After a day of waiting, there had still been no official response from United Jerr. Several more attempts had been made by private citizens to establish contact, as well as attempts by minor nations to communicate with the Wałęsa, but once again, those attempts had been ignored by the Sunguard.

The first response they had to act upon came thirty-one hours after the initial message.

It was the survey probes orbiting the planet that first detected the missile launch. From behind the rim of the planet, an intercontinental missile had been launched without warning. Captain O’Sullivan held her breath, waiting for the intelligent computers to analyze its trajectory, hoping fervently that the Wałęsa was its intended target. But until the analysis was complete, she could not exclude the possibility that a minor nation had decided to take advantage of the confusion during first contact to go to war with another country—with possibly devastating consequences, both for Jerr and for the Terran Federation’s mission there.

Two minutes later, she felt like she could start breathing again: the Wałęsa was indeed the missile’s target. The Sunguard had not been responsible for starting a war on the alien world, after all. Now, the next set of questions were: who had launched it, and what was the composition of its warhead?

At first glance, it seemed obvious the missile was launched by the country from where it had been sent into space. But O’Sullivan knew national alliances could be complex. The country from which the rocket had originated could be an independent nation, attacking the Sunguard for its own reasons. Or it could be an ally—openly or secretly—of United Jerr, making the attack a significant wrench in the gears of the mission.

From the bridge, she monitored how the missile was closing in on the Sunguard Command Ship, its powerful chemical engines accelerating it faster and faster. As the distance measured ticked down, thousands of kilometers became hundreds, and still, she did not know the answer to their most pressing question. Then, after what seemed to have been an eternity, one of the intelligent computers onboard the Wałęsa finally spoke up.

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“I have analyzed the emissions from the rocket and can say with almost complete certainty that the warhead is not nuclear. Despite its proximity, I detect no emissions related to radioactive decay.”

“Thank you, Bluetooth,” Captain O’Sullivan replied, relieved to know the crisis had just diminished in magnitude. This was good news indeed, but it also made the choice she had to make now much harder. Had the missile been carrying a nuclear warhead, shooting it down would have been her only option. Letting it explode would have carried significant risks to the safety of the Wałęsa, as well as triggering the standing order for the 12th Army. Shooting the warhead down before it exploded would have prevented both those outcomes.

But this was just a conventional warhead. Probably a strong one, she thought—otherwise, the sender likely wouldn’t have gone to the effort of putting it into an intercontinental rocket. That meant she had to make a choice between shooting it down and potentially escalating the military confrontation, or letting it explode, hoping the ship could withstand the blast.

She looked in the direction of Special Agent Oliveira. He gave her no indication of which response he would prefer, either not caring or simply trusting her to make the right choice herself. Perhaps both—she knew him well, having worked with him for many years as the Special Agent assigned to the 12th Army, and she believed she had his trust. But he also knew the technical specifications of the Wałęsa and had likely already assessed the probability that the ship would survive the explosion. Since he didn’t seem to care, she guessed those probabilities were fairly good.

That resolved the issue for her. If Oliveira was confident the ship would not be significantly damaged from the detonation, it was better for the mission to not respond to the threat at all.

Twenty-six seconds later, the warhead exploded harmlessly against the hull of her ship. Some of the Wałęsa’s ablative armor peeled off, taking with it a significant portion of the energy into space. The rest of the explosion was soaked up by the shock absorbers built into the hull, distributing it along the full volume of the half-kilometer-long Command Ship, diluting the energy into harmless vibrations.