It was a harsh planet, made even harsher by the ravages of war and revolution. Those who had survived had made the difficult decision to launch the mothership the previous year and there was still much argument about the wisdom of the act. There were many who wished to do nothing — except hope. That despite the billions who had already died.
Two things had forced the action — one was logical, the other emotional The cold facts laid out by the scientists indicated that the devastated planet could not sustain the current population beyond another generation. They had won the war but lost the following peace in the process. The burning emotion was to ensure that what had happened to them would not happen to others. And there were others out there. That startling fact had been uncovered when they gained control of the alien mothership and accessed its star map. There was also the unspoken fear that others from the alien race they had defeated would come to investigate the lack of communication from their kin. They had defeated those who had come on the ship at the cost of their own planet. Another ship, with more Airlia, would be too much to fight.
Those who were in the running for the final selection were the best the planet had to offer. Men and women who were at the pinnacle of their chosen fields whether they were scientists or soldiers — and the selection was heavy with the latter, based on their experiences.
Besides people, the mothership would be loaded with ships and weapons that those on the planet had developed under the dire necessity of combat along with scavenged technology from the aliens against whom they had successfully rebelled.
When the final countdown for liftoff began, troops were needed to encircle the launch site to keep out protestors who wanted to stop the launch and those not chosen who desperately fought to be on the ship. Over a mile long and a quarter mile in beam at the center, the black craft rested in a cradle made of the same practically impenetrable metal. Despite the excellent construction of the ship, there were scars on the skin where heavy weapons fire had played along the surface, indicative of the brutal fighting the inhabitants of the planet had waged against those who had flown the ship here. They had captured the mothership during the final assault, overwhelming the last of the aliens who had taken refuge aboard it before they could escape. The war had been savage and the costs almost beyond bearing. For every alien they’d killed, tens of thousands of their own had died.
Among those who crowded onto the interstellar craft, was a young woman, a scientist by training and a mother by love. Also with her was her husband, a soldier who had fought in the Revolution. Their young son was among those who ringed the departure field. The decision to leave their son had not been easy, but where they were going and the mission they had been given precluded the presence of children. That was the cold reasoning of those in power, but the tears streaming down the scientist’s face as the cargo door slowly closed, cutting off her view of the distant crowd, indicated emotion warred against intellect. She knew no matter what her destiny, she would never see her child again.
She had had many long discussions with her husband about the future of both the mission and their planet. He had been blunt and honest, as was his nature, hiding any emotions with a focus on preparing for the upcoming mission. But she noted his chest moving rapidly as the door shut and their world disappeared from sight. He kept his face averted from hers as he reached out and put his arm around her shoulders. All on board had left loved ones behind, and they were merely an island of misery among a sea of pain. Large as the ship was, the five thousand chosen were tightly packed on board along with their supplies.
At the appointed moment, the ship lifted out of its cradle without a sound. It moved upward, accelerating through the planet’s polluted atmosphere until it was in the vacuum of space and out of sight of the millions of eyes on the planet’s surface who watched it with mixed emotions. It continued to accelerate conventionally away from the planet and the system star’s gravitational field.
After two years of travel, the star’s field was negligible and the mothership was moving at three- quarters of the speed of light. It was also far enough away that those on board hoped any sign of its passage would not be linked back to their home world.
At that point the mothership’s interstellar drive was engaged. With a massive surge of power as great as that of a brief supernova, the ship shifted into faster-than-light travel and snapped into warp speed.
As had been feared by those left behind on the planet, the warp shift was eventually noted by sensors on board a Swarm scout ship over twenty light-years away. The scout immediately turned in the direction of the disturbance. It recognized the pattern as that of a mothership belonging to a race it had fought against for millennia.
Star maps were brought up on the scout’s control room display and all nearby star systems were marked for reconnaissance. An alert was sent to the nearest battle core.
The planet had circled the star over sixty times since the departure of the mothership, which was equal to the now average life span of those who survived there. Those who remembered its launch were few and far between and their words little heeded by their offspring, who struggled to eke out their survival among further diminished resources. The civilization, what was left of it, was barely at a subsistance level, so there was no technology sufficient to notice when the Swarm scout ship finally entered the star system, the fourth on its list to be checked. Signs of intelligent life were immediately noted on one of the planets. The small ship swung around the star and took a long time to decelerate so that when it reached the planet it could move into a stable orbit.
Once in position, probes were sent down to the planet’s surface. The population of the planet was by then less than twenty million, a small number on the intergalactic scale, but the crew of the scout ship didn’t concern itself with numbers, only with the fact that there was intelligent life on the planet. The scout descended to the planet and secreted itself beneath one of the seas while the crew did a closer and more intimate inspection of the populace.
While the crew continued to gather information and infiltrate the population, a probe was launched. It moved into space a sufficient distance from the planet, then transmitted a message into the vastness of space from which the scout had come. The nearest battle core had already been alerted when the scout had picked up the mothership transition and it was already on its way. This message updated the strategic situation and pinpointed which star system and planet was to be targeted.
The Swarm orbs and tentacles sent to the planet’s surface to infiltrate the people learned some things of value. That there had indeed been a mothership, of a type they were familiar with, but there was no sign of the race — the Airlia — that had built the mothership. They also learned that the mothership had departed just prior to the time of the interstellar shift nearby so the logical assumption was that the mothership had departed, abandoning the planet for some reason. They also learned that the remaining population — not Airlia, but rather an apparently rudimentary intelligent species — was not currently capable of spaceflight and offered no interstellar threat.