Doug Dandridge is the author of twenty-three books, including a number of bestsellers. He is currently creating a new space opera/military sci-fi series for Phoenix Pick, and this story takes place in that universe.
PHOENIX PICK INTRODUCES
a new shared universe
www.KinshipWars.com
“Incoming message,” said the voice of the bridge computer. “Incoming message.”
Captain Azhar Talpur looked up from where he was sitting, at one of the configurable multi-stations on the small bridge. The tall, swarthy-skinned man ran a hand through his longish hair, wondering what information was coming their way, and where from. Coasting along through space at point-eight light speed was about as tedious as it got. Right now any news—even bad—would be more than welcome.
Things would get exciting enough in another seven months, when they would turn the Behr one hundred and eighty degrees and start the deceleration toward the target star. Two hundred and eighty-three days at one gravity—the same profile that had gotten them up to their coasting velocity—and they would be at their new home. Unfortunately, that was not now. Now was as boring as it got.
The captain looked at the message register and grunted, seeing that it was a warp pulse from the expanse ahead. That was unusual in itself as most messages for them came from Earth.
Talpur waited a moment for the rest of the message to arrive, not really expecting much. Warp pulse was the faster means of transmission—thousands of times that of light—but it could only transmit limited text information through a binary code. He suspected it would be a transmission from their future colony destination to Earth.
Lahore was a fairly new colony, sitting over fifty light-years from Earth. Two ships had made there it so far. With the boom of births all colonies experienced shortly after landing its population would be sitting at just over two hundred thousand people. The Pakistan Regional Authority had won the bid on the planet, one that was very friendly to Earth creatures. Behr was the third ship, and there were a half dozen behind her at five year intervals, each carrying their fifty thousand passengers in cryo.
The captain looked in disbelief as the message came up on the viewer. By Allah, it can’t be, he thought. But there was no reason the colony would send such a message unless it was real.
LAHORE COLONY UNDER ATTACK BY UNKNOWN ALIENS. DESTROYED. MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON US.
The message repeated, as it was supposed to, so anyone tuning in mid-transmission would hear it in its entirety in the follow-up transmissions. It was supposed to repeat for ten times per protocol. This one lasted for two, ending halfway through the third repetition. Not a good sign.
“All officers to bridge,” said the captain, stress straining his voice. He had been young when they had left the Earth, and now was middle aged, looking forward to the normalcy of again living on a planet.
The entire trip took sixty-six Earth years. Due to relativity, time was thirty-nine years. For the fifty-thousand colonists in cryo it made no difference. For the two duty crews who alternated spending half the trip asleep, the other half manning the ship, it cut their awake time down to nineteen and a half years. The captain had been twenty-five on leaving Earth, sleeping through the first half of the trip. He was now forty-four, not that old for people in this age, able to still live seventy or more productive years.
The first through the hatch was the engineer, Nadeem Sarpara. The expression on his face showed that he had seen the message, the shaking of his head indicated he still didn’t quite believe it. Dr. Mehmood Kahloon followed him by about a minute, breathing heavy as he moved through the pseudogravity of the spinning colony drum.
“Have we heard anything else?” asked Kahloon, throwing himself into a chair and pulling up another console. The bridge was alive with screens, holos, lit panels, the ship itself monitoring all systems and presenting the results for anyone interested.
“No, doctor,” the captain replied. “All we’ve gotten is the same message repeating over and over again before cutting off. And if they’re under attack I really don’t think we’re going to get any more messages.”
“That is not good.”
Before the captain could respond Saira Patel came through the hatchway, putting her long black hair up in a band. Her official title was second officer, but she was the acting exec since the first officer had served as captain on the first half of the voyage. Her unofficial title was spouse to the captain, and the expression on her face showed that she had already been mulling over the message’s implications on the way to the bridge.
