"Alright, let me get this straight," Admiral Istia Fenway rubbed her temples. "We have a probe coming in from one direction, followed by this little fleet who are trying to hide behind that anomaly of a comet the astronomers spotted last month. And we have a ship roughly equivalent to a destroyer heading here from another direction, and it's not the same kind of ship. So we've got two different sets of ships, both arriving in-system at the same time, one hiding and one hunting. Does anyone else feel that we've arrived in someone else's war?"
"And a bad cliché besides," Captain Tamsin Reese noted. "Quite frankly, Admiral, if I read this in a book I'd throw the book out the window."
"Well, whoever they are, the single ship is going to arrive in orbit within two hours," Commander Dashwood remarked. "And they'll pick up the normal chatter a bit before that; this colony never needed to keep its communications stealthed, after all, so we can't keep it all quiet without shutting down just about every computer on the planet."
"Well, this colony wasn't built to be a true military stronghold either," Fenway said. "We've got four orbital platforms, two destroyers, one fighter squadron and the ground missile emplacements, plus the Marine Corps militia and the Guardian Force, such as it is." Both forces were made up of weekend warriors, retired military personnel and eager young teenagers who hadn't finished their schooling or had dropped out early. There would be little hope for the colony in an ongoing battle unless they could hold on for the three weeks it would take for a Fleet convoy to arrive. There were drawbacks to being the first colony out that far, after all.
"Well, we can hope for the best," Captain Nakshitarh said gloomily. "But I'm not having my crew stand down from battle stations until this is over. Ma'am." He nodded through the viewscreen. "Call me paranoid, but this situation makes me very, very uneasy. I don't want to get caught in someone else's war, ma'am, not one bit."
"I agree completely, Captain," Admiral Fenway said, the deep lines in her face and the silver in her hair suddenly seeming very real. Fenway had served the Terran Fleet for nearly sixty years, and suddenly her quiet semi-retirement was looking to become very unquiet indeed. Yet she didn't seem to mind. "But just in case, let's see if we can find some anthropologists. Who knows, we might have a chance for peaceful contact for once."
"But we can't afford to assume it," Reece said.
"And in case we don't, what do we know about the weapons systems on these ships?"