It took Rusel a moment to think that through. Day seven: the day the Coalition convoy was due to reach Port Sol. Rusel flinched from the thought. But one of his worst moments of that chaotic launch day was when he had run down that desperate father and driven on, without even having the courage to watch what he was doing. Perhaps this would atone. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.
Ship Three, like its four siblings, was a fat torus. To reach the observation lounge the brothers had to ride elevators up through several decks to a point in the Ship’s flattened prow, close to the rim. The lounge, crammed with Virtual generation gear, was already configured for the spin-up phase to come, and most of its furniture was plastered to the walls, which would become the floor. It was big enough for maybe fifty people, and it was nearly full; Rusel and Diluc had to crowd in. Pharaoh Andres - now Captain Andres, Rusel reminded himself - was here, sitting in a deep, heavy-looking chair, front and centre before an immense, shining Virtual.
A ball of ice spun grandly before their eyes. It was Port Sol, of course; Rusel immediately recognised its icy geography of ancient craters, overlaid by a human patterning of quarries and mines, habitats and townships, landing ports. In the inhabited buildings lights shone, defiantly bright in outer-system gloom. It was a sculpture in white and silver, and it showed no sign of the chaotic panic that must be churning in its corridors.
The sight took Rusel’s breath away. Somewhere down there was Lora; it was an almost unbearable thought, and he wished with all his heart he had stayed with her.
The Coalition convoy closed in.
Its ships materialised from the edge of the three-dimensional image, as if sliding in from another reality. The fleet was dominated by five, six, seven Spline warships. Confiscated from the expelled Qax, they were living ships each a kilometre or more wide, their hulls studded with weapons and sensors and crudely scrawled with the green tetrahedron that was the sigil of liberated humanity.
Rusel’s stomach filled with dread. ‘It’s a heavy force,’ he said.
‘They’ve come for the pharaohs,’ Diluc said grimly. ‘The Coalition is showing its power. Images like this are no doubt being beamed throughout the system.’
Then it began. The first touch of the energy beams, cherry-red, was almost gentle, and Port Sol ice exploded into cascades of glittering shards that drifted back to the surface, or escaped into space. Then more beams ploughed up the ice, and structures began to implode, melting, or to fly apart. A spreading cloud of crystals began to swathe Port Sol in a temporary, pearly atmosphere. It was silent, almost beautiful, too large-scale to make out individual deaths, a choreography of energy and destruction.
‘We’ll get through this,’ Diluc muttered. ‘We’ll get through this.’
Rusel felt numbed, no grief, only shame at his own emotional inadequacy. This was the destruction of his home, of a world, and it was beyond his imagination. Worse, Port Sol, which had survived the alien occupation of the solar system, was being devastated by humans. How could such things happen? He tried to focus on one person, on Lora, to imagine what she must be doing if she was still alive: perhaps fleeing through collapsing tunnels, or crowding into deep shelters. But, in the ticking calm of this lounge, with its fresh smell of new equipment, he couldn’t even picture that.
As the assault continued, numbers flickered across the status display, an almost blasphemous tallying of the estimated dead.
Even after the trauma of Port Sol, work had to continue on booting up the vital systems that would keep them all alive.
Rusel’s own job, as the senior nanochemist on the Ship, was to set up the nanofood banks that would play a crucial part in recycling waste into food and other consumables like clothing. The work was demanding from the start. The banks were based on an alien technology, nano-devices purloined from the occupying Qax; only partially understood, they were temperamental and difficult.
It didn’t help that of the two assistants he had been promised a share of - most people were generalists in this small, skill-starved new community - only one had made it onto the Ship. It turned out that in the final scramble about ten per cent of the crew had been left behind; conversely, about ten per cent of those who actually were aboard shouldn’t have been here at all. A few shame-faced ‘passengers’ were yellow-uniformed Enforcers who in the last moments had abandoned their posts and fled to the sanctuary of the Ship’s interior.
