From Haaven to… Eedeen

Tomorrow we leave for space and… well, the stars or at least a star. It’s a one-way trip, probably. If we did manage to return it would mean that we had failed.

Today is my last day before the mission; the last day here in my home, on my home. I sit at the window watching the sun set or trying to see it, hoping against hope that the air will be clear for this last time but, as ever, the smog is reducing the scene into a dull blur.

Maybe it will be different in the morning, I tell myself. Of course, it isn’t and I leave my family, donning a mask against the fumes, for the short walk to the collection point. There are no tears, our farewells were completed the night before. The transport takes us to the launch site and our final briefing before…

I hold my breath as mission control counts down the moments before our shuttle rockets fire.

The launch is clean even if I find that breathing is a struggle as the g-forces press my body back into its seat. We reach orbit in minutes although it takes longer to reach and dock with the space station. Now breathing is not a problem but adjusting to zero gravity is.

The selection process had started with more than five hundred candidates before, finally, reducing the numbers to twenty-four. During the time we had spent developing our skills and fitness, the command team had faced constant questioning, not all of it friendly, but I watched every broadcast I could find.

“How do they work? I mean, we know that the planets, the scientists tell us are, MAYBE, habitable, are in a system thousands of light orbits away. No-one can live long enough to reach them.”

I listened as Falno, the master physicist, replied, trying to remain calm; he had had to answer that question many times.

“The ships will take that long but for most of the time will be manned by the on-board computer systems. The brave men and women who will make up the crew of each ship will sleep for most of the journey in hibernation pods. They will only age a little more than an orbit.”

Second voice was raised. “We are faced with a breakdown of the planet’s ecosystems. We can hardly breath the air. We need to spend more on supporting our own lands not on such a wildly optimistic venture.”

“Without such optimism our civilisation will certainly die. Even the colonies on Paradiss will not survive without support. They are only a short-term solution to the problems we face here. I understand, my colleagues understand, that you would have us spend every last cent on the climate here but even if that were possible there is no certainty that we would be successful.”

“You mean that unless we give way to the extremists and eliminate half of the population we are doomed. Will you sacrifice yourselves to their demands?”

“I would fight that to my dying breath but people have constantly fought against the need to curtail the birth rate until we have halved the population. That could be done in a generation or less but…”

The arguments had continued but, to Falno’s, and my, relief, the threats of the extremists proved limited to protest crowds that could easily be kept away from the space centre and launch site and now we were less than an orbit away from the departure of the interstellar craft.

In truth I never expected to be successful and like the others was now in space for the first time.

“How can the ships reach light speed? Nothing can go that fast.” Johaaan, one of the other candidates who I found rather attractive, had asked during one the earlier briefings.

“The new engines will generate one gravity of acceleration constantly for roughly twenty orbits. By that time, they, the ships, will have reached a velocity of almost nine tenths of light-speed. Time will slow for the ships themselves and their crews, when awake.”

“Each of you have been evaluated and the final pairings will be as near perfect matches as is possible to make, both physically and emotionally.”

“But why a crew and one so small – only four for each ship. Even if the planet in that other system is habitable what can they do? We won’t be able to have enough babies for the colony to survive!” Another candidate, Chistina cried.

“Now that, for once, is a sensible question and, thanks to the support of others, we have an answer. Many families have donated embryos and each ship will carry a thousand and more unborns of either sex. Add to that a hundred artificial incubators. There will also be seeds and animal embryos which should be enough for you to establish colonies around the planet.”

“You sound so confident but how do you know?”

“Our predecessors sent an automated probe ten thousand orbits ago. The data transmitted back confirmed that life existed on one of the worlds circling the star of that system.

“How can we be sure that we will be welcome?”

“There were no life forms sufficiently advanced to challenge you.”

I found myself quivering at the idea of meeting other life forms wondering what they might look like. Then I returned to my study papers. I had to be ready.

Now, as we rested on the space station, we were able to listen into another broadcast.

“This is Harnt reporting from the space centre. I am with Sund, the mission commander. Sund, we have repeated reports that this is a suicide mission. That the crews will die long before they reach the target system.”

Sund could be seen to sigh. When will they accept the truth, he thought.

“The crews will sleep in hibernation pods for most of the journey. On arrival at the system the ship’s intelligence will commence the seeding of the planet, starting the process of enabling our people to survive and thrive. Once that part is done the crews, who will have ben woken from their hibernation as the ships approach the planet, will then need to trigger the incubators to bring the first of the young to full maturation before being born. Each ship has a set of robots programmed to support them in raising the children.”

It had only been a few days before then that I had learned that I was one of the successful candidates and only then we told the full truth about the mission; learning that the journey was truly a one-way trip.

“I can’t do that. What if I failed, we failed?”

“Then our race is doomed. You may wish that we can reverse the damage done to our ecosystems. Sadly, that is not true. Conditions are already deteriorating. Few of the people will survive.”

