Caroline watched as the ensign left the bridge. She recalled his personnel file: He was born in the Mississippi Administrative District, in the city of Atlanta, but had spent most of his life on the Lionsgate Space Station. George Archer used to scratch out a living as tug-pilot, hauling fuel and spacecraft parts around the Earth-Luna system. He had been one of the best pilots in the business, and it was for his expertise that he was drafted for this mission. He'd received only rudimentary military training, and she did not appreciate his inexperience. He might fly well, but greenies could be the doom of any ship. Especially this one.

The journey would be ten years long. During that time, the crew would only be working once every six months, making sure that the flight AI was still doing its job properly. The duration of the mission was not unheard of; it was the nature of the mission that was unique.

The constant groan was still audible over the sounds of congratulation, reminding Caroline that the engines were roaring at their full capacity. Those engines, she realized with some dread, would continue to drone for more than a half year before finally shutting off. By that time, the Facem would be traveling at a large fraction of the speed of light, as fast as they could safely take her.

The admiral walked out of the bridge and into the observation deck. It was a simple rectangle, with windows on all sides. A bank of metallic doors stood vigil on one of walls.

Through the windows, Caroline could see the interior of the huge spacecraft. It was largely hollow, a massive column of air, many hundred meters in diameter. The walls were perfectly smooth, painted in the same shade of white that plagued the rest of the structure. Four platforms ringed the cylinder, positioned one above the other. Skyscrapers sprouted from these platforms like a black, stringy fungus, reaching up to touch the bottom of the next platform. They were almost identical to each other, every building made of darkened glass with strips of white metal running up their lengths. The light of the artificial sun glinted off their crystal skins. From where she stood, the reflected light looked like silvery slash marks, gaping across the height of the towers. Down at the base of the cylinder, Caroline could see the main common area, with its gardens and shops and cafes.

This was the starship Facem, the torch that would lead humanity to the greater lights in the distance. That was the sales pitch. She heard somewhere that the starship was more expensive than any other single project in the history of mankind. Whether the vessel was worth its hefty financial weight was not Caroline's concern, however. She would just be getting it where it needed to go without killing anyone.

The ship was manned by a crew of about twenty. For the most part, they served as a redundancy; the Facem's computers were perfectly capable of completing the mission on their own. But still, there must be a crew. If nothing else, they helped keep the passengers in high spirits. Then again, a human being is flawed and difficult to predict, where a machine would follow orders without question or deviation. On a mission this long and empty, it was dangerous to allow such a liability access to the flight controls. Apart from the crew, there were thousands of civilians onboard as well, each a possible saboteur. The screening process could only pick out so many bad apples. So many weak points, Caroline thought.

The mission was separated into three phases. The first phase of the flight was the primary burn, during which the ship would gain phenomenal speeds. The ship would accelerate uniformly for about a year. By the end of the astoundingly long burn, the ship would have reached relativistic speeds, meaning that time would be moving slower in the ship than it was in the rest of the universe. This resulted in a total mission length of about six years, whereas the people on Earth would see the ship in transit for twenty.

When the engines finally ceased their constant drone, the pseudo-gravity they provided would also be lost. To replace it, the habitation module would begin rotating on its axis. Of course, this meant that objects would fall toward the walls of the column instead of the base, so the whole population would have to be relocated into structures oriented accordingly. Then, the longest part of the mission would begin. The ship would be moving at seventy percent of the speed of light. At such staggeringly huge velocities, even the diffuse gases of interstellar space could become dangerous. An enormous ablative shield, docked to the bow, would take the brunt of the damage, and keep the vessel in one piece throughout the flight. As an added safeguard, the Facem was also equipped with a magnetic field that would slow incoming particles significantly, reducing their impact. Those that did strike the starship would reduce its momentum slightly, slowing it down to a safe speed over the course of several years. At that point, the heat shield would retract, much like a beetle's wings, and reveal the secondary engine beneath. The final burn would bring the ship down to orbital velocities, and traditional chemical engines would then take over and maneuver the leviathan into position at the destination.

Each transitional step was to be overseen by the crew, but otherwise, there would be very little to do. Whole months would go by, during which the bridge would remain untouched and dark. Without the stimulus of command, the crew could become either lethargic or rowdy, neither of which was acceptable.

On her many missions as a UDS sailor, Caroline had learned that action is what kept a crew together. On most flights, there was always something to set the tempo; military ships were usually understaffed, and the vessels themselves were always only a few weeks away from their destinations. In the few cases where a ship was deployed to the outer planets, there was still a nearby cargo vessel or asteroid to worry about. But here, there was absolutely nothing of the sort. Just the darkness. Compounding the problem was the fact that there would be no radio link for most of the voyage. As the vessel accelerated, red-shifting would render radio communications nearly impossible, and by the time the ship ceased accelerating, it would be simply too far away for radio to be utilized for high bandwidth communication. The signal would have dissipated, too thin to be detected by even the most powerful antennae. There would be no calling home on this voyage. Nor would there be any distractions for the thousands onboard, nothing to keep them away from the insanity of the void.

To combat the consuming existential terror, the Facem's engineers had installed an onboard media hub, the largest library of books, films, and music ever made. It was all digital of course, and physically small enough to fit in a palm, but the exabytes of information it contained spanned the width and breadth of human achievement, from the Greek classics to the most current pop music.

Caroline watched as people began to stream out of the walls like termites. Many looked up to the pale disk of the ersatz sun above, or stretched, or stamped their feet in appreciation of the return of gravity. Clueless, the lot of them. Most had made the decision to come aboard on a moment's impulse, not realizing the true implication of their choice. Six years of empty space, and at the end, an unknown world where they would all be stranded for the remainder of their lives. Most of them had no notion of the great empty, having lived their lives in the finite expanses of Earth, where the horizon was as far as anything could be. What poor fools.

Prior to her promotion to the admiralty, Caroline had served aboard the UDNS Opes, one of the largest battleships in active duty. The Opes had never seen battle, nor had any other Republic vessel. This was because the United Districts of Sol was the first nation in human history to exist in a political vacuum. There was no competing national power, since the UDS governed every inhabited place in the known universe. The continued employment of armed forces in space was not for defense, but rather a projection of Sol's power into the impossible distances over which it governed. The dream of unity only went so far.

Therefore, the main purpose of the Opes was essentially policing the distant colonies, traveling from planet to asteroid to planet and brandishing the UDS's military muscle. In the process, she had seen all the wonders the solar system had to offer, from the floating cities of Venus to the luxury resorts on Titan and Miranda. She was not always well received, but that hardly mattered. Even so, the one element that Caroline was most intimate with was the utter emptiness. Even the rocks in the densest regions of the Asteroid Belt were months apart, with nothing but open vacuum between them. It was chilling, to say the least, and would only be worse out in interstellar space. No one else had ever gazed into that abyss. No other ship had ever sailed across it.

Except for one.

The fate of the Colossus was impossible to avoid thinking about, considering the circumstance. Granted, the Facem was much harder to lose, but the sheer distance could swallow anything. It would be fitting though, to have the most expensive project in all human history go missing. To be laughed at by the ever-unattainable stars.

She had a job to do.