Microstory 2425: Industrial Farm Dome

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A bunch of domes are dedicated to farming. Some of them are designed for necessary food production, but others are just for the sake of it. Industrial farming describes the kind of farming that they did during and after the industrial revolution. They used machines to farm giant fields for massive numbers of people, and even used electricity, but they didn’t have computers. There was absolutely no hint of automation. Lots of farm hands still had to do all the work, and that’s how it goes here. Nothing gets done if there’s no one here to do it. If that means the crops die, then so be it. There’s actually plenty of waste, because the rest of the current population of the planet doesn’t really want to eat this stuff. Everything they could ever want is provided for them. They got their lab grown meat, meal bars, food printers, and dayfruit. They don’t really care how hard I worked out here in the hot sun, and the Castlebourne leadership isn’t incentivizing them to choose us over those other things. I think they really should have worked this out differently. Screw that other stuff. If you have the real thing—and people are willing to labor FOR FREE—why would you choose anything else? Those should be a last resort. If they want this planet to be self-sufficient, then we have what you’re looking for. I don’t blame the other visitors for doing this wrong. There is so little awareness about what we can do for them. I guess what you really need is cooks. Some domes have culinary components, or so I hear, but I can’t find a dome that’s dedicated to the culinary arts. If they did that, we could work closely with them to make the supply chain a real thing. See? I got ideas, and I’m just a dumb regular human. I came here on a ship with one of these new reframe engines. I can’t even upload or transfer my consciousness to a new body. This is the real me. These other people don’t always even need to eat, so they have no appreciation for any of this. Some changes need to be made around here, because I don’t want to go back to the stellar neighborhood. I shouldn’t have to. I should be able to find what I’m entitled to on this planet. People just need to do the right thing.

Microstory 2335: Vacuus, January 31, 2179

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Dear Condor,

Father has not yet written to me. It’s fine, I’m not disappointed. I don’t know him at all, so I can’t know what I should expect out of him. I just wanted to give you an update before it happens that I’m going to be out of communication range again. It won’t be too long, but it’s out of my hands. You see, when researchers first discovered Vacuus, they thought to send probes here before they sent people. Unfortunately, they lost contact with these probes, and were never able to gather much information about the planet. They obviously decided to just send a manned-mission without enough information, and that’s because the ship they were using was self-sustaining. If, for some reason, it wasn’t possible to reach or land on the surface, it wasn’t like a death sentence. We could have been living on it this whole time. It’s still orbiting us right now, and people regularly go back and forth. I could have gotten a job up there instead. In fact, I told you that I’m the only one doing what I do, but that’s not technically true. Someone is up there right now, using their own instruments to track nearby cosmic events. They just don’t do it for the same reasons, and have other responsibilities. It’s not for safety, they’re mostly studying the effects of deep space survival as it pertains to remoteness from the host star. I kind of forget about them, because we don’t really interact. Anyway, that’s not really important. The point is that, once we arrived here, we discovered why communication with the probes stopped working. It’s because of a periodic meteoroid shower called the Valkyries, which causes a blackout. These meteoroids are very close to one another, and interconnected via weak, yet still impactfully disruptive, electromagnetic fields. It has to do with the ferromagnetic composition of them, and the occasional electrostatic charge that builds up when they scrape against one another. This can last for years, but it’s a relatively rare event, and has only happened twice since Earth sent the probes. What’s not all that rare is when one of these meteors becomes dislodged from the shower, and we end up between it and all its friends. If we’re in the right position, it’s pretty as it’s streaking across the sky, but it’s problematic too. We don’t always know when it’s going to happen, and we don’t always know when it’s going to affect us, but it too knocks out signal transmission, though for a much shorter period of time. Our astronomers have devoted most of their careers to studying these phenomena. At first they thought that the shower was falling apart, but they now believe that the stray meteoroids eventually find their way back to the shower. Earth is aware that this is going to happen, and have upgraded their protocols to account for it. So if you send a message, it will end up being stored in a nearby buffer until the relay station receives word that signal transmission has been restored. I’m sorry to spring this on you so last minute, but if you reply, I doubt that I’ll receive you for a while. Please let your father know as well, thanks.

Hopefully not for long,

Corinthia

Microstory 2319: Vacuus, September 12, 2178

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Dear Condor,

It’s okay, I don’t mind about the extra message. And yes, I would love to send you photos. I have to limit them, though, and I would ask you to do the same. Excessive data costs money. Each resident is allotted one message per week (to send), which is perfect for the two of us, but only if they’re text only. Again, I don’t want to worry you, I can afford it. Message quotas are transferable, so I can probably snag one from someone else. The other younger people don’t know anyone on Earth, so they don’t use theirs at all, but I don’t want to do that too much. So basically, what I’m saying in the most roundabout way is that I’ll step back, and send you one photo of my quarters. You can send as many as you want. Received messages do have limitations, but it goes by the day, and it only counts if I open it, so I can just wait to view them one at a time. Unless it’s a video. Those are mad expensive, whether they’re opened or not. I’m not even sure we could manage to get a video message through between the two of us. The leaders restrict it pretty heavily. The compression alone takes a ton of energy. We can’t have solar power here, and the fusion reactor is, of course, dedicated primarily to life support and field research. Which reminds me, I never told you what I do for work, or asked you about you. That might sound like a non sequitur, but field researchers are the rock stars of the land. It’s a coveted position, but it’s also the most dangerous. Nearly all deaths are caused by field accidents. It even outweighs death from age-related disease. I never wanted to do anything like that, and not because it’s dangerous, but because of how arrogant and self-absorbed they all are. Gee, I hope no one here reads these messages before they go out. Anyway, I am only a solar flare monitor. You might be asking, “Corinthia, I thought you couldn’t even use solar power all the way out there.” EXACTLY! Sunlight has little effect on us at this distance, but energetic particles still do pose a risk. Even though you’re much closer, Earth is protected by a much stronger magnetosphere. If the sun decides to stretch its legs in our direction, it could have serious consequences for our equipment. Nothing’s ever happened since I’ve had the post, but it’s not an impossibility. The great thing about it is that I just sit here all day, and do whatever I want. The bad thing is that I’m the only one in the position, so I don’t get any time off. When it’s time for bed, I turn up the alert volume so it can wake me up. Again, though, it hasn’t ever happened, so it’s kind of a non-job, really. What about you?

