Captain Samuel Jacks stood in front of the view screen, his attention held firmly by the unbelievable scene unfolding before him. Everything around him dissolved from his consciousness as he watched with rapt fascination as the massive gas giant planet slowly shed layers of its cloudy skin, the ephemeral atmosphere swirling in towards the sun's corona as it expanded outward, sluggish yet hungry as the sun expanded to devour everything around it.
A slight gasp escaped his lips as one of the giant's larger moons, barely visible at this distance, was pulled from its orbit and disintegrated into flaming shards, adding flickering sparkles to the stream of gasses and making it appear as a magical enchantment. Another moon, fleeing the ravenous pull of the sun, hid desperately behind its gaseous mother in a vain attempt to escape the angry sun's influence.
This is what it's all about, he thought to himself, deep wonderment making his chest tight. Scientific discovery and documenting things that have never been seen before.
"Captain!" the urgency in the call pulled his attention reluctantly from the hypnotic stellar tableau. "They've found us, Captain," there was a note of panic in the navigator's voice.
A tremor ran through the ship as something impacted it from the outside, which brought the captain completely back from his wandering thoughts. Warning claxons began their lamenting wail in accompaniment to the frightened voices proclaiming damaged areas of the ship.
"Time to go," Captain Jacks muttered to nobody in particular. His own anxiousness was rising. Not the sharp stabbing fear for survival, but the unequivocally weighty fear of failing the people that were depending on him to know what to do; of failing those that he was responsible for.
With a renewed clarity of purpose he ordered, "Miss Strahovski, get us out of here. Maximum speed."
