They were too late. Having dropped out of warp almost an hour ago, they had been searching the region for m-class planets with both long and short range scanners. So far they had just found some floating rocks and not the typical signatures of carbon based life they where looking for.

Jean-Luc Picard was standing behind a console showing the energy signatures picked up by the long range scanners and he was disappointed. Since they received the strange distress call this morning he had had good hopes of finding the source of it and here they were, just looking at space debris and listening to background noise.

It was a coincidence that the enterprise-e had picked up the transmission at all. They were far out into unknown territory, exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy when they had picked up some chatter on their long wave low frequency radio receiver. A relic from an era of light speed communications, the receiver had not been of any practical use in over a century and it was only protocol that made Laforge include its data in the morning analysis for out of the ordinary patterns.

And there it was, a piece of chatter that sounded like background noise to the human ears was flagged by the computer as a "non naturally occurring wave pattern". After the computer was done with the fragment it sounded a lot like a human voice that was calling for help. The voice, which sounded female, gave the coordinates to a planet by the name of alderaan, in the alderaan system which was just in the next galaxy.

Apparently the planet had been under attack inspiring its inhabitants to call for help on all frequencies, even the ordinary radio frequencies. Their signal had survived its long trip through the relative void between two galaxies. Unfortunately it seemed the signals had been underway for several years before they reached the enterprise-e which, as it now seemed, had come too late to be of any assistance. The question bugging the captain most was: what had happened to the planet alderaan and its inhabitants?