The two SFT Wings, Alpha and Beta, were gleaming blades of silver against the colors of the nebula. Angel glanced at her readouts just to make sure that her two newbies, Firefly and Woncha, were in line. They had been flying for two hours now, scanning along a grid as they tried to find any trace of either missing ship.

{Angel, Reaper; Hammer. Starting grid section thirty two- I'm showing some scattered debris on 872.4. Looks like we're confirmed; at least one of the missing ships was damaged or destroyed.}

"Roger that. Alpha, hold pattern and wait for the HGs."

{Beta, same. We are hold for the HGs.}

"Corinth, this is Angel. We have confirmed readings in section 32, we have debris on 872.4. We are go for UFS deployment."

{Copy that, Angel. UFS squad Vagrant deploying to your coordinates now.}

{Bloody HGs,} Nova said, and Angel couldn't help her smirk as she switched back to the Wing's private band. Hammer beat her to the punch.

{C'mon, Nova. Improper attitude,} he said, voice so thick with sarcasm Angel could have cut it with a knife. {HGs are the future, don't you know that?}

{Great, now I feel old on top of everything, Hammer. Thank you ever so for that.}

Angel shook her head a little, grinning. "I'll tell you what, when they go past you can yell at them to get off your lawn."

{Pinky swear?} Cinco jumped on that. {Can I do it on open band?}

"That is a big fat negative, Cinco."

{Spoilsport.}

A dozen small blue blips appeared on Angel's board and she glanced out of her pit as the UFS squad went past. A third of the size of their Champion-Class RTKs, they darted past and through their formation like a flutter of sparrows through trees. If Cinco or Nova did in fact yell at them to get off their lawn, they did so off the band.

Angel understood their dislike. There wasn't a fighter in the pit these days, certainly not any that had actually fought in the war, who cared much for them or their 'pilots'.

UFS squads were piloted almost exclusively by young, brash, fresh-out-of-Academy hot-shits. Officially, the UAS were drone squads; small fighters remotely piloted by those hot-shits who stayed safe and sound back on their base ships.

Angel couldn't fault the logic behind them. The drones were smaller and cheaper than piloted craft, could do almost everything a piloted craft could do, and when one was destroyed or lost a well-trained and skilled pilot was not lost right along with it.

Fighters who risked their life every time they climbed into the pit tended to view them with disdain, however, and Angel was no exception if she was entirely honest with herself. Sitting in a safe pod on board a deployment ship and playing what amounted to an elaborate video game felt somehow like cheating.

'HG' was pilot slang that demonstrated their aversion to these drones. It stood for 'hobby grade', similar to the name for smaller drones when they were first invented, decades before the Confed even existed and there was any knowledge of life on other worlds

UFS was the official name, of course: Unmanned Flight System. It had been the Confed's big technological baby almost the moment the Kilrathi war was over. Save money and lives by keeping your pilots safely at a well-protected location.

Unfortunately, the theory was better than the reality. In atmosphere and for certain applications, the UFS was just fine. When it came to actual combat deployment, however, they just couldn't solve for the latency. The further away a drone got from its base and its pilot, the less it could be controlled, the more there was a delay between the command and execution. Confed R&D were still trying to figure out a way to add an effective quantum entanglement computer system to solve for the problems in latency and in range, but so far that had proven to be far more expensive, bulky, and complicated to implement. It all but necessitated an advanced AI 'brain' being installed in the fighter, and that opened up all sorts of moral and ethical considerations that Earth scientists and courts had been unable to solve in over a century.

Another issue with the UFS is that, unlike SFT Wings, the UFS fighters could not be sent on distant covert surveillance, reconnaissance, or other delicate missions that might necessitate a trained pilot being able to get out of the fighter and achieve needed objectives dirtside.

Part of why Merlin Killdare had been such a legend in the Confed was that he was able to take down a Kilrathi biobase, alone and on foot, after his fighter had been shot down. The biobase had been supplying chemical and biological weapons to the Mandarin Order- human terrorists and traitors that were using them to try and undermine the Confed and the war effort. Had Merlin been remote piloting that fighter from some safe ship or bunker somewhere, when it was shot down that would have been it. It was likely that biobase would not have been taken down, and who knows how many others would have died before it could be?

