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The short answer is that I’ve always believed it’s important to accept the people in your life for what they are. There’s no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there’s any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you’re going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table.
Space, as Jemma carefully explained to me, is not as empty as you might think. Any given cubic meter of what we think of as hard vacuum actually contains on the order of a hundred thousand hydrogen atoms, for instance. Hydrogen atoms are benign at rest, but at point-nine c they’re dangerous projectiles.
Interstellar space also contains the occasional dust grain—only about one in every million cubic meters, but every square meter of the ship’s surface area was passing through two hundred and seventy million cubic meters of space every second, so we bumped into those on a pretty regular basis as well. The vast majority of those grains carried enough net charge to get funneled along the surface and away by our field generator. Some of them didn’t, which produced a continuous patter of tiny explosions against the nose cone.