Khurshid Sarpara, the assistant engineer, was the last to come into the chamber, immediately taking a seat at the table and leaning forward, her eyes wide. “Anyone know what’s going on?”
“Only what the message says,” said Talpur. “Incredible as it sounds, if the message is authentic, the colony is being attacked.”
“No more messages?” asked Khurshid. “Should we start decel to halt the vessel till we figure this out?”
“So that’s your idea of a good plan?” asked Patel, leaving her position on the wall and throwing herself into the chair across from the assistant engineer. “Just put us adrift in space?”
“We can wait till we hear more from them or get some indication that it’s safe,” said Khurshid in a frustrated tone, shrugging her shoulders as she looked at the other woman as if to say, What else are we going to do?
“And if they aren’t able to take back the system?” asked Nadeem after throwing a questioning glance at the captain, as if to ask, Why me?
“Earth would have to take back the system,” said the assistant engineer, throwing her hands up in the air. “They wouldn’t let someone—something—take one of their colonies.”
The captain returned the glance of his chief engineer. He really couldn’t blame the assistant engineer for her optimistic outlook. There had not been a real war in human space for centuries.
“If this is a war with aliens we have no idea what will happen,” said Talpur, turning to look into the unbelieving eyes of Khurshid. “Or that Earth will take the system back. And if we decel to a stop outside the system, we’re at the mercy of whoever finds us—if anyone does.”
“What do you propose?” asked Nadeem, leaning forward again, elbows on the table.
“I don’t propose anything for now,” said the captain, eyes narrowing. “What I want to do is to look at the possibilities. How long until we have to start deceleration? Seven months, ship’s time?”
“About that,” agreed the ship’s engineer, closing his eyes for a moment, going through calculations in his head. “About four hundred and ninety-three days absolute.”
So then it was two hundred and eighty-three days absolute to decelerate down. If they had been hitting the system, they would have deceled for two hundred and eighty days, then coasted into the system, adjusting course to their target world and burning off the rest of their velocity on the way.
“And how much fuel will we have left if we go for full burn to stop?”
“Enough for eighty gee hours,” said the chief engineer. “Not enough to choose a different destination. We could change our trajectory, but there’s no way we would have enough fuel to slow down to insert into any kind of orbit.”
“How about dropping some of our mass?” asked Patel, brow furrowed in thought. “That would give us some more hours of thrust.”
The chief engineer shook his head. “Ninety-two percent of our mass is reactors, acceleration tubes, supporting members, and fuel, all needed for boosting. The only mass not needed for operating the ship is the area we are occupying now, and the colony support module behind us. We could kick out all of the vehicles and supplies in the colony module, then start cutting it apart.”
“We’re going to need that if we try to establish ourselves on a new world,” said Doctor Kahloon, scowling. “And don’t even think about taking the colonists out of cryo so we can push the chambers out. We don’t have enough resources on board to support them through years of travel.”
“Shit,” said Talpur. Messing with the cryo chambers was not something that was recommended on a voyage. There was a small risk of neurological damage going in and out of cold sleep. It increased tenfold with a second immersion and increased exponentially with every reiteration; one reason why the working crew only went in once, the first shift taking the initial half of the voyage, the prime crew the second. They were given incentives when they got to the colony, like prime real estate and positions in the hierarchy to pay for the years they had wasted in transit.
“Okay. What else is a possibility?” asked the captain.
No one said a word.
“Well, we’ve got some time, just not too much,” Talpur muttered through gritted teeth. “Everyone, think. Look over the ship’s library. Dammit, we’ve got the sum total scientific knowledge of the human species in our data banks. There has to be an answer there. So get to it.”
In a little over seven months ship’s time, it will be too late to do anything, he thought, feeling as helpless as he ever had.
* * *
Talpur sat in the command chair on the bridge, not a place he normally spent much time, looking at the viewer that was presenting an image of the space ahead, the G-class star that was their target directly centered. What had been their hope, now perhaps their doom. Something was waiting there, maybe not knowing that they were coming, but sure to be able to overpower them when they did appear.
