Nebo Station - Part 1

I brought the P3x72-A out of hyperspace after another short jump and started extending the twin grids of antennas, dishes, scopes and other electronics that made up the Hopeful Folly's custom built sensor suite. It took almost five minutes for the grids to fully extend, but trying to jump with them extended would have sheered the grids right off the ship during the acceleration of a run to jump.

An hour later I started retracting the grids and getting ready to make another jump. Just like it had for the last three days, the sensor sweep had picked up lots of random ambient background fuzz, a very slightly higher than galaxy normal concentration of space dust, and a few solid blips between the mass of my head and the mass of my body rolled up into a ball. What they had not picked up was anything reading even remotely like a ship, let alone a mothership sized carrier from the last war, which was what I was out here looking for, while risking my life by running solo on not enough sleep in the empty reaches of space in what is variously called the out-planets, or the neutral zone depending on your particular viewpoint or inclination.