“Captain, I think you should take this chance to get some sleep,” Barrett leaned over and whispered. “We’ll need you fresh.” Celesta opened her mouth to argue and then the weight of her exhaustion and the stress of sitting in an occupied system seemed to crush in from all sides. She turned to her XO and nodded once, standing to leave.

“XO, you have the bridge.”

****

Celesta had only slept for a little over three hours, but she felt enormously refreshed as she strode back onto the bridge in a clean uniform and a mug of coffee grasped in her left hand.

“Report!”

“Drones have gone active and the data is just now coming over the Link,” Ensign Accari said. She looked at him suspiciously, but the young officer did appear to be fresh and rested. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to wait until she left the bridge and then just stay on duty.

“How does it look so far and are any of the enemy ships reacting to the active sensor net?” she asked, sitting down and logging into her terminal.

“There are a lot of targets flying in twelve distinct groupings, all flying along the orbit of the Ushin planet,” Accari said. “There also seems to be no reaction to the drones’ high-powered tactical radars. Not even so much as a directed scan.”

“That’s interesting,” Celesta mused. “Keep me updated as we get better resolution on the makeup of those formations. Has there been any word from either the Ushin planet or their ships that were supposed to meet us here?”

“Negative, Captain,” Accari shook his head. “The only thing making noise in this system right now is us.”

Over the next ten hours the bridge crew was in constant contact with the CIC as the drone sensor network Celesta had employed began to gather more details about the enemy formations. They knew there were at least one hundred and nineteen ships, almost four and a half times the number of Terran ships that would be in the fight and more than twice as many as the Ushin had claimed would be in the system.

The high-resolution radar scans were picking out over sixty of the cruiser-class vessels they’d already tangled with, along with a more or less even distribution of what looked like smaller frigates and support craft. The emitted radiation scans of each formation were inconclusive given the range the drones were operating from, but she could see that over two-thirds of the enemy armada was showing signs of active weaponry. So why weren’t they reacting to the drones? They knew from the previous engagements that the Darshik could detect their RF-based sensors, so why weren’t any ships coming out to investigate?