It took another year for all of the fuel shipments to arrive, and by that time all of the crew were fully trained for their roles. There were now two captains, as another member of the Colonization Group had completed his Captain training and come onboard. Theodoros had decided to join in as a captain as well, but he hadn’t yet finished the Life Support branch of the training so he couldn’t actually be assigned to Captain duties. It shouldn’t take him more than a few years to finish his basic training, though.
The ship had finished its upgrades a few months ago. Four 500 meter long engines had been attached to the outside of the ship, each attached at ninety degrees from each other around the 100 meter diameter of the ship. In between the engines were the fuel tanks, 300 megatons of raw liquid hydrogen from Jupiter, hauled to Luna 100 kilotons at a time with a fleet of tankers. The engines were fusion based, compressing a string of hydrogen at millions of degrees down their length so that it would come out the rear of the ship at over fifteen thousand kilometers per second. All of the extra tanks and engines made the ship far larger than it originally was, the ship now being over three kilometers across instead of the original one hundred meters and looking more like a pizza than a sausage, but over time the tanks would be emptied, then removed and recycled back into the metal they were made of.
The ship itself was a non-rotating outer level which contained an inner 75 meter diameter section which rotated about four and a half times per minute, keeping a force of one standard Earth gravity on the outside ring of the interior. The interior, however, had ten three meter tall levels, each one decreasing the gravity by around eight percent until one got to the innermost level of the ship where the gravity was only 28% of normal. That layer was used for hydroponics, as plants didn’t need much gravity to grow properly. Down the center of the ship ran a series of LED bulbs that reproduced the parts of the sun’s spectrum that the plants most needed, and the area had higher than normal carbon dioxide levels, as that meant that the plants could grow faster.
The layer below that was mostly factories. After all, while humans needed to oversee them, most factories functioned automatically, with humans only being needed to fix the issues that arose. And with a gravity comparable to Mars, many of the crew were already comfortable at that level.
The rest of the ship was a mixture of all of the different offices and facilities that were necessary to run a ship of twenty thousand people. There were everything from stores to restaurants to office buildings. Most of the housing was on levels nine and ten, those being the two outermost levels and therefore the ones with the most similar gravity to Earth. Even if they had moved away from Earth, most humans still liked living at Earth-like gravity levels, and most ships functioned at that level out of habit. The fact that about half the crew came from Earth certainly helped with that.
The outer shell of the ship was mostly storage, both in spare materials for the factories and in people. A frozen person only took up around two cubic meters of space, so the ship had taken on a group of almost two hundred thousand people over the last year, all of them having their neural pattern stored both in their pod and in the ship’s computer. Around one hundred and sixty thousand of those people were refugees, having fled Earth because of political reasons, and seeking refuge in another star system. They had paid one thousand credits each, about what a starting position paid in one year, to be frozen and loaded onboard, earning the colony a mere one hundred and sixty million credits, but the funds had helped. They would be traveling as passengers. They would have no responsibilities onboard, and would simply wait out the journey on ice, only being woken up if an emergency occurred in which the ship needed their help. Anything which risked their life would be better handled with them being frozen, as that made them easier to move as well as made surgery and cloned replacement tissue easier to deal with. Not to mention that they wouldn’t have to experience pain that way, as they would technically be dead.
As Johanes had been the Captain for most of the ship’s preparations, he had been given temporary command for the launch. In order to get up to their maximum speed of 10% of the speed of light they would be accelerating at 1% of Earth’s gravity for almost ten years. At the end of the burn all of the empty external fuel tanks would be brought in for recycling and the ship would only be around 350 meters across, small enough that the forward shielding could cover it. In fact, all empty tanks would be moved forward until they could be recycled in order to help shield the rest of the tanks from impact.
The ship had already left orbit of Luna, as the burn took too long to function as the kind of cinematic moment they wanted. They were currently drifting out of the system, out of the disk of the solar system. The Trappist System, after all, wasn’t in that plane.
When the time came the captain opened a broadcast to Earth, Luna, Mars, Ceres, and Ganymede, the main world of the Jovian system. They had notified the news crews ahead of time, and many news groups on each of those worlds were listening on the designated frequency for his speech. “Today, on the seventeenth of July, 2268, the ship Trappist Traveler will begin its journey to the Trappist one star system. This will be the furthest that humans have ever traveled from the world of their origin, but it must be done, because humanity needs to know what is out there.
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The system we head for is an anomaly, one of the coolest stars in the galaxy but with many worlds which might bear life, or might have at one point done so, as Mars once did. This trip will take us around four hundred and fifteen years, and it will take us several more years before we have built a transmitter powerful enough to send messages to of receive messages from Earth. But we will be building such a device, and using it we will send out all of the data we collect about the structure of that system and it worlds. You won’t receive the signal until some time in 2723 at the earliest, but at that time humanity will have the answers to this mystery, and hopefully those clues will help it answer some mysteries of its own.