They had tried contacting the colony again and again, but failed.
If this was an invading force, they have to be using Alc drives, thought the captain. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to invade, would they? Slower than light ships made invasion impracticable, one reason Earth hadn’t tried to reclaim their revolting colonies.
Behr was the largest class of human vessel ever put into space, equal to the other hundred-odd colony ships plying the space lanes on one-way voyages between Earth and the new worlds. She had the most powerful reactors in space, capable of producing almost limitless electrical power, useful for running the high-powered ion drive. And while not a warship, she was armed, with a dozen strategically placed gigawatt class lasers and even a couple missile accelerator tubes. Only an idiot sent out a ship with so many people aboard without some kind of defense.
However, if Alcubierre drive warships were waiting, with their almost impenetrable Alc bubbles and torpedoes that could laugh at their defensive lasers. Well, they would be dead meat when they arrived.
There has to be something we can do, he thought, clenching his fists in frustration. Right now, the choices were to decelerate into their target system and risk being blown out of space or boarded.
Or they could boost onto another course, and a new promising system, but if they used their fuel for the course change they just didn’t have enough to decel again; they would continue on through space forever. The colonists would stay in cryo until the ship ran out of fuel for the reactors. That could be thousands of years.
They could possibly gather enough hydrogen from space with a magnetic field to keep going for further millennia. But that thought seemed even more depressing. The colonists would never know that time had passed, eventually dying as their cryo chambers failed.
Earth might have the answer, but they were too far away to be of any help. Or even to communicate with in time. It might be better if they just went on their chartered course and got it over with.
How about we set up a Bussard and capture more fuel, was his next thought, then quickly dismissed. It had been proven centuries ago that the interstellar medium was to diffuse for a Bussard ramjet to actually work. Maybe we can gather enough to stretch the fuel we already have?
He calculated the figures out in his head, then ran them through the ship’s computer, and both results were disappointing. They would still become a ghost ship, floating forever through the Galaxy, or crashing into something when they couldn’t decelerate enough to get into any kind of orbit.
“I thought I would find you here,” said a familiar voice behind him.
Talpur smiled as he turned his seat, taking in the image of the person he loved most in the Universe. Saira Patel, the woman he had married before launch, came walking onto the bridge and moved to a seat at one of the stations. He still thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
“Still trying to come up with something?”
“I can’t think of anything else to take up my time, my love.”
Saira sat there silent for a moment, looking at Talpur, then turning to take in the view of the Universe. She sighed. “It’s so beautiful. But now I find myself wishing that we had stayed on Earth. Or maybe just moved to Mars.”
“I had to get out of that place,” growled Talpur, shaking his head. His could still see the images of Pakistan in his mind. There was still some natural beauty there, the snowcapped peaks of the most awesome mountains on the planet, but in most ways it was just like the rest of Earth. With too many of the twenty-eight billion humans crowding the surface. “I needed room to move, to breath. And Mars is going to become another Earth soon enough. I wanted our children to have a better future than that.”
“Now it’s looking like we might not have children,” said Saira, closing her eyes for a moment.
Talpur knew that his wife wanted a family. If they were still heading to the colony—and that was a big if—they would be older when they arrived, but still capable of having children.
“I’ve been thinking about how we might use this ship to slow us down without taxing our resources, so we can travel farther, go elsewhere,” said Talpur, looking back at the viewer and the image that represented the beauty of God’s Universe. “I keep coming back to the idea that we have the ability to produce terawatts of power. There has to be some way to use that to slow us. If we could slow down, we have options.”
“I don’t see how,” replied Saira, shaking her head. “We need mass to accelerate and decelerate. Without it, we really can’t do anything.” She sat there, silent for a moment, obviously thinking, and Talpur let her have her time. She was a better physicist than he was. The only reason he had command was because of his background in the Earth Defense Force.
