Commander Rosa and the Meteor Parade
The meteor shower wasn't in the mission log.
Commander Rosa had pulled up the Academy's astronomical event calendar before the patrol and cross-referenced it against their orbit path, like she always did, she liked to know what was coming. The Aquilid shower hadn't appeared. Either it wasn't in the database, or the database had it listed under a different name, or the Academy's orbit had shifted enough to pass through the debris field unexpectedly.
She found out about it at 2247 hours when the bridge observation lights suddenly looked like they were inside a firework.
"Pip." Rosa didn't take her eyes off the streaks of light crossing the forward screen. "Tell me what I'm looking at."
Cadet Pip, navigator, resident encyclopaedia, and the only cadet Rosa had ever met who read astronomical journals for fun, pulled up her charts. "Meteor shower. Dense debris field, approximately eight hundred by two thousand kilometres. We're going to be inside it for about six hours, give or take."
"Danger to the hull?"
"Minimal. Sub-centimetre particles. Our shielding handles anything below two centimetres." Pip paused. "It's genuinely beautiful, Commander."
Rosa had already decided. "General wake-up. Non-mandatory, tell them what's happening and let them choose."
All four of her crew came.
They arranged themselves around the bridge and the observation alcoves, whoever could find a clear view. The shower was denser than anything Rosa had read about, not just streaks but curtains of light, the debris field thick enough that some moments the stars were hard to see behind the glow.
Cadet Tariq, who was planning to specialise in astrophysics, began naming things. "Iron, that's the white-gold one. Magnesium burns blue. This field is mixed, you can tell because the colours are layered."
"Where did it come from?" asked Yuna.
"Probably a comet. Or a collision in the asteroid belt, something that happened thousands of years ago and scattered debris along this orbital path. We're just flying through what's left of it."
Something that happened thousands of years ago, Rosa thought. And here we are flying through it.
She found that thought almost too large to hold. She pressed her hand against the observation glass and felt the familiar distance between her palm and the stars, metres of hull, then kilometres of vacuum, then the particle that had just streaked past them, burning up in a shower of magnesium light. Something very old. Something very small. Happening right now.
At 0300 hours, as the shower began to thin, she filed a report noting the unlogged event and its approximate debris field coordinates, so future patrol logs would have it.
She added one line at the end that wasn't in any Academy template: Crew morale: exceptional.
The captain who reviewed the log later flagged that line with a question mark.
Rosa left her answer blank. Some things you had to be there for.