Bored on Vacuus,

Corinthia

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 13, 2434

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Ramses wasn’t lying, nor even exaggerating. This particular pocket dimension was the smallest any of them had ever experienced. No, that wasn’t true. The one that Olimpia was trapped in between the two halves of The Sixth Key was even smaller than this, but to be fair, it was just for her. This was a very short hallway. Each of them had enough room to stand, but not outstretch their arms, if they wanted to. At one end of the hall was a storage closet with food and other necessities. At the other end was a stasis pod. Ram was glad that he installed that much, or Vitalie would have to find a way to survive over the course of the next year alone. They still had no clue how they were going to get out of this mess, but they were alive and together, and that was all that they could hope for for now. They were essentially living in a tiny little dimensional generator, which was floating alone in outer space. An EM field protected it from impacts, but there was no form of propulsion, not even for station keeping. There was no way of knowing where they would end up after a year, or what the former planet would look like after the dust settled.

Everything was completely different when the six of them returned to the timeline in 2434. Their living quarters were a lot larger. It had somehow grown while they were gone. It still wasn’t as big as the main one, which had been destroyed in the missile attack on Ex-741, but there was some breathing room now. “How the heck did this happen? Rambo?” Leona asked.

“It wasn’t me.” He ducked into one of the few rooms. “But my lab is back. It looks exactly as it did before, including all the stuff that I was working on.”

“How is that possible?” Marie questioned.

Mateo reached up to the console, and disengaged the stasis bubble of Vitalie’s pod. “Hey, do you know anything about this?”

Vitalie looked around. “Yeah, I built it while you were gone,” she answered as if they should have known that she would do that.

“How did you manage that?” Ramses asked her.

“Well, I’m a builder,” Vitalie said, just as casually as before.

“You are?” Leona asked.

“Yes. Newt Clemens transferred all of Étude Einarsson’s powers to me. As the Last Savior of Earth, she had teleporting abilities. As the daughter of Saga Einarsson, she had doorwalking abilities. As the daughter of Camden Voss, she had century-hopping abilities. And as the daughter of Andromeda Mercari, she had builder abilities. Now they’re all mine.”

They stared at her, only now realizing that none of them had bothered to ask her about this before. They had just gotten so used to being around people with special time powers that they didn’t question where they came from anymore. But Vitalie didn’t have any of that stuff before. She was born with the ability to astral project, which they hadn’t witnessed in a very long time. Actually, Leona was probably the only one who had ever seen her do it, since Mateo had a bad case of not being in existence at the time, and none of the others were part of the team yet.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“No, no, no,” Leona said apologetically. “I meant to say thank you. We’re just shocked. We’re all grateful for you, though. Really. Thank you.”

They all agreed using their own words.

“How did you rebuild all of Ramses’ inventions?” Angela asked her.

“She used my master key,” Ramses answered instead. He held up a virtual storage device. “Everything I’ve finished, am working on, or plan to work on is on here, as is the current state of my lab. If you load a pack of starter nanites with my Bookmark program, it will start to rebuild everything from scratch. I told you about it in passing,” Ramses noted to Vitalie.

She shrugged. “I listen.”

“So, you’re a builder, huh?” Olimpia asked, stepping forward. “Can you build us an entirely new ship?”

“Not from in here,” Vitalie said apologetically.

“It’s been a year,” Leona began to reason. “Whatever the results of all those planet-destroying explosions, this system has surely fallen into some kind of equilibrium again. We just need to find the nearest celestial body. Then one of us can take a spacewalk, and teleport us to it.”

Ramses looked ashamed. “Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are no sensors on the exterior of the dimensional generator. There’s a single 180 degree camera, so you can hypothetically see if someone’s standing in front of the door, but that’s it. If one of us jumps out of the generator right now, and sees an object that we could teleport too, they wouldn’t know how far away it was. It could be beyond our range. Mateo, you’ve spent the longest in space? How many jumps did you make?”

“I made 48,” Mateo answered. “Well, it was technically 49, but the last one was to the other side of a door. I barely made it in before I would have died, though.”

“Yeah, so if it’s too far to see with the naked eye, we may all need to pitch in, teleporting along the route one at a time until the next person’s turn,” Ramses suggested.

“Could you build sensors now?” Olimpia offered, grimacing a tiny bit, worried that she was overstepping.”

“Oh,” Ramses said, “I suppose I could just print one of my new probes. It’s not designed for outerspace, but it wouldn’t take too terribly long to modify it.”

“I’ll help you with that,” Leona volunteered. “Everyone else, just relax. There’s nothin’ else to do. There’s no one to help, no bad guy to fight.”

“There are plenty of people to help,” Mateo muttered to himself after everyone separated into different parts of the pocket. The seven of them were people too, and right now, they were the ones in need. He didn’t want to say anything before, because he wasn’t used to being right, but Leona and Ramses made a mistake. They jumped onto the idea they had of trying to solve this problem through technology. But the explosion of Ex-741 only happened a year ago, and it happened right here. Remember, the tiny little instrument they were hiding in had no form of propulsion. It could only move due to drift, and gravitational disturbance. They were not swimming through a vast empty sea of space, like the asteroid belt that was between Mars and Jupiter. They were still within a densely packed field of objects. There was no way that they weren’t close enough to something. Ramses needed raw materials, and that was all around them. They just needed to get a look at it.

Mateo first tried to check the camera, but the cosmos was swirling by it too fast to gauge anything. They didn’t have attitude control, so nothing was stopping the generator from spinning and spinning and spinning. He decided that he would just make one jump out there to get a look at things. He would do it totally in secret from the storage closet, in case somebody wanted to give him some advice about it, or try to talk him out of the attempt.

Just before he could leave, Vitalie stepped in. “What are you doing in here?”

“Nothing. I’m—stealing food,” he stammered.

She rolled her eyes. “Really. Tell me.”

So he told her about how he was going to check outside before they spent all this time on a new probe. It was like breaking into someone’s house. You always try to doorknob first. It might be unlocked anyway.

“I had the same thought,” she admitted, “but I assumed the smarties had already thought of that.”

“Maybe they did. But it can’t hurt to check for ourselves, in case they didn’t.”

“It could hurt, Mateo. I know you people can survive in space, but you shouldn’t do it if you don’t have to. If all you need is a good look, then...” she offered her hand. “Let me take you.”

“Okay, cool.”

She projected them outside the generator. They were floating in space, but still breathing the air that was being recycled inside the pocket dimension. He was right. The majority of Ex-741 remained intact. Massive chunks had been dislodged, and were now orbiting it like moons, but they were all totally visible, which means that they were close enough to reach. In fact, it would not take more than two jumps. He looked over at Vitalie next to him, but didn’t say anything. She laughed. “You can talk. We’re not really here, remember?”

“Thank you, Miss Crawville.” He jerked his head down towards the generator.

She pulled them back inside.

“Let it be a surprise.”

Vitalie smiled. “Okay.”

