“Most of them have arrived. The others…” West’s voice trailed off and she gave a shrug. Her meaning was clear. Everyone who was coming had got here. I squinted up at her. There was no trace of the young, uncertain officer I’d briefly met. Instead, the woman before me had been tempered with cold, hard experience. I dreaded to think what adversity she must have faced keeping a crew in check throughout the long voyage.
“Ranger?” I continued wiping the disgusting gloopy mess off myself as I swung my legs over the lip of the creche. I was enough of a veteran of interstellar missions that I was unselfconscious about my nudity.
“She’s here.” West nodded, equally as ambivalent.
I felt a palpable sense of relief on hearing that she’d arrived. My link to home. Hell, she was my home, and one I wanted to get back to as soon as possible.
I tugged on a dressing gown and tied the belt closed. “So, have you seen it yet?”
“Oh yes,” West grinned. “It’s still here, all right. Brad, it’s beautiful.”
“Hey, doc,” I called over to the patiently waiting medic. “The post-sleep check-up can wait. I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”
*
There were few actual windows on a warship; in fact, few on any modern vessel. They were intolerable points of vulnerability. One of the exceptions was the back-up pilot station, a small blister on the very bow of the ship which could be used to get the ship in and out of dock.
“You really do have a flare for the dramatic, don’t you?” I settled into the co-pilot chair and reclined back for the show, West in the seat next to me.
West gave a thin smile, and slapped a button. Silently, the scarred blast doors folded open. Light washed through the small cockpit.
I gave a low whistle. The view was just as majestic as I remembered. Defiant hovered over the vast glittering sand-colored ring which stretched away into infinity. To our port side was the imposing bulk of the burnt rocky world it orbited.
Even those beautiful marvels paled in comparison to what was off our bow.
The derelict Ark ship.
Looking at it again after all these years gave me a lump in my throat. Only this time, it wasn’t just a fascinating mystery. This thing was our best hope.
Like the last time I’d seen it, I was reminded of an old movie I’d seen. I couldn’t remember the name, but it involved a bunch of revolutionaries or something attacking a half-completed moon-sized space station.
The Ark was a sphere, nearly 200 kilometers wide, still clad in the lattice-like structure of her clamshell dock. One whole hemisphere of it was an uncompleted mass of piping and chambers. Some of it was blackened by what we thought had been an intense solar flare, which had wiped out all life in this system.
The core, though, that was a displacement drive of truly epic proportions, so big that when her three sister-arks had departed nearly 300 years ago, it had been detected by the primitive equipment of that era even on Earth, 122 light years away. It had been something so weird, so unexpected, the astronomers of the time had called it the Wow! Signal.
Intermingled in the grid work of its lattice-like dock, and even throughout the superstructure of the ship itself, I could see the twinkling lights of human vessels already picking through it.
“Captain Rhodes of the Ranger,” West began speaking. I felt a pang of fondness, overlaid by more than a touch of jealousy, course through me at Tyler’s new title, “sent through your original notes and logs. There’s still a lot to go through, but it looks like your initial assessment about the status of the drive was correct.”
We’d spent the better part of a year exploring this huge ship. She may have looked half completed, but the main thing was, the drive was basically finished. It was just everything else which was a construction site.
“So, we can use it?”
“It’ll still be a lot of work to actually get it operable. The factory ships are going to have to spool out literally millions of kilometers of hyper conducting cable to complete the displacement sphere. And, for the most part, we’re going to be living in our ships, clamped onto the superstructure until we can properly complete some habitat sections. But yes, a few years’ work, then we’ll have our ticket out of this neighborhood.”
I looked over the huge vessel. Yeah, she looked like a junker now, an impossibly huge junker, but the potential was mindboggling.
“It doesn’t have to stop at just getting us out of the neighborhood, Tamara. The builders of this thing left the Milky Way, full stop.”
“So you want us to rebuild an Ark and head out of the galaxy?” West gave a laugh. “You are ambitious.”
“Well, maybe not the galaxy, but we certainly don’t have to settle for second best. Our analysis says this thing’s drive can manage up to ten light years per year. That’s double our efficacy. I say we kiss goodbye to this spiral arm, and see what some of the others have to offer.”
“It’s still a long way.”
“It’s not like we’d have nothing to do while we cruise.” I gestured at the huge ship before us. “We load this with a few asteroids, we’d have all the raw materials we need to rebuild civilization. A different kind of civilization. This thing doesn’t have to just be a ship for getting from A to B. It can be a home. Something to colonize. Hell, we spent a year here, and saw less than one percent of the completed sections.”
West nodded thoughtfully. “People expect a home, as in a planet. It would require a hell of a lot of managing expectations.”
“Yeah, I get that. But look at it, Tamara.” Her eyes glinted with reflected light. “The war back home is thirty years old now. Maybe humanity survived back there. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe we won the war against whoever or whatever it was that attacked us, maybe we didn’t. But, even if we did, we have an imperative to ensure all our eggs aren’t in one basket again. To ensure that humanity isn’t constrained to a small group of stars. For those that want to settle on a planet, we can find them one while we travel. For those who want to come with us, they can.”
