Stellaris: People of the Stars

by Robert E. Hampson

  I shrugged. “Reasonably confident. I can’t get a good read on their tech level, but I can make do with whatever they’ve got.”

  “Let’s wait until we’re a month out. We can tell the others when they awaken. We’ll all go down to Riece and make everything right.”

  * * *

  More sluggish than usual due to the damage in the cargo module’s stern engine, Time’s Arrow headed down toward the surface of Riece. I still didn’t know what to expect.

  We had entered orbit, identified the largest cities, verified that Riece was a technological civilization, although one with minimal radiofrequency chatter. I had contacted them from the command module, describing our situation and listing the cargo we had to trade. Riece sent only intermittent acknowledgements from a bland-looking shorthaired woman, Renna Qo, who claimed to speak for the people. She gave coordinates for us to land, showing neither threat nor exuberance. In order to repair the lower cargo modules and the engine, we didn’t have much choice.

  “You’d think they’d be a little more excited to receive out-of-town visitors,” Dorothea muttered.

  The four other crewmembers were still dealing with the loss of Delman, Thea, and Olivia in the rec room fire. As engineer, I explained that the damage was mostly confined to the lower module of the ship and that Time’s Arrow could fly just fine for now even with the reduced crew.

  “The main thing is to make repairs,” I said. “I’ve already taken care of the electronics and life support. The command module and the living quarters are fine. Our fabricators can make the necessary components from basic planetary materials even if Riece doesn’t have the manufacturing capability. Given a stable work environment, I’ll fix the cargo module and the supplementary stern engine in a few days.”

  “Sounds like a week of vacation on Riece. Let’s hope it’s a nice place,” said Doctor Max.

  “With pretty girls at least,” said Elber. “Or pretty guys.” The other two remaining scouts, Henrik and Anya, agreed.

  I set us down where Renna Qo had directed in a textbook maneuver, despite the sluggish response from the lower half of the ship. Only about fifty people had gathered on the fringe of the landing area, though I had expected a much larger crowd. The Riece natives were gaunt, pale skinned, and wore drab clothes. They had an odd sameness about them, and they didn’t even seem to talk with one another. We had scanned for weapons and found none. The people weren’t a threat, just uninterested.

  I remembered the banners and the cheering reception on Irrac. This was quiet and subdued.

  While Captain Dorothea, Doctor Max, and the three scouts emerged for the traditional raised hand and “I come in peace” greeting, I went to the cargo vault to prepare our wares for display. Even after all this time, the air inside the cargo hold still held the sweet resinous scent of the sealed and preserved lumber. Other crates of goods were stacked up and neatly inventoried after our numerous stops along the way.

  Now that I was down in the cargo bay myself, I looked around. I hadn’t been fully candid with the crew about just how damaged the lower-level systems were. Yet, after ten thousand years of voyaging, every system could use an overhaul. I hoped Riece had the right facilities to let me accomplish my work.

  I thought enviously of Amos staying behind on Irrac. That pleasant world would have been a much nicer place to work, while Riece seemed flat and exhausted, compatible with human life but not an Eden by any means.

  I opened the cargo-bay doors so the gathered natives could see our warehouse. At the nearby disembarkation ramp, the captain, Doctor Max, Elber, Anya, and Henrik came forward to greet the people. The Riece reception committee stood eerily silent without cheers or whistles, not even background conversation. I spotted Renna Qo, the inflectionless woman who had served as their spokesperson. She stepped forward.

  Dorothea acknowledged her. “Thank you for receiving the Time’s Arrow. Our journey from planet to planet has lasted thousands of years, and now we need your help. We bring many goods to trade, along with the full database of our travels so you can learn what humanity has been doing over the millennia since you left home.”

  She paused, waiting for a response. The people of Riece stepped forward as if to greet them. Renna Qo’s expression remained flat.