Mateo went back out there alone, but corporeally this time. He grabbed the generator with his hands, and teleported to the nearest chunk. He walked around and jumped a little to make sure that it was solid enough to hold together. Then he set the generator down, and piled some space dirt over the handle so it wouldn’t fly off. Then he dove back into the pocket, calmly walked into the lab, and took Leona and Ramses by the hands.

The two of them looked at him funny. “Are we going on a date?” Ram asked.

“Just hold your breath.” He jumped out yet again so he could show them where they were.

A few seconds later, the girls all appeared too, including Vitalie, who was in her astral form, so she could still breathe. Ramses reached down, and scooped some dirt up with his hand. He let it filter back down through his fingers. Like Mateo before, he nodded affirmatively, and disappeared. Everyone else followed, meeting in the common area that Vitalie had built for them.

Ramses sighed, and plopped himself down on the couch. “Well, I feel like a right fool,” he lamented in a British accent.

“I didn’t see it either,” Leona concurred.

“We all lack perspective sometimes,” Vitalie tried to reassure them. “That’s why you make such a great team, because you’re not just one person in six bodies.”

“I keep telling you, you’re part of the team,” Leona claimed.

Vitalie shook her head as she was smiling. “No, I don’t belong with you. There are dozens of planets in the Corridor, and not all of them have a Caretaker. I didn’t know how to calculate the error rate when I started duplicating myself, but I knew it wouldn’t be zero. I need to fill in the gaps.”

“You could duplicate yourself again,” Olimpia put forth.

Vitalie shook her head again. “No, I work alone. I appreciate you taking me in, but I gotta go.”

“Well, you can’t leave yet anyway,” Angela reasoned. “The smarties haven’t built us a new ship yet.”

Vitalie let out that sweet knowing smile one last time. “I never needed a ship.” She looked towards the exit. “I just need a door.” She stood up, and grabbed the knob before looking over her shoulder at them. “Whose birthday is coming up the soonest?”

“Ours is June 19th,” Marie said, indicating herself and Angela.

“Happy birthday.” Vitalie checked her wristwatch as she was opening the door. There was a hallway on the other side of it, but it wasn’t the one in the pocket dimension. It was in another time and place. “Your gift is outside.” She closed the door behind her, and when Olimpia opened it up seconds later, she was gone, and it was back to the regular hallway.

They teleported outside once again to find a ship waiting for them, still powering down from having just landed.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 12, 2433

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Leona peered at the viewscreen. “A shipyard, you say?”

“A shipyard, and a ship graveyard. A sizable portion of the surface is riddled with old ships, new ships,” Ramses explained. He looked more excited than a child on Christmas day. “All shapes and sizes.”

“You wanna take one?” she asked.

“Noooo,” he insisted. “I mean, if the shoe fits, I guess... But it has everything we need to build our own. The place looks abandoned.”

“You don’t have a life signs detector, though, so you don’t know that. All we can do is search for radio waves.”

“Yeah, but look at it down there, there’s no activity.”

“They could be lying in wait,” Mateo suggested. “This feels like a trap. We’re going in a straight line. They’ll always know where we’ll end up next.”

“They couldn’t have set all this up in just a few years,” Ramses contended. “Trust me, it’s fine. But...”

“But what?” Leona questioned.

“But we’ll need to land this little vessel down there to get to them. We can’t teleport to the surface without it.”

Leona was suspicious now. “Why not?”

Ramses breathed out through his nose, worried about how he’ll be received. “Okay, you know how most ships in our little underworld of time travelers have a teleportation field, right? Instead of just letting micrometeoroids hit the hull, we teleport the objects away as they pass through the field.”

“Right...” Leona encouraged.

“Well, the Exins apparently use that technology too, and...all of those ships down there are...passively active.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” She shook her head, getting kind of annoyed with him. “Passively active?”

“The fields are in standby mode. They’re not constantly using power, but if you try to make a jump anywhere down there, sufficiently close to the materials I need to build us a real ship, the generators will react, just as they would to any other celestial object. They’ll activate briefly, and then close back up again.”

“How do you know this?” Leona asked incredulously. “Have you seen this phenomenon before, a giant collection of ships with teleportation field generators?”

“No,” Ramses assured her, “I tested it with a probe.”

“What probe? We never talked about any probes.”

Ramses acted almost offended. “I built a probe. I thought it made sense to start using them to scout ahead. It’s designed to search for Vitalie too, so no one will ever need to go on that mission again. At least, not at first. As soon as it finds the pod, someone can jump there to wake her up, and greet her. And that will continue to work, just not here.”

Leona sighed. “Ramses, what happened to the probe? Was it sent back like a slingshot?”

He seemed afraid to answer, but he did. “There’s a game that you people used to play in the before-fore times? There’s a metal ball, and you hit it with these little things, and it bounces around...”

“Pinball,” Mateo realized.

“Yeah, it was like that.” Ramses nodded. He started pointing at the screen. “The probe was here, and then here, and then here, and then somewhere over there, and then I lost contact, because I think it was ripped apart by the tidal forces of overlapping teleportation fields.”

“Sounds like a wild ride,” Leona said sarcastically. “We could sell tickets.”

“Well, that’s why I want to land the ship, so that doesn’t happen!” Ramses argued.

Leona’s eyes widened in frustration. “The field isn’t teleporting teleporting objects, Ramses. It’s teleporting anything that falls into the field. Why would our ship survive that where the probe didn’t?”

Now he smiled. “Because our ship also has a teleportation field, which we can use to counteract the effects. We can force them to cancel each other out, and make it all the way through. I’m sure of it.”

“I assume we don’t have these fields ourselves?” Olimpia asked.

“No,” Ramses answered. “That’s not a bad idea—we would basically be bulletproof and punch-proof—but no.”

“I say we leave,” Leona voted. “It looks great down there. A real smorgasbord of amazing technology that we could salvage, but it’s not worth risking being ripped apart inside the Roche limit of two conflicting teleportation fields.”

“It’s usually more than two,” Ramses corrected.

“Oh, well, in that case...”

“Leona, I can do this. I’ve done the math already.”

“When did you do the math? We just freakin’ got here.”

Ramses put on a pompous face. “I’m fast, because I’m just that smart.” He reverted back to normal. “You can check it yourself, if you want. We have a little time, but I do want to get started. I’m sick of these cramped quarters. Pocket dimensions just don’t feel real to me. The AOC was designed to get you and your friends to the next planet over. It was never meant to house a full crew for the long-term. We made-do, but technology has progressed since then, and I want to create something better now. This world gives me that chance, and I don’t want to pass it up. We’ll survive, because we always do. That’s our job.”

Leona sighed again, but more patiently this time. “Okay, I’ll trust you, and won’t check the math. But I’m not making the decision for everyone. We vote, and it has to be unanimous.” She looked over at the rest of the team. “You all understand what’s at stake here if we do this?”

