With the Cutter in orbit over the planet, the interference was reduced, and they managed to pick up more signals to work with, giving them a much better idea of where they were even though most of the stars that they could see were unfamiliar.
But the few that they did recognize and had stored in their computer systems were enough to verify their exact location, roughly 10 standard astronomical units away from where they had found the Grey aliens.
That was a manageable distance, and they could make their way back to the battlefield from here in only a few weeks, but Max had the feeling that there was a reason they were dropped here, other than the fact that it was uninhabited and unmonitored.
"Alright, now we know where we are, but is anyone else getting the feeling that they should know something more about this area, and it's just slipping from their mind?" Max asked.
It might be an anomaly caused by the creature that dropped them here, to guide their actions toward increased chances of survival for the cats that they had on board, so if someone else had a strange feeling, then he would go with instinct and explore the area first.
"I get the feeling that there is something that we're missing. Something that we should know, but we don't, does that make sense?" One of the human team members agreed.
The Innu all nodded in unison.
"This place is strange, familiar, but not. It feels like we should know where we are, but I know I've never been here before." They agreed, taking turns to finish the sentence.
A few of the cats wandered over to inspect the display screen, then promptly lost interest. To Max, that meant that whatever was here wasn't something that was of particular interest to them, but if it was giving a strange feeling to both Max and the Innu, then it might be something important to them.
"Alright, let's search for something that we're missing. I want two teams, one searching for signs of inhabitable planets, the other searching for signs of anomalies, areas with missing data, and anything else that shouldn't be here, like destroyed star systems." Max ordered.
The team got to work, and Nico ordered the Androids, who were all on standby in their Mecha, for lack of space to be anywhere else, to do the same thing, using hundreds of computing points to identify and corroborate anything that they found.
There was no chance that they would find everything that there was to see out here, but if Max was right, then the thing that they were intended to find would either be very close, or incredibly obvious once they started looking.
Of course, that was just a theory, and they might not even understand how to look for the thing that they were intended to find until it was too late, and they had already given up and left the area.
Fortunately, they had just the right sorts of experts to search for things that were out of the ordinary, with the intuitive abilities of Nico and the Innu, as well as the logic of the Androids, but it ended up being Max's system that picked up the anomaly before anyone else did.
[Optimize Optical Emitter Array?] It asked him.
Max didn't recall there being any unoptimized items on the ship, and the feline nomads certainly hadn't brought one with them, so where was this mystery device in need of optimization?
Max searched for it using the indicators that [Optimize] had given him, and found that it was in space, only a few thousand kilometres from their position, but so small that it had been mistaken for another piece of debris.
It also appeared to be active, and as Max examined it in preparation to bring it onboard and try to determine its origins, he saw the entire universe in their scanners flicker.
"Tell me someone else saw that." Max demanded.
"Yes, sir. All of us, and the Androids. There is something wrong here, I think that we are in a very sophisticated illusion." The crew team leader agreed.
Max sent a drone out of the ship to bring the emitter back on board, depositing it directly to the research lab, which was now accessible through only one route, as the ship was almost completely packed with drones and Mecha.
"I found the emitter, it's in the research bay now. Try not to break it, I want to know how it works and where it came from that it can emulate an entire universe in our sensors." Max instructed them.
The way that they raced out of the room almost looked like Max had changed the gravity settings, and they were in free fall. One second they were right in front of him, the next they were gone, all disappeared into the research lab to work on the identification of the newest gadget to enter their workshop.
While they worked to learn how the emitter worked, Max worked on discovering what it had been hiding. As far as he could tell, it wasn't actually replacing all the data they were gathering, only a portion of it, and he just had to find out what had been replaced to learn the secret that whoever had left it there wanted to hide.
The problem was that while the sensors had flickered, nothing really changed. It was more like a wave of interference had come over them, and the signals had been scrambled.
Max would have believed that if he hadn't already identified the device, and would have called it a signal jammer, not an optical emitter.
But it couldn't just be emitting optical data. If all their sensors were affected, it was transmitting data on every wavelength that they were scanning. Or, possibly, it had malfunctioned and caused the sensors to flicker when it was only supposed to be creating a false image.
One by one, Max sorted through the data inputs until he found what he was looking for. The optical transmitter had been trying to hide an empty spot in space. Or a seemingly empty spot in space, since Max didn't yet know if the flicker had shown them reality and not a distorted version of the transmission.
