At that moment, Ina adjusted her terminal and played another video.
It was a panoramic view of the star system. Dominating the image was a space station built in the style of an Imperial temple, with a green planet and a sky full of stars in the distance.
Of course, rather than Imperial temple style, it was more like the Enlighteners' priestly style. Or perhaps the Empire's space architecture and shipbuilding traditions had both been deeply influenced by the Enlighteners.
Yu Lian quickly guessed that the ship in question was one of their own. To him, it was a true warship in every sense of the word.
"This footage was taken by the exploration telescope aboard the Socrates," Ina explained.
Space telescopes installed on exploration ships could capture every optical signal within their observation range to the greatest extent possible, then use the billions of computing units in the shipboard terminals to reconstruct the image. However, because they collected so much complicated information at once, a team of science officers usually had to analyze it. That was the main value of the crew aboard the Socrates, an exploration vessel.
Ina dragged the playback to the forty-seventh second, pointed to a spot in the image, and had the technicians magnify it by tens of millions of times. In a patch of deep space, they could make out a blurry speck of light.
"That should be a gravity well," Ina said. "We did pick up a faint jump signature when we entered the system. But it lasted only an instant, so at first everyone thought they'd imagined it."
"You really are impressive, spotting an anomaly in such a short time," Eleanor praised.
The science officers aboard the Socrates, whose names weren't important, accepted the commander's praise, but bashfully explained that much of