Part 1: The Long Dark Winter, by Flat Earth Games originally published by Objects in Space Website

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Jump drives, giving ships the ability to instantaneously shift from one place in space to another, had allowed humankind to explore farther than we'd ever dreamed, at least outside of the realms of fantasists.

But there were limitations. The further the distance, the more power it took - so large vessels were required. Very large vessels. And even they might take dozens of 'short jumps', having to recharge between each one, to make the journey to a relatively nearby star, such as Barnard's Star, Epsilon Eridani or Lalande 21185.

Great projects began - the building of jumpgates. Two huge structures, which allowed small ships to move from gate to gate, but with the huge energy requirements being provided by enormous reactors attached to the gates - not ones needing to be carried by the little freighters and exploration vessels commonly ferrying humans about the clusters.

Of course, to build the gate meant travelling there in the first place. So engineering fleets, bringing tons of rare metals, computers and generators arrived, slowly constructing each gate. The process took years, and it opened up a rather harsh reality for human travelers: that the nearby star systems to us were often barren, with few resources and no habitable planets to make the trip worthwhile.

We were, it seemed, stuck in a backwater - an empty spiral arm of a galaxy largely filled with barren rocks orbiting soulless stars.

"You gotta understand that we tried. We really did. Dozens of jumpgates, spanning light year after light year. So many systems. Everywhere we went, we found ores... but none of the rare stuff," explained Herschel Markowitz, later a prominent mining magnate. "This isn't the middle-ages. Iron isn't enough. It's 'rare earth' metals as we used to call them - or complex materials in the right situations. That's what mattered, and that's what we couldn't find. Floating, useless rock after floating useless rock. And let's not forget about food. You can grow a lot in pre-fabricated domes, sure... but if you've got even a half-useful atmosphere... well let's just say it was a big deal we didn't find places like that near Earth."

Hope came from the great space-based radio-telescopes at Pluto. Seeing further than we'd ever imagined, they gave us clues that there was a place worth visiting. In an adjacent spiral arm of the Milky Way, hundreds and hundreds of light years through dark space entirely devoid of stars, lay the Apollo cluster.

The moon race beginning in the 1960s gave generations hope that our future would not be cut short on Earth; the discovery of the Apollo cluster solidified our idea of what that future might be.

It was a cluster, radio-telescopes said, with dozens of solar systems - many showing signs of atmospheres and metals of great use. But a jumpgate to travel the distance would be an enormous undertaking - the power systems alone to charge the gate would take hundreds of tons of fissile materials, to say nothing about the huge rare metal structures which were needed to shift matter from one gate to the next.

But what if we could surmount that? A project began larger than any other Earth had undertaken. Taking decades of planning and construction, the greatest space-going vessel ever launched, the deep-space colony ship Cassandra, was finally given a send-off worth of a project to send over 700,000 humans on a ten year voyage to travel to Apollo.

"Apollo appears to have what we'd... what we'll all need to expand and thrive," said Richard Lansky, an astronomer assigned to the cluster in a worldwide exclusive interview. "We can keep on eking out a living here in our little corner of the galaxy, colonizing one lifeless planet after another scrounging for enough resources to continue this pointless expansion... or we can jump. One big jump. One massive influx of everything we'll need as a species for decades, possibly even centuries to come!"

"This will be the most dangerous trip humankind has ever undertaken," said Nandan Bhargava, the Cassandra project lead. "But if these tends people, these exemplars of humanity, can safely get to Apollo and build their end of the gate, we may just craft a new dawn for our species."

As Cassandra, an enormous, cylindrical structure tens of kilometers long and the biggest man-made structure ever, slowly crawled her way past Mars, Jupiter and Saturn to the outer rim of the solar system, where the lack of gravitational interference would let the biggest mobile jump drive ever created spin up and prepare to take it out of space-time for the first of what would be hundreds upon hundreds of jumps, it passed an early framework of what would become the second-biggest human-made structure: the Apollo Gate.

While Cassandra began her journey, back on Earth the construction on Earth Gate was made priority to connect humanity to the structure in the Apollo Cluster.

A decade of travel followed by a further decade of construction in Apollo itself to build their side of the jumpgate pair would mean that future travel between Earth and the cluster could happen almost instantaneously.

Cassandra was the most carefully-engineered vessel of all time, with the most vetted and analysed crew since the first voyages to Jupiter.

Her captain was Jason Novari, a young, but highly-decorated officer, who had famously saved hundreds of lives during his stint in the Sol Rescue Corps.

The engineering captain, Niklas Lipponen, was one of the greatest industrial engineers to ever work at the Mars Orbital Fleet Yards, and had been heavily involved in the design of both, the Cassandra and Earth Gate.

First officer Gregor Halsey, the only American in the command crew, had a history as one of the most stoic and efficient scout captains in the Earth Astrometrics Corps.

And, finally, Silvia Chang, a uniquely talented Astrobotanist responsible for the design of the "great greenhouse of Sirius", was named Chief Botanist for the mission.

These four figures, along with several others heading up smaller divisions, rapidly became the most famous figures in human spacefaring history since Neil Armstrong, Xiu Chu or Dr. Declan De Vass.

Her De Vass drive charged, Novari ordered the Cassandra's first jump and the vessel blinked out of existence in a heartbeat.

Arriving millions of kilometers away without incident, the crew began a job which would become very familiar in the years to come.

First, all system checks were completed - the Cassandra was intact. The largest man-made object in history was now also the fastest-travelling.

Then the dozens of small support crafts, from light freighters to scout ships, began to undock and buzz about the structure, assisting it in unpacking the largest solar panels ever created. For while it was possible to re-charge the ship's De Vass drive purely using the reactors in the vessel itself, as most of the trip would be near numerous light sources, the engineers figured they could use these to speed up the journey. By using the enormous, 21 km long solar wings, the trip would be reduced from 13 years to just 10.

Days performing system checks and charging, and finally the Cassandra was ready to jump again. The solar wings were packed up, the ships re-docked and once again, the enormous vessel disappeared in the blink of an eye just to re-appear millions of kilometers away.

For years, this went on. Each time, the solar panels would be unpacked and the generator would be charged. Jump after jump, with the 752,452 colonists living life in deep space in a way no people in history ever had before. And each time, the recharge would take longer.

"You know, growing up on the Cassandra wasn't so bad," Fernando Salazar, who boarded the Cassandra at the age of 12, said during an interview. "For children, there was a lot to do, and there's something about the structure of the jumps which were exciting to us. We'd all meet up at school and discuss when the next jump was going to be. Sometimes we heard different things, so we argued. It's funny, because I heard later there were arguments about the ethics of forcing children to grow up on a prolonged deep-space voyage. But ask any of us - it was a good environment... certainly better than the early years of what came after."

By nearly five years in, Cassandra had reached almost exactly half way between the two spiral arms of the galaxy, and recharging the jump drive no longer took days; it took weeks. With almost no usable light reaching the solar panels, Cassandra was finally at the place the crew began to dramatically call 'The Long Dark Winter'. At the precise mid-point, it was announced by First Officer Halsey that they were now at the darkest, longest jump stop - and that from here on, it would only get brighter. This was the happiest day of the entire journey.

He also announced something else - that their number had changed. Despite two accidents and several natural deaths taking the lives of twelve crew-members, the Cassandra, due to births in numerous creches, had now increased the human population of the mission by precisely one thousand souls. This marked the first point in history of humans alive who had never known anything but life aboard a colony ship.

Five years later, these toddlers would, for the first time, lay eyes on a planet - a desolate but beautiful world named Lagrange - in the star system known optimistically as Sagan's Lights.
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