“I’ve thought that maybe we could start dismantling the ship around us,” she finally said. “If we were still going to a world that was already made ready for us, I think that would work. But we’re going to need everything we have aboard if we’re to start a new colony.”
“I’ve thought of that too,” said the captain, looking back at the screen that was showing the latest search results. “And I keep coming back to the idea of all of that energy. Isn’t there some way we can use it without throwing mass around?”
“Not that I can think of,” said the woman.
And if you can’t think of anything, and neither can any of the others, what hope is there? We need a lifeline. Something in the word lifeline struck a chord with the captain, and an idea formed in his mind.
“Wait a second,” he cried out, startling his wife. “That might be it.”
“What?”
“How much superconducting cable do we have onboard? And I don’t mean what we use in the drive and power systems. What do we have in the colonizing systems?”
“Probably a couple of hundred kilometers in all.”
“Not enough,” growled Talpur through clenched teeth.
“Why?” said Saira, standing and walking over to stand over his shoulder and look at the screen. “What the hell is that?”
“If we can get it to work, maybe our salvation.”
* * *
“Yeah. I think we can make this work,” said Nadeem, looking over at Khurshid and getting a nod in return. “It’s going to take a lot of work. And we’ll need to put it all back together before we get to our new destination world.”
Everyone at the table looked at the globe spinning in the holo. Another beautiful world. Maybe a little more desert than their original hoped-for home. More primitive life forms, and no people. It had been surveyed, but it was so far out that its turn hadn’t come for colonization.
“I’m against it,” said Kahloon, shaking his head. “Our people had their hearts set on this world and living with their own. I don’t think we can just arbitrarily change the plans for everyone in this ship. Don’t they have a vote?”
“Doctor,” said an exasperated Talpur, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the man, the only one among them not trained as a spacer. “This is not an arbitrary decision. Only disaster waits us if we continue in, and we need to make a decision soon.”
“And how do we know it’s a disaster?” argued the physician. “I don’t believe God would allow our colony to fail. I have faith that we will succeed.”
The captain stared at the doctor in disbelief. He too believed in God, but he was enough of a
scientist to compartmentalize his faith from his knowledge of the facts of the Universe.
“The colony has already been destroyed, as the mayday message stated. I have made the decision,” said Talpur.
“And I support his decision,” said Saira, looking at the other two members of the ready crew. “How about you two?”
“You are just supporting him because he is your husband.”
“And if I thought he was wrong, it wouldn’t matter what he said,” said Saira in an angry tone. “I would advise him he was wrong. Don’t question my sincerity, doctor. Or my ability to perform my job.”
“I have to agree with the captain,” said Nadeem, looking over at Khurshid, his wife.
“And what about our passengers?” asked the physician again. “Don’t they get a vote?”
“It doesn’t work that way, doctor,” growled the captain. “This is a ship, I am the captain. I don’t even have to ask any of you for your opinion.” While that was true, Talpur was very thankful that the three ship handlers along with him had agreed. If not, he could be facing a mutiny. But his wife and the engineering couple were realists.
“I could declare you incompetent,” said Kahloon, not willing to let it be.
“And who would take my place?” asked the captain, shaking his head. “These others stand with me. And you are not qualified to captain this vessel.”
“Plus, none of us will listen to your nonsense,” said Khurshid with a cold smile. “I don’t even know why we are having this conversation. We know what we need to do, so let’s work together to do it.”
Something appeared in the doctor’s eyes—some idea forming in his mind. Something that the captain noted.
“And doctor,” said Talpur, reaching across the table and grabbing the man’s forearm before he could stand. “You will wake none of the colonists to try to get allies. That is a direct order. If you disobey, I will have you placed in cryo.”
The eyes of the physician grew wide. He had already been in cryo for the first half of the journey, and another stint increased the chances of brain damage by an order of magnitude.
