Administration
Too late, I realized I didn't provide a deadline for the Chapter 2 vote. I apologize. However, voting has slowed down now, so I will tabulate and present a short Chapter 3 ahead of what promises to be a difficult weekend for many on account of bad weather.

The final tally is as follows:

    The history of our species is a history of tools. - 4
    Technology is a drug: sublime when sampled, but so easy to abuse, and so dangerous! - 6

This means our character is one of many passengers skeptical of the new technologies and their acolytes.

Chapter 2 – Load 'em up!

Like Carthage, Spain, and America of old, we will be great not because of what we build at home, but because of where we are willing to go while others remain behind. - Grand Horizons

Logistics Update
All essential crew, colonists, and stores are safely aboard. The U.N. Office of Supply Chain Management is taking advantage of the remaining pre-launch window to add supernumerary payloads. Priority is going to Charter colonists, but some national consignments are also on the schedule, including from the United States of America and the Republic of India. Many Earthside shipments have been compromised by ongoing security problems and operational issues afflicting key embarkation points (e.g., space elevators, launch stations), which could lead to failed or incomplete deliveries, whereas cargoes and passengers originating from orbital staging areas or points elsewhere in the solar system and are more likely to arrive on-time. Details below.

Approximately 9,000 Multiple Use Labor Elements (M.U.L.E.s) are headed to the Lunar Space Cradle. Points of origin include the British space elevator at Singapore, the Indonesian space elevators at Pekanbaru and Pontianak, the Dutch space elevator at Manokwari, and Lunar LaGrange Point 4. Authorities at all four space elevator anchorages report critical perimeter security breaches due to ongoing civilian rioting, subjecting cargoes to damage, tampering, and delay. Some containers may now contain bombs--or even stowaways. (It has not been an uncommon experience for technicians to discover dozens or even hundreds of people laid up in first-generation cryobeds, powered by shunts from Main Power or old atomic batteries, secreted away behind false bulkheads.)

Rioting by so-called "Left-Behinds" has now reached epidemic proportions worldwide.

Emergency travel orders have been issued to members of four oceanographic teams under American Reclamation Corporation (ARC) supervision. They are presently scattered across the Inner Solar System. Comprehensive Transport, the all-space carrying monopoly, will speed their journey. Earthside personnel will load at space elevators in Quito, Ecuador; Macapá, Brazil; Kisangani, Zaire; and Kisumu in British East Africa. Again, be warned of extreme security risks. The Office of the Chief of Security anticipates heavy casualties among inbound personnel.

Equipment for the ARC oceanographic team is being sent from High Earth Orbit.

I need more information about M.U.L.E.s.

All machines are time machines. If it can do in an hour--in an instant!--what you once did in a day, or a year, or a lifetime, then what possibilities lie before us! - Faster!

The M.U.L.E. is an autonomous, radio-dispatched, mission-configurable ground-effect robot suitable for low-complexity industrial tasks. Major manufacturers include Tata Motors and Isuzu Motors India.

While unmanned, successful M.U.L.E. operations nevertheless demand a substantial "tail." M.U.L.E.s must be individually programmed ahead of each mission. Tape decks will be provided for this purpose. During the missions themselves, human controllers troubleshoot error codes and coordinate (read: deconflict) their pathing using radio signals. All Landing Pods possess long-distance transceivers and elevated, high-visibility control rooms suitable for mission control. Records appended to the manifest indicate that the Indian Government has supplied a diversity of mission packages. Your workshops will be able to modify M.U.L.E.s for warehouse and transfer work, forestry, seeding and fertilizing, surface mining, defoliation, basic firefighting, dumping, and hauling.

"Dumb as a M.U.L.E." conveys an important insight about how to make best use of these assets. Never forget that the original concept for the M.U.L.E. was to perform simple, repetitive tasks that demanded very little precision.

Your M.U.L.E.s use combustion engines that rely on diesel fuel. It is expected that the colony will be able to produce low-quality (dirty) diesel fairly quickly after Planetfall. In any event, all Landing Pods are stocked with full diesel tanks that should keep you going for the short-term, provided you do not face many competing demands on your supply.

Paper authority over the M.U.L.E.s belongs to the Mission's Director of Field Operations, Jeremy Tanner Marsh, whose surveyors and roughnecks will land on Chiron thirty Earth-standard days before the main mission to prepare a landing site. Plans call for Marsh's five thousand-strong Forward Contact Team to establish a security perimeter, scout for survivors of the Chiron Interstellar Probe, and set up a basic survival infrastructure—e.g., rain catchments, solar arrays, and automated mines.

Port officials are warning that the containers are setting off their radiation detectors, indicating that (1) the M.U.L.E.s have not been effectively decontaminated, and (2) they are surplus from disaster recovery campaigns in the Gujarati and Sindhi Exclusion Zone. Expect this to complicate safe handling.

Marsh questions how well the M.U.L.E.s will perform on Chiron. Some instructive comparisons: Chiron's air pressure is 1.74 times that of Earth, its gravity is 1.31 times greater, prevailing temperatures are noticeably warmer, and its oxygen levels are just forty percent those of Earth. The air-cushion effect will be useful to avoid bogging in the nitrate peat, which is known to have posed a problem for certain expedition vehicles carried by the Chiron Interstellar Probe, but you can expect severe diminution in top speed and towing/carrying capacity. (In hopes of mitigating the issue, Indian mechanics dismantled most of the M.U.L.E.s' radiation shielding, reasoning that you wouldn't need it where you're going.)

Tell me more about Marsh, please.

The earliest civilizations were sun worshipers. In the Bible, God first made light. Yet we, a people of the sun, have raised full generations underground, or wrapped in metal cocoons. You aren't really human if you've never felt the heat of sunlight on your upturned face. - The Lost World

Victoria Cross winner "J.T." Marsh is popularly considered the last of a dying breed. His sterling career in the British Special Air Service was cut short when a motorway accident killed his wife and child, causing him to up stakes for South Africa, where he found work as a game warden and lands supervisor at Kruger National Park and served intermittently as a reservist in the South African Defense Force (SADF). He put new feathers in his cap commanding firefighting operations during Kruger's catastrophic '51-'53 fire season and leading three successful climbs of Mt. Aconcagua for Seven Summits Expeditions. Upon returning to Johannesburg in 2057, Marsh consulted for various private military and humanitarian outfits on intelligence-gathering, austere medicine, bush logistics, personal protection, and personal security awareness. Rumors have long had it that his heart is for lost causes. MI5 suspected him of brokering arms to hard-put South Sudan and Fur secessionists resisting Morgan SafeHaven advances and North Sudanese-aligned paramilitaries during the Saharan Burst Wars. Historians remember Marsh as the major influence that convinced the Gathi military not to invest in combat automatons in 2059 despite severe manpower shortages on the eve of its successful counter-invasion of Shiloh. Marsh's credentials came to the U.N. Mission Personnel Selection Board via a Col. Derek Hacker, British Special Intelligence Service. Marsh scored an unprecedented .98 on the Atherholt Trauma Function Test during Mission screening.

