Darwin, Part 2

[herewiss13]

From last time: "The reason for this failure was simple. By that point in time, the 'Appleseed' was only nominally located within the same spiral arm.


2.

Not long after achieving its cruising velocity of .3c, the 'Appleseed' encountered an extremely unusual, and almost certainly artificial, object on an intersecting course at right angles to their own. Extremely large, shaped like a constantly twisting torus, and apparently heavy enough to blow out every Forward Mass Detector aimed at it from the Astro lab, it had been sighted by side-scan sensors only hours before the collision; far too little time for the unwieldy vessel to avoid it. At 1700 hours on November 13, 2279 (ship time), the enormous ring-like object passed around the 'Appleseed' and bent space in such a way as to send the ship into a closed timelike loop, catapulting it millennia into the past and hence thousands of lightyears off course. After accomplishing this task, the object sailed on and vanished from sight before the first BeeGee scouts arrived several decades later.

The passage through the artifact was rough, to say the least. Though the ring had seemed no more than a few hundred yards wide, strange relativistic effects telescoped the transit time into hours. Constantly shifting tidal forces pulled and twisted at structures throughout the interior while threatening to crack the rocky hull around it. The milky, luminous halo surrounding the ring (which had allowed them to spot it in the first place) turned out to be a thick, roiling nimbus of interstellar gas and dust swept up by the object's passage. Violently energized plasma discharges, like small stellar eruptions, lashed out from the cloud to scourge the surface of the vessel like a fiery flail. The rocky hull was scoured clear of sensors and antennae and scored with deep gouges littered with scorched and molten stone.

One of the first strikes obliterated the ship's main observatory, one of the few inhabited structures on the ship's surface. It also wiped out the entire faculty of the onboard University's Astrophysics department, which had flocked to the dome en masse as soon as the torus had been detected.

Another flare ripped through the doors of the main hanger bay, which had contained shuttles and mining craft, stowed carefully for the far-off arrival. This would prove to be even more disastrous than the loss of the ship's entire compliment of star-gazers.

After hours within this maelstrom, the 'Appleseed' was spat out, limping and broken, only to find herself in geosynchronous orbit around an M class planet! Among the other mysteries it left behind, the artifact had somehow subtracted the vessel's tremendous velocity and momentum, leaving her adrift and alone under foreign stars.

In her battered state, the ship would not sustain life for more than a week before catastrophic systems failure. She would have to be abandoned. Instead of a slow, orderly transition from ship to star system, the colonists found themselves in a frantic rush to evacuate. Their lifeboats were cheap, primitive re-entry vehicles stashed away against some incredibly unlikely Titanic Scenario. These now spilled out of the battered hulk like a cloud of smoke and drifted into the atmosphere toward a designated landing area. Most made it.

The colonists' descendants would call this the First Winnowing. Between lost lifeboats and the casualties of the Passage itself, almost 10% of the expedition was dead. Besides this, only a fraction of their industrial base had made the drop and only some of that equipment was salvageable. There would never be any return to space.


Timelost and marooned, it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.