Chapter 1: Diamonds

“Kaygoo are you sure they’re not asteroids?” Melissa stared at the screen. There was something there, surely? If there was...

“Negative,” replied the ship’s computer. “Not rock. Diffractive return is marginal. Homogeneous. Stand by...”

Leila, Susan and Isobel were staring too, while the computer worked to analyse the barely-there scan returns from in front of their spaceship, in which they were flying through supposedly empty interstellar space at 15 megametres a second.

“Kaygoo, decelerate and evade,” Leila decided it had taken too long already. The computer was great at solving problems, but not quite so great at priorities. The scanners were working at their usual range, which could detect asteroids at six months’ distance, but now, if these were objects, they were looking much closer - perhaps only a couple of days away.

She shouldn’t have left it so long. They’d all become a bit lax after three hundred years, though to be fair a few hours wasn’t going to make much difference.

“Affirm: decelerating, turning...” the computer said.

The three scientists clustered nervously together at the console with First Officer Leila. They felt a change in the craft’s motion, but only a slight one: they all knew the microwave drive hadn’t been optimised for reverse or side thrust, because forward speed had taken priority of course, with a hundred light years to cover. Not that they had a huge amount of thrust in any case, with their power source being just ambient radiation collected by their tail.

Their craft was basically a big unwieldy wheel a hundred metres across, with five hundred tonnes of mass, spinning at four rotations a minute to provide artificial gravity. It had taken thirty years to reach their current velocity. Manoeuvrable it wasn’t. The trajectory was plotted years in advance and there weren’t supposed to be any obstacles in the way - nothing bigger than a micrometeoroid anyway, like a grain of sand or smaller.

“Objects identified as crystalline,” said Kaygoo an hour later. “Section up to six millimetres, orientation unknown, mass up to three grammes. Density of the field is variable, approximately one hundred thousand objects per cubic kilometre. Extent of the field ... unknown. Depth ... estimate six hundred metres ... no avoidance trajectory is available at this time. Speed at intercept will be fourteen point three megametres.”

“Too translucent!” muttered Susan. “Shards of translucent rock floating about in interstellar space?”

“Shit,” breathed Isobel. “From asteroids colliding somewhere?”

Nobody had known about that: rock apparently so clear that the scanners hadn’t been able to detect the tiny pieces, until now. When it was, to say the least, a bit late.

“Yeah, somewhere we didn’t know about,” sighed Leila. “Diamonds in space! Well, there’s no point starting to wake anyone up,” she stated the obvious as the situation sank in. More crew couldn’t affect the outcome, so if it was all about to end the others could at least die without feeling anything. It took a week to bring people out of cryothermic suspension even with nanowarming.

“No, let them be,” agreed Melissa.

The quartet stood digesting the news for a minute or two. They all knew what it meant: even tiny lumps of rock at 14 megametres a second would easily pierce the shell of the ship - hardened and shielded or not. Then they’d pierce anything they struck inside, and exit a few nanoseconds later before they even had time to explode. Though the shockwave would make a lot of things in the ship explode.

“Kaygoo,”sighed Leila, “manage the rotation, try to have the Control Module aft when we hit the debris field. Aim for the least dense part we can steer to.”

“Affirm: Control module to be aft, target least dense area.”

The spaceship was flying like a disc, rotating, so with the four main modules spread evenly around the perimeter it was possible for the computer to have the Control module at the back as the ship hit the debris field. That way it might be slightly less in harm’s way than the Farm, the Research Unit or the Cryogenics Unit. Although out here, with two thousand years to go to reach their target planet, they needed to have all the modules in service to survive, so the difference was, to say the least, nominal.

“That’s it, now we wait.” Susan put her arms round Isobel and Melissa, and invited Leila into the group hug. The women stood together at the console with its scant three screens. The ship was designed to fly itself, and the bulkheads all through the ship were kept sealed routinely, so there wasn’t much more they could do.

“Well it was always odds-on we’d die on the way, so...” Susan offered. She was used to accepting evidence. All the scientists were.

“Yes,” agreed Isobel, “it’s a one-way trip, we always knew.”

“And it’s not as if we’ll die young,” smiled Melissa ruefully. “Or not all that young.” She was sixty-nine, in awake years, and the others were even older, even if they all looked a few years younger.`

“It’s been amazing anyway,” said Susan, “even if it ends now. We’re technically about three hundred and fifty years old, and we’ve been in and out of cryo successfully, several times, learned a lot and made progress with cellular ageing, so we’ve achieved things with our lives, and we shouldn’t fret too much just because we happen to know in advance when we’re going to die. And it’s not our fault Earth haven’t replied recently.”

“We haven’t died yet,” Leila pointed out. The scientists could be a bit short of aggression, in her opinion. Not that they shouldn’t be, of course: they were supposed to be the ultimate nerds. But still...

“Shame we don’t have a man on this shift,” grinned Melissa, catching Leila’s tone and trying to lighten things up.

The others grinned with her for a second. There was a strict no-sex policy on the mission, to help keep relationships stable, but they got the joke that now she could have ‘gone out with a bang’, if only the men hadn’t all been in cryo on this shift.

But as usual men were not on this shift. Melissa thought same-sex shifts were something that happened too often to be a coincidence, even though at their age it was moot how much difference it made. The man thing had been an ironic joke.

“Bit late for us really,” smiled Susan, who was nearly eighty. Isobel at seventy-seven and Leila at seventy-two were equally post-menopausal, and equally had lost interest in men. Not that men had been a big part of any of their lives anyway - part of why they’d been selected for the mission no doubt.

“We can reduce air pressure,” Leila wrested her mind away from the doom-laden mood her companions were developing. “Help the ship not to completely explode if there’s a breach. We can suit up and drop it right down to zero. I’ve a vague memory about some patch kit for the hull...”

“I’ll go and have a look in Storage,” the empathetic Melissa tuned in. “Kaygoo have we got patch kits for the hull?”

“Hull repair kits are in Bin TY34,” replied the computer, “with inner skin repair kits.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Susan.

The friends and fellow geneticists set off up the corridor, which was like a spoke of a wheel leading to the storage unit in the central hub of the ship. With no mass to be wasted on elevators, they had to climb a ladder - the way the ship worked the hub was ‘up’ whatever direction you approached it from - though as they climbed, the artificial gravity reduced, so it became easier and easier, until in the hub there was no gravity at all.

Then once in the hub, the issue became managing momentum, because if you pushed off towards somewhere without using the handrails, you didn’t slow down until you collided with it.