Lonetrek region — Okela constellation
Tsuguwa system
6 January YC 127
The probe scanner showed an anomaly which was not there when I first scanned down Guristas Watch; it indicated a presence of Guristas Refuge base in the system.
“Is it as well-guarded as the Watch?” I asked Aura.
Aura did a quick research and replied, “It doesn’t have a DED rating but Eve Uni rates it as tier 3. According to the academics, we shouldn’t expect swarms of frigates or anything stronger than a destroyer. Not a Watch, but a good opportunity to test our new fit.”
I nodded, “Good idea,” and warped to the Guristas Refuge location.

I landed on grid 15 clicks away from two defense batteries and two frigates which guarded the base. All the hostiles immediately told me that I was officially unwelcome in their neck of the woods by targeting Merimetso. I turned on the kinetic shield hardener and the afterburner and started building distance between my destroyer and the pirates, at the same time targeting them. The light missile battery managed to hit me with two Scourge missiles reducing my shield by 4% but that was all the damage that I suffered. Soon I was out of their reach, and the battle became one-sided. Even with the reduced 45-km targeting distance I was safely out of the batteries’s and frigates’ firing range, and it was just the matter of time before the base was illuminated by four explosions.


The pirates did send reinforcements, but either I was lucky that they didn’t have significant forces nearby, or they didn’t want to commit them to the defence of an inconsequential base. Anyway, the three wings they deployed had a couple of frigates and the same number of destroyers apiece, and every wave came a few minutes after the previous one, giving me time to deal with each wing separately. Even if Guristas sent them all together, they wouldn’t have a single chance against me as I was orbiting outside their firing range. Two Pithi Despoilers made a spirited but unsuccessful attempt to jam my sensors, and that was their swan-song.


After the battle I inspected the log and frowned, “Those light Scourge missiles still hurt. If they can apply 40-50 HP damage each despite my resistance, I won’t last long against a larger fleet.”
“The good news is that they can’t reach you once you’ve got away from them,” said Aura. “The shield should hold while you are building the distance,” then she looked at the overview and asked, “By the way, are you going to leave those bunkers waiting for the next generation of pirates?”
“No, those dogs will have to build new kennels for themselves,” I chuckled and initiated structure bashing.
To my disappointment the bunkers did not drop any loot at all, so the the only enjoyment I extracted from them was purely esthetic, as I watched them explode. I was about to warp out when Aura stopped me.
“What’s that?” she asked with a frown.
“What’s what?” I asked, perplexed.
“There was a flash on the probe scanner as if an anomaly appeared in the system. It was visible just for a second, and now it’s gone.”
“Maybe it was a pirate base which was destroyed?” I suggested.
“No, the probe scanner does not pick up explosions. It’s possible, however, that the base leaked emissions for a brief period of time just when I was looking at the scanner.”
“Would those details be available in the logs?”
“Let me check,” said Aura and froze.
After a few seconds her image came back to life and she shook her head, “Not in the flight logs. The raw data may still be in the system logs though.”
“Let’s check the system logs then.”
Aura nodded, froze for a split second and then an error message flashed on the screen.
Access denied
“Argh!” exclaimed Aura in frustration, “I don’t have admin access,” then she looked at me and pursed her lips thoughtfully, “but you should.”
I shrugged my shoulders, “If you say so. I never tried.”
“Are you going to die wondering?” teased Aura and displayed a shell script on the screen, “Here you are. Go to the command line interface under your account and run this code.”
I looked at it suspiciously, “I hope it won’t break anything.”
“Nah, it’s read-only,” said Aura, dismissing my concerns.
I wasn’t a shell script guru but even to my untrained eye the commands looked innocuous. There was only one way to check, so I copied the text to the shell window and commanded the capsule computer to execute it. The screen was immediately flooded with a wall of binary data which made zero sense to me.
“Yippee!” cried Aura, “It worked!”
“Erm… you had doubts?”
“Just… the small ones, you know, tiny,” she said hastily, and added, “Okay, now give me some time to decipher all these ones and zeroes, and make them human-readable.”
Aura froze for a few moments, then unfroze with a befuddled expression, then froze again. This sequence repeated several times, each iteration producing a deeper state of confusion on Aura’s face. Finally, she emerged from her activity and looked at me in utter bewilderment.
“Anything wrong?” I asked cautiously.
“Everything is wrong!” exclaimed Aura rotating her eyes wildly, “It just can’t be!”
“What can’t be?” I probed gently, doing my best impression of a loony doctor interviewing a particularly unruly patient.
“The coordinates! I’ve found the coordinates of that anomaly and they are just wrong. They are in Inari system!”
I gasped, “In Inari? Are you sure? Maybe you just decoded the data incorrectly?”
“No, I used the same method for all signatures and anomalies and they all appear in Tsuguwa, all except that one! ”
“Is it possible that the scanner really picked up an emission from an anomaly in Inari?”
Aura rolled her eyes, “Vlad, don’t be silly. Our scanner is not that sensitive.”
I pondered for a while and said, “And what if it was not a random emission but a targeted tight-beam transmission from another pirate base to this one?”
Aura’s eyes remained in the rolled position, “Inari is five light years away but the signal was as strong as if it came from this system. To achieve such transmission strength you need to get together a squadron of Titans loaded with ammo to the rafters, and detonate them all simultaneously. Then you must convert all that energy into a directed modulated signal. I would really like to see such technology! Even if it existed, why would Guristas send a message which would take five years to arrive. For all I know, this Refuge base did not exist five years ago. Anyway, if they can’t use FTL comms, it is much faster to deliver information by a ship with a warp drive.”
Something clicked in my mind, “Wait a minute… If you can send an object through a warp tunnel, why can’t you send a transmission beam through it?”
Aura waved her hand irritably, “Because it will only reach the stargate to which the ship jumps.”
“No, forget about the ship. The warp drives and the stargates operate on the same principle – they create a warp tunnel through which you can travel. What if you had a stationary mini-gate which generated a warp tunnel through which you sent not a ship but just a radio transmission?”
“You mean, directly from Inari to Tsuguwa? It would take a massive amount of energy.”
“Would it?” I wondered, “That energy is required to keep the tunnel stable while a heavy object moves through it. The heavier the object, the more energy you need. And what if that object was as light as… light, if you know what I mean?”
Aura chewed her lip, “Maybe… possibly… but we will never know for sure unless we find that transmitter.”
I gave Aura a meaningful look, “And now we know where to find it. Shall we?”