Chapter Seven:

At Planetary Control on Syriahs, a crowd of Professors collected at their conference room in the Viniker Building under the light of a single sun, eleven months after their last transmission from Star Stepper, on the announcement that the craft was communicating again.

The information was not good.

“Boarded?” Credig Acuff demanded. “Seriously?”

“We did go significantly farther than intended,” Grellin countered. “I didn’t think that it would encounter another solar system capable of supporting life, however it could be another species, doing exactly what we’re doing, except they’re farther along.”

“Or have no regard for other lives,” Prem said, a scowl on his face. That the Legislator had awakened with the Academes demonstrated public concern over Star Stepper. What had been used as an extremely popular publicity stunt now had the whole planet speculating whether they had the technology to explore space, and at what cost.

“I don’t think they were boarded,” Viniker said, the reports spread out on separate pads before him.

“They might not concur,” Credig added, sarcasm clear in his face.

“I think they would,” Enigmat countered, looking at his own collection of pads. Grellin stood shoulder to shoulder with him.

“Right here,” the older man said, pointing to one set of reports.

“I see it,” Viniker said from the other side of the table.

“What?” Prem demanded.

Enigmat straightened. When it came to speaking to non-scholars, he was their usual candidate now that Maglen had passed.

Viniker really missed that old man – though Maree missed him more. She was home with their son now – it was too early to get someone to watch him, and there was no place for a two-year-old here.

Enigmat pointed to a series of reports, in order by time stamp rather than their source machines. “It looks to me like we responded with a ‘come home,’ command, and that command came almost a year later than Star Stepper expected it.”

“That touched off one of the robots to make up for a year of missed meals for its clones, and it killed them,” Grellin concluded, “and this tells me that that robot went looking for more victims.”

One of the Professors, a younger woman named Ghegee, said, “Oh, no.”

All eyes turned to her. She was the lead programmer on the project, and she’d taken care of the robots herself.

“Those robots were programmed to defend their clones,” she said. She pushed back a thick mop of black hair from her eyes. Like Viniker had been once, she was a complete academic who didn’t care about her looks, who lost herself in the beauty of her science – in this case, programming.

“Who authorized that?” Grellin demanded.

To his credit, Prem spoke up. “I did,” he said. “Or, rather, my party thought that it was likely that there was life out there, and that life out there might not welcome us.”

“So, why not kill them?” Grellin scoffed at him.

“No,” Ghegee said, “just don’t die like sheep in front of them, and give them the idea we’d be easy to conquer.”

“Oh,” Enigmat said.

“Another party argued that these were only clones – anything that could board our craft at light speed, would see what we were doing and not think that the clones represented our best and brightest,” Prem said. “So we rescinded the instruction.”

“But they changed their mind so often,” Ghegee said, “that I didn’t remove the code. There were sub routines that I wanted to use from there, anyway.”

“So we shipped the code,” Viniker said.

“Be you grateful she did,” Enigmat said, “’cuz it looks to me like that there robot would have kept on overfeeding them clones, until there wasn’t no more.”

“I think that’s true,” Prem said, leaning back in his chair. Credig leaned forward.

“So we lost some clones, and a robot,” Credig said.

“And we convinced the control AI that it was under attack,” Grellin said.

“What?” Credig demanded.

Viniker pointed to a spot on his pad. “Right here. It’s going to take defensive action and flee the scene. Here it changes course on its own, and here it flies through a solar storm and picks up enough power to go faster-than-light. Here it’s prepping for acceleration and trying to calculate where we are – last transmission.”

There was a moment of silence as they all digested this.

“Where did it go?” Ghegee asked quietly.

Grelling and Enigmat were scrolling back through reports that might give them a clue.

“It didn’t know where it was,” Grellin pointed out, “and it didn’t like when. It can’t find the celestial guide posts that were programmed into it, because it flew past them.”

“So it turned itself around 180 degrees by 180 degrees and headed back ‘a heyah,” Enigmat said. “And it did that right after it sent this message, which says to me that it already got where it thinks it’s supposed to go.”

“So we’re looking at another unguided missile heading for Syriahs at the speed of light,” Prem said, standing. He looked to Credig, still sitting.

“We have to alert –“ he began.

Viniker stood, “No,” he said. “We need to hand this data to Professor Ambergee, but it headed back to where Syriahs was, when it left three years ago.”

“So the solar system, but maybe not here,” Prem said. “It might have already hit one of the suns.”

Viniker was shaking his head. “No,” he said, “because the entire solar system is moving through space, just more slowly than Star Stepper is. We’re millions of miles from where we were in space, three years ago.

“And there’s no guarantee that Stah Steppa got its ‘a calculations right,” Enigmat said. “But I think right now, if I was a bettin’ man, that ship has begun slowin’ an’ it’s a’ askin itself, ‘Where you all gone?’”

Much to her chagrin, Ambergee and her staff were roused early that morning, and a frank interpretation of where Star Stepper might be had begun.

