Chapter 3 - Meeting the Team

Luxembourg Hilton

The following morning, Cho rose blearily at 6.30 am, and in an effort to recover from the lack of decent sleep over the previous week, took a long shower in the steam spa bath the hotel featured in its luxury suites, and dressed in some civilian clothes so he wouldn't stand out in the restaurant.  Then he made his way down to the hotel restaurant for what he hoped would be a quiet breakfast before his mission briefing started at 9.00 am sharp. 

There he found Harrington, some Earthgov Security minders, and about a thousand reporters.  The room was wall to wall people clutching microphones, talking loudly into cameras, using quadplexes, and a variety of other various ear pieces, and all awaiting his arrival.  The news had clearly been leaked after his meeting.  The fact that the reporters had been let in at all meant that Earthgov Security was relaxed about the news being confirmed.

Harrington met him at the door to the restaurant.  'Sorry, Sir,' she said.  'But the President's Office released a statement first things this morning about the transmission from Centaurus, your appointment to your new command, and the existence of the Anubis.  Then the whole herd turned up.  The security guys wouldn't let me get you out of here, or even let you know they were here.  They want a statement, and to ask you a bunch of questions.'

Cho took this news on the chin.  He knew he would be facing this ordeal at some stage, he just hadn't expected it before breakfast on his first day.  Somebody was going to get the hard word from him in the very near future, starting with Earthgov Security.  He knew the ES Commander well, so he could ensure whoever made the decision allowing this fiasco was going to have unpleasant things fall on him or her from a very great height.

Nonetheless he allowed himself to be ushered him to a long table set up at one end of the restaurant festooned with microphones and sound and mini cameras.  However, rather than put up with a question and answer process which was obviously going to take hours, Cho stood up to give a short speech instead.  The reporters eventually got the point after he ignored the first hundred or so shouted questions, and eventually the hubbub died down.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' he began.  'Thank you for coming this morning.  As you will be aware, we recently received a message from a human colony in the constellation of Centaurus.  I have been appointed as commander of the mission to investigate the status of the colony, and search for news of some of the other colony ships that left Earth two centuries ago.  We aim to fit out an expedition, and leave in about a year.  We don't know what we will find out there, but we expect to message back our findings as soon as we can.  I'll take a few questions now?'  Then he sat down, and the baying began again.

Cho randomly pointed at a pretty blonde reporter, and after her compatriots quietened down she said, 'Anita Glover, Manchester Times Science Reporter.  General Cho, how soon you expect to get a message back to us about the Centaurus colony.'

Cho smiled, and replied, 'That's a little uncertain, but I would expect in Earth time it would be sixty to seventy years.'  The reporters' jaws collectively dropped when they heard this.  Cho pointed at another reporter who had recovered somewhat faster than the others.

'Henry Todd, CNN-Reuters,' said the tall black man with the North American accent.  'Given the huge time it will take to get out to the colonies and get the news back, is there any point in sending the mission at all?  Surely any news would be seriously out of date by the time it arrived.  Why don't we wait for more transmissions from the colonies?'

'Because we don't know the status of those colonies and if they need help from Earth,’ Cho replied.  ‘There may be colonies out there unable to communicate at all, and in dire need of assistance.  That one of them has managed to call home tells us that it was able to set up the orbital array needed to communicate between systems.  The message suggests they do need our help.'  He pointed at another reporter, a small man apparently from the Indian sub-continent.

"Ranjit Subas, New Dehli Times.  When will you start recruiting for the mission crew?'

'As soon as we can,' Cho replied.  'I envisage recruitment will be largely completed within six months, allowing time for the training required.'  Cho selected a diminutive Asian lady for the next question.

'Tsi Tsu, New Beijing Freedom Television,' she said.  'General Cho, there has been speculation as to why you were selected to command the mission.  Aside from time on the Moon, what special characteristics do you bring for this unique role?'

Cho smiled.  This was virtually the question asked when he was interviewed for the Lunar Five appointment.  'I have the required seniority,' he replied, 'the command experience, and the time in space required to make this new mission a success.  That includes graduating from the Defence Force's Space School.  There are also the strong similarities between commanding the Lunar Five Defence Force Base and commanding the expedition.  However, as you say, this is a unique responsibility, and I intend to do everything in my power to make it work.'

By this stage, Cho had had enough.  He stood again.  'Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you again for coming here this morning.  As you will understand, I have other duties which I must attend to.  We will be running regular media briefings over the next year, so I expect to have many opportunities to meet with you again.'

Then Cho smiled for the cameras, and walked out to the sound of hundreds more questions aimed at his back.  He returned to his room, and ordered room service.  After today he realised that going to a hotel restaurant for breakfast was going to be a rarity.

