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.
