From the nav data the CIS had provided, she had decided to transition in as far away as she could and stay cold for as long as possible. The Icarus wasn’t a Prowler and the destroyer didn’t run very cold when she was underway. She had again cursed the bad luck of losing the damn RDS pod, something that would have allowed them to get in close with minimal risk of detection, and had her people working on a practical plan to allow them to capture the much-needed intel without risking the ship. While it was true they needed to know as much about the Darshik, and apparently the Ushin, as possible, she wasn’t about to risk the Icarus or her crew doing something foolish like trying to play spy with a mainline warship.

“Maintaining general quarters; we need to rotate watches soon,” Celesta said to her XO. “We may have come in undetected or they could be sending an intercept for us right now. With the passives it’s just too difficult to tell. Either way we need to rest the crew.”

“I’ll handle it, Captain,” Barrett assured her. Celesta nodded her thanks and went back to staring at the threat board as the tactical computer struggled to identify anything from the small bit of light and radiation captured by the passive array. She needed to come up with something drastic or the entire trip would have been for nothing. With one final look around the bridge, she handed over command to her executive officer and went for a quick meal in the wardroom, hoping against hope that the passive scans would turn up something interesting over the next few hours.

****

“We’re sure about this?” Celesta could hardly believe what she was being told.

“This is the one thing in this system the tactical computer has a very specific model for,” Lieutenant Commander Adler nodded. “There’s a Phage Super Alpha sitting down in that system.”

The Super Alpha was the first type of combat unit the Phage had sent against humans in the first probes before the war cranked up in earnest. Although it was still connected to the hive, or the “core mind,” it had a much larger neural mass than the standard Alphas and a bigger profile. Their shapes were all somewhat irregular due to the growing process the Phage used when producing them, but the sheer mass and rough shape wouldn’t have been something the computer would have mistaken for something else. The thermal signature of the object was also an identical match for a Super Alpha that wasn’t trying to hide. With a ninety-seven-percent probability the computer had picked up on one of the Phage’s most devastating combat units sitting down in a Darshik star system.