“No damage, no casualties, Captain,” Accari read off his master status display. “Engineering is requesting we secure from powered flight mode until they’ve had time to inspect the warp drive.”

“Tell Commander Graham he has ninety minutes and then we’re underway whether he’s finished or not,” Celesta said.

“Aye, ma’am.” Accari pulled his headset back up and began speaking into it.

“How did you know?” Barrett breathed.

“Lucky guess,” Celesta said. “The two trailing ships either left the system or dropped back to give themselves a greater degree of accuracy to try and appear close behind us. Since Agent Uba said they were trying to capture Terran ships, and we hadn’t shown ourselves to be much of a threat, it had to be the latter.”

“That’s not really a lucky guess, ma’am, but whatever you call it you just saved our ass again.” Barrett was still speaking quietly amid the chaos created by a short warp flight on a drive that was not designed to perform such a maneuver. Celesta ignored the well-meaning compliment, still physically ill over the loss of at least two ships under her command.

“Listen up!” she called loudly. “That time limit isn’t just for Engineering. Get with your backshops and get the Icarus checked out stem to stern … we have no idea what sensor capabilities the enemy might have so we need to be underway as quickly as possible.”

“I can’t believe this is happening again,” Ellison said as he let his headset slip down around his neck.

Celesta opened her mouth to chastise him, but he’d said it to himself and, honestly, she shared the sentiment. Not even a decade of peace and in the middle of major political upheaval it looked like they had a new alien threat to deal with. She fervently hoped the Prowler, with its extensive sensor capability, was well on its way back to New Sierra with the record of the engagement for CENTCOM to view.

****

“The Icarus made an emergency warp jump out of the system.” The sensor operator turned in his seat. “That’s the last taskforce ship to get clear.”

“Not all got clear,” Agent Uba said, pacing the cramped bridge of the CIS Prowler. He’d had to pull rank and, against the Prowler captain’s protests, had ordered them to stay on the edge of the Xi’an System with stealth protocols enabled. The small ship was now sitting just inside the orbit of the outermost planet, just a dark hole in space, her passive sensors soaking in and cataloging every detail, every emission.