Everyone nodded, including the dummies, Mateo and Olimpia, because they were indeed able to follow the conversation. When Captain Matic called for an official vote, they all raised their hands, except for Vitalie, who seemed distracted by her thoughts.

“What is it?” Ramses asked.

“If she’s voting no, I won’t let you bully her,” Leona argued.

“You didn’t ask for nays yet,” Ramses reasoned. She’s not voted at all. She could be abstaining.”

“I’m not—” Vitalie was stammering. “It has nothing to with—” She huffed, and raised her hand. “Never mind, let’s go. I vote yea, or aye, or whatever.”

“Vitalie, you’re a part of us now,” Leona told her. “You have every right to express your opinion. We should have made this a blind vote,” she added when Vitalie didn’t respond.

“No, it’s not that,” Vitalie continued to stammer. “I agree, we should risk it. It’s just that I’ve realized that there is no hope for us finding Vitalie!741 down there. The only way we’ve ever done it is by triangulating it with your makeshift stasis pod communicator. If we can’t even teleport.”

“It’s not impossible,” Ramses began to explain to her. It would just take longer. When you get close enough to the pod with the locator, it will detect that there’s a pod somewhere nearby. When you jump again, if you get another ping, that tells you that you’re going in the right direction, or at least that you’re not farther from it. With enough jumps, you can eventually determine its position. But you don’t have to jump. You could take a car. You could even walk.”

“Then I’ll do that,” Vitalie decided. “I’ll walk.”

Ramses chuckled, a bit rudely. “I meant that you could technically, possibly do it. But not in practical terms. You could potentially have to walk across the entire surface. We can’t stay here that long.”

“You don’t have to stay here,” Vitalie said. “Just leave me with a locator, and I’ll work on it as long as it takes. Just promise me you’ll build another locator, and keep using it on the other planets, assuming this teleportation field mess doesn’t continue.”

“I already have multiple locators. That’s not the problem.”

“The problem is we can’t leave you here alone,” Leona said to her.

“And also that you still can’t be expected to walk the entire surface,” Marie added.

“Well, I could build her a car,” Ramses declared. “Hell, I’m sure one of those ships down there works well enough.”

“We’re not leaving her alone!” Leona insisted.

“It’s my choice,” Vitalie fought. “We voted on going down to the surface. But all of the sudden, you want to make an executive decision?”

“We could vote,” Leona began, “but it’s never gonna be unanimous, because I’ll always be a nay.”

Mateo placed a hand on her arm. “Lee-Lee. You’re the Captain; not the King.”

“Well, she—”

Mateo stopped her from continuing to argue with a simple jerk of his head. “Captain,” he whispered.

Leona looked back over at Vitalie with puppy dog eyes, hoping that she would change her mind, or maybe just show some sign of reluctance, but Vitalie was steadfast. Leona hung her head. “Okay. But we’re staying here for two days at least. Right, Ramses? You need that long to build something good?”

“It’s true,” Ramses confirmed. “I didn’t mention that before, but the construction will last beyond today. Vitalie, you’ll probably want to go into stasis, since we won’t be traveling at maximum fractional speeds. You don’t have to be awake for the locator to start trying to triangulate Vitalie!741’s pod. I can program it to wake you up if it finds her during that time. If it does, you’ll both be able to leave with us, no problem.”

They discussed the details a little more, and then made the jump. Instead of leaving their ship in orbit like they usually would, the whole thing dropped down. It was impossible for Ramses to predict what would happen with certainty, but they did survive the ordeal. They were sent teleporting all over the place before they found and island of stability, but once they did, everything was fine, and they were all in one piece, which was what they were really worried about. Their own teleportation field protected them without issue, or excessive power drain. They climbed out of their little ship manually one at a time, which made them feel like animals, but it worked. The industrial atmosphere wasn’t pleasant, but it was breathable. Vitalie wore a filter mask for added safety, but the rest of their substrates handled the task on their own. 

“All right,” Leona said, “get what you need. We’ll help with whatever, I guess.”

Ramses pulled out his tablet. “I have a list.”

“Do you guys hear that?” Angela asked. Their hearing was heightened, but they couldn’t hear everything on the entire planet, so they all tilted their respective heads to get a better angle on the soundwaves. Something was definitely sounding off in the distance, and it seemed to be getting closer. It was a sort of screaming noise. Angela took a couple steps forward. “What is that?”

Leona reached into her bag, and pulled out a pair of digital binoculars. She started to scan the sky. “Run.” She dropped her arms down, but kept looking in that direction. “Run!” she cried louder. She took off, and so did everyone else.

“Remember, you can’t teleport!” Ramses reminded them. “The field generators actually do react to each other! That’s why they’re kind of evenly spaced!”

They ran as fast as they could, the ones in front looking over their shoulders to make sure the ones in back were still coming. They could move pretty fast, but they were still within range of the blast when the missile crashed down, and exploded on impact. Mateo could see a piece of shrapnel flying towards him, but didn’t know what to do. Before he could try to escape, someone’s arms were wrapping themselves around his body. They teleported away, but they didn’t just make one jump. The teleportation field generators all around them started pinballing them every which way several times, until one of them managed to throw them clear of any other vessel. They fell from several meters up, and crashed onto the ground, just like the missile, but with no explosion.

Only then did Mateo see that it was Vitalie who had rescued him. “I’m sorry. I know we weren’t supposed to do that.”

“No, no, no, thank you. Leona, can you hear me?” Mateo half-expected the trauma to have fried his communicator, but it was still working.

“Yeah,” she replied. “We’re all fine. You and Vita?”

“We’re okay. I don’t know how far away we are.”

“We have locators, remember? You’re only a few kilometers away. You see that giant blue crane?”

“Yes.”

“Jog towards that. We’ll meet in the middle.”

“The ship? Our ship, that is?”

“Gone. You were right. It was a trap.”

Just as they were starting to run towards each other, the ground began to shake. It shook, and it shook, and it didn’t stop shaking. Gargantuan explosions began to rage in the distance. The blue crane that Mateo and Vitalie were using as a reference point suddenly sank below the horizon. Cracks were forming in the ground.

“A really good trap!” Marie shouted into the comms.

“Leona, everyone, jump.”

“We can’t!” Ramses complained.

“You can! Just come to our location. There’s a reason we finally stopped moving in this spot. This spot is safe!”

The group appeared in scattered formation around them. Mateo and Leona hugged and kissed each other. They all began to huddle together instinctively as the tremors and explosions intensified. “If there’s any antimatter in those ships, it will be devastating. Ramses, do you remember where the biggest open area was?”

