Credit: Jamie Tufrey
Callisa faintly felt the Stork being slingshot from the Adelaide. Numbers spilled from the Stork's icon, describing all the things that the g-forces were doing to her body. She blinked them off. The system would let her know if there was a problem.
When she was done, the Stork's icon expanded. A generic AI avatar, a man in a bowler, bowed. "Welcome, Callisa," the Stork said warmly. "I have downloaded your files, and I see that you like chess."
Callisa grinned. "Is that a challenge?" A virtual chessboard appeared. "Go easy on me," she said. "I like chess, but it doesn't mean I'm good."
"Well, I am very good, but I am also in charge of eight tonnes of spaceship. My concentration is somewhat fractured."
Obviously not enough. The Stork beat her 14 times. The 15th game was a stalemate. The 16th she won.
Callisa didn't know how to give up. She had graduated at the top of her class, then gone on to blitz her extrasolar studies. All her life had been devoted to getting here: to getting on a Stork, the ultimate piloting gig.
She had let lovers and family slide to become a midwife – what an antiquated term, there was pretty much a 50-50 split, male/female, for the job – the human face of the embryocolonisation of the galaxy.
As they played chess, the ship hurtled from the wombstation, toward the Gate. The Gate was a tangle of wormholes, open mouths leading to the 400 terraformed worlds (402, the Stork updated her). Huge sub-light generation ships had trailed the wormholes behind them like silk. In another few decades some of those ships would be back, creating, on the other edge of the Solar System, another gate. Then interstellar travel would become a lot quicker. But that wasn't the way of it now.
Colonisation was a four-step process. First the worlds were found, then terraformed, a process taking decades in some cases. When the wormhole carrier ship reached its destination, the colony ships were sent out. On their arrival the first Stork was sent along the wormhole. Seventeen years later, the second Stork followed. Callisa's Stork was the first one for the Regent System, the 700th Stork launched.
Days passed, and weeks, radio frequencies buzzing with gate-bound craft, Storks and other ships, all on the one-way trips.
Stork 1787b's engines fired, launching bursts of nanoparticles into space – precise squirts of intricately shaped matter that shifted the Stork this way and that, so that it struck the Gate at exactly the right point.
Travelling through wormholes was both an exact and inexact science. The maths was gruesomely complicated, fooling the universe as to the ship's length, or more specifically the distance between two points of its length, as well as its mass.
Even so, the Storks were at the upper limit, in size and mass, for wormhole travel. Strike the target wormhole mouth at the wrong speed and the wrong angle and you could end up light-years off target, or, most likely, torn into a spiralling trail of exotic particles.
The Stork hit it perfectly.
Things only started to go wrong afterwards.