  Dorothea continued, “Your planet is very isolated, and I know you haven’t received many offworld visitors. We look forward to learning more about you.” She extended a hand as Renna came close. “We’ll also need a place to make repairs to our ship. We’ll be self-sufficient, though we’d like your support.”

  “We cannot allow the contamination,” said Renna Qo. “The mind of Riece has decided. You will be purged.”

  Immediately wary, Elber, Henrik, and Anya drew their weapons. Doctor Max raised his hands. “Now, now! There’s no reason to—”

  The crowd of fifty fell silent, moving in an eerie unison. They concentrated, then hummed.

  Dorothea’s head exploded.

  Even sheltered inside the cargo bay, I felt a pounding roar in my head, destructive thoughts like a telepathic battering ram. Elber screamed and dropped to his knees, clutching his head as if to hold his skull together. Doctor Max yelled, and blood leaked out of his eyes and ears, then his brains boiled out of his eye sockets. Henrik and Anya turned to run, eyes squeezed shut, screaming as they ran back up the ramp, but they managed only three steps before both fell flat as if someone had struck them on the head with a heavy club.

  Even shielded inside the cargo hold, I felt the throbbing through the hull. The natives pressed closer as if to storm the ship.

  Barely able to see, I staggered to the cargo-bay controls and sealed the door. The heavily reinforced slab slammed shut. The people pressed around the ship, and waves of their deadly thoughts vibrated through the hull. I didn’t know how long I could last against that onslaught.

  The lower cargo module with its damaged systems and the malfunctioning stern engine would be dead weight in the planet’s gravity well. I knew what I had to do. Sooner or later their telepathic battering ram would kill me. I couldn’t stick around to find out.

  Sweating, seeing red static in my vision, I reached the command module and threw myself into the bridge seat. The pounding in my brain was so great I couldn’t think of grief or shock, couldn’t react to seeing Dorothea’s head split open, to the loss of my remaining comrades. The people of Riece pressed forward against the ship.

  The upper section of Time’s Arrow, the command module and living quarters, had everything I needed. The cargo half of the ship was a hindrance, and I couldn’t take off with it. I blasted the explosive bolts and separated the command and habitation module from the bottom section, burning more fuel than was wise, but I had to tear away from the leftover carcass of the ship. I left my dead captain, my crewmates, and all our cargo surrounded by murderous natives.

  As the command module rose higher and higher, roaring away from the colony, I felt my thoughts grow still. The aggressive mental attack faded with distance. I touched my face and found blood coming out of my nose.

  As soon as I reached orbit, I set course at random, a straight line out of the Riece system. I just needed to get far away, find a place where I could recover.

  As soon as the ship was flying, I fled into slowtime so I could escape, all by myself.

  * * *

  When I was a year away from Riece, I returned to realtime in order to assess where I was, what had happened, and what my options were. I had no captain, no doctor, no scouts, no crewmates…no family or friends. Time’s Arrow was so far out on the rim, I would have to change course and follow along the spiral for centuries before I reached the next known colony. Even so, it was only a name on an old star map that was impossibly out of date. If the people of Riece had evolved into telekinetic, xenophobic murderers, how could I know what the next planet might hold?

  And what would I do there when I arrived? I had only the command and habitation module, and no cargo to trade. Yes, I had information and the
ship’s records of our journey, and many colony worlds would be happy to receive an exotic traveler such as myself. But I still had reservations.

  Time’s Arrow could travel forever, for all intents and purposes, but entering orbit, dropping down to a planet’s surface, and then climbing back up out of the gravity well burned a lot of fuel and added the most wear and tear to the ship.

  I thought again of how I hoped Amos had lived a long and happy life on Irrac. I had criticized his decision at the time, but maybe Amos had been right. He was long, long dead, but here I was alone on a ship on the far rim, where colonies were breathtakingly far apart. I could turn around and head back into the more densely populated star systems…or I could keep going outward.

