Keep going. They'll either be near a jump point or a nebula. You don't have much stuff to check around, really.

I have windows 7 pro 64 bit running on an hp z400 workstation with xeon x5670 processor. this game only kind of works for me. on ep2 m2 it would not let me build a military base. the game would not recognize that I had researched military bases. I completed research on them 3 times to no avail. finally I tried reloading the game. still no go on bases. I got by this eventually by researching military bases in the mission before ep2 m2. I have the same trouble finding pirates as reported by others. if there is a later revision than 1.09 I would sure like to try it. there are way too many space video games to waste much time on one that fights you too much. thanks to gog I have dozens of space games from their summer sale.

ep2 m2 update. I tried this mission again. during play the program quit accepting keyboard input. the program then would not terminate normally. mouse input still worked. I quit the program with ctr-alt-del. I restarted the program but the keyboard problem was still there. it is as if the program had reverted back to a version before 1.09. obviously, something in the program or its data files had corrupted. the sad thing is that with windows 7 pro 64 bit the gog uninstall program cannot properly uninstall all of haegemonia. this means you cannot reload the program from gog properly without manually eliminating the previous left overs. you have to call on the almost sacred win 7 administrator privileges to do this. if you have done this, you know what a pain this is. haegemonia is in my past now, thankfully.