“That might not be good enough either.” Ramses slipped Angela’s bag off of her shoulders. “Thanks for carrying this for me.” He reached in, and pulled out a dimensional generator, but it wasn’t the same one they used in the ship. That one would still have been in there when the missile struck. That one was destroyed. “This one is smaller, barely enough room to walk past each other, but it’s stocked with supplies, and it’s all we got.”

“Then what?” Marie asked.

“Once all of you are inside, I’ll jump into space, and join you,” Ramses explained.

“I’m the Captain, I’ll do it,” Leona volunteered.

“That’s why you shouldn’t.” Mateo stole the generator for himself. He pointed it at Vitalie first, because she was the only one not equipped to survive in space, so she absolutely had to be inside. Then he started to shoot everyone else as well. 

No one argued, except for the last one, Leona. “Stop!” She breathed deeply, and looked around at the planet as it was being ripped apart. She laid hands on the generator. “We’ll go together.”

“Were I you.”

“Were I you.”

They jumped.

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Microstory 1817: Vector

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A lot of people think I’m a dumb meathead, but just because I was good at sports doesn’t mean I didn’t exercise my brain. I’m actually really smart and well-read, but I chose not to go to an Ivy League school, because my family didn’t have the money for it. Of course now we know that I could have taken out loans, and had them paid off after my first vector season, but we couldn’t run that risk. Besides, I ended up becoming a professional vector player because of a series of events in my life, starting with birth, and being admitted to my state school somewhere in the middle. So no, I don’t walk around with that prestige, but I’m happy with my choices, and you can’t argue with the results. There was a reason that I did so well in sports. I possessed a naturally high degree of precision. I could hit or throw a ball exactly where I wanted it to go, at least as long as it was within an acceptable range. I didn’t have all that much strength, so yeah, I could throw it towards the moon, but it would never reach it. I did not exactly choose Vector so much as it chose me. I liked to play a lot of different sports, but when it became clear which one was on the path of least resistance, I took my opportunity. I worked really hard to show the scouts that I had what it took to do this for real. I could play every position, but I was mostly a grabber. For those who don’t know, the grabber is the one that’s blindfolded much of the time. I had to take direction from the caller, and find the balls scattered throughout the field. At that point, I could remove my blindfold, and pass it to the wielder. I did things a little differently, and built up a nice reputation.

Here’s the thing, the opposing team’s jacker is watching you at all times, and as soon as they see your eyes, they know you have a ball, and they come after you. If they reach you before you can pass the ball, you lose that ball, and have to find it all over again, and good hiders do not make that easy. That’s why I just never took my blindfold off. It’s a strategy that had never been employed until then, and one that no player replicated quite as well after I started it. Man, I knew where my wielder was, and the jackers, and even the shielders, even though I didn’t need to know that information. I kept my ear on the whole game, and could give you the play-by-play later even though my eyes were covered the whole time, and I was busy with my own job. I could covertly pick up that ball, and toss it over before anyone could stop me. I was sneaky about it too, sometimes pretending to have a ball when I didn’t. If a jacker tags you, and your pocket is empty, they incur a penalty, so they better be right. They learned to be real careful when I was on the other side, but it still didn’t usually do them any good. Yeah, I was a great player, but like all good things, it was destined to come to an end. My game partner, the caller, was my best friend. We had to have a good relationship, and a secret language, in order to communicate effectively without anyone else knowing what was going on. One night, he took me to dinner to tell me that I ought to think about stepping down, and letting a new generation take over. It was tough, being told that it was time for me to leave. I felt like I had a few good years in me. I chose to go through with it, and I think my fans respected my decision. Looking back, I'm grateful for the honesty, and wish I had told him as much. I loved being the star of the show, but he was right. There were so many great kids whose chances I was stealing just by sticking around. I kept enough money to live comfortably, then gave the rest to charity. I never married, nor had kids.

Microstory 1805: Field Work

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Like any young girl with parents who taught her to be independent and powerful, I dreamed of joining law enforcement. No, I know, that’s not a universal dream, but it sure felt like it back then. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. As I grew up, my passion for the work only grew stronger. I wanted to be out there in the field, making the tough calls, and actually seeing the people I was helping. While I was still in college, my personality began to change. I still wanted to help others, but I no longer seemed interested in field work. Fortunately, I knew that there were plenty of jobs that didn’t require me to do anything like that. I won’t get into specifics about the path I took, but I ended up becoming a Threat Investigator for the government. It was my job to process calls from civilians who were reporting crimes and of course, threats. I occasionally had to go out and speak to people in person, but that only ever happened when the potential threat was nearby. Most of the time, I asked questions, and determined next steps, which generally involved contacting local authorities, or my branch’s local offices. It could be rewarding, but it was also stressful. It would be terrible if I downplayed a threat that turned out to be a really big deal, and it was almost as bad if I sounded the alarm about a threat that ended up being nothing; maybe even a hoax. Citizens from all over the country counted on me to accurately evaluate each situation, and decide the best course of action from the information I was given. I made mistakes, and I lived with regrets, but nothing was bad enough to warrant a disciplinary response...until it was. I made the wrong call, and people got hurt. No one died, but they very well could have. I should have taken it more seriously, even though the caller sounded unconvinced himself, and a background check made it look like he didn’t have much credibility. I wasn’t fired, but I couldn’t let anything like it happen again. Then I received my last call.

It was from a young man who lived in my city, or rather on the outskirts of it at the time. He was a member of a militia who was supposedly planning an attack on the capitol. The more I spoke with him, the more I realized that this guy actually joined the militia with the intention of taking them down from the inside. Apparently, his family was more into the anti-government stuff, and he had been forced to pretend to be like them so he could blend in, and stop his life from being so hard. Now he was in way over his head, and he needed my help to get him out of it. I went out into the field, and investigated the threat myself. Suddenly, I found myself in over my head. It wasn’t against protocol for me to go out there for a visit, but things snowballed so quickly, and I was captured and detained by the aggressors. Well, this proved that the threat was real, but there was nothing that I could do about it, at least not on my own. Fortunately, the self-appointed mole in the organization wasn’t found out himself, so I was able to sneak him a message, which he bravely took back to my superiors. They sent a strike team to raid the place, and I would like to tell you that they successfully prevented the attack, but I honestly don’t know one way or the other. It turned into a bloody mess just as the year was coming to a close. The bad guys realized immediately which among them ratted them out, and we were both executed in an attempt to show the agents that they meant business. Again, I can’t tell you what happened after that, but I can only hope that some good came out of our sacrifice, and they weren’t able to commit any further acts of violence.

