The small shuttle, cloaked in stealth, slipped lightly along an arc after passing the Lagrange point, hiding itself even deeper within the star's immense gravity and chaotic electromagnetic background. It then changed course and deployed its thermal shield at the rear, while pointing the antenna array at the front of the ship toward a certain point in the dark starfield.
There was an FTL communication array there, in the deep-space region between Lo's hideout and Grey Dwarf Star. A cluster of high-power transmission antennas was anchored in the darkness, powered by an old reactor and an accompanying gas-collection station. It had been operating for several centuries.
The FTL communication array had originally been built by a band of audacious interstellar merchants. (In the Darkstream Starfield, that name was basically a tense-form variation of "pirates.") But after an unpleasant transaction, the Black Dot Group revoked the caravan's business license in the Darkstream Starfield—the revocation was carried out mainly with 1250mm focused cannons and "Hellfire" fortress torpedoes.
After that, the entire communication array became the property of the Black Dot Group.
In the Darkstream Starfield, these "improvised" communication arrays built by various factions were as important as navigation beacons along a route. Although they were often accompanied by all kinds of dangerous viral broadcasts and countless scam signals, and sometimes operated rather unreliably, they at least supported the most basic communications "business" in this lawless region. They kept the rats hiding in the dim nebulae from devolving into blind, deaf primitive tribes after several generations. After all, the Galactic Union, Terra, and The Crossroads weren't going to come here to build any kind of space infrastructure. The locals had to solve their practical needs in their own way.
Chaotic, bustling communication signals, noisy illegal broadcasts, all sorts of garbled encrypted call signs