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The Four Colonies

The Universe

Near Space

In the early 22nd century, Earth suffered from such problems of war, overpopulation, climate change, and famine that something had to be done to preserve humankind. After the second use of nuclear weapons in human history, the farsighted nations in Europe and Asia devoted a substantial fraction of their resources to establishing self-sustaining colonies in orbital habitats, on the Moon, and on Mars, hoping that all of humanity's eggs would never be in one basket again.

In 2122, the jealous Americans diverted their attention from petty wars and religious squabbles on Earth long enough to launch a nuclear strike on an Earth-orbiting habitat, destroying it and its thousand inhabitants. Ironically, this strike had the effect of proving the Eurasian nations' case to the rest of the planet. The pace of colonization accelerated even as the earthbound wars intensified. When the newly sworn in Reverend President ordered a nuclear attack on a South American rogue nation in 2135, the United States faced nuclear retaliation for the first time in history. The exchange delivered a devastating blow to the climate of the Western Hemisphere.

By 2200, the outer moons of the Solar System had been colonized. Fossilized, long-dead microbes had been observed on Mars a half-century earlier; but now, the existence of primitive life forms on the moons Europa, Titan, and Enceladus was confirmed. Despite the profound impact of science and the necessity of maintaining substantial colonies, the wars continued. The Americans were late to start their own colonization program but threw themselves into the endeavor with a will after the war of 2135-40, extending their own conflicts and prejudices into the Inner Colonies. War found its way into space.

The Extrasolar Colonization Initiative

Conflict, as always, accelerated the progress of technological and scientific development. Entangled-particle communicators allowed events and instructions to be relayed instantly to any point in the Solar System. Together with the Colonial Authorities, the New United Nations declared a cessation of hostilities in 2219, shortly after the first exchange of the first antimatter-based weapons, which meant instant death to any Earth city, orbiting cylinder, or colony habitat. They used all their political and financial capital to push for a twenty-five-year program to develop antimatter containment technology to the point where relativistic ark rockets could be sent to colonize other star systems, identify candidate systems for that colonization, and deploy the arks. All, of course, in the name of preserving the human race from extinction by its own hand.

A full-sky survey commenced and, in 2230, the astronomers announced that they had found four suitable systems: Zeta1 and Zeta2 Retuculi, Omicron2 Eridani, and Epsilon Indi. Each system met the New United Nations' criteria: they must be within 50 light-years of Earth, they must have a near-Solar star, there must be at least two planets or moons in each system capable of supporting liquid water, and the elements of nitrogen and carbon, as well as oxygen compounds, must be prominent in the spectra of those planets. The systems were given the names Hope, Deliverance, Salvation, and Escape. The journeys would be one-way for all colonists. However, Hope and Deliverance had only a few thousand AU between them; a separation that did not preclude interaction with conventional propulsion.

Ahead of schedule in 2229, the ark designs were complete. Construction in the Outer Colonies started immediately: ECI workers hollowed out four small comets on highly eccentric orbits and fitted them with habitation modules, cold storage, and massive antimatter confinement tanks. The comets' ice would protect the colonists from radiation bombardment; the highly elliptical orbits would decrease the delta-v necessary for Solar escape. Each comet was built with an accompanying base station-a "first stage" antimatter rocket to boost them out on their journey. They were completed in early 2244, with one hundred thousand hibernation berths and tens of thousands of metric tons of vehicles, equipment, and raw materials. However, it took another eight years for production facilities to capture enough antimatter to fill the arks-over two-thirds of each ship, by mass.

The Departure

The New UN ceasefire expired in 2244. While most of its resources remained concentrated on the Extrasolar Colonization Initiative, old conflicts began to crop up again. The ECI scrambled antimatter for the arks out to them amidst the new wars, sequestering it against a strike. Small skirmishes erupted over the precious antimatter pods. The arkships were filled and launched; the last one, dispatched to Salvation, escaped a nuclear strike on its departure station by barely six hours. The other stations burned out their antimatter in their first and final activation. The ECI detonated their remnants soon after, destroying the most advanced antimatter confinement systems known to humanity.

The arkships had always been slated to carry 'tanglers, to relay news of their colonization efforts. It was during the eight-year scramble to deploy the colonists that someone at ECI had the idea of completely decoupling the communicators from any influence of politics. The Colonization Initiative approached an order of Buddhist monks and entrusted to them the task of maintaining the tenuous links between the Stellar Colonies and Earth. Each arkship carried four 'tanglers, providing a link between each of the five settlements and Earth. The new order of monks took on the task of relaying information through the 'tanglers. Their paramount tenet was that they were not to issue any directives or orders through the communications net. They were also required to provide political information from an unbiased perspective. Each group of the monks was given a substantial set of dataprocessing computers to analyze information, maintain detailed records, and extract items of crucial importance. Before they embarked on the arks, the monks devised a series of codes and safeguards to ensure that only they could use the 'tangler net linking the human outputs.

The ships accelerated at one-quarter gee until they reached half the speed of light, then coasted until it was time to flip over and decelerate at a quarter gee again. The first ark arrived in Escape in 2278, twenty-six years after departure measured by Earth, but only twenty-three and a half years ship-time. By 2281, the colonists had established an open-air settlement on a habitable world, alongside native vegetation. In early 2287 the passengers of the second ark arrived at Salvation. The colonists could not find a human-habitable world in their system, but the two worlds with the key spectral markers had close enough atmospheres that closed habitats required only minimal catalytic alteration at their intakes. Modular prefab environments were installed by late 2288.

The arks sent to Hope and Deliverance arrived within six months of one another in 2333. The temperate plains of Hope became host to a thriving open-air colony by 2335. The people of Deliverance, however, could not locate a suitable human-habitable planet. They had to scrape colony habitats together from the resources in their new system, with no way to return.