Extremus: Year 7

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Their only short-term solution to the growing micrometeoroid problem is to divert extra power to the teleporter field. There was, as far as they knew, no power loss at all, but it’s kind of all they have right now. The errors came out of random chance, and nothing will stop it until they find some other workaround. For now, though, things seem to be going okay. There hasn’t been a strike since the one that destroyed main engineering. In more than a year since that, the two missing decks have been entirely replaced, using the raw materials they had in storage. While it wasn’t all they had, they certainly now have a lot less than they should. They still have over two hundred years to go, and there is definitely not enough material to build the frontrunner ship that they need. They might have to cannibalize the internal structures just to get by, which the passengers are not going to be happy about. It could also endanger the compartmentalization and modularization components of their safety strategy, which is the whole reason they survived the first major strike.

As for the personnel, the engineers are doing okay. The apprentices that were working on main engines weren’t anywhere near the decks that were destroyed, and they’re really stepping up to make sure the current team members don’t have to work too hard. New recruits have been signing up to compensate, and are running through an accelerated education program. It’s looking like the original crew won’t have to extend their shift after all. Still, general consensus is that they’re all willing to stay to make sure the job is done, and not leave the ship hanging. At the moment, they’re back in another meeting, just like the one they were in when tragedy hit. Omega now believes that the original frontrunner ship design isn’t the best chance they have. He’s preparing to pitch a new plan, which should lower the amount of needed material, but probably requires more labor.

Omega clears his throat too close to the microphone. “Oops, sorry. I’m not an orator, so I’m going to get right down to the point. The frontrunner plan is out. Now we’ve moved on to the frontrunners. Instead of one large metal shield, all we need are small vessels with their own debris transport fields. Our problem is that we only have one field mounted to Extremus, and when it fails, all is lost. Sure, we have a thin backup inner field, but it’s designed to support us only at slow speeds, or when we’re docked. If the main field falls, protocol dictates that we decelerate, and effect repairs at drift. I don’t wanna do drift repairs, I want to keep going. So instead...” He engages the hologram. “I propose five frontrunners; one at the apex, and four at the base points, in the shape of a pentahedron. They will be positioned at strategic locations in front of Extremus, with minimal field overlap, like a protective cone...protecting us. We’re not planning on getting rid of the main teleporter field, but if we can minimize the number of objects that even reach it in the first place, we minimize the potential for catastrophic damage.”

An engineer raises her hand. “Yeah, how does this help us? Each frontrunner still has the same probability of transporting the object inside the protected area, rather than away. Sure, multiple fields is great, but can’t we just install more on Extremus?”

“On Extremus proper, no. It’s a design flaw, actually. For reasons I won’t get into now, because it’s all outlined in the report, retrofitting the ship with additional fields is impossible at reframe speeds. We would have to stop, and take both current fields offline for an extended period of time. Otherwise, the new ones could interfere with the old ones. I could imagine a celestial body being batted around like a ping pong ball, and the longer that object stays within range, the more opportunities it has to collide with us. That’s kind of why it wasn’t built with multiple fields in the first place. Our best chance has us creating entirely new transport fields that are not incorporated into the main systems.”

“You’ve not answered my question. How are you decreasing the chances of a strike?”

“Notice how I keep calling it a transport field, and not a teleporter field. That’s because we don’t have to transport it through space. We can jump it through time. The hologram illustrates in slowmo as he’s talking about it. “The object passes through the field, and instead of being sent an AU away, it’s sent one second into the future. By the time it shows back up, Extremus is a hundred million miles away. Frankly, I don’t know why Weaver and Team Keshida didn’t come up with this themselves.”

“Um, probably because the chances of something going wrong actually increase,” Valencia pipes up. “At relativistic speeds, time is complicated. A year outside is half a day inside. Add the reframe engines into the mix, and even though the time differential approaches zero, the complexity is only compounded. Time travel is more imprecise than you’ve probably been led to believe. You may have seen people suddenly appear in the room with you, and you think their aim was good, and since they didn’t blend into a wall, yeah, I suppose it was pretty good. But the average room is measured in meters. On the macro level, that’s totally fine. But at the quantum level, that’s a problem. Every time you try to send a meteoroid into the future, there’s about a percent of a percent chance that it’ll show up in the past.

“And this one second figure you’re going on about, you can forget that. There is no way we generate enough energy to go that far in time for every single particle we’re encountering on our way to Extremus. We’re only worried about the larger pieces, but the teleporter field doesn’t care about that. It transports everything, because it can’t distinguish those sizes. Anything that goes in, must come out. Also, don’t underestimate those smaller particles.”

“So we calibrate the time field,” Omega argues. “We only go after the bigger pieces, and let the teleporter field handle the smaller ones. It’s like installing a larger filter in front of the finer one.”

Valencia shakes her head. “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but time travel requires a lot more energy than teleportation. People with powers absorb the energy they need from the environment as time marches on, but technology hasn’t been able to do that. There is no such thing as a temporal energy generator.”

“Then help me with the math,” Omega requests. “I suppose I should have come to you about this first.”

“Probably,” Valencia agrees. She takes a moment. “Very well. Send me the full report, and I’ll get back to you in a week. I make no guarantees.”

The meeting breaks. While Valencia starts to go over the report with her team, Omega returns to his new lab, which is the one that Old Man had before he made himself disappear. Halan has given Omega a lot more leeway with his work than either of them ever thought he would. Some random guy is already in there. He’s looking through some physical papers.

“Can I help you?” Omega asks in faux politeness.

The man turns around. It’s someone that Omega doesn’t recognize, which is strange, because like Halan, Omega prides himself in knowing everyone on this ship. “No. I think I have it well in hand.”

“You are not authorized to be in this section of Extremus.”

“How can you be so sure?” the man questions.

“Because only two people are allowed down here, and you’re not one of them. I don’t even know who you are.”

The man smiles knowingly, and separates one of the papers from the stack. “This formula is wrong.” He taps a finger on it. “It’s missing a minus sign.”

“I didn’t write that,” Omega explains. Some of this stuff is from what Old Man left. A lot of it is written in code, or is just illegible, but they have to mean something. It would be irresponsible to just throw it all away when it might be useful in the future.

“I know. Old Man. He, uhh...” He pauses to laugh. “The flourishes. It’s the flourishes that get him. He has more lines in every character than he really needs, and sometimes, when he’s reading it back, he mistakes one for something else. He transcribed this from his clearboard as a seven, but it’s a negative-one. That’s important. You’ll need it.”

Omega crosses his arms impatiently. “I’ll need it for what?”

“Who are you talking to?”

Omega spins around to find Captain Yenant standing in the doorway. He turns back. The intruder is gone. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Parker—”

“It’s important. Did you see me talking to the wall, or did you just hear me from around the corner?”