They had plenty of clues – the pictures that the ship had sent back, corrected for speed-of-light travel. Its intricate sets of data reports, sent while moving at the speed of light, but bounced off of other celestial bodies, where they would be garbled but could be descrambled later.

It turned out that Star Stepper’s AI did a passable job of getting her back to where Syriahs used to be, and then corrected for travel along the way, again based on its concept of time, not that of the rest of the universe.

An orbiting satellite with a telescopic attachment was redirected along the path that their binary star system had travelled and located their craft sitting in space, beeping out a message of ‘tell me what to do now!’ Planetary Control answered it and then sent a shot of energy from their plasma cannon to goad her along her way.

Star Stepper set down quietly to a hero’s welcome on the grounds outside of the Viniker Building, three years and three months after she’d left the planet. Legislator Prem and his colleagues, alongside other leaders of the Government and the Academy, droned on about the importance of the mission and the accomplishments of those who’d participated in it, handing out several medals, recognitions and awards. In memoriam, Maglen was declared a family name (the man had no progeny and then it caused no stir for this to happen).

Viniker and Maree entered the cramped quarters of Star Stepper with a team of doctors, to take control of their clone passengers and to study the effects of the journey.

“Oh!” Maree gasped. “Oh – oh my!”

Viniker was right behind her. The stink was beyond measure. Not just the reek of twenty unwashed clone bodies, but the results of ten more rotting corpses, an elimination system that had been leaking for a year and the close quarters of reclaimed, semi-circulated air.

It was decided that the entire team would retreat, and the top of the craft should be detached. A pavilion was thrown up around the craft as a crane approached with grapples that would lift the craft’s removable top. A team in complete containment went in to make disconnections necessary, all the while as the robots tended their charges, just as any other day.

The crowd was cleared back, and still the stench overwhelmed some lookers on. The team came back with containment and breathing apparatus, and the ship and its crew were finally made ready to be analyzed.

The Professors met alone three days later in the conference room in the Viniker building.

“Very little cancer,” Professor Brezden of the veterinary department put forward. “Were the robots equipped, I think this could have been treated successfully underway. I would call the level of exposure notable, but treatable.”

“On the other hand,” her assistant, a younger man named Groff, pressed, “other diseases are rampant.”

Groff was a thin-boned man with a rather obvious belly, a neck that seemed too small for his bulbous head and a nose like a crow’s beak, set under blue eyes. “Dysentery, E.coli – the usual diseases associated with the breathing of decaying flesh, influenza –“

“Is this all from the close quarters?” Credig asked. He sat in his personal chair, Prem’s next to him left conspicuously empty.

“I think it is,” Brezden said, and Groff nodded. “We simply didn’t allow for a lot of this, and we should have.”

“Our robots weren’t programmed to analyze or to treat any sort of disease,” Ghegee said, without looking up at them. Her black hair actually touched the table before her as she scribbled furiously on her pad with a stylus held in pale fingers. “We could have – though. In the future, next flight, I think. Yes. Yes.”

Viniker chuckled to himself. He remembered when other persons around him were more of a distraction than a help. They were all that to Ghegee.

Grellin said, “The craft, itself – very little damage, but there’s a problem.”

All eyes turned to him.

“A deflector was damaged,” he said. “When the ship was turning to come home, I think there was just a random bit of debris in just the right place, at just the right time, and it struck a cone from its underside.

“The problem, though, is that there was no way to fix the problem. The AI turned up the intensity of the other deflectors in the array, like it was supposed to, but future flights should include a way to fix external damage.”

“Update the AI,” Ghegee said to herself, without looking up.

It was determined that the ship’s stores lasted for as long as they should have, for a flight of a year, which is what it believed it had done. Sanitation was definitely a concern, and the mission could be reported as a success.

“We would normally want to make a longer trip, now,” Ambergee said, “but, in fact, we’ve already taken that step without realizing it.”

“We’ve also corrected the logic for the time difference,” Ghegee said, her dark eyes finally lifted from her pad, her stylus at rest for now, beside her pale hand.

“I’ve been analyzing images that Star Stepper stored and transmitted, both. They’re on all of your pads now. I turn your attention to number 41,135, at the center of the image, and then similar images in 40,214, 38,889 and 36,000.”

The Professors all shuffled through the images in their pads. They saw a seven-planet system around a single sun, a yellow dwarf with a predictable spectrum of light emissions.

Ambergee looked up from the images. “This?” she asked.

“The third and fourth planets,” Ghegee said, “should be studied. Both of them exist in the habitable range. In fact, the third is mostly water and could be a service planet used while exploiting the fourth.”

“We need to study this,” Ambergee informed the rest. “Unfortunately, this system isn’t easily visible from where we are, due to the interference of our own stars.”

“How far away is it?” Maree asked.

“Between eight and one half to nine light years,” Ghegee said. “That’s what makes it so optimal. A crew onboard a craft like Star Stepper would see this as, perhaps, a little more than two years in space?”

