"Lirin Bopir," she said and looked into its black, round face. Then the suit opened completely in front of her. Lirin sat down on her back into the already sitting suit and told it: "Close." So the suit closed again to its original form, and now with Lirin inside. Lirin briefly checked the attachment of her hands and feet inside the suit and then stood up in it. No one, no one would have guessed at that moment that there was a beautiful girl inside. From the outside, only respect and strength could be read from the suit. The whole effect was further enhanced by the helmet itself, which was basically set so that no one could see who was inside. Revealing the face inside the helmet was optional. But Lirin had her face revealed. It looked unusual. A delicate face floating on a black and dangerous body. By then, Oril was also preparing for the suits. Draine was still driving. Oril did the same, and in a moment, he was also inside the combat suit and standing with Lirin in the back of the ship, where they were waiting for Draine. Draine finally stopped the ship on the surface and joined the pair.

All three then stood on the gray surface of the planet. At first glance, wherever one looked, there was nothing. But Draine knew very well why he brought everyone here. As soon as they got behind the first rocky unevenness, an impressive crater awaited them. From its center, burnt black streaks rose to the edges. "So something definitely happened here," Oril said. "Obviously," Draine replied. "We now mainly have to CAREFULLY find out if anything remained after it that would tell us more. Any debris would be great," Lirin said. Draine took the first step over the edge of the crater. He stomped his boot, and from its back, behind the heel, a toothed knife came out, which caught him in place. He slowly shifted his weight and remained hanging on his boot, facing down the slope. "Well, yeah, it works here. Elsewhere, the rock is too hard or soft, but here this function finally finds its use. Dust and ice, beauty," he assessed and went down, stomping with each step so that it would catch him in place. But Oril added in a slightly uncertain tone: "O-or you just fly over to the center." "If it can be done differently... I won't waste. Something will jump out at you guys, and the only one who can still fly will be me," Draine said, while the two of them, with the help of tiny thrusters inside the suit, flew over to the center of the crater, from where they watched Draine stomp towards them.

"We have the same instruments. You see what I see," Oril said, reading from his display in his helmet. "There's not much left here," Lirin continued, "We can still fly around here and do a 3D scan. Then we could calculate the size of the charge and the position of the fragments and stuff. It'll be all tiny shards here." "Look, you shard," Draine said, "my amazing conservative method found you a pretty big piece." And he waved a ten-centimeter sheet of metal at them. They both waited for him to reach them and then he handed them the sheet.

Oril took it in his hand and said: "Ordinary aluminum with foil on the other side. Interesting." "Why?" Draine said. "Because it's so ordinary. If it was part of a ship that flew on Gorinium, and which was then torn apart inside a space tunnel, that its debris and remnants of Gorinium were scattered so far apart, it would be anything but ordinary aluminum," Oril explained. "We have one fragment so far. We need more," Lirin decided. "Yeah," Oril confirmed and knelt down. "Well, if it exploded in all directions, there should be something under this melted rock. Right under the place of the explosion. The subsoil here is, as Draine tested, good." Lirin considered further: "Who says it couldn't have been a more primitive civilization. They tried what Gorinium can do, and now they know." "Yeah, that's good. It didn't have to be anyone we know," Oril replied. "Well, I'm going to look for more on the other side of the crater," Draine announced and went again.

Oril on the ground, meanwhile, took a desperate breath and sighed: "Ugh. It's solid there. So I'll have to waste energy on the laser cutter, I think, with the way we flew out, we didn't take anything else." "No," Lirin said. "Well, yeah, so if the others find something similar, we'll still have to go to Jaspitus first for a plasma saw and other tools if we're going to find out anything." "I see it the same way. Collect what you can. We'll quickly look at a few other places that are on the way, and on Jaspitus, we'll equip ourselves properly for it and return to all those places with everything we need." Oril extended his forearm and began to cut into the ground with a bright beam. Meanwhile, steam from the melted ice and burnt dust gushed into the surroundings. When he made a large cube with the beam, he also made a sloped area on one side so that he could eventually cut it from below as well.

Draine, meanwhile, was happily searching the surroundings for shards in his own way. When Oril finally jumped, a 40kg cube was waiting for him, which, however, the technology inside the suit helped him to easily carry away. Lirin then called Draine, and they all returned together to the Vega, where they immediately headed for the next red dot on the map. But there, the story repeated itself. It was also a wasteland without life, with minimal signs of anything else that could explain what a device for Gorinium was doing in such a place. If only it were possible to find out what kind of device it was, but no, they always found only the remains of a container. As if it were on purpose.

