Image by Peter Schmidt from Pixabay

Vera was bored. These deep space runs never got them anything except one crew member who developed a phobia of the dark, one crew member who became too fond of their own voice, and a whole lot of boredom. She’d been on five so far for the Genesis Deep Space Exploration Service and they’d all ended the same way.

“Bored yet, Vera?” Nikaea, the current chatterbox, asked.

“I’m always bored, Nikaea,” Vera said. “This is my sixth run. Nothing ever changes except the faces I see every time I wake up.”

“Six? This is my second and I’m already thinking about calling it quits. How do you stand it?” Nikaea asked.

“I’d have to go back to desk work if I quit and I’d rather take the boredom of space than the boredom of poking buttons on terminal,” Vera pointed out.

“Vera, Nikaea, we’ve got some unnaturally high radiation readings up ahead,” Geno said from where he was monitoring the readings. “Like dangerously high radiation readings.”

“What?” Vera got up and went over to the console. “What the hell? That’s not supposed to be like that.”

“Want to send a probe?” Geno asked.

“Hell yes,” Vera said. “This is an anomaly and we’re supposed to investigate those.”

A probe was launched and a short while later it began transmitting images. “What the hell is that?” Simeon asked.

“It’s a star nursery,” Vera said, her voice full of awe. “I’ve heard of them. I’ve never seen one, though another exploration team found one about a decade ago. Get some pictures of it. We need to log its location and report this back to the big bosses.”

The probe took several images, both video and still, and then was called back to the ship. The ship’s course was altered to avoid the massive spikes of radiation, and Vera wrote up the report. Maybe these deep runs weren’t all the boring after all.