The Armstrong hung in space a few hundred thousand kilometers outside of the range of the strange starship's "mass drivers". They had been playing cat-and-mouse with the alien ship for hours, staying out of their firing range and exchanging scans. At least, that's what Dr. Kang theorized the exotic particles the ship was bombarding them with were for.

Captain Littlecrow insisted they stay within a light year of Gaia and continue their attempts at communication. So far they weren't getting a response from anything the Armstrong was capable of emitting.

"Trying to brute force this is a sucker's game," said Dr. Kang, finally "It's becoming more and more likely that this new life form uses means of communications as yet unknown to us. Rather than sit here and try to get them to answer messages they're not even receiving a far more effective use of our resources would be trying to detect how they communicate with each other."

"According to our scans the interior of the ship isn't pressurized," offered Commander Gibson "That implies there's no crew. If the ship is being controlled remotely from the planet we may be able to intercept that signal and find a way to replicate it."

"It's nice of you to join us over here at the adult table, Commander," said Dr. Kang "But you're still thinking in far too human terms. Based on behavior the ship appears autonomous, this means it either has a crew that has different atmospheric requirements than humans, or the ship itself is it's own helmsman. Once we work past all of your ignorant assumptions, however, we approach something resembling a workable idea, even if it was something of a hijacking of my point. We need to look for any signals being broadcast by the ship and see if we can reverse engineer them."

"Ensign Marceaux," said Captain Littlecrow "Make it happen."

"If the Ensign there was going to find something he'd have done it already," said Dr. Kang "Get McAfree up here, have her work ops."

"McAfree is not a crew member of this ship," Captain Littlecrow reminded him.

"It's your ship," said Dr. Kang "If you're content with the information the Ensign is producing far be it for me to impose an alternative on you."

This was when Dr. Kang was at his most insufferable: when he was right. He was cut a lot of slack in an emergency, and worst of all he knew it.

"Fine, we'll play it your way for now Dr. Kang," said Captain Littlecrow "Put a call down to the Science Department and get McAfree on the bridge."

Marceaux glared at Dr. Kang.

"The Huxley Foundation is a meritocracy," said Dr. Kang "If you weren't willing to accept that you shouldn't have signed up."

"If you could limit your commentary to the issue at hand, Dr. Kang," said the Captain.

"I have no-" began Dr. Kang, but Marceaux cut him off.

"Captain," he said "The alien ship is on the move again. We'll be in range of it's weapons in five minutes."

"Set a course," said the Captain "Maintain the distance between us but stay with a light year of Gaia."

"How much longer are we going to play hide and go seek with this thing?" asked Mitzner.

"However long it takes to establish communications," said the Captain "We're staring down the barrel of history. What we do today is going to be remembered and we are going to conduct ourselves in a manner befitting the crew of a starship on a mission of peace."

"They've already conquered Gaia," said Mitzner "And killed all the colonists. There are limits."

"We don't know that yet," said the Captain.

"Perhaps you're not willing to admit that yet," said Dr. Kang "But barring some fundamental changes to our understanding of physics it's the fact of the matter."