Chapter One Eternal Night

I

The moment Galactic Imperial Fleet captain, Siegfried Kircheis, stepped onto the bridge, he stopped thoughtfully. Countless specks of light inlaid the abyss of the universe, and they enveloped Siegfried’s body with an overwhelming sense of infinity.

“………”

It was as if his entire being was floating in the boundless darkness, but this illusion disappeared quickly. The bridge of Flagship Brünhild was shaped in a giant hemisphere. The hemisphere’s spherical part was the bridge’s upper half, and it was covered with a single screen resembling a transparent piece of glass that allowed one to clearly observe the universe outside.

After his momentary sensibility subsided, Kircheis re-inspected his surroundings. Within this spacious room, the lighting system controlled the brightness to produce a thin layer of darkness. Numerous screens both large and small, consoles, gauges, computers, and communication devises, etc, were arranged in an orderly geometric pattern. People walked back and forth, and the movements of their heads, arms, and legs made it easy for one to imagine schools of fish riding along with the currents.

A hint of odor stimulated Kircheis’s nostrils. It was the scent of adrenaline produced by nervous people under a state of fight or flight, mixed with the electronic odor that machines emitted in the recycled oxygen. It was a scent that spacemen found to be most familiar.