[snip]

Riley shook his head. “We produce it in small amounts. Not… asteroid sized amounts. It is roughly three times as massive as uranium. I can’t even imagine what would have to happen to create such huge amounts. of the stuff.”

He swept aside the sensor log and tapped a few times on the table’s inputs, pulling up a sphere dotted with points of light, and the nebula. “Here’s the initial stellar scan; I’m running spectral and radiographic analyses on these, to see if they match anything in our database.” He hesitated. “I’ll… move on to farther objects after that in case… it doesn’t recognize our location.”

Left unsaid was that farther objects would only be useful for locations on a larger, galactic scale.

• Ensign Riley, Science

Scans kept coming in now from the probe. Sadly nothing on the analyses came up as anything on record. Out to the far range of the probe’s scans nothing pinged as being recognizable. They did though find what might be the ‘edge’ of the nebula indicating it was likely somewhat sizable in scope. What was also picked up though were faint subspace pulses which could or not be some kind of alien comm signal outside the nebula’s boundaries at the extreme range of scans.

GM CockRoach

Riley’s eyes widened. “Possible radio contact,” he said, zooming on the indicated area. “At the very edge of the sensor range - 720 million kilometers or so. Subspace pulses. Running cryptoanalysis now.”

His fingers flew across the inputs as he passed the signal through the computer’s database of algorithms, trying to see if they could determine a pattern, or if it was recognized. He executed the command and waited, strumming his fingers on the table, watching the visual representation of the pulse vibrate in place on the holodisplay.

“How far do you think he flung us?” he asked quietly, eyes not straying from the map. “He sent the Enterprise to the Delta Quadrant once.” He glanced at the star positions on the map. “This… feels… farther.”

Ensign Riley, Science

The analysis continued to chug away, no immediate patterns came up as a match, but given the pulse patterns it did have a ‘speech’ like pulse quality to it indicating seemingly intelligent life nearby. Full analysis would take a few hours at this point there did not seem much else to learn on scans.

GM CockRoach