Astra watched with interest as Shamus wrote the note. She would have thought that for the Shuunai to use paper would be a bit masochistic, but thought better of saying that out loud though. "Believe me, my people know enough about misfortune to last an eternity." she said, accepting the note. She was mildly surprised the Shuunai would share this information. "I am sure our peoples will see eye to eye. We Faira are builders, not warmongers. And it's a pleasure to make you an acquaintance." Astra said as she saw the CMO out.

Once he left she sealed the lab door and brought up the environmental controls, raising the temperature as high as it would go. The 150°C were still pitiful, considering the average temperature on their homeworld was around 300, but it was still better than before. Not only did the heaters in her suit have to do much less work, but she could also see much better. Time to get to work.

Astra wouldn't admit it, but she was smitten by the human FTL method. For years she has been trying to figure out how to make Faira ships capable of jumping anywhere rather than along predetermined natural paths, but she was coming up short. The best her people could muster was the introduction of intrasystem jump gates that allowed some ships not meant to leave their home nebula to travel without their own, expensive subspace drive. She absolutely had to get her hands on it's blueprints on this trip, as the predictable travel paths of their ships were too much of a weakness if the current conflict with the Rahq escalated to full scale war. Even the humans, once they noticed, silently built an outpost near the Nebula-Sol jump node. They claimed it was a diplomatic station for contact between their own species, but it's escort and capacity suggested it was more of a staging area and fortress. On the other hand she could hardly blame humanity for being careful - the Faira took their own measures, stationing remote beam cannons and one of their [url=http://p3d.in/Il4cD]destroyers[/url] on the other side.

She took a seat and started flipping through files on her computer, trying to familiarize herself with human powerplants as she wanted to integrate the shield generator as quickly as possible. Astra was just about to call the fighter pilot and ask if she had time to see her, but her thoughts were interrupted by the intercom coming to life and playing a conversation between the captain and the pirate vessel. Quickly remembering their objective, she decided to try something, instructing the AI to keep a channel to the enemy ship open and messaging the captain about her attempt:

[i]
Captain, I will try to get a look into the enemy's computers. If they interfaced the probe and downloaded it's data, I may be able to extract the information we seek without the need to retrieve the probe itself. If you can, keep them talking.
[/i]

As she sent the message, she quickly found one of the Faira electronic warfare intelligence programs and started transmitting it over to the pirate frigate, hoping it would finish before they closed the channel from the other side.