The room was mostly dark, with several screens faintly illuminating it, time series data scrolling across them, graphs of several kinds, long columns of numbers.

Sgt. Sharma was the only analyst left, the faint clicking sounds of her keyboard adding to the low buzz of the power adapters. Some of the other monitors were still showing the last simulations and tactical analysis results that her team had been working on all day. Extrapolations of Qyrl technological progress based on the sensor data during the battle, mostly.

Now, after the others had left, she had the opportunity to look at another thing that kept bothering her. Those unexplained rhythmic pulses from behind the planet. In the heat of the battle and the chaos of its aftermath, everyone else seemed to have forgotten about them.

On her screen, the AI was trying to match them to a known pattern. Fortunately, the Aegis Prime was a battleship, designed to be a fleet flagship if a large war ever came, and thus had extensive databases stored. And yet, there had been no match so far.

Right now, Sharma was assuming that the pattern they had registered was incomplete, only a piece of a larger signal. But even the partial match had come up empty so far.

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After the ship had returned to normal space from its emergency jump, she had not seen the pulses again. The hand-written notes on her desk had a mind-map of possibilities sketched. The two she had circled as the most likely were that either the signal had stopped, or that its distance attenuation was so high that it was undetectable from the current position of the Aegis Prime.

Another set of calculations on the left side of the screen had completed. „Interesting“, Sharma thought as she looked at the results. She had not expected them. The margin of error was high, but according to these results, the pulses originated either from the surface of the planet or at least within its atmosphere. She turned towards these calculations, her slightly overweighed body in a chair casting shadows across the room. A few quick adjustments later the computer showed that even with the assumption of a much higher error in position, a ship outside the atmosphere, hiding in the shadow of the planet, was impossible.

She pulled up the planetary data. Aethel was the name of the planet. Never colonized. She scanned through the little data on geology and flora. „Interesting“, she said again, zooming in on the part about crystalline plants unique to this planet. She scrolled past, looking any mentions of alien settlements or ruins, but found nothing of the kind.

Sgt. Sharma made a note in her personal calendar. Back on Erulas, she would write a report and request an expedition to Aethel to search the area that her calculations had narrowed the source down to. If there was an alien ruin hidden somewhere, finding it could produce valuable insights. But that was a task for another day.