Abstract

In 2088, five colony ships set out from Earth, destined to bring human civilization to the stars. They were the first of their kind; man had made landings on worlds outside his own solar system, but such colonies were only research and resource-gathering stations. The privatized space programs of the 21st-century led to a joint project by several international corporations and private interest groups to construct ships capable of transporting 10,000 humans, complete with all the equipment they would need to establish a successful colony.

The ships were equipped with quantum tunneling drives which would allow them to jump through a space gate, teleporting instantly to a similar gate anywhere else in the galaxy. This system had been thoroughly tested for over a decade, and the path they were taking was well in use at the time. As expected, the first four ships jumped successfully through the gate. However, the fifth ship did not; it never arrived at its destination. More disturbingly, an unknown temporal paradox caused the first four ships to disappear from existence.

While Earth lost contact with the colony ships, they had not, in fact, been destroyed. The four ships which had survived the initial jump found themselves in deep space, in an unknown location. After the initial panic, they decided to make a desperate gambit for survival. Each chose a nearby star system with likely planets, some as distant as 83 light years.

The ships parted company, and made their way to their destination suns, using fusion-powered drives capable of accelerating at 1g (9.80665 m/s/s) for years at a time. They traveled for years, though, due to relativity, they observed the other ships spending far longer than they actually did to reach their destinations.

Three ships landed on habitable worlds. The first was Firmament, a frozen snowball of a planet whose only habitable ecosystem was an ocean completely enclosed by ice. The second was Eden, an untouched Earth-like ecosystem of great beauty. The third was Absolution, a world rich with exotic flora and fauna, dominated by a plant species which releases DNA-altering spores into the air to command all other forms of life.