"Perfect place to hide unauthorized equipment," Vaxon observed. "I'm taking a team to investigate. Er'dox, keep monitoring in case they try to relocate the bleed. Dana, good work."
He left, and I returned to Dana's station. She was still watching the variance patterns, her focus absolute.
"You should be proud," I said. "You caught something most engineers would have missed."
"I got lucky. Right place, right time, right paranoia."
"That's not luck. That's skill and instinct working together." I pulled up her performance metrics. "You've been exceeding expectations since your first shift. This just confirms what I already knew. You belong in Engineering."
Dana looked up at me, and I saw something uncertain in her expression. "You mean that? It's not just you being nice because I'm the displaced alien who needs encouragement?"
"I don't donice. I do accurate assessment of capability. You're exceptional, Dana. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll stop working like you're about to be fired."
"I work hard because the alternative is failing. And failing means?—"
"Means what? Extended debt? Demotion? Those are possibilities for any crew member. You're not special in yourvulnerability." I softened my tone slightly. "But you are special in your capability. Start recognizing that."
Before she could respond, alarms erupted across Engineering. Multiple systems showing critical variance simultaneously, not just subsection twelve, but six different subsections scattered across Mothership's power network.
"What the—" Dana was already pulling up data. "Er'dox, this doesn't make sense. The variance pattern is different from the bleed. This looks like deliberate overload."
I was at my central command station in seconds, analyzing the cascade. She was right, this wasn't the original sabotage. This was a distraction, a system-wide attack designed to overwhelm our monitoring capacity.
"All stations, emergency protocols," I ordered. "Prioritize critical systems, life support, propulsion, structural integrity. Everything else is secondary."
My team moved with practiced efficiency, but the attack was sophisticated. Whoever designed this understood our response protocols, knew exactly which systems to hit to cause maximum chaos with minimum actual damage.
The comm from Vaxon: "Engineering, Security. Cargo bay three is empty. No unauthorized equipment, no signs of access. Whatever Dana detected, they moved it before we arrived."
"They knew we were coming," I said. "This system-wide attack is cover for relocating their operation. Dana, can you track the power bleed in real-time?"
"I'm trying, but with all this interference—" She stopped, eyes widening. "Wait. The interference pattern itself is wrong. The variance is too coordinated, too precise. Er'dox, I don't think this is an attack. I think it's a signal."
"A signal?"
"Look at the timing." She pulled up a correlation analysis. "The variance spikes occur in repeating patterns across differentsubsections. It's not random. It's intentional. Someone's using our power distribution network as a communication system."
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant observation that I should have caught myself. The variance pattern wasn't chaos—it was structured, organized, carrying information.
"Can you decode it?"
"I can try, but I don't know what encoding system—" Dana paused, something shifting in her expression. "Actually, maybe I do. This pattern reminds me of something from Liberty. We used power grid modulation for secure communication during emergency situations. If someone studied our technology and adapted it..."
She was already working, her fingers moving faster than I could track. Cross-referencing the variance pattern against databases, running decoding algorithms, testing hypotheses.
The pattern resolved into recognizable data.
"It's coordinates," Dana breathed. "Someone's broadcasting spatial coordinates through our power network. And they're using modified human encoding because they want humans specifically to find it."
"Where are the coordinates pointing?"
She pulled up navigation data. "System seven-three-nine, third planet. That's near where we found the derelict Liberty fragment two weeks ago."
The implications hit me immediately. Someone knew about the Liberty debris field. Someone had accessed it, studied human technology, and was now using that knowledge to communicate covertly through Mothership's systems.
And they were specifically trying to reach the humans we'd rescued.
"I need to report this to Captain Tor'van," I said. "Dana, compile everything—the original bleed detection, the signal analysis, the decoded coordinates. Complete documentation."
