The Martial Unity

Soon enough, five days passed.

"Target approaching."

"Initiating deactivation of superluminal travel."

"Preparing deactivation of negatron pumps."

"Calibrating space-time field generator."

"Activating inertial stabilizers."

"Preparing stealth systems."

The command room grew more active as a series of virtual reports and commands flew across the crew, each seated at their terminals with alert expressions.

A large hologram of a screen at the glass window in the front of the command room featured a zoomed-in star map of the destination star system. The pointer representing the Stellarch on the map rapidly grew closer and closer.

Until it arrived.

"Deactivate superluminal travel," Captain Sherman, one of the captains of the three teams of crews aboard the ship, commanded with a calm tone of voice.

WHOOSH

Suddenly, the view of outer space outside the window of the Stellarch changed from the flood of flashing streaks into that of ordinary space once more.

It featured a solar system with a bright blue star at the center, as they had known it would. Beyond that, they also knew that it was something that they would have to deal with.

The solar system had a ring of asteroids that revolved around the star at its outskirts, while a distinct pink dot in the sky shone brighter than the stars of the cosmos.

"Stealth systems active."

"Energy consumption rate at ten percent."

"Conducting immediate proximity danger and threat analyses."

"Remain on standby," Captain Sherman instructed before turning behind towards the five owners of EsoQuest Solutions in their respective seats behind that of the captain's seat at the top of the helm.

"We have arrived, as you can see."

The five of them had been eagerly awaiting arrival at the target destination for some time now, having worn the respective exosuits that they had prepared for the operation, entirely rested and prepared for immediate action, if that was required.

Ria stood up with immersed concentration, squinting her eyes as she stared at the distinct pink dot in the distance.

It was, of course, Pinky. Despite being in the same solar system, the planet was so far away that it was similar to the countless other stars painted across the canvas of the cosmos.

But she wasn't merely admiring the planet from a distance.

She was observing it with her senses.

Her special sense of the cosmic virus.

She didn't say it out loud, but she conveyed her thoughts to her teammates with nonverbal communication.

"There's no doubt about it," she told them silently. "This world is infected."

She could feel the eerie, disgusting presence of the virus within the planet, as if gazing at a person with a severe fever and being able to see the flu within their body.

It was a sickness.

One that she wanted to exorcise from the world, at all costs.

As they slowly drew closer and closer, she felt increasingly queasy herself, as if she had caught the flu. Consulting the data on her vitals from her exosuit with her neural inlay revealed that her body temperature was entirely normal.

She couldn't tell if the sensation was truly in her head or if it had something to do with her so-called relationship with the universe.

Regardless, it didn't change what they had to do in the solar system.

"We have detected probes of human origin in this solar system, Master Ria," Captain Sherman remarked as several high-resolution images emerged on the hologram at the front of the command room.

It featured several probes that were identifiably of human origin, conducting routine scans and transmitting that data back to various parties in human civilization.

Like with other more advanced civilizations in the Orion Star Strand, human civilization's influence didn't strictly end at the frontier. There was a layer of absence of actual human presence, but a surveillance apparatus that scanned the environment around human civilization for a dozen or so light-years, ensuring that they weren't caught off-guard by anything.

Of course, EsoQuest Solutions had known about this well ahead of time.

"Conducting analysis to estimate probe models and cybersecurity systems."

"Preparing electronic infiltration phages."

"Preparing synthetic astronomical data assembler."

Modern probes possessed nano wormhole generation systems that involved a milliliter of negatron matter and the energy absorbed from the sun from remote Dyson swarms to fuel the opening of the smallest of wormholes to transmit back the least data available.

If they simply destroyed the probes, then the research labs, observatories, and even the private companies responsible for them would undoubtedly be alerted, and expeditions would be prepared, or other probes would be deployed soon enough.

Even if they were very unlikely to make it in time to realize that there was an infected world before EsoQuest Solutions could sell the information to countless well-pocketed parties, it was still not something that they wanted to do, since it would make them enemies of many groups.

That was why the Stellarch was equipped with much more sophisticated solutions.

The probes deployed to star systems beyond the edge of human civilization were generally composed of older-generation probes created at the start of the Era of Expansion, leaving them much more vulnerable to cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technologies of the Stellarch.

Because the data fed back home was limited by the very minute bandwidth of the nano-wormhole, it was much easier to fake with advanced artificial intelligence. Cutting-edge electronic infiltration technologies could smoothly latch on to the chips within the probes and completely seize control of them and send back home any data they wanted it to send.

There were also probes hidden inside asteroids across the star system from state actors who wanted to keep a quiet eye out in star systems near them. These were generated by fringe frontier polities, similar to the Jakarthar Federation.

They would need to infiltrate those as well.

The Stellarch simply lingered in empty space for a while at maximum stealth as it conducted a painstaking sweep of the star system with its highly developed, cutting-edge passive surveillance systems. It couldn't rely on active systems such as radar or highly invasive electromagnetic scanning, for these would immediately give its presence away. Instead, extremely high-resolution cameras, including the quantum entropy sensor technologies of the Stellarch, simply collected data across the entire solar system to analyze for any hidden presences that weren't immediately visible.

It was only after they confirmed that the solar system was truly devoid of any other dangerous presences that they moved to the next stage.

"Commencing deep-body sweeping scans of Pinky."

The Stellarch set out to do what it had been made for.

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