Red light strobes over The Raptor’s bridge. Mara leans into the tactical display, the patrol’s hesitant signal still hanging in the channel like a held breath.
A fresh burst of encrypted traffic floods the comms. The patrol is not advancing, it is triangulating. Their relay trace is opening a path straight back toward the ship.
Mara Vey
They have our wake. Give me ten seconds, I can trace their command relay before they finish pinning us.
Shifter
The warning scar on the console is still live.
Mara’s fingers race across the tactical panel, pulling the signal apart layer by layer. The ship’s engines thrum harder as she reroutes power, buying speed from a wounded system.
Mara Vey
If this works, we find who ordered the purge. If it fails, they jump on us first.
The relay trace resolves into a command signature, clean, imperial, and close enough to strike. The Raptor now has a target and a clock, and the hunt turns from evasion to attack.
✓ Quest Accepted
Identify the Imperial command hub
“Divert all remaining power to the forward shields to prepare for the jump.”
SUCCESS (Good Health, rolled +2)
Shifter cuts power from the core and feeds it forward. The bridge lights dip, then the forward shields flare brighter, a clean blue wash across the viewport.
Mara looks up from the relay trace as the ship’s systems redistribute the surge. The warning scar on the console glows steady instead of spiking.
Mara Vey
Good, keep that channel stable. I have the relay signature, now I need the return path.
The patrol answers at last. Fresh return traffic scrolls in, tagged with a command relay marker and a tight imperial cipher nested inside the reply.
Mara Vey
That tag is the thread. Pull it, and the hub shows itself.
Mara freezes the feed and expands the cipher map. A command node resolves on the tactical display, close enough to feel like a knife point.
Mara Vey
There. Imperial command hub identified. They just told us where to strike next.
Quest Complete
Identify the Imperial command hub