Moth System Observation Post

“Please explain your report. Lieutenant. Our Intelligence people want facts. What did you find?” Captain Zinab Sjöberg pushed the button that closed the door to her office on the space port. 

The lieutenant stood stiffly. She had been the commanding  officer on the bridge of a 400 ton Escort that had been involved in an incident.
“The sensor operator had picked up an energy pulse from the outer part of the system. I instructed the pilot to head for that location at best possible speed with sensors off. We estimated that the pulse was from a small craft drive, it looked like a commercial drive rather than a military one. Assuming that, the distance was estimated at  around 3.03 AU.  At 4 G that’s just under 60 hours. I sent a compressed message to base and, having no negative reply, continued.”
Sjöberg shook her head. The lieutenant had clearly memorised her report. “You said you were conducting a training exercise.”
“It was good training for the crew, Captain. After 59 hours and 40 minutes I brought the Escort to combat alert status and activated the sensors. We were in luck. I picked up a contact at 45,000 kilometres distance. We passed it 11 seconds later, before the weapons had chance to calculate a firing solution.”
“What about the sensor scans?”
“A large rectangular object , about 400 to 500 tons. The scan data is available, but we think it was shielded, we got a lot less that you’d expect. Was it a hostile, Captain?”
Sjöberg shrugged in a non-committed way. “Who knows? What happened to it?”
“By the time we had turned round, it had jumped out of the system. We detected the jump pulse but we were too far to track it accurately. The sensor operator thinks it was heading to Stolitsa, but they are our allies, it doesn’t make sense.”
Captain Sjöberg nodded. “If we have no reliable data on what it was, who owned it or what it was doing, we have nothing to go on.” She waved the lieutenant away.  “Thank you for the report, lieutenant, dismissed!”

The lieutenant closed the door after herself. 

Sjöberg shook her head. They were 20 parsecs from the border. It was clearly a spy ship, but who amongst their allies was spying on them? The alliance to Stolitsa had been in place for some 90 years. She would speak to Sector Intelligence. They could decide what to do. The politicians would not like the evidence but Intelligence could deal with them.

The Moth is not acknowledged, not discussed and rarely seen. It lurks silently several AU from its subjects. It listens and records. Sometimes it watches a world, and coordinates First Contact with new cultures, or re-establishes contact with lost ones. Crews spend a long time on Moths, sometimes their judgement fails. Others are assigned to Moths because they are unlikely to cause trouble there.
The Moth supplement gives you deck plans and a description of the Moth and a long range pinnace. There’s an adventure with a new alien race, a list of the crew and specialists. There’s 8,600 words, 30 pages and lots of artwork.

Please note that there is a new version of the scenario file  (26th July 2021) to correct a formatting error)