  I took stock. Since it was only me aboard, and since the ship’s systems were highly efficient, I had enough food, water, and air to supply myself for centuries even in my subjective frame of reference, and that was more than enough. After all my life, after ten thousand objective years flying across the galaxy in Time’s Arrow, I didn’t like the idea of going backward.

  In fact, as I sat in the command module and looked at the sparse star field before me, I realized that if I dropped down to my slowest possible subjective speed after accelerating the ship, I could keep cruising practically until the end of time. I would drop back into realtime once every thousand years or so and have a look around.

  It seemed as good as my other options.

  There’s something unique and egotistical about knowing you’re the last human—at least this version of human—in all of existence, in all of the universe. Given the length of our journey, maybe I already was.

  If I kept flying, I’d have a front-row seat to watch the evolution and maybe even the end of the universe. I had my lifespan, my allotted number of minutes, whatever it was—and I also had the ability to stretch out that lifespan as long as I could.

  I had forever, and forever seemed a worthy goal.

  I set the course of the Time’s Arrow out of the galaxy and flew into the great unknown. I triggered myself to awaken once a century, once a millennium, once every ten thousand years.

  The ship drifted on, and my minutes ticked away. I wondered how far I would get.

  But every time I awakened I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars.

  Blackness and stars.

  Blackness and stars.

  Something no one else had ever seen.

  Blackness and stars.

  Blackness and stars.

  Forever.

  Our Worldship Broke!

  Jim Beall

  Jim Beall (BS-Math, MBA, PE) has been a nuclear engineer for over forty years, a war gamer for over fifty, and an avid reader of science fiction for even longer. His experience in engineering and power systems began as a naval officer after surviving his much-dreaded interview by Hyman G. Rickover, the Lord Admiral and High Priest of nuclear engineering. Subsequent experience includes design, construction, inspection, enforcement, and assessment with a nuclear utility, an architect engineering firm, and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC). Along the way, he either learned or derived the safety-focused mantra of the nuclear engineer, and fully expects that it will be applied most rigorously to worldship design.

  “The reason I asked to speak with you here, in this place, is to tell you that something has broken.”

  Perhaps we are meeting in the heart of the Tabernacle, with you in the vestments of the High Priest and me in the raiment of the ArchDeacon of Engineering. Or, maybe we are on the bridge of our great vessel and you’re wearing the glittering dress uniform of a ship captain, with me your engineer. There are countless other possibilities—from business suits to no clothes at all!—but my fear in every case will be the same.

  It’s not my fault!

  “Please don’t excommunicate, execute, or recycle me!”

  I am not going to try to blame our ancestors. Whether I am reading from scripture, logs, or reports, I will attempt to convince you that failures have occurred before, and they simply happen no matter what. After all, we have been traveling in the vacuum of space toward our destination star for a very long time.

  “Raise not your staff to me, I beseech you, Your Eminence! Lord Captain, please sheath your sword! I meant no disrespect to the Designers. Their near-zero operational failure rate is miraculous, but even ‘near-zero’ is not zero, especially over centuries of operation. The reliability level that they did achieve merits admiration, if not adoration.”

  * * *

  The worldship designers may or may not use religious tracts, but they would certainly rely on redundancy, diversity, and margin when choosing and sizing essential systems.

  Redundancy has long been recognized as a critically important design element. Indeed, the mantra of the nuclear engineer is, “Redundancy is good. Redundancy is good.” Worldship designers would be expected to hold it in even higher esteem. Nuclear power plants generally have two one hundred percent capacity, physically independent groups of systems (called a “train”) for each safety function. A worldship might have three or more. Redundancy allows removing a safety train for inspection, testing, and maintenance. If one train fails during an accident, another full capacity safety train is there to save the day and, on more than one occasion, it has.

