Galaxy-filled starfleet insignia with a starship

You had come over the pass to deliver a brass theodolite to the observers at Cwm Rhyd, wrapped in three jumpers and strapped to your pack. The woman who ran the hut had told you the only safe way was to walk the ridge at night, while the cornices were frozen hard, and she had added, not unkindly, that anyone who walked it with their head tipped back would end up in the valley. You kept your eyes low for an hour. Then a cloud peeled away, and there it was: a faint triangle of stars inside a ring of pale fire, and beneath it, low on the eastern shoulder, a hard black hull drifting across the nebula like a thumbprint on glass.

It did not move the way a plane moves. It hung. Then a lamp blinked twice from the observatory roof, and the hull blinked back, and you realised the grey sphere below it was not a moon at all but the lit window of a hut you had been told was empty.

By dawn you had the instrument levelled on the ridge stone. You sighted along the brass until the sphere sat dead centre in the crosshairs, read the angle off the scale, and wrote the figure in the margin of the old woman's ledger. Then you pulled the jumpers back on, shouldered the empty pack, and went down to tell her the lamp had been answering all night.