ESED Briefing - Reconstruction Ministry Building

After a belated breakfast in his room, Cho climbed into his blues, and was taken by car back to the Earthgov precinct.  The precinct was a fortified compound built in a style akin to the old Kremlin in Moscow before the collapse of the 3^rd Russian Empire during the Long War. 

Thick walls, proof against heavy artillery, surrounded the compound, and guard/missile towers protruded every 100 metres along its length.  Inside the compound elegant neo-Classical buildings featured, the legacy of the post-war enthusiasm for the style which the West was still fascinated with.  The decorative features did not mask the true strength of the buildings.  They were actually capable of surviving a nearby nuclear blast, something not mentioned in the Luxembourg tourist guides.

At the checkpoint, the vehicle was checked for bombs in the chassis, and a sniffer dog was run past it as well.  Once the driver and Cho’s identity was verified by checking their personal biochips against Earthgov’s central ID computer with a hand held reader, they were allowed to proceed.

Once past the security checkpoints, Cho was driven to a large lecture hall attached to the Reconstruction Ministry, and was shown to the front row for the briefing.  The hall featured the heavily reinforced polished concrete finish common in the complex, but also sported polished rare tropical hardwood in the decor as well.  Replanting tropical forests had been a cornerstone policy of Earthgov from its inception, but this timber had come from one of the old growth stands, the ones Earthgov was supposed to be protecting from cutting.  This smacked of conspicuous consumption on the part of Earthgov, something Cho found himself decidedly uncomfortable with.

The pre-mission briefing to be a somewhat cosier affair than his press conference, with a mere two hundred or so other military and civilian officials listening to Doctor Leah Clark. 

As Leah confidently addressed the audience in melodious tones, Cho couldn't help noticing that her hands were bereft of rings and other decorations indicative of a permanent attachment.  Since his divorce, his personal life had been largely bereft of significant romantic company, but after the personal fiascos of his first year in the Lunar Five command, he was wary of seeking the company of female colleagues.

'Good morning, everyone,' she began.  'By now you will have received your assignments.  Our collective task is to get the Anubis functioning and on its way in a year.  I have been appointed Science Advisor to the project coordinating committee, which is headed by General Cho, who as you all know, has been also been appointed overall commander of the mission.  I am sure you all have a great deal of questions, and I will try and deal with as many as I can before lunch.  After that we will break up into sub-project groups, and work can begin on scoping the tasks required for the mission.  I have tried to answer as many as I can in the info packs downloaded onto your personal datapads, but we will try and consider the more important questions this morning.'

She paused for a moment, and then added, 'but before we begin, I am sure General Cho would like to start today's session with a few words.'

Put on the spot for the second time that morning, Cho walked to the podium and addressed the room.

'One of the things,' he began, 'a new commander of a unit faces is a situation like today.  You only know a few people in the room, and everyone else are the people you will come to know well.  What I have found is that what makes things work for any project is the friendship and mutual respect that develops when people work together for a common purpose.  It is those two things which make the extraordinary possible.  From today our task is to do the incredible and then embark on humanity's greatest adventure.  I know that each of you will do your utmost to make our common goal come to pass.  It is my honour and privilege to work with you all, my new friends, from today onwards.  Thank you.'

As he returned to his seat, everyone rose, and gave him a rousing round of applause.  Even the normally aloof Harrington wore something approaching a grin on her face.  As he sat down, she shouted over the clapping, 'That was pretty good, Sir.'  Cho just grinned back at her.

Dr Clark returned to the podium.  'Thank you General Cho for those wonderful words,' she said.  Then she added.  'Now I will do my best to answer your questions.'  A forest of hands rose in the room.

A male voice in the back of the theatre asked, 'What sort of condition is Anubis in?'

'As far as we know, she’s in reasonable condition,' Dr Clark responded.  We know she was hit with a hail of nuclear weapons at the end of the war, but shortly after the attack she was able to be patched up enough to move her to L4.  We know that what's left of her external pods are highly radioactive.  So are sections of her outer hull.  However, the radiation won't affect anyone inside the ship past a certain point in the hot zones.  We are looking at scraping or burning off the affected exterior as we need to.  A survey team will be looking her over soon.  The mothballing team's report has been declassified and is the infopack sent to your datapads.  Her interior is pretty much what was there when the war ended.  We will have to decide what we keep, what we replace, and what new stuff is required.'

'Are we going to change its name,' another male voice said from the back?

'I don't see why not.  We should hold a competition,' Dr Clark replied, flashing a set of pearly white teeth.  That quip got a laugh from members of the audience.

‘How much is it costing Earthgov to use the ship,’ a Gallic accented voice said from the rear of the chamber.

‘Nothing.  I understand that the Anubis Mining Corporation transferred ownership to the Western Alliance when the latter took over the ship.  Earthgov inherited those ownership rights when the Alliance was folded into Earthgov,’ Clark replied.