Unless there were bigger leaps forward in their technology to allow the UFS to work efficiently at range, or the moral and ethical conundrums regarding AIs were solved (or more likely, just thrown out the window), the drones would never replace a good pilot in a fighter pit. They were limited now to close defensive and offensive missions and short-range transports and supply runs.

The only reason they were being used here was that the situation was so uncertain. They hadn't known until just now if either of the two ships were actually destroyed or in distress and not just out of communication. Silva had insisted that, unless the ships were found intact and without damage, the UFS would be first in to scan the situation. That way, if something happened or they came under attack, the SFT Wings and their pilots would not be risked.

And so, the two Wings waited, watching the small drones dart off toward the distant debris and start their more direct scans. Here, the damned HGs were even more limited than they would have been in normal space, as the same radiation that had disrupted communications for the Black Eye and the Gaza more than halved the drones' effective distance.

While the drones did their thing, Angel kept an eye on her scans and readouts, looking for anything unusual. Anything could have caused the small amount of debris they were seeing here. A mechanical malfunction, an accident, a hit by an asteroid or other space detritus- but they could not rule out an attack.

The Kilrathi may not have been heard from in ten years, but that didn't mean they weren't out there. Humanity hadn't run into any other advanced alien life form out here (beyond the Kilrathi and the Nephilim), let alone a hostile one, but that didn't mean they weren't out there either.

Her eyes stole over toward Ripley's fighter a moment as her previous concern and disquiet came back.

She's probably perfectly safe so long as she doesn't use any of her Nephilim abilities, but I can't be sure of that, either.

As if she had sensed Angel thinking about her, Ripley came over the band.

{Alpha, Beta; Ripley. I just got a blip on my long-scan. It was there and gone again. Possibly just a flutter of interference but I can't be sure.}

"Ripley, I've got nothing on my long-scan. Anyone?"

A score of negatives came through before a familiar voice from Beta Wing came through.

{Alpha, Beta; Rabbit. I think I saw the same blip as Ripley. A shadow. Could be interference. Shade static. Roughly…39.7}

{Reaper. Scanning 39.7. Vagrant Squad, are you getting this?}

{Alpha, Beta, this is Lt. Kellan Foster with Vagrant-}

Angel actually jolted, sitting up a bit in her pit and scowling. Before she could say anything, however, another pair of voices broke in.

The first was Captain Silva, who was monitoring. {Pilot, you will school your tongue immediately, is that understood?}

The second was a young woman's voice. Her words were apologetic but she sounded more amused than anything else. {Alpha, Beta; this is WC Starlight of Vagrant. Ignore Meathead, there's a reason he's got that callsign. That's an affirmative, we picked up the static shadow. Dispatching Tundra and Alakazam in that direction- Meathead, you too. You just volunteered yourself.}

{Starlight, HiHo. I will be speaking with Captain Hermann. Status update on the debris?}

Now the WC sounded less amused, more irritated. {HiHo, Starlight; it doesn't look good. Some of it appears to be part of the Black Eye, but we also have pieces of what look like a champ fuselage.}

Angel shook her head slowly. If there were bits of a champ out there, that meant that a fighter or fighters had also been damaged. While that didn't necessarily mean what happened wasn't an accident, it did look more and more like a possible hostile attack.

Captain Silva apparently thought so too. {Alpha, Beta, drop back.}

"Affirmative. Alpha, drop back and grid up."

