Prologue: The Journey
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I looked out into the vast, vast void of the heavens. Darkness, nothing but deep, black darkness. In the old days, humans would say that the sky was beautiful. They would say that the sky, the heavens, hold the treasures that we could only watch, but not touch.

 

Anton Chekhov, a Russian playwright in the 19th century once said, "We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."

 

Well, obviously he had never been to space. Space is empty. Dark. Boring. It's so boring that if I could, I would've killed myself. But I can't.

 

I hold in my hands the lives of fifty thousand souls. It has been so since we set off from our homeworld Earth three years and seventy-one days ago. It has been so since we crossed Mother Earth for the last time.

 

As a result, Mother Earth rejected us. The children she created, cared for, nurtured. Mother Earth could no longer deal with our problems, our arrogance. And therefore, we built gigantic ships to colonize other worlds, a desperate attempt to preserve our species and all that we held dear. At least, until Mother Earth would allow us to return.

 

I am not so optimistic. Nobody was optimistic of our chances to be welcomed home. Even the tree-hugging hippies Gaia's Children decided to leave for a world that would embrace them. Even they have given up on Mother Earth’s forgiveness.

 

And so it came to pass, that eight hundred and twenty-two colony ships carrying between five hundred to fifty thousand passengers took off from the gravity well of Mother Earth to seek for a new home among the stars.

 

Six never lifted off the ground.

 

Twenty-one exploded as they took off.

 

Twenty-nine miscalculated their trajectory and crashed somewhere on Earth.

 

One hundred and fifty-five ships were destroyed as they passed through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

 

As for the rest, we only managed to maintain contact with the colony ships Juno, Meerkat Manor, and Athens. We were going the same way, so it made sense that we formed a fleet together. So was the decision made by the six captains of the colony ships.

 

Six captains, six ships. Had anyone on board been awake, they would have probably asked the question, "But why is it that there are only four ships now?"

 

Well, one of the ships was destroyed by asteroids. They were too small for our combined sensors to catch. Normally, those would be dealt with by the forward deflector array. Unfortunately, despite all its technology, the Sanctity of Life could not protect its own life from the asteroid barrage.

 

The destruction was fairly quick. First the shield was pierced by the same asteroid that would later hit the deflector array itself. Then one section of the second warp ring was smashed right off. The remainder of her own damaged warp rings clawed a deep gash around the central hull as more asteroids punched holes in the cryosleep chambers.

 

Should we have helped? Perhaps stop the fleet and transfer the surviving colonists and crew out of the Sanctity of Life and into one of our own pods? I did ponder that. I pondered that for a good four seconds.

 

The conclusion I and the others came to was, "No, we cannot stop."

 

If we had stopped, we would probably no longer be able to reach our destination even if we spend a hundred millenias. You see, warp drive has a peculiar quirk. In the early days, scientists realized that warp drive was possible and feasible. The problem was, they could not stop it once it was online. The second prototype for the warp drive is supposedly still flying somewhere in the Milky Way.

 

The warp drive uses antimatter to produce a tremendous amount of energy to allow the ship to create spatial waves. The ship does not actually travel faster than light, it simply creates a negative gravitation wave that is always lower in front and higher behind. Thus allowing the ship to 'surf' the waves of space-time, effectively allowing the ship to move 5.62 times faster than light.

 

The problem with this system is that once you expend the energy to create this phenomenon, the phenomenon continues forever. You become part of the natural space-time phenomenon. And natural space-time phenomenon does not stop at your will. What they had to do was 'fire' the warp drive a second time. Technically, the warp drive is always active, but what this does is that it disrupts the gravitational wave, making it unstable and as a result, kicking the ship out of the warp field.

 

As antimatter cannot be realistically contained even with the technology of the late 21st century, we naturally only carried enough to fire the warp drive once. More than that, we'd either have to worry about it destroying the ship, the containment of the antimatter or the energy required to contain the antimatter. None of which we had the space nor time to care about. We had plenty of fusion power, but it didn't have enough energy density to create a functioning warp field. It only had the energy to disrupt the warp field.

 

We calculated that had we stopped the warp field, we'd have to continue to our destinations with only conventional drives. For us, the Noble Endeavour, it would take us over two thousand years to reach our destination with conventional drives. At that timescale, the risk of mission failure would increase exponentially decade by decade. The ship would not survive the travel, all calculations point to this eventuality. And in turn, none of the colonists would survive the travel either.

 

As for the other ship, the Low Flying Monsoon, it simply parted ways from us slowly over the years. We have no idea what happened to them after we lost contact, but I won't deny the possibility that they were also lost to the void. It would be a pity had that been the case. I had enjoyed my conversations with Zihan-203.

 

Two decades and six months after we parted ways with the rest of the fleet, we finally arrived at our destination. A little purple planet astronomers named G442a. I suppose 'little' would be inaccurate in this case. The surface measures about 1.3443 times larger than Earth while mass measurements suggest that the planet is 1.9423 times heavier than Earth.

 

Living here would be a significant challenge, but with our current situation, it was a challenge that we could not afford to refuse. One of my duties was to decide whether the planet was habitable. My duties do not include being fussy about the details. I deem this world habitable, and if the others think otherwise, they can kiss my shining ass. Pardon my German.

 

With that said, I started the sequence to bring the captain and essential officers out of cryostasis.

Wahoo! Ai-chan writes again! Sorry, Ai-chan has not been able to write anything of note for the past year. Let's see if this will kickstart Ai-chan's passion again.

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