Chapter 1: Disaster

"All hands, prepare for—!"

BAM! The hull of the Envoy rattled as the starship bounced off a chunk of asteroid and careened off into deep space.

"Never mind," Captain John Roland sighed. Today was not going entirely to plan.

***

It had seemed so simple, riding the tremendous elevator up to the ship’s airlock a few hours earlier.

“There she is, Captain. Isn’t she beautiful?”

The Envoy stretched upwards, forty meters of chrome and gold.

“I designed her, you know,” said the loud, obnoxious man on the captain’s left, “she’s perfect. The epitome of luxury. Chandeliers, marble countertops, I even put in a hot tub. I think you’ll be very impressed with your room as well.”

The captain grunted noncommittally, and the elevator rose on, carrying the forty men and women who would call that ship home for the next two years. Or, ten years; time dilation was a confusing concept. At any rate, it was a perfect ship to greet the beings at Proxima Centauri: sleek, stylish, and shiny. Everything a human would want to show off. It was classically rocket shaped, there’s no better way to put it. A cylinder, tapering toward the top, resting on four large fins.

“It’s amazing,” said the ship’s doctor.

“It’s beautiful,” said the ship’s cook.

“It’s distressingly phallic,” said the ship’s janitor.

The remainder of the ride went on in silence.

***

"Captain, what now?" called Commander Vic Majors from the pilot's seat, "She's not responding to any of my commands!"

"Keep trying. I'm going to go figure out what the Hell just happened," Roland said as he leaped out of the captain's seat. He arced across the bridge, pushed himself off the ceiling, landed gracefully on the massive circular staircase in the middle of the floor, and, after realizing it he couldn't walk down stairs very effectively without gravity, flipped over and proceeded to pull himself down by his hands.

The second deck held the Envoy’s lounge, dining area, and medical bay. There was about enough room for twenty people to sit comfortably, and exactly enough room for thirty-one people to flail about helplessly and shout while they bounced against the walls. Roland surveyed the madness, and decided he needed to get control of the crowd.

"Everybody," his voice cut through the cacophony, "We've had a minor technical malfunction. We're looking into getting it under control."

"What did you do to my ship?" yelled Stephen Richardson from somewhere in the mass of humanity. Richardson wasn’t hard to spot; though a short man he was half again wider than anyone else there. He had no function as a crewmember, and drained their food reserved faster than anyone else, but he was the only member of the Extraterrestrial Contact Advisory Board who had volunteered for this mission, so he stayed. In his mind, Captain Roland defied the lack of gravity to stride over and slap the bureaucrat then watched and laughed as he spun around like an angry little moon.

“We’re trying to figure that out. Lopez!”

“Eh?” a head popped in from the dining room.

“Get to the engines and see about shutting them down.”

“Aye!” Jose Lopez pulled himself through the doorway, kicked off the wall, and sailed to the grand staircase, curving around the floating civilians, occasionally pulling them back to keep up his momentum. He pulled himself down the stairs that led through the bottom deck and to the engines with speed and grace; he was the most experienced spaceman on the ship.

“There’s going to be a tactical meeting in fifteen minutes right here!” the captain shouted to be heard through the wall of people, “If you’ve got something to tell me, stay behind. Everyone else head back to your bunks and wait there!” And with that, two dozen civilians who had never been in space before simultaneously spun in midair and tried to swim down a single stairway. Roland would have found it pretty hilarious if he weren’t so sure they were all about to die.

As it stands, he had only a mild chuckle.

***

Fifteen minutes later, nine of the ship’s forty crew remained in the Envoy’s Lounge.

“All right. Talk to me. Majors, you go first. What happened?”

The young pilot took a deep breath and mentally ran over what he had to say. “I used the positioning rockets to point us in the direction of Proxima Centauri, killed them, and started the main engine. We’re supposed to be accelerating steady at one G, but we’re going about twenty-five centimeters per second squared… barely anything. But the rate of acceleration is increasing.”

“Yes,” said Aaron Poppleton, the Czech physicist whose work let to the fusion mechanism in the Envoy’s engines, “We are beginning to move faster and faster. Gravity is caused by acceleration on this ship, it moves forward and we are pushed down. Within a day, we will be moving fast enough that fake gravity is same as Earth gravity. But it will not stop, we will keep moving more fast. I am thinking we will cap out at five times Earth gravity, but I am not sure yet. Even then, is enough to kill the older and more out of shape peoples. Our reactors will burn out at some point, but it will be years. By then, we will be moving almost speed of light, if we have not crashed into a sun.”

“Well, we can turn around the sun, yes?” asked Stephen Richardson.

“Not really,” said Majors, “I mean, the positioning rockets will alter our heading, but this is a constant acceleration ship. It’s supposed to be pointed in the right direction, accelerate halfway, turn around, and decelerate the rest of the way. Trying to turn us while we’re moving… especially at that speed… it’s just not going to work. We’re out of control.”

“I see,” said Roland, “is there something wrong with the engines?”

On the other side of the room Jose Lopez shook his head. The engineer’s assistant, Andrew Keyte, hurried to explain.

“It all seems to be in working order, sir. Near as we can figure it, the problem’s due to the computers. It’s a design flaw.”

“Now just one minute!” Dan Hansen squeaked, “There is no design flaw on this ship! I designed it myself; the Envoy is the greatest starship ever created.”

“He’s right!” Richardson’s already-red face had turned a deeper purple, “And the Extraterrestrial Contact Advisory Board went over everything in detail! It’s perfect!”

