Travelling at 99.9965% the speed of light does wonders for escaping the authorities. Oh, not the speed – the Explendia Security Forces had ships that were faster than the low-grade, low-quality junk I was flying. No, it was the relativistic time difference that would save me. My month-long mission, surveying deep space, would take ten years by their reckoning. Long enough for any charges to be forgotten.

  I was innocent, of course. I was always innocent.

  But that hardly mattered. And wanted felons were a great source of labour for the most boring job in the universe: mapping an area that was 99.999999…% empty (I don’t know, but there needs to be an absurd number of 9s after that decimal point).

  Trust me, I’ve been doing this a lot. My birth date was almost 200 years ago in Explendian years, but, by my reckoning, my biological age, or maybe that should be chronological age, is only 23. That's how much I had been doing this. We weren’t going to find anything out here. There were about to be another 29 days of complete boredom ahead of me.

  But, before we get to the inevitable alarms and light display indicating how wrong I was, here’s a little about myself.

  My name is Ryan Starfire, captain of the deep-space vessel, the Dragon Nova. I was the first and only human ever to be born on the Explendia space station. My parents' heritage was as much a mystery to me as the rest of the sector. 200 years is a long time, and they were long gone. I don't want to talk about them, except to say that I was at least grateful to them for my dashing good looks and imposing 6-foot-plus frame.

  All of which would have been impressive on my ancestral planet (wherever that was), but never quite got the respect it deserved when surrounded by aliens with all their peculiar ways. I’d have been better off 2-foot shorter with a monobrow and explosive ear hair.

  Speaking of 4-foot creatures with plaitable ears and a bushy tail: Felix, my usually silent co-pilot, started to chatter away, his tail flicking from side to side.

  “Use Explendian standard, Felix!” I said, having no idea what he was saying. I’d never felt the need to learn the Granit’s language.

  The grey squirrel-like creature cast an angry look my way. He hated me calling him Felix.

  Before he could reply, the display lit up, and alarms rang through the ship. Substandard inertial dampeners kicked in as the ship automatically decelerated in response to a detected anomaly. I gripped the sides of my chair, suddenly wishing I’d used the protective restraints that were no longer required in most modern spacecraft, and struggled to stay in the seat. My seat.

  Felix continued chattering into his comm. He was fully buckled in and safe. What a prefect!

  The door to the bridge opened, and two figures burst through.

  “Ensign, report,” the lead figure said.

  Baltrax. She was a Taurovian, a species that had evolved from something similar to a bison. She was bipedal, like most of the known species. She had short brown hair covering a snouted face, dark raging eyes and even had two horns sticking out from her forehead, curving upwards. She was shorter, but far stockier, probably weighing half as much as me again.

  “Unknown mass, sir,” Felix said, not missing a beat. “The readings are unclear, scattered debris, most likely, but a huge amount. Some chunks might even be on a mineable scale.”

  The second figure, Faithon, had a more human face, despite it being covered in red-black scales. His eyes were slitted, and he lacked any hair on his face or scalp. But he had a nose, lips and ears, and some very human expressions.

  Unlike Baltrax and Felix, he forewent the tradition of wearing clothes. The scales were all over his skinny body. Luckily, due to not being a mammal, he had no embarrassing body parts on display. Although I had sometimes wondered, asking how his species reproduced was not going to be part of my limited discussions with him any time soon.

  “Dribble! Out of that chair!” Faithon rolled his eyes at me. “Why are you even on the bridge?”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I said, and slouched out of the seat, standing off to the side, in an attempt not to be noticed further.

  Baltrax ignored me and took my place. “Full scan sweep. I want to know what we’re facing. Cannons hot!”

  Ok, there are a few things to unpack here. My name is indeed Ryan, and the stuff about my parents and the deep space mission is true, but the rest… well, allow me to dream, won’t you?

  And anyway, if you had the surname Dribble, you’d hardly go around introducing yourself with that, would you? The captain thing? Well, ok, my bad. I might be more of a general hand, maintenance and the like. But we’re getting to the interesting bit now, let’s not get hung up on who said what, alright.

  We slowed to a stop a few hundred thousand miles from our target. On the view screen, I could see… nothing. We were hundreds of thousands of miles away. It would be like trying to see your house from an orbiting moon, with the sun turned off.

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  Lights flashed, pulsating through the whole spectrum on Felix’s console. I’d never been able to afford the biological evolution required to interpret photonic messaging, so I waited along with the captain and Faithon to hear what Felix would say.

  After a few tense moments, Felix spoke, his voice clipped as he sounded off his findings. “Yes, definitely debris. Looks like a battle. Ships. Lots of them. No signs of power. A graveyard.” He paused for a second before adding. “Wait! There’s a biological signature. Very faint, but definitely there. It’s…” he looked over at the captain, a question in his eyes. “It’s just floating in space, not on board any of the wreckages. How is that possible?”

  Baltrax’s three-fingered hands clenched on the chair’s armrest, her thick, blunt nails grinding into the metal’s surface. The hair raised, almost imperceptibly, on her scalp. She did not answer straight away, which went against the instant authority she was known for. After a few moments, she nodded. “Take us in, Ensign. Slowly, I want a visual on those ships before we go on to the biological.”