‘I believe the Anubis Mining Corporation is looking to reassert its ownership rights,’ the Gallic voice said.

‘I can’t comment on that,’ Clark replied.  ‘That’s a matter for the lawyers to sort out.’

'How many people are going,' said a female voice near Cho?

'The Anubis was the largest of the asteroid ships.  She was originally tasked with moving a population of one hundred million, mostly in cold sleep, over one of the shorter flights of about fifty years.  I doubt the crew for our mission would require more than a few tens of thousands, maybe one to two hundred thousand at the most.'

Cho sat there stunned.  The entire population of Lunar Five was only just over sixty thousand people.  He had been responsible for only seven thousand of them.  That Earthgov could be contemplating sending so many people was incredible.

'How long is going to take the ship to get to Centaurus,' said a woman's voice a few rows behind Cho?

'If we went directly to Centaurus, about thirty two Earth years all up,' Clark remarked.  That includes the year to get up to near light speed, and another year at the other end of the flight to slow down.  As you will have seen from the briefing we are not planning to go directly to the Centaurus colony.’'

'Does that mean we would age thirty two years before we even get there,' asked a young female voice directly behind Cho.  She sounded horrified at the passage of time involved.  He wasn’t too happy about the issue himself.  He began to wonder if Kessler wasn’t right after all.

'No,' said Clark.  'The crew would spend most of that time in cold sleep, and courtesy of time dilation, the apparent  time spent by the crew on such a voyage would about fourteen years.  For the people back on Earth, it would be the full thirty two years though.  Even if we turned back immediately after arriving, doing a sling shot orbit around HR4523A at near light speed, everyone we knew back on Earth would be about sixty five years older when we got back.'

'Assuming they are still alive,' said a gloomy man's voice from the centre of the theatre.

'Yes, that's right,' said Clark.  'Anyone going on this mission will say goodbye to their loved ones, and in all likelihood never see them again.  That's why we are thinking about taking entire families on this mission.  The ship certainly has the space for it.'

'Just how long is this mission going to take,' said a woman three seats to Cho's left?

'The current estimate of full mission duration is expected to be between five hundred and a thousand years; Earth time that is.  The mission plan is to look at about twenty systems in the upper right core ward quadrant before coming back to Earth.'  As she said this she pointed at the quadrant to the upper right of an observer looking directly at galactic centre.

'Just who would be reporting to after all that time,' said a man directly behind Cho in a defiantly English upper class accent.  Cho turned around to get a better look.  The man wore an unfashionable handlebar moustache, and was clearly some kind of civilian academic.

'Earthgov or its successor.  I am afraid we are going to have to get used to the idea of huge amounts of time passing over the course of this mission.'

'That's like going on a mission for Alfred the Great, and reporting back to Winston Churchill.  What kind of government or society would we encounter when we got back?'

'A more important question is what sort of societies are we likely to meet out there,' said a man sporting what passed for an Australian accent.

'Gentlemen, I can't answer speculative questions like those,' Clark said in an acerbic tone.  'As you two have been designated as the heads of the mission's anthropology and ethno-history departments, I suggest you work it out.  And for your information, the mission will be sending data pods back to Earth over the course of the mission.  We can shoot them back at near light speed, which means that Earthgov will be getting regular updates.'

'How effective is the cold sleep,' Cho asked, deliberately changing the subject?

'A lot better than it was back in the 22^nd century.  Back then only eighty to ninety per cent of people subject to long term cold sleep were expected to survive.  For those who woke up, there was a further five to ten per cent chance of serious brain or organ damage.  Developments since the end of the war have seen those rates improve to ninety five percent, and two to four per cent respectively, for an unscreened population.'  There was a noticeable stir when Clark said this.

'So you go to sleep, and not wake up, or if you do wake up, you’re not all there when you do,' said a perturbed male voice to the far left and back of the theatre?

'Yes,’ Clark replied coolly.   ‘Although the odds improve after the first experience of cold sleep.  If your body is not up to the rigours of cold sleep death or crippling injuries tend to happen the first time around.  Don't worry though, we have a good understanding of the cold sleep contra-indicators and anybody with them won't be going.  That will keep the personnel losses down to a manageable minimum, and we will have considerable personnel redundancy to avoid mission problems.' 

'That seems a rather callous attitude, Doctor,' Cho heard himself say in a dry tone.

Clark turned her attention to him, and replied a little acerbically, 'General, there is little point in sugar coating the risks.  Long duration space travel is full of them.  The mission to Centaurus and the other systems will be very risky, and not everyone will make it.  Even without the risks of prolonged cold sleep, disease, ailments, accidents, and simple bad luck will claim a percentage of the crew.  That's why so many people will be going.  The good news is that aging and cellular degeneration in cold sleep have been reduced to very low numbers.  The latest cold sleep technology means that a person ages about a day for every six months in the chamber, not counting rest periods during long duration voyages.'

