To hail a vessel more than a light-hour away from the Flagrant Swordmaidens required the use of their quantum entanglement node. Among their entire combined fleet, only the Jaded Sword and the Shield of Hispania still possessed an intact node.
Contacting a stranger you met in a desolate star system in the middle of nowhere posed a risk. The transmission attempt alone exposed the combined fleet's whereabouts. However, emerging in the same system already exposed them considering the light of their arrival would arrive at the occupants more than an hour later anyway.
The Ermeghast System centered around an orange dwarf star, and a fairly small one at that.
An Orange dwarf was like the middle child between the bright and promising yellow dwarf and the total good-for-nothing waste of space of a red dwarf. Like all dwarf stars, they lived a long time, but they had the benefit of being a lot less volatile in pumping out masses of radiation in its own star system.