  “Aye aye,” Felix said as he tapped on the navigation interface.

  I had slunk back towards the rear of the bridge. This was too exciting to miss, there was no way I was going to be sent back to unclog, I mean, back to my ablutional maintenance while an actual space encounter was unravelling.

  Faithon side-eyed me as he took his seat by the captain’s, but didn't say anything. He shook his head slightly, which I took as a warning to stay quiet. Way ahead of you there, buddy. He then turned his attention to his console and did some second-in-command things.

  For agonising minutes, nothing happened. The pinpricks of far-off stars and galaxies were the only thing visible on the view screen against the backdrop of blackness.

  Felix was counting down the distance until contact, and it wasn't long before we started seeing glints in the darkness, a few extra stars flickering dead ahead of us.

  “10,000 miles.”

  It took me a few seconds to realise, but those new points of light were the ships Felix had reported. There’s no way we’d have spotted any sign of an Explendian vessel at this distance. I was riveted now, along with the rest of the crew, it seemed. We approached in silence. The only sound was Felix's countdown as we continued forward.

  “1,000 miles.”

  “By the lights!” Faithon swore as the pinpricks turned into blobs and then into recognisable shapes.

  “500 miles.”

  I could already see the outlines of the ships forming. I didn't have access to the consoles, which would be showing the others heavily magnified images. Faithon’s curse wasn't the only expletive to come from their lips, but I hadn't heard anything useful about what we were coming up upon, apart from their size. Nothing like anything anyone here had ever seen before. I dare not walk over to look over their shoulders – the risk of expulsion was too great. I just needed to bide my time. Patience, Ryan, patience.

  “100 miles”

  The destruction caused to the behemoths was now clear. Felix had already altered the ship’s course about 20 times to avoid debris, melted hunks of metal larger than the ship we were flying. What sort of weapon could cause such destruction? Our mining lasers could smash asteroids to bits, but to melt the phase-stabilised refractory alloys used in the hulls of ships would require insane plasma weapons, and for damage on this scale. It was awesome.

  I tuned out Felix’s updates as we closed on the outliers of the fleet. My mouth was open in wonder at the sights out of the view screen. We flew within a few miles of the first ship. Our sensors recorded every scrap of information we could detect on every wavelength. But my meagre vision took in enough.

  The first wreckage was literally miles across. Almost as big as the Explendia station, where whole communities had lived and evolved for thousands of years. But that was a static station in orbit around the moon of a gas giant. This had been, by all appearances, a fully functional interstellar starship. The technology to move this beast was mind-boggling, and it had been completely destroyed. The remaining structure reminded me of the engines on an Explendian warship. But it was just the part containing the engines. The original ship could have been many times bigger.

  There were melted holes in the hull that we could have flown through, with ten sister ships by our side and room to spare. The metal edges of the hole looked like volcanic rock that had bubbled away and then cooled to smooth, rounded lumps; entire sections of the hull had just gone.

  And there were hundreds of these ships in the void before us.

  “Orders, captain?” Faithon said, his voice low as we all marvelled at the sight before us. “Boarding party? Anything we can scavenge would be worth a fortune.” His voice was eager, and there was something else, an avarice I had never noticed before.

  “Not yet, Faithon.” Baltrax seemed just as enraptured by the sight ahead of us, but there was an edge to her voice that I couldn’t place. “First, we need to check out the biological.”

  “Setting course,” the ever-professional Felix said, and we turned slightly, aiming at a void amongst the carnage.

  Faithon shifted, his eyes following the retreating ship as it slid off the side of the view screen. He was as tense as Baltrax, but I couldn’t understand why. Sure, this was an incredible find, but even I could see that the ships were long dead; there was no obvious danger here. Why was everyone on the edge of their seats? Actually, scrap that, Felix was his calm and collected self. He didn’t notice an emotion in someone else until they were hitting him over the head with a toilet brush.

  We approached the area where the biological signals were originating from. In sharp contrast to the massive ships around it, the source was tiny. We had slowed to a crawl, mere meters away, when the form finally appeared on the screen.

  “Unknown lifeform,” Felix said, with obvious frustration. “The database holds no records of this creature.”

  On the view screen, out in the void of space, was a bluish blob, about the size of a medium dog, with its head pulled down towards its legs, and wings tightly folded around itself. I had only ever seen a picture of this creature in a book left to me by my parents. An illustrated encyclopedia of the animals from their home planet. This creature had been in the mythological section.

  “No signs of artificial life support,” Felix continued. “Faint signs of life. But it has survived the depths of space. This is unheard of.”

  “That’s impossible,” Faithon said, eyes locked on the view screen. “What sort of creature can survive for so long in space?”

  Baltrax slowly got to her feet and spoke a single word, almost regretful. “Dragon.”

  While the others turned to look at her in shock, I leapt into the air, fist pumping, and did a little dance. Mum and Dad were right. Although I was excited for a very different reason. “Yes!” I shouted. “We have a mascot!”

  When I looked up, all three were staring at me, incredulous.

  “Well,” I said. “Let’s get it on board!”