Cho decided to change the subject again, 'Doctor,' he asked, 'why haven't any of the other colonies sent a message back?  I've read they were all equipped to make interstellar transmissions.'

'We don't know.  The message sent from Centaurus was probably sent using an orbital radio array equivalent to the Giant Ear.  The later ships had ten satellites using nuclear powered signal boosting, each the size of a standard Earth-Moon transport which they set up as a joint array.  The earlier ones were equipped with huge folding radio dishes that could deploy in space.  They should all have been able to communicate with Earth when they got to their destination systems.  The ship's ordinary radio and laser communication systems were only good for the first two light years of their flights.  After that, they went silent.  That was known when they were sent.  They could only deploy their big transmitters when they got somewhere they could stop.  As I said, we just don't know.'

'And your view on the message from Centaurus?'

'Your guess is as good as mine.  We thought there might be more information in the data bursts, but no.  All we got was a young woman speaking in old English asking for help.  She sounded terrified.  But that's all we know.  And it's going to take us at least another thirty Earth years to find out what frightened her.'

Doctor Clark pointed her laser pointer into the holographic star map projected from the flat top of the speaker's pedestal.  Cho had seen the Tri-D projection from e-text books before, but the much larger projector did a much better job.  He could see the relationships and the distances between the stars far more readily.  More importantly, the target systems were marked in red, and the quadrant posts showed clearly.  All eight quadrants above and below the map's equator showed up clearly, along with dotted tracks in each quadrant marking the voyages of the 43 colony ships.

'This map covers a 50 light year radius sphere,' Clark said.  'As you will understand, the problem facing the original colonists is the same one that we face.  'It's worse, actually, because we won't know until we get into a system whether the colonists passed through it, stopped and colonised a planet, or came to a sticky end.'

'Would you please explain that, Doctor,' Cho asked.

She fumbled with the pointer, and then switched it off and put it in pocket of her lab coat.  'The plan adopted by various governments and the mining mega-corporations two hundred years ago was straightforward.  You build an asteroid ship, you stock it with people, food, cold sleep units, and everything else a colony could possibly need, and you dispatch it to a star with known rocky planets in the life zone.  Once they get there, they colonise a convenient planet or moon, mine asteroids, put the high value refined metals, alloys, and other valuable material into robot ships, and send them back to Earth.  The deliveries may take decades, even centuries, but governments and mega corporations are longed lived entities and some of the corporations, like the Anubis Mining Company, are still around today, no doubt wondering when their ships will come in.'  A few people laughed.  'Of course,' she added,' it was no secret that colonisation on a huge scale back then would have a beneficial effect on Earth.  Reducing the human presence by hundreds of millions of people during the worsening eco crisis was very attractive to all of Earth's governments, so the initiative was supported.  But, the crisis came anyway, and it required much more to lower humanity's presence on the planet to a sustainable level.'  The room went unexpectedly quiet as the listeners contemplated the deadly import of her words.

'Anyway,' Clark continued.  'We know the target systems had rocky exo-planets of roughly the right size and in the liquid water range, or gas giants large enough to have exo-moons of the right size and orbit.  The problem is that then, and now, of course, we can't see those planets very well.  All we get to see are occultation of the primaries by planets through the gravity lenses of other stars.  That means we can just make out the presence of a planet as it transits the star, and get a rough idea of its size, mass, distance from the primary and orbital speed.  But we have no details as to what they are really like.  It's even worse if a gas giant or a huge rocky planet sits in the liquid water zone.  It might have rocky moons the size and mass of Earth, or lifeless rocky belts.'  She slurped some water from a glass on the podium.  Then she continued.

'No one knows until the system is actually visited, and a survey team goes down to have a look at a planet.  God knows there are enough reasons why a planet or moon of even the right size and distance from its primary is still useless as a home.  That's why travelling to another system in the 22^nd century was just like the convicts being transported from England to Australia in the 18^th century.  The trip was long and arduous, and once you arrived, there was no coming back.  That meant they had to have not just one target star on the core trajectory, but several.  The energy costs, and time required, were just too long to do anywhere else.  As it was, even with the cold sleep systems of the day, it was entirely possible for those ships to play host to several generations before they arrived anywhere viable.'

'What about robot probes,' a man behind Cho asked?'

