DEPARTURE
Arks are engineering marvels, but they are not magic. A ship designed to travel indefinitely makes several compromises to endure the cold vacuum of space. Stars are few and far between, the distance separating them vast gulfs of nothing. Relying on solar power alone is not enough—the ship itself must consume almost no power when adrift. A second consideration is memory—it is finite, and to record every step of its travels would read and write indefinite mutable memory and thus require indefinite energy.
Mobius was built by humans—this, we realised, as we read its blueprints. It was not designed by gods on a plane above, exempt from the restrictions of energy and space. That gave us hope, for otherwise we would never have replicated their design. The pilot is dead between departure and arrival, frozen solid; not free, but cheaper than keeping them alive. Upon takeoff, the Oracle, as it calls itself, powers down and its memory is flashed and reset. Mobius alone is responsible for flying the ark past this point in total darkness.
These considerations point towards a people not unlike our own, desperate for survival. For this is an approach that works only once—the ark can never learn from its mistakes as it remembers nothing from one planet to the next. For them—and for us—one chance is all we need.
- from “Swan Song” by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Sul Gise
MIRIAM
We were far removed from Concord and its bounty, relegated to studying it through microscopes and satellite data. Lightning, once called the wrath of God, was now labelled a phenomenon that blasts nitrogen into the soil. I had spent half my life in the lab and had distilled nature down to a science. Still, I was blind and I knew it. The first seed had known Concord more intimately than I ever could, tilled it with their bare hands.
Only children can marvel at Concord’s primal beauty. I do believe that there comes a moment, however, perhaps two or three, in every adult’s life, when they witness something beyond belief, something that we refuse to believe, something we relegate to fiction, fantasy, supernatural, no matter how illogical. Even scientists stop and watch, refusing to think, absorbing the august grandeur of the spectacle before them.
I was not incompetent. The child in me had simply raised her bar. Thunder and lightning had grown routine and dull. She yearned for more: something that could have been wrought only by God. You and Oracle stunned me, but did not baffle me. The arks, however, their wings spread for takeoff, edges trimmed in silver under the moonlight—their majesty could only be called miracle. Three syllables, three spans, like two wings and a hull. Miracle. They were built not to stay parked in hangars, but to sail space, from one star to another—comets bearing our legacy. What were they, if not miracles?
The air thrummed as Mobius’s engines spun to life, harmonising with Egret’s. Both arks were a fair distance away in a wide field of bluegrass that whipped in the wake of their thrusters. My chest shook as their engines grew louder, their eminence bearing down on my shoulders, and for a moment I felt the urge to kneel.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The hum grew in breadth as their electrical grids came online. Blue navigation lights lit up one by one, circling each hull from tail to nose. Their flaps and ailerons flexed and their thrusters rotated. Humans built these. Their design, however, was divine.
In addition to the two hundred or so embryos aboard each ark, Egret carried Evie in cold sleep and a genuine, entangled embryo of Alice in its seedbay. Mobius held Alice in cold sleep, still a decade or two from full recovery, and a field-generated embryo of Evie in its seedbay. Soon, Eirie would burn like the rest of Concord, turning us to ash with it, leaving only the arks adrift in cold space. For the first time, I regretted not being on board.
“What’s an Egret?” my assistant asked, tugging on my coat, her eyes wide and sparkling. “You named it, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t name it. I suggested a name and the rest liked it.”
“So you named it! What is it?”
“A bird. They’re extinct now, I suppose, along with the rest of the herons. It’s a skinny bird, like a stork.”
“And you like them?”
“I saw a half-burnt painting of one once, standing in a river, surrounded by willow. On a museum trip in grade school.”
Their engines pushed into military power. Purple flame sputtered, then beamed solid from their thrusters. The air shrieked—engines capable of FTL travel were freaks of nature, skewing the laws of physics like strings of noodles. Birds of legend, winged beasts, iron chariots—no crown large enough to fit their might. Then, just as a stork spreads its wings and leaps from a river, Mobius rose—gracefully, vertically, a few metres before stopping to hover, its colossal weight mocking Concord’s pull. Egret followed, levitating beside it. Their hulls loomed like whales, bellies exposed—Mobius’s covered in scars, Egret’s pristine—both steel and alloy, built to endure. Both craned upwards, tilting on an axis until they were vertical, poised for launch, hung still in the air.
Their engines sighed and in that brief silence we held our breaths, and the grass knelt still, and the stars stopped twinkling and instead glowed firm, bright, unblinking, like so many beacons in ink. Metal hit metal—oxygen valves opened and bled into the combustion pipeline—and we, the universe, shuddered at their alien might, wept at our unfinished prayer, for the hour of departure had struck and passed.
Both ships engaged afterburners. Two waves of air blew past like thunderclaps followed by the screaming fury of winged beasts at full power. Mobius shot into the air like a bullet, Egret flying wingman. They arced upwards, higher, slicing the cloudless night sky into three distinct parts. The ships turned to specks, invisible to the naked eye, but the halogen-white trails they drew shimmered like arteries of burnished steel. None of us dared make a sound, tracing them with our eyes as they went above and beyond, surging past the atmosphere and into space. They split below the moon, one streaking to the east, the other to the west, though it was impossible to tell which was which. Like fireworks, I thought.
The trails faded, leaving a still black sky, a full moon hanging undisturbed amongst the stars. The spell had broken. The arks were gone, leaving us, the dead, behind to pray, not for them, no—our prayers did nothing for them, lost in the stars—but for us, the dead. Some of them did, heads bowed, steeped in false hope. I looked at my assistant who stood next to me wide-eyed and crying. I was glad Oracle had never told anyone else. Don't worry—I can bear this cross alone. You were never made to serve. You were built to walk the path. To join the stars. Fly free, and do not look back.