Challenge #00346: Didn't This Happen On Star Trek?
Most sci-fi universes either use FTL travel, or involve long trips in suspended animation to go to new planets. Why not both?
Science moves faster than space travel, and an FTL ship overtakes a stasis ship from the same planet.
[AN: Working top-down from my inbox because our internet is being a shitty-head]
Fiction became fact so fast that fiction itself had been abandoned. Except for soap operas. Nothing could kill them.
But there were still the beloved classics, and humankind carried those wherever it went.
Truth, on the other hand, did not put the operations centre of a space vessel under a glass dome on the very top of a surface that was almost designed to sweep space debris straight for it. Truth did allow for some streamlining, but it was made to drive anything that hit the ship away from anything important.
The stars did move. The old shows had that right, at least. They moved through rainbows, from blue through to red, if one cared to peek aft and watch.
“Sir, we have a nav beacon.”
“All slow. Match speed and course.”
By the time the engines obeyed, they had caught up to the old vessel.
And it was old.
Predating navigational shields, it relied on heavy, multiple layers of armour to protect its contents. It was pock-marked and barely recognisable as a space vessel.
“Identification?” said the captain.
“It’s a long-hauler, sir. Trying to get into the on-board computer…”
The bridge crew busied themselves with everyday tasks until data arrived.
She was called Purgatory, after the thought that vessels given inspirational or aspirational names were bound for a bad end. The same theory went into the naming of colony worlds.
Any place called Paradise was absolutely, positively, guaranteed to be the exact opposite.
There were three colony worlds called Hellhole so far.
This vessel had the same destination in mind as the Goldbrick. And, given current calculations, would take five hundred more years to get there.
“Options?”
“I see three. Towing. Carting. Stripping. Towing is out because there’s only one way to do it: protect the ship mother-duck style and travel CTL the rest of the way. That’s a year of fartin’ around. Or more, depending on the Purgatorys hull integrity.”
“Right. How’s Carting looking?”
“I can’t find any docking ports that are intact. Looks like this one was built around its cargo with no avenue for later intervention.”
The captain rolled her eyes at the inclinations of her short-sighted ancestors. “So that leaves Stripping. Which would more than likely kill the passengers.”
“What about a hybrid approach? We mother-duck it and then start working on building a damn airlock out of the wrecked hull. Then we can move the passengers into a modded cargo hold and strip the rest.”
“Sounds like a workable plan. Well done.” The captain clapped her hands, once. “Right. Let’s get kludging.”
Specs for the cargo bay came from the Purgatorys computer. All was ready for the passengers by the time the engineering crew finished their version of an airlock.
There were hundreds of them. Ferried out, one by one, with battery rigs attached to their pods. Inspected and checked before getting docked to their new home in the Goldbrick. Stacked floor to ceiling like cordwood. If cordwood steamed gently in downward drifts.
Nurse Batanga noticed it first. “They’re all… white. All of them.”
Which lead to a flurried cross-check through all of the illogical windows in the cryo-units. Every last one of the passengers was of european descent.
Further checking in the records revealed that the Purgatory was part of the Great White Exodus. When the white and white-passing left Earth to make worlds in their own privileged image.
Which resulted in months of debate as to whether to let them die or let them pickle in their own ignorance, culminating in them inbreeding themselves out of existence anyway.
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