  Diversity is an important social imperative, but it’s even more important to the concept of design. No matter how reliable a given machine may be, relying on only one design creates vulnerability to the phenomenon called “common mode failure.” Extrapolating from a historical scenario, if four helicopters are needed to complete a desert operation, an inadequate sand screen design on the engine intake would doom the mission no matter if eight—or eight times eight!—identically vulnerable choppers were dispatched. Similarly, a materials defect (e.g., tainted lubrication oil) could simultaneously fail all machines that used it. Even diversity in location is important, as demonstrated during the 2011 accident at the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The designers of the coastal Fukushima plant had placed all emergency power sources in basements, despite flooding being a possible common-mode failure risk. The extended duration of worldship transits would make their creators even more sensitive to design diversity.

  A typical nuclear power plant taps its own generator output for normal a/c power and can also connect to the grid through a separate transformer. Worldships would similarly tap the main propulsion drive (e.g., fusion or antimatter “torch”), but by a great variety of diverse methods such as magnetic coupling, photovoltaic, thermovoltaic, and even thermophotovoltaic. The intent would be to provide multiple copies (trains) of every chosen power design, each of sufficient size to provide the necessary output. Where defective lubricant might fail all the magnetic-coupling-driven generators, the “solid state” photovoltaic trains would be unaffected. Nuclear plants supplement diesel generators with gas turbines for on-site emergency a/c power diversity. Worldship emergency power design would doubtless include multiple long-lived, battery-style fission plants, fuel cells, and the like.

  Margin is another vital design element, both in building codes and operational hardware. Each nuclear plant safety train is nominally capable of supplying one hundred percent of needed power or fluid flow but, in practice, can provide more, sometimes much more. US naval history is replete with wartime stories of propellers at an rpm greater than thought possible. What those events had in common was that scared engineers called on those margins. One peacetime example reportedly took place during USS Enterprise (CVN-65) sea trials. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover—with one eye on the increasingly restive civilian vendor representatives on the bridge—kept adding rpm to the maximum flank bell. According to the story, after a couple of the admiral’s “Two more turns, Captain,” one vendor rep suddenly announced, “One more turn, Admiral, and they’re your reduction gears.” Rickover then reduced speed, confident that he had learned both the limiting propulsion component and its design margin.

  On a worldship, the des
igners would craft their margins to be synergistic. For example, if the ship’s radiators experienced a failure beyond their design margin, the propulsion drive would necessarily be limited to the heat output the remaining radiators could shed. Full drive thrust would be impossible. The effect would be to lengthen the trip from, say, five hundred years to seven hundred. As long as life support and other key systems had that much margin, the worldship could still safely reach its destination, albeit later than planned.

  Once you have calmed down, you will have questions. Hopefully, you have spared me so that I might answer them. Otherwise, you will have to summon another.

  “Are you sure? How did you learn of this?”

  “By the will and word of the Designers, Your Eminence.” If your rank is military, I would cite the applicable standing orders. No matter what, however, my answer would be steeped in the design elements of monitorable and testable.

  * * *

  Monitorable systems allow operators to discern system status. Well-designed systems provide continuous affirmation of operability, and clearly announce failures or other variances from expected performance. System sensors would monitor a great many parameters. The classics of temperature, pressure, flow, level, voltage, current, etc. would be joined by ones such as continuity, tension, torque, thickness, flux, field strength, and a vast host of others. Oversight routines would interpret and weave the streams together into qualitative depictions (e.g., green, amber, and red), yet allow human inspection of the quantitative data upon demand.

  Some control panels feature a layout that imitates the displayed system (“mimic bus”) to simplify operator recognition. For example, plastic shapes of pipes, pumps, and turbines might depict a system, with the switches to operate valves inserted in their proper places, and with indicator lights showing position and gauges showing flow. As is the case at nuclear plants, our worldship will doubtless have systems too complicated for classic mimic bus treatment. However, the designers would know that the multigenerational nature of the ship demands a user-friendly interface. They would likely use expandable three-dimensional holograms, easily accessible and possibly even triggered by alarms.