“Perfect? Then why is a major conduit running right under the bathroom?”

There was a long pause. Majors was the first to react.

“Eeeew!”

“Wait,” asked Roland, “Do you mean that…”

“Yeah,” Keyte said.

Roland took a deep breath. “Right. Well. That’s disgusting. But can it be fixed?”

“The leak, yes. Patched already. The mess, I’ll have Aram take a look at—”

“Gee thanks,” Aram was floating near the entrance to the dining room, a ways away from the other eight.

“Zlottowitz?” Captain Roland had been facing away from him, but turned around, “What are you doing up here? This is a tactical meeting! You’re a janitor!”

“I’m cleaning. There were eight people eating in there,” he jerked his thumb in the direction of the dining room, “and I don’t think you want to see the mess they made.”

“Ugh. Carry on then,” Roland turned back around, “Alright. Business. Let’s talk about getting the ship under control. Keyte?”

“Right, sir. I asked Mister Romano to speak with us…”

Jason Romano was one of Earth’s foremost computer technicians; he had a hand in programming the ship’s computer. He glanced at the crowd staring at him, and cleared his throat. “Um. Uh. As far as I can tell the, uh, the computer can’t be repaired. We’re pretty much, uh… doomed.”

Silence.

“Uh. Sorry,” he added.

More silence.

“I tried.”

“Why not?” demanded Roland.

“What? Oh! Oh, um, it’s a hardware problem. The conduit was damaged, sent a screwy signal to the engines, and when we hit the asteroid the link broke completely. I might be able to scrounge together something to get around that, but I’d have to connect it to the engines.”

“And the engines are hot,” Keyte continued, “too hot to get close to. Another design flaw.”

“Don’t you dare blame me for that!” shouted Hansen. “I didn’t make those things! I just make a workable ship around them!”

“And you didn’t put in a remote shutoff for them! You put in computer systems without backups! Your plumbing leaks! You designed a superb little shuttlecraft, but it doesn’t have half enough air to get one person back to Earth! Face it Daniel, this ship is a pretty, pretty piece of crap! Just like everything else your little pack of cronies came up with, Richardson!”

The little bureaucrat took an ineffective swing in Keyte’s direction, ending up spinning in place.

“He is right, you know.” Aaron Poppleton’s thick Slavic accent poured out like a river of mud. “I am physicist. I do not know politics, technology, sociology, anything like that, but even so is clear to me that the ETCAB is not wanting Earth to be better, just to look better for the creatures we are going to see. Ship is same way. Pretty first, useful second.”

Richardson was almost out of breath, “Do you want the Proximians to see a half-developed planet? Do we want to be the galactic equivalent of… of…?”

“Of the third world? Of one of those little countries that used to be in the USSR? I am a proud Czech, or I was. Now I am a Board-approved “citizen of Earth.” My country is now state of the thrown-together world government. My people now speak our language in our homes, and your language everywhere else. And then I see engines I helped create over last twenty years bolted to ship made in six months. It has been an interesting year, since SETI hears her little signal that we still have not deciphered. And it comes to this: I am out of control on spaceship, with no way to turn around, and you insult my homeland. You are lucky I am not quick to anger, Mister Richardson, or I would be also spinning in place like fat little top.”

“HA!” the janitor bounced over to the crowd, “I need to shake your hand for that one. Little man had it coming.”

“Zlottowitz,” Roland growled, “You don’t seem to be cleaning at all. Why are you still here?”

“Because this is so exciting, captain. Besides, I had an idea.”

“For what?”

“For how we escape.”

***

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Captain Rolland’s voice boomed throughout the ship, “It’s time to make a difficult decision. There is an opportunity to return home. The odds you will survive are slim, but the odds that you will survive if you stay on the ship are, at best, unknowable. Everyone who wants to take the risk, please report to the storage bay.”

Soon enough, there were forty people gathered in and around the storage bay, and Roland was carefully explaining the plan.

“We have, on this ship, a total of thirty-nine cryogenic pods. Three are in the medical bay, and the rest are here. They are currently holding perishable foods and other Earth goods for the Proximians, but they could hold a human body in a state of suspended animation, long enough to get back to Earth… if we fire them from the torpedo tube.”

There were gasps from the crowd. Most of the civilians weren’t even aware that the ship had weapons, but the ETCAB decided that it was better safe than sorry.

“Now. Let’s be perfectly clear, we can’t aim especially accurately. We estimate that a quarter of you will arrive safely at Earth, and you will be moving very slowly, so it will be years before you arrive. But then, you all signed up for a trip to Proxima Centauri so that shouldn’t be an issue. Finally, you’ll notice that the gravity is high enough that you can stand. Our acceleration is increasing. We have less than a day before torpedo is no longer a viable option. There are enough pods for everyone except one person to be sent out. Is there anyone who wishes to stay behind?”

Roland glanced at the assembled crowd. No one said anything. Majors stared at the ground. Hansen stared directly at him, with a hand on one of the pods, as if claiming it his own. Richardson was mostly hidden behind a group of philosophers, and Lopez and Keyte were busy detaching pods at one end of the room. Romano looked sick to his stomach, and Poppleton was as unreadable as ever. Aram Zlottowitz was leaning against the wall, looking rather pleased with himself. Captain John Roland of the starship Envoy came to a difficult decision.

“Very well then. I will go down with the ship. Now, everyone go to a pod; we have a lot of work to do.”