“Yeah, we’re gonna break out of here, see? We’ll go through the wall, see and we’ll be gone before morning roll-call see...”
The night watch was on duty of the bridge of the Pinta when the first blip appeared on the scanner, the young man at the duty station looked up from his tablet where he was reading a novel, momentarily interested in his job. After a couple of minutes of nothing he drifted back to the make-believe world of the novel in his hand.
Another blip would sound a few minutes later. This time he called the acting commander of the ship, since the Captain and Commander were both sound asleep. The Lieutenant and the young Ops man watched the scanners, fiddled with the bandwidth of the scans, but the scanners found nothing. After a few minutes they decided that this had just been a hiccup and drifted back to what they had been doing, being bored.
The next time the scanners sounded a blip it showed the object as being only a few miles behind their ship. Then there was nothing. The Lieutenant and the Ops man and now the helmsman on duty were all trying to find out what had popped up and disappeared. They decided to activate the active search and targeting system to improve the chances of finding whatever it was.
This system included cameras that would zoom in when an object was found. They looked at the area where the blip had supposedly been. They saw nothing but flaring from some stars, so they screened out the stars. Then they saw something fuzzy pass in front of the image. Quickly they realized it had been a lot closer than where they were looking, thus it had been out of focus.
The computer automatically searched and tracked the object but failed to identify it. Finally the object stopped and they got a look at it, but it was dark and even with infra-red and other systems getting a good look was impossible. They only knew it was some kind of ship.
“Get the Captain. Sound General Quarters...” the Lieutenant said before the ship jerked and even with artificial gravity he was thrown to the bulkhead.
“Venting atmosphere in the rear section, near the engine room” someone reported “It’s being sealed”
Finally the alarms sounded. Seconds later they could hear boots pounding up and down the corridor outside and also above them.
“Arm plasma cannons. Where are they?” The Lieutenant demanded of the Ops man. They looked at the screen, it was filled with blips. The screen showed that they were well-surrounded and outnumbered.
The Captain walked onto the bridge, looking crisp in a perfectly clean and ironed uniform. “What is going on?”
He didn’t really need an answer after he saw what was on the screen. The main Ops officer took his seat, relegating the younger man to his assistant.
“Who are they?”
“They haven’t communicated with us” the Lieutenant informed him.
“Scanners are detecting more than two hundred of the small vessels and further out is returning signatures of about four very large vessels” the Ops “Mother ships, I guess”