After a while, I felt like we were low budget tourists stuck aboard a crappy cruise ship, it didn't feel like being in the Army. After a bunch more hyperspace jumping, that I didn't even bother trying to keep track of, the star carrier arrived outside some star system, or so we were told. The Kristang ship went to zero gee again, detached, and jumped four times. Finally, we maneuvered into orbit at our destination. All in all, my first interstellar voyage consisted mostly of being stuck in a windowless compartment. I wouldn't recommend it for a vacation, unless you're desperate.

We did get a look at the planet below, and it wasn't inviting. Earth from orbit looks blue, and green, and tan where there are deserts and grasslands, and white ice at the poles. This place looked brown, and red, and even the places that had water weren’t a nice blue. The one pole I could see had an anemic layer of dirty white, like snow beside the road in April, when it's all dirty and crusty and everyone wishes it would just freakin' melt and go away, damn it.

In groups, we packed into the mess hall to get a briefing, Lt. Gonzalez stood on a chair, and waited until everyone got settled into the compartment. “Welcome to Camp Alpha! The Kristang didn’t want to tell us their name for this planet, so it was just ‘Alpha’.”

Some guy at the front asked “But we know where we are, right, LT?  I mean, somebody has figured it out?”

“Yeah,” Gonzalez smiled, “the advance team took pictures of the night sky, and astronomers on Earth calculated where the view must have been taken from. I think the Kristang were having fun with us, keeping it a secret, they must have known we’d be smart enough to discover this planet’s location. We are still in the Orion Arm of the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, about twelve hundred and twenty three lightyears from Earth. That's far enough that you can’t see our sun from here, without a telescope. I’m told our sun is an unremarkable star anyway."