"There's nothing more maddening than hope." Fintan, c. 3154, Battle of Coal Saks
The ship, and all the other names and forms its known by, occupies a special place in human history.
Sometime around 4000 BC, a river and a problem and human ingenuity produced the first.
And then it didn't sink and the whole world got bigger.
Nothing more than reeds and string, but it conquered water and awakened human imagination.
"Follow me," it whispered, "and I will carry you to the end of the world."
Early humans hadn't understood, and most probably don't even now. Back then it had carried them to the other side of the river and then across the gulf to the edge of the map where "Here be monsters" was scrawled.
Back when monster meant unknown, and the goal of exploration was to learn.
Now, in the space-faring age, it would carry humans to the very edge of existence.
If they could ever find it.
Progress brought a new obsession as humanity immediately began trying to find the limits of their new, wider world.
They did the same thing again in 1957 when suddenly space was on the table.
NASA launched its first large scale exploration program in 2042, after the original creators failed to carry through, and in 2056 launched a thousand interstellar probes equipped with light sails into space.
These 1000 probes, called Starshots were aimed at a thousand possible exo-planets in distant star systems and out of the 1000, only a few dozen found habitable worlds.
Habitual, as in formable. Buildable.
They never did find a planet similar to Earth.
And they certainly didn't find the kind of life found on Earth.
They found something completely different.
Many, many completely different kinds of life.
Once Starshot confirmed life in space the goal of every country on Planet Earth changed from fights over land and money to unending expansion into space.
China reached Mars first. The Soviets ran out of gas somewhere around Mercury. For some reason India when to Venus and surprisingly enough Japan, Turkey, and a significant number of African countries stuck with the United States and established a series of satellite colonies reaching from the moon to Saturn, laying claim to everything in between.
A young engineer in California cracked cold fusion.
And then CERN did one better and built an improved ion thruster based on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's original design and merged it will the Hall-effect thruster design, although somewhere along the way a misspelling led to the name Hell-effect and the whole thing became the Hellion Effect Propulsion Thruster and then because soldiers had never met a name they didn't want to shorten, it became the Hell Engine.
Because soldiers are just that creative.
And because soldiers are just that stubborn, it stayed the Hell Engine even after the VASIMR Fusion and its convergence with the first cold fusion LENR engine.
The name had stuck with such voracity that a thousand years later, Hell Engine was the official, scientific designation for the ion thrust, LENR assisted engine that powered all interstellar ships originating from Earth.
After that there was a certainty that mankind was moving to the stars and in that certainty, there was a degree of madness, for anyone one who stopped and thought about it all for too long.
There was a time, calculated down to the second, two hundred and two years, twenty-one days, seventeen hours, six minutes, and thirty-seven seconds, where there was almost a pause.
They'd created the engine, built the ships, but they didn't have colonies. Goals. Plans.
And then one day it clicked, and it cost just as much to travel between colonies as it did between countries on Earth. Miners commuted to work from space stations to asteroids. Children took field trips to moons and soldiers patrolled an entire galaxy, on top of their home planets, a dozen colonies, and twice as many moons.
They discovered worlds beyond imagination. Where it rained sideways, where it rained diamonds and other precious stones and liquid fire. Worlds that existed under oceans and skies of ice and rock.
When the droughts hit on Earth, they imported water from the Qausar Reservoir and managed to pull through. The value of precious metals plummeted until it was nearly non-existent, mined in abundance from asteroids and comets.
The Milky Way had turned out to be a better creator than most of the gods worshiped throughout human history. She'd fed and nursed her race until they'd flourished, grown and expanded into every corner of her.
They'd even outgrown her for a brief time, venturing beyond the Milky Way galaxy and learning the hard way that she wasn't the only galaxy to produce life.
Which was when, in true human fashion, they went to war.
The wars that had followed had seen advancements in Earth's technology and knowledge to levels even the most creative science fiction writer of the 20th century could never have guessed.
And despite being pitted against races who had been space faring far longer, somehow, humanity survived.
There's something to be said then for mad hope and the only recorded race that embraced it. They didn't come out dominating all space in the tradition of the wars on Earth, but they hung on with such tenaciousness and suicidal determination and proved so impossibly creative and utterly dismissive of any established rule or understanding in their tactics and techniques that the sheer possibility of facing them resulted in hesitation and massive missteps.
When resources on all sides had finally been exhausted, the only force still willing to fight had been humanity. The terms for peace were the first of their kind, all races barred from humanity's arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. Taking it a step further, humanity desperate and on the brink of extinction, built the Light Wall. A massive system of interconnected light waves surrounding the Solar System that burned so hot they were impossible pass through.
Humanity had won.
~ tbc