“Vruahn help?” Ensign Accari spoke up, looking stricken as he realized how inappropriate it was for him to speak without being prompted first.

“We don’t think so, Ensign.” Marcum showed no sign of annoyance at having a junior officer interrupt his stream of consciousness. “One of the things we were able to glean from the Ushin is that the Darshik weren’t just left alone after the initial Phage assault; it seems they had continued contact with them, or it … I still have trouble considering the Phage a singular entity.”

“This makes more and more sense,” Pitt nodded. “The Phage wasn’t omnipotent. What better way to get the lay of local space and have defensible fallback locations than to find a willing partner? If the ‘test’ was to find a species with the traits it wanted in order to use them, then it explains why Blake had never heard of it. The Vruahn may have but they kept all the Colonel Blakes under tight control, so it’s not something they’d likely pass on to him … them.”

Celesta almost smiled at his correction. Like most people who had interacted with Colonel Robert Blake during the war, she had trouble coming to terms with the fact that he was a manufactured copy of an ancient Earth explorer, one of many that the Vruahn had used to try and tame their runaway creation: the Phage. Before coming clean about having created such a devastating lifeform, the Vruahn had been cloning humans to fight the Phage in an attempt to mitigate the harm it was causing. Once it became obvious that holding action wasn’t going to be enough, they stepped up their support of the human-led war.

“Captain Wolfe told me the core mind didn’t die quickly.” Celesta was talking before her brain could stop her mouth. “If there was a Phage unit in contact with the Darshik at the time of its death, it’s possible that it passed on our location to them in its final moments. What if it did that with ten other species, a hundred?”

“Whoa!” Marcum almost shouted and raised both hands. “Let’s throttle back here, Senior Captain … we’ll leave the wild speculation to the eggheads and we’ll do what we do: deal with the immediate military threat. Lieutenant Emerson, write that down as an action item anyway,” he said to his aide, a shapely young officer that was standing conspicuously close to Ensign Accari. “We don’t have to chase that rabbit down the hole ourselves, but we’ll pass on anything of interest.”

“I think it’s probably nothing,” Celesta said, rethinking her comment. “Because if it is then the ‘warning’ we received makes no sense. What are we interfering with?”