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Thorsson stepped from behind his podium and began to pace the stage.
"That is what we are! Stoic both in defeat and in triumph. That is the spirit
which must shape us, and, in the shaping, lead us onward to the stars."
He smiled softly.
"For the stars await us. You all know what I have done, where I have been. I
first went into space over forty years ago, aboard the last flight of the old
United States Shuttle Two. I even witnessed a flight of the original shuttle
when I was a boy back in 1997.1 was on the first team to go to Mars and the
second team to orbit Jupiter. And yet I would trade all of that, all of it, to
be where you now are. And that's not just an old man wishing to be young
again. Not at all. For I believe that before much longer you young men and
women will lead the way on the journey to the stars.
"If Earth is our nursery, then the solar system is our playground, our
backyard realm of adventures. But pretty soon, far sooner than anyone dares
imagine, we will be setting sail for Alpha Centauri, Wolfs Star, Betelgeuse
and Sirius. I'm not giving away any great secrets here. Maybe we'll crack the
secret of that alien ship we are reassembling and master light speed, or maybe
we'll go the long slow way at a fraction of light speed aboard Ark ships, but
one way or the other we will go!"
Justin found himself nodding excitedly. Thorsson had just alluded to the
greatest non-secret of everyone involved in space. Nine years back the
mysterious raiders, known simply as the Tracs, had staged an attack and
destroyed several colonies. Thorsson himself had managed to bag one of the
Trac ships, and even now it was reported that recovery teams were scouring a
billion cubic kilometers of space looking for wreckage and parts in a
painstaking effort to put the ship back together, piece by piece.
Mankind had known that someone or something else was out there for forty-five
years, ever since the
SETI project, the "Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence," had confirmed a
clear signal being detected
from Proximus Gemini. Ten years later the first of three Trac raids had
occurred. Who they were, where they came from, what they even looked like was
a complete mystery. No one even knew if the SETI
programs decision to beam a signal back had been the trigger for the attacks.
All humanity had to go on was the scattered wreckage of a ship the task of
reassembling it equivalent to putting together a million-piece
three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle without even knowing what it would look like
once it was done. If the machine was ever put back together, and someone could
then figure out how to activate it, mankind was on its way to the stars. But
even if that failed there was still the Ark ship program of building habitats
to accommodate twenty thousand people for journeys of thirty years or more
until the nearest star was reached.
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It was one of Thorsson's favorite programs; during scrub summer he had
lectured about it to Justin's class. He compared the journey to that of
19th-century colonists and whalers braving the Horn on trips lasting up to a
year or more into the South Pacific.
Thorsson slowly scanned his audience as if he were already searching for
volunteer crews who would leave Earth forever, and in spite of the fears and
anxieties he had yet to completely ditch about space flight, Justin knew he
would go if Thorsson asked him.
"There is one thing, though, one thing that can stop us from fulfilling our
destinies," Thorsson said at length, interrupting Justin's thoughts. "And it
is not the Tracs. Oh, they're out there that's one of the reasons we must go
forward, to meet them in their backyard, and not ours. Perhaps we can make an
arrangement with them, but history shows that more often than not when two
cultures collide, the weaker one will suffer. For that reason alone we must
forge ahead. But that is not my fear, not now. Rather it is the events
sweeping our system the separatist movements."
Justin looked over at Matt and saw his friend shift in his chair. Matt was in
quiet support of the movement, and he feared that maybe the UN had issued some
sort of decree or was about to require an oath of some sort. If they did, he
knew Matt would refuse, if only as a matter of principle, being a very
pig-headed solar sailor.
"As you all know, two weeks ago the Mars Assembly issued a decree of
noncompliance with the United
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