Thanks for the comment, Samuel! As far as tone being more historical than narrative, there will be more of that, I feel. I want the story to have the feel of how a salvage operation in deep space might actually be. There are no corner for things to hide around! It will take centuries for a second ship to catch up to the Resilience. Serious communication between the two vessels could start decades before actual contact. So right now my task is to get the events down on paper and that lends itself to the historical. On rewrite, I hope to find angles to convey the same information with vignettes and short stories. What I fear is that the investment in characters may suffer since they would not carry over from chapter to chapter until we get to actual contact - the real heart of the story. So the challenge will be getting there as quickly as possible without boring the hell out of the reader! Thanks for the input.

I had some time and roughed out a first draft of the prologue of this book. It is wordy and dense. But it is on the page.