First with his clients, then later using the platform given him by newsmagazine hagiographers, Marsh showed a fascination with what he called "the paradox of human indolence," whereby the enervating effects of modern lifestyles—largely sedentary, excited to off-load even the smallest task to robots, focusing on work that increasingly called for more mental resources than physical, and slaved to mind-altering substances—would so "emasculate" the human species that it would eventually "pass away from some preventable crisis." The Tetra Vaal robot soldiers used by the SADF, he said, were a case in point: more harm than help—a distraction from the need to "make real soldiers of real men who understand that their job isn't just to point and shoot."

Surprising no one, Marsh has lodged additional concerns with your office regarding "the clear and present danger of deacclimatizing our road crews to the essential work for which they have been selected" by becoming inadvertently dependent upon the M.U.L.E. force.

I need a briefing on Oscar van de Graaf and the American Reclamation Corporation.

A reporter for The Wall Street Journal once asked me whether I stuck my thumb on the scales of justice. Absolutely I did. The hand must be seen to sit firmly on that scale. That's the only way it works. We say that justice is blind for a reason. Too many people think that means it is fair. Not true. You've got to lead justice. You have to collect the facts, but you have to make sense of them, too. Justice itself isn't going to do that for you. The blind can't lead. -- Under My Wings, All Things Prosper: A History of the American Reclamation Corporation, Vol. 2

The American Reclamation Corporation, better known as the ARC, is a corporate instrumentality of the United States Government purchased from private hands by the ARC Act of 2060. First founded in 2039 by industrialist Oscar van de Graaf, it is the largest federal civilian employer and equivalent to a Fortune 50 company.

Born in 2006 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Van de Graaf was heir to multiple fortunes in rail logistics, petrochemicals, and manufacturing. When he was just twenty-two, his mother was killed in the Union Station Bombing—one of the first Hypersurvivalist terrorist attacks against a civilian target.

A Young Van de Graaf followed the trajectory of his class. He read history at Trinity College, a juris doctor from Yale, and sailed his way to the America's Cup five times. Companies his great-great grandfather founded sent him to the nation's capital, where he was dubbed "The Collector" by unfriendly press, in reference to the breathtaking number of supposed favors owed him by public officials.

Most sources estimate that Van de Graaf's net worth plunged by between eighty and ninety percent during the opening months of the war, and it is broadly accepted that Holnists inflicted most of this loss, tearing up rail track and ransacking his factories. The ARC was a holding company intended to consolidate personal and family assets then on verge of receivership. Calling in his markers, Van de Graaf convinced the U.S. Congress to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal—an experiment in mobilizing private resources against not only the Holnists, but state secessions in the American South and Midwest. The ARC began operating more or less as an armed auxiliary of the U.S. and Canadian Armed Forces, and Van de Graaf eventually amassed a pool of federal and loyal-state contracts that took the company into war manufacturing, rear-area logistics and security, incarceration, disaster relief, and management services for newly-established occupation governments. On the decennial of its founding, the ARC employed one in six Americans west of the Mississippi River and distributed the food relief that fed three.

Van de Graaf was appointed Secretary of the Interior in July 2049. Administration lawyers stayed busy defending the new cabinet member against claims of overreach, articulating many of the defenses later deployed by proponents of the unitary executive. His war on the Holnists was both personal and bitter. Actions by ARC "operators" raised objections even from the Attorney General of an administration at war—one that had recently presided over the controversial hanging of two rebellious governors. But the results spoke for themselves. The Pentagon was bullish on the ARC. The company's star hit apogee in 2054 when it was widely credited in newspapers with the near-independent liberation of Utah, Nevada, and Northern Arizona from hypersurvivalist militias. At times, ARC administrators exercised practical command over forces from Nauvoo Legion and the Volunteer Army of the United States, receiving only limited assistance from Regular Army. The Pentagon was bullish: his generals told the president that the ARC's work was the very thing that allowed the U.S. Army to mass its forces for decisive battles rather than ruin itself on counter-insurgency.

Forbes ranked Van de Graaf the second-richest American in 2055. From this strength, he bid for elected office, once for Senate in 2056 and then for president in 2060 as head of the new American Restoration Party, which was widely attractive among veterans and the huge population of ARC employees.

Then came the revelations. CBS reported that ARC regional administrators were complicit in debt peonage and other forms of human slavery. In ARC "company towns," investigative journalists repeatedly filmed systematic abuses of workers' rights, including forcible vaccinations. Audiences still darkly fascinated by tales of government overreach learned that the ARC was involved in the so-called Federal Long-Range Studies, a series of experiments under the aegis of the Civil Defense Administration that placed hundreds of volunteers in suspended animation for twenty years to test plans for Continuity of Government. That the onslaught of bad press was orchestrated, everyone knew—the bigger problem was that it all proved true, including the reporting that ARC executives funded the gut-wrenching 2040 Palace Coup in Shiloh, a recently-established nation in the Indian Ocean Exclusion Zone. The country's well-regarded prime minister, Leal ben Tab, was arrested at a game of billiards and taken away under guard the following morning the back of an Army lorry, centered in a haunting black-and-white photograph, then never seen again.

The ARC reached a $1.3 trillion settlement with the U.S. Government in late 2060, just before the election. In a three-way race for the White House, Van de Graaf secured 23% of the vote—a historic showing, but nowhere near successful.

Nearly wiped out by the settlement, the ARC became prone to hostile take-over by a Morgan Industries proxy, leading Van de Graaf to negotiated a rushed Congressional buy-out. (Morgan's companies' support for secessionist governments in Missouri, Texas, and Louisiana led to seizure of his American assets and a strong determination on the part of the President and legislative majority to block his rehabilitation.) The new Harrington Administration then reappointed Van de Graaf as the ARC's first chairman on a national reconciliation platform, in which role he effectively oversaw reconstruction in more than three-quarters of war-impacted counties.

