Prologue

The invention of the HEFEIN (High Efficiency Fusion Energized Ion Thruster) drive in 2140 followed by the Malinksy Suspensor Field in 2156, interstellar colonization was now viable. The first test colony group of three ships left Earth space in 2192 bound for Alpha Centauri where a near-Earth size planet with a Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere orbited in the habitable zone. Each ship carried three thousand colonists and thirty two crew, with the crew only awake two months a year in rotations of eight. The just over fifty year voyage would age them by two years while the passengers aged not at all.

Upon arrival in 2246, the colonists discovered two things that made surface living impossible. First was the vast array of bacteria and viruses that humans had no defense against, and while that could be overcome with enough time and research it was the second problem that killed any permanent settlement. The soil and water that supported a variety of algae, fern and moss analogs, as well as an impressive array of invertebrate, fish, and amphibian analogs was loaded with cadmium, chromium, and thallium. The life forms that had evolved here actually metabolized those, it was necessary to their existence.

To make it so that humans could live on the surface would require them to erect domes, carefully decontaminate the soil within, and then closely monitor their air, water, vegetable growth and animals. That was deemed impractical due to the labor intensiveness of it, so they set about building an O’Neil cylinder using the twin moons and nearby asteroids as source material. One hundred years later, the population was up to forty thousand from the initial nine thousand colonists, and plans were being made for a second cylinder to be built.

The ‘failure’ of the Alpha Centauri effort didn’t dissuade the people back in the Sol System however. Plans for more colony groups were made, ships were built and volunteers selected. Six systems within thirty light years were settled, with four of them allowing planetary enclaves to be started. O’Neil cylinders were built in all systems and populations expanded. At this time, the first shipments of were arriving from Alpha Centauri, paying back the funding for the mission in titanium, platinum and rare earth metals.

The third wave was more ambitious as four of the stars selected were within fifty light years, two groups were sent much further. Group Thirteen was sent to 51 Arietis at sixty-nine light years and Group Fourteen was sent to Gliese 304 which was a whopping ninety-five light years away ... a voyage that would take the ships traveling at 10% of light speed over nine-hundred years to complete. Each group consisted of four Conestoga class colony ships, each with slightly over 3200 passengers in stasis and 64 crew operating in rotating shifts of eight with the standard two months on duty, then 10 months of quiet before the next crew is awakened for their shift. While the passengers wouldn’t age, the time spent out of suspension meant that the crews would age 20 years over the over the long journey

285 years into the journey, crew five in Colony Group Fourteen records that Pi Puppis has gone nova. With the ships at a range of 32 light years, the radiation emitted poses no danger as the magnetic shields will handle the wave front with capacity to spare. Notes are made of the event, and the next few crews take readings to add to the knowledge base of stellar evolution. No thought is given to any possible danger to the ships. The AIs aboard all four ships analyze the effect the nova burst would have on the star’s lone planet, but all calculate that the possible danger to the ship is negligible so do not alert the human crew.

Contrary to the AIs analysis, the super-Earth was not only on the side of the star facing towards the convoy, it was also at perihelion in it’s widely eccentric orbit. The nova burst was strong enough to not only shatter the planet, but to send a large portion of the debris on an intercept course with the ships of Group Fourteen at the astounding rate of 7.3% light speed. While the cloud would spread over the intervening sixteen light years, when the convoy made it’s closest approach to Pi Puppis, there were a lot of pieces in the cloud ranging from the size of Deimos down to grains the size of beach sand on Earth.

Two-hundred nineteen years after the nova burst, Group Fourteen and the now thinned cloud of planetary debris met...