Excerpt: Nebula

It's never as dark as they make out. There are always the stars, and they've been shining for so long that there's almost enough light to read by. They don't twinkle, unless you're rock-bound, they just gaze impassively in at you, an infinite tiny balls of gas sprinkled across the blue. It's not black, that's for sure. Except the oldest nebulae, that is, but we don't mention them. I've only been inside a nebula once, and it's not something I'll do again. It's like stepping outside the universe for a while; you can't hear your own voice, and a chill overtakes you from the inside. The old, cold, dead stars, squeezing in through the airlocks, through the pressure plates and bulkheads and pores and lungs, until they surround you, engulf you, whispering silence loud enough to drown out your own screams. We don't talk about them.