Chapter 48: War
The very first thing he asked for was direct communication with the colony, which he promptly got.
“What’s the closest to a real-time location as we can get?” Derek asked.
The answer he got was somewhat less than helpful.
“Uh … Boris has a real time zone of visibility of like two light-minutes, I think, but he’ll take a while to get out there, so we can get you the location in like an hour, but if Jack takes him, then it’ll only take half, but … oh, shoot, we can’t move the comms …”
All in all, it took five minutes and a whole lot of tangents for Derek to lay his hands upon all the relevant facts.
Firstly, the FTL communicator they were talking on was the only one present, and it could not be moved, resulting in a situation where whoever went scouting would have to fly back to the planet before Derek would learn it.
Secondly, they did have someone who could ascertain the real-time location from two light-minutes away, a safe distance against all but the most absurdly exotic weapons, but with the comms issue, that really just meant the scout would have a more up-to-date location from further away, but that was just about it.
Thirdly, there was a teleporter who could chain jumps to get the first guy outside the star’s zone of interference really quickly, so …
All in all, getting far enough from the star to use [Alcubierre Bubble], then actually getting close enough to the alien starship to get an exact location, and finally returning to the communicator to report it would take around twenty minutes, leaving the information he’d get outdated by that much.