Beginnings - chapter 2

By late Tuesday I found myself in a grand old castle about an hour’s drive outside Edinburgh. The number of armed guards on duty on the grounds was impressive, as was the armament they carried. I was introduced to the head rich dude, Lord Loftman.

“Mr. Campbell, pleased to meet you. I’m delighted that you decided to accept our offer, absolutely delighted.”

“Thanks, Lord Loftman. I’ve known Easton long enough to know that if he’s behind a project, it’s got to have potential. And given the current state of affairs on Earth, who in his right mind wouldn’t be eager to check out the possibility of leaving it all behind?”

“Quite, quite. And leaving the lovely Miss Cunningham behind will not present an obstacle?”

“Who? Oh, Gretchen - no, not at all. There are bound to be other interesting young ladies participating in the project.”

“Indeed. Mr. Warwick will not have had an opportunity to tell you about our project structure. The design committee drew up an arrangement where all participants will be assigned one or more Occupational Specialties - rather like you yanks with your ‘MOS’ among the military people. Within a given occupational specialty, practitioners will be assigned levels or ranks from 1 to 9, where 1 indicates an entry-level familiarity and a 9 indicates mastery. For example, a medical doctor would be a level 9 life sciences specialist. Using this system, the committee has designated you as level 9 engineer, level 9 communications specialist, and level 9 provisioner (what you would probably call a ‘woodsman’). There will be very few individuals holding two occupational specialties, and even fewer with three. They actually wanted to assign you a fourth occupational specialty, for Manifold Jump navigation, but the system they designed is really only suited to a maximum of three specialties. I do hope that you will still agree to be our navigation specialist even though not assigned a formal specialty code.”

“Who really cares about labels, Lord Loftman? I don’t. Just point me at the work to be done and I’ll get busy.”

