Chapter 1

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The Legion settled into dormancy, their directive achieved. But celebration was not of their nature, nor concern for purpose — they simply slept hidden away. Only by the Architect's bidding would they awake again, perhaps never.

The Swarm of trillions, created in turn by the Legion, simply died. So mindlessly simple were they, and so relentlessly ruthless. This world, cleansed per the Architect's design, was ready to be remade.


[Gan]

"You will wallow in the agony of defeat! Its stench will permeate your very soul for all of eternity."

"Such brave words from the man who shall drown in the sea of the vanquished. The light of a thousand suns would not illuminate the darkness of your defeat!"

"Then it is time to settle this in the arena. Once and for all, for the Interstellar Championship of Space Pong!"

It truly was an interstellar championship, since we were on the Ark Hope colony spaceship on our way to Tau Ceti Four. Also, we just invented Space Pong and were its sole players. The game was a a mashup of ping-pong and squash, but played at only 25% of Earth's gravity, or 0.25g as we geeks called it.

The low gravity made it a challenge to construct a proper arena, since the ball seemed to take forever to reach the floor after it bounced off a vertical wall, but we found a cargo hold with an acute-angled back wall that would direct the ball more downward. After a couple hours and a roll of white tape, we had the first ever official Space Pong arena. Racquets were constructed from the stock of aluminum plate and the balls 3D printed with an elastomer substratum.

This was going to be epic!

Eric was taller and more athletic than me, but I was more determined. He served first. Grinning as he pulled his racquet back for what I thought would be a hard power-serve. I backed up in anticipation. But then he pulled up on his swing and barely tapped the ball into the front wall.

Trickster!

I made a running dive forward just to keep it in play, fortunately applying just enough racquet to the ball so that it hit the front wall hard, bounced high off the floor, and up over Eric's head. He leaped high to make his return, giving me time to get up to my feet. At 0.25g, the ball seemed to hang in the air, but so did Eric. I returned his shot low before he could settle back on the floor.

The first ball was mine, but I did not gain a point toward victory. According to the official rules, which we made up as we went, you only score on your own serve, so all I did was prevent Eric from scoring. First player reaching twenty-one points wins.

Now, my serve.

Back and forth the game went, filled with soaring leaps and diving returns. So awesome! The score remained close, so we added a rule that you must win by two points to make it more exciting. The score came to thirty-one for Eric and thirty for me, and it was his serve. Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I backed up, crouched on the ready, but he soft-served me again! I should have seen that coming. This time I muffed the return, and the game was lost.

Eric pranced around singing, "I am the Champion!" over and over as I plopped down in mock despair. He didn't have to be so 'in your face' about it — I wouldn't have done that. Well, actually I would, but that's different.

Eric came over to me, held out his hand, and pulled me up. Maybe he wasn't so much a sore winner.

"Good game Gan, but you lost the bet, so you get to clean the bio-filters," he said with a taunting grin.

We were the only two humans presently awake on this ship and in the middle of our six-month stint monitoring the voyage. The other four thousand on board slept in chemically induced hibernation within stacks of cylindrical tubes. Since the ship AI and its robot minions did all the work, it made our time quite boring. But boring was actually good, since that meant nothing major went wrong. Thus, we did things like invent new sports to pass the time.

But the only thing worse than the boredom was cleaning the bio-filters. No use showering my sweaty body now.

With only about nine months until arriving at Tau Ceti Four, there would be no point in going back in stasis. At 0.25g acceleration and deceleration, the voyage took twelve years by our clocks, or eighteen years on an Earth clock, to go the twelve light-years' distance. The overall average speed relative to an Earth observer was about two-thirds the speed of light.

The Ark Hope was a massive starship shaped like an elongated four-sided pyramid with huge thrust cones on the bottom. Four awesomely powerful fusion engines with electrical exhaust acceleration propelled the ship — state-of-the-art technology stuff.

We were promised a terraformed paradise when we arrived, and by all accounts, it was. The images showed lush forests, sweeping grasslands, and blue seas, at least in the equatorial regions. With a cooler temperature on average than Earth, ice covered about half of the planet's surface around the poles. The gravity was only slightly less than on Earth, at 0.92g, and there were two gorgeous moons of sufficient mass to stabilize planet rotation without too much tidal force. The first explorers even nicknamed it Paradise.

With a name like Paradise, what could possibly be wrong?

I looked forward to a new start, and like many of those aboard, left something painful behind. The Earth was a mess. Between overpopulation and the usual corruption of power, it spiraled down toward some sort of dystopia. And I needed an escape from a past dark tragedy and a chance to move on. Funny, though, how grief stayed with you no matter how far you traveled — even light years away, it shadowed my heart.

The bio-filters removed solids from the bio-oxygen generation and wastewater recycling systems — one of those processes that everyone takes for granted when it works and everyone notices when it doesn't. I thought they would stay fairly clean with nearly everybody in hibernation, but no, scraping out the brown stinky sludge was even more gross than I feared. As if not enough, it was a tight squeeze accessing the filter heads. The smell was going to stay with me for a while.

Eric came by as I pried off a filter head with my back pressed against grimy piping. A smirk came on his face as he pinched his nose. "Having fun? What a wonderful smell you discovered."

"Laugh it up, flyboy. Next time, you may be wedged in here."

I grumbled as he did indeed laugh it up. "I would like to throttle the engineer who laid this out."

The shower afterward felt so good.

In three months, we would pull the captain and his flight crew out of hibernation. Captain Greer was old-school and a stickler for rules and protocol. He would probably be pissed that we converted a cargo bay to a Space Pong arena, but if we got him to play a few games, I think he might come around.




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