Chapter 10: The Derelicts
Two ships locked in unlikely marriage—beauty and beast, needle and haystack, miniature hare and exploded tortoise.
Ranglen set aside his labored metaphors and plotted a course. He knew they’d spend time on the silver spaceship so he wanted the first flyby near the big piece of “driftwood”—he called it that, for lack of a better name.
A nearby cluster of young stars, fierce and blue-white, awoke emissions from a nebula parked nearby, whose energetic light cascaded through canyons of murk. The glows shone delicate and pale, but compensations made by the viewscreens brought out structure, milky dyes floating in ink: oxygen’s fluorescent greens, hydrogen’s excited reds, reflected dust’s gossamer blue.
But Ranglen paid attention to the object before him.
The light
