My Mask of Clarity was up and fully active. I had Permanent See Invisibility up (which thoroughly annoyed Susan Richards at times), Devasight, and x50 magnification was clocking up to 500x here in space with no atmospheric haze to get in the way.

I didn’t tell Rich, but the superscience cloaking effect over that ship wasn’t working on me; too bad, so sad.

Huh, long and phallus-shaped, like they hadn’t gotten the message that with Floorium you could totally get economical on ship design, and didn’t need to stick with rocket designs.

Whatever. A mile-long rocket from a super-science civ. Fine by me.

We were still powering forward, as there were thousands of miles to cover, and what was twenty-five miles per second up here? The inertial compensator wasn’t helping with acceleration yet, but it could still brake us without a problem, its main job regardless.

“We just hit the passive cloak scan range of the ship. Initializing a com-link and recognition codes,” Rich spoke up for everyone to hear, and we eased up on the towing. The straining chains crinkled through to us as the stress eased up, and we drifted back to the nose of the shuttle.

The red star on Nova’s bucket-shaped helmet was glowing, normally a sign that Mentor was speaking with someone. We all waited patiently for some reaction from the ship ahead of us.

“Handshake established. Establishing Mentor identity verification,” the AI told us as we continued to close on the much larger vessel. “Identity confirmed. The ship is named the Starholder.”

Sure, why not. Nova Corps, loved their stars. It held Novas, natch.

“No true AI, Mentor?” I asked curiously.

“Artificial Intelligences of Xandar are restricted to those dealing directly with sapient organic life, Dynamo,” Mentor informed me. “Leaving them in control of vital systems has been exploited in many hostile ways.”

Well, that was a very enlightened approach. Stop an AI from taking your systems by making it impossible to host an AI. The more complex the attack, the less likely it was to succeed if your own tech was advanced enough to max out every edge inside a lower tech level, and actually did so.

A rather clever idea.

At a mile long and with this level of clarity, it was visible from a long distance away, but since it was still cloaked, nobody but Nova and I could see it. I waited patiently as we closed in.

“Master Grimm, start matching inertia,” Mentor directed him, following up with velocity data, which Ben rapidly followed. Kinetic energy was shunted smoothly, and we began to slow down without using maneuvering jets, Nova and I just holding onto the chains anchored to the hull so as not to go flying ahead.

There were a lot of gasps as we breached the cloaking field, and suddenly the massive starship seemed to coalesce out of nowhere into everyone else’s sight. Ben took over direct maneuvering, Nova and I holding onto the outside of the hull even though we could certainly make do with our own power, and we began to circle the giant silent starship, heading for the landing bay.

Lights came on to display the broad hangar door, and it rotated open smoothly, able to admit boats fifty times our size with ease. We breached the hangar field smoothly, Ben having no problems guiding the shuttle, looking around as we did so.

The outside had been in almost perfect condition. The insides here, not so much.

Ruins of boats and equipment were everywhere, trashed, blasted, exploded, toppled, and scattered about. There were blast scars from energy weapons on the walls and floors, showing some hard fighting, with dents and depressions and gouging from physical impacts here and there, too.

“Air temperature is subzero to save power and help the cloak,” Nova said, looking at his environmental metrics for everyone. Radiating heat into space from nothing was kind of an infrared giveaway, after all. “Other than that, the air is compatible with Terrans.”

“Setting ‘er down.” Grimm smoothly brought the shuttle down into an open area, while I unhooked Nova and me from the harnesses and wrapped them on the mounts. We shoved away some of the bigger pieces of rubble close by, while Vier used TK to send the smaller pieces skittering into a pile and clear a space.

“They even shut down the self-repair and maintenance functions to aid the cloak,” Nova murmured for us. “All this battle damage should have been cleared within a day, if not just hours...”

“No sign of any dead?” I asked, looking around as the shuttle landed, and Grimm started powering down. Less than a minute later, the airlock cycled open, pressure equalized, and everyone was leaping out it, not bothering to wait for the stairs to deploy.

“Organics would have been cleaned away, even under a cloak situation. Nova Corpsman often disintegrate if their Core is destroyed, and their uniforms are designed to degrade with them,” Nova reported softly.

If he died, he probably wasn’t coming home.

Looking around the massive hangar deck was one thing, but the hangar bay door just sitting there open to the stars was what drew the most attention. I mean, right on the other side of the containment field was pure vacuum, and, well, it was full of stars.

“Was the entire crew meant to be Corpsmen, or are there fast transit tubes, Rich?” I asked him, finding the doors out, even before Mentor downloaded the basic specs and layout to us.

“There’s gravity fall tubes running the length of the ship for those who weren’t capable of flight, and for moving volumes of cargo,” he confirmed. “Security is tied to the Corps, however, so until I can reach the manual validation on the bridge, we have to stay together!”

“Awww!” all the geniuses on the teams promptly complained in unison.

