Colin Barrett: Blog

Somebody e-mailed me a while back to say I was putting too much emphasis on their being able to leave the Eden system before the nova's radiation struck. It would be possible, he said, for them to ride out the radiation storm in the umbra (shadow) of Eden's sun, or even the planet itself.
There'll be a fuller explanation of what just happened in the next chapter. Suffice it to say, neither body would offer a full shield. Consider putting your hand between a light source and a nearby surface. Hold your hand close to the light source, there's a perfect shadow; but move it away from the light the shadow becomes less distinct. Of course ordinary light spreads more rapidly and more broadly than does the kind of collimated beam I'm postulating as emanating from the nova, but even so. And the particles with which the Ark must be concerned are less ephemeral than insubstantive photons. In other words there's bound to be some spread that will soon penetrate the umbra; the shelter it offers will at best be transitory. If they could hang in there within a short distance of the shielding body it might work, but they of course can't. And even then it's uncertain.
Of course, I'm dealing here with speculation, inasmuch as there's obviously no experimental data. Still, consider what we know of lasers. For a short distance the projected beam is remarkable coherent. There have been reports of miscreants using laser pointers to disrupt the vision of aircraft on final landing approach, shining them into the cockpits to blind pilots. But the distance there is no more than a few hundred meters. Over a matter of a kilometer or more the light becomes too attenuated. Same principle, especially since we're considering distances of more than 100 light-years from the nova itself-the source-to Eden.

The price of extra gravity is logically felt most by the eldest on board.

Diverting more power to the thrusters. Seemed reasonable to me that the greatest non-propulsion use of available power would be gravity control.

A new use for the story of Noah. For those who aren't aware of this the story is ubiquitous throughout middle eastern mythology. A version is to be found in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. and there are other iterations. It's a pretty widespread tale, far beyond the Bible.

OK, here's some more science stuff.
And on this occasion it's real science, too. Hard as it may be to believe, the slingshot maneuver has actually been accomplished with unmanned space probes headed for the more distant planets or beyond. It works about as described in the story. Of course, it's only been tried (or even considered) with a planet, but it theoretically could work with a star as well. As noted, the stars move along at a pretty good clip, rotating around the galactic center. Our sun's speed has been calculated at what I write in the story. Now, in the fictional universe of my tale the idea is simply to gain speed, the direction doesn't matter. The ship has to be moving very rapidly indeed in order to pass completely into the wormhole before the very short-lived hole collapses, but the direction of the movement isn't relevant.
By the way, the wormhole is also real science, though only in theory. The theory of general relativity allows for their existence as an exclusion from the normal space-time continuum. Originally such a deviation was termed an Einstein-Rosen bridge, but the more popularly used nomenclature today is Lorenzian wormhole. Needless to say, no wormhole has ever been physically observed, but the math says they're out there or at least could be.