But we won’t just be conducting a survey of the system and leaving, like most science ships which carry people. We will be building a civilization, a forward base for humanity so that when the main wave of expansion reaches that point, perhaps some time in the early third millennium, there will be people out there to greet you, people with whom you can trade. An established society which can provide humanity everything they need to travel even further in search of even more answers to even more mysteries.”
With that he closed the channel. Many people tried to contact the ship, from the hundreds of news agencies wanting to ask questions to the millions of fans wanting to wish them well. He ignored them. The ship’s computer would record them all, of course, but they could be dealt with over the journey out of the system. For now, he had the ship angled to just off the location of the Trappist One star system, to where it would be in four hundred and fifteen years, and ordered the engines ignited. It took a few seconds for the superconducting magnets in the engines to properly condense and heat the small amount of hydrogen that was being fed to them, but soon the engine temperature started to increase and rapidly climb into the millions of degree range. They were off.
Ships could still intercept them, of course. At their rate of acceleration almost any ship that was currently available on the market could plot an intercept course and meet them. It was unlikely that any would, though. None had any reason to do so. All of the passengers were loaded, as was all of the cargo. All relationship and family issues had been settled so that no one now had any stronger ties with the worlds of the Solar System than a simple video call might be needed for. And soon, even those video calls wouldn’t even be possible, as they would be too far away from any inhabited world to have anything more than greatly delayed messages sent back and forth. Even now, it took several minutes for the messages to travel each way.
There was no reason to wait on the bridge now. This maneuver would take years, after all. The crew would be left on the bridge, however, just in case something came up, being swapped out for another crew every eight hours until the maneuver was over. The bridge would then lie dormant except for a few course corrections for the next four hundred years, until they needed to return and start the deceleration burn.
There were better ways to get up to speed than burning fuel, like solar sails or surfing the solar wind. The problem was that they required large amounts of hardware and provided very little thrust. To get a ship as heavy as this one up to even a small fraction of the speed of light using those methods would have required arrays of solar cells or magnetic fields hundreds of kilometers across. And they couldn’t be certain that the system they were arriving at had the characteristics they needed to use them, nor would any solar winds have been mapped out. That meant that either they would have to send out an advanced ship to map these, which kind of defeated the purpose of going there and still wasn’t a guarantee that they could stop, or get there through traditional means. Such means would also cost as much or more than the fuel and extra tanks, so when the ship was on a budget they weren’t that attractive.
Johanes returned to his office. While second Captain Yahya Wlodek was now officially in charge, the press would be expecting him to respond to their messages. And those questions would likely continue for several weeks if not months, until interest in the ship and its mission died down.
They reached the Kuiper belt one hundred and ten days later and were through it thirty three days after that. They, of course, scanned everything they passed with enough resolution that they were barely able to keep up and send that information back to their sponsors. Some of the objects they passed contained large amounts of fairly rare materials, and even more had large amounts of fissile elements. There was no doubt in either captain’s mind that soon after they left colonists would follow their course in order to claim those valuable rocks for themselves. The crew of the Trappist Traveler didn’t care, though. They could do nothing with the asteroids, and, with thousands of kilometers separating even the closest ones, they weren’t a threat to the ship.
At a distance of about point one light years, only four years and five months into the journey, the signal from the solar system became too weak for full quality data transmissions and they had to start decreasing the quality. The signal was just too weak for the equipment onboard to pick it up reliably, so some of the bandwidth had to be used for error correction, and that fraction steadily increased until at less that half a lightyear away, near the end of the initial burn, the signal had to be cut out completely. From that point forward all scientific data they gathered would be saved to the ship’s computer and transmitted once the Mega transceiver had been built in their target star system.
By that point they had found it necessary to activate parts of the ship that were meant more for colonial operation than for shipboard operations; nurseries, natal and pre-natal medical facilities, and early childhood schools. Few people had brought children onboard with them, as that would require them to have full custody of the child with no possibility of the other parent(s) getting even partial custody in the future, or bringing all parents onboard, but after the launch many of the crew had chosen to start families. It had been assumed that the nearly universal use of long term birth control by the crew would delay that, that only a few children would be born during the journey. But now the ship had over a thousand children under ten years old and that number was rapidly increasing with every year that passed. And according to the ship’s charter, they could make no rules limiting the reproductive rights of the crew.
Johanes had thought about having a child of his own, of course, but he decided against it. Even if he could find a willing woman, any relationship would compromise his objectivity. He couldn’t risk showing favoritism to one of the crew, and so he must remain single, content with only the occasional fling, usually in VR, where you never knew what the other person looked like or even if they were the type you were interested in. You only knew their avatar, and that was enough for the occasional rendezvous.