Back From the Dead (41 page)

B-deck (also called middeck)

A-deck (also called top deck)

Appendix II: History and Technology

The story proper takes place starting in 2655. Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel was discovered in the late 21st Century, but there is no FTL
communication
, so star systems are still connected similarly to the 18th-century days of sail, with message-drones and ships carrying data and people between stars, often taking days, weeks, or even months for flights. Explorers might be out of touch for many months. Thousands of star systems and planets have been explored, and some have been partially terraformed. The dominant cultures out among the stars are the descendants from former British Colonies, but there are scattered colonies from various other places as well.

A supernova at Eta Carinae disrupted subspace enough that FTL was shut down for several centuries, and each terraformed planet (and planets that were still very much “in progress”) and colony had to survive (or not) on its own. This was known as “the deep dark” or “the big blackout”, as well as by several other names. Places still inaccessible are often referred to as being “in the dark” or “in The Deep.” This story takes place after things have quieted down a bit and stars are “coming back,” meaning FTL travel is once again possible in some places. However, subspace is like a stormy ocean, and “swirls” in it can make FTL flights faster, or slower, than normal, or even shut them down altogether for a while.

About the terraforming technology: Earth found a number of star systems that had apparently had planets moved around to place roughly Earth-sized rocky planets into the water zone orbiting the star, sometimes even two or three of them, in stable orbits. Some were planet-sized moons, some ordinary planets. The unknown aliens that moved them were dubbed “Planet Movers.” The only traces Planet Movers left were the evidence of moved and somewhat engineered planets, and a message they engraved into the rock on each planet. The text of the message was always the same, but the surrounding “decorations” have some variations on a theme — chains, interlocking gears, and what appeared to be swords and spears. There is no consensus of any sort as to what the message means.

Humans recreated how their technology worked to terraform a planet as follows:

First, a set of twelve giant gravity field benders that looked like huge three-prong tuning forks are placed in two sets of three orthogonal pairs. These could bend or manipulate the planet’s gravity enough to alter orbit, rotation, and core spin, in order to move it to the desired distance from a star, give it an approximately 24 hour day, a proper axial tilt (20–25 degrees), and a spinning core to generate a strong magnetic field (to protect the atmosphere from the solar wind).

While this happens, numerous giant automated ships (each about one kilometer in diameter), called Gas Transport Spheres would ship hydrogen from a local gas giant to the planet, where they would land on top of a terraforming platform (TFP) that was grinding up vast quantities of rock (mostly silicates and carbonates) and extracting the oxygen to mix with the hydrogen to make water. A largely automated manufacturing process is set up on each planet to make a bunch of the terraforming machines (the goal was a hundred or more per planet). The terraforming machines were designed to also be similar to colony ships: to establish life on the planets while they engineer the surface and atmosphere, kind of like a high-speed genesis — air, water, bacteria and algae, simple multi-cellular forms like grasses and seaweeds, then working up through more complex species as conditions allowed, starting with grazers and filter-feeders, etc. Each TFP had a population of dozens to hundreds of self-supporting colonists. Some colonies that were going strong survived the big dark just fine, some promptly expired, a few squeaked through. So there are several hundred potentially colonizable planets, some with thriving colonies, some abandoned, some still being terraformed on total automatic.

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