[i]"The dereliction of a Fleet Command vessel is to be regarded as an extremely urgent affair... Because even the smallest combat vessels are armed with extremely lethal weaponry and/or sensitive content, every effort must be undertaken to ensure that a combat vessel or the weaponry, technology, or informatics aboard such a vessel do not fall into the wrong hands. In the event of the capture or dereliction of a Fleet Command starship, the OpCode Designation "Wayward Trident" is to be utilized. Such designation provides for the mobilization of all available naval assets to mitigate and ultimately neutralize any potential or perceived risk."[/i]

- Excerpt from the Eosian Fleet Command Officer's Handbook, Volume 3

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[i]Yūrei[/i] drifted silently through the endless darkness of interstellar space. Light years from the glow of the nearest sun, her multifaceted, polygonal hull melted seamlessly with the void. Only the occasional flash of the strobe beacons scattered across her arrowhead-esque form or the glow of interior lighting of her bridge window gave any visible indication of her existence. Similarly, one would be hard pressed to detect her with all but the most sophisticated sensor arrays; as a standard Preamble-class stealth corvette, [i]Yūrei's[/i] angular hull had been engineered to absorb and scatter radio pulses. In this remote and empty tract of space, [i]Yūrei[/i] was nearly invisible - a ghost lurking in the emptiness.

Underneath the [i]Yūrei's[/i] radio-dampening skin, Captain Hirnschall floated across the bridge, peering over the shoulders of the officers strapped into the seats of their terminals. He looked over the holoscreens of the crew as he drifted by, supervising their work as they diligently monitored the vessel's suite of ultra-sensitive sensors. He reached out to the backrest of one seat to halt his weightless flight across the bridge upon seeing something disagreeable on the screen of one of his greener crewmembers.

"Are you checking the KR array, ensign?" Hirnschall asked.

"Oh," the eyes of the technician widened upon hearing the captain's voice behind him. "N-no, sir. I'll do that now." The ensign's fingers flew across a holographic keypad suspended just beneath his palms and the screen refreshed with data points from a new sensor feed.

"Cycle through [i]all[/i] of the K-series sensors at regular intervals." Hirnschall reminded. "I need eyes on every sensor feed every four minutes." With that, the corvette's captain shoved off the ensign's seat and launched himself back through the air.

Even if his crew carried out their duties flawlessly and didn't miss a single cycle, Hirnschall knew that it would almost certainly not amount to anything. In spite of keeping the artificial gravity off to minimize the ship's energy signature, going out to remote space to avoid the interference of stars, and all the other measures and precautions, the [i]Yūrei's[/i] mission was almost impossible. Finding the [i]Nemesis[/i] was like trying to find a needle in a haystack 500 light years across with the expectation that the needle is doing everything in its power to avoid being found.

Almost impossible, without question, but the possibility of getting a whiff of the [i]Nemesis[/i] was still higher than one might initially expect. Humans had learned from the Vorqhul that the speed of light was not the end-all, be-all speed limit to the universe as they had believed for centuries. Humanity's alien foe had developed technologies capable of detecting exotic energies and particles that sent ripples through space and time that could be detected nigh-instantaneously. Using such techniques, an event that would take an observer 10 years to detect at the speed of light might be detected in minutes by observing such phantom energies. Thanks in large part to the treasure trove of Vorqhul technologies captured by Admiral Vranas from the [i]Trojan[/i], mankind had been able to crudely replicate the machines that allowed the Vorqhul to see and hear at superluminal speeds. Curiously enough, it might be the very technologies that Admiral Vranas recovered that amount to his undoing.

"I've got something!" A senior officer reported across the bridge. Captain Hirnschall immediately threw an arm out at an ensign's seat to halt his drift and directed his attention to the crewmember who had just spoken.

"Show me," the captain urgently commanded, "sync your feed with the main screen."

The officer did as commanded, and the main holoscreen at the front of the corvette's bridge refreshed and populated with a quivering graph display that showed rhythmic pulses that spiked up the graph's Y-axis at one second intervals.

"What sensor array is that coming off of?"

"Excuse me, sir," another officer interrupted, "but I'm picking up a similar sinusoid pulse on the K-alpha array. Signature checks out with what I'd expect from our target." Before long, three ensigns were reporting the same phenomenon occurring on their sensor readouts.

"I don't believe it," Hirnschall said under his breath. "That's a transponder; the transponder has been re-activated." The captain's disbelief was contagious. There was no celebration upon that their mission had been accomplished, as no one was yet satisfied that this was not some sort of error.

"Someone on the [i]Nemesis[/i] made a colossal mistake, accidentally flipped its transponder back on?" An officer mused.

"Not a mistake," Hirnschall corrected as he shoved off from the bridge's floor to the captain's seat at the head of the bridge. "The [i]Nemesis'[/i] crew is too well trained to make a blunder of that magnitude. I suspect we might be seeing a counter-mutiny - a crew member trying to call our attention to its location, something to that effect." Hirnschall threw himself into the captain's seat and pulled the restraints over his chest where the two buckles met with a satisfying metallic clack.

"Attempting to corroborate signal source and obtain a location," a navigations tech announced. "Standby."

On the bridge's primary holoscreen, a map comprised of white pinpricks manifested upon the screen - a star map generated by the [i]Yūrei's[/i] navigation computers. The map zoomed in through nebulae and clouds of stars until it focused and enlarged on a single star system, which continued to expand until the onscreen map showed a pair of bright yellow stars pirouetting abount one another. The screen continued to zoom in, veering away from the binary star system and focusing on a single holographic planet orbiting the sister stars. The planet's holographic avatar spun slowly above the [i]Yūrei's[/i] crew. Off the cloudy skin of the alien planet was a flashing blue dot that represented the source of the signals.

"What planet are we looking at?" Hirnschall demanded.

"One RV7S3-003," the navigations tech rattled off. "An unsurveyed terrestrial planet of binary system RV7S3... no records of surface survey. Last flyby was pre-war."

Suddenly, the black field of space of the holoscreen turned a threatening red hue, bathing the holograph of this uncharted alien world in a red light.

"Well no wonder," the navigations officer chimed in. "This star system is situated squarely in the middle of the Mutual Exclusion Zone."

"This is Admiral Vranas' doing." Captain Hirnschall muttered as he watched the star map zoom out to give a full view of the Mutual Exclusion Zone - shown on the map as a transparent red band that stretched across the stars and enveloped perhaps a dozen star systems. "He has turned on his transponder on purpose, to taunt us from the one place we cannot reach him."

"That system is only twelve light years from Vorqhul space," the navigations officer added. "I'm sure they're seeing the exact same thing we are. I'm certain I don't need to remind you that if the Vorqhul perceive this as a hostile move on our part-..."

"This could get ugly very fast." Hirnschall finished. "Naval Command needs to hear about this immediately. Zhou, what's the status is our displacement drive?"

"She's spooled and charged-up, sir!" an almond-eyed officer replied from across the bridge.

"Then let's pack it up, ladies and gentlemen," the Captain commanded as he entered the coordinates of the Eos System with the holographic keyboard floating beside his armrest. The starscape beyond the [i]Yūrei's[/i] bridge window shifted as the corvette turned about to orient itself in the direction of mankind's homeworld. Captain Hirnschall and the rest of the crew were shoved against the back of their seats as the starship's thruster pods roared to life.

"All hands brace to jump."

With a second jolt, the starscape outside the bridge began to zoom outward as the [i]Yūrei[/i] rocketed homeward at many times the speed of light.