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until he noticed two more of the
technicians moving over to the man’s desk to look at his screen. He
turned around and looked directly at him.
    “What is it?”
    “ The nearest
moon...I’m...well, Sir, I’m picking up a coded radio signal from
its surface.”
    Captain Raikes was dumbfounded at the
news. The only way any coded radio signal could be sent was if
something or somebody was there and had sent it. There was no
possibility it could have come from them, they were the first
visitors to this system.
    “Sir, we’re being scanned by
something!” called out the same man.
    Captain Raikes
snapped to attention, his initial surprise now starting to worry
him.
    “ What the hell is
it?” he asked to the surprise of the rest of the crew. “Get me a
long range view of the moon on the main screen.”
    It took just a few
button presses to bring up a direct feed from one of the many
stabilised camera mounts on the ship. The moon filled the display
and looked like most moons, small, barren and desolate. He looked
at it in detail but nothing of note appeared. He looked back to his
crew that seemed equally perplexed.
    “ Get to
work , I need a working rift and
fast!”
    Command
is going to want to hear about this , he thought.
    B ut even more important to him was that he wanted to know
they had a way back home. The thought of being stranded out in a
star system this far out was the greatest fear any of them had on
the ship. The only backup plan was that the Rift could be recreated
back in Proxima Centauri, but that would not occur for another
twenty-four hours. In the meantime, he had a damaged ship to
repair, a rift to create, and a strange foreign signal to
investigate. He looked back at the image of the moon and tried to
imagine what could be transmitting. None of the options were
particularly appealing to him.
    “Lieutenant!” he called out to the
nearest science officer.
    “Sir?”
    “Prepare a reconnaissance drone. I want
orbital scans by the end of today.”
     
     
CHAPTER THREE
     
    Admiral Jarvis first came to
public significance during the attack on the Titian Naval Station.
Her command of the Confederate counterattack has become legendary
in the annals of the Navy. Her flagship, the battlecruiser CCS
Crusader fought a long and bloody battle like none that had been
seen for generations. She w as present at
the start of the War and her selfless actions at Terra Nova helped
end it.
    Heroes of the Great Uprising
     
     
    “Thirty seconds until activation,” said
a pre-recorded voice over the ship’s internal speaker system. It
was nothing more than a simple reminder that they were about to
move through. Spartan suspected the warning was more for insurance
purposes, as at least half the trips through a rift ended in minor
injuries or at the very least some violent shakes.
    He
wa tched the glowing shape of the
Spacebridge from the observation area of the liner. The entrance
itself reminded him of a whirlpool, and no matter how many times
he’d travelled through; it gave him a sickening feeling in his
stomach. This wasn’t the bridge that had been found in the middle
of the War though. This was one of the first artificially made in
the years since the War and had been lauded as the ultimate example
of Alliance engineering. He knew where the technology had been
found, and it had been won through blood and combat, not science
and discovery.
    Not that Spartan
really cared too much about where it had come from. He’d made
hundreds of such trips in his long career, but times had changed.
In the past, he travelled to warzones or to fix problems, but now
he was travelling to another private security post and yet another
contract. He looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see one of
his comrades from the Marine Corps or the Alliance Navy, but
instead all he found were groups of civilians. It seemed a long
time since he’d completed his ten years in the Marines, and there
were still days when he missed the