“Scott! What are you seeing out there?” I called out to him. He, Director Carter, and Bobby had wandered over and were standing just a pace from the hard vacuum beyond the hangar bay doors right now.

Scott’s primary focus as a Psion was on his eyes. It was an odd field of study, as it wasn’t the various kinds of kinetics, nor the scattered kinds of divination possibilities. He wanted to control the energy of his eyes, and he wanted to be able to see.

It turned out that being able to manifest terrifyingly powerful amounts of kinetic energy riding photonic streams had some other side effects when it came to looking at stuff. Scott could flick through some very odd spectra simply by attuning himself up through the colors of his optic blasts and focusing on the energies they used.

Out in space, the range of this was magnified a whole bunch. He was seeing things he could never see from Terra, a fact we had learned aboard the Shi’ar ship after the M’Kraan incident, and worked out while the Starjammer was still here.

“I can see Primus out there, and the nodes of a whole lot of satellites broadcasting information back and forth,” he reported back, as the starfield slowly rotated. “LaGrange station and the alien ships around it are pretty obvious, and there are half a dozen satellites which are using alien tech, by their emissions.”

“Mark them and send them off to Doc Bronze to verify,” Director Carter said quietly.

“Got it. Waiting for a full circuit to complete,” Scott nodded slowly.

We all waited patiently as the stars, moon, and planet rotated in and out of view slowly in turn.

Bobby pointed first, more sensitive to heat differentials than any tech out there. Scott focused immediately in that direction, and also pointed silently.

“Maser the location to Primus,” Peggy said with a frown.

Scott nodded, turned his head, and there was a flash of yellow, nothing more. A beam of microwaves powered by his golden beam, only an inch wide, flashed out over ten thousand miles to where the most powerful hero of Terra was watching and waiting.

“Confirmation beep,” Mentor reported.

“Alright, let’s head to the bridge. Schmot guys, keep all scans passive. I don’t want the defense grid to light up on anyone. Plenty of time to investigate. Confirm.”

Reluctant agreements came back to Richard Ryder, and everyone headed for the bridge, Disks coming out for some who couldn’t fly to tag along.

------

The main transverse corridor along the keel of the ship was actually big enough to fly a shuttle down, and held the main gravity tubes. They were powered down, but we could fly through them easily.

The Starholder was built like a skyscraper instead of a sea vessel, with three whole ‘floors’ devoted to the hangar bay. We were basically zipping up an elevator shaft in zero g, as there was no Floorium in here.

Nova brought us off at the bridge level, putting a hand to a scanner as things powered up in the walls all around us with ominous hums. It validated a rather non-standard Nova Core was in operation, and the doors opened for us.

The bridge area was divided into two areas: the command bridge and the conference chambers and ready rooms behind it. Nova stepped out onto the bridge slowly, silent reverence hanging in the air as we all looked around at a level of technology the movies could only hint at... and which wasn’t all that far off from the rough holos Mentor had made up of a standard Xandaran command center.

There was one person here, slumped in the command chair, the bucket helm and star plenty obvious, although he had a full command cloak, which meant he was a Corps Seven or higher.

“Centurion Rhomann Dey,” Mentor announced to everyone softly. “He passed his Nova Core on rather than let it dissipate or be dispersed by the enemy.” We all quietly filed around in front of the fallen Centurion, seeing the holes blasted in his uniform, and all that remained of the bones beneath, which were greened and yellowed by something.

“Is his Mentor intact?” I asked calmly.

“I will see if some of its recordings are intact. Mentors typically wipe themselves upon loss of the Nova Core to prevent an enemy from accessing them and their data.”

“No touching!” I warned Peter and McCoy, who were wandering too near the science station, and they both jumped back hastily.

Nova carefully and respectfully moved the clenched hands of the Centurion’s uniform from the arms of the command chair, the bones crinkling audibly as he did, folding them down into the skeleton’s lap. He then took a deep breath, and placed his own hands on the arms.

There was a deep crackle, and the three suns and one sunburst on the front and back of his uniform lit up with a strong internal glow. Multiple particle effects in the odd combination I’d come to associate with his energy absorption and Core feeding swirled around him, reading, assessing, and information exchanging between him and the ship’s systems.

“Non-native Nova Corpsman detected. Non-standard Nova Core detected. Mentor AI detected. Update parameters noted and exceeded. Lockdown protocols recognized. Non-native species on the command bridge detected.”

The Starholder’s voice was vaguely feminine, mostly emotionless and neutral... but also VERY emphatic.

Peter and Hank’s hands were kept tightly to their sides, and even Ebersol was making no moves for anything. Everyone else was basically standing there with arms crossed, waiting.

“Downloading Mentor command request. Acknowledging homeworld authorization. Registering temporary command authority,” the Starholder continued.

Huh. So the request to send the ship home came with some extras. Helpful, if temporary.