From the glare filling his helmet, Captain Sonoda figured he had thirteen minutes before the exploding nebula over his shoulder baked him and the four hundred people on the other side of the meter-thick vibranium hull to a crisp. On the upside, the view wasn't bad. "Cap?" First Officer Veska sounded as if she were right beside him, scaling the hull of the unpowered starship on the edge of space. "We need to hurry." "Krint?" He looked down at the tech officer far below him. The kid had no business being out here. A hard-working Engy of farmer stock whose father had wept with pride at the Nomad's christening ceremony. But the repair-drone was on the fritz again and Schade was dead. Sonoda had promised to take care of the kid, to whatever extent such terms even applied in deep space. "Now." He joined the cables strung between his fingers, while simultaneously far below him Krint flipped the switch, diverting the emergency power back where it belonged before it could fry their power core. Nomad shuddered. Tongues of blue flame chugged from the boosters, silhouetting Krint's spindly outline against the brightness as he began clambering upwards. Sonoda flicked the arc welder off. The panel slid shut. "Done," he said. "We're coming in." His luck had held. Again. As the Cassian civilization's first space travelers, to have even survived this long was a victory. Miraculously, it had been a mere year since the launch of their mission. In that time they'd seen more wonders than they'd dreamt possible in a single lifetime. Plasma-based organisms awed that meat-like beings such as humans could exist, let alone master space travel. Volcanic eruptions severe enough to dent the ship's hull from orbit. Granite humanoids of consummate martial prowess. Massive dark matter worms that preyed on black holes. Machine intelligences that piloted worlds like dragsters. Jellyfish the size of whales that Nomad was thankfully too miniscule to entice. Entities that defied description. All fascinating. None sufficient. Sonoda propelled himself along the rungs set into the hull towards the hatchway. "Captain, stand by," said Science Officer Thekford in his other ear. For the Nomad's new Science Officer, this was an unusually loquacious utterance. "We're picking up an energy sig. It's...curious. A cycling radiation bandwidth unlike anything we've run across. Ten degrees off your starboard." Sonoda resisted the urge to look over his shoulder at the looming whorls of nebulae. "Show me in ten minutes." He bunched his shoulders in preparation to leap aboard into the decompression chamber yawning open beside him. "It's cycling over a billion ergs a second." Sonoda froze.

Source: World Story