The log of the ship has been a time-honored tradition since the royal navies of old Earth. When we reached the stars so many things became digital, intangible. Paper was a novelty, an antique. It was expensive to buy blank paper but every captain does it. They spend usually over a thousand credits for each real leather back book. With that kind of money they could fuel the ship to run from the core worlds to the outer colonies. Still every ship’s captain from the flagship of the Royal fleet to the lowliest garbage tugs make the investment. Sure others have tried to do away with this tradition and many commercial fleets require a digital submission; however, the first and often best account will always go in that leather book.

This was my last entry.

Captain’s Ledger. Cycle 165; Kelacycle 214 ALE; 0164 Ticks, Galactic Standard Time

The Rings of Gamora. It sounds like something that would be either totally beautiful or totally evil. I fear that it is quite possibly both. Last cycle at 2501 Ticks GST we were the first vessel from the Royal Science Repository to make it this far out. We entered the Gamora system to investigate an interstellar phenomenon that one of our outermost research posts found on there tachyon telescope. From what I understood it is nothing like the telescopes that the ancestors used when they first dreamed of the stars, which is why we couldn’t get a real view of what were about to stumble on.

We entered the outermost edges of the Gamora system and our minds could not believe our eyes. Halfway through the system there was a set of beautifully colored rings. Never in all the places I’ve visited in either my time in the Royal Navy or the Science Repository have I seen anything close to being as beautiful or strange. The rings were placed like an asteroid belt and each one seemed to have the consistency of a nebula. The strangest thing is that each ring seemed to be composed of stellar matter different from the adjacent ring. It was like looking at nearly forty different types of nebulas in one place.

The egg heads wanted to take a closer look. They claimed that this could be the ultimate laboratory for studying the different types of nebulas that could exist in the rest of the universe. The scientists had their work cut out for them however because I had already ordered us into the system before I took Dr. Remus’ call. Remus makes a great lead scientist and not a half bad first officer but I sure did make him work convince me before I told him that I had already set the course.

We entered the system and passed the outer four planets without incident. The entire system seemed devoid of life but we didn’t think much of it at the time since we weren’t in the Goldilocks zone until we were on the other side of the rings. I doubt we will ever make it past the rings, or anywhere else for that matter. Shortly after we crossed the orbit of the fourth planet all hell broke loose. The astrometrics deck was calling me from multiple labs. Countless other departments followed when every instrument started acting like it wasn’t in normal space. Frankly, I don’t think we are anymore.

Without instruments to guide us the bridge crew began to panic. There were some strange colors swirling on the main viewer and the data coming across its HUD didn’t make any sense. I took a walk to one of the small viewports embeded along the back wall of the bridge and stepped up on the chair of one of the rear auxiliary stations to bring my head level with the claristory style portal. Once I saw the swirls of colors and gas I knew that I would be going down with my ship today.

The gravitational eddies are drawing the ship further into the maelstrom of nebula-like space. The scientists told me that these pockets of space are not made up of gas and space matter as we know it. The best they could figure is that these were overlapping tears of space-time crossing multiple dimensional plains. They don’t even have a clue what these plains are even like. The probe we launched into the storm ahead of us sent back readings  of a planet two ripples away from where we are now. The Special Engineering Lab thinks they can ready the escape pods to blast free of the gravitational pull. It has something to do with the fact that the mass of The Hathor is exciting the forces of the tear. They feel that the pods, having a mere fraction of the mass of the ship, would be able to make it out of the field with the right modifications. The med lab insists that the crew would need to be in stasis to survive the journey which means someone would have to stay behind to launch them. I doubt that anyone will be able to ever reach them to mount a rescue, not anyone from our dimension anyway. At 200 Ticks I’ll launch the pods and shortly after the eddies will draw me out of range. I wont even know if they make it. I’m told the ship will be torn apart before the pods are even close to being there. The pods will make it to the planet in about 235 kelacycles. By then I would have been dead of old age anyway. I only hope they can make it.

After three years of captaining this boat I never looked at the commission plaque on the bridge until now. I never realized what the old Egyptian goddess was goddess of. The last thing on the list is “goddess of foreign lands”. I hope the ancestors of Egypt were right about Hathor, these scientists will need all the help they can get. I hope she doesn’t hold it against us that we abandoned Earth 214 kelacycles ago, and when the scientists wake up it will have been more than twice that.

END LOG.