The professors exchanged glances. Even with the exposure risks at their current levels, so short a time seemed well within the bounds of hope.

In the next year, the crew of Star Stepper were studied for continuing problems from their exposure. It was a surprise to those involved that, having overcome the problems of radiation to some extent, it was sanitation that proved so lethal.

As Syriahs’ population insisted on moving out into space, and the existence of this prime planet became common knowledge, the Government began working with the Academy both on the creation of a new craft which could move more than 200 people, and then of course the selecting of those people.

The latter proved more difficult than the former.

With years’ experience behind them, a larger version of Star Stepper, Intrepid, nearly built itself. Double-hulled, multi-sectioned, with access to its own exterior, a machine shop to fabricate repairs for broken parts and equipment, shifting, half-moon flooring so that compartments could take advantage of gravity from acceleration, battery rooms, hydroponics, and all of the other parts and conveniences that a large crew would need, in order to occupy itself in space for a trip of two to three years.

“People can live for a year without meat,” Maree argued with the rest of the Professorial staff, which had grown from a handful to dozens in the course of a year. She bounced her daughter on her hip as she spoke, her son having achieved school age and being otherwise occupied. “The cost of bringing live-stock –“

Another Professor stood and interrupted her. “We have no guarantee,” she said, “that the planet where we’re going has edible animals.”

Many Professors nodded.

“We can achieve the same with an embryo bank of as many types of animals as we want,” another asserted. “And we can do it at a fraction of the cost of space and convenience.”

This was what Maree had wanted – however there were Professors now who would oppose her or Viniker just because they put forward the idea.

This whole expedition – the concept from beginning to end – was hers, with Viniker. While most people, Academic or otherwise, recognized that her husband had put them into space, it was she who conquered it. This had been her dream for over a decade – and like one of her children, she’d birthed it, she’d nursed it, she’d taught it to stand and now it walked on its own.

Two persons who’d almost completely changed society – it was too much credit concentrated in too small a space. The House of Viniker was already the wealthiest of all of the Great Families, as well as the youngest. So many things had arisen from their study of space, so many new fields simply grew up out of what they’d accomplished – from simple things like old Maglen’s wheel chair, to super-fast, inexpensive drives and vehicles which were as comfortable underwater as in the air – that it took a team just to manage their wealth.

Professors who were initially snatching crumbs, come new to the adventure without having been there when this had all been guess work, now wanted whole sections, and they didn’t want to be fighting Vinikers, just because Vinikers made it possible.

So now, she occupied herself with this planning for the new ship, rather than her husband, and most of her ideas were presented by others whom she advised. Almost all of them were much older than she, so that this became the effort of the well-known, established Academy, not these upstarts with their new disciplines.

An embryo bank was her idea. Hydroponics was her idea. Viniker had come up with double-hulls and compartments, but he’d been put them forward as she had, through other Professors. That had been her idea.

The meeting droned on-and-on. It used to be televised – those days had seen Professors speak about nothing for hours. No one complained when that ended.

Reports would now paraphrase them and present progress to an eager public. From these, thousands of volunteers had applied to be the first to populate this new planet, and the best of these, from all manner of fields, were living now in a habitat created by the Academy.

The habitat breathed recycled air, ate hydroponic food, drank recycled water and congregated together, developing new ways to occupy their time in a world where almost all of the work was automated.

Every day, the habitat revealed a new discovery, a new improvement. Here was where Viniker spent most of his time, trying to meet the challenge of housing two hundred humans as they flew through space.

They still walked home at night, they still held hands. Now, however, armed guards protected them from both fans and enemies alike. There were still those who looked on suspiciously when the idea of space travel, of colonizing another world, was mentioned. There were others eager to share their ideas, their insights, as if these hadn’t been debated for hours, as if each were a new concept and its bearer an untapped resource, about to change the progress of their new endeavor.

When they arrived home, she no longer cooked for him. They had staff for that. They had a caretaker for their son Regnal Viniker, and for their daughter, Aleen Viniker, as well. Maree missed those simple things – but these days there were only so many hours in a day, and she fought against demand for every one of them.

Regnal greeted them at the door, fresh from his studies, juice down the front of his white shirt speaking to the fruit he’d eaten. As he hugged his parents, Aleen’s caretaker took her from her mother’s hip and whisked her away to be changed and bathed. The rest sat down to a prepared dinner as the house moved on like a machine.

Like their space craft would – but would it do so without them? This has been a bone of contention between them.

She wanted to go – she’d been dreaming of it all of her life. Why develop the technology and then not use it?

Then she sat at dinner and watched little Regnal shovel food into his mouth, as if someone were going to take it away from him, given the opportunity. He definitely could not go – was she ready to leave two children to the care of another?

Her husband was not interested in leaving Sariyahs. Travel through space was not his dream. A new world would have no Academy, no laboratories, no pads and styluses. He felt that his contribution was here, as was hers, collecting data sent from nine light-years away.