Van de Graaf went on to contribute $232 billion of his personal fortune to the Unity Mission, helped along by an American policy of generous tax breaks and matching funds for their national donors. He personally interviewed and recruited the three hundred "stake-holding" families chosen to comprise his envisioned charter colony and competed openly and effectively with the U.N. for world-class experts in dozens of fields, including mining, surveying, infection control, robotics, and agronomy. They call themselves "The New Two Thousand," or sometimes "Pilgrims," and some of them have proposed to crown Van de Graaf their king.  The majority of van de Graaf's colonists are ex-ARC personnel, and he is thought to have obtained large quantities of colonization equipment from ARC surplus stocks on highly favorable (and legally dubious) terms.

Tell me more about the ARC equipment.
Base camp for the oceanographic team will be aboard the Queegqueg, an experimental commercial patrol vessel and light aircraft carrier that the Americans claim is capable of serving as a mobile supply point for planetary survey operations.

Queegqueg was laid down in 2041 by Uljanik in Yugoslavian Trieste for the Dodgeson Group, an engineering and construction multinational headquartered in the U.S. Virgin Islands that was then seeking entry into the global security marketplace. The was accepted for service in 2049, taking on a crew of private contractors. Dodgeson's board of directors hoped to make the Queegqueg an affordable auxiliary for countries that required "the temporary expedient of a high-quality naval force," and in this expectation, they were generally satisfied, but better opportunities for future investment arose before the Group could exercise the options for two sister ships. After a career that included freedom-of-navigation patrols in the Red Sea in 2054 and resupply of the British Honduras garrison during a period of high tension with Mexico in 2055, the ship was sold to ex-ARC CEO Oscar van de Graaf, drydocked on St. George's Island (a Western-allied micro-nation in the Arabian Sea some 200km due south of East Yemen), and painstakingly dismantled for transportation up the Singapore Space Elevator. It has since languished in high orbit for six years.


Consistent with French design philosophy, a center-citadel design divides Queegqueg's deck into two zones, a forward space used for launch operations and an aft deck used for recovery. Airframes are shuttled through a taxi space served by four through-deck elevators and sheltered by the massive superstructure. To protect their $19 billion investment, Dodgeson's fitted Queegqueg with numerous banks of countermeasures launchers, a high-powered ECM suite, four center-mounted guided-missile defense systems, and two 20mm cannons. During operations in the Amazon, Dodgeson's board also approved the purchase of a small but unknown quantity of ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore cruise missiles stored in intermodal containers. She carries 40 mostly-Aérospatiale helicopters rated for operations in Chironian conditions, a half-dozen parasite submersibles, a number of floating industrial platforms and tenders, and a bulked-up crew of aircraft technicians. Queegqueg was selected for the Unity Mission because of her excellent seakeeping abilities and Dodgeson's willingness to supply a crew. She was intended to serve as the flagship of the Aquatic Operations Division and assist with retrieval of cargo pods crash-landed in Chiron's seas.

What else do I need to consider here?

Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. -- Datalinks

Sailing master of the Queegqueg is Captain Zorion Montilla, a Peruvian graduate of the Escuela Naval Militar. (The Viceroyalty of Peru is a colony of Spain.) Prior to his retention by the Dodgeson Group, Montilla received a medical discharge from the Armada Española due to burns suffered during a naval skirmish twenty nautical miles out of Callao with missile corvettes registered to Morgan Industries. (Morganite interests are today in possession of much of what was once Peruvian Acre, a region to which Peru has not given up claim.) Montilla is a neo-monarchist.

The global neo-monarchist movement began as a late TwenCen reaction within colonial settler societies to the possibility of national self-rule, which they saw as a threat to their political, social, and economic privilege. Die-hards in Kenya and Algeria began sounding out their respective metropolitan royals. These strains of thinking soon combined with the growing body of critical thought on Corporate Replacement, a euphemism for the privatization of government functions, which the ARC helped popularize in the United States as the federal government grappled with the spiraling cost of environmental disasters. Frameworks of neo-monarchic government call for popular referenda to bequeath qualified political power to a dynasty of the people's choosing. "Modern monarchy" possesses several alleged virtues:

• Elections—when outcomes can be trusted--are at best a distraction for the one doing the governing, and at worst an open invitation to moral turpitude.
     
  Trust in government at all levels has declined steadily in the West since the 1970s, while anti-tax movements and anti-government cost-cutting have exploded in popularity. These "solutions" rarely succeed in their stated objective—devolving power back to voters—but are almost always linked to higher future tax burdens and worse agency performance. Altogether, this is evidence that voters are unworthy of the franchise. What actual value therefore lies in choice?
  
  Left to their own devices, voters will reliably choose fiction over fact. A monarch they chose with open eyes is no worse than a plutocrat they chose with eyes closed.
  
  Regnal periods in the age of advanced geriatric treatments are likely to run far longer than periods of single-party dominance, so contracts and commitments issued by a monarch should prove that much more durable, leading to improved international stability.
  
  Inasmuch as it was believed that only wealthy families would become vested, monarchy supposedly created an opportunity for developing nations to stem capital flight by binding the vast personal fortunes of their chosen rulers to the public interest.
  
  Whereas a corporation would be interested primarily in short-term gain, a ruling family could be expected to feel a much stronger obligation to their nation's future welfare.
  
  A monarch would have substantially greater incentives to quickly remove incompetent subordinates than was usually the case in the elected legislature, judiciary, or civil service of a democratic nation. Some went further, claiming that a royal court, even if comprised of sycophants and fools, could be no worse than divided government in a democracy, where voters sometimes also knowingly sent felons and fools to do the people's business.
  
  The royal heir(s) would be free to receive a focused education reflecting the particular needs of the nation. They could be raised to fit the expectations of service, and would not pursue the executive's role incidentally as the putative "reward" for their outsized ambition or achievement in other fields.
  
  Access to modern medicine, including genetic screening and longevity treatments, can counteract the chance of unsuitable heirs, an idea popularized by the Planitzer Group, a bio-engineering firm that used the shelter of corporate self-government to raise more than 450 children from infancy to adulthood in a lab.

Okay. Tell me more about the Charterists.

