Prologue
Gustav Mueller stood ramrod straight with his hands behind his back looking out the floor to ceiling observation window in his office. He had been working on this project his entire fifty eight year professional career and that didn't count the twenty two years it took to bring the asteroid to Lagrange Point 5, the stable gravitational point following the Earth in its orbit around the sun.
He had been an eager young engineer just out of university back then as they mined the thirty eight kilometer diameter asteroid for the materials needed to build a huge generation ship to send humanity to the stars. Despite all their efforts, however, a mere two years after launch, that ship was lost with all hands, a victim of more hazards in the space just beyond the heliosphere than anticipated or the ship could handle.
Naturally, all work came to an immediate halt, with only the barest beginning of a frame of the second ship visible. Countless hours of meetings, discussions, repercussions and finger pointing ensued, with nothing getting done.
Using all of his off hours, Gustav worked on an alternative proposition, one that was totally outside the box of conventional thinking and, at the same time, the solution right in front of all their eyes. It took him a few months but when he made his proposal, he had seemingly every question answered and every detail worked out.
Gustav simply suggested using the asteroid itself as the next vehicle.
With a kilometers thick nickle iron shell, it would withstand almost any conceivable collision hazard, although some defensive measures could easily be built on the outer surface just in case anyway. There was still plenty of unmined materials for the elements the crew couldn't reclaim and sufficient interior room for a large enough traveling party to establish a viable colony.
The single massive engine planted on one side of the asteroid that brought it to the Lagrange Point couldn't be reused but the data from its flight provided Gustav all the information needed to propose five much more massive engines that could propel the ship away from Earth.
After more months of countless meetings, discussions, computer simulations, endless arguments and one or two fist fights, his proposal was not only accepted but Gustav was made the Project Manager at the age of thirty one.
Then the real work began.
An army of engineers tended to the task of hollowing out the inner core to a thirty kilometer diameter sphere and then converting the ninety four kilometer circumference inside surface to slightly more than 2,800 square kilometers of livable area to house the crew leaving behind everything and the generations of their descendants who would ride to their final destination two hundred light years distant. A fusion powered artificial sun was suspended at the exact center of the huge cavern by five massive columns, provided light and heat as it shone and dimmed in the same twenty four hour day and night cycle the colonists left behind.
To create gravity in the core and elsewhere on the asteroid, it spun counterclockwise to the direction of travel on its equator, giving the inner surface of the core the equivalent of 0.8 Earth gravity. On the other levels, the artificial gravity gradually increased slightly until the surface was about 1.1g of Earth.
An inner one half kilometer thick shell was the last defense for the core. Massive tunnels, each protected by three ten meter thick blast doors led from the core to the next level, which was another half kilometer wide, with recycling facilities, factories, workshops, offices, hydroponic farms and the all important four redundant flight control centers and four equally redundant server areas for the artificial intelligence, CLARE, that contained a copy of every item of data, updated in real time, on the planet and could process trillions of data transactions per second.
CLARE would manage every aspect of the ship's operations once underway.
Despite any number of requests for clarifications and countless guesses what the acronym stood for, Gustav never revealed his secret. He named the AI for his long lost first love, the girl in his first year at university who took his virginity as she gave hers to him.
That area was not completely open like the core. Rather every ten kilometers, there was a two hundred meter thick wall, again with two massive blast doors, that were left in place when area was hollowed out. Like the inner core, maglev trains looped on both surfaces at regular intervals to move people, supplies and equipment where needed and back to their homes.
Another kilometer thick shell of the original nickle iron and granite composition protected the work area. It too was penetrated where need by massive tunnels and thick blast doors that led to the engine and tanks level, another half kilometer wide area that contained a series of huge storage spaces. Some were deliberately open to the cold of space to maintain the millions of frozen eggs and sperm of animals and seeds of plants that might thrive in their new environment.
In addition, massive tanks stored the fuel and other resources the ship processed from hundred kilometer scoops extending perpendicular to their direction of travel. An elaborate magnetic field both directed the bits of material, some as small as a single atom, between the stars to automatic processing facilities manned for the most part by self replicating robots. In the event an object was too large to deflect, lasers and rail guns would blow then to suitably sized pieces.
* * * * *
"It's time," Helena said softly from behind him in the doorway to his office.
Gustav turned and smiled warmly at the the woman in her mid thirties with the same auburn hair and warm inviting smile as her mother, Marie, who had been his personal assistant for the first twenty seven years he was in charge of the project. He and Marie divorced twice and married three times, with innumerable other dalliances for both along the way, until her health failed and she passed away ten years before. Helena was Marie's daughter by some other man during their second hiatus, yet Gustav cherished her like a daughter. She stepped right in as his right hand immediately after her mother's passing, taking on both Marie's professional and most personal duties.
Gustav inhaled deeply before turning away from the view of the asteroid
for the final time at rest. He took Helena's arm in his as they walked to the ceremony, the first firing of the massive engines that would
take the ship to
the stars.
The ceremony was mostly for the benefit of the press and population staying on Earth. All five engines would fire at once, nudging the ship away from it's parking spot in space. By design, it would only accelerate at 0.0003 gravities, meaning at first it would barely move.
Yet that level of continual acceleration over the course of the years...all day, every day...would bring it to a top speed of 25% of the speed of light. When it was two light years away from it's final destination, a star system called
WD 1425+540
two hundred light years distant with two potentially hospitable planets in the system's habitable zone, the entire ship would flip over, decelerating to a stop.
After more than a sufficient number of boring speeches, Gustav pushed the ceremonial start button to thunderous applause, essentially telling the AI CLARE to start the ship's engines. For him it was his final act as project manager...for the eight thousand men and women of child bearing age, and the two thousand prepubescent boy and girls on board ranging from infants to barely teens, it was really just the beginning.
* * * * *
Year 122
"I got a lottery assignment this morning," Ben whispered into into her ear as he nuzzled up behind her in the bed and gently tugged both of her stiff nipples.
He meant the pregnancy lottery, whereby CLARE kept the population stable while providing the necessary mix of genes to continue the mission and the crew with hereditary ability to master the necessary skills. The AI matched the couples DNA then provided the medication needed to temporarily override the infertility with which everyone otherwise lived.
"Anybody we know?" Dayl, his companion and sexual partner since they left school four years before, asked squirming back against him until she felt his hard dick split her ass cheeks.
"I don't," he replied, his hand snaking down over her belly to slide between her already moist pussy lips, "her name is Bailey, a teacher over in North West."
"Oh I think I remember her...she was two years ahead of me," Dayl responded, turning over to face him and at the same time wrap her fingers around his stiffening cock, "I always wondered if she actually was a real blonde."
"I'll give you a complete report, even get you a sample, assuming she doesn't have a smooth bare pussy like you," he laughed, playfully biting her erect left nipple before licking down her body until his tongue slipped into her already warm and damp pussy slit.
"So what is your schedule for all this," Dayl asked moaning lowly, threading her hands through his short brown hair and pulling his face against her dripping cunt even harder, her legs quivering with the first hints of a coming orgasm.