He would not be a settler, tilling soil. He would stand on high, the god of those people.

She ate the food laid out before her, oblivious to its taste. Of course, it would be years before they had to decide – if certain members of the government had their way, Ragnar might not only be old enough to go before they were ready, he and his sister might be the only ones among them young enough.

The Maglen was a beautiful craft, circular in design rather than oblong, still golden in color, with its RF drive beneath it and passive EM plates of varying strength all over its hull. Innovation to Viniker’s original anti-gravity device had replaced clumsy cones with physical cables to more sophisticated sheets with adjustable polarity across their surface, allowing the same device to be a shield from the debris in space and a propulsion device. A built-in AI controlled it all, and all a pilot had to do was to tell the AI where to go, and the it, in turn, would alter the task, strength and polarities of plates throughout the ship.

With this plating, decks within the ship could provide gravity of a sort to those within. Viniker had risen up from bed in the middle of the night a year ago with the revelation – if you need gravity, why not just reverse the polarity of his original cones?

From this had also come an exceptionally formidable weapon – a cannon of a type that could repel a projectile at speeds faster than sound, with no kick-back against the ship. The Maglen could handle herself in a fight if it had to, or blast a meteorite in its path.

That last reality had become another concern in moving forward with space travel – at faster-than-light travel, a rogue comet or meteor could find its way into a ship’s path, and that ship wouldn’t know of it until it struck it. Part of the reason for this ship’s circular design was to give it the chance to repel and ‘roll off’ of an obstruction – something that would be at least upsetting but perhaps not lethal to the crew.

A year before, the Intrepid with twenty Sariyans aboard had navigated out past the solar system, achieved light speed and almost immediately struck a tiny asteroid barely larger than a cobblestone, but too large for the ship’s deflectors to repel, and it had torn wide swath down the outer hull. While the inner hull still held, the shielding was gone and there was nowhere in the ship to hide from the exposure. The ship returned home, but the crew was dead in months from cancer.

The Maglen had shielding not only on both hulls, but on all of its inner compartments. All of them could be sealed against a loss of hull integrity. All of the same essentials – machine shops, hydroponics, medical centers with full operating rooms – were doubled up through the ship. Maglen could take a real battering and still protect her crew.

Just as her namesake had protected his students, Viniker couldn’t help thinking.

Where Viniker had thought that Intrepid would be on its way to a new world in just a few years, Maglen would see space nearly a decade after Star Stepper went to a museum, where curious Sariyans could look into her compartment and her robots still cared for make-believe clones made of plastic.

Old Ambergee still ran the observatory with an iron hand, but now it was three times the size it had been when Viniker had first met her. The Academy’s observatory worked hand-in-hand now with what was now known as ‘Planetary Control,’ the Government’s regulatory committee for space travel. Viniker stood there now with Maree and their teen-aged son, Regnal and their pre-teen daughter, Aleen. Raised around the Academy, the two children were closer to professors in their manner and their experience than to students.

Still, they wore the yellow and white, and they were here as a part of their studies, not just as company to their parents. Regnal was already an assistant to Ambergee, fully capable of doing the math required to track objects moving through space and graph the trajectories of objects that might be in their way.

It was doing this that he’d come up with the data that upset their plans and brought them all here.

“You’re sure?” Ambergee asked him.

Where Regnal’s father might have been more distracted, and his mother more timid, Regnal was capable of an amazing focus that both took him to deeper mathematics and unintended consequences of his behavior.

“Would I have bothered you otherwise?” he asked, without looking up from his computer screen. The trajectories that he was plotting was too difficult to be done on a simple pad.

Ambergee bristled and looked sideways at Viniker. For any other student such hubris would have been admonished or worse. Regnal was a child of name, and that name was one of the most famous and wealthiest on Syriahs. Ambergee’s instinct to make anyone who crossed her pay a heavy price wouldn’t see much success against one who would, soon enough, be able to buy the place where she worked and have it condemned.

“Regnal!” Maree admonished him. She wasn’t a woman who’d raise privileged children, who acted like privileged children.

Regnal looked up from his screen and caught Ambergee’s expression. “My apologies, Mistress,” he said. “I mean, I would not think to waste your time otherwise.”

Ambergee didn’t look mollified and likely wasn’t. Viniker interceded.

“A planetoid – perhaps the size of a moon – was struck by a large asteroid in our target solar system, and it is destroyed,” he said. “The planetoid was either a piece of one of the larger planets that broke off when this solar system formed, or it was caught in an orbit as it passed through the galaxy. Regardless, it’s now a belt of heavy asteroids and, to get to the 4th planet, we’ll have to fly through it.”

“I don’t see how,” Regnal continued for his father. “The math involved to calculate the trajectories of so many moving objects, affected by the gravity of the gas giant and the 4th planet, considering that the asteroids themselves likely collide regularly – I wouldn’t even know how to design the computer program that could pull that off.”

