The Space Station - Chapter 1 - Page 3

Entering the mess, Functionary wandered over towards one of the small windows which gave a view back across the aft of the ship from whence it had come. Functionary gazed over the ship’s improbable structure which betrayed its zero-gravity existence. This ship was never to enter the atmosphere of any planet. Stretching out from the inhabited module in which he stood, a thin connecting filament led out to the throbbing engines consuming their poisonous power source that slowly infected everything with which it came in contact, no matter how remotely. Ultimately, this propulsion unit would be replaced with a new unit just beginning its life cycle of poisonous colonisation, while this unit, with its associated superstructure, ended its existence dumped into the sucking gravity of some conveniently nearby star.