'Not enough range, and too slow.  The technology two centuries ago for the robot ships was able to get them up to about ten per cent of the speed of light, and that still required a large and expensive shielded ship with a vast amount of fuel for the ion drives.  To get to a star fifty light years away would take about five hundred years, and the message a further fifty years to get back, assuming somebody was listening at the time.  Earth's environmental crisis was getting worse, and the asteroid mining corporations just didn't see any point in waiting.  So they built the ships as quickly as they could, and sent them.  And before anyone asks, building a robot probe out of an asteroid doesn't make any kind of sense.'

'Would the asteroid ships have travelled any faster,' a man at the back asked.

'Yes.  Unlike potential robot probes, an asteroid ship can do things no robot probe could do, including run old fashioned rockets for extended periods of time, and because of their size, insulate its crew from the ionising radiation effects of running into interstellar hydrogen at high percentages of the speed of light.  Two centuries ago, they built rocket engines many times larger than those on the Saturn 5's which put men on the Moon in the 20^th century.  And they had huge amounts of space for rocket fuel.  In conjunction with fusion powered Electro-thermal Plasma Thruster drives, they could get their ships up to a quarter of the speed of light or more.  With Anubis we can do much better.  The mass driver that runs down her axis is capable of accelerating small objects to near light speed.  She uses fusion reactors to power up massive capacitors to run the mass driver to do that though.  With the new micro fusion reactors developed since the war we can run the mass driver all the time, and get her up to 90 per cent plus of the speed of light.'

'Where are we with FTL,' an interested male voice off to Cho's right asked?

'Nowhere,' Dr Clark snapped.  Then she half-smiled, and continued.  'I won't bore you with the details, but theoretical physicists have been chasing that particular boondoggle for the last half a millennia.  As far as we can tell, Einstein was right.  Nothing goes faster than the speed of light, and if something does, we haven't found it yet.  And don't ask me about warp drives, subspace, or wormholes.  They don't exist either, and even if they are possible, the postulated energy costs are too high.  And for you Star Trek fans out there, Dr Heisenberg's uncertainty principle rules out transporting anything large than qubits.'

'What about aliens,' the same voice asked?

'If there are any out there, they are stuck with the same physics problems we are.  And no, I don't believe aliens have ever visited this planet.  If they have, it can't have been right for them, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.  Then there is the small matter of time.  An alien race that explored the galaxy a mere fifty thousand years ago would have dismissed our ancestors as intelligent animals.  If we found a planet with indigenous life similar to us fifty thousand years ago we would probably do the same.  The odds against bumping into intelligent and space faring aliens are very long indeed.'

'Once we get to a planet, how are we going to transport large items to and from the surface,' said a man off to Cho's left?

'We are taking one of the spare space elevators.'  There was a chorus of grunts of disbelief were heard around the theatre.  Cho was surprised to hear he was the source of one of them.

'Aren't they awfully heavy,' an English voice asked from the back?'

'Yes and no.  The spares are sitting on Angel, and while they have tremendous mass, they don't weigh anything in freefall.  The plan is to cut a deep slot into Anubis's hull, manoeuvre it close to Angel,  and slowly winch the broad end of the elevator inside it.  The rest of the machinery to make the elevator work will be attached to the exterior of Anubis.  The alternative is to use small ships to land on a planet, which severely limits our capacity to do anything when we get there.  We won't have to replace Angel’s lost mass, but we will have to increase the length of Angel's tether a bit to compensate.  Fortunately, those calculations were done during installation.'

‘What about at the other end,’ a voice at the back called out?

‘That’s the tricky part,’ Clark conceded.  ‘We would be reliant on the colony having the resources necessary to anchor the planetary end of the elevator.  We will be giving that problem further thought over the next few months.  Of course, the alternative may be simply relying on ships to get to and from the surface.’

A bell sound rang from the intercom, and was followed by the sound of catering staff pushing in serving carts with tea and coffee urns atop them, along with a range of savoury and sweet snacks.

'Right,' said Dr Clark, 'the most important time of the morning, morning tea.  We'll break for twenty minutes, and then continue.'

Cho waited a few minutes, and then joined the queue for the coffee.  A few people seemed surprised that he didn’t rely on his position to barge in, or detail Harrington to get it for him.  It really was a Command 101 ploy, but those present appeared to appreciate the courtesy.  While he waited he fielded a few questions from some of the others.  He answered the ones he could, and politely deferred the ones he couldn’t to Harrington to make appointments to see him later.  As the officials were all working on the project, meeting with them was essential anyway.

ESED Headquarters

After morning tea, Dr Clark turned her attention to the more technical aspects of the mission, including known data on the systems the mission planned on visiting.  Cho had this information in his info pack, so he went to his next meeting, which was at ESED's HQ with the ESED Director-General on the other side of the Earthgov precinct.  This meant he didn't have to pass through the security cordons to get to it.  He knew that Winkel had served as ESED's head for the past five years, having been promoted from ESED's deep space exploration division.