The work had to get done anyhow. And it was urgent; until the nanofood was available the Ship’s temporary rations were steadily depleting. The pressure on Rusel was intense. But Rusel was glad of the work, so hard mentally and physically in the high gravity he had no time to think, and when he hit his couch at night he slept easily.
On the fifteenth day Rusel achieved a small personal triumph as the first slab of edible food rolled out of his nano-banks. Captain Andres had a policy of celebrating small achievements, and she was here as Rusel ceremoniously swallowed the first mouthful of his food, and she took the second. There was much clapping and back-slapping. Diluc grinned in his usual huge way. But Rusel, numbed inside, didn’t feel much like celebrating. People understood; half the crew, it was estimated, were still in some kind of shock. He got away from the crush as quickly as he could.
On the twenty-first day the Ship was to encounter Jupiter.
Captain Andres called the crew together in the acceleration-couch amphitheatre, all two hundred of them, and she set up a Virtual display in the air above them. Few of the crew had travelled away from Port Sol before; they craned to see. The sun was just a pinpoint, though much brighter than seen from Port Sol, and Jupiter was a flattened ball of cloud, racked with storm systems like bruises - the result, it was said, of an ancient battle.
The most intriguing sight of all was four sparks of light that slid across the background of stars. They were the other Ships, numbers One, Two, Four and Five; the little fleet would come together at Jupiter for the first time since leaving Port Sol, and the last.
Andres walked though the crowd on their couches, declaiming loudly enough for all to hear, her authority easy and unforced. ‘We pharaohs have been discussing destinations,’ she said. ‘Obviously the targets had to be chosen before we reached Jupiter; we needed to plan for our angles of emergence from Jupiter’s gravity well. The Coalition is vindictive and determined, and it has faster-than-light ships. It will soon overtake us - but space is big, and five silent-running generation starships will be hard to spot. Even so it’s obviously best to separate, to give them five targets to chase, not just one.
‘So we have five destinations. And ours,’ she said, smiling, ‘is the most unique of all.’
She listed the other Ships’ targets, star systems scattered through the disc of the Galaxy - none closer than five hundred light years. ‘All well within the Ships’ design parameters,’ she said, ‘and perhaps far enough to be safe. But we are going further.’
She overlaid the image of the shining Ships with a ruddy, shapeless mass of mist. ‘This is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy,’ she said. ‘Twenty-four thousand light years from Sol. It is the closest of the satellite galaxies - but it is beyond the main Galaxy itself, surely far outside the Coalition’s grasp for the foreseeable future.’
Rusel heard gasps throughout the amphitheatre. To sail beyond the Galaxy? …
Andres held her hands up to quell the muttering. ‘Of course such a journey is far in excess of what we planned. No generation starship has ever challenged such distances before, let alone achieved them.’ She stared around at them, fists on hips. ‘But if we can manage a thousand years of flight, we can manage ten, or fifty - why not? We are strong, we are just as determined as the Coalition and its drones - more so, for we know we are in the right.’
Rusel wasn’t used to questioning the pharaohs’ decisions, but he found himself wondering at the arrogance of the handful of pharaohs to make such decisions on behalf of their crew - not to mention the generations yet unborn.
There was no serious protest. Perhaps it was all simply beyond the imagination. Diluc muttered, ‘Can’t say it makes much difference. A thousand years or ten thousand, I’ll be dead in a century, and I won’t see the end …’
Andres restored the images of the Ships. Jupiter was expanding rapidly now, and the other Ships were swarming closer.
Andres said, ‘We have discussed names for our vessels. On such an epic voyage numbers won’t do. Every Ship must have a name! We have named our Ship-homes for great thinkers, and great vessels of the past.’ She stabbed her finger around the Virtual image. ‘Tsiolkovsky. Great Northern. Aldiss. Vanguard.’ She looked at her crew. ‘And as for us, only one name is possible. Like an earlier band of pilgrims, we are fleeing intolerance and tyranny; we sail into the dark and the unknown, carrying the hopes of an age. We are Mayflower.’