Viniker would have to consult with Ghegee, but he didn’t hold out a lot of hope. In fact, Regnal had studied under her as she’d become a Professor in her own right, and she’d proclaimed that she had nothing left to teach him years ago.

“This means we switch to the third planet,” Maree said, but she already knew the problem – Viniker knew that.

And he voiced it. “We’ve been streaming power for the 4th planet for five years,” he said. “We can’t just direct it to the third and, were we to direct another particle beam too soon, it couldn’t help but intersect with the existing one. We’d have to wait years just to start, and then more years before it would be of any use to us.”

This problem was a bad one. The public was clamoring for the first mission to the new world – another delay was bound to bring great annoyance and, very likely, a change in government to families who understood the risks less well than that sentiment. Sending two-hundred volunteers to their deaths because the public demanded it didn’t sit well with Viniker.

Regnal straightened at his desk, clicked off the screen and sighed. He turned to face his mother and father.

“There’s no solution for it,” he said, solemnly. “The calculations with take years, but so will the journey. I’ll just have to go.”

It didn’t take much to add another computer center to the Maglen. Powering it was another matter.

“One of our biggest problems,” Livven Esteve informed them, from inside of the newly-added compartment, “is going to be the dispersion of heat.”

She was a tall woman, as tall as her father, Grellin. Like him, she’d embraced the Academy and its riches over her own. Unlike him, she was a startling beauty – long, brown hair cascaded over her shoulders and, where her father’s eyes were a muddy brown, hers were soft and doe-like. She was slim-figured, not well-endowed like Maree, but she drew the same stares that the older woman had drawn in her youth.

Unlike Maree, the attention didn’t seem to haunt Livven. Maree rejoiced in finding a man who loved her for her mind until she had him. Livven seemed to notice right away when a man’s eyes ran over her body, and this only seemed to inspire her.

“From the processors,” Viniker pressed her.

She nodded. “The heat of 200 bodies is enough to have to contend with. As heavily insulated as Maglen is, it contains heat well and we’re both collecting it for the hydroponic section and expelling it into space. In addition to that, we have a cooling system which will run constantly, however that system can’t handle the addition of the computers you’ll need to run, for the calculations your son plans to do.

It would be impossible, even with accurate maps, to calculate the trajectories of asteroids in a belt between them and the 4th planet in the target system, so instead Regnal would be spending his time on a sophisticated deflector pattern which would allow the ship to evade them in-path. This would mean running complicated graphics, simulations, and a solid stream of computing power. Seven years would pass while Maglen travelled from Syriahs to its target, but less than three would pass for her passengers, and Regnal would likely need it all.

Powerful computers with sophisticated processors had been considered in the design of the ship from before her frame was set in place, but more of them upset the equations.

“Mebbe its own conduit?” Enigmat suggested. “We could make us a shaft right from the outer hull –“

But Livven was already shaking her head. “It would be a structural vulnerability,” she informed them. “We’ve built Maglen to be circular, so that in the event of a close-in encounter –“

“So it could roll with th’ punches,” Enigmat finished, cutting her off in turn. Unlike most people ‘of name,’ it didn’t seem to bother her. Among her peers, most expected to be allowed to pontificate all day without there being a word said.

“But we’re thinking of a shaft here,” Viniker said. “Or some sort of duct. But heat really doesn’t need a shaft or a duct, just a path to travel.”

Livven nodded.

“We could use a copper coil, instead,” he continued. “Simple enough – an excellent conductor, solid for strength.”

“Wrap that ‘round a barrel,” Enigmat continued, “blow air through it, aim it at yer computers…”

“Well,” Livven said, “not around a barrel. But I see what you mean. Transmit heat to the interior of the hull, and then let space do the rest.”

“But will it work faster-than-light?” Maree asked. “Between the computers and the outside of space, it doesn’t just cross distance, it crosses time.”

Livven nodded again. “A web, perhaps, throughout the interior of the hull? Copper inlay that can transmit throughout the entire breadth of Maglen. Then, no matter how much dispersion is slowed, it should be able accommodate you.”

“We’ll have to test it,” Viniker said.

They all nodded. There was a Maglen prototype that they’d been using for the last two years to conduct trials in space and to make changes to the main ship without risking it, as they had Intrepid. It was planet-side now - they arranged for the webbing to be smelted to the inside of its hull and then connected to an artificial heat source far in excess of what the computers would generate.

With some adjustments, they had it working in six months. It was the last impediment to Maglen making her journey to another star, another solar system, another life.

It was a sad moment for Maree, who would be saying, “Good-bye” forever to her eldest son. She’d feared that it would be her children, not her, who would make this journey, and she’d turned out to be right.

It was one of the few cases where she’d have been glad to be wrong.

The people of Syriahs celebrated when two hundred bold explorers stood at attention outside of the hull of Maglen, six months after her retrofit with the new cooling system.

Every video screen on the planet tuned to listen to the members of the great houses sing their praises of these adventurers, this mission, their own people and the science that brought them to this moment.