On arrival, he was whisked past some startled workers, and shown up to Winkel’s office.  What he found striking when he first saw Winkel peering up at him from behind his desk was his expression which could best be described as somewhat wrinkled amusement.

'My dear General Cho, it is good to meet you at last,' he began. 

‘Dr Winkel, it is a great pleasure, ‘ Cho replied as he shook his hand, and they repaired to Winkel's office lounge for coffee.

'Try the cream cakes, General, they are very good,' Winkel said as he poured the coffee into a demitasse cup.  Cho sniffed at its sweet fragrance.  He could usually tell where coffee came from, but this one had him stumped.

'Sorry, I'll have to pass on the cakes, I'm lactose intolerant,' Cho replied.  He sniffed at his cup and then tasted it.  The coffee had a delightful sweet, strong and nutty flavour, all at once, and it too was unfamiliar.

'Where was this coffee grown?  I don't recognise it.'

Winkel's face developed an amused look, and then he replied.  'Where do you think it might come from?

Cho took this challenge up.  'My first impression was that it might be Blue Mountain, but now I am not sure.'

'Very good.  We did use a Blue Mountain varietal as the source, but this coffee was never grown in Jamaica or anywhere else on Earth.  If we could produce enough of the stuff we might call it Angel coffee.'  To Cho's look of confusion, he added, 'The astronomers up on Angel produce a lot of their own food in a large hydroponic greenhouse, including a section devoted to growing coffee bushes.  The plants grow in permanent sunshine, albeit filtered to prevent the plants suffering radiation burns.  We think the cosmic rays that do percolate have altered the plants genetic structure somewhat.  Whatever the cause, the resulting coffee has remarkable flavour.  Of course, if we were to start selling the beans by the kilo, it would put civet coffee deep in the shade.  On a purely cost recovery basis the cup of coffee you are drinking would cost around $12,500 new dollars on the open market.

Cho just about dropped the cup when he heard this.  He decided to put it down very carefully.  The coffee he was drinking was literally worth more than its weight in gold.

'I'll remember that if I ever visit Angel.  Maybe they can slip me a bag of the stuff.'

Winkel laughed.  'General, I think you passed the test.  But I think your next test will be much harder.'

'The mission,' Cho replied?

'Yes.  I know you’ve had this job thrown at you, and I wonder if you appreciate just what it will entail.'

'I have a pretty good idea,' Cho said.

'I appreciate you believe your experience to date would lead you to think so, but I really don't think you do.  Once the mission starts you will be in command, with the final decision on a host of matters.  What's more, there will be no appeal from your decisions either.  Solomon never had such a weighty responsibility, although there are few people who have.  If you have the time, I think you should read the journals of Captain James Cook.'

Cho, who was slurping down the last of his coffee, and eying the remainder in the plunger, misheard, and looked oddly at Winkel.  'Captain James T Kirk?'

Winkel laughed.  'Him too.  He had similar problems as I recall, although I doubt there were too many Klingons in the South Pacific.  No, I mean the great navigator and explorer of the 18^th century.  He preserved order on his ships through sheer command ability, firm leadership, and by garnering the everlasting respect and admiration of his crews by his constant care for their wellbeing.  Moreover, he was a very long way from home, without any support at all, facing extraordinary dangers, and meeting and successfully interacting with strange alien cultures, well, until Hawaii anyway, where the people ate him.  Try and avoid that when you run into the alien cultures on your journey.'

'But they will be like us,' Cho responded.  'They only left Earth two centuries ago.  How much change could possibly occur in that time?'

'A great deal, as the anthropologists, ethnologists, linguists, and historians on the mission will tell you, at length, many times, if you let them.  The colony ships were like the great canoes which carried the Polynesians from one distant island group to another, subject to the same classes of cultural and technological drifts the Polynesians experienced during their colonisation of the Pacific Islands.  As you may be aware, as succeeding generations migrated from island group to island group, they generally lost technology that could not be supported on the new islands, and their cultures changed to reflect those losses, albeit with the occasional gain along the way.  By the final migration from eastern Polynesia to your homeland, they had long ago left behind the very definition of their source culture, namely the pottery the Lapita people produced, and despite living in a land rich with clays, the Maori never reproduced it, because the techniques needed to fire clays had been lost by the many generations surviving on the coral atolls beforehand.  On the other hand they brought with them kumara, a sweet potato acquired from South America, and it was a kumara farming culture that settled in New Zealand.  Where kumara couldn't grow they stopped being farmers and become hunter gatherers again.  I have little doubt that the inhabited worlds you encounter will be suffering from similar technological and culture changes, and will be different, maybe very different, from what you regard as normal.  Isolated cultures drift according to their environment, and can become hardly recognisable in surprisingly few generations. Just look at what happened on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island as it was dubbed by the Dutch.  I cannot emphasise this point enough.  Humans are very adaptable, and their cultures can adapt very quickly in light of changed circumstances.' 