West looked over the vast derelict. “It would be a hell of a thing, cruising through the galaxy. Going where we want to. Knowing we’ll be safe. That humanity would be safe.”
“Forever, Tamara.”
*
Defiant had changed much in the last few years. Now, she was no longer just the old battered warship. She was bonded into to the very structure of the Ark itself so intricately, it was no longer possible to tell where one ship ended and the other began.
At least that made naming the Ark easy.
“Cunning.” West smiled at me from her command chair. “You brought us here, you made this possible. Do you want to give the word?”
I stood from my chair on aching legs. Soon I’d have to go in for rejuvenation. I had been old when I’d first voyaged on Ranger all those years ago. The decade we had spent renovating and refitting the Ark had just about finished me off.
I glanced at the holo table, seeing the representation of our new home on there. She didn’t look finished, not by a long shot, and that had been with our mining and factory ships working twenty-four hours a day, every day, converting the carefully harvested raw materials into the components we needed. Instead of a solid sphere, we’d run the drive’s hyper conducting cable around a scaffold girder system to complete the displacement sphere necessary for interstellar travel.
The domes of our agricultural modules clung onto the ship like vast green and blue barnacles, each not just an indispensable source of food, but a reminder of our long gone home. Lodged in the gargantuan cargo bays of the Ark were resource-rich asteroids, enough to continue construction of the Ark for the years we would be between stars. The crews of the ships clamped onto the Ark certainly wouldn’t be bored. Hell, even now, we’d only explored a fraction of her. Who knew what wonders were secreted within the remaining sections of a ship designed to carry billions?
“All hands,” I said. “Prepare for departure.”
It was purely a
symbolic gesture, of course. The ship had been ready to go for weeks now. Only final testing on the displacement drive had held us back.
“Release moorings.”
The clamshell of the lattice encasing the Ark hinged open.
“Mister Tsang.” I addressed the not-so-young officer before me. “If you please, take us out.”
Silently, the doors of the lattice swept by us. Only it wasn’t them which were moving anymore, it was us. We pulled forward, hovering over the ring system. I looked in wonder at the fine particles. It had never occurred to me until now that this ship was so huge, it held its own significant gravitational pull. A tidal wave rose behind us on the ring as we gently accelerated forwards.
I reached over to Captain West and took her hand in mine. We were leaving this galactic neighborhood, perhaps forever, and seeking our destiny among the stars.
And, of course, defying those who sought humanity’s untimely end.
West nodded to me. “Do it.”
I couldn’t help but give a grin. “Defiant is go-flight. Activate displacement drive… now.”
A flash of light bloomed on the display, growing in intensity and washing everything else out.
Ralph Kern Biography
Ralph Kern, a frequent contributor to the Explorations anthology series, has released three novels to date; Unfathomed, which was acquired by Audible Studios for production, Endeavour and Erebus.
For as long as I can remember I've always enjoyed science fiction, especially the grand masters of the genre, Arthur C Clarke, Stephen Baxter, Alistair Reynolds and many more before deciding to try my hand.
I hold a degree in Aerospace Technology and won the opportunity to work in Milan on the design of a satellite with the European Space Agency, gained a Pilot’s License (which led to the best weekend job going - taking Air Cadets flying in a motor gliders) and for a year was an officer cadet in the Territorial Army.
After all that, I had a quarter life crisis and decided that I would succumb to the kid in me and follow a career in chasing bad guys and joined the Police. That led to a huge hole in my life though, the desire to think about what I consider 'the big issues', a desire I'm addressing with my writing.
Nowadays, I've calmed down a bit and enjoy spending time traveling, seeing what the world has to offer, scuba diving, long distance running and writing, of course.
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The Colony of Imago
By Scott Bartlett
Of all the strange things Harriet Vaughn had experienced in the colony of Imago, falling in love with a man who didn’t exist had to be the strangest.
Maybe that was because the farming sims had prepared her for almost everything else about life on this alien world.
The settlement had the same name as the planet whose surface it clung to—Imago. And despite being many light years away from Earth, the settlement’s needs were almost identical to the colonies that had been established on humanity’s homeworld throughout its history.
Of course, we reached Imago on a spaceship instead of a disease-ridden wooden boat.
Food. Water. Sewage. Transportation. Security. Energy. Governance. Recreation. All things Imago needed. Luckily, they had robots to do much of the work.
But someone had to oversee and maintain the robots, in every sector. And the bots weren’t smart enough to perform complex administrative duties or navigate procedures that weren’t thoroughly standardized. So there was still plenty that humans needed to do for themselves.
That had created a unique dilemma. Humanity’s exodus into the stars had been prompted by catastrophe, and so colonists came from all walks of life, with skills largely suited to a global society, not a society limited to a single town.