Last among them was Viniker, whom people credited with this great accomplishment more than any other. In truth, Maree had done far more, but she hadn’t put the first foot down, and history celebrated the first usually over the most successful.

“From this moment on,” he informed them, “Siryans become a multi-planetary species.

“This means that no natural catastrophe, no disease, no calamity can take us all. Today, we take a step to insure our own immortality. No matter what we find out in space, as we claim it in the name of Syriahs, it adds to our own greatness, and we are bettered as a people.”

It was something that Maree hadn’t really considered. In the passing decades, she’d come to realize how ‘not empty’ space actually was, how many things flew through it, crashing into each other at random. Hundreds, even thousands of comets might fly through their binary solar system, but it really only took one of them to strike Syriahs and extinguish it, or send its people back to an age of hunter/gathering.

But not now. As Sariyans pushed out into the rest of the galaxy, the loss of one stronghold, even of Syriahs herself, wouldn’t be the end of all. There would be Sariyans to carry on, somewhere.

And one of these would be her son, who stood before her in his new, black robes.

“You’ll be careful,” she demanded of him.

He shook his head. So like his father, she thought. Though not really. Viniker wouldn’t dream of going on such a mission – there would be nothing for him on this new world. Not so, Regnal. He might not have craved this like his mother had, but he didn’t avoid it like his father.

“It will be like sitting in a classroom,” he said, “except that I won’t be able to stare out the windows.”

“And it won’t be boring,” his sister chimed in. She still wore the yellow-and-white of a student at the Academy. She wasn’t the student that her brother was, but she had focus like her father. If she set her mind to something, it haunted her until she solved it.

Maree frowned, but her brother laughed with her. Their instructors had described both as ‘too smart for their own good,’ however their parents were considered geniuses – even revolutionaries – and Maree wondered if these opinions were foisted upon them.

A Professor at so young an age, she couldn’t doubt her son’s intelligence. Aleen still had to prove herself.

Regnal hugged his sister, then his mother. “Soon you’ll be hearing my stories,” he informed her. “People will tell you all about how your son saved the mission to the new world.”

“And how your daughter came up from behind and exceeded him!” Aleen promised from the side.

Maree shook her head. Some of her mother in that one, too.

She’d wanted this – she’d wanted this so badly she could almost cry. She’d spent her whole life seeking the stars, and now she sent one child, and another promised to follow. Perhaps, in her lifetime, interplanetary travel would become no different than moving from one region of the continent to the other. Perhaps she and her husband would just jump in a fliver and ‘go.’

But not today. Her son kissed her and, a satchel over his shoulder, walked the short distance to the Maglen. She watched him and she didn’t wave, because he didn’t turn around. His mind was already on the program he would write.

Her husband should have been here, but Viniker was in Planetary Control, checking details and making sure that nothing went unaccounted for. It didn’t even occur to him to say, “Good-bye,” to his son. His son knew he was leaving, so did Viniker.

“I’ll miss him,” Aleen informed her.

She nodded. She’d burst out crying if she did more. She didn’t want that for her daughter. In her mind, a million things could go wrong with this extended flight. The ship could crash, the systems fail, the food stuffs spoil. They could strike a comet, a meteor or just a really large rock in space. The guidance system could fail, or they could have miscalculated.

She heard the hum of the ship’s anti-grav engaging. Maglen would lift off soon.

They should have sent another test-flight, she thought. They should have waited for one to make it all of the way.

The Government had considered and discarded that idea. The people were growing impatient. They’d had this technology for decades now. Any more waiting and a new party would unseat the existing one, and do so with promises of an immediate trip into space. As she’d thought before, as her husband had expressed, she’d not be the reason why two hundred brave volunteers were sent to die.

The ground didn’t shake as the Maglen rose up into the atmosphere. The ship quietly and efficiently did what it was supposed to do. There was no straining of engines, no majestic plume of smoke, as Maglen didn’t so much rise as she was pushed away from Syriahs.

Appropriate, somehow.

“Good-bye, Regnal,” Aleen said, waving to the windowless craft. “Be careful! Be well.”

Just stay alive, Maree thought to herself without daring to speak the words. “Don’t make your mother cry.”

And, with that, Maglen left the planet Syriahs for a system where the light from there sun took 9.8 years to get here.

Aboard Maglen, the surge of lift-off was a slight weight increase, followed by a significant decrease as the ship changed directions and headed for the path of the particle energy stream which would be its highway to the new solar system.

Regnal sat at the little terminal in his little cabin and tried to ignore it. While other members of the crew chattered among themselves and others-still went about the duties of maintaining an actual space ship, he was already laying out new algorithms in his mind, to upgrade the ship’s guidance system and its deflector array, in order to avoid or repel the asteroids and meteoroids that they’d encounter on their way to the new planet.

