Dajorra System, Gethsemane
d’Tana Range, Nighthawk landing site
Middle of Beta shift

The bridge crew had frozen in place as the message came across the aether. The bridge officer shrieked out, “What do you mean you found survivors?”

A voice belonging to one of the more decorated members of the house returned, “Exactly what I meant, this block of metal that exuded heat on the sensors… turns out it’s some sort of experimental new escape pod. I’ve got about 50 people here that could use medical attention and we may want to retrieve them before the power in this pod fails completely.”

“Please hold for a moment.” the officer turned to one of the other bridge stations, “redesignate that energy signature into being an active escape pod, then rerun the broad spectrum scan we ran when we arrived. Are there any more of these pods present?”

As the young lieutenant implemented the changes and the Nighthawk’s powerful scanning array swung into action, the crew waited, most pretending to do other tasks as they were too distracted by the surprising news.

[ping]

“Sir, I’m detecting another 20 signatures matching the ‘escape pod’ exactly and about 50 that fall inside the margin of error but those appear to either not be intact or they are potentially something else.” the young naval officer responded.

“20 pods, 50 people potentially in each. So we’ve got potentially 1.000 survivors.” an old voice rang out from the entrance to the bridge.

As the old General wandered to the bridge officer, the crew adjusted postures and returned to their actual duties. The old man usually didn’t modulate his voice too much so they’d be able to overhear more easily what was going on.

“Yes sir, what are your orders?”

Ood smiled grimly, “Redefine the operation as ‘Search and Rescue’ in the duty roster and ship logs please. Send word of the discovery to the civilian government, inform Selen we’ll repatriate survivors through Selen Spaceport. Contact the Citadel and request naval support, I seem to recall the ‘Wrath of the Dawn’ should be coming out of a standard maintenance visit to the drydocks around now. That cruiser should be of an adequate size to handle this number of survivors and transport them to Selen. Oh and let the recovery teams know what’s going on. Divide the coordinates of the identified pods into clusters and assign them to the teams in the field. At this point, the other shifts do not need to be activated yet, but be prepared to wake them and send them out the second the Wrath arrives in orbit.”

“Sir, yes sir!”

As the bridge officer turned around and began barking out orders, the Neti smiled and started to move towards his duty office. Time to contact the Consul and explain what was going on and what he was planning to do about it.

Placement and scoring:

• 1st place = 5 points
  
• 2nd place = 4 points
  
• 3rd place = 3 points
  
• 4th place = 2 points
  
• all other places = 1 point
  At end of all subcompetitions, the points will be counted and medals awarded.
  Ties will be broken by counting up the placements and lowest score wins (10th place and higher will get 10 points each)