The USH, short for United Sylvanian Hive, Womb of Terror was, in galactic standards, a cruiser class carrier build for pursuit, surveilliance and law enforcement in sylvanian space.
The Sylvanians believed strongly in deterrence and modelled their spaceships accordingly. The Womb of Terror was practically on its maiden voyage and boasted state of the art sylvanian tech. It came with a sensor suite sensitive enough to detect heat differences of minute grade within an entire starsystem in seconds, a tripple barrel positron cannon that could burn holes straight through a small moons core, automated high G attack drones that could accelerate, without warp assistance, at 150 G and were loaded with tiny explosives and some other goodies, designed to damage, but not destroy, a fleeing ships drive.
For the Sylvanians fear mongering had been the backbone of their cultural heritage from ancient times on. Most galactic civilisations earned dominance over their competitors at an early stage of development when their wars were still fought with blunt objects and possibly but not necessarily fire (only a meager percentage of a percentage of atmospheres provided the oxygen or equivalent needed for endothermic reaction). In their case their homeworld had already been occupied by an ancient spacefaring race of peaceful and benevolent bipedal crab like creatures. It had taken centuries of uplifting attempts by the "crabs" to finally create the first sylvanian hive mother. It wasn't known whether the crabs did it because they were bored lonely or just felt they needed someone to share the universe with but the original hive mother didn't care. She preferred life without crab overlords and put her children to the task. Sylvanian drones had the ability to conciously alter the way their bodies looked and functioned with almost no restrictions which was most likely a trait that the crabs had intended to utilize but was instead made best use of by the sylvanians themselves in their quest for crab extinction.
To this day the standart sylvanian phenotype included a pincor as a reminder to the universe at large of their superiority and hate for crabs. The Universe at large adored the Sylvanians. Sylvanian worker drones could be bought in batches, were incredibly adaptive, you breathed oxygen on your ship a sylvanian could be molded to do that, you needed a plummer that could go inside the tubes and clean them from the inside out a sylvanian did that, you needed a bodyguard made of liquid titanium that could shoot lasers from his eyes a sylvanian it was. A Sylvanian was what you needed it to be. Not quite cheap to acquire but affordable for the wealthy, the sylvanians had, out of lack of real intellect and ingenuity, made an intergalactic business out of selling their drones in exchange for technical expertise and rare metals. The hive mother had, at some point after a lenghty civil war, put a hard limit on the intelligence her drones could wield for fear of being overthrown and it turned out to be the perfect decision. Business was thriving. The Womb of Terror was an acquisition gained from such a transaction with a neighboring, comparatively new and weak civilisation, calling themselves the Terran Federation. It came with human personel that was supervised by a small contingent of sylvanian drones.
The Womb of Terror had been attracted by a distress call it logged a week ago from a mining vessel that identified itself as The Golden Nori and was in hot pursuit. It had followed its heat trail to a remote starsystem called EV Lacertae and was just running its sensor through the system when the ships Ai recognised an emergency locator beacon pinging away relentlessly.
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