“Passive sensors are picking up a disturbance on the fourth planet,” Roberts said.

Weston could understand that; passive sensors were just picking up data from no less than twelve hours earlier. They’d have to wait for the tachyon generators to regain a charge before they’d get anything current. Even so, information from twelve hours ago might explain some piece of the puzzle they were unraveling. “Correlate and send it to my station, Commander.”

“Aye, Captain.” Roberts flipped over a manual control panel and typed in a quick command, supplementing the vocal orders that he snapped over his induction microphone.

Weston flipped open his own display screen and wished, not for the first time, that the holographic displays had been cleared for bridge use. Unfortunately, the displays were deemed potentially unstable and were not approved for use in critical systems. It was a decision that Weston approved, but he still felt a pang of loss as he stared at the fourteen-inch screen and missed the room-sized equivalent that his simple desk system provided.

Lt. Michelle Winger was the Odyssey’s go-to girl when it came to the array of long-range sensors that studded nearly every exterior surface of the big ship, but just now, she scowled as she scanned the data stream and wished that she’d been able to hijack the same three arrays she had used earlier. The information pouring in from her long-range array was interesting, but correlating data across multiple frequencies was her forte.

Whoa. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted something. What the hell is this?

Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she cursed the power drain that transition caused. As the data began to coalesce into something resembling a picture, she shot a glance to one side to check the power display.

Bridge systems had full priority, with weapons and navigation following right behind. But her systems were on the list, too, and the reactors were providing enough power that she would be fully online in a couple minutes, at most. In the meantime, all her scanners were already up and functioning perfectly, so she would have to make do with the basic interface for another hundred seconds or so.

“Commander!” she spoke up, a little louder than she’d intended. “I’m sending over my initial findings to you!”

A rap of her fingers across the board sent the data packet flashing across the fiber to Commander Roberts’s station. Only after it was gone did she let out a breath she’d barely been aware of holding, her eyes floating back across her screen to where the data was still highlighted.

A moment later, the rest of her interface touchpads lit up as power was fully restored, snapping Winger out of her daze as she returned to work in full form.

“High-energy discharges?” Weston questioned as he looked at the data Roberts had redirected to his attention. He noticed something familiar in the information and looked up with a cocked eyebrow. “Weapons?”