"Their intelligence is going through us from here on."
"Understood, sir."
With that the junior officer turned toward his terminal and began drafting.
The senior officer walked to the wall display, where the last captured frame of the woman, beautiful, red-haired, smiling, mid-gesture, still hung on the panel.
He looked at it for a long moment. Then he pulled up the archive interface and marked the frame for secure preservation. Every fragment of imagery.
Every scrap of sensor data. Every audio recording, however fragmented. All of it was going into the classified vault and, from there, up the chain to whoever at national command was going to be handling the analysis.
He did not delete the recording. He was, in the specific way that career operators were, a man who understood that the correct response to an event this far outside standard operating parameters was to preserve every piece of evidence and let the analysis run wherever it needed to run.
