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The Fallen Angel's engine flared as she slowed to a halt. The region of space she was in was empty, even compared to the high standards of emptiness that deep space tended to set. There was nothing even approaching the size of a speck of dust to be found for light-days around the Fallen Angel.

Normally such emptiness would go unnoticed, for as it has been mentioned, space is typically empty, and while this patch was unusually so, variations occur and regions like this do occur. The emptiness was noticed because they were expecting something to be there, and it wasn't.

The missing item was none other than the HMSS Wanderlust. This was causing a not insignificant amount of consternation amongst the crew of the Fallen Angel. Spaceships were hard to miss, even in the vastness of space. They gave off heat, they emitted light. Spaceships occluded stars and they bent space-time. They sent out signals and broadcast navigational data. In this case it should be sending a distress call, but they had ceased several hours before the Fallen Angel had arrived in the sector of space the Wanderlust had claimed to be in.

The Wanderlust did none of these, and Captain Votan and his crew were coming to the conclusion that while they were in the right place, the Wanderlust was not.