“Then we are the lucky ones?”

“That may be true, though I suspect that there will be times when you will question that.”

Johaan, my partner on ship one asked. “Why three ships?”

“Redundancy – there is no certainty that all will succeed. There are many things that could grow wrong, things that we cannot plan for.”

Despite my fears, once selected as a part of the chosen few I had been given no choice but to continue the training and ultimately climb onboard the shuttle craft that would lift us to the space station.

Twenty-four of us reached that height only to then find that just two would crew each of the interstellar craft. For the rest…. some would never get closer to the ships than the station itself. A dozen would be frozen in hibernation pods even before boarding and not waken again until journey’s end.

I remember with mixed emotions the great ships firing their engines and starting the long journey away from our home. We remained in charge, notionally at least, for those first days until, at a safe distance, the star engines themselves ignited and the long acceleration towards light speed began. Then, with the ship’s main computers taking command, we lowered ourselves into the pods and the conserving liquid that would maintain our bodies for the journey’s duration.

In the following times my partner and I were woken twice by the ship intelligence. We were supposed to run additional checks that, we had been told, could not be carried out by the intelligence. I understood that the truth was that those checks were designed to ensure that the computers maintained their functionality without doing anything that could place the mission at risk. Those times were both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. The ship was travelling at almost ninety percent of light speed and the stars themselves seemed to have changed to blue as we raced towards them or to red as we fled their light.

The first wakening had been as the long acceleration had ended and we had reached our cruise speed. The second time at that point where the ship, and its fellows, were due to flip over and start decelerating slowing our approach to the system that some of us would learn to call home.

I sat at the flight deck’s forward vision port watching the starfield flow as we turned head over heel until the engines pointed ahead of the direction of flight and firing again, this time to slow us. As their power increased, we could feel the pull of gravity changing and increasing. It did not take long but before the computer’s timer triggered our hibernation pods for the last time, unless something happened that required us to make decisions in an emergency, John and I took the opportunity to spend the hour or so together in the only area that was available. Then it was back to sleep.

Almost four thousand planetary orbits after we left our home, I could hear the gentle tones of the computer drawing me back from the depths of hibernation. A computer it may have been but there was something in its voice that alarmed me. Like it or not though, I could only waken slowly, the hibernation process did slow my bodily functions to almost nil but there was some aging, a few months or so, and I needed to take care avoiding stressing my body before leaving the pod.

As the recovery time passed, I slowly absorbed the sounds of the ship which was no longer under power. That was wrong, I should have been woken before we reached the planet, we hoped to colonise but it seemed that we were already in orbit. And then it was the absence of other sounds that alarmed me, Johann should have at least been mumbling, cursing the delay with his usual impatience.

“Ship! Why did you not instigate awakening before now?” My voice quavered in panic; something was very wrong.

“Wakening was attempted on entering the star system as instructed. Certain faults became apparent; some hibernation pods have failed. One crew member is deceased. Emergency protocols have been instigated. Your wakening was delayed pending the ship entering orbit and the seeding processes completed.”

“My partner is dead? How?”

“Hibernation pods cracked under the stresses caused when the ship, when all ships, were forced to undertake emergency changes of course to avoid danger. Only two crew members have survived. You and a member on ship three. Six of those personnel who were in hibernation since the start of our mission have also died.”

“So many dead? Then the mission is doomed.”

“That is not an accurate summary of the situation. I and my fellow intelligences have already completed the first two stages of activity. We have seeded the planet using remote equipment. The incubators have been landed and are being fully utilised to bring all animal embryos to fruition.”

I pulled myself out of the pod, why was I the only one to survive? Pulling myself into the flight deck I looked at the scene below. A planet, green, blue, and white, orbiting a brighter star than I was used to but then that was as we had been told before leaving Haaven.

“Haaven”

I felt that I must say the word aloud to remember where I came from, where we came from. This world was different, so different, from being in orbit around a giant planet which had or was circling a star that was closer and cooler. It was a beautiful sight and I wept for those colleagues who would never see it.

“I can’t do this, Ship. Johaaan was my perfect match; no others can suffice.” I cried, my tears continuing.

“You must.” Ship responded. “The other survivor would have partnered with you, had Johaaan not qualified.”

“But if we are only eight, how can we raise the children?”

“The robots on each ship which are programmed to provide parental type support. Their power packs will last ten local orbits, perhaps a hundred orbits of Haaven. They are designed to then decompose leaving no trace. You must develop the populations across the world. You must lead your children to build that new world.”

Ship gave me no choice, as had happened on ship three, and I finally launched an escape pod landing in a green and warm area enclosed by trees.

I turned to the other survivor of the crew members. “I cannot do this, Adanm.”

“You can, Eviee, because we must. This is our new home; we must do our best to lead our sons and daughters into a new future. Here on Eedeen.”