This wasn’t easy math. Maglen was sufficiently large to house two hundred Sariyans, their baggage, food stuffs for two years and of course their equipment and its own. If this had been a ‘fueled’ ship – one of the ancient rockets which had once been used to explore the solar system – its bulk would have prohibited its take off. They would have had to use one group of rockets just to break with the atmosphere, and another for the journey, and even then they never would have achieved light speed.

“Entering the particle stream,” a speaker in his cabin announced. Because he was a person ‘of name,’ and due to his special assignment, he had the rare honor of a personal cabin, where the majority of Maglen’s passengers and most of her crew lived in bunk cabins or berthings of ten or more, in beds stacked three high with ‘coffin lockers’ for personal possessions as a part of them. Regnal’s cabin included a bed attached to the floor, a chest of drawers and actual shelves.

And the terminal, of course. In the Viniker home, his closet was larger. Here, this was the peak of excess.

“Regnal Viniker?” someone said at his doorway.

He turned in the hard chair before his terminal to see a young woman standing at his door. She was dressed in the ship’s red uniform – serviceable one-piece pants suit with a white sash at the hip where odds and ends that she would need could be stored. She smiled and she handed him a laminated piece of paper.

“Your schedules, sir,” she informed him. “When you can eat, when you can shower. Do you know where the sanitary facilities are?”

He didn’t but he wasn’t willing to admit it. He’d ask when he needed them. He glanced over the sheet.

“Two meals a day?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she informed him. He’d known there would be rationing, but not starvation.

“And bathing every other day?” he read on.

“Showering,” she informed him. “Yes, sir – we’re trying that now, but count on it becoming every third day.”

He looked up at her. A pretty brunette – her hair up in a bun now, but it would be tumble-down long around her shoulders if she let it loose. She had rare, blue eyes and a dash of freckles across her pert nose. Her mouth had generous lips which she didn’t apply any sort of makeup to. In fact, she didn’t use any makeup at all.

“The purification of water takes more than we’d counted on,” she informed him. “As well, we were originally hoping to recycle more… wastes. That proved ineffective.”

He’d been aware that he’d have to try to perform different bodily functions into different receptacles. The alternative was a tremendous waste of water, or bathing in one’s own recycled feces.

He didn’t think these restrictions would apply to him.

“Are all persons of name subject to this?” he asked.

She regarded him for just a moment. “Sir,” she said, finally, “on Syriahs, you were a person of a noble house with an influential name, I’m sure.”

“My father is Viniker, the inventor of the fliver,” he interrupted her. “He designed this craft –“

“With about a thousand other engineers, I’m aware,” she interrupted him. His mouth opened in shock. In his life, only his parents had dared to be treat him with such disregard.

“On Maglen,” she informed him, “you’re a passenger. I and a few dozen like me are doing everything we can to get you to another solar system, alive. It’s going to take three years.

“The resources you take, in excess of what’s on that sheet, come right out of someone else’s mouth. Would you like to pick someone and inform them that you’ll being eating their food? That you’ll be bathing in their drinking water?”

He scowled at the idea.

“Perhaps one of the older people? I could help you pick out someone with just one name, who maybe we could do without or don’t mind to watch die?”

This was intolerable.

“Because that’s what it would take, sir,” she informed him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“Kharen,” she told him. “Crewman First Class, and this is my section. If you want to get anything, you’ll be getting it from me.

“I can’t be reassigned,” she informed him, “and I don’t have much use for pay for the next three years. If you want to get me in trouble, you probably can, but then you’re still mine for the next three years.”

He’d actually planned to demand to see the ship’s captain, but Kharen was right. For now, she had power here, and he would need her, he was sure.

He didn’t have to like it, any more than she did. He flipped the laminated page onto his tiny bed. “That will be all, Kharen,” he dismissed her.

She smiled. “If only that were true,” she informed him, and turned on her heel.

Three years couldn’t pass quickly enough.

Regnal missed the announcement when they moved to faster-than-light speed. He didn’t realize it had happened until he went to one of his two daily meals and heard people buzzing about it.

“Can you tell the difference?”

“So now we’re not aging?”

“I think I can tell – things feel… different.”

Regnal didn’t notice any difference, although he probably wouldn’t have noticed someone flicking matches at him, for the work that he was doing and how immersed he was in it.

The program that he needed to write didn’t exactly write itself. Every time he came up with a solution for the problem of rapidly avoiding moving objects in three-dimensional space, he came up with a problem that defeated him.

The largest ones: Maglen was a huge ship – it couldn’t just squeak between gaps in a belt of asteroids. It had to do as much repelling as maneuvering.

Then came the second problem – the plates that worked so well in an array to repel foreign objects couldn’t necessarily work in harmony when repelling multiple objects from an infinite number of directions. Those plates could actually rip the ship apart if too many were engaged against multiple targets. They worked fine on one ship moving in one direction with all debris ahead of it. They wouldn’t just repel dust and small debris; they would actually ease that debris to one side by fluctuating their repulsion strength.

