The Oather capital system of Ranquil was a possibility, but it was too far away by her judgment. Certainly, it would have the best facilities somewhere—the failure of the recon forces to locate their chief shipyard facility was something that still greatly irked her—but the ship that had dealt with Aymes hadn’t needed such extensive facilities.

The hard part was crossing out all the known Drasin-devastated systems, since some of those had been struck after the observer units were forced to pull back due to increased Oather fleet movement.

“Here,” she said finally. “Make for the Oather system of Por-Que.”

“As you command, Navarch.”

Misrem settled in as the orders went out to the squadron. Getting all the ships moving in the same direction sometimes seemed to be the most difficult part of running such a group, but she’d learned a long time before that the secret to such a feat was simply finding people you trusted to do the hard work—but only a certain level of trust. No one trusted too easily if they were wise, as there were always up-and-coming officers looking for an open promotion slot.

The Third Reconnaissance squadron was under power a short time later, warping space and time as they left the scene of the Piar Cohn’s defeat. As they cleared the influence of the local star, the ships seemed to twist and stretch briefly before they vanished away into the great black ether.

►►►

Odysseus Task Force, Kepler 571

► “Nothing.”

Eric grimaced. He was running out of leads that made sense.

Oh, they had an entire database filled with what appeared to be ancient installations, thereby giving him a near endless string of “leads,” but he needed one that made sense with the last known vector of the Imperial ship. He and his crew needed to have some concept of what Imperial territory included, but at the moment they had no real ideas at all.

Worse, Kepler 571 didn’t appear to have any sort of precursor facility. That was a problem of a very different sort, and one that didn’t bode well for Captain Passer’s mission. If this lead was false, or if someone else had raided the site to the bedrock, so to speak, that might mean the others would be in a similar state.

Which would make Passer’s mission a game of Whac-a-Mole without the decency of actually having a visible target.

Well, that wasn’t his headache for the moment, and for that, at least, Eric thought he should be grateful.

“There should be some sign,” Eric said as he pored over the data that was still being funneled to the Odysseus from the combined scanners of the entire task force. “The data crystal clearly indicated something was here.”

“Yes sir, but there was no date stamp, so to speak, associated with those files . . . and we know that the heliobeam facility was mobile.”