I was escorted to my quarters in the residential wing of the castle. They had taken a huge room (maybe a ballroom, or banquet hall?) and partitioned it into a dozen or so habitation units. Mine was on the end, and had a window looking out over the courtyard. This wouldn’t be a bad gig!
The next few months were a blur. I spent all day poring over personnel folders (achingly boring) and talking with mission planners (mostly interesting), and spent most of my evenings out on the town. Easton came along once in a while, but most of the time I was on my own. I met some lovely Scottish ladies and a few of other nationalities, and getting them to come back to my quarters proved to be quite easy when I told them I lived in a castle. I never did find another companion quite as impressively built as the initial redhead, but they still filled the bill adequately.
After spending a couple weeks in Scotland, a normal Friday night found me at my usual watering hole trying to rectify a severe blood ethanol deficiency. My normal contemplation of my pint was interrupted by loud voices coming from midway down the bar. A loud Geordie voice was arguing with a Yank voice about who had the right to be making use of the pub. The Geordie was arguing that only locals should be allowed in, while the Yank was inviting the other to try to throw him out. The local was quite a bit larger than the Yank and outweighed him by at least 30 pounds, but when the local took a swing he ended up sitting on his ass on the pub floor. The friends of the local didn’t seem to appreciate this turn of events, as I noticed a slimy looking individual sneaking up on the Yank from behind, preparing to break a beer bottle over his head. I really don’t like bullies or sneak attacks, so I headed off the slime bag by breaking my pint mug over his head. This resulted in several locals deciding they needed take a swing at several Yanks, and an amusing bar fight erupted. I found myself back-to-back with the original Yank, and we managed to dispatch at least 7 locals between us. When we heard sirens approaching we ducked out the back door and made tracks back to the castle. Upon getting safely inside the castle gates we headed to the Commissary for some coffee.
“Thanks for the hand back there, man. I suspected one of the nasty bastards might try something shitty like that.”
“No problem, man. I’ve been in enough bar fights to really not appreciate sneak attacks. By the way, I’m Red.”
“Fredo. So what skills do you bring to our little party, Red?”
“They think I’ll make a decent communications engineer, general engineer, and provisioner.”
“Woo, three rates! Good for you. I’m the mining supervisor, and also do some work with the materials sciences folks.”
“Good to meet you! Next time you feel like pub crawling, let me know. I haven’t been in a good bar fight for quite a while.”
The next 6 months consisted of long days working with the personnel selection committee, assessing available astronomical data for the initial jump, reviewing equipment selection and acquisition, and performing receiving inspection as equipment arrived. I also spent at least 3 nights a week out at the local pubs, up until the local hostility became too much of a danger. As the planned launch date drew near, security at the castle seemed to develop leaks as the public learned of our plans. Almost all of the personnel selections remained secret, but the plans didn’t. We were soon on the receiving end of quite a bit of negative publicity and hostility. The groups opposed to our plans fell into two groups. The first and largest group was people who wanted to go along but hadn’t been invited. Their ranks grew daily, and they often tried to camp outside the castle gates. The castle’s security forces were usually able to move them along without too much difficulty, with the local constabulary helping out when necessary. The second group was the religious nutters who insisted that God had created Earth as mankind’s home, and trying to get humans to live on any planet other than Earth was a direct insult to God’s Plan. This was the group I most feared. My life experience had shown me that few causes can be used to justify extremism and violence more easily than religious convictions. While the first group were primarily begging and pleaded to be included, the second group occasionally tried to bomb the castle or shoot the guards walking patrol.
Things got hairy around this point. The Chinese government built a ship they called an ark ship and equipped it with a mainfold engine, and they announced publically that they were going to travel to the Alpha Centauri system in just a single jump. They called it a “grand display of the technological prowess and united will of the Chinese people”. Engineers who saw footage of the ship under construction called it a foolhardy attempt at mass suicide. The problem with their plan was the phenomonon of “bow shock”. When using a manifold engine to warp space-time, there is a release of tubulent energy whenever a body attempts to span the warped space. The magnitude of the energy released is proportional to the linear distance being spanned by the warped space-time curve. By planning to jump a little over 4 lightyears in a single jump, the Chinese would be encountering enough turbulence to shred a 21st century aircraft carrier. The day of the planned departure arrived with great fanfare. TV networks from all over the world were on hand to record the event and had crews monitoring the tangle-link communications gear. The tangle-link spit out a steady stream of information coming from the ark ship.
“Crew and passengers all secure and ready to jump… Manifold engine on-line… Engaging manifold engine now… Experiencing tubulence… Turbulence growi”
Then the communications from the ark ship cut off. The Chinese military immediately shoved all the news crews out of the tangle-link communications hut, and a few minutes later a Chinese official made an annoucement.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press, and people of the world, it is with great pride that the People’s Republic of China announces the successful transition from this solar system to the Alpha Centauri system of the first Chinese colonization ark ship. An unfortunate technical problem with the communications system prevented us from sharing the words of the ship’s crew with you, but we would like to assure you that the ark ship is now safely landed on a hospitable planet and is now proudly launching a grand colony of proud Chinese adventurers. Thank you for coming.”
Of course everybody knew that the reason the tangle-link communcations stream was interrupted was that the ship disintegrated. The Chinese government would never admit this, of course - that would be embarrasing to the government. But everybody knew anyway. The religious nutjobs took this failure as a sign from God that mankind was not meant to stray from the Earth that God had created for him. They responded to this divine sign by trying again to firebomb the castle, hijack equipment deliveries to the castle, even trying (unsuccessfully) to infiltrate the castle’s staff.
When the local cops stopped responding to calls from the castle Lord Loftman tried calling his friends in the British military. He quickly learned that even decades of friendship and mutual support didn’t count for squat when public sentiment became involved. Not only did the military refuse to come to the castle’s aid, they were even said to be considering storming the castle and arresting all inside for treasonous activity. This led the management council to make a decision they had been hoping to avoid -- we needed to abandon the castle. Since the engineering and physics staffs were already present, we figured out a reasonably safe way to bug out. We simply built and configured a small Manifold Engine and set it to travel to the planned launch site, a remote island in the Indian Ocean. The launch site had facilities to store all of the materials, but didn’t have facilities to house all of the personnel. This meant that the engineering and facilities teams had to jump first and rig some hasty residential units. This only took us a couple days, then we started shuttling the tonnes of equipment we had already received to the new location. Lord Loftman arranged to have the remaining deliveries of supplies redirected to a transshipment point in order to avoid discovery of our new location, and in less than two weeks we had all of the staff and all of our materials relocated. The security staff was the last to leave, and as the last of them arrived in the IO they reported that army helicopters had just arrived at the castle, and troops were fast-roping onto the grounds.
It took us an additional 30 days to get the rest of the initial colony crew assembled and briefed. The first jump ship was ready, and I joined the spacer crew in making some short-range test jumps within the solar system and back. Once we determined that everything was working we spent close to a week getting all of the gear loaded, then another day getting the personnel loaded and briefed. Once everything was secured, we made our first jump, taking the Consortium’s first step out of the solar system.