In andere Welten

Little by little, Emma gets the Sycorax's basic systems up and running again. She starts life support, as even the supposedly bulletproof, triple-redundant backup has shrunk to less than 10 percent of its capacity. Most of the interactive control screens are blank, but she gets the navigation working again. Nothing is working as it should. The few metrics that are there are all flashing red. She says, "Okay, we can't generate a warp field, but we can fire our thrusters." "But?" asks Marc, who suspects there's a catch to her statement. "But there's no point in going from the frying pan into the fire. We need to be sure what's going on out there before we intervene." "I don't understand," Marc says. "What did we hit?" "Not hit," says Emma. "Whatever we hit, we're still inside." "I'm confused." "The light strips," she says. "We flew through what I think is a dense molecular cloud - except it's moving relative to the Sycorax. That's literally screaming at me." "How is that possible? How did it get through the warp bubble?" "I don't know," she replies. "But it's far too dense for interstellar hydrogen. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what happened. Can you run a parsec scan? I need to know what else is out there." "There's nothing," Marc says, going through the control systems on the digital interface. "Nothing except your rogue planet, but that's about 80 AU away." "We flew into a storm," she says. "A storm of incoming particles." "Particles?" "It looks like some kind of intense stellar wind. The thing is as dense as fog. Way too dense. It's like we flew through the corona of a star." "But there are no stars nearby," Marc says. "I know. I know," Emma replies, sounding frustrated. "But it's there and it's moving at a phenomenal speed. My dear Saraswati, this stream is reaching 99 percent of the speed of light.".