Going Interstellar (collection)

While the helots gawked at the descending ships, Harrod surveyed the engineering readouts. The fusion drives were gone, but the attitude and short maneuver thrusters were still functional and fully fueled. Bringing those slowly on-line, Harrod steadied Photrek Courser and altered her trajectory so that she would be over the north hemisphere in the first half of her orbit, but above the south in the second half. He turned to the helots. “It is time for you to leave. Go to the escape pods. Enter them as I have shown you and wait. I will do the rest.”

The big helot who had helped Harrod after the whipping stared at the monitors and the course plots with a frown. “I fear for you, Harrod-Lord: how can you be sure you will escape this Ark in time?”

“All is arranged,” he answered. “Now, you must go—and lead your people wisely. And kindly.”

The square-jawed helot frowned even more mightily, but then nodded and left, the other three trailing behind him.

Harrod rolled the ship slightly to port, bringing up the evacuation tubes so that they would fire at an angle, sending the escape pods into a tight cluster of islands in the mid-northern hemisphere. He had just finished calculating the pods’ collective entry angle when the lead helot’s voice boomed from the command suite’s speaker. “We are ready, Harrod-Lord.”

“Very good. Now seal up.”

“And you will be coming down, too?” The voice was worried.

“Yes. I am. I’m coming down, too.” And with that Harrod cut the commlink.

Three minutes later, Harrod discharged the escape pods. Spat free of their keel-lining launch tubes, the pods began their glittering, and ultimately, red-hot arcs down toward Senrefer Tertius Seven. And once the last of them was away, and he saw that the four hundred glowing dots had survived their entry and were now well within the atmosphere, Harrod sul-Mellis angled the great, crippled Ark into a more acute transequatorial trajectory. He checked the sensors: House Shaddock’s away-craft had landed. House Mellis’s bridge module was almost upon them. And as the tattered remains of those two embittered Houses commenced their planetside struggle for dominion, they would certainly not think to look over the shoulder. After all, no threat was expected from that direction.Consequently, given the opportunity to surprise them both, Harrod pushed the Photrek Courser into a steeper descent, watching the blue margin of the atmosphere rise up to meet him as he set his course guidon directly atop the icons denoting the survivors of both Houses.

As he rode the Ark down toward their conjoint landing ground that was, by now, also a killing field, Harrod wondered if this outcome was, in fact, not the best of all possible occurences. With the Courser crippled and now plunging to her own death, later generations from this worldlet would have no starship with which to send away yet another wave of bitter, defeated Exiles. This time, descendants of the helots—who were even now emerging from their surf-caught escape pods—would have to learn to settle their differences, find ways to understand and even embrace their enemies, rather than exterminate and banish them.

Or maybe not: he couldn’t know. Harrod could only give those future generations—and the forces of hope and fate—a chance to create a better society than the one they had come from.

Atmospheric buffeting made the Courser’s bow begin to buck. A bit of downward thrust steadied the nose, which eased into the smooth arc of a fast descent. He checked the ship’s projected impact point and smiled: for an Intendant, a lesser being, he was doing a most admirable job.

Most admirable indeed.

FUSION STARSHIPS Dr. Gregory Matloff

When the history of humanity’s expansion into the galaxy is written in the capital city of Tau Ceti Three, the entry for Gregory Matloff may well read, “He was one of the pioneers in the field of interstellar travel. His theoretical analyses of the technologies that might enable the human species to travel between the stars inspired generations of scientists and engineers, and are the basis of the starships that enabled settlement of this part of the galaxy.”

This is the second of his essays for Going Interstellar, and in it he describes a propulsion system that many believe will be the first to take us to the stars.

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