“I would just send you out an airlock, Mehmood,” said Saira, staring straight into his eyes. “Such an action would be mutiny, and that can be punished with death.”
The doctor shook as he got to his feet. His face had paled in fright. Talpur didn’t trust him, and as soon as Kahloon left the room he spoke to the others.
“Keep an eye on him. I don’t trust him at all.” He switched his attention back to the most important matter at hand. “How much of a burn do you think we need?”
“Approximately one hundred and sixty-nine hours,” said Saira with a smile.
“So just a tiny bit over a week.”
“And the sooner we do it, the less energy we will have to use,” said Khurshid, nodding at Saira.
“Then let’s get to it.”
* * *
Talpur really didn’t like excursions beyond the hull. But with four of them, and the need to have one remain aboard in the event of an emergency, he had to take his turn. So here he was, in a hard suit, an armored spacesuit that protected him from most radiation.
“Okay. I’ve got the cover off of this section,” he reported over the com. He looked for a second at the glory of space around him, the stars distorted by the relativistic effects of the ship’s travel. He closed his eyes for a moment and set his concentration back on the task at hand. Robots were doing the actual work. He was just there to supervise. The insect-like devices had multiple tools at the end of each of their ten limbs, and a dozen of them were working detaching and removing the long strand of superconducting cable. The cable ran from the front of the reactor section forty kilometers to the rear of the accelerator tube that sent their ions out at point-nine light speed.
They had taken all of the superconducting cables out of the vehicles and equipment from the colony module. And it wasn’t enough by even a tenth of their needs. So they had been forced to pull the long superconducting cables from the five accelerator tubes. A process that would take several weeks. And then months to set the sail, and another couple of weeks to put the cable back in place, so the accelerator tubes could again start them decelerating. All of this effort, just to get rid of an eighth of their velocity, and it would take several years to get down to that velocity.
“We’re picking up a lot of scatter ahead on radar,” said Khurshid over the com, her voice tense. “We should be hitting that density in about nine minutes. Maybe all of you should come inside for a little while.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” said Talpur, halting the robots in place before they could pull any more of the cable out of the tube.
“I’ve almost got my section out,” said Saira, working on another tube. “Give me another couple of minutes.”
“Don’t take more than a minute,” said Talpur, turning his own pod and heading back up the ship. “I want you back inside in five minutes.”
“Will do.”
The captain’s pod sped along the outside of the ship, boosting himself with the thrusters up to just over a hundred and sixty meters a second, five hundred and ninety kilometers an hour relative to the ship’s own speed. The bulk of the ship shot by, the pod keeping itself at a safe distance. The captain still felt a thrill when he looked at the enormous size of the ship. The Alc ships, with their ability to warp space and out speed light, were considered the ultimate in space faring technology. But there was a certain elegance to this dinosaur, which was still the cheapest way to send a large number of people to another star. And energy was still the scarcest resource in interstellar space.
“It looks like a concentration of gas ahead, and there might be some large particles within it.”
The captain frowned. “Can we go around it?” If it was a narrow cloud they might be able to do a couple of short burns that wouldn’t use too much fuel.
“Not a chance,” said the assistant engineer. “It’s too wide.”
It was worth a thought. He was almost to the opening. Even though the ship was coasting at point-eight light, to his perspective it was standing still. In a moment he was through the pod hatch and as safe as he could be in the ship. The clock had ticked off four minutes, which gave his wife one minute to get here. He checked up on her and cursed under his breath when he saw that she had just started off for safety, which meant she would take at least three and a half minutes to get to him. Not enough of a margin.
I’m worrying about nothing, he thought, telling himself that even if they went through the cloud, the odds were still against anything bad happening. But she was his wife, and it was part of his nature to worry about her, just as she worried about him.
“I’m having a problem here,” said Saira over the com. “My thrusters just went offline.”
“Any way you can get them working?” asked Khurshid, worry in her voice.
