The Director-General chuckled as the Ambassador defended her charge, rubbing his clearly shaven chin on a knuckle. “Sure thing.” He winked an augmented eye at Vreta. “I’m sure your man has updated you on what happened last night, so I won’t go into all the details. But I sent a team back to the compound after those things had cleared out. They discovered the creature Vreta was chatting with had been using a Rothian testing backdoor to manipulate a long-range comms array here on Babylon. It was trying to ping something using a very precise set of coordinates. And do you know where those coordinates led us?” The Director-General took another sip of water.

This was the part that truly excited Freyr. She simply [i]had[/i] to find out what the creatures from the Cradle wanted so much. She jumped in almost without realising it. “Somewhere on Rothia.”

“Exactly right, Dr Lang!” The Director-General grinned, clapping his hands loudly together and slapping them back down onto the table. “Somewhere on Rothia. And I'm willing to bet my ridiculous government paycheck that you can’t detect it on your own. Otherwise, you would’ve found it already. So, I am proposing a joint expedition to Rothia, to figure out whatever that creature was trying to communicate with. With the galaxy’s most informed Cradle experts…” The Director motioned to Freyr and her deputies stood behind her “at the helm, i’m certain we’ll be able to track it down. In exchange for your full support on this expedition, and dropping all charges against Five Nine Five, we will share the knowledge of whatever we find with you. You can’t say fairer than that.”