The cornerstone of the American dream was each man's inalienable right to property. A man's land was often his patrimony, and always his future. From it, he made his livelihood. To obtain and defend it, he fought and died. In 1776, farmers with fowling pieces pledged their mutual fortunes in war against the greatest empire on the Earth at that time for the promise of a few measly acres. -- No Step Backward: A History of the American Reclamation Corporation, vol. 1

The Mission to Alpha Centauri was originally conceived as a unitary venture. One colony, organized and governed under special U.N. charter, to which all members of the expedition had sworn allegiance. Captain Jonathan Garland, Unity's master, would retain overall command until the colony achieved a series of predetermined survival benchmarks. All passengers and crew would meanwhile be accountable to the paramilitary division structures into which they were already grouped for pre-flight training, in-transit emergency response, and disembarkation purposes.

National sponsorships dried up almost completely during the 2040s, reflecting the massive mobilization of relief for those impacted by the Six-Minute War (2042) and the onset of the Holnist Crisis, when the ultra-reactionary Hypersurvivalist movement challenged democratic governments worldwide in a series of bloody civil wars that lasted well into the following decade. Faced with the alternative of laying Unity up in ordinary, the increasingly-desperate Secretary-General sought private funding. (Corporate sponsors predominated, but credible allegations persist that the Office of the General-Secretary accepted money from trans-national criminal organizations on multiple separate occasions.)

The major demand of private sponsors was access. In return for their money, the U.N. dramatically reduced qualification and screening for their nominees and cargoes. It was agreed that the new colonists, sometimes called "Charterists," and any resources they brought along would be subject to the Mission Charter for a period of five years from Planetfall, after which the ostensibly healthy "mainline" colony would release them, with their remaining equipment, to form independent settlements.

Many Charterists were indentured—bound by contract to serve the one who had paid their way across the stars, sometimes for the rest of their lives--but others were themselves small-time donors who banded together under the terms of compacts and looked forward to lives as subsistence farmers on the "New Frontier."

Since all Charterists had preexisting relationships with their sponsors, the latter received warrant as so-called Factors—subordinate to U.N.-commissioned officers set over their assigned functional divisions, but with supervisory authority over those that had recruited.

Proponents of Charterism point out several advantages of the practice. First, most donors recruited world-class talent at least as impressive as the nominees put forth by national selection boards, which were prone to politicization. Second, the U.N.'s Stellar Lifeboat Project, which set aside billets for refugees, had set a precedent of bringing aboard large groups of people who did not meet traditional recruiting qualifications. Third, the very favorable terms extended to donors incentivized them to shift valuable supplies and equipment to the Unity Mission that would not otherwise be available. Fourth, nobody who joined the expedition could expect to live in anything approaching conventional comfort for the rest of their natural lives. Mission Planners had sometimes let on that mortality projections were egregiously high.

Charterists usually had exceptionally positive views of corporations--efficient, responsible, and purposeful, they were everything that so many governments were unable to be in the Blackjack Century. All corporations had one simple and recognizable goal: profit. The rules of the game would always be clear. And if corporations were impersonal, were not governments even more so? At least corporations chose those with whom they associated: if you were hired, you'd already passed the test. And unlike governments, which claimed their citizens by nothing more than the accident of birth, corporations had no alternative but to make investments in every hire--they trained them, after all.

Both parties accepted Charterism under duress—the U.N. because the mission was in danger of being scrubbed, and the donors because this was their best chance off an increasingly unstable planet. Crucial questions still remain unanswered. How could the mission's new financiers be assured that Mission Command wouldn't manage the early colony so as to exhaust all valuable supplies and heavy equipment ahead of the partition? Why should they believe that Captain Garland, with all the coercive power of the U.N. Security Force and Marines at his disposal, would not declare force majeure to keep the mainline colony whole? What if any of these private colonists petition for asylum? Will the U.N. not experience moral crisis if asked to enforce obligations of service on people for whom such a pledge was the only certain escape from global cataclysm? Contemporary press and popular opinion had it that the terms of the personal contracts exceptionally unfavorable—to the point that most signatories would likely perish before satisfying their obligations. Special constabulary powers have been granted to the mainline mission to investigate and punish abuse, but nobody has given much thought to precisely how these would be exercised.

Corporate influence either crucially altered or badly mutilated mission design, depending on one's point of view. With each body of Charterists came a healthy contingent of private security forces—Struan's Strategic Services, Morgan SafeHaven, Iron Key, Bras de Fer, Directed Outcomes, and the Twin Cedars Trust. On paper, they undertook to provide "operational capabilities" that most corporate recruits lacked by virtue of having received only a very abbreviated course of training and instruction before launch. In practice, everyone understood exactly what the mercenaries were sent along to do.

What's up with the technology level?
Racing the Darkness is a cassette-futuristic setting. The Fallout franchise provides a good baseline. To quote Reddit's r/cassettefuturism, "The future is saved 200KB at a time." Unity operations depend on bulky data tapes—about the size and thickness of a human hand and wheels of reel-to-reel fiche. Most displays show text, not images.

Psych Evaluation
I will now ask you a series of questions. The purpose of these questions is to ascertain our perspective on the cause of this strange expedition of ours.

Question one. What is our perspective on technology? Choose the one at best applies.

[ ] The history of our species is a history of tools. Creations tangible and intangible. Language, fire, the stirrup, the corporation, the computer, the atom bomb. With our many insights, ideas, and devices, some wonderful, some cruel, we changed the world and ourselves. We leveled mountains and raised them up, drained oceans and filled them, visited places over the horizon and above the clouds. Technology has made us. It has been the salvation of countless millions. How many have cheated death or immiseration thanks to bifocals, surgeries, and the telephone? How many masterpieces are made by artists on statins? How many sports heroes go on to play again after being injured? How much better is life because our loved one's cancer was put into remission by chemotherapy drugs? In this modern era, it is not the will of god or priests, nor the strength of one's sword arm, that determines fitness to govern. Weighty decisions should be left to the experts: those who have been trained to know. Methodical. Dispassionate. Fact-based. If I cannot demonstrate it to your satisfaction, you are under no compulsion to accept it.

