2952-10-30 – Tales from the Service: The Beauty of the Nebula 

Stefan Giunta swept his Cavalier’s directional sensor cluster across the thick mass of nebula gasses as he and Clemens circled around it. Based on the strange readings he was getting, the cloud had to have a high phased matter concentration, but he lacked the equipment to determine quite what kind. Flying through a phased-matter soup would put a lot of wear and tear on their rigs, but compared to the damage it could do to their mothership, they would be expected to take that risk. 

Beyond that, of course, it was nearly impossible to get any clear picture of the inside of the cloud. There was some chaotic radar reflection from some angles, but no infrared readings, nothing on gravimetrics, and nothing on the visible light scopes. 

“Think maybe there’s some debris in there, Giunta?” Clemens asked. 

“Could be.” Stefan panned the directional array back and forth, looking at the raw-data readout to try to get some better sense of what he was looking at, since the modeling computer had spat a series of errors and given up on the problem several minutes beforehand. “I think it’s all contiguous, but I can't get a good picture of the structure.” 

“Denser sub-layer of gas?” 

“Don’t think so.” Stefan fiddled with the frequency settings on his radio emitter. “The radar profile has hard edges from some angles.” 

“Let’s just call it in as a possible pirate harbor.” Clemens sighed. “The skipper will either have us light it up or route us around, and either way it won’t be a problem anymore.” 

“That’s probably safest.” Stefan knew only too well that Brushfire pirates did love to build forward bases in outriding clouds of the nebula, making it easier to raid nearby systems and get back into hiding, without leaving an easy trail back to the main hideout deeper in. “But I think we should get a visual.” 

“Bad idea.” Clemens’s voice had gone from lackadaisical to sharp in an instant. “Our rigs will be in maintenance for a week while the techs figure out what that cloud has done to them. And Commander Jansson will have us scrubbing deck plating and recycler tanks the whole time for risking a couple of brand-new Cavaliers just to satisfy our curiosity.” 

“No sense for us both to go in, then.” Stefan disengaged his autopilot and put his hands back on the stick. “Continue your orbit. I’ll catch you on the other side.” 

Clemens’s sigh was cut off by the other pilot muting the comms channel, probably in order to call in the uncertain sighting as a possible pirate installation. Stefan chose a course across the slightly narrowed middle of the cloud, then accelerated to a speed that would take him through in about two minutes and pointed all of his sensors forward. Running right into some object was incredibly unlikely, because even at the thickest part the cloud’s gasses would not reduce his visibility below a dozen kilometers, but he was interested in surviving this gamble, even if it did mean scrubbing recycler tanks. On the off-chance there was something to see, he’d be the one to see it. He’d heard stories of strange things people thought they’d seen in the Brushfire Nebula, and thought most of them just spacers’ tall tales, but perhaps today he’d have a story of his own. 

A few moments later, Stefan’s Cavalier entered the outer part of the gas cloud. There was no sudden transition from open space to misty pink and grey, only a gradual transition from the usual infinite crowding of background stars, to a black sky with fewer and fewer stars, then to no stars at all except the hazy orb of the putative local primary. Only when he was deep into the gas did the Cavalier’s lights start to light up the colors and striations that had been visible from a distance.  

“Still got you on sensors, Giunta.” Clemens had apparently gotten over his distaste for the idea, probably because he would get to be the one to tell Janssen “I told him so” if things went wrong. “See anything?” 

“Nothing yet.” Stefan gave his rig some reverse thrust, further extending his time inside the cloud. “Visibility is about fifteen or twenty klicks.” 

“You’ll be coming up on the largest area of radar artifacts in about ten seconds... Make that twelve.” 

Stefan put hi counted down in his head as his craft hurtled through the darkness. What was he expecting to see? Pirates building a new outpost? The shattered wreck of a hauler which had blundered into exotic phased matter and had its reactor go critical? Some strange nightmare shape uncoiling in the gloom like the cantina tall tales? 

The Cavalier’s lights glinted on something ahead. Stefan leaned forward against his restraints and stared hard, even though he would have plenty of time to review the recordings from all his cameras later. Whatever it was, it reflected the lights back into his eyes as it gently tumbled through the nebula pocket, but he got a glimpse of a jagged but somehow regular profile. 

In an instant, he was past the object, but just as quickly another one, this one far larger but obviously of the same kind, loomed up on the starboard side, each of its pillar-like protrusions as long as a space station’s docking gantry, each a different thickness, and each faceted like it was cut by a jeweler with hands the size of moons. 

“Woah.” Stefan made a few small corrections to his course. What he was looking at was so beautiful it could only be natural formations, but he hadn’t the faintest idea how such things could form out here. “No pirates, Clemens.” He paused to appreciate a smaller object, about the size of his Cavalier, that was particularly intricately formed. “Just some of the prettiest rocks you’ll ever see.”  

The position of this anomalous formation is, obviously, withheld, presumably to protect the objects from tampering until a Hegemony scientific expedition can study them in greater detail. Unfortunately, no images are provided with this account; most likely the intelligence officer aboard Flit Diver put them under seal to reduce the chances of someone guessing the location of the anomaly. 

I will spare you all Mr. Giunta’s longer description of the objects; it would nearly double the length of this feed item. He seems to regard seeing them as a life-changing event, though he is certain they are natural crystalline minerals.