"Doyle, sensors?" Dylan was pacing between stations.
"Sensors are showing all clear so far." The same thing they were showing when you asked me five minutes ago the android added silently. Inwardly she chided herself for the thought, sneaking in the Dragans back door was nerve wracking work even for her, and she didn't technically have nerves.
"Beka?" He didn't look away from forward display, just beginning to show the edge of the debris field.
"Slipstream is ready and waiting." Beka let her exasperation creep into her voice. Dylan turned to the note in her voice and met her steady gaze before finally giving a half abashed shrug. This wasn't even the most dangerous thing they'd done as a crew, but still something had him on edge about this set up. Maybe the fact that an unknown or at least previously unheard of opponent had torn apart a Dragan battle fleet and left no trace of whom they were or where they came from was the problem. Hard to say really, again it wouldn't be the first time Andromeda and her crew had gone looking for the unknown, still Dylan Hunt was a man who had learned the hard way not to ignore a hunch.
"All stop, Andromeda launch a recon drone."
"Drone away Captain", Andromeda's hologram appeared next to him. "Nothing so far, wait I'm picking up a distress beacon, moving to investigate.
"Carefully, I don't like this." Dylan felt his gut tighten in anticipation.
An eye searing flash cut off the ships report in mid sentence
"What was that?! Andromeda, report."
"The drone had begun a scan of the source of the beacon, the indicated vessel lit in red.
The scan must have tripped something; the weapons came online and fired before I could move away."
"Trance, life signs?"
"Nothing, unless they're heavily shielded there's no one out there."
"What do you think?" Dylan was hoping her more, unusual senses, were telling her more than the ships sensors
The ancient girl closed her eyes for a moment, trying to reach out with senses that no organic could even imagine let alone understand. "No, there's no one there."
"Captain I've isolated the distress beacon. It appears to have been…altered." Hahne had been quietly manning engineering, now he turned to address Dylan.
"Altered ?"
"The cruiser is broadcasting some sort of virus it would appear."
"A virus?"
"Yes sir, of course it's far to primitive to pose a threat to Andromeda, but as you know Neitzcheans don't use AI's and from what I've deduced of it's structure it would be more than sufficient to paralyze a Nietzchean ship, which I surmise would then have been destroyed by the trap that you so cunningly revealed. Hahne paused to give the rest of the crew time to catch up with his brilliant hypothesis. It wasn't that he was smug, just that, like all his people he liked a job well done. Unfortunately for him he was dealing with the most experienced crew in the new Commonwealth, which meant they had already moved past his conclusion.
"Beka steer us a course around the center of this, let's see if we can find a less, active, area." He turned back to watch the forward screen, catching the slightly dejected posture of his chief engineer in passing.
Without turning his head he spoke. "Good catch ." He didn't have to look to see the engineer straighten with pride. It was several slow, excruciating hours later when Beka, Dylan and Hahne worked their way over to what was left of a Garuda class attack craft through an umbilical extending from docking bay three. Dylan could almost feel the nerves radiating from the engineer, he thought back to the Persieds service record. He had spent his time in R and D this was his first field posting.
"Easy does it Mr. Hahne, just like zero g training."
"Of course Captain. Just like training."
"Except for the possibility of dying horribly in a Niet booby trap." Beka chimed up earning a sour look from Dylan and a horrified stare from the Warrant.
"Let's just focus on the job at hand. Dylan waved Hahne forward after scanning the closed airlock. Mr. Hahne if you please."
"Oh! Of course Sir." Dylan's voice startled him out of contemplating all the things that could go wrong. He grabbed the nano welder from his tool belt and started working on the airlock release. Having a job he knew he was good at made all the difference and it only took seconds to get the doors open. As Beka stepped past the engineer, drawing her force lance to cover Dylan as he moved into the passage that led from the airlock to the cockpit, she thought that Harper would have done better, and then quickly suppressed it. It wasn't Hahne's fault he wasn't Harper, it was Harper's fault for not being there.
Dylan advanced down the passage, leading with his force lance, taking a knee as he came to the intersection his force lance down the left hand corridor then waving her forward to cover the other side. Once they both sides of the intersection covered he waved Hahne forward, holding up a hand to stop the Warrant just short of them. A nod was all that Beka needed to pivot smoothly and cover the left hand corridor while he mirrored the move. Then a second turn brought them across the intersection each pointing the direction they had started out in, her covering the right hand, Dylan covering the left.
Still using hand signals in case there were traps that could be set off by a comm signal he waved Hahne across then shifted to cover the doors to Command. The engineers nerves seemed to have steadied as the mission went on, maybe if they had been less steady he would have checked the scanner before he tried to open the door. The explosion slammed both Dylan and Beka back down the corridor driving them into the wall past the airlock. Hahne never had a chance.