On The Edges - Final Part Completed Short Story)

V.Y. 673

There was a dream once, Svari understood now. That dream had died in the darkness down below. In violence. They’d scribbled messages as they died – for there were hundreds of bodies. Svari couldn’t read, of course. Reading was forbidden him and all others of the 4 tribes. Reading, he was told, had brought “It” about.

But he understood the dream, because the Old Ones spoke as he did. They’d left messages.

There was a world that they were flying to, though Svari didn’t understand what “world” was. Maybe it was like the vessel? But bigger? Maybe worlds had open skies? Maybe they didn’t have starlight? Svari would never know, because they would never reach it in his lifetime, he understood from those messages.

The last plant in his tribe had died just last sleep. He hadn’t seen the other tribes for some time – they were far away in the vessel.

Svari lay down, for he was tired. His bones ached. He was in the much forbidden “down” now, and the darkness had swallowed him. Above, far above, he could see the skies and the stars. The light reached him still, though it was slight. There were corpses around him, in old clothes he’d never seen.

Svari closed his eyes, and let the starlight entomb him as he breathed his last, The Humming God rocking him to sleep as though he were still a child.

The CS Amisos was still 353 lightyears away from Svarg-A.

V.Y. 4, 2657 A.D.

“Don’t be a damn fool, Charlie,” Mr. Stick bellowed across the meeting room. Outside their window, another Odyssey-Class puttered into the sky. “45 ships are ready to launch, and we’ve already sent off 7. I have no time for your committee’s revised advice. Or your committee’s, Henry!”

Charlie was in charge of Constellation’s Ethics Advisory Board. Henry headed their Drive Engineering Department.

“But sir!” Henry, a slight man of Chinese descent, tried again to plead his case. “New evidence has emerged! The Mythology Class that we’re developing has stellar engines that will reach Svarg-A by the time the Amisos is just about a decade into her voyage. There is no point. We should recall her now, and scrap the Odyssey program.” Charlie shook his head as Henry spoke. He had recognised long ago what Henry was too much of an idealist to see; Stick was never going to concede.

Stick, a well-built South African, was the Head of Launches and he answered only the CEO.

“Don’t give me that shit, Henry. We don’t even know when the first Mythology will launch, and Constellation needs the Odyssey launches to go well if we’re going to launch the Mythologies at all! And you!” Stick pointed a finger at Charlie. “I don’t want to hear another damn thing about the Ship Operations’ Directives. The fuck do you suggest we do? Send them some more habs? More synthesisers? No, I think the fuck not, not when the Amisos and the Miletus and the Ephesus are at almost 0.9 Light, and the others are at 0.5. Even if we wanted to, which, let me be crystal fucking clear, I do not, we cannot.”

There was silence in the board room for a moment.

“Your initial assessment was that the Odyssey classes’ social structure is well designed. That is the fucking assessment I am going to stick with.”

Charlie sighed. There was nothing to be done. If he was right, then the consequences wouldn’t materialise until long after he was dead and it wasn’t worth losing his job over. If he was wrong, it definitely wasn’t worth losing his job over.

Stick sighed and sat down. He breathed in and out for a few seconds, and nursed his whiskey.

“Look, gentlemen,” he invited them to sit, and they did. “I apologise for shouting, but we cannot scrap the program, and we certainly cannot recall the ships. For one, the Mythology program is dead in the water if we waver now. The London Committee is already debating cutting our funding – and we don’t want them to lord the London Space Treaty over us.” The London Committee had been set up in 2525 by the League of Spacefaring Nations as the primary oversight board for human spaceflight, and Charlie knew that they were looking to shut down private space exploration.

“For another, we are the only people who take interstellar travel seriously. Svarg-A is one thing – I know it’s a thousand lightyears away. But we were the first to send people to Alpha Centauri. We beat the LOSN! No one has beaten a government agency on something like that, ever, and LOSN is still playing catch-up,” Henry seemed becalmed by this. Engineers, Charlie fought the urge to roll his eyes.

“I know that if the Mythology classes launch, they’ll be there millennia before the Odyssey classes even get close enough to start their decel burns. But that doesn’t happen, that cannot happen, until we get enough Odysseys into space. And if the Mythology launches don’t happen, then at least we have the Odysseys to fall back on.” Stick, when calm, was extremely agreeable.

Charlie nodded. Not worth getting sacked, Charlie old boy, he reminded himself.

The CS Amisos was still 1017 lightyears away from Svarg-A.

V.Y. 1248

Two figures, ant-like against the massive and elegant silhouette of the generation ship, observed her rusting hulk. She’d landed perfectly and deployed all the automated systems designed to get the colonists started. Still, there was no sign of life.

“Reckon she ended up like the other Odyssey classes?” one of them remarked, inching forward, as if afraid the ship would come alive.

“Looks like it,” the other shone her torch against the hull. “Amisos… huh…”

“What?”

“Wasn’t that the first one that the Constellation Company launched?”

The other explorer flipped through her infodeck. “Well, would you look at that. Yes, she was!” She looked up at the behemoth. “I thought she was supposed to have reached Svarg-A safely. What’s she doing here?” They were on Sthan-B III – a backwater planet home only to gambling dens and sandstorms.

“Probably all dead, I suppose,” the first explorer sighed.

“Wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“Pity.”

“Is it though? I mean,” the second explorer shrugged, “they knew what they were getting into when they signed up to sail aboard her.”

“Still, they had such hopes and dreams, and plans for paradise! Now… they’re just… dust.” The wind blew the sand around them into a tiny frenzy, sending lonely grains of sand whipping in fury against their exosuits.

They regarded the ship for a moment longer. The second explorer surged forward, uncaring. “Yeah, these Odyssey classes have great salvage, come on. Maybe we can get those old keychips! Tev always pays a premium for those. You want a real pity? The pity is we don’t use keychips anymore.”

The first explorer stood still, mesmerised by the Amisos’s failure. She couldn’t find the words she wanted to say, no... salvage would have to do. She looked up at the sky one last time before being consumed by the shadow of the ship, and in the night sky she saw the burning blue dot that was the Svarg system. Svarg-A was now home to a sprawling metropolis and satellite cities.

“It really is a pity,” the first explorer mumbled to herself, but followed her friend. “Come on, though. Maybe we can find some of those old circuit boards. I know museums in the Svarg system that will pay a pretty penny for that.”

So, saying, they ascended into the bowels of the ship, whence came a blast of ancient tinned air and out tumbled skeletons of old. The explorers continued their ascent unbothered, though the second rolled her eyes.

“Always the same,” she remarked with a bored sigh.