Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  The ships had no rotating segments, and no external windows. Their interiors wouldn’t be pressurized during the journey. These were ghost ships, cities of the dead. They were filled with thousands of cloning towers, enough to found several new belt cities, and an army of robots reverse-engineered from the ones that had survived on the Aurelian. They would lie dormant, like seedpods, for thousands of years. By the time they sprouted, humanity in the sun’s belts would be long dead.

  Jonas pulled a microphone from his nest and began the broadcast.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the project, the time has come,’ he said. ‘I would like to thank every one of you for your selfless dedication to our cause. I know that some of you think that you’ve been working on some rich true-born’s folly, a colossal launching of money and resources into the void. I thank you for your work anyway. Others of you understand that we have been working for a higher purpose, for a result that none of us will live to see. Thanks to your efforts, the human race will escape the Worldbreakers and live new lives around new stars: not on belts, but on planets, under cloud-filled skies.’

  He felt his voice cracking at that last phrase. He closed his eyes and paused to compose himself before finishing his speech. The ships’ names had been chosen years ago, but the formality remained; the names were indulgent on his part, but everyone in the project had been happy to allow an old man his nostalgia. ‘I name these ships the Gabriel and the Keldra,’ he said. ‘May whatever god exists watch over them and guide them to their destinations. Unfurl the sails.’

  Strell was beaming with pride. On his nest’s audio feeds, Jonas could hear members of the project applauding.

  He sat back to watch the ships. He wanted to see every moment of this departure, and this time his view came from a space-based camera drone, so there was no chance that the city’s rotation would hide an important event from his sight.

  Slowly, the sail bud at each ship’s nose opened, and the golden sheets spread out like insect wings or the petals of two infinitely complex flowers. Smaller ships, the project’s armed cruisers, fired up their reaction drives; they would escort the seed-ships until they were safely clear of Belt Three and out of range of pirates. Almost imperceptibly, the seed-ships began to accelerate, tiny bursts from thrusters pushing them onto the correct courses, starward, and away from the plane of the ecliptic.

  ‘You should have run,’ Jonas whispered to himself as the seed-ship Keldra slid across his screen. ‘You always fought. You should have run.’

  Acknowledgements

  I have found communities of writers invaluable in my journey as a writer. I would therefore like to thank everyone from the Cambridge NaNoWriMo group, without whose encouragement this book would not have been finished, and the Cambridge Writers of Imaginative Literature, without whose feedback it would not have been worth reading. I would also like to thank the writing group of the Durham University SF+F Society, for helping with my earlier stories, and my parents, for indulging my very first.

  I would like to thank everyone at HarperVoyager UK (especially Natasha Bardon, Eleanor Ashfield, and Rachel Winterbottom) for believing in my book and helping to shape it into its current form.

  Finally, I would like to thank Katia Bowers for immeasurable emotional support.

  About the Author

  John Ayliff lives in Vancouver, Canada. He honed his writing skills while working in the computer games industry, and still sometimes calls his protagonist the ‘player character’ by mistake. Outside of writing, his hobbies include tabletop roleplaying games and going to the opera. He can be found on Twitter @johnayliff and online at his website: http://johnayliff.com/

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