[ ] Technology is a drug: sublime when sampled, but so easy to abuse, and so dangerous! In just twelve words, Hilaire Belloc explained holocausts: "Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not." Once we have a tool to hand, we are tempted to use it. Studies show that the suicide rate quadruples in homes that have a pistol. Can we not therefore admit to ourselves that our organizational capacities are not in all cases sufficient to manage the results of our scientific progress? Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Deepwater Horizon disaster—these are just three profound reminders that progress has a human cost. Audiences thrilled to the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park in part because it seemed plausible that in not so many years to come, we would have the power to resurrect creatures once confined to art and imagination. Yet through the mouthpiece of chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, author Michael Chrichton issued a prophetic warning: can does not mean should. In a great irony, the lawyer, Donald Gennaro—representative of an entire profession devoted to managing risk—sees only the profit to be made at John Hammond's wonder park. Rather, it is the archaeologist, Ellie Sattler, and the game warden, Robert Muldoon—two people with every reason to hope for Hammond's success—who spot the first signs of breakdown. Sattler warns that Jurassic Park's understanding of the prehistoric past is shallow, and indeed we soon learn that he has not created true dinosaurs, but rather new creatures that are merely derivative. Seeming-dinosaurs, you might say. Muldoon recognizes immediately that the thinking and safeguards suitable for apex predators of the late twentieth century are inadequate to monsters from an earlier epoch. Disaster follows. Predictably. This doesn't mean we should abjure science or its fruits—only that we should remember to retreat often to the refuge of things that are timeless, and therefore more reliable than the blithe assurances of white-frocked charlatans who will have a new theory for us by this time tomorrow. Modernity has not been entirely kind to humanity. We are proud, but sick. How long before we admit that sitting in an office chair for eight hours a day is no less likely to end in premature death than smoking tobacco? Mathematics cannot tell you the needs of the people. Hew to the fact that some stories, humans have told for three thousand years. This is collective wisdom. Hew to the people who have loved and raised you. Hew to the relationships which are physical and immediate, not those that depend so much on the keyboard and the imagination.[/list]

Finished Legion of Super-Heroes Archives Volume Seven last week.

Now on Dragon on a Pedestal, by Piers Anthony.

Understand the difference between survival and adaptation. Cockroaches are survivable. But only the species that had evolved free will was capable of the change required to escape the Great Catastrophe. - Ethics for Tomorrow

Chapter 1: The Fitting Out
Before we discuss what happened during the Crisis of Arrival, we will first complete the story of Unity herself by making some important decisions specific to cargo and passengers. Since no one ever forecasted that the expedition would break up, we'll make these decisions without the benefit of knowing which faction we'll play.

Sponsors were asked by the U.N. to part with huge sums, scarce intellectual capital, and precious equipment during a period of global crisis. The Mission itself was controversial and global opinion fickle. Many governments calculated that there were better uses for their resources closer to home. Those who did give looked always for some advantage.

Unity departed lunar orbit in 2067, never to return. In the final months of that year, exceptional efforts were made to rush critical equipment out of orbital factories or up Earth’s many space elevators. In this frenzy, any hope of effective organization was dashed, so good luck finding anything quickly, but that is a problem for future discussion.

Tell us: what special cargos made it aboard just in the nick of time?

Choose two of the following options. Voting will close Tuesday at 3:00PM Eastern Standard Time. Questions and discussion are welcome.

[ ] The United States of America. Americans are sour on the U.N. The Unity Mission never seemed as promising to them as exploration of our own solar system, which they led and mostly financed. And that was before the national embarrassment of their defeat in Québec, for which most hold the U.N. responsible. Still, American firms are undisputed masters of maritime operations, and the Secretary-General was prepared to make substantial concessions to gain the export licenses recommended by the mission’s Terraforming Committee.

With Washington’s grudging endorsement, the American Reclamation Corporation assembled a contingent of experts in climatology, oceanography, coastline management, deep-ocean mining, and aquaculture, along with a small fleet worth of ships and rigs to mark a real start at seaborne settlement. There are only three problems remaining. One, nobody has told the mission’s Aquatic Operations Director, who is already in cold sleep. Two, the ARC has insisted they answer only to Captain Garland or ex-ARC executive Oscar van de Graaf. Three, the team negotiated to go with Van de Graaf when, five years after Planetfall, he leaves the mission umbrella.

[ ] The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Interstellar Probe provided humanity with the first evidence that we were not alone in the universe. Although the pathfinders found no sentient life on Chiron, what they did encounter was sometimes deadly-dangerous. Soviet diplomats arranged a gift of ten thousand surplused armored cars ready for reconnaissance, liaison, utility, and even light combat duties in environments requiring full NBC protection. Keeping with Soviet practice, the cars are powered by fission batteries. The upside? These hunks of metal are not only rugged and survivable, but have practically limitless range. Their simple construction promises easy refits, repairs, and modification. They will serve most any purpose, from ploughs to patrollers.

Time being of the essence, it was impossible to perform anything like an inspection, but even if large numbers of the vehicles turn out to be unserviceable, the scrap value will be very high. Naturally, the U.N. agreed to hold Moscow blameless for any "accidental fission" arising from user mishaps or faulty equipment, and quietly found space in Unity's detention block for 20,000 additional prisoners “evacuated” from the Soviet GULAG.

[ ] The French Union. France retained a substantial amount of overseas real estate and subjects in the second half of the twentieth century, and although the terms of association sweetened progressively, it fought long and traumatizing wars in North Africa, Indochina, and the Levant. U.N. purchasing agents found the bargain-basement deals they were looking for in Algerian depots.

The original concept for the Unity's small armory placed an emphasis on less-lethal and reduced-penetration solutions: stun guns, flechette launchers, and low-velocity plastic munitions. French Army cast-offs now significantly expand the small arms (“hand weapons”) and light weapons available to the survivors at Planetfall. Secure storage isn’t readily available, so Captain Garland has tasked his Executive Officer, General Francisco D’Alemeida and his chief of security, Rachael Winzenreid, to come up with an alternative solution.

[ ] Republic of India. In 2042, India and Pakistan attempted mutual annihilation. The worst of the damage was confined to an approximately 1,000km swath between Karachi and Mumbai, but the intensity of the fallout posed daunting—and deadly—challenges to hands-on response and recovery. The Indians were soon deploying robot armadas of every conceivable size, shape, and purpose. There were robots to search for and lead out survivors. Robots to collect irradiated soils. Robots to spray-sanitize public spaces day and night, and others to soak the runoff. Robots to deliver food, fuel, medicines, and other necessities to every household that could not be evacuated. Robots to replace the missing labor in factories and fields. Robots to fight fires, fill sinkholes, repair collapsed shoreline, and build earthen dams. In the words of The New York Times, "The sub-continent learned the full horrors of push-button war. Now, it will try push-button peace."

India sold Factor Oscar van de Graaf's charter colonists upwards of 9,000 Multiple Use Labor Elements (MULE), a kind of autonomous mechanical worker. Under prior agreement with the U.N., these will be placed in general service with the “mainline” mission for a period of five years before reverting to the personal ownership of Van de Graaf and his stakeholders when they depart to establish a proprietary colony of their own.