And what if it was? That option was already quite obvious. Smaller Gorinium charges large enough to be detected by satellites and send a patrol to the location. Because Gorinium was banned for its environmental unfriendliness and risk, it was PCP's duty to detain anyone who had anything to do with it and find out their intentions.

When, after the third failure, Lirin returned with her colleagues to the Vega, Berindr was waiting for them on the computer to tell them:

"There are 42 of them now."

And each of those dots was equally significant. It was already obvious. Someone was diverting their attention. But that made it all the more important to quickly check each case, because it meant that someone was trying to hide something significant among all those false alarms.

No detailed investigation was carried out for the next time. They quickly jumped to the location, scanned it with scanners in the ship, and jumped on. After a total of eight visited locations that they had on the way, Lirin finally returned with the Vega to Jaspitus. Where reports from the satellites were coming in with a delay and at given intervals, and so every hour there were more and more cases. When they flew into their hangar with the discharged Vega and partially discharged suits, they couldn't believe their own eyes.

There was chaos and hustle and bustle everywhere. New Vegas were arriving and departing with a crew composed of recently called reserves. So they left the ship with the suits in the hangar to recharge and went in their regular red and black uniforms to PCP headquarters to see Berindr. But then they received a notification on their handheld devices that they had already been assigned a new target. So Lirin picked up the pace and went to see Berindr, what did that mean, that they had just returned and that unless they were assigned a new ship, they couldn't fly across the entire Space Block again.

With a brisk pace, she walked out of the hexagonal vertical hangars onto the artificially leveled area connecting the hangars with the hospital and the PCP building. In the middle of this triangle of buildings, a tiny island of greenery was hidden, where flagpoles with flags were stuck. The flag of the Community of Planets had the form of a bright comet in a black sky full of small stars. The long tail of this comet gradually widened and decomposed from the initially white color gradually into increasingly saturated and diverse rainbow shades, which smoothly flowed into each other until the entire color spectrum was created at the end.

In contrast, the PCP flag was far more geometric. It was again a black flag, this time, however, with a red hexagon, inside which stood another hollow red triangle, from whose three sides three silver connectors extended to the hexagon like clips holding the two shapes together. The same symbol was now pinned to the chest of their uniforms.

Together, they entered the PCP building and took the elevator all the way up to Berindr. They burst into the room with three operators like a flood.

"We just, just got back! So what's this now?" Lirin called out, who was also slowly starting to lose her nerve from the whole situation. The large Berindr, sitting behind the middle desk, announced calmly with his back to them: "Equally significant signature, Lirin. I'm sorry, I apologize. We have to use all the people we have."

"We've already been to 8 such cases, and it's all decoys. Listen, we have a discharged ship..." Lirin wanted to start arguing.

Then our alien turned around in his chair from his large transparent screen to speak face to face with the unit.

"I know. Look, who knows... It might just be a decoy again. Even if it's nothing again, you still have to fly there. Look, I see all these events here completely the same, equally seriously. And it's my job. When I find an unusual energy signature, I have to report it and pass it on to someone, even if it's likely that in this case, it will end up similarly," Berindr said a little offensively and added:

"I know about you that your shift should have ended today. Unfortunately, the situation has developed differently. I can't do anything about it, it all has to be checked quickly, whether we want to or not. We know the condition of every ship, and I know where you'll fly. It's close, don't worry. We've now given other more distant targets to people from the reserves, and they'll also be going through it on their way back, as you did. We're trying to quickly, like with rakes, cover all the anomalies. We've sent almost all the units far away, so unfortunately, I need you for the closer things."

Berindr belonged to the race of Osktylans, which meant that his face was a bit like a horse and a dragon at the same time. The dominant features of his face were an elongated jaw and large nostrils. His skin was covered with occasional sharp, transparent scales and was a creamy pink color. Finally, Berindr could boast of his impressive height, which reached 2.46m when standing.

Lirin subsequently added to Berindr, already more calmly: "Yes, I know, Berindr, but I can't bear the thought of what we're probably missing now, when we're sending all the units to check false signals." At the same time, Lirin slowly walked towards Berindr, and Berindr replied: "That's precisely why we need to check everything immediately, they're trying to hide a tree in the forest." Lirin nodded in agreement and had meanwhile come with the unit behind her all the way to Berindr and asked: "So where are you sending us again?" "To FC-506, at the edge of the Karfus Nebula," Berindr said.

The story continues to be very well-crafted and engaging. The pacing is excellent, and the sense of mounting pressure is palpable.