{Corinth, Alakazam.} A man's voice, thick with a Hindi accent. {We have identified that static signature. It is the Gaza, repeat- we have found the Gaza. She is in a roll and drifting.}

{Damage? Communications?}

{We're approaching her hull now. I don't see any scoring or indication of weapons-fire. We are getting no response to our pings.}

{Corinth; Tundra. There appears to be a minor hull breech on the forward shielding, just to the starboard side of the helm. Moving closer. Confirmed. Corinth, the breech is about a meter and a half. Asteroid hit maybe? I'm not seeing weapon scoring, and picking up no residuals for known weapon traces.}

{Wings; any hostile traces at all?}

"Corinth; Angel. That's a negative. No sign of ship emissions, no sign of known weapons discharge of any kind. No bogies on scans."

{Corinth; Reaper. Confirmed, but readings are still extremely unreliable.}

{Corinth; Starlight. We have core material traces on the debris of both the Black Eye and the champ. If I had to guess, I'd say that the Black Eye had some kind of malfunction that caused the core to compromise and the ship to explode, shortly after the Gaza and its Wings arrived to investigate. The Gaza copped an unlucky hit from the debris?}

"Starlight, Angel. One hit? If the Gaza was close enough to be hit by shrapnel from a core explosion, hard enough to penetrate it's shielding, it should be peppered."

{Angel; Starli-}

Whatever the drone WC had been about to say suddenly broke off as Alakazam cut through.

{Code two, code two! I have a champ eject capsule at 22.7, just off the Gaza's flank!}

{Status and ident?} Starlight asked immediately, as Angel leaned forward. The eject capsule had likely been floating for at least two days at this point. Back at the end of the war, an eject capsule could sustain a pilot for a few short hours for S&R to pick up before they'd run out of oxygen. Fighter designs had come a long way in the decade since. The champs they flew now made their old VMX series tourney's look like rusted old tin cans. Part of the advancement in design was a fighter eject capsule that could sustain a pilot's oxygen for three days.

If the fighter was destroyed about the same time that the Gaza dropped off the board, it's been floating nearly that long.

{I'm trying to get ident but its communication and signal grid is offline. I am getting power readings in its oxy-sat and…yes, confirmed. I have life signs. Repeat. I have life signs. We have a live pilot.}

"Corinth, permission to-" Angel began, but Silva didn't let her finish.

{Permission granted! Secure the pod and the Gaza, we are sending in S&R and MSOT.}

Angel didn't even have to issue an order. The moment Silva said the word 'granted' they were moving out, closing distance quickly toward the Gaza's coordinates, as the HG WC sent the rest of her drones on a search pattern. One intact eject capsule might mean there were more out there, unable to ping for help.

Angel ordered most of her Wing to flanking positions on the slowly rolling ship, while she and Ripley went toward the escape pod's position. Alakazam's drone hung just beside it, light playing over it.

She was unsurprised when Reaper and Tink approached as well.

{Attempting remote access of the pod's communication grid,} Ripley said. {No go. I'll keep trying.}

The eject capsule, as it had been on the old tourneys, was literally the entire pit of the champ fighter. Unfortunately, like those old tourneys, once closed up the pit was impossible to see into from the outside, thanks to its solar shielding. Angel tried to see through the dark surface anyway, straining for any hint of movement, even as she scanned for damage.

{LIfesigns confirmed,} Reaper said. {Steady but weak.}

"I've got what looks like minor damage on the starboard, just past the hatch," Angel said, squinting.

{I'm not getting it on the scans,} Ripley told her. {There appears to be some blast damage and core residue to port. From the same explosion that produced that debris from the Black Eye, no doubt.}

"It may be too minor, I'm not even sure I'm seeing it. It looks like a small smudge, but I thought I saw a hint of pitting in the shielding."

{Alpha, Beta, Vagrant; this is S&R 250. We are approaching from 95 niner. ETA to your position, two minutes.}

"Roger that 250, clearing."

As the fighters and the drone backed off to give the retrieval vessel room to maneuver, Angel turned her eyes to the Gaza itself. It looked pretty intact, as the HGs had reported. It clearly had a malfunction of some sort with its roll, but she could see the lights onboard. She turned her head as she caught motion, then looked down at her scope, just as a second voice came over.

{This is MSOT transport 45. We are approaching the helm airlock now, about to get Wolverine boots on deck. Stand by.}