Outward Borne by R. J. Weinkam Page A

that might be brought on
board.
    Space is not empty. Whole stars
are blown to gas and dust. This refuse is scattered in thin clouds
across our galaxy and often collected into bands surrounding solar
systems or wandering streams between the stars. The space through
which the Outward Voyager would travel contains an immense quantity
of widely disbursed matter. The vessel would sustain itself by
continuously sweeping these diffuse clouds using its wide
collecting grids and deceleration fields to slowly accumulate the
water, hydrogen and less abundant heavy elements that it would
require.
    The Outward Voyager’s memory files
held few images of the entire ship. It may be that the original
crew never got more than a glimpse at some small part of the
spindly ten-kilometer long craft. The Outward was a mostly empty,
stripped down husk. The resting mass was carefully controlled in
order to reduce the immense amount of energy required to accelerate
such a tremendous structure to fractional light speed.
     

     
    The crew had lived on the Outward
Voyager for months. All through their preparations for launch they
had been weightless, but now they were well into the ordeal of
acceleration. The small crew occupied the outer two levels of the
boxy, fifteen-deck habitat module. This structure and the
counter-balancing anti-module with its laboratories, warehouses and
construction facilities, were located on opposite ends of a long
tubular connecting arm. The near duplicate arm and pair of modules
on the opposite side of the hull were largely empty at launch, but
would be fitted out and furnished in flight as the need developed.
A bridge that passed through the central hull of the ship connected
these dumbbell-shaped arms to form an H-shaped unit. The bridge
served as an axle that would enable the habitat and working modules
to rotate and provide a simulated gravity after the Outward reached
cruising speed and its engines shut down.
    Now, during the long period of
acceleration, the small crew was divided between a portion of what
they called the Filim Side module and temporary quarters within the
propulsion unit as they struggled to manage the ship as it
continued to gain speed. After full their full velocity was
attained and the arms rotated to create a simulated gravity, they
would bring the anti-modules into operation, begin fitting out
proper living quarters, and complete the control deck from which
the ship and its robotic modules could be managed. The thirteen
empty levels of the habitat module would, in future, if all went
well, be filled with captive aliens. Duplicate living quarters and
control facilities would ultimately be built in the Farside module
in case of an emergency. All this would take time, but that was a
commodity that they would have plenty of.
    The Outward Voyager had a long
hollow central hull. It was a large, long, almost empty tube. The
interior of the hull contained little atmosphere and that was as
cold as the vacuum of space. It was an alien environment where most
of the work was conducted by robots. A cluster of deuterium fusion
engines and the massive electrical generators needed to power the
ship, and even larger units to maintain the fusion process force
fields, were isolated in the rear of the hull, far from the living
quarters. The wide material collection array and chemical
processing equipment were spread across the leading edge of the
ship. Stubby tethering flanges protruded a short way from the hull
to lock and support the module arms during the long acceleration
phase and course changes when the force of the engines provided the
gravity equivalent and would have collapse the anti-modules under
its own weight if they were not supported.
     
    LonRi JonDar and the other
crewmembers had maneuvered weightless within their sparsely
equipped quarters for eighty days preparing the ship for launch,
testing control systems, and initiating a long list of automated
procedures. The rotatable arms were aligned along