Calyx was busy minding his own business, gathering data from a nearby stellar anomaly while the main fleet orbited the nearby stellar body. They’d been in the Lambda cluster for several weeks now, doing little more than collecting readings. Most of the crew knew the writing was on the wall for the wayward group. There was no money left for continued operations; this was just an exercise in maintaining some kind of normalcy while their jobs quietly evaporated.
He’d come aboard straight out of university, sold on an “on-the-job” program that promised credits and experience toward his PhD. In reality, Calyx had become little more than a gopher--sent out to collect data, samples, and whatever else could be scraped from asteroids and anomalies the larger ships couldn’t safely approach due to their size. Even now, the flagships sleek silhouette orbited a distant moon while his aging Osprey did the dirty work.
"Yeah. This is really great experience." he muttered, adjusting the scanner to pull in yet another data point from the anomaly spinning ahead of him.
"Be advised, Zenith-2. We’re detecting a buildup of energy near your position. Advise caution." the the cruiser reported over the comms.
"Confirmed. I’m seeing it as well. Backing off to a safe distance."
As Calyx eased back on the ship’s engines, nothing happened. He increased thrust, but the Osprey refused to budge as the anomaly began to suddenly flare up in a violent cascade of colors.
"Zenith-2! We’re on our way. Stand by--we’ll try to pull you out!" the Fearless-class cruiser called as its shadow surged toward him--belying it's size.
"Go into deep space, they said," Calyx muttered, wrestling the controls as the anomaly fought back. "Good opportunity for experience, they said--"
The console in front of him suddenly detonated, his last quip cut short as he was swallowed by darkness.
A brief flash of pain was all he felt before darkness took his sight. For a time, he drifted through the vacuum of space. The massive Q-ship and its escorts were nowhere to be seen--the anomaly having flung them far from their original position. All that remained was the small ship, drifting alone through the darkness of its new home.
A song played somewhere nearby. Ominous. Ethereal. His eyes cracked open for a moment before vertigo overwhelmed him and he slipped back into unconsciousness, catching only a brief glimpse of a strange, pulsing glow beyond the cockpit.
He must have been out for some time, because when he woke again he found himself surrounded by darkness--as if light itself wasn’t welcome here. He reached for the controls and found them inert. Cursing, he checked the gauges. Dead. Bringing up the HUD on his suit, he noted he had roughly nineteen hours of oxygen remaining.
"Great. Nineteen hours to get bored to death before I actually die."
He scanned the void outside the cockpit, half-expecting to see his coworkers drifting nearby. There was nothing. At least, nothing close. Far off in the distance, a faint blue light glowed. He couldn’t make sense of it, but it was there.
"Could be a star." he muttered. "No power, so I might as well get out and walk. Even then, the engines are probably toast. I can impulse toward it, and my corpse can burn up in the corona like a true Starli--"
Something struck the canopy--solid, but not hard enough to crack it. Calyx flinched as the body of a man bounced off the wing and tumbled away into the darkness. He sat in silence for a moment before moving, then got to work restoring power to the ship.
"Power first. Engines after, if I need them. Then I get to that star and see what’s what." He began humming a tune as he worked, unsure where he had last heard it...at least he had music in lieu of operational electronics.
Little did he know, however...his journey wasn't taking him to a star.
