GENERATIONS
GENERATIONS
There is an old and stupid law of matter that says nothing is ever created or destroyed; it can only be changed. It can grow. It can adapt. It can mutate, shrink, or lie dormant for a time, and it can splinter into billions of little pieces, but it will never go away, not totally. And there is an even older and much stupider law of men that says the same is true of conflict. It seemingly has always been and seemingly will never go away. It may change forms, grow or shrink, lie quiet for a time, or (worst of all) explode into a billion little grudges, but it will never go away for good...
Earth 2 was found purely by accident.
EBLM J0555-57Ab was a red dwarf no larger than Saturn, so faint and so ordinary that three separate surveys had logged it and moved on before anyone thought to look closely at what orbited it. The planet in question sat so near its little sun, long range telescopes never noticed it.
It had an atmosphere, and a sky that shone with a permanently tangerine hue, a sunset that never ended. Were there downsides? Sure. A year lasted only two and a half days, give or take, which means colonists would have to readjust how they tracked time, otherwise they'd have little babies turning 2,000 years old before they hit puberty. And then there was the star. UV radiation was basically non-existent, but the real problem were the solar flares, irregular and devastating. One flare was enough to microwave your insides. Then again, solar shields had been a thing on Earth 1 for decades, and were primarily responsible for ending the Global Warming threat.
Was it perfect? No, but other than Earth 1, no planet was. Earth 2 was close enough. Grass could grow there, water could flow there, future generations could live there. Once word got out, the race was on. A coalition of eastern nations began building a near-FTL ship big enough to hold thousands, capable of reaching the new world. A coalition of western nations did the same. Good thing the two sides remembered how much they hated each other or they might've worked together and gotten the work done twice as fast.
It should be said, in fairness to humanity, that the hatred that drove the two sides was old and mostly inherited, the kind kept alive not so much out of conviction but national habit. A war not long ago had come and gone, leaving both sides relatively isolated and quiet... plotting who knows what. In the meantime, they worked on their ships, hoping to be the first to launch, the first to land, and the first to plant their flag on a new Earth.
The western ship was The Meridian, a jewel of human engineering and built in full view of the public. Western idealism demanded public accountability, but all that did was expose them to eastern saboteurs. The Meridian burned in dry-dock four weeks before her maiden flight. Her drive assembly had been gutted by a device small enough to fit inside a coffee cup, killing men and women who'd spent a decade working tirelessly, caring nothing for the grudges and wars of their military financiers. In a blink, their lives and their work were up in smoke, leaving only the eastern ship (the Dawnbringer) nearly ready for launch.
Launch day in the east never came, however.
The west struck the eastern shipyards within a month of the Meridian's destruction. Both ships were left as ashes to the winds. The two sides now had nothing to show for their dreams of the future; their petty hatreds from the past had seen to that. Then, just as hope for Earth 2 seemed to slip away, word came that a third party had been quietly building a third ship in secret.
Smaller nations, the ones too proud or too poor to join the race, had pooled what resources they had and built a ship. All they lacked was a crew to fly it, something the eastern and western coalitions had while lacking a ship to fly. A bargain was struck: A third from the east, and a third from the west, joining the best third that the ship-builders could provide. Both sides, east and west, accepted the offer, publicly they promised a truce. Privately, they plotted a takeover, eager to plant their own flag, not only on foreign soil, but through a foreign corpse.
They called the ship "Generations."
A crew of mismatched travelers, rivals, and enemies, joined families and explorers from across the world, selected by lottery, on a journey to a new planet, with the hope of a new beginning for all of them.
The five-century-long journey required cryo-sleep: A needle-prick inside a pressurized chamber would be the last thing you felt before dozing. When you awakened, it would be in orbit around a new world.
Three-hundred years into the flight, however, the crew awakened early. Their ship was snagged by a gravity net and pulled toward a space city in orbit around a faraway moon orbiting a faraway gas giant.
They had been intercepted by a people who had left Earth a century after the ship's own launch and arrived at this crossing centuries ahead of her, riding engines her own builders had never lived to imagine. These successors had watched her creep across the dark for decades but chose not to interfere in their voyage. They broke that law now only because the news demanded it: Two other ships, also coming from Earth 1 had launched only a decade after Generations took flight. The Meridian II and the Dawnbringer II, powered by newer engines, were racing for Earth 2, and had recently passed.
It was a curiosity of time dilation when moving near the speed of light: The space city, though it launched centuries after Meridian II and Dawnbringer II, arrived at its point in space first, built a life for itself, and watched as its ancestors slowly approached, greeted them warmly, then watched them leave for Earth 2 still carrying the same hostile thoughts and grudges that the space city's inhabitants had long-ago abandoned.
Fearing the worst, they stopped the Generations to warn her away from landing on Earth 2, fearful that the world they might encounter would be too much like the world they left.
Some who heard this desired to stay behind, to live among the star-farers who'd caught them, rather than gamble their lives on Earth 2. They were denied, however. Those of the city had grown too far beyond the prejudices and biases of these travelers. The city was a temporary reprieve, nothing more. Generations was given an updated star chart, with several potentially habitable planets marked, and with enough fuel for the rest of their voyage, plus fuel to spare. They were warned, however, not to bother with Earth 1; there wasn't a world there to go back to. As for the city, they made it clear: "You are not to return," the crew was told.
Two hundred years later, Generations arrived at Earth 2, finding the world hauntingly quiet. There were satellites orbiting, but no radio transmissions, no chatter, no welcome from those who'd left Earth 1 after but arrived at Earth 2 before.
Down they went, breaking through the atmosphere, into the tangerine sky. A beach was their landing, near gentle waves of the sun-pulled tides. The crew remained in the ship for another three days, experiencing a full "year" while their instruments confirmed a breathable atmosphere. Once the coast was clear, the hatch was released, and a landing party was sent to investigate.
They returned half a day later, wide-eyed and stammering.
The world was black in places that should have been green and glassy in places that should have been black. The terrain was scarred in patterns far too straight and man-made to be the work of weather or time. There were no cities, only the remnants of cities, decayed and overgrown by wild foliage, residing on the outskirts of what once had been a beautiful metropolis, before it had turned to cinder and rained snow in a nuclear winter.
Days---years on this world---followed, with a crew in denial, in anger, in depression, before finally being stirred to action... but to what action? What was there to do? Earth 2 was dead. Earth 1, by now, was even deader.
The crew, what remained of them, returned to their ship, hopelessly aimless. Their star charts showed seven possible planets, each habitable, each potentially ready to be explored. Could any of them have been places of refuge from those of Earth 2, seeking to escape the fate that befell them, as it befell Earth 1?
They settled on a star, and the distant point of life that orbited it, and took their chances.
In the last moments before their departure, two families fell into an argument over nothing important. Other bickering broke out over ration allotments, cryo-sleep waking schedules, and whatever else they could fight over. They were simple disputes, but the kind that would become grudges, then a feud, then war.
Soon, Generations' engines came online, and the ship rocketed into the dark, star-spangled abyss, carrying its sleeping passengers with it, along with all their arguments and reasons to fight. Off they went, down the same proverbial road as those who journeyed before them, carrying the same seeds of destruction others had sown and reaped as well.
THE END