“I saw you talking. There’s no one there.”

Omega sighs. He finds a pen on the table, and draws over the negative-one to make it more clearly distinguished from a seven. Then he gathers all the papers from this particular stack, and presents them to the Captain. “Please give all this to Valencia. It may be important, it may not be. I’ve not had time to study it.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“You saw me talking to no one?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I need a brain scan. You’ll have to take me off active duty, and put her in charge of the project.”

Halan nods with a grin. “This is a surprisingly mature decision, Omega Parker. I’m proud of you.”

“This is who I’m supposed to be. This is Saxon Parker. This is what he would do.”

“Come on. I’ll escort you to the infirmary myself.”

A few days later, Valencia finds herself bursting into Halan’s office, holding the mess of loose papers in one hand. She’s a bit out of breath.

“What did we say about doors, Miss Raddle?”

Valencia sits down. “I don’t remember.”

“Please remember for next time.”

“I’ll look into it.” She drops the papers on his desk.

“Did you find something in there?”

“Umm, just the answers to everything.”

“How do you mean?”

She starts excitedly pointing out the text, graphs, and formulas, almost forgetting that Halan doesn’t know how to interpret any of it. “I know this handwriting. This was Old Man. He survived, didn’t he?”

Halan set his face into a quizzical look.

“He did, didn’t he?”

“I imagine it’s possible. It’s a big ship, and a man like that...we can’t rule out that he’s been hiding all this time, or even that he transported himself a couple years in the future, long after we concluded our sweep of the ship. Why?”

“He has it all laid out. The...frontrunners, the time traveling miners, everything. The plan is right here. It’s everything we need to make this happen.”

“Maybe he knew it would be a problem down the line. Whenever I gave him a mandate, I knew he had no fewer than three side projects he would work on when he needed to take a break from the main issue. I think that coming up with long-term solutions to seemingly insurmountable obstacles were a hobby of his.”

“I still think you should sweep the ship again.”

“We can do that,” Halan agrees. It couldn’t hurt. Actually, it could. It could undermine people’s faith in him as a leader; this question whether Old Man has been able to evade detection all this time. Or they could lie about why they’re searching every square meter of this place. What could that reason be, though? He’ll have to speak with Mercer, and finesse the situation. “So we’re good? You can do this?”

“Well, when I said everything, I didn’t mean everything everything. We still need to double check the math, and translate some of the writings into a human language. His code isn’t uncrackable, but it’s...sloppy. I think that’s the point.”

“What do you need from me?”

She’s nervous to ask. “It would be helpful if I could...maybe...recruit Omega back into this?”

“Not possible,” Halan says with a shake of the head.

“I know he’s in trouble again—”

“He’s not in trouble,” Halan contends honestly. “He’s sick.”

“Sick with what?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“I just need his mind. If he’s in quarantine, I’m happy to communicate virtually, or even wear a hazmat suit.”

“You can’t have his mind, that’s...” He shut his trap.

That’s enough for Valencia to understand. “His mind is what’s sick.”

“I urge you to respect his privacy, as I would expect him to do for you.”

“It’s okay.” She stands up. “It’ll take us some time, but we’ll figure it out.” She starts to leave.

Halan lifts his tablet up, and leans back in his chair. “Take those weird dead trees with you, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Right. Thank you.”

“And chirp the door next time.”

“Of course, sir.”

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Extremus: Year 6

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Over the next year, the micrometeoroid problem worsens. Several even manage to slip through the field. Or maybe the field actually teleports the objects inside of it, instead of away, which was an early problem that the technology had. A woman named Weaver figured out how to reduce the chances of that happening, but she was operating under the assumption that the interstellar density would not change this dramatically. Fortunately, it’s not like Extremus was designed with a single layer of aluminum foil. The bulkhead has so far proved strong enough to withstand the damage, and robots have been dispensed to repair the dents immediately. Many of the meteoroids don’t even hit the ship itself anyway. The field is meant to be a buffer; not the last line of defense. Still, it’s a concerning issue, and it still needs to be dealt with.

After a week, the new committee that Halan formed reconvenes. Individuals and teams give their own ideas about how to solve this issue. The Bridgers make another appearance, but it’s their last one. Any information that they need to know about the future of the mission can be passed along to them at a later time. They don’t vocalize any ideas themselves, but everyone else has more than one possibility. Head of Security Gideon has the simplest idea. They could make a lateral course adjustment, and fly parallel to the galactic plane, rather than right through the center of it. It’s not the craziest plan, but it’s also not ideal as it extends their mission time by a measure of years, and potentially uses up too much energy. Lead Mechanic Holgersen thinks that all they need to do is bolster the hull by adding Whipple bumpers, and other armor. Again, this isn’t insane, and it’s certainly doable. Almost all of the ideas come with downsides. They are only short-term solutions, or they make something else about the mission harder, or they just won’t necessarily be good enough for an even higher interstellar density. And then there is one that is the craziest of them all. Surprisingly, it comes from passenger representative, First Chair Ebner.

Omega and Lead Engineer Ocean have been working out the details for the last year, and now it’s time to present it to the rest of the engineering team. So far, no one else has been brought into the mix—not even the rest of the crew—and this strategy has been working. That has to change now, but they should still be able to keep the circle tight. “Thank you all for coming,” Veca begins. “I know you’re all worried about your apprentices, but I’m confident that they can survive the next few hours without you. That’s what they’re here for.” When the mission began, a certain number of people were approved for the crew, based on their education and background. Now that the mission is six years in, some of the younger passengers are finally ready to prepare to replace the initial crew members at a one-to-one ratio. Each current crew member has been assigned an apprentice to train, who will supposedly take over their responsibilities when their shift is over.

Veca continues, “before I begin, due credit is owed to the woman who came up with the idea. She has no engineering experience, so it’s the rest of us who will have to make it actually work, but it’s a good example of how everyone has something to offer, and solutions can come from some of the most unexpected places. First Ebner, would you please stand up?”

Satyria likes to be heard, but she doesn’t just want people to think that she’s important. She wants to actually be important, and to earn all of the recognition she receives. She works hard to contribute to the cause, and never rests on her laurels. Still, she doesn’t love to be the center of attention. She would rather just know that people are pleased with her contributions on their own time. Even so, she stands up, and thanks the crowd as they clap politely.

“Now. Again, we need you. This is a massive endeavor. About half of you are directly responsible for the construction of Extremus. The other half was still in the middle of your education. Either way, you all know what it took to make this dream come true, and none of you takes that for granted. It is a magnificent vessel, and I am profoundly proud of the work we have all accomplished. Unfortunately, as you read in the pre-meeting brief, there is one flaw, which comes out of a lack of data about the composition of the galaxy. You built a great ship. Now I’m going to have to ask you to do it again. It won’t be an entirely new ship that’s the same size as this one, but it will be heavily fortified, and it will be responsible for acting as a sort of frontrunner shield. We’re tentatively calling it The Spearhead.”

