The night sky was an inky black, pollutants clouding the spectacular stellar display of the Maelstrom that could be seen from less industrialized worlds. Nikolas shifted his bag from his shoulders, taking out an elongated steel object. He flipped a switch at the bottom of the device and pointed it towards a rubbish heap as its miniature generator flickered to life, illuminating the scrap in a bluish glow. A deep, creaking noise came from somewhere above the smog. Normally Nikolas would have ignored a noise like that in a world full of factories, but he knew that the power was out in this neighborhood due to another bombing by eco-terrorists. He moved his gaze to the oily clouds. With a groan, a large white shape sank down out of the sky. The length of several factories, it gave off a rapidly diminishing blue glow that made the carefully parted hairs on his head stand, as if an electric storm were coming. He tapped his light five times with each of his fingers in an effort to repress the fear that was snaking up his spine. A shout came from somewhere in the distance, and he knew that others had seen this machine. He thought it might have been a Tellerite warship, but it was certainly too large, and there was no visible weaponry. A resounding crash signaled the impact of the unidentified craft. Nikolas winced as two more sections of the city lost power. The ship lay unmoving now, sticking out from the ground unnaturally. A small, oblong metallic capsule fell out from the side of the craft. Muffled voices could be heard coming from inside. They spoke English, but their accents were different from those of any of the people he had ever met. The front of the capsule crumpled outwards, and two men stepped out. They were dressed in segmented white armor that seemed hastily pulled on. "Hello." The taller man straightened out once he noticed Nikolas. "I am Jonathan Doe of the exploratory vessel Wanderlust. What world is this?" "Saaste, sir," said Nikolas, "But who are you? And what is that?" He pointed a grimy finger toward the ship. Its color, once brilliant white, had faded to a dull grayish shade in the thick, greasy air. "That is a standard Corps joint exploration-peacekeeping starship, fitted with prototype short-distance jump boosters. It seems like the engines weren't as short-distance as we first thought. We didn't expect to be out of the Agrippa Nebula until Aphelion Beta at least." Nikolas blinked in confusion.
Note: this story takes place in the Maelstrom, the galaxy that will be formed when the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies collide in several billion years. 300,000 years from the present day, all of humanity left Earth for a heaven-like dimension in a huge spaceship called the Ark. The teleportation mechanism, called jump engines, failed, and the survivors of the explosion were scattered through time and space.
The military and medical sections of the Ark crashed together, on a barren moon in the Maelstrom. The survivors formed a peaceful, colonizing militaristic civilization called the Corps. They use shield technology and gravity control technology, are very advanced, and are more or less "good guys". The museum section crashed in the Maelstrom as well, in another section of the galaxy. The least damaged section was devoted to early 1900's scientists, and the civilization that came from this was a strange mixture of pre- WWI tech mixed with hi-tech devices. These people worshipped scientists such as Tesla, Edison, and Einstein as godlike beings.