Over the next six months, Holt’s men, under the supervision of Gebhard, rushed to harvest the alien ship for as much information and technology as possible. Though their effort was slowed by the foreign nature of the technology, Gebhard’s seemingly infinite resources enabled them to make remarkable progress nonetheless. The technicians eventually gained access to the secondary systems and even managed to reverse-engineer captured alien translators.However, the information they most desired, specifically the technical schematics of the ship and the star charts containing the location of every system the ship in theory had access to, remained stubbornly inaccessible. These were protected by security measures that Gebhard’s team had failed to circumvent. It eventually became clear that bypassing these measures would not be possible in the foreseeable future, and Gebhard and Holt… especially Holt, were not willing to wait that long. Among the information they had acquired was a list of crewmembers and their roles, as well as the ship’s name. It was called the Minboa, and hailed from an organization called the Galactic Union. The power of this supposed Union and its true agenda remained largely unknown to them. Holt, characteristically, assumed the worst, though Gebhard emphasized caution over overt belligerence. Now equipped with a rudimentary understanding of what they were dealing with and lacking other options, they made the decision to awaken select high-ranking aliens (...)