“It’s more than we have to go on right now,” Steph said lightly, aware that several eyes on the bridge were now focused on him and Milla.

“Very much so,” Milla mumbled. “I’ve found the files. There is . . . less than I would have expected. Tagging them for you. I’ll see if I can locate more.”

Steph turned to his own screen, noting the new files showing up in his priority queue.

“These should do for the moment, Lieutenant,” he said, getting to work. “Thank you.”

Milla was too deep in her own work to bother replying.

►►►

► Commander Heath listened to the conversation between her two subordinates as she worked on her own analysis of the encounter. The direction the two were taking was interesting but a little outside her specialty. She was trying to extrapolate where the Imperial ship had fled to when it left the system.

She didn’t know whether the ship had attempted countermeasures, but had to assume that they had. Still, even the general direction the ship had vanished in might be a lead she could work with.

Since the invasion, the James Webb telescope had been retired in favor of new systems: the Tyson series. The network wasn’t complete yet, but the stellar cartography database was already being filled with more data than Earth had ever recorded.

Along the vectors she was examining there were multiple stars with a reasonable to high probability of inhabitable planets. The problem was that most of the data they had were based off very early observations made from terrestrial observatories. The Tyson series of space-warping observations platforms were barely six months old, and while they provided nearly infinitely more data, there was one massively sized sky to explore. The vector the Imperials had departed on wasn’t one of the early priorities for deep and intensive scanning.

Still, there are several interesting systems in that general direction, she noted. The Imperial ship had departed the Orion arm and headed deeper into the galaxy toward a quite crowded section along the inner galactic hub. No radio signals or the like, and no sign of any mega- or hyperconstructs. However, it does appear to be a reasonably rich neighborhood . . . speaking in stellar terms, of course.

Unfortunately, she didn’t know what that meant as far as alien cultural interest went. There just wasn’t enough historical data to draw conclusions. What Earth culture considered rich could have no particular value to another society. Hell, there weren’t any historical data on which she could draw, and that meant she was flying blind.

Miram Heath stretched slightly and glanced at the schedule. They’d shortly be breaking orbit and heading to the Forge for repairs.

That would leave them with the better part of a week for everyone to get their pet projects whipped into a shape that might have some value in the very likely event of a rematch with the Imperials.

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 17

IBC Piar Cohn