M.U.L.E.s are indefatigable irrigators, haulers, and foresters, and mechanically very reliable. However, their power plants use hydrocarbon fuels, whereas most mission assets used nuclear fuels. Operating the M.U.L.E. fleet will mean building a dedicated carbon-based energy grid in parallel to the colony’s main power system, or expensive and time-consuming conversions on a per-unit basis.

[ ] Golden China. Ever heard the saying that information can be worth its weight in gold? The Bureau of Investigation and Statistics approached you directly with a private warning: U.N. Mission Planners were keeping even their own captain in the dark—about what you will find on Chiron, and exactly who are bringing with you.

You can’t yet say what’s worse: the sheer quantity of materials they provided (and which you were unable to study before you came aboard), or the fact that you were able to corroborate all the high (low?) points with your contacts in New York, Addis Ababa, and Geneva. Realistically, it will only be a matter of time before the tapes containing these secrets fall into the wrong hands. You will need to act quickly to tie up loose ends.

[ ] The Federated Nigerias. “One Nigeria” disintegrated early in the Blackjack Century, but its successor states, each having secured itself from the unwanted domination of the others, eventually returned to the confederal proposals of the 1950s.

After losing access to Lake Chad, the Sultanate of Sokoto turned to its brethren in Lagos, Benin City, and even Port Harcourt. Together, the Three Nigerias fought a long and ultimately successful battle against desertification on its northern frontier, placing huge acreages under the till. At last, a U.N. intervention force has been deployed to expel the Morganites from the vicinity of Maiduguri. The Secretary-General’s price was a second seed bank even larger than the original sourced in Brazil, along with valuable new microbiotic and insect cultures that should greatly enhance the colonists’ health, both by expanding their diet and access to rare pharmaceutical compounds.

So what’s the hitch? All this was done without input from the mission’s chief botanist, Deirdre Skye, who was clear in her warnings: the greater the number of non-native organisms in your possession, the greater the chance of inadvertent contamination of the alien biosphere.

[ ] Imperial Iran. There are dangerous neighborhoods, and then there’s Persia. Soviets to the north, Iraq to the west, and Islamists to the south. No wonder the Shah has pursued an atomic weapons program even over the protests of his American benefactors. By 2055, a hollowed-out America was hard-pressed enough to turn a blind eye to the Shah’s project.

Without telling Captain Garland, the Shah’s people have approached you with an offer of a six 100-kiloton devices and a delegation of so-called Mechanists, members of a popular movement dedicated to supplanting human workers with machines. [1] They insist that their purposes is simply to create space for an intellectual and emotional “flowering,” and their technical skills will surely be useful, but the U.N. prohibited their recruitment over a string of assassinations carried out by extremists in their ranks during the 2050s and 2060s.

[ ] The People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Red Ethiopia is the confirmed hegemon of East Africa, and a recent sufferer of Dutch disease. Victory in a short, sharp conflict with Sudan gave the DERG confidence enough to extort huge sums from the Egyptians to keep the Nile flowing and play the part of kingmaker in South Sudan, Puntland, Somaliland, and the Yemens. None of these endeavors came cheap, and Ethiopia has drawn heavily on its reserves of rare earths for credit.
Telemetry from the Chiron Probe shows that the deep nitrate mat smothering the planet’s continents will make mineral extraction even more labor-intensive than on Earth. Ethiopia’s contribution of reserve stockpiles buys the first colony more time before the first boreholes must be drilled. As compensation, a “mistake” will soon cause the unintended separation of certain hull-mounted cargo bays containing computer equipment otherwise unavailable to Ethiopia, which Soviet tugs will recover after Unity’s launch.

[ ] Chile. This South American nation has seesawed politically between Right and Left for more than a century, rarely enjoying stable government for more than twenty years at a stretch. Exhausted by the unrelenting demands to make a binary choice between two ideologies that had only ever immiserated them, its youthful population flocked to the new Solar religion in unprecedentedly large numbers. In hopes of clearing the streets, Chilean authorities readily offer them up to the Alpha Centauri Mission.

You can expect a very large number of solar techs, along with enough practitioners of traditional medicine to create a dedicated medical auxiliary, assuming you’re also prepared to take on thousands of unskilled colonists already in family units.

[ ] Kellerites. If the direst predictions hold true, then securing a billet aboard Unity is a matter of life and death. The list of proscribed persons runs into the millions, and it includes Kellerites—followers of late radio personality and Iowa lay preacher Jean-Baptiste Keller, one of the leading personalities of the Holnist Era. In strict ideological terms, Keller was what is now called an antidissassociationist: someone who believes that technology is causing a diminution of local community spirit. Kellerite communities were neighborhood-scale civil defense organizations just prior to or during the Second American Civil War, mirroring the parallel creation of right-wing “gun clubs” and anti-government militias that claimed to be adherents of Survivalism. Most Kellerite communities consisted of a few extended families and their immediate physical neighbors. The Kellerites were alleged to be cultists and ultimately gave the United States Government considerable trouble while they struggled to confront state secessions and a general Holnist uprising. Nevertheless, their adherents proved difficult to dissuade and most of their leadership is still unaccounted for. The American intelligence community estimates there are still millions of sympathizers throughout the Inter-mountain West who don’t accept the prevailing attitudes toward Kellerites and see them as credible defenders against the Holnist onslaught. Kellerism also attracted considerable interest in Canada, Australia, Western Europe, Central America, and Southern Africa.

Hours away from cold sleep, you are requests to attend a private conference. You are joined in a small radio shack by a junior officer you don’t recognize. His revelation forces you off your feet: there are Kellerites aboard Unity. He claims not to be one of them, but has clearly kept their secret. You hear him out, perhaps from curiosity, but if not, then in order to have the greatest quantity of information to take to Winzenreid. By the time he finishes, you are shaking hands.

The Kellerites—there are several hundred sheltered behind false bulkheads shipwide—have survival skills that will be valuable to the mission and no ambitions other than to escape dying Earth, just like yourself. The U.N. has made grievous mistakes before, and you are convinced that discriminating against the Kellerites is one of them.

Japan. The island nation built the world’s second-largest economy on the back of a manufacturing renaissance that began in the 1960s, earning a sterling reputation for quality and cost-competitiveness in less than twenty years. More recently, Japan became a mid-century haven for California exiles and supplanted America in the “Great Chip Race.”

