Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2073: Unidentifiable Arriver

A long pause followed as the communications officers worked at their stations. The red marker on the central display blinked steadily, drawing closer to Jalun with every passing second.

"We can’t, Commander," one of them said at last. "The signal is unreadable. It isn’t a Federation identification code. It doesn’t match any registered vessel in our records."

"Is it Mekharan?"

"It doesn’t match any known Mekharan pattern either. It doesn’t match anything. Our systems can’t make sense of it at all."

A murmur ran through the room.

Commander Ostrava turned toward the soldiers who had escorted the cadets inside.

"Get them out of the way," she said.

For a moment, it seemed as though the cadets would be taken out of the command center entirely. One of the soldiers glanced toward the door, but the commander shook her head before he could move.

"There’s no time to escort them out. Put them against the far wall and keep them there."

The soldiers moved quickly, ushering the cadets to the side of the room and positioning them against the curved wall behind the last row of workstations, well out of the way of the officers working below. Lorna and the other instructors went with them, standing at the front of the group.

"Stay where you are," one of the soldiers said. "Don’t touch anything, and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to."

The cadets pressed themselves against the wall. Some looked frightened, others excited, and a few simply stared at the central display, where the red marker continued to draw closer.

Ning stood among them and watched the room.

All around him, the outpost was coming alive. The officers at the gun battery stations were bringing their systems to readiness, and on the central display, Ning saw the icons representing the batteries along the ridges outside shift from gray to bright, active green.

Somewhere deep inside the mountain, he could feel the vibration of the hangar systems preparing to launch interceptors.

And beyond all of it, far out in the darkness at the edge of the system, something was still coming toward them, broadcasting a signal that nobody in the room could read.

The command center did not stay calm for long.

At first, the officers worked in a tense, clipped silence, each of them focused on their own station as they tried to pull more information from the incoming signal. But as the red marker on the central display drew steadily closer to Jalun and the communications officers continued to report that they could not read what it was broadcasting, that silence began to break apart.

"It’s Mekharan," one of the officers at the tracking stations said, loudly enough that half the room turned toward him. "It has to be. Something comes in from outside the system, hiding behind interference, broadcasting a signal nobody can read. That’s exactly how they did it the first time."

"The first incursion used cargo signals," another officer snapped back. "Signals we could read. This isn’t anything we recognize."

"Because they’ve changed their methods. Four thousand years, and you think they haven’t learned anything new?"

"And if it’s one of ours?" A third officer had half risen from her seat at the communications station. "If it’s an allied ship that’s been damaged, with its transponder broken and its systems failing, then this is exactly what it would look like. A ship limping into the system the long way because it can’t reach a matrix, broadcasting whatever its damaged systems can manage. If we fire on it, we’ll be killing our own people."

"Then why is it hiding behind interference?"

"Maybe it isn’t hiding. Maybe the interference is part of the damage."

The argument spread across the room as more officers joined in, some insisting the object had to be an enemy and others pointing out every reason it might not be. Nobody had any evidence to settle it either way.

Commander Ostrava stood at the center of it all with her eyes fixed on the central display.

"Frequency analysis," she said. "Now."

One of the communications officers worked quickly at his controls, and a moment later, a breakdown of the incoming signal appeared on a secondary display beside the main map. It showed a jagged, irregular waveform that looked nothing like the clean, structured patterns displayed beside it for comparison.

"It doesn’t match, Commander," the officer said. "Not Federation, not Mekharan. The frequency pattern matches neither. It’s structured, there’s definitely something there, but our systems can’t parse it."

"Range?"

"It will enter firing range of the batteries in under six minutes."

The room grew quieter.

Everyone understood what that meant. If the object was an enemy and they waited too long to act, it would come within range of the planet itself.

A Mekharan vessel close enough to strike at Jalun would be disastrous. It could hit the outpost, the station, or any of the facilities scattered across the surface, and with the rumor of a Federation planet already fallen still fresh in everyone’s minds, nobody in the room needed to be told how quickly something like that could spread.

But if it was an allied ship and they fired too soon, they would destroy it, along with whoever was aboard.

The commander had less than six minutes to decide, and no way of knowing which choice was right.

Among the cadets pressed against the far wall, the realization began to sink in as well.

They had heard enough of the officers’ argument to understand what was happening, and the calm of only a few minutes earlier evaporated.

One of the girls near the front had gone white and was breathing quickly, clutching the arm of the cadet beside her.

A boy further back muttered under his breath that they should never have come on this trip, and another kept asking, in an increasingly high voice, whether the outpost would be able to stop it if it was Mekharan.

"What happens if it’s an enemy?" someone whispered. "What happens to us?"

"We’re inside a mountain," another said. "They can’t hit us in here, can they? Can they?"