Garden at the End of the Universe
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I sat cross-legged on the bed in my cabin, watching the blue glare of the plasma engines of the approaching ship on the screen and thinking dispiritedly about the events which had got me - all of us - to this time and place. Our ship, the Endurance - thrown together in a great hurry using an iceball from the Oort Cloud and equipped with fusion reactors powering plasma drives and inertia nullification generators - was one of many escaping a brutal war in the solar system at high relativistic speeds. Despite copious reinforcements with super-strong carbon fibre cables, our iceball unexpectedly suffered from serious cracking under acceleration, and we were unable to decelerate to rendezvous with our target star system. We might have been stuck in space forever, but we cobbled together a smaller craft - the Message in a Bottle - to transmit a message back to Earth. Shortly afterwards, an impossible spacecraft - the Yelcho - rendezvoused with the Endurance. Although only a few months for us, whole lifetimes had passed back on Earth, and apparently space drive technologies had advanced immensely, providing for effectively faster-than-light travel. The Yelcho crew appeared barely human, except one who was called Waldo. The rescuing ship initially offered to return us to Earth, then later persuaded us that we would not fit in there - so much time having passed, and we should instead continue in the Endurance to another habitable stellar system instead. Now, we had just arrived at the promised system. It was every bit as pleasant as Waldo had suggested, but we were very soon hailed by another of the ships which had escaped from the war around Earth at the same time as us, the Constellation. It was this ship I was watching approaching right now, even though it had headed off in a very different direction from our own. Edith Tan, our Captain, had already had numerous exchanges with Alan Chun, the Constellation's captain, who was also an old acquaintance of mine. This had already led to several revelations, including the assertion that Waldo and the crew of the Yelcho were not human, never were, but members of some unknown alien race who appeared to being engaged in a complex long-term operation intended to prevent the human race from spreading across the galaxy. My phone beeped twice, jerking me out of my reverie. It was a message from Captain Edith Tan, asking me to join her in the control room as soon as possible. I sent back an acceptance, then washed my face to remove dried tears. The Captain clearly want to engage me in some new endeavour, although personally I was not convinced I had the strength for anything, just at the moment. Four minutes later, I entered the control room which was, perhaps, rather less full than I might have expected. Edith was accompanied by Bruce Atherton, her second in command, who always managed to look toned and bronzed, as if from a vacation at the beach. My dear friend Adele Rothschild was also present, although the reason for her presence was not obvious to me. The usual stations were manned, but the atmosphere was surprisingly calm, given the revelations about the crew of the Yelcho. Perhaps we were all getting a little shell-shocked. "Katrina, thank you," Captain Tan said. I nodded in acknowledgement. "The Constellation will be alongside in the next fifteen minutes. Or at least as close as I'm prepared to get." This was understandable: the engines of the Constellation - and the Endurance, for that matter - threw out vast quantities of super-hot plasma and hard radiation, and nobody would want to be on the receiving end of those exhausts. The two ships were rendezvousing in the outer system, near one of the Lagrange points of the second-largest gas giant planet - like Saturn, but without the highly visible rings. Iceballs, like both ships started as, cannot get much closer to the any reasonable star, otherwise the outer shell will start outgassing violently and perhaps even breaking up like a comet as it gets closer to the heat of the sun. So we were now in a distant parking orbit synchronised with the Saturn-like planet. Another person entered the control room: a man I knew only slightly but was reputed to be one of the best in-system ship's pilots aboard. "Thank you for coming, Michael," Tan said, "Now that we are all here, I want you to consider a mission off the ship." I glanced at Adele, who frowned; it seemed neither of us had any clue what was going on. The two of us nodded in agreement. Michael seemed unperturbed. "Captain Alan Chun," the Captain went on, "Who I believe you know?" - I nodded again - "Has invited me and a small party to join him aboard the Constellation. I would like Katrina and Adele to be my technical advisors and Michael to pilot one of the in-system craft to act as a shuttle to get us over there." Michael nodded enthusiastically. The Constellation was a quarter of a million kilometres away - less than the distance between Earth and its moon - and it would be easy enough for an experienced pilot to navigate the distance. "Sure," he agreed, "But I would want to do a thorough systems check on whichever ship we pick." "Yes, absolutely," Tan confirmed, "So could you work with Adele and Katrina to select a shuttle and check it out. Let me know when you feel we would be ready to depart." There was a chorus of "Yes, Captain" before Tan turned her attention to Bruce and, presumably, other important matters. There were plenty of in-system ships to choose from. We had used one as the starting-point for the Message in a Bottle and cannibalised another for parts - although it was certainly repairable if we chose to use some of the automated factory units to construct replacement components - but there were dozens of others which should be fully functional, even though they had been hangered on the outer parts of the Endurance's icy shell for months.
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Introduction