Winkel paused for a moment, finishing his coffee, and then he added, 'The effect could be even more profound if they suffered losses of key personnel, or key technology, along the way.  The fact that we've heard nothing until now suggests as much.'

'To be fair,' Cho pointed out, 'I doubt anybody was listening during the Long War.  There may have been many other calls home, but we weren't in a position to hear or respond.'  As he said that, he poured another cup of coffee.  Winkel only shook his head when he offered to refill his cup.

'Ach, that's true, so much time has been lost.  Earth was in the grips of an end of days ecological crisis when they left, with global tensions boiling over.  Maybe when they received no response, they assumed we destroyed ourselves.  Or maybe it took so long to get to where they could settle that their messages are still coming.  We really don't know.  That's why we are sending you.  It's a shame I won't be alive when you finally report in from Centaurus.'

'You could come along for the ride,' Cho said mischievously.

'Sorry, I have other things to do,’ Winkel said with grin.  'It is young Turks like you who get to wander the galaxy.'

Then his mood changed, and he adopted a more serious expression.  'I want to return to what I was talking about earlier.  When you are out there, you will be taking Earthgov with you in every possible sense.  That means law, order, and security.  We are not sending you to conquer planets for Earthgov, but you will have the discretion to use your resources to influence events on colony planets.  We are trusting you and your staff to use your power wisely.  I dare say that you will not be as welcome in some of the places you may visit as you might think you will be.'

'I would have thought our arrival would be the biggest thing that would have happened since the colony ship itself arrived,' Cho responded.

'That's true, just as Cook's arrival in Hawaii in 1778 was the biggest thing that had happened in Hawaii in six centuries.  He found a culture utterly isolated from the outside world.  Things didn't go well for him, and you will have to be wary of similar outcomes.  Your ship's arrival will change everything for the colonists, and there will be some who will not welcome those changes.  I'll leave you to ponder that.'

Cho's coffee had gone cold while he had listened.  Everything Winkel had said had the ring of truth, or bloody good foresight.  It was something that he would have his planners look at.  He hoped that contacts would run smoothly, but as the old man had made clear, just about anything was possible.

He was considering how to respond to Winkel when the old man started speaking again.

'I expect your next move is to inspect the Anubis.  No captain of such an enterprise would wait any longer.  I know Cook took special interest in his vessels for his voyages.  I expect no less of a man who follows in his metaphorical footsteps.  I trust you have been wondering at the condition of the old ship.'

Cho's chagrin was plain on his face.  The whirlwind nature of his appointment had left him little time to give much thought to what must happen next.  He would have to take a grip of the new administration that was springing up around him.  He would also have to start running it as his show, not somebody else's.  Where he was going he would stand at the apex of power, with no higher authority to appeal to.  But he was also going to be the captain of a ship, and commander of an expedition, with all the responsibility of running it.  Winkel was right to point his attention in its direction.  His next move would be to inspect his new command.

But first, he needed to familiarise himself with it.  Cook's advantage with his ships was that he knew them inside out before he left England.  He only had the vaguest notion of what he was to command.

Anubis Project Office - ESED Headquarters

A day later, Leah and her team delivered their presentation on the ship.  This consisted of a Tri-D depiction of the ship, and a very long list of its capabilities.

Essentially the Anubis had been designed as a colony ship.  A super colony ship that is, built by the Anubis Mining Corporation, hence the name, as a long range colonisation and business venture.  It was designed around its purpose of getting it crew and human cargo of an incredible one hundred million people to its destination in the stars.  To that end it had massive multi deck cold sleep holds with massively redundant dedicated power sources.  The irony was that now, with the improvements in cold sleep technology of the previous two centuries, the ship had enough internal capacity to convey five to ten times that many people to the stars; up to half Earth's entire population if that was necessary.  The limiting factor then, and even now, albeit to a lesser extent, was the need to regularly wake people up from cold sleep, and the concomitant life support demands that that generated.  While huge, the capacity of the ship to feed that many people was limited.  Even so, that still meant that the ship had huge sections devoted to food production, with other huge areas devoted to industrial plant, manufacturing of just about everything a colony world could possibly use, massive power generation, and in the stern or blunt end of the Anubis, over a third of the ship marked in blue.  Those, were, Clark advised, the water tanks, or holds, to continue the marine vessel analogy. 

Apparently the  Anubis Mining Corporation had spent seventy five years mining the interior of the asteroid for iron ore before deciding to use it for a colony ship.  A decade into its operations on the asteroid it had set up extensive iron smelting works, and the massive fusion power systems and water holds installed for those operations formed the basis of the colony ship design, especially as the latter provided the hydrogen and oxygen fuel to drive the ship through space.

