Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2075: F2R-66 Native

Commander Ostrava studied him for a long moment.

"That’s a very convenient explanation, cadet," she said. "Do you have proof?"

Jason nodded quickly.

"Your archives should still have the old frequency records, even if the active systems don’t use them anymore. Pull up the frequency with the code name F2R-66 Native and compare it to the incoming signal."

The commander turned toward the communications station. "Do it."

The officer who had waved Jason away a minute earlier was already working, his hands moving quickly across his controls.

Several long seconds passed as he searched through the outpost’s archives, and the room waited in silence, the red marker continuing to blink on the central display.

Then a second waveform appeared on the secondary display beside the incoming signal.

The officer overlaid one on top of the other.

They matched.

The jagged, irregular pattern that had defeated every system in the room aligned almost perfectly with the archived frequency, peak for peak and trough for trough, as though the two had been drawn from the same source.

"It’s a match," the officer said, staring at his display. "Commander, it’s a full match."

"Identify it."

The officer read from the archive record. "F2R-66 Native. Federation identification frequency, second range. It was in use more than eight thousand years ago, before the matrices were built."

He looked up from his station, his expression stunned.

"We’re on the fifth range now, Commander. Our frequencies use a completely different channel. That’s why the signal looked like nothing we’d ever seen. It’s a Federation ship. A human vessel. Just a very, very old one."

Another officer at the tracking station leaned forward. "The decoded signal is coming through now. It’s carrying a registry number. It’s in the old archive as well." He paused. "It’s human, Commander. No question."

For a moment, nobody spoke.

Then Commander Ostrava straightened.

"All batteries, hold fire," she said, her voice carrying clearly across the room. "I repeat, hold fire. Launch two interceptors and send them out to meet the vessel. They’re to escort it in, not engage it. Bring it to the outer landing pad."

The room burst into motion once again, but the urgency was different now. On the central display, the gun batteries along the ridge shifted from active green back to standby gray, and a moment later, two small markers lifted from the outpost’s hangars and began moving out toward the incoming vessel.

Many of the officers who had been ready to fire only minutes earlier turned to look at the cadet standing at the edge of the tier.

Jason stood there with his hands still trembling at his sides, as though he had only just realized what he had done. He looked toward the commander, then toward the officers staring at him, and then back toward Ning, as if checking whether he was supposed to say anything else.

Ning smiled at him.

Commander Ostrava was not finished yet.

"Once the vessel is close enough," she said, "I want a full scan for Mekharan signatures. Every compartment, every structure, every piece of the hull. I don’t care how old the signal is. I want to know exactly what’s on that ship before it lands."

"Yes, Commander."

The interceptors reached the vessel a few minutes later and fell into position on either side of it, matching its course and speed as it continued toward Jalun.

On the central display, the red marker had changed to a steady amber, and the three markers moved together toward the planet.

When the vessel came within range, the outpost’s sensors swept it from one end to the other.

The room waited.

"Scan complete, Commander," an officer said at last. "No Mekharan signatures detected. None at all."

Commander Ostrava let out a slow breath that Ning suspected she had been holding for several minutes.

Jason had been right.

The vessel came down slowly, flanked on either side by the two interceptors, and settled onto the outer landing pad a short distance from the mountain with a heavy, grinding shudder that the cadets could see clearly on the outpost’s displays.

Up close, it was even older than the archive had suggested.

Its hull was battered and pitted from end to end, scarred by countless tiny impacts from the long journey through open space, and several of its outer plates had been torn away entirely, exposing the frame beneath. Its shape was long and blunt, with a squared-off prow and a heavy rear section that bulged outward around a set of enormous engine housings, and nothing about it resembled any ship the cadets had ever seen.

Most of the officers in the command center did not recognize it either. Several of them leaned toward their displays with frowns, trying to place the design, and one of them muttered that it looked like something out of a museum.

Jason recognized it immediately.

"It’s a long-haul carrier," he said quietly to Ning, though several of the cadets nearby were listening. "The kind they used for moving cargo and passengers between systems before the matrices. They were built to cross open space for years at a time. That’s why the engines are so big. Nobody’s made one of those in thousands of years."

The commander sent a boarding team out to the vessel as soon as the landing pad had been pressurized around it.

The cadets watched the feed from their helmet cameras on the outpost’s displays as the team made their way inside through one of the ship’s old airlocks, their weapons raised and their lights sweeping the darkness ahead of them.

The interior was silent.

Dust drifted through the beams of their lights as they moved through narrow corridors lined with old control panels and faded markings in a script that had changed slightly over the millennia.

Doors had to be forced open by hand, and several sections of the ship were completely without power, their lights long since dead.

Then the boarding team reached the crew quarters, and the cadets in the command center went very quiet.

There were bodies inside.