You didn’t study history on Port Sol. Nobody knew what she was talking about.
At the moment of closest approach Jupiter’s golden-brown cloudscape bellied over the upturned faces of the watching crew, and the Ships poured through Jupiter’s gravity well. Even now the rule of silence wasn’t violated, and the five Ships parted without so much as a farewell message.
From now on, wherever this invisible road in the sky took her, the second Mayflower was alone.
III
As the days stretched to weeks, and the weeks to months, Rusel continued to throw himself into work - and there was plenty of it for everybody.
The challenges of running a generation starship were familiar to the crew to some extent, as the colonists of Port Sol had long experience in ecosynthesis, in constructing and sustaining closed artificial environments. But on Port Sol they had had external resources to draw on, the ice, rock and organic chemistry of the ice moon itself. The Ship was now cut off from the outside universe.
So the cycles of air, water and solids would have to be maintained with something close to a hundred per cent efficiency. The sealing of the Ship against leakages was vital, and so nano-machines laboured to knit together the hull. The control of trace contaminants and pests would have to be ferociously tight: more swarms of nano-bots were sent scurrying in pursuit of flakes of hair and skin.
Not only that, the Ship’s design had been hastily thrown together, and the vessel wasn’t even completed on launch. The construction had been a hurried project anyhow, and the shaving-off of those final ten or twelve days of preparation time, as the Coalition fleet sneaked up in the dark, had made a significant difference. So the crew laboured to complete the ship’s systems in flight.
The most significant difficulty, Rusel believed, was the sudden upping of the design targets. A thousand-year cruise, the nominal design envelope, was one thing. Now it was estimated that, cruising at about half lightspeed, it would take Ship Three fifty times as long to reach Canis Major. Even relativistic time dilation would only make a difference of a few per cent to the subjective duration. As a consequence the tolerances on the Ship’s systems were tightened by orders of magnitude.
There was yet another goal in all this rebuilding. A key lesson of ecosynthesis was that the smaller the biosphere, the more conscious control it would require. The Ship was a much smaller environment than a Port Sol habitat, and that presented problems of stability; the ecological system was poorly buffered and would always be prone to collapse. It was clear that this small, tight biosphere would always have to be consciously managed if it were to survive.
That was manageable as long as the first crew, educated on Port Sol, were in command. But to ensure this in the long term the Ship’s essential systems were to be simplified and automated as far as possible, to reduce the skill level required to maintain them. They couldn’t foresee all that might befall the Ship, and so they were trying to ‘future-proof’ the project, in Andres’s jargon: to reduce the crew to the status of non-productive payload.
As Diluc put it with grim humour, ‘We can’t allow civilisation to fall in here.’
Despite the horror of Port Sol, the hard work, and the daunting timescale Andres had set - which Rusel suspected nobody believed anyhow - the rhythms of human life continued.
Diluc found a new partner, a plump, cheerful woman of about thirty called Tila. Diluc and Tila had both left lovers behind on Port Sol, and Tila had been forced to give up a child. Now they seemed to be finding comfort with each other. Diluc was somewhat put out when they were both hauled into Andres’s small private office to be quizzed about their relationship, but Andres, after much consulting of genetic maps, approved their continuing liaison.
Rusel was pleased for his brother, but he found Tila a puzzle. Most of the selected crew had been without offspring, back on Port Sol; few people with children, knowing they would have to leave them behind, had even offered themselves for selection. But Tila had abandoned a child. He saw no sign of this loss in her face, her manner; perhaps her new relationship with Diluc, and even the prospect of more children with him in the future, was enough to comfort her. He wondered what was going on inside her head, though.
As for Rusel, his social contacts were restricted to work. He found himself being subtly favoured by Captain Andres, along with a number of others of the Ship’s senior technicians. There was no formal hierarchy on the Ship - no command structure below Andres herself. But this group of a dozen or so, a meritocracy selected purely by proven achievement, began to coalesce into a kind of governing council of the Ship.