The Japanese government will offer the Unity mission access to a pair of so-called “subordinate machines,” or SUBMACS, which should substantially increase the processing power of the Unity supercomputer… provided you are prepared to take the risk of linking these unsecured boxes to the equivalent of Unity’s brain.

[1] Their name is an homage to the Fallout franchise, which featured Mechanists in Fallout 3 and 4.

On our small planet, at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history: what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity, we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this plant, to enhance enormously our understanding of the universe, and to carry us to the stars. - Cosmos, Datalinks

Foreward
This is the story of an expedition into the unknown. It was an act of desperation, undertaken not in optimism or from a place of pride, but because our species, and the civilization it created, had run out of time. And so we fled the world we had seemingly destroyed for one that might yet destroy us in turn.


What is a Quest?
A Quest is an interactive story, exactly like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. The author writes in short installments. At the end of most installments, readers vote on a range of options that shape the future story.

Introduction
Planet Earth is dying. The year is 2071AD, and for nearly two centuries, self-destruction has been our unshakeable addiction. We fought until there was nearly nothing left. The victors, if we may call them that, will only have what is spoiled.

The sweet waters that once cooled us and the oceans that bequeathed us, we poisoned with our chemicals. The air we breathe and the soils that once fed us have been ruined by the hundreds of "low-yield" atom bombs detonated since 1945 and a run of reactor meltdowns so numerous they have been indexed by computer. Despite their well-documented consequences, we used these tools unsparingly to better shape our home to our liking, always telling ourselves that there could be no gain without a little pain.

But now that pain has become too much. We ourselves are dying. The global population level is just three billion. Governments were too feckless, and our patience too thin, to accept the short-term inconvenience of long-term cures. Even setting aside the war dead, we have perished at an industrial rate from ruined ecologies, eradicable diseases, preventable famines, and frequent billion-dollar weather disasters.

The United Nations put up a commendable rear-guard action. Recognizing even forty years ago that our only salvation lay in flight, they inaugurated Project Unity, an effort of unprecedented technological and organizational complexity. Soon, we will launch an emergency expedition to Earth's nearest habitable neighbor, the planet Chiron in the Alpha Centauri star system.

It's not as unlikely as you might believe. Humans have been living in space more or less continuously since 1980. Today, there are permanent settlements on or above every planet in our solar system nearer than Neptune. Nuclear pulse propulsion, while capable of just a fraction of the speed of light, should keep the journey to well under a century. Colonists can be placed in suspended animation--"cold sleep"--to slow the natural aging process and reduce the logistical complexities of travel. A scouting mission, the Pathfinder Probe, was sent ahead to lay the groundwork for something larger. Contact with the Probe’s crew was quickly lost, but they survived long enough to confirm that Chiron is habitable.

The Impossible Ark
First conceived as the American Ares III intra-solar foundry, Unity's future skeleton had been a fixture in the nighttime sky above North America for more than fifty years before it was purchased by the U.N.'s Janović Commission in 2030. The ship then spent another thirty-four years in geosynchronous orbit fitting out, followed by four of trials that took it as far as the orbit of Pluto. By volume, it was the largest object ever built by man. Knowing that technological progress would outpace them before completion, her shipwrights opted for a modular design, hoping to install the engines, reactor, and data core last.

The Project was, in generous terms, an unmitigated disaster--a case study in the perils of consensus-based project management. Amidst countless changes in leadership, endless industrial accidents, and incidents of terrorism, entire sections were started, gutted, and started again as the availability of money, materials, and expertise waxed and waned. A revolving door of visionaries, sponsors, and builders produced a "Frankenstein's Ark" of obsolete and incompatible systems. Political imperatives often spoke louder than practical considerations. When the Western powers suspended their participation during the two-decade agony of the Holnist Wars, Chinese and Warsaw Pact engineers dismantled and stole entire mission modules for closer study Earthside. Notoriously, Unity had four different "splinternets" slaved to a single mainframe, one French, one Japanese, one Soviet, and one American. A crew member in one section might have to travel as much as six miles to access a familiar terminal.

The number of contractors engaged topped six thousand, and the U.N. struggled to provide adequate oversight. In a fit of pique over a no-notice audit, Morgan Aerodynamics sealed over dozens of cargo bays previously installed by competitors, claiming "safety irregularities." The American Reclamation Corporation, which supplied a major share of the mission's earthmovers, installed remote "kill switches" that were only discovered after it was too late to arrange their removal. A dozen firms designed, manufactured, and installed the all-important Landing Pods--household names like Serrol-Merowe, Fairchild-Grumman, Dai Seung Heavy Industries, and Chevrolet-Monarch Consolidated, and so there were as many fuel mixes and launch systems to account for.

Unity's computer systems followed the principles of mainframe computing, slaving tens of thousands of dumb terminals to three high-reliability supercomputers, a primary and a back-up, and a pair of physically separated data cores.

By special agreement with France, the mainframe ran three operating systems simultaneously: the shipwide standard (using machine language from Bharat Operating System Solutions), a partitioned Minitel instance for user-to-user plain text communication, and a partitioned Soviet-sourced Kronos instance dedicated to the ship's fission plants.

Cold War tensions prevented emergence of a single common programming language, so that the Data Services division had well-established (and well-siloed) English, French, Russian, Japanese, Indian, Esperanto, and Chinese branches. The official mission language was English, and proficiency with that language was a requirement for crew selection prior to 2050, but non-native English-speakers together formed a plurality of the crew. Unfamiliar keyboards hampered timely, accurate input for systems administrators and made text communication practically impossible for traditional life-safety responders.

Because the ship spent so long under construction, entire generations of technology came and went before launch. This was a predictable challenge for any endeavor so long in the marking, and the U.N. firmly embraced a principle of using systems and equipment from the Second Generation of space exploration whenever possible. There were several reasons for this. First, legacy technologies typically had a well-documented history, meaning planners could have confidence they would succeed in purposes for which they were selected. Second, from a purely technical perspective, this mostly-analog technology was easier to manufacture and repair than the digital products that had replaced it. Third, using mostly-dead machine languages reduced the population of bad actors who possessed the tools and know-how to tamper with them. Fourth, and perhaps mostly importantly, it would ensure that colonists who completed their training and entered cryosleep in the first tranches would still have knowledge, skills, and abilities as relevant to the expedition as their counterparts who joined closer to departure.

