[h2]Sharlin Vande Tanne[/h2]

Sharlin held back a sigh. She took a deep breath before transmitting to the [i]Indomitus[/i], "Phantom. Roger scanning sector Epsilon-Orange. Redeploying."

She goosed the Phantom's throttle, feeding reaction mass into its thruster chambers. The Core responded gracefully, going into a languid turn that bore all the elegant precision of a mathematical solution. Sharlin hated waste, refused to use more thrust than absolutely necessary. It also kept the Phantom's signature to a minimum. All the thermal baffles and low-observability coatings in the Empire were worthless if you simply vented heat recklessly. 

And the less you radiated, the better your own sensors worked, at least in passive mode. And if you were looking for something out there that might be able and willing to shoot back - possibly with much larger guns than you had - you wanted to be able to look without announcing that you were looking. 

A twist of a dial activated a small servo arm that deployed a dedicated sensor control deck in front of Sharlin, swinging it out from a slot beneath her left armrest. It was a reassuringly physical thing, with knobs and buttons that could be operated with gloves on, under g-loading, by touch. Through long familiarity, and hours spent configuring the deck just so, Sharlin could tune every aspect of the Phantom's prodigious sensor suite without a glance away from the screens before her. 

Sharlin was a spider in the centre of an exquisite web whose strands were streams of ions and eddies in magnetic fields. The Phantom's myriad sensors trickled data into its expert systems, which processed and abstracted it into useful information. Stripped of noise, they resolved into a picture that Sharlin's human brain could make sense of, and direct the Phantom's own computer mind - far larger, far quicker, but literal and limited - to identify among all the possibilities. 

It took less time to do so than the other Cores of the Lance needed to get into action. 

Sharlin toggled the laser comms on, and another thread of light connected the Phantom with the [i]Indomitus[/i]. "Indomitus, this is Phantom. I think I've found what you're looking for...."