<<< Imperial Star Date 2319-J-9>>>

This is Captain Unrith of the Falcon Class Freighter, Perseus. Our mission was one of exploration, our destination the U-91A system in the Fringe galaxy, only we never arrived there. Four days ago we were forced to make an emergency release from hyper-speed when our fusion reactor failed.

Since that time our navigators have scoured every star chart on the ship trying to find out where we are, but without luck. We didn’t come out of the hyper-jump cleanly and do not know where we are. All our transmissions go unanswered. We can receive nothing. The ship is so far away from any colonised system that it could take months for any messages to reach us.

By the time you listen to this it could already be years old. It is a dead part of space where our ship now floats, endless black all around us with only the faintest flicker of stars out of reach light years away. The engineers cannot get the ship’s reactor working. The malfunction is irreversible but still they work at it. None have slept since the accident. Our secondary energy module will run out in two days.

We cannot tell if anyone is receiving this transmission. There will be no more messages from us, as we cannot spare the power to send even just one more. Our only chance is to shut down everything but the most basic life support systems and hope that somebody finds us before it is too late. If you are somewhere out there listening to this, know that us, the crew of the dying ship Perseus, tried to the end.