[capnq]

Rerta Malre rocked nervously as she stood at the command console of the _Speculation_, alternately shifting her weight off each of her three legs in turn. She was about to become one of the first Eifralo to leave their home system. As they approached the warp portal, she tried to ignore her concerns about whether the ship would make the passage intact. She knew that the _Speculation_ was as overbuilt as any other Eifral vehicle, but it was little more than a flying fuel tank, and hundreds of times the displacement of the probes that had previously tested the portal.

"Nine seconds," she announced to the bridge crew, "eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, transition!"

The viewscreen seemed to explode in swirls of color, sweeping over her in waves. It's like falling down a kaleidoscope, Malre thought to herself. The screen cleared within seconds, but instead of the friendly orange glow of Edasich, there was just a murky green cloud with a few stars peeking through.

"Engineering, status?"

"All systems nominal," came the reply. "You'd never know we ever left normal space."

"Astrogation?"

"Hard to tell with so few stars visible, but judging by the coordinates of the portal we came through, we're somewhere inside the Sestraci Nebula. About twenty light-years from Edasich."

Malre cursed under her breath. The ship's contract specified discovery bonuses for colonizable worlds, but didn't even mention nebulae. They weren't going to turn any profit at all here.

"Sensor readings?"

"Radiation levels off the scale. Spectography matches known readings for Sestraci Nebula. Trace reading of one other portal besides the one we came through; judging from the signal strength, it's more than two months' travel time away."

"The third portal we discovered in Edasich is closer than that," Malwe commented. "Prepare to return to Edasich; hopefully, we'll have better luck with the next system."