The Alexanderov Federation
Book 1 The Grendarl War

Part Five - The Discovery

As the radiation from the explosion quickly decayed into harmless sub-particles and shortly vanished almost entirely, the Bumblebee's crew was not just sitting around admiring their handiwork. Lewis and Turley continued their use only of passive detection devices, but they stepped up their efforts to find something. Although they would almost surely have no idea what had happened, if another ship or any sensor platforms were in-system, they could not possibly miss the radiation event from the ambush. So Lewis was looking for any sort of communication traffic from ships yet undetected discussing or reporting the unexpected burst of radiation, but detected nothing at all. After a half hour of this, she reported in. "Sir, I'm detecting absolutely no communications traffic. Either they know it wasn't an accident and are keeping silent to avoid tipping their hands, or there's nothing here."

Goodman glanced at her quickly. "Your opinion on the likelihood of option one?"

"Negligible."

"Turley, any luck spotting sensor platforms?" Grendarl sensor platforms were detected fairly easily if you knew what to look for, but it was still a bit of work to coax that data out of the general hubris and noise of normal space. This was a direct consequence of getting themselves kicked out of the Senate and being at war with their only neighbor over half of the time, for their technology was quickly lagging behind, and soon would be totally obsolete.

"Nothing sir. If they're here, they're inactive sir, and that's about as good as not here at all."

"Unless they turn on while we're in mid-scan."

"Well, there are no guarantees, sir."

Goodman had never been one for taking a long time to make a decision. To make it to a captaincy, you couldn't. Those who were more comfortable leaving their options open until the last minute rarely made it past lieutenant. Goodman was happier when the decision was made and life could go on. So he mulled over his options for less than a second before ordering, "Full sensors, focus on likely spots for inactive platforms first, and if none are found, continue scans and tell me everything about this system."

"Aye sir." Turley worked his boards for a few minutes. Goodman waited patiently, rushing him would only distract him and induce error. After what seemed like hours, but was in reality only 15 minutes, Turley looked up in amazement. "Sir, you're not going to believe this!"

"I'll take that chance, Lieutenant. What have you found?"

"Three planets with extreme biodiversity and mineral richness, all of them with freebies of some sort, two of which are also sweet-spot planets for us!"

"What? Why the slood is it still uncolonized?"

"Well, sir, as you know the Grendarl prefer their worlds a fair bit more humid and with higher gravity than we do. So it made a lot of sense for them to colonize the next one over, which is also rather valuable and is not yellow zone to them, as these worlds are."

"Hmm. OK, what are the bonuses?"

"That, sir, is even more unbelievable. The first planet, in the third orbital position, is a pharmacopeia, the next planet out has ancient artifacts, and the third planet has a magnate civilization of rhea. After that are two gas giants and the asteroid belt we're hiding in now."

"Lewis, we better report this right now. Get a message drone prepped with the sensor logs. I'll record this one personally."

"Aye, sir."

"And go passive again, Turley. If we haven't been detected already no point in advertising."

"Aye, sir."

Unbeknownst to the humans, however the Rrk'g'kreglin had finally re-established contact with another alien race just one year previously. The silicoid emperor Satrag was not a particular fan of the Grendarl, but his distaste for graktoz humans had prompted him to trade cautiously a few trinkets to the Grendarl. One of these was a set of five sensor platforms significantly ahead of what the Grendarl had on their own. Luckily for Goodman, the one local platform had not detected him earlier, and now it was damaged, having been caught within the blast from the exploding transports. Its self-repair systems had managed to re-establish power just in time to catch to launch of the message buoy. It didn't have a clue what it was, but its programming didn't care. It detected a launch of some sort of device in the system and a lack of transports about to make it to the jump point, and that was enough to trigger alarms in its rudimentary AI. It immediately launched a message buoy of its own towards the jump point leading to the main empire of the Grendarl with a mayday. And due to its unfamiliar nature, Turley mistook it for a distant quasar event and ignored it.

Lesson number 2 in 3,000th century English. Slood (originally sYl'Ud) is an expression of disbelief, generally not used in polite society (or what passes for polite society among Grendarl) due to its crude etymology. Graktoz (originally G'aKt's) means honorless, and is a severe insult among Grendarl. It is the closest translation for the actual word Satrag used to describe his nemesis Alexanderov.