“Afternoon Captain,” Gabrielle Camargo said as she greeted both her captain and Adelinde Gantzmann at the turbolift. “Turns out, it only takes ten minutes for one situation to turn into two.” She then held out a hand to direct the two women towards the mission operations bay at the back of the bridge.

Ten minutes had given the captain, fresh from her defeat in the Top Gun, time to return to her quarters and change into her uniform. And ten minutes for Gabrielle to get the bridge in order and let everyone get the discussion from watching the match out of their systems. But on a ship stuck at impulse in essentially the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t much need for a full bridge crew most of the time.

“So, a good news, bad news situation?” the captain asked.

Gabrielle smiled and rolled her head side to side briefly. “More interesting news, helpful news,” she said as she fell into step beside Tikva. “Helpful news first though. Looks like our distress call hit one of the Cardassian communications relays and got passed along so it hit DS47 quicker than we expected.”

“What’s the response?”

“Rather mundane update,” answered LtJG Samantha Michaels, already present in the bay. In fact, she was the only person present as they descended the two steps down. “One moment ma’am.” She was standing by the large screen against the back wall and tapped on a few controls onscreen, bringing up the reply message.

The screen filled with the face of an Andorian man, late middle age, with a commodore’s pip on his collar. Commodore Aben Ch’Thobar, the actual commander of DS47, looked to be in station ops when the message was recorded. “Atlantis, message received. Glad to hear all are well and safe. I’ve been informed that a ship has departed Beta Antares with replacement parts and a crew to assist. By the time you receive this, they should have cleared the Badlands and assuming no further issues will have departed DS47 for your location. Unsure what class, will send the expected arrival time when I can. DS47 out.”

“So, two weeks minimum I guess before we can get out of here,” Tikva said with a smile. “But more like three or four. Right, guessing that was the helpful news, so what’s the interesting news?”

“Interesting, problematic…” Gabriella shrugged, then nodded to Sam, who brought up a system map of the star system they were approaching. The ships in the race were both highlighted, so close to the system’s largest gas giant. A few blue specks around indicated Atlantis’ probes, deployed to survey as much of the system as they could without getting too close to the natives. And then there was a third blip in orbit of the populated world.

“So, the Conglomerate do have a ship in the race,” Gantzmann commented. “Bit late though, yes?”

“Oh, that’s not the interesting development,” Camargo said. “We were just finally able to identify where it was and have a probe watching it now.” She stepped up to the monitor on the opposite side from Sam and tapped it as well. A window popped into existence with a simple graph – time along the x-axis, and electromagnetic flux along the y-axis. While the line was jagged, it was mostly even save for three large spikes all within ten minutes of each other, all of about the same intensity.

“Okay, that graph Gabs isn’t terribly helpful,” Tikva said, her brow furrowing. “Could be anything. What window of the EM spectrum are those flux spikes occurring?”

“Radio in a sub-meter range. And the flux was awfully collimated when it passed over us.” She brought up an analysis of the flux in another window once more. “Someone on that planet lit us up with ranging radar.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” Gantzmann spoke up. “They’d have to know we’re even out here to even consider ranging us and stumbling upon us optically is…improbable.”

“But not impossible,” Sam countered. “Sorry ma’am, but it’s technically possible.”

“Granted,” Gantzmann conceded. “But three pulses spaced apart like that?”

“Early astronomers might do such,” Gabs answered. “Takes a few hours for a response, you get three returns in quick succession versus waiting for one. And yes, our shields absorbed the whole thing like they’re supposed to when undertaking pre-warp observation work, so they won’t get a return.”

Tikva hummed a moment, mouth pursed to one side in thought. “But someone down there still thought it worthwhile to aim radar in our direction. And in a few hours, they’ll get no returns and be really confused. And it’s not like we can reposition rapidly because we don’t have a warp drive.”

“There is also a small matter of who sent the radar pulses out,” Sam added. “The probe we’ve managed to get into orbit of the planet, called Qal by the locals by the way, has managed to map all installations we think capable of such a radar pulse. Bit of math, there’s only two sites that could have sent the pulses and both of them are in the Conglomerate.”

“Nothing else on Qal could have reasonably done it?” Tikva asked.

“Time they would have had to send a lightspeed pulse out and planetary rotation only allow for two sites to be responsible. Everything else would have been beyond the horizon.” Sam brought up a planetary map to emphasize her point. “There’s just nothing else down there.”

“Just the Conglomerate?” Tikva asked, looking between Gabs and Sam, both women nodding in the affirmative. “Have we got eyes on their ship?”

“Yes and no,” Sam answered. “It’s in a scaffold at the Conglomerate’s space station. Pretty well wrapped up to stop the Kinship or Pact taking a look at it. We did spot a crew going up to the station a few days ago and they have also sent up two large supply ships that our probe was able to scan – deuterium by the tanker load.”

“Deuterium?” Gantzmann asked. “No chemical rocket, or a fusion rocket for that matter, is going to let them catch up with the Kinship or Pact ships without killing the crews.”

“If used as reactant mass yes, but if used for reactor fuel, it’s ideal for a fusion reactor and an attached impulse engine.” Tikva stood there, staring at the display for a moment longer, her head tilted to one side. “But a good impulse engine comes after…” She trailed off, then started to grin. “Oh, that’s clever. That’s real clever.”

“Ma’am?” asked Gabrielle.

“If you can’t brute force a win in a race, what would you do?” Tikva asked in response.

“Smarter not harder,” Gabrielle answered. “Try and come up with some clever solution to the…oh.”

“Uh, can I get clued in please?” Sam asked.

“We might want to crack out the first contact protocols and give them a read-over,” Tikva said to Samantha. “We’re about to have company I suspect.”