The United Earth Foundation hadn’t had the time or the resources to make sure the colony ships were filled only with people whose skills would be useful once they arrived at their destinations. That was because establishing extrasolar colonies hadn’t been the only reason for leaving, nor was it even the most significant one.
The most significant reason had been the slow death of Earth’s sun.
And so the UEF had put some of their finest minds in the same room together and told them they needed a solution to the problem in a matter of days, so that they could start implementing that solution immediately.
What they came up with was as elegant as it was brilliant.
They adapted the history sims.
History sims were used to simulate historical periods with a degree of fidelity that would trick you into thinking it was real life if you didn’t already know you were inside a sim. What the UEF’s brains came up with was to reprogram those sims to instead mimic what life would be like on the various colonies humanity was setting out to establish.
It was perfect: while each colonist’s body was kept perfectly preserved in transit through the stars, using the cryo-tubes each ship was outfitted with, the mind would be busy getting trained in whatever job that colonist would have in the colony.
Everyone called the adapted simulations “farming sims,” even though they trained people in an array of jobs that went well beyond farming. There was no official name for them—UEF bureaucracy moved far too slowly to produce a name in time for the colony ships’ departure—so the name “farming sims” just stuck.
As it happened, the job Harriet ended up filling had nothing to do with farming whatsoever. Each profession had a limited number of positions, and for some jobs, like “hunter” and “restaurateur,” there had been competition. Everyone had had to vote on who would fill them—based on prior experience, general competence, work ethic as determined from references, and so on.
No one else had wanted the position Harriet chose for herself, so she obtained it without causing any resentment or hurt feelings.
On Earth, she’d been a housecleaner. On Imago, she would be a virologist.
She had always liked to challenge herself.
Her choice had meant several years of studying, including thousands of hours of simulated on-the-job training. There’d been plenty of time for that during the trip from Earth to Imago, even though, inside the sim, one’s subjective experience of time was much slower than real-time.
The brains who’d come up with the idea of using the history sims to train people for jobs had also hypothesized that having passengers experience the journey in real-time was a bad idea. Even though the cryo-tubes would keep their bodies perfectly healthy, it seemed likely that experiencing the passing of hundreds of years would cause some mental health issues.
Harriet felt glad they’d made that call. Living for so long, all the while knowing that your reality wasn’t actually real, and that nothing had true meaning…it sent a shiver up her spine just to contemplate it.
When it came to jobs on Imago, perhaps the true winners were the farmers—that is, the technicians in charge of the farming robots. Almost every crop thrived here. As useful as the farming sims had been, they’d come nowhere close to conveying the true beauty of Imago.
The planet was idyllic. Perfect. Even the most optimistic projections of exoplanet experts fell far short of the reality that was Imago.
The planet was all rolling hills, lush forests, sparkling rivers…even the weather was great. It was almost always warm, but rarely too warm.
There was a lot of rain, though, which did make sense, given all the vegetation. Harriet hated the rain, but as with everything she hated, she tried to remind herself that it was a part of God’s plan.
Even the planet’s predators were unusually few in number, and few of those that did exist were large enough to do much harm to humans, especially if you remembered to carry your stunner with you.
Imago was a lot like Earth, except better. Harriet and her fellow colonists had truly lucked out.
Harriet certainly felt lucky—ever since arriving here almost two years ago, she thanked God in her prayers every night for how he’d blessed them. And she knew that some hardship in life was nec
essary, to make her truly appreciate her blessings.
Even so…I wish I could have fallen in love with someone real.
The man of her dreams came to her every night, in…well, in her dreams. She could never remember what he said to her, or what she said to him. But their conversations were always charged with a sense of urgency. And she always woke up feeling breathless, enchanted by his earnestness, his vibrancy, and his compassion…
The man bore the likeness of Philip Mann—a UEF ensign, who was now charged with helping to keep the peace on Imago. Yet the actual, real-life Philip Mann was nothing like the one who came to Harriet in her dreams.
She knew that because the week before last, she’d finally worked up the nerve to ask the young ensign on a date.
*
They’d chosen a pop-up sushi restaurant that only opened on evenings when there was enough demand for it. If you were craving sushi for dinner, you had to indicate that by four o’clock, at which point the restaurant owners would make a snap decision about whether enough diners had committed to sushi to justify opening that night.
If they did decide to open on a given night, you didn’t need a reservation to walk in and enjoy all you could eat. But if you’d signaled a desire to eat sushi on a given night and failed to show up, they hit you with an extra surcharge the next time you came.
It was possible to avoid the surcharge, if you never went again. For Harriet, that simply wasn’t an option. Without sushi, she would die.
Of course, actually tasting the sushi was a key part of eating it, and her senses of taste and smell had been all but obliterated by the bug everyone had caught the instant they’d shuttled down from the Delphi. The virus, which had been given the somewhat uninspired name “Imagovirus,” was far from life-threatening—all it did was give you perpetual cold-like symptoms. It also seemed virtually impossible to cure, despite the best efforts of Harriet and her assistant, Mariah.
Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four) Page 9