One of the engineers raises his hand. “You want a second ship to fly in front of us, so it can take all the micrometeoroid damage on our behalf?”

Before Veca can answer, another engineer piggy-backs on the question. “How do you suggest we get this thing in front of Extremus? Even if we build it in modules, and assemble it on the outside, we’re literally going as fast as relativity allows us. We’ll have to slow down so it can accelerate, and get ahead of us.”

“That’s what those three are for.” Veca points to the corner of the room.

Temporal Engineer Raddle and her apprentice, August are sitting with a second apprentice whose first day on the job was yesterday. Valencia stands up. “We don’t have to slow down to get something in front of the ship. All we have to do is teleport it to a point in space ahead of us. FTL technology isn’t fast or safe enough for general interstellar travel, but it’s perfect for short range jumps. We’ll attach the Spearhead to the bottom of the hull, fire up its engines, send it to the edge of shield space, and let it fly in front of us. Boom, easy.”

“Yeah, that sounds easy,” someone from the crowd groans.

“Simple, not easy,” Veca corrects Valencia’s point. “Look, I know that this sounds crazy,” but Omega and I have been running simulations for months now. Quite frankly, we should have designed the ship to have an external shield the entire time. It will create a clear path for us to follow, and warn us of other dangers ahead of time, like gamma-ray bursts, and collapsed stars. The Spearhead is about more than just micrometeorite strikes. It’s about knowing what’s coming before risking any lives.”

Before anyone can say anything more about anything, they hear a thunderous explosion, and feel a shockwave ripple through their bodies. Captain Yenant, who’s been quiet this whole time to let the experts carry out this presentation, jumps up and activates his emergency teleporter. He likes to walk from place to place most of the time, but obviously he needs to get to the bridge quickly. Mayhem has taken over, and crew members are screaming data at each other, and trying to communicate with their comrades around the ship. “Report!” Halan screams.

“Fires on decks nineteen through twenty-two. Casualty reports still coming in. Deaths upwards of eleven.”

“Sir,” someone else begins.

“What? Just say it!” Halan demands.

“Deck twenty-four, main engineering, has been obliterated. Twenty-three is exposed.”

“Has it been sealed off?” Halan questions.

“Yes, sir.”

“Teleport all injured parties to the infirmary.”

“Already done, sir.”

“Main engines.”

“Holding.”

“Power efficiency.”

“Down to 83%, but rising.”

“Hull integrity.”

“Stressed between twenty-two and three.”

“You’re sure that everyone is out of twenty-three,” Halan asks.

“Sir,” he confirms.

“Decouple,” Halan orders. “Jettison deck twenty-three, and what’s left of twenty-four, before they tear us apart.”

“Jettisoning twenty-three and down,” he agrees as he inputs the command into the computer.

Halan waits a moment, and watches the screen to make sure the damaged sections are successfully removed from the ship. “Okay. Reframe speed.”

“Seven-oh-seven-C.”

Halan sighs and shakes his head in sadness. “All that. All that death, and we’re still just moving along like nothing happened. Did we even lose any time?”

“No, sir.”

“Great. I’m sure everyone we lost was comforted in their final moments that we’re all still doing okay.”

“Sir?”

“Compile the data, and run full diagnostics on every single system on the ship, including the passenger sections. I’m going to the infirmary.”

Fifty-five crew members, and one passenger were killed in what they could come to learn was yet another micrometeorite strike. According to what little data could be recovered from the incident, it was about the size of an ancient Earthan baseball. Though not so big, it was able to do sizable damage, because of how fast the ship was moving. The teleportation shield made an error when it transported the object closer to the ship, where it was able to rip straight through the lowest deck, and kill everyone there instantly. The only silver lining was that this was the main engineering section, which was designed to sit lower than anything else. The passenger sections were numbered from the opposite direction, since it was more intuitive for them to think of it like an above-ground building. Level one actually coincided with Deck 20.

Since nearly all of the current-shift engineers were in the middle of the meeting on Deck 2, they managed to survive the strike. Sadly, their apprentices were down there instead, monitoring systems, and relogging data. They were all killed, and as if that wasn’t sad on its own, it also meant that there would be no one to replace those crew members once their shift officially ended. Perhaps Halan would be able to convince them to extend their shifts until replacements could be sufficiently trained, but that isn’t what matters right now. They have to rebuild, and fortify the physical shield, and increase power to the teleporter field, if possible. Nothing like this can ever happen again, and it falls on Halan’s shoulders to ensure that. No one seems to blame him for it, but as Captain, he is ultimately responsible for literally everything. A lot of people were nominated for the position, and about half of them declined specifically because it was too much pressure. The other half are probably feeling lucky right now that they weren’t put in charge. Well, one of them doesn’t feel lucky, because she’s dead.

Captain Yenant addresses the whole ship on the evening announcements, explaining to everyone what happened, and what they will be doing to prevent another tragedy. It’s over the next few days that he starts to hear the criticisms, and they are all pretty much valid. He can’t condemn anyone for losing faith in his leadership, or in the mission as a whole. There is a carefully laid out procedure for recalling a captain, but the passengers have less to say about it than the crew does. For now, no one’s been talking about that, and Mercer has been keeping his ear to the ground for it. It’s not out of the question, though. It’s never out of the question. And Halan will step down gracefully, should the need arise. A battle for power does no one any good, and undermines the spirit of the ship’s mandate. Hopefully it won’t come to that, and it’s looking like it won’t. The crew still does not blame him for what happened.

The repairs themselves were fairly quick and easy. Extremus was designed to drop any section at will in case something like this occurs. The decks above were negatively impacted, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed. A significant portion of the vessel was designated for spare parts and raw materials. That’s not the problem, though. It’s the missing decks themselves that are going to make things difficult for them. They don’t ever plan on stopping, unlike most ships, which only have to make it to a destination in the stellar neighborhood. The really cool thing about relativistic travel is that it cuts down on the amount of time that something can go wrong. At the moment, the closest outpost is only twenty light years from Origin, which means while it takes a little over twenty years to get there from Earth, the crew only experiences ten days. Extremus, on the other hand, will be en route for 216 years. They can’t afford to have to rebuild the ship over and over again. They’ll be able to replace those missing decks over the course of the next year, but every time that happens, it cuts down on their reserves. They will eventually run out, and Halan doesn’t know what happens when they get to that point. For now, the problem has to be solved, and Halan isn’t sure they’ll be able to take care of it before another strike kills them all.

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