The senior staff was reassembled to go over what we had learned from studying the probe’s reports. Everyone knew that that probe had been destroyed, but they were hoping that my team had been able to obtain some useful data first.
The captain called the meeting to order, then addressed me, “Okay, Vydor, your team has been working on the probe data for several hours. Did you come up with anything?” He said this as if he expected me to say no, with good reason.
“I am passing out a copy of the pertinent data from the probe. The first thing you might notice is that the time of the report and the time we received the report are not equal. If you allow for travel time, you’ll still come up roughly a minute shy. Other than that, you might notice that the data is perfect, an exact match to all Imperial records of the colony.” I paused to give them time to digest that. The captain did not look happy with this. He already had a good idea what conclusion I had come to.
“From this data, I must conclude that the report has been falsified. This leaves us still with no information about our target.”
“Vydor, is it possible that the equipment was malfunctioning?” said Larath. He was a bit of an odd character; he never seemed to show any emotion at all, yet somehow still managed to convey that he cared a great deal about this mission. There was something else about him that I could not put my finger on, but I just did not trust him.
“No, Larath. I personally checked the equipment before it left. It was in perfect working order. It may have developed a bug or two along the way, but nothing that could cause it to do this,” I replied. “There are only two ways that this could happen. First, the enemy could have cracked our codes and used them to send back a fake report, but I do not think that is what happened here. If ‘they’ captured the probe before it started to transmit and played with its sensors so that it would record only the data they wanted it to, then let it transmit, it would send it all in code. They would have no need for the codes; the probe would handle that for them.” I stopped there to gather my thoughts.
“Vydor, is this something that is easy to do?” Dr. Rannor asked. The good doctor was like the grandfather I never had. He always spoke with a soft, gentle tone, and was the only member of the ranking officers on the Dragon Claw who did not seem to mind my appointment.
“Absolutely, Doctor. If a person has the time and knows his probes, it can easily be done with this type of probe. The one-minute lag is probably from turning the power off temporarily to disconnect its defenses,” was my reply.
“So it appears that all we have learned from this operation is that the enemy knows our probes as well as we do, and they know we are coming. They still have the upper hand, and that is not acceptable. I want better probes assembled immediately, which are to transmit over their entire voyage. I don’t want a repeat of this,” ordered the captain.
Much of the rest of the meeting was throwing around ideas on how to get information on “them.” Larath proposed we call them the “Magi,” just to give them a name. I was not clear where he got that name from but it was approved. After all, what was the difference?
After the meeting with the captain, I headed back to the probe bay where some of my better probe technicians were waiting for me.
“Okay, team, we need to get a probe to a hostile planet and have it stand up to attack long enough to get us some decent information on our enemy. What are our best options?” I asked.
After much debate we chose a battle probe that would only need minor reconfiguration to handle the type of search we wanted. It could only handle limited, short scans. Even though it only needed some minor changes, it still seemed like years before it was ready to launch. Now, just days away from the system, we were finally able to launch it.
“Sir, the probe launch was a success. We will be receiving data shortly… Okay, we are getting a good clear signal. Probe is functioning to full specs.”
We still had no idea who or what the Magi were. A lot of theories went around, even one that pictured them as monsters right out of some cheap horror movie. The most reasonable conclusion was that they were a previously undiscovered alien race. If this was true, then we had a big problem on our hands. That would mean war with an obviously powerful race.
Though I had no fear that our naval forces would defeat them, it could be a long and devastating war.