That his father had done this with cables and cones spoke to him of what a genius that man was. He missed being able to consult with his father, to bounce ideas off of him, or to be the one to hear those ideas. The hardest part of all of this was that, even if his father sent him a message right now, it wouldn’t be received until years after they arrived. He was actually, completely and for the first time on his own.

He sat down at a small table in their common mess, where the crew and passengers ate at their assigned times and for their assigned intervals, with three of the few other people ‘of name’ aboard Maglen.

There was Hames Acuff, of what had once been one of the most prominent names of Siryahs. Where his father, Edzig, had been Dean of the Academy, Hames was an athlete who excelled at any sport, but at no math. He’d impoverished his family in a short period of time and actually lived on a stipend from his uncle, Credig. He brought his name and his desire not to work for a living with him.

Another male, Efrain Zane came from what was likely the only military family left on Siryahs. Peace had reigned there for so long that the only ‘military’ left was more of a police force, and that mostly ceremonial. Crime wasn’t unknown on Siryahs but really it was largely unpopular.

Efrain, however, lived his life as if there was an enemy at the door. He remained very fit, kept his black hair cut close to the scalp and watched the world through sharp, hazel eyes, as if waiting for the bullet that would come out of the dark.

And, of course, there was Livven Esteve. When she turned her doe eyes on him, Regnal could feel his heartrate increase and his mouth go dry. He was so infatuated with her that, if she asked him to meet her in an airlock that wasn’t secure, he’d likely do it.

She actually waited for him to stop ogling her breasts before she spoke, a smile on her lips.

“How goes the war with the asteroids?” she asked him.

He set his tray down and he sighed. The other men looked intently on. This journey was a waste of time or worse if they couldn’t overcome the asteroids, and going around them would take more than another year.

The worst part of that was that it would have to be done at sub-light speeds, meaning that they would have to begin braking a year early. Regnal didn’t have three years to solve this mystery, he had a little more than eighteen months.

“Slowly,” he told them. He peeled a protective film from his plate of rice and vegetables. No meat – they wouldn’t eat meat except for once a month, and then portions so tiny that he almost wanted to forgo them. Frozen vegetables and fruits might be brown and mushy, but there was plenty of it.

“What’s the problem?” Efrain almost demanded. It was a problem – he would attack it like any other.

“I’ve reconciled myself to repulsing objects, not trying to avoid them,” he said. He took a mouthful of food and the other three did the same.

“But the problem is that the anti-grav plates on the hull have to be totally repurposed to deflect and move obstacles before they hit the ship. When there’s one obstacle, there’s no problem. When there are several, it’s a real strain on the hull, and the tolerances aren’t there. We didn’t build the ship to do this, and we can’t rebuild it while we’re in it.”

“And you can’t repurpose those panels until we get to where we need them, either,” said Hames, stating the obvious.

Regnal took another bite. There was a light vinaigrette on the vegetables but it wasn’t very good.

“So nothing hits us, and we kill ourselves,” Livven said. She shook her head, her long brown hair waving at her cheeks and shoulders. “Not good enough, Viniker.”

“I know it,” he said. At the next table, someone snorted.

He turned his head and saw Kharen with other crewman. She was eyeing him, a smile on her lips. The derision came from her.

He’d done his best to avoid her since their last confrontation. She did what she had to do; he did what they all needed him to do. There were times when he’d willingly trade places, but such thinking was ridiculous.

“Something, crewman?” he asked her.

On Syriahs, the whole room would have gone quiet and the woman’s heart would have frozen in her chest. This was the wrong type of attention to get from someone with a last name.

On Maglen, there wasn’t a flicker, although the other crewmen at her table suddenly had other directions to look in.

“You’re looking at it all wrong,” she informed him. He was surprised she’d answer – this woman had completely forgotten herself. She should have looked down and apologized.

He certainly didn’t want her advice.

“Am I?” he asked, and looked to his other three persons of name for support. There were sarcastic smiles all around.

“Yes,” she said. “You want the program to do all of the work, and you want to sit back and watch it.”

“I certainly don’t want to go outside the ship and push the asteroids away myself,” he countered.

“No,” she said, “but what you need to do is to become a pilot and, using your program, navigate Maglen through the asteroids yourself – unless you can find someone better at it.”

Regnal actually blinked. Now his compatriots fell silent.

Maglen really didn’t have or need a pilot. It went where the computer told it to, and made micro-changes in its course based on where it thought it was and what its stream was doing. Regnal wanted it to continue to do the same.

“Make yourself a game,” she informed him, “with the same parameters as this ship, and then make yourself an asteroid belt in the game, and then navigate yourself through it, and learn to do so without destroying the ship. You’ve got more than 2 years – you should be quite an accomplished pilot by the time we’re there.”

There was a chime that told them that they meal period was nearing an end. She returned to her meal as if he’d just been a distraction, or a child who’d broken a toy.

Regnal looked to his compatriots.

“You know,” Livven said, “that’s a pretty good idea.”