The bad news

"I'll start with the worst facts first then," Captain Gray began, "and then we'll work our way to the nicer things Cass has learned, and we'll end it with our options.

"First off we've been traveling now for 75 years, our ship was originally designed for a 100 year trip with earth as a return destination in the even that we found nothing habitable. However the projected energy consumption seems to have been off.

"We're now down to roughly 15% remaining power life, and that's after Cass began cutting low priority systems to conserve power. And the stasis serum will run out on this ship in 25 years whether or not we try to keep going. So going back to sleep isn't an option for us here right now, it takes too much power and chemicals to do that.

"Currently we're traveling between Ross 128 and Wolf 359, but we're close enough that Cass has confirmed that neither star has a world suitable for a new human colony in livable temperature ranges or gravity.

"We have learned that there is no such thing as empty space in the Ort Cloud, instead it's a massive field much like the Asteroid belt in the Solar System, but with more ice crystals and some objects bigger than Jupiter. Apparently without being in close enough proximity to a star these objects just float in no particular direction until they collide with another object or get caught in a star's gravity field. However Cass was able to keep to our original course with some small flexibility so we never hit anything, but this also consumed more power than the original forecasts accounted for.

"Which leaves us with the current decision, we can redirect a course back to earth and share what we've learned, which probably means the Earth Federation will decide our fates. It will take close to 10 years for the trip so most of us will no longer qualify for another colony expedition.

"Our other option is to continue the flight plan towards our next destination, G51-15, it's only another three to five years before we'll get a solid reading on it's satellites, but we'll probably be stuck there regardless of if it has a suitable world for us or not.

"And that leaves us with our two possible futures at this point. Anyone else have something they'd like to add?"