copied from the snippet index thread to make it easier to find and simplify linking it to the index.
Dark Fall
●I●
Hear now my song and weep.
Hear of the blackness of Dark Fall,
Of death, dust, destruction of all.
Hear now of terror on night-black wings,
Of heartbreak and horror — the end of all things,
Of destruction below and death from the sky
On the day human history died.
— The Dark Fall Saga.
* * * * * * * * *
Navigation Deck
Generation Ship Calvin’s Hope
March 402 Post Diaspora
“It’s confirmed,” the leaden voice said in Vincent Anderson’s headphones. “No way. The damage at ground level is even worse than we expected. We’d need three times the resources we’ve got to establish even a temporary foothold down here. And it’s still getting worse.”
“Understood,” Anderson said. He drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Come on back up. Looks like we’re going to have to come up with something brilliant.”
“Lots of luck with that,” the voice said harshly. Then there was a pause, and Anderson visualized the owner of that voice drawing her own deep breath. “I’m calling in the survey parties now. We should be back aboard in a few hours.”
“Good.” Anderson’s voice was soft. “I need you, Trish.”
“I know, Babe. See you soon.”
Anderson killed the circuit and pushed off against the captain’s chair to send himself across the nav deck to the main visual display. The command section, like the engineering core, was outside the spin section, and he’d always loved the microgravity. It made him feel lighter than air, with a buoyancy that went beyond the merely physical as he floated here, watching the endless stars recede into infinity.
But not today, he thought. Not today.
It was late in Calvin’s Hope’s day, and he’d decided to take the watch by himself. It wasn’t as if the nav deck needed manning, and the truly critical parts of the huge ship’s infrastructure had always been managed from Engineering and Environmental. But there’d been someone here — usually only a single someone, admittedly, but someone — every day for the last three and a half centuries.
Well, he amended, hooking a toe through a safety loop, for the last four centuries, as the rest of the universe had told time. The time dilation affect at fifty percent of light-speed was significant, and Vincent Anderson had spent his entire forty-three years — subjective — tearing through the cosmos at that velocity. His parents had spent their entire lives doing precisely the same thing, and so had their parents. In fact, his great-great-grandparents had been only in their thirties when the shuttles delivered them to their new home in space. He was the eighth captain Calvin’s Hope had known since it departed the Sol System, 135 years after the Beowulf Expedition, on its own long, lonely voyage, and they were farther from Earth than any humans had ever traveled.
Angelique Calvin hadn’t lived to see the ship that bore her name depart. She’d driven the expedition with every gram of her steely will, though. She’d personally rammed it through the Earth Union’s committees and bureaus and petty tyrants, despite their bitter opposition to interstellar exploration. She’d personally designed the generation ship’s drive, but she’d known she wouldn’t be making the voyage aboard the project to which she’d devoted her entire adult life. There was no room for octogenarians aboard a starship. But on the day the transmission confirming the Beowulf Expedition’s safe landing in their destination star system, her son Angus had begun the countdown for Calvin’s Hope’s launch.
Now, four hundred and two years later, the great-great-grandchildren of that ship’s crew had reached their destination.
Vincent Anderson looked at the image of the world they’d come so far to reach and tried not to vomit.
