Commodore Igsat Tarimenloku took the bit in his teeth and pressed the two keys. His Reverence's ship Blessed Flenyaagor emerged into real-space with its troopship companion. Everyone was at his battle station, but nothing happened except that they continued at emergence speed in the now star-bannered blackness.
He hadn't really expected an attack. For the last two hours in hyperspace, he'd stopped, speeded, stopped again, with no sign of a bogey. And it was inconceivable that they were still inside the hostile sector they'd been in before. But as the first minutes passed, he felt the gradual ebbing of tension, leaving him slack, letting him know how tense he'd actually been.
He'd emerged in a system whose primary was a singlet, a Type F main sequence star, visually a small disk blazing intensely some 800 million miles away. His flagship couldn't evaluate the system for a habitable planet nearly as quickly as the lost survey ship would have, but if any planet had parameters promising enough to call for close examination, he'd know it within the hour and close on it within a day or so. And depending on the outcome of each subsequent phase of observations, he'd determine its critical habitability parameters within a few days more, at most.