Bellamy had made it to Jupiter and heard the transmission the station was broadcasting. He jumped a week before us to Epsilon Eridani. When we met up with him he wasn’t alone. A Coalition fleet, weakened, but largely intact, had randomly jumped here. Their commander demanded I turn over all Coalition ships which had joined us. I refused, I was going to need them for the trip. He invited our entire, I guess I’ll call it a task force for now, though its come to be known as The Fleet, to join him. He didn’t really want a fight. He was headed rimward, thinking that there might be less chance of running into an alien civilization that way. I decided to go the opposite direction. Aliens could mean help, though they might not, but I didn’t think we were likely to get out of this on our own. Not permanently. The Marauders could always search us out again. In addition, I didn’t want to run into his force years later, in case they had become desperate and more prone to aggression. We prepared for the first in a long series of jumps toward the core. Incidentally, the fleet we encountered at Epsilon Eridani seems to have survived. Current intelligence estimates support the theory that they later settled in the region which now is home to the Outsiders.
The Churchill and Captain Bellamy joined us here. He’d hidden from the Coalition force until we arrived and we were glad to have him and his ship along. The Churchill was the most modern warship in The Fleet.
We jumped twice more and then stopped to skim a gas giant to refuel the tankers. All of us captains met aboard a cargo ship named Jhonung to hold a discussion to hammer out details of our chain of command and such in the giant cargo hold. I think Dmitri Melnikov, the young captain who first brought the odd fleet movements to my attention, began calling our group The Fleet at this meeting. The name has endured for several centuries now. Dmitri died in a skirmish with Marauder patrols a decade later.
The crew of the Sagan told me something of interest. There were ruins of an ancient civilization on one of the Alliance colony worlds before the Alliance razed them and settled the planet. It made me think that alien civilizations might be common enough that we could find one if we looked long enough. I thought maybe we could even find friends and strike back at those who sterilized Earth.
We wandered for two hundred years. We read every book and piece of fiction in the ships collective memories, we played every game, we listened to every piece of music and we grew to know every other person. At the same time we were harassed by small patrols of Marauders and it was wearing us down. The excitement had long since faded and we needed to retain our will to go on. We instituted measures. We improvised our own instruments and performed for one another, we wrote our own fiction, we recorded our travels, we created sports designed to be played in ships and formed teams, we mixed crews up and trained in each others specialties. Even with all this I don't think it would have been enough if it wasn't for the knowledge that we were the future of the human race and it would die if we did.
Ruins of civilizations are much more common than living ones. We were heading coreward because I had decided that interstellar civilizations might be more common where stars are bunched up, and we kept running into ruins. It was hurting morale. People wondered if the Marauders had wiped out all of these, and if so was it possible for us to resist them? We searched ruins for anything that might help us but found nothing.
We eventually found New Canaan. Canaan was the land god promised to his people in the old testament. This is the derivation of the name. It looked like paradise after all the years of our wandering, but I wanted to press on to find something to make it possible to stop worrying about the Marauders once and for all. There was a group that wanted to settle the planet immediately. I said no, but everyone got a chance to head down to the surface for a day and samples of everything were returned to the Sagan for analysis. I figured we’d probably come back one day.
The Centaurs
We were in an empty system, not even any planets left around this dying star, when we received a message. There was a small ship. It had a single passenger with an astounding cargo. It looked like on of those old pictures of centaurs, if you crossed it with a dolphin. It was blue grey with smooth skin and two legs, two half leg half arm appendages and two outright arms. Eventually we were able to communicate with it. It had an advanced translation program. It told us it was on a quest. It had come from an advanced civilization as they had been under siege by a powerful aggressor, which he identified as being the same as the Marauders we had seen.
The Centaurs, as we came to call them, had built hundreds of these "seedships" and sent them fleeing out into the galaxy. Each carried enough genetic material, and accompanying technology to restart the species once a safe place could be found. This one had been travelling away from his now sterile home for thousands of years, using coldsleep to stretch his life. He saw that we had a similar situation and asked to come with us. He was the loneliest and most tired being I've ever met. He was relieved to find us I think though, because if he died we could carry on his duty for him, and I swore I would.
His species must have been amazing tool users. They're appendages and fingers are so well developed for precision work that it makes me feel a bit clumsy. They use a form of sign language to communicate and its amazingly rapid, almost as if his hands were dancing.
We told him we were looking to find alien civilizations, and to warn them of what was out there, and maybe even find a way to fight back. We told him we eventually hoped to find a world to settle on and rebuild our race. He instantly asked to join us. He hoped, but wouldn’t tell us for a while, that we would allow him to settle a world with us. He had been searching for a very long time and after meeting us he immediately began growing a replacement for himself, he felt his duty was nearly at an end and he could finally die.
We learned from him. We weren’t sure it was actually a him at first of course, Centaurs have three distinct sexes, two of which can be considered male in that they contribute genetic material without actually giving birth. We didn’t know enough about him to ask, until our journey was nearly over. He gave us efficient electromagnetic field technology that made refueling by skimming atmospheres much easier. His drive was also more efficient, but we needed facilities beyond those at hand to duplicate it.
The Relic
We arrived in a system with a single inhabited world. On it lived a primitive species possessing intelligence. We went into orbit around the third planet. This one was covered in ruins, just as the belt and moons had been. As soon as our orbit stabilized we received a transmission. It was coordinates, explained mathematically, without language, and they were for a point amid the asteroids. We moved to the location. The asteroid had been modified. It had a sophisticated translator and learned our language quickly from transmissions. It assumed we were the “brothers” of the race which had built it, and had built all the rest of the ruins throughout the system. It thought we were the intelligent primitive creatures from the second planet come to claim our birthright as descendants of the same solar system that spawned this earlier civilization.
It told us that life evolved on the third planet and that a piece of rock blown free of the gravitation pull of the third had landed on the second and brought life to this neighboring planet. It gave the secret of the Alderson drive and then listed coordinates for the twenty nearest star systems, which they believed would have intelligent life during the epoch of civilization on the second planet. Some were marked in an odd way. The second planets coordinates were not so marked. We found Earths location on that chart and it bore the marking. The asteroid gave languages for some of the locations.
I quickly took a look at the second planet and saw that it had no advanced civilization and concluded that since Earth was advanced and its star was marked oddly and this primitive planets was not that this was a sign of advanced civilization.
We jumped to the nearest marked star that we had a language for. A spherical ship a half kilometer in diameter pulled alongside us, matching vector and velocity in seconds with no visible means of propulsion. It fired a single beam of energy behind us and maintained it until we were able to jump out of the system several days later. The beam was powerful enough to melt any of The Fleets ships in a matter of seconds. They didn’t like trespassers and they weren’t exactly friendly, but they didn’t shoot trespassers on sight. The whole system was developed beyond belief. They were technologically advanced, but I got to thinking maybe the symbol meant potentially hostile, or dangerous.
We jumped to the next system we had a language for, which was also oddly marked. I had decided to try once more. It was a large star with a large gas giant and a huge moon and that was the center of civilization. We were almost immediately passed while leaving the jump point by forty or fifty small warships headed out of the system. A large ship left the moons orbit and came to meet us. They language we had was partially correct. It appeared as if the current language was based upon that old one.
After the linguistic problems were solved we learned that these “Kentaurans,” once possessed eleven worlds, but their civilization fell long ago and they have now risen again to try to unify what was once theirs once more.
We were escorted to the planet and met with the Military-Political authorities.
Main
Modern day (not yet up)