Chapter 1
Merkatus Arcuatus, 33041 R.M.A.
Mordos Kahn slouched on the throne and closed his eyes. The last of the day's seemingly endless procession of envoys counselors, advisers, dignitaries, and other
species of nuisance had left, and he was tired, and even more bored than when the day had started. The noise from the nearby spaceport gradually subsided as the last
ships departed, and at last the old castle became quiet.
He dozed, awoke, and saw that the sunlight had faded from the narrow windows of the throne room. In the deepening gloom he leaned back and looked up at the ceiling,
forty ehrls above. He contemplated the long brown beams, the grey stone. In his mind he tried to form the alien word for the material in the beams, his father had related to
him so long ago. Transported from far away, at enormous expense, twenty or thirty generations back, the material was also used
in a few prized pieces of furniture and other items in the castle.
He didn't know why he was thinking about the stuff. Perhaps because it was so alien to his world, to all the worlds he knew. Perhaps because he was bored. He wondered what
kind of world it came from. He remembered vaguely the race of creatures associated with it. Odd little beings. He wondered if any of them lived on the homeworld or the
worlds in his domain. He couldn't remember ever seeing one at court.
A staff member stuck his head in the door, was ignored, and retreated. He stood up, stretched his enormous body. It was time to sleep some more.
Earth, 11 August 2031 Southern Missouri
The daylight was almost gone as we finished evacuating our own dead and wounded, and Glenn and I walked among the ruins of the camp with some of the partisan leaders, looking for
anything of interest. As expected, we found Erskine McCormick, the former senator and FBI director who had been running the ISD special forces in Missouri. He was in command at
the the Jefferson City massacre. war. We collected some IDs and other evidence and took photographs before the sun set. The enemy dead could remain where they were until a
cleanup crew arrived. And if they stayed there until they rotted, that was all right too. This wasn't a war - it was something much worse.
The insanity of it all was beginning to grind on my nerves, but the war was at last clearly nearing an end. We had control of most of the country west of the Mississippi, and
much of the southeast. The Texas militia had joined the Northern Alliance and was by conservative estimates moving over one and a half million men into the area of the capitol.
The armed forces were mostly in the rebel camp, despite the military conditioning to obey whatever the nomimally legitimate government was. In a few months, certainly not much
more, it would be over.
Virginia, near Washington D.C., 3 September 2018
As he had done many times before Dr. Karl Hamblin looked at the body in the acrylic cylinder. The old astrophycisist had come down here often in recent years, since the last
of the little beings had passed on. Their bodies were preserved, but they could no longer assist in the attempt to recreate the technology that might allow them to
return home. We are so close, he thought, yet so much is unknown. And who knows what will happen now, with the war, its ultimate outcome no longer in doubt. The
southern rebel forces were closing on the capital, escape had never really been an option and was now out of the question. He had seen the force approaching from the south on
television. Their numbers were estimated at well over a million, and among them he saw a lot of confederate battle flags. The word payback was often heard from pundits and in
rumors from the field. What will the new government do with the project, he wondered. Or would the facility even survive the war? Rumor had it that the fanatical part was
the minority and it was likely that cooler heads would prevail when it was over. He hoped so.
He closed the doors to the room and went back upstairs. Sitting down at his computer, he tried to get back to work, but his mind wandered constantly. Finally he
decided to call it a day, and started home, knowing he would have no more success sleeping than he had working.
I awoke, again. How many times? This was number six. It didn't take long to remember. Physically and mentally, waking from months, even years, of travel
sleep was no different from ending a normal night's rest. The technology was quite impressive.
All of it was, from the sleep chambers which placed a human being in a state of precisely controlled and monitored hibernation for months or years to the giant ship
itself, and the engines which pushed it relentlessly, tirelessly, and to those inside, silently through deepest space.
The canopy of the chamber was open, I rolled over and swung my feet to the cool tile floor, stretched, yawned, and stood. The soft light revealed the row of chambers in which
some of my fellow travellers slept, and I walked down the aisle between two rows to the end of the room to the showers and dressing room. Twenty minutes later I was
making my way to the bridge, as we called the great control room from which the ships progress was monitored by whichever crew members happened to be awake. That was
when I got my first shock. The bridge was unoccupied.
That was not supposed to happen. The ship's systems were supposed to keep a small number of crew awake and on duty at all times, normally about half a dozen of us were up
at any time. This not only kept the sleep periods short (we were skeptical of anything over a year even though the system, as we understood it, could theoretically
keep people in hibernation for extremely long periods.) but allowed a crew to be available for any emergencies requiring human intervention. The crew also
sent messages back home detailing our progress. Normally the system that controlled the hibernation process would wake a crew member up and somehow,
by means we did not completely understand, program him to go back to sleep about 30-40 days later. I had been up five times before, and there had always been
several other crew members about.
I stood there for a few minutes, finishing my coffee, then headed back to the sleep chamber I had just left. It was as I had left it, only my pod was open, the other
twenty-nine occupants remained asleep. There were forty-four more rooms like this one, each with thirty occupants, over thirteen hundred people sleeping away the
thirty-seven year trip. Asleep, one aged only a few days per year, and even awake the aging process progressed somewhat slowly for a month or so after awakening. Thus we
could make the nearly forty year trip while only aging a few years.
I should inspect the other rooms, but that was going to take a while. In past awakenings there were always crew members present. It was a strange feeling, and a little
unsettling. I continued my tour on one of the small electric vehicles we used for moving throughout the great ship, checking the storage rooms full of food, the stocks
of frozen plant and animal genetic material to be used in colonizing a new planet. There were the hangars for the shuttles to be used for exploring prospective planets.
Other rooms contained various supplies and equipment, but I was the only thing moving on the ship. I decided to go back to the bridge and see what the computers had to
say about it. As I entered the room I was aware of another human presence before I saw him. Glenn Miller (formerly Captain Glenn Miller, USAF) stood at one of the computer
consoles, sipping coffee and looking at the screen just as I had a few hours earlier. Miller was the only person on the ship I knew well, and although we had been
friends for a number of years, encountering him this way was something of a surprise.