With her deep space charter complete, Commander Altsain was now free to return home to Shinrarta Dezhra. However, there were a couple of sights she wanted to see first, starting with Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy.

Upon arriving, the commander found Sagittarius A* to be… weird. The Cosmos dropped out of witch space a respectable distance from the black hole (a lot further back than some of the smaller ones she had already encountered on this journey), and spent some time flying around, watching the light of distant stars distorting as they were bent around it (an effect known as gravitational lensing).

Also present in this ‘system’ is a class B star known as Source 2. The commander was pleasantly surprised/amazed as her scanners were able to get a detailed picture of it from over 100,000 light seconds away, a new record for any of her ships.

After scanning the tourist beacon (while pushing her way through the fleets of Belugas also there), Commander Altsain set course for the journey home – but decided to go through the ‘second Bubble’ at Colonia because, well, she had never been there before!

Perched on ‘top’ of a nebula, Colonia is a fair home from home for anyone who has… issues… within the core systems. The commander was hoping to visit all the stations and bases at Colonia, including the recently commissioned Dove Enigma, visit neighbouring systems and maybe even join in with Community Goal that was gathering materials in Colonia itself.

Then she remembered her passenger, the explorer Alan Robertson.

He had specifically asked not to be scanned (apparently he had gathered some important data from the Eye of Fire that, somehow, others had missed in that tourist site…). That meant they could not hang around at Colonia, so the Cosmos had to sneak into the station.

Inside, a few repairs had to be made to the ship, just a little cosmetic damage sustained over the tens of thousands of light years it had travelled since servicing. The commander also took the opportunity to upload her exploration data to the Cartographic Service – and netted nearly MCr125. With 20,000 light years still to go, plus her charter’s pay of nearly MCr40, this voyage would prove to be not only interesting, but immensely profitable!

However, the call of the core systems was getting strong now, and the commander had received a communication that things were hotting up within the Federal Liberal Command. Ms. Winters was calling for aid in a big operation, and Commander Altsain was duty-bound to answer!

What followed was a fair rush to the core systems, with only the briefest of exploration being performed (though the commander did manage to discover another Earth-like world on the way back that others had missed).

Upon returning to Jameson Memorial and wishing the explorer well in his future endeavours, the commander immediately plotted a course for Rhea to see what had happened in her absence…