2
For the next forty-five minutes, Carlton watched the strange ship draw nearer.
As it grew in the display, he made out more details. Strange markings, letters of some kind he thought, but in no language he had ever seen, decorated the hull in a number of places. The hull was breached. Twin cuts, perfectly parallel and framed with dark scorch marks, tore across the vessel's port side. Gasses of some variety or other vented to space through the cuts, slowly increasing the ship's rate of rotation. Whatever happened to that ship, it had occurred recently.
True to her word, the Captain returned to the bridge. As she floated up to the pilot's console, Carlton noticed she had a spiral-bound stack of paper tucked under her arm. Paper! Carlton hadn't seen a paper document since...well,
