The funny thing about being a terrorist, Sarah McFarlen thought, was how eerily normal it felt. Almost seven years had passed since she had last travelled freely through the colonies of Sirius, yet the stars that glinted beyond her Greyhound's windows were the same as they ever had been. It seemed wrong, somehow, that so much could change without the universe so much as blinking. Humanity had reached the stars and yet, so many of the glittering points of light remained beyond their reach, millions more worlds walled off by the unrelenting tyranny of distance then the houses of Sirius would ever bar her from. There was a pleasing sort of irrelevance in the notion. What were two systems, three, even the whole of Sirius, held against the scale of the universe?

The stars blinked out in a wash of brown as she drifted into the unnamed nebulae that lay to the south of Luneburg's chartered space. South was a wholly abstract concept here, the only magnetic reading in-system radiating from Bielefeld Base, more then three million miles behind her. It was the sort of thing Sarah tried to avoid thinking about, if only for the sake of avoiding the headache that inevitably resulted from trying to put stellar distances in human terms. Even Bielefeld's diminutive signature faded as the field enveloped her fighter's sensors, reducing the chaos of her display to a pair of pulsing dots. She tapped them, absent mindedly calling up specifications.

One of the signatures belonged to the Humpback keeping pace alongside her, Alex curbing the freighter's oversized engines to maintain its position in formation. The second dot was sprawled across an entire grid square, a hive of emissions that glowed in an otherwise dead region of space. Their destination. She didn't bother opening a comms channel to the Humpback. The pair had already spoken briefly before leaving Bielefeld, and even if she'd had anything to say what was waiting in the field was just as likely to render half of it unintelligible anyway. Even so, the cockpit was far from silent, the gentle hum of the air recyclers mingling with the pulse of the engines - the heartbeat of a living ship quietly beating. The sound comforted Sarah far more then any maternal pulse. This far out, noise meant life, and silence bought with it only the slow, trembling decline of an oxygen gauge.

On her scanners the second signature expanded, a blot of red disappearing and reappearing behind the makeshift convoy. A moment later, it swelled again, engulfing the two lesser dots that were the fighter and freighter. She'd been warned to expect it, but the systems failure was still disconcerting. It made sense, on paper. Metropolis was far too large a ship to hide conventionally, so it simply played with the systems of whoever was looking for it, throwing out enough junk information and emissions to hide the warship's exact location in a sea of misinformation. The whole thing reminded Sarah vaguely of a puffer fish frantically trying to seem bigger then it really was.

Seconds passed, and the manic signal coalesced to a single, smaller signature, her scanners painting the still-warm dishes and arrays that dotted the warship's hull in faint blue. Sarah released a breath she didn't realise she'd been holding as a pair of turrets larger then her entire ship slowly pivoted back to their natural positions, carbyne-reinforced barrels pointing down Metropolis' hull. It was hard to fault the Raider's caution, but there was something distinctly unnerving about having weapons capable of immolating a moon pointed at her. She quietly thanked the dockworker that sent their details on to Metropolis before departure.

A flurry of keystrokes sent their docking request flashing across the intervening space, received and returned in kind by the crew of the battleship. The nebulae still hid the ship from her eyes, but Harmless had no such limitations, the Greyhound's sensors highlighting the opening docking bays with accuracy down to the millimeter. No doubt Metropolis was doing the same thing, albeit with equipment advanced enough to make her scrapyard mongrel of a ship look no more advanced then a tin can and a piece of string. The whole ship was an engineering marvel, advanced enough to make the heaviest military warships set to space seem like children's toys, and with a natural signature no larger then a cruiser despite the patchwork plates that still dotted her hull - scars from the battle at Zwickau. And Sarah was getting a tour. Despite her best efforts, she couldn't keep the grin from her face. She set the autopilot to guide her in and tried not to think about how many range-finding signals were bouncing off her hull.