“Not unless I go outside the pod.”
Without thrusters she wouldn’t be able to decel before she got to the hatch: she would shoot past.
“I’m going back out to get her,” he said, starting the pod back through the hatch.
“Don’t,” said Saira in a hushed voice. “Don’t put yourself at risk too.”
“Shut up and get ready for me to grab you. Don’t argue. I’m coming.”
No one else came on the com. The engineers knew better than to argue with either of them.
Talpur turned the pod in space and started accelerating. He needed to build up to a greater velocity than her pod, pass her, then decelerate and match velocities, catching her craft in the waldos of his own. Not a difficult maneuver, but with a gas field approaching, one that was very anxiety provoking. It was possible that either or both of them could be killed if he made a slight miscalculation, and he hoped that if only one could make it, she would be the one. Since her ship wasn’t working that was an unlikely outcome.
“I’ve got you on radar,” he cried as the blip of her pod appeared, right after he cleared the front of the ship.
The pod looked like it was drifting ahead, even though it was speeding along at relativistic speed. His was leisurely following, at least from their perspective.
“We’re hitting the gas cloud in two minutes,” called out Nadeem, getting on the com.
“Turn around, my husband. There’s no use in both of us risking death out here.”
“No one’s dying,” he said, pushing another burst of acceleration as he said a silent prayer. His ship shot past hers, and he turned it quickly on its attitude thrusters, then hit the panel that let the pod’s AI take over to match velocities and bring them together. The pod kicked in a couple of gees of thrust, pushing him back in his seat. He was concerned for a moment that the computer might not be able to handle the maneuver, but it went through the evolution perfectly, and his pod touched hers with barely a bump. The waldos of his pod grabbed hers, and they were locked.
“Here we go,” he told his wife, manually taking over the piloting so he could get some more gees out than the AI was likely to allow. Four gravities, the most the craft could do, pushed him back in his seat, and Saira cried out for a moment as it hit her. The only gravity they had endured for the last decade of ship’s time was the one third put on by the spin of the habitation section, and that only near the outer hull.
“It’s here,” announced Khurshid on the com, just an instant before the radiation detectors went off, filling the small cockpit with flashing lights and screaming alarms.
Talpur quickly checked the readings, breathing a sigh of relief. The hydrogen and larger molecules in the cloud were sleeting into his pod, a storm of radiation, but the magnetic field of the craft was handling most of it. Some was getting through, invisible particles that were hitting atoms in his cells and breaking them apart. Neutral particles, neutron and uncharged molecules. Worrisome if they were out here long enough, which wasn’t the plan. And his own pod was shielding Saira’s.
Nearing the point of entry he switched the AI back on and let the pod handle the decel and insertion, something it could do better than he. That meant putting Saira’s pod to the front of his, but it shouldn’t last long enough to matter.
“What?” cried out his wife as a long clang came over the com. “My hull’s been pierced.”
Talpur felt his heart race at the thought of the interior of her craft open to space. “How’s your suit?”
“It seems to be fine. The pod is leaking atmosphere, but it won’t make any difference.”
Talpur told himself to remain calm. That was the reason they went out in the hardsuits and not in shipboard clothing or soft spacesuits. It had seemed like overkill to most of his people, but now he was glad he had stuck to his orders.
The AI had pushed them into the hangar, where they settled onto the outer skin that was the deck of the spinning structure. He was out of his pod as soon as it latched onto the deck, pulling open his wife’s hatch and grabbing her suit, pulling her into a hug and wishing that they didn’t have the suits between them.
“Don’t you ever wait again,” he said, keeping his voice measured when he felt like yelling. “Never. If I tell you to come now, you come.”
“Yes, Talpur,” said Saira, looking down at the deck. “It won’t happen again.”
“This isn’t something I’m telling you as your husband, but as your commanding officer. Don’t think I’m going to put up with your insubordination.”
