria’s Cog again, still slowly drifting away from each other.
“I want Science using secondary sensors to find those pods – without an obvious current danger we want to close our window of vulnerability and get them out of there as soon as possible. Engineering, you have primary sensor arrays. Start your own investigation, see if you can ascertain what destroyed the vessel. Even more than rescue, we need to know if this was an attack or an accident – if there’s a threat, it goes beyond the fates of the Maria’s Cog‘s crew and even our ship. The Union needs to know if we’ve got an enemy in our midst. I want your preliminary answer in twenty minutes.”
He sighed. “And until we can rule out an attack, get the combat drones launching as soon as the rescue ones are out. At the very least we’ll need them to intercept that debris. Just . . .”
He hesitated, staring again.
“Try not to shoot the bodies unless you have to. I want to recover everyone we can. The living and the dead.”
Other Terrestrial 
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