The Armstrong had been orbit of the planet Cardea for a standard day and had been unable to solicit any kind of reply to their attempts at communications. The ship had detected cities, or something very much like them, on the surface on the world but the Armstrong had tried everything from radio to tachyon link and had been unable to open communications with the inhabitants.
Captain Littlecrow finally decided to send a team down to check out one of the "cities" and see what was going on down there. Lieutenant Commander Mitzner would take command of the ground team, and pilot the shuttle. Dr. Kang would accompany her to help set up a communications relay if necessary, and provide general scientific expertise.
This is why Mitzner was surprised to see McAfree meet her at the shuttle bay, instead of the Doctor.
"Where's Dr. Kang?" asked Mitzner.
"Doc says that this assignment is beneath his dignity, but above Wagner's. That means I'm stuck with it," said McAfree.
"I would have thought Dr. Kang would leap at the opportunity to solve a mystery like this first hand. This is going to be an adventure," said Mitzner.
"Doc seems to believe it's grunt work," said McAfree.
"But you have a sense of adventure, right McAfree? This is the kind of thing you sign up for the Exploration Division for," said Mitzner.
"Actually," said McAfree "I never signed up for Exploration Division. I'm a graduate student, I'm just here because I'm the Doc's assistant. I'd rather be back on Mars."
"Right," said Mitzner "Well you still sound like you'll be a better traveling companion than Dr. Kang," said Mitzner.
Mitzner helped McAfree load her equipment into the Vostok, and they took off for the surface of Cardea.
* * *
"Woah," said Ensign Marceaux "Something just came into range of our short range scanners moving at FTL speeds. It's massive."
"Can you be more specific?" asked Captain Littlecrow.
"It's about 200 kilometers across," said Marceaux.
"That's enormous," said the Captain "What could it be? An orbital city?"
"If that's true," said Commander Gibson "It could explain why we were getting no reply from the planet below. Perhaps the population lives on the orbital city and uses the planet exclusively to resupply. What we're detecting as cities could just be their agricultural bases."
"It's approaching Cardea at more than a trillion kilometers an hour," said Ensign Marceaux.
"Does the trajectory suggest a likely impact?" asked the Captain.
"Whatever it is, it's either preparing to enter Cardea's orbit or crash into it," said Marceaux.
"Hail the Vostok," said the Captain "Pull them out of there until we know what's going on."
"They just broke Cardea's atmosphere a few minutes ago," said Marceaux "I'll bring them up on the Ansible."
There was a moment of silence.
"I'm not getting a response," said Marceaux.
"Keep trying," said the Captain.
"Still nothing. The approaching object will be within visual range in thirty seconds," said Marceaux.
"When it is," said the Captain "Put it on the main screen."
"We've got visual," said Marceaux, 30 seconds later.
The image of the approaching object appeared on the screen. It was a huge metal sphere bristling with weapons, towers and other haphazard protrusions. This was a Babylonian War Sun, essentially a mobile Dyson sphere built around an artificial sun in order to harness it's energy. Even now, years after the Reunification Wars, the War Sun was still one of the most powerful machines of destruction ever made by humans.
The Babylonians, or at least their then-government the Hegemony of Marduk, had been responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Reunification Wars from the perspective of the Huxley Foundation. The orbital bombardment of Arcadia City on Earth, the enslavement of the civilian population of the Cathedral Androkles and, most grisly of all, the use of a weaponized virus to wipe out all life on Enki, both Earth-type and native.
The war had been over for a long time, though. The Hegemony was broken and the planet Marduk was now the economic engine of the core worlds. Two members of the Armstrong crew had grown up on Marduk. There wasn't supposed to be a Hegemony of Marduk any longer.
The War Sun itself had more worrying implications than just it's culture of origin. The Huxley Foundation attempted to, and believed it had succeeded in, destroying every last piece of the Babylonian war machine once they conquered Marduk, when the wounds inflicted by the Hegemony Starfleet were still fresh. A fully functional War Sun would contain at least three different weapons the Huxley Foundation considered illegal and thought eradicated.
"Recall the Vostok, now," said the Captain, tersely "We're going to retreat from this system and monitor the situation via long range scanners."
"Still no response," said Marceaux.