"What kind of ship is that Jurou? I've never seen anything like it & there's nothing in the computer..." Laura asked.

It was easily hundreds of times their ship, The Star Witch's size, it's immense rings and overall shape betraying it's design as being from the uncomfortable period of several centuries ago between the discovery of 'Space/Time Fabric Needle' transport and 'Core Taps' and the subsequent discoveries of 'Para-Location' Gates and artificial gravity control.

The ability to turn vast ships into a quantum entangled energy pulse that would disentangle and reconstitute at a predetermined point was a relic now, because of the huge number of accidents, however this ship seemed to have avoided the pitfalls and made an incredibly long journey out to what even now was the fringes of the ever expanding sphere of known space.

There were ten still spinning rings along the middle of the ship, each one thousands of kilometers across and holding inside it a miniature world, self contained ecosystems which would have supported human crew and colonists. six more such rings were damaged and dead, four no longer spinning and two blown open and vented into space.

One in particular caught Jurou's eye however, all the way at the back of the ship, an island ecosystem clearly modeled on his native Japan with it's mountainous coastline and fringe of sea...