'So, let me get this straight,' asked Cho.  'The water tanks on board the Anubis can hold how much water?'

'About 18,325 cubic kilometres of water, or 18,325 billion tonnes.  The miners cracked the water for oxygen to run the smelting plant, and used the liquid hydrogen to operate the transports that delivered the smelted iron to the old High Point.  Later on the system was adapted as fuel tanks for the rocket engines that were to drive the ship to other systems.  We can use the water with the mass driver she has now.'

'And where did they get that much water from?  Surely they didn't pump it up the old elevator.'

'Heavens no.  That would have been absurdly difficult and expensive, not to mention impossible,' Clark replied.  'No they got it from the same place the Moon got its water from, the asteroid belt.  The Anubis Mining Corporation sent five expeditions out there, and brought back a number of ice asteroids using the ice as reaction mass to move the asteroids.  They used small fission reactors to heat the water to steam and then blasted it out through rocket nozzles,.  Since there was no need to land the asteroids anywhere, like they had to do with the Moon asteroid, it was just a matter of matching orbits with the Anubis, and drilling into the ice with a hollow pipe.  The drill head heated the ice until it was in a liquid form, and the it was pumped it into the water tanks.'

'That must have been one hell of an operation,' Harrington interjected.

'It sure was,' interjected another voice.  A medium sized black man speaking in a north-eastern American accent.  His name was Dr Alec Detroit, and he was the head of the space propulsion unit allocated to the ship.  He hailed from Boston, the capital of the Republic of the New America, what used to be the north-eastern and mid Atlantic states of the former United States of America. 

The Republic was one of the rump states left over from the breakup of the USA during the rigours of the Long War.  What had been the USA was now split between the Mexican Empire, which had reacquired much of the lands it lost in 1848, the 2^nd Confederation of American States, and the North American Republic, which claimed the remainder of the 48 former contiguous states and Alaska, and of course the 2^nd Texan Republic, whose wealth was once again based on oil and cattle.  Now the Texas Gulf Coastal Plains, after the extensive dyke construction required after the sea level rise of the 21^st century, incorporated massive oil algae plants among the revitalised coastal wetlands, whose surplus was being returned to the old Texas oilfields depleted in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

'Would you like to explain that , Mr Detroit,' Cho asked?

'Call me Alec, General,' Detroit replied.  'Each of those five trips out to belt took two years there and back.  That used up a lot of ice getting the asteroids back, but they still brought enough back to keep the Anubis smelter as it was then going for about forty years.  One of those asteroids was nearly twice the size of the Anubis.  It holds the record for the largest manned vessel ever.  Of course, they got the idea from the Asimov story.  It's a shame he wasn't around to see his idea in action.'

'Thanks for that Alec,' Cho replied.  He looked at the Tri-D representation again.

'How up to date is this representation, Doctor?'

Clark hit a few keys on the keypad controlling the Tri-D show, and a date flashed up under the image.  'H'mm,' she added.  'This says that this was the ship at the last construction report prior to the ship being acquired by the Western Alliance.  I'll see if there is anything more recent.'

She spent the next minute tapping keys on her keypad, while the expression on her face grew more and more annoyed.

'Damn, that appears to be the most recent plan ESED has.  I had thought Earthgov included the Western Alliance modifications in the material they released to us when the mission was announced.  This is not good.'

'Why not,' asked Cho?

'Because the Western Alliance used the ship for over seventy years during the war.  As you will be aware, there was a period when the Eastern Federation was winning the Long War, and the Western Alliance government retreated to the asteroid colonies and the Moon.  What the war histories tend to gloss over is just where the Western Alliance government set up shop during that time.  The Moon colonies were too vulnerable to attack, and the asteroid colonies were too far away for effective command and control.  So guess where the Western Alliance leaders retreated to?'

'The Anubis,' replied Cho in a hollow voice.

'It spent most of its time parked on the other side of the Moon.  Dad mentioned it looked different from what he expected.  But he’s gone now, and everybody else who did know is dead.  God alone knows what they did to the Anubis during that time, aside from boring out the mass driver, of course.  There could be anything on board, absolutely anything.' 

Clark's concerned tones now echoed the worries filling Cho's head.  Aside from the known problems of reviving an old and damaged ship, there was now the not inconsiderable risk from leftover ‘anything’ to consider as well.

'There's nothing for it, Doctor, we will have to inspect the ship.  I was going to send an engineering detail, but now, because of the security implications, I will be leading the team.  I hope your spacesuit certification is up to date.' 

The brighter look on Clark's face persuaded him as much.

'Right then,' he added.  'Let's go look at our new ship,' he said, real excitement coursing through him.