Cambria's Corner

It began, as so many things do, with an accident.

The shuttle was first detected just outside the orbit of Jupiter. It was drifting aimlessly, seemingly as though it had been on course for something and had run out of fuel. The pilot was gone, perhaps ejected in a desperate, but ultimately futile attempt to buy a few more hours of life.

Once the display was deciphered, we found out that the ship was tracking down our radio signals, desperately racing towards Earth in the vain hopes of survival. The fuel ran out a couple hundred million miles short.

Eventually, we managed to crack into the ship’s logs. Deciphering their language was a whole endeavor of its own, but we were able to learn a bit more about the universe outside of the two light-year wide bubble we call the Solar System.

The craft was essentially a lifeboat, ejected from a cruiser built by a spacefaring alien species. Little was able to be gleaned about the aliens themselves, other than the layout of the pod lending itself well to them being more or less humanoid. It was also impossible to tell how long the pod had been there drifting in the void of space. However, the pod did have a copy of the parent ship’s logs. A lot of context had to be inferred from the very limited information in the logs, but a lot of very clever people were able to figure a little bit of information from it.

This one tiny ship came to be known as the Lifeboat, and it revolutionized human technology and society. It had sublight thrusters that made our current ones look like biplane rotors, weaponry that made mass drivers and nuclear missiles look like children’s toys, deflector shields, advanced armor, and a device that allowed it to reach speeds faster than light for short amounts of time. Humanity’s exploration and research in space, as well as engineering on the ground, began to accelerate and take off at an enormous pace: and this was just an escape pod! By the end of the century, humanity had colonies and outposts on nearly every rock in the Solar System big enough to hold a launch pad and life support system.

The trickiest bit to recreate was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the faster-than-light drive. To keep it as simple as possible, the so-called “referential drive” merges a ship’s reference frame with that of the universe and allows it to emerge at a different point in the universe. There are numerous complications and restrictions involved, but it works. Faster-than-light travel through space was finally in humanity’s hands.

With this knowledge, it was inferred that the Lifeboat used up most of its stored energy (as it did not have a reactor onboard) to make the jump to our system and unsuccessfully tried to use its sublight fuel to make it to Earth.

The first (unmanned) ship equipped with a functional referential drive was launched from Saturn’s moon Tethys. It was called the Farsight, and in addition to the referential drives, shields, advanced sublight engines, and moderate weapon defenses, it was equipped with a small fleet of drones. These drones were also equipped with referential drives, and were programmed to essentially act as buoys that the Farsight would jettison, allowing them to dive and then emerge back in the Solar System, bringing back data from the Farsight and potentially pave the way for a manned expedition to follow. The ship was also equipped with a regular radio transmitter, just in case. The Farsight flew to the edge of the Solar System in little under a year (traveling at about 80% the speed of light thanks to the reverse-engineered alien sublight thrusters), transmitting back to the outer colonies the whole time through. It dove into reference just past the threshold of the Oort Cloud, heading for the Wolf 1061 system (chosen for, among other reasons, its high likelihood of a potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanet).

The drones never returned to the Solar System. Humanity waited with bated breath for the roughly 14 year time it would take for the radio signals from the Farsight to reach us after the ship reached its destination. The Farsight transmitted the expected data for approximately 3 days, after which it cut off abruptly. 2 days later, we received a message, originating from the same location as the Farsight. The message was in the same alien tongue that the Lifeboat used, and when translated it consisted of just 7 words that would shape human, and indeed, galactic, history for generations to come.

“They have found you. They are coming.”

32 hours later, the Farsight’s buoys returned to the Solar System.

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Chapter 1