The system of Alpha Cucurbita - originally V354 Cephei - had absolutely nothing to recommend it except its location. Its single star was an elderly supergiant with a volume greater than some entire star systems. By stellar standards it was at death's door, with barely a million years remaining until its inevitable supernova. There had been some concern about that even becoming a threat to the colony at Hestia, barely forty light-years away, but the time scale had been investigated and determined to be acceptable.
Instead, the giant sun shone redly in the southern night sky of Earthpeople's newest home.
"I'm bored. Boredy boredy mcbored. So bored I'm willing to talk to anybody just to get some noise to be bored to. How 'bout you, how bored are you?"
First Lieutenant Coda Parino of the United Nations Space Forces closed his eyes and reminded himself, as patiently as he could, that neither punching his fighter's control console nor turning to shoot down his WORTHLESS OBNOXIOUS DEGRANZ EXCUSE FOR A WINGMAN would be acceptable in any term longer than a few days. "I brought a book. Which I was enjoying, until you opened your mouth."
"A book? Man, you shouldn't mess around with that kinda shit - guaranteed to rot your brain overworking it all the time. It's not healthy!"
"And you're not funny. Clear the com and watch your screen, Two."
Alpha Cucurbita was one of more than thirty systems forming the outer shell of Hestia's defenses. Unlike most of the rest, however, that was all it was. The bloated star's expansion had long ago swallowed its rocky inner worlds and melted and evaporated the icy moons and rings of the outer ones. The thick, slow flood of exited plasma and particles boiling away to its escape velocity tangled into the atmospheres of the gas giants and tore them away into the void layer by diaphanous layer. The aurorae were magnificent with the density of charged fields and particles, but the bloody light of the swollen sun was too chilling for even a hope of tourism.
"Hey, what are you getting so tightassed about? It's not like-"
An alarm screamed.
One of the many wise pieces of advice that his ex-soldier parents had given Coda when he went to enlist was that convenient incidents never were. His father had spun tale after tale of the way the cunning enemies of the Zentradi could attempt to lure an escort ship to its doom, and his mother had pithily noted how many of even the elite Quadrono battalions had found their prayers - if Meltrandi could be said to pray - for relief from boredom ever-so-briefly answered.
"I repeat: Shut. Up."
"Rodger, lead. I show two capital contacts, seventeen cruisers, fifty-three lighter units, over."
"Confirmed," Coda said. "Vectoring Ghost three-eight for distant sensor pass per procedure."
The outer perimeter's purpose in the overall defense of the Hestia colony was simple: to provide warning of intrusion. It was for that reason alone that automated fold-sensors had been constructed and distributed across this and so many other systems. It was in the spirits of shadenfreude and standardization that those sensors had been designed as add-on packages for the United Nations Space Forces' existing robotic fighter craft. Standardization, in that by using those platforms no new designs or parts would need to be produced or paid for. Shadenfreude, in that hostile forces would find that destroying a front-line fighting craft, even a burdened one, was a far different matter than eliminating a mere floating satellite.
The robots sat in space and watched, and the humans assigned to monitor them and decide what was worth reporting to their commanders sat in space in cramped fighter cockpits for days on end and meditated on the sins that had gotten them assigned to such a miserable duty. Until something different happened.
Time passed. Even with the powerful engines of the drone fighters, and even with hundreds of them scattered across the volume of a sphere the size of the orbit of the system's outermost surviving world, the sheer distance involved in the interception made it a matter of hours before more data than the mere presence of the fold came in.
"Hmm... that looks like a CAP perimeter to me, Two."
"They've got the fighters in among their escorts, too, though, Lead."
"True... I don't think those are escorts, the formation's wrong. Transports, maybe?"
"A bit small for that... hey, they're intercepting the Ghost."
"Agreed. Locking them to course and speed... Weapons are safed, sensor take incoming... Pin-pon, look at band 228.3."
"...Sounds like Zentradi, sorta."
"Something like... Woah!"
"I have no idea what that meant, but it sounded pretty feisty."
"'Feisty's' one word. I were you, I wouldn't want this 'Starbuck' lady pissed at me." Coda paused and listened closely to the 'alien' communications. The language did sound like Zentradi, vaguely, the way Italian sounded like Spanish, and getting the gist took concentration. Verbal report describing the drone... something about writing... looking for a cockpit...
The excitable wingman that 'Starbuck' had chewed out just moments earlier yelled two words - one that couldn't have been anything but an explitive - and Coda watched through the sensor feed as he snap-rolled his fighter into the robot's six and fired.
"Damn, I hope the brass don't make us pay for that. What's a Cylon?"
"Dunno. Some kind of robot, maybe? Ghosts are, after all."
"Or a stocking."
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."