Nonetheless, this did not mean that Unity's TO&E was never expanded with new technologies, and there were times when critical breakthroughs in relevant fields upended well-laid plans. Thus, Unity's astrogational and light-beam communications systems were replaced two and four times, respectively. Believing that the expedition would find a way to make use of the previously-installed components, rather than remove them, technicians simply left them in place--unlabeled and unloved. Politics and penury disposed the U.N. to accept surplus donations even when they were unsupported by a concept of operations. Thus, Unity was laden with enormous stockpiles of mislabeled, unlabeled, and unwanted materials--at worst, it was thought, they would go to Matter Reclamation after Planetfall. To a U.N. Board of Inquiry completed just hours before his departure for the Lunar Cradle, Unity's captain, Jonathan Garland, observed wryly that there was not a single integrated or accurate schematic--let alone a proper inventory--of the whole ship anywhere in existence.

Preparing for the Unity Mission
Providing a crew and passengers for the ship presented a separate brace of problems no less thorny than its construction. The U.N. determined to send the best of us--but, of course, there was very little agreement about how to measure such qualification.

Even once consensus candidates were found, tens of thousands perished in training. Many more died at the hands of mobs and terrorists incensed at the idea that they had been found somehow less-deserving. And no matter how generous, donors always came with agendas of their own. Earth's best and brightest will therefore serve alongside exiles, outcasts, and stowaways of every conceivable stripe.

There are more than 400,000 of them. At first, individuals were first nominated by national commissions, then processed by medical and occupational panels operating under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council. Virtually no trade or calling was excluded. Our species's future will be secured not only by astronauts and botanists, physicists and physicians, but judges and civil servants, poets and preachers, lawyers and musicians. Ninety-two percent of the ship's original crew are single, able-bodied persons of sound mind and body between the ages of 24 and 32. Most had advanced degrees prior to selection, and all--whether "core" expedition members or charter colonists--received a mandatory four years of additional preparation, half of it in classrooms. Crew were trained and billeted in waves at facilities in the Sonoran desert, on Antarctic's Amery Ice Shelf, in the tunnels of the Armstrong Colony, and in the foothills of Olympus Mons. The first graduates entered cold sleep in January 2047; the last, in February 2071.

A standard developmental battery such as that developed and administered by Morgan Adaptive Learning Associates in cooperation with Tokyo University and the Indian Institute of Technology, featured intensive evolutions in physics, agronomy, chemistry, computer science, electric and mechanical engineering, wilderness survival, emergency medicine, civics, and self-defense techniques. Fewer than 1-in-23 recruits completed the Earth-bound leg of training, after which they took the long journey up the equatorial space elevators to orbital gantries for a further year of practical schooling in zero- and low-gravity maneuvers, firefighting, and heavy rescue. Here, colonists were sorted by division for the first time to practice together the tasks they will eventually be expected to perform after Planetfall. The dropout rate from this point was 84%. Those who endured could expect to spend a final phase of learning on the Martian surface living and working in environmental domes designed to mimic the Chironian ecosphere.

With the exception of senior command staff, made by direct U.N. appointment, crew were usually seconded from the uniformed services of various donor nations and corporations. Space agency alumni predominated, but many countries used the project as a way to sideline politically unreliable military personnel. The quality of the more than 80,000 charter colonists also varied widely: while the hand-picked recruits of industrialist Oscar van de Graaf's New Two Thousand were almost all world-class leaders in their fields, Struan's Pacific Trading Company provided its nominee, Roshann Cobb, with far less-salubrious characters. So-called factors were even permitted to employ their own private military service providers for settlement defense once they eventually completed their terms of service under the Mission Charter.

Inclusion of re-socialized prisoners, a Warsaw Pact innovation, prompted the U.N. to furnish Captain Garland and his officers with a complement of blue-helmeted Marines to ensure their safety. Robotic servitors were placed board in the 2050s after long-range spectrographic analysis of Chiron indicated that planetary conditions would be considerably more hostile than initially projected.

Cryogenic stasis was achieved according to the Wespe-Quinn-Vagner Process, selected for its comparatively high rate of patient survival. The U.N. settled on Wespe-Quinn-Vagner after a thorough investigation of more than two dozen alternatives. On this, the mission's medical personnel achieved a rare full consensus. CMO Pravin Lal's official memorandum of recommendation to the U.N. Medical College, now housed in the archives of his alma mater, The Aga Khan University, is counter-signed by Unity's Director of Neurosurgery, Dr. Aleigha Cohen; its director of Genetic Medicine, Dr. Tamineh Pahlavi, also a noted expert in geriatric therapies; and Psych-Chaplain Miriam Godwinson, who attended to the ethical implications associated with artificially extending human life. Chief Engineer Prokhor Zakharov took the unusual step of appending an amicus note.

The journey to Alpha Centauri required seventy-seven years of travel. Wespe-Quinn-Vagner slowed patient metabolism to a virtual halt during that time. Cumulative practical aging was less than one full year. Sensitive monitoring equipment filtered toxins and introduced supplemental nutrients into the bloodstream as needed. Dynamic suspension gel exercised muscle groups while psycho-pharmacological cocktails managed the risk of vivid dreaming.

The Journey
The odyssey that brought a fully-powered Unity from the Lunar Cradle to the edge of the Alpha Centauri system was a harrowing one. Just hours after launch in November 2071, an explosion destroyed one of the seventeen-mile-long starship's four precious hydroponics bays. Finding that the ship was still space-worthy, Mission Control chose to override automatic crew resuscitation and simply jettison the affected compartments. At the push of a button, ten thousand lives were sacrificed on the altar of human survival, and nobody aboard was any the wiser. The U.N. Intelligence Cell went on to confirm that the cause of the explosion was sabotage. Odds of mission success were revised downwards to >7%.

Seven decades passed, and, against all odds, Unity was T-minus three weeks from deployment to Chiron's surface. A Forward Contact Team had been planet-side for a whole month, working to a clear a landing zone under the supervision of celebrated wilderness guide J.T. Marsh.

Then, at 01:19h Zulu Time, 1 December 2148, a micro-object impacted Unity when the ship was just 0.2 Astronomical Units from Chiron. At once, the impact sheared off three cryobays, gutted a fourth, and destroyed two of three remaining hydroponics modules before striking the ship's solar sail. Loss of the latter component was especially problematic, for unlike her nuclear reactors, the output of the sail could be readily trimmed to meet relatively small changes in power demand. The port side ventral hull suffered hundreds of shrapnel impacts, depressurizing critical compartments and compromising the primary reactor shield. Coolant system failure triggered a SCRAM, but radiation began leaking into cryobays. Crew emerged into a steel envelope bleeding oxygen and devoid of light, with hope itself fast running out.