tracer

Somewhere in the sea of darkness, the remnants of the S3M-32 interstellar reconnaissance rocket glittered in hyperspace. There had been the scream of the alarm, the tearing of metal, and then the explosion—the four rookie scouts, secure in their emergency pods, had been ripped from the chaos of the ruined ship and scattered like light through a prism.

One by one, with the inevitability of time and speed, the pull of a strange blue planet wrapped invisible hands around their capsules and drew them down to the foreign soils and alien buildings of the surface. Each stepped out of the smoking pods, stepped out into a world of bizarre creatures and unknown words. Utterly isolated and far beyond the farthest interstellar comm links, they began to teach the strange civilization their language.

In time, Headquarters recovered the scouts’ reports, written and murmured into the pod’s computer banks in the hopes that someday someone might find them. The distant capsules were only found thanks to the tracer module in each ship…