Credit: Jamie Tufrey
After a moment they were where they wanted to be, shooting out of a wormhole 40 light-years from Earth, the Stork firing squirts of nanocarbon in braking bursts, mass decreasing alarmingly (though not as rapidly as Callisa's pieces on the chessboard) as it used up its own matter to fuel the nano-squirts. Eight tonnes down to 6.5.
"The Regent System," the Stork announced. "Twelve planets, mostly gas giants, and one rocky body, Earth-like and ready to take those embryos. Hmm, that's odd."
The Stork went silent, the virtual chessboard disappeared.
"Stork," Callisa said, "What's wrong?"
"The Regency Darling isn't responding to my signals."
She had studied the Regency Darling, and was as familiar with its structural peculiarities as with her own Stork's. It looked like a dumbbell, two spheres linked by a long cylinder. Both spheres generated the arc of a magnetospheric plasma sail. The bulk of the ship contained the helium used to feed the sail.
The process was simple: the Regency Darling blew a big bubble of magnetically charged plasma, and solar winds drove it on, accelerating the ship slowly but steadily out of the system.
When the Regency reached its destination, it blew another bubble and this system's solar winds slowed her. Elegant as sailing ships, but none of that messing about in the rigging. It also burned through less matter than the Stork's propulsion system, even if it wasn't as precise in its steering.
Its crew had done the hard yards. Callisa and the Stork had merely swung in on its coat-tails. Travelling in space is dangerous. The constant streams of radiation, the dangers of striking particles at speeds close to light, their mass immensely multiplied by velocity. Wormhole travel was dangerous, but regular space travel was akin to travelling down the wrong side of the highway late at night with the lights off while wearing a blindfold.
The odds of dying were high; almost 30 per cent of those who travelled out of system perished. But the wormholes were small, you couldn't run a ship through them any larger than a Stork, which meant that most of the crew and matter needed for colonisation, including the other end of the wormhole, had to be carried at a quarter of light speed by the colony ship, hoping nothing lethal was in its way.
The colony ship was whole, but everything on it, Callisa saw now, was dead, even the ship's AI – self-terminated, the Stork told her, after searching the AI's data-necrosphere.
Why? How? Tragically bad timing, that was all. The magfield had ruptured, nothing fatal and easily repaired. But one of the benefits of magfields is the protection they offer from radiation. The Regency Darling was opened to any stray burst of lethal radiation. Before the AI could generate another field, the Regency Darling had encountered a fatal gamma ray burst, or some other deadly remnant of a star's demise.
Just bad luck, but deadly. There were no redundant systems in play, no back-up storm shelters, and the attempt to construct one had come too late. Within days the crew was gone, the ship silent. The Regency Darling's AI had survived that silence for a dozen years, getting the ship into the system and orbit, but finally burned out its circuits in its grief.
Callisa walked through a crypt. Dead children were wrapped in their parents' arms. She knew what she must do.
She was a midwife, she had a delivery to make.
"Can we do this?" she asked the Stork. "I'm a midwife, not a mother."
"I'm a Stork, not a colony AI."
"At least we're not alone in all of this."
The Stork uploaded a copy of itself into the ship, which decided within microseconds on the name Regency Stork. The Regency Stork contained 580 droids, everything from wall cleaners to external structural scuttlers.
All the tech that had been devoted to building a world was now turned to raising its population. The embryos were defrosted, enwombed, and umbilicated. Callisa spent the nine-month gestation getting ready. Then came the hard part.