Saira didn’t say a word, and Talpur was sure she would wait for him to calm down.
“Now, we need to get you to medical and check you out.”
“You too,” she said with a slight smile. “And thanks.”
“We’re in the middle of the storm,” said Khurshid over the com. “Sensors on the bow are off the scale. But the shielding is holding up.”
Now, let’s get through this thing, and then the rest is easy as pie. He scoffed as he thought that. Getting the superconducting cable out was the easy part. The second stage would be the most work, more than he wanted to think of.
* * *
“I’ve always wanted to sail to the stars,” said Saira, settling on his lap, drink in hand.
Talpur nodded as he looked at his wife, then turned his attention to the viewer.
It was a beautiful sight. A glowing web radiated out from the ship in all directions, forming a disc. Eight superconducting cables, each spliced to reach out a hundred kilometers, with other cables linking them. A fine mesh covered the entire construct, a microfine polymer. It didn’t glow from its own power, but from the tons of charged particles it first attracted, then sped up to the front, in the process slowing the huge ship. It wasn’t much thrust, less than a hundredth of a gravity. But it was enough to take a twentieth of light speed off of their velocity, given just under twenty years. Relativity would shave some of that time off, but the effect would be decreasing as they slowed.
“You realize we’re going to be very old people by the time we get to the new home,” said Talpur, putting his arms around her.
Saira stared at the viewer, silent.
“I’m sorry,” Talpur blurted quickly. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Saira nodded, tears in her eyes. She would not grow very old. She would be here for at most another twenty-five years. The radiation had gotten through her pod, infiltrating by way of the rip in the skin. They would be able to keep the cancers at bay with nanites, for a time, but eventually they would take her from him. And she would not have the children she—they—had wanted.
The captain nodded, trying to convince himself it wasn’t important whether they had a family or not. What was important was that fifty thousand colonists would have that chance.
“In twenty years we’ll have to put the ship back together again,” he said, changing the subject. “Don’t think you are getting out of that duty, my second.”
“Spoilsport,” she said after a short sniffle, rubbing the tears from her eyes. “I’m just going to enjoy our cruise and worry about that backbreaking labor when it comes.”
He smiled. There were a lot of things they wouldn’t need to worry about over the years, and some things for which they could do nothing. They had sent a message by Al com to Earth, so they would know where the ship was heading. Hopefully the Earth would meet the threat of whatever aliens who had destroyed their first colony planet, causing them to change course. Hopefully they would send out the faster-than-light ships to protect their other colonies. If they didn’t, if the aliens attacked the other human settlements—or even worse, reached Earth—this ship might be the last vestige of humanity in the Universe.
But those were things the captain and his people couldn’t do anything about. What they would have to do was put the ion drive accelerator tubes back together and decelerate the rest of the trip in the old manner. Then they would have the reach to get to a new colony and build a new home.
Talpur looked at his wife, sitting on his lap, staring at the viewer. She wouldn’t be there with him.
But maybe...
I refuse to lose you, he thought, closing his eyes and blinking back his own tears. They had the medical technology and the unfertilized eggs in storage, to help the population explosion needed for a new colony to thrive. He could transplant her genetic material into one of those eggs and bring it to term in an artificial womb. It wouldn’t be her, not exactly. But it would be her down to the cellular level. He would have her back. His heart constricted at the thought of losing his love. But then it fluttered in hope. He would raise the clone to be the same woman. Or as near as he could get. They could have the children his wife had wanted. It would be honoring her wishes, if anything, to have a family.
Talpur put his arms around his wife and sat there with her, looking out at the stars that had been their hope. He considered telling Saira his plans, but then balked. He knew she would say she had had a wonderful life with him; that when her time came, she would be ready.
But he wasn’t.
So he would treasure Saira for as long as he had her, silently buoyed by thoughts of a second life and new hopes as he considered the years to come.
Copyright © 2018 by Doug Dandridge
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