The Away Team

The USS Plymouth had finished construction in a lonely starbase that orbited the surface of Mars. The crew, largely scientists, would be anything but lonely among the tens of thousands of others who would call the Plymouth their new indefinite home. It was captained by an advanced AI, one set on course for a mission with no intended end date. For the foreseeable future, the Plymouth would enter slipstream at the edge of a galaxy, blink in seconds to an unexplored one, then spend the next few days recharging the slipspace drive with local solar energy while scanning and sending out away teams to local planets. The plan, simple yet daunting. To explore the cosmos, to settle the unsettled, to do what little they could to tame the jaws of infinity that lay just outside of the atmosphere of a long-overstrained home planet. The crew had everything it could need. Terraformers, doctors, linguists, technicians, survivalists, mathematicians, diplomats, engineers, carpenters, and a single horrifically overworked bartender.

It had been both easy and shockingly difficult to sell the concept of manning the ship to those who had wound up occupying it. Conditions while aboard would be less than stellar. Every walk-in closet and extra personal restroom would only add to the city-sized spreadsheet of engine calculations that would need to be done. It was essentially a life-long post, there would be no shuttle back for decades if ever. However, it promised the expansion and betterment of man. Life as a colonist would be hard, but as the colony grew, the position of original settler would promise no end of luxuries and privileges. It was the kind of job for people with nothing to lose. Scientists mastering in fields previously locked away behind corporate greed, doctors sick of treating the symptoms of a polluted world, a bartender not told he would be the only one aboard.

Fortunately, the conditions of an ailing home planet and the stratification of a privately terraformed and colonized Mars made there no shortage of people with nothing to lose. The ship could establish a colony of 50 several thousand times over, a colony of 500 several hundred. Both magic numbers to ensure the colony in isolation didn't eventually inbreed into a new species. And sharing a ship with thousands of like-minded individuals meant that running out of colonists was only a danger should they find several dozen promising planets in a row. Of course, no situation went unaccounted for. Just as the ship had been segmented so that a breach in the hull of one deck could be isolated, much to the dismay of those on it, to save the other decks at the cost of those sealed within. The ship's AI was prepared to dictate breeding programs. Both were unspoken but understood realities of it, a little autonomy sacrificed for the greater good.

There had been no grim thoughts of those kinds when the Plymouth had been christened and pulled out of the dock in a slow burn. The civilization of people sealed comfortably within felt the first telltale lurch of being unable to turn back, the settle in of artificial gravity and the perpetual inertia of the rest of their lives underway. Some celebrated, some lamented as the true weight of their new responsibility kicked in.

A day after leaving the dock, the Plymouth blinked out of the local cluster, leaving a smoggy Earth and a chrome-plated Mars behind forever. Impercievably, the balance of power in the universe shifted irrevocably. Reality shuddered, snapping into place in the new line it would now occupy forever. Perceivably, the bartender cursed under his breath for the second day in a row as he worked long into the night.