Signals in the Void 6

("Signals in the Void" is my attempt at an in character fan fiction revolving around my adventures in exploration.)

As the rest of the science and salvage crews finish transferring over to the station and our small base camp, I move the Arbitrator back away from the station and head towards the group of spaceship wrecks we found earlier, while we wait for our inside teams to finish their preparations.  I think starting with the smaller ships will be a good approach and maybe help determine who was on which side. 

Coming upon one of the small wrecks it seems to be of Caldari make, probably a Merlin by the looks of it, but the thing is shredded by what looks to be auto-cannon fire.  It seems several of these smaller wrecks are all Merlin class frigates.  I guess we had an organized group of pilots protecting what looks to be an ORE cruiser class hull, strange that it's a new hull design, maybe they're branching more into the exploration side of things.  I'll need to come back with my science crews and get what I can from it.  Even selling the hodge-podge of information and design I get from it on the market could make me a whole ton of ISK as long as ORE doesn't find out who leaked the plans.

Now this is a surprise looking at the other wrecks, they show signs of Angel Cartel's craftsmanship.   They probably jumped this group of explorers and made short work of them, a few Dramiels and two Cynabals will do that.  But these ships are sure a long way from the Curse region of space.  So either these were bought on the black market or the Cartel is looking to expand into a new area of space.  Though the Dramiels died relatively close to the explorers the Cynabals are several kilometers away.  What's disconcerting is the fact that whatever killed these pirates after their little ambush were using some type of new weaponry.  The hulls are cracked open as if something burst forth from inside the ship or pulled plates off to get at the inside. 

But with some scans of our salvager module it appears these ships have already been stripped of anything valuable and are only good for scrap metal now.  The ORE exploration vessel though, I could wiggle out the hull design to sell even though I can't get a hold of some of the technology.  Whoever ended this fight sure was thorough with their salvaging.

Setting a course to start orbiting the station near our make shift base camp, Captain Erhan informs me that the science teams have squared things away and are moving further into the station.  It seems we've now begun the actual work.  I begin bringing the ship down from combat alertness to pre-combat readiness.  While we will need to exert more power to run our analyzers and can't run all combat systems at the same time I want to make sure that whatever finished off these previous ships doesn't catch us with our pants down.

I start a 3000 meter orbit from the station and activate the various composition and data analyzers we have on board.  Even though we now have men on the inside it will still speed things up if we can help pinpoint areas of high value, and spend less time blundering about.