"Well. Goddamn." Asuka stared out the front viewport and shook her head slowly. Once both shuttles had launched, the crew found themselves surrounded by a cloud of debris that seemed to stretch on for miles. The repair bay loomed directly in front of the shuttles, its severed edges still glowing faintly, as if the hull had been vaporized. But the rest of the debris …

"That doesn't look like it could've come from the station," Kamala said, her voice quivering. She pulled herself closer to one of the side viewports.

"Nope. The colors don't match, the shapes aren't right, and what little I can see in the way of lettering isn't even familiar." Asuka's eyes zoomed in on some of the larger chunks and she raised an eyebrow. "And I've just spotted one that appears to be semi-organic. Definitely not one of ours."

Kamala glanced over her shoulder at Asuka. "You mean … alien?"

"Could be. No way to tell without a closer look, and we don't have any spacesuits or scanning equipment." She shrugged. "Oh, well, we've got more important things to worry about."

Kamala nodded, sniffed, and wiped away a tear in the corner of her eye. "Yeah. My brother's still on the station. If it hasn't blown up, that is." She sobbed and clamped a hand over her mouth.

Roger put an arm around her and rubbed her back.

Asuka nodded. "I've got a lot of friends there, too, particularly on the security team."

Another sob came from behind her. She turned and looked at Marissa, crammed into the passenger compartment with Seth and the rest of the maintenance crew. Seth put his arms around Marissa and glanced around at the others.

"Our girlfriend is there, too, if she's still … alive." He winced.

"Take it easy." Asuka zoomed in on the repair bay again. "Look at the edges. That wasn't an explosion, it's a clean cut. Like someone used an enormous blowtorch to cut a section out. And I don't see the rest of the hull anywhere near us."

T-Bone, sitting in the pilot's seat, waved a hand at the red gas and dust cloud that dominated half the sky. "Whatever dropped us here is probably the same thing that sliced us off from the station."

"So all the people we got separated from are most likely still alive. I bet they're thinking we're dead."

"I hope not," Marissa muttered and sniffed again. "I hope they keep looking for us."

"If we're even close enough to find." T-Bone tapped a button on his console, opening a link to Lopez, who'd clamped his magnetic footpads onto the roof of the shuttle. "See anything familiar out there?"

"Nah," the robot replied. "I don't recognize any of the constellations. None of the hull fragments match anything in my files. Not that we had any ships farther out than Jupiter, except a few automated probes and the deep-space explorer Carl Sagan. And none of the pieces here resemble any part of the Sagan or the probes."

Asuka nodded. More ships would've been launched on exploration missions once the jumpgate was finished, but until then, the Sagan was the only Earth ship out there, and it had only gone as far as Alpha Centauri. Humanity and its progeny -- AI mechs like Lopez and bioengineered anthros like Kamala -- had just barely begun to explore the galaxy.

"Whoa," Roger said under his breath. He pointed at something off to the left. "Take a look at that."

T-Bone tapped the RCS thrusters, turning the shuttle enough to bring the object into the main viewport, and Asuka's jaw dropped. She was looking at what appeared to be the front half of a large sailing ship tumbling slowly amid the rest of the debris. She zoomed in again.

"What the hell? That's a Spanish galleon. Well, half of one." She swept her eyes over the hull and spotted several bodies floating around the wreckage. "Oh, damn, I just found some of its crew."

Kamala shivered.

"How the hell did that get way out here?" one of the people in the rear of the compartment said.

"Same way we did." Kamala flicked her eyes downward. "Oh, man. We're lucky we got out of there when we did."

Asuka followed the direction of her gaze just in time to see a gigantic chunk of metal smash into the repair bay. Whatever the thing had been, it was so big that the bay looked like a bug hitting a car's windshield.

Everyone was silent for a long moment. T-Bone sighed.

"What now?"

Kamala took a slow look around at the debris field. "Well, we've seen parts of possibly alien ships and one from Earth hundreds of years ago, so who knows what else might be out here? How about we look around and see if we find a ship that's still intact?"

Asuka smiled. "Works for me."

"It's better than sitting here and waiting for our oxygen to run out." T-Bone put his hands back on the controls. "Okay, let's see what we can find."