Colonyship 27

By Erica Jones

Colonyship 27 is a unique mixture of good hard science fiction with erotic lesbian romance and explicit sex. Halfway through its 250-year voyage to Gamma Leporis, it is entirely populated by women, since guys have proven to be far too much trouble for long space voyages. Our narrator, who is never named, still has a great desire for a man, but she discovers that women lovers on the ship more than fulfill her every desire.

Later an alien signal is discovered. The heroine discovers that the signal might in fact be a rescue vessel, a Faster-Than-Light Earthship that was developed when the colonyship was already well under way. It would shorten their voyage, but getting together with it proves a daunting problem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erica Jones
• Release date: Apr 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311528162

Erica Jones

I am a little older than this picture. I majored in physics but just became a high school science teacher. I have done a little modelling and have written for several online science fiction magazines. My boyfriend and I live in Seattle where we enjoy the art scene. He encouraged me to write this novella and said it would be a big hit for all sexes and passions. We'll see. I have another book that I plan to put on Smashwords soon.Erica

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Colonyship 27

Erica Jones Revision C Oct 2018

Y129:D310—Dear Diary:

Life is not fair!

Some girls are born naturally pretty and some have to work like dogs to try to keep up with them. Paris never has to do anything to look good, and she is adored by absolutely everyone on our ship. They cater to her just because she is beautiful. Her skin looks perfect; not a stray hair or blemish anywhere. Her exactly thirty-millimeter-long silky blonde mane is perfect and her irises have some kind of striking golden sparkles in a field of green. They look almost unreal. She wakes up, pats her cheeks to bring up their naturally rosy color, rakes her long perfect fingers through her perfect hair…and she’s fucking perfect. She’s taller, thinner, and a few years older than me. She doesn’t even seem to perspire. I spend two hours every damned morning doing my hair and makeup to try to look even half-as-good. I hate her.

But I guess having something to do and keeping a strict schedule on this colonyship is important, and spending two hours in the bathroom every morning is just my form of meditation. Routine makes the time pass faster and gives some structure to my life.

The others all say I’m standoffish and think too much. I’m a nerd, I guess.

And I keep this diary. Well, mostly…

Y129:D312—Dear Diary:

Boring Technical Stuff: Our ship is 500 meters long and only about 50 meters wide when the scoop is stowed, not counting antennas and such. Our ship is currently 22,500 metric tonnes. We started out almost twice as heavy, and we’re getting lighter as we use up stuff. The ship’s engine is an advanced General Electric C-N-O Fusion-Fission Ramjet that gulps interstellar gas, basically just hydrogen, for fuel. The gas is collected by the large forward scoop, 100 meters wide at the smallest and extending up to 250 meters wide when needed. The scoop adjusts by itself, since we can collect all the fuel we need with the smallest scoop setting in the denser interstellar gas regions and the really big scoop in low-density sections. We use a small Gates Traveling-Wave Fission Reactor for electrical power, relighting the main engine, turning water into fuel when we need to, and doing whatever.

Our ship is officially named Colonyship 27 which is supposedly painted on the hull, but none of us onboard now has ever seen it, and it is not quite visible from the external vids. Actually this ship has had several other nicknames, and sometimes we have ship-naming contests for fun, but none of the names seems to stick more than a few years, mainly because we just don’t have any other ships we need to distinguish from this one, so the name really doesn’t matter much. We just call this The Ship and everyone knows what we mean.

We launched from lunar orbit on Day One, Year One, since relativistic time makes things so complicated, keeping Earth’s calendar makes no sense at all. This is the 312th day of the129th year traveling towards Upsilon Leporis, which is a star located about 290 ship-time-years from Earth. We are almost halfway there. Our destination star is slightly larger than the Earth’s Sun and about the same spectral class. Long-range probes showed two M-class planets that are likely to have breathable atmospheres, blue oceans, and some sort of green organic life. The environment scanners say that they are 80 to 85 percent likely to be nonpoisonous. Oh great… They are both radio-silent.

Since the moment the powerful rumbling of the main engine pushed us out of the Sol system, we have not passed within naked-eye distance of any planet, or moon. Seems weird, but that’s what space is really like. A whole lot of dark emptiness. But you can sure see lots of stars.

Y129:D313—Dear Diary:

Today at lunch some of us girls were talking about our mothers. We were all born here. The child I will have someday will have a grandchild who will probably survive to set foot on the planet we are headed towards, but she’ll be pretty old by then and I’ll be just a memory. There are only 31 of us, ranging from three to 48 years old, not counting the Main Mistress, the M-M, who will be 58 this month. The younger crew take care of the children while the older ones do the work of running the ship. We have all kinds of girls to assure the greatest genetic variation. We are all named after old Earth cities. Nobody needs a last name, which kind of makes sense since there are so few of us.

My mother, Havana, who was much taller than me, was retired when she was 50 and I was 12; so I guess she had a long life. The only girls who get much older than that are the ship’s M-M’s. It’s just the rules. The population has to be kept stable. The goal is to get humanity to the next star. Our resources are perfectly adequate but fixed, so a lot of tough choices have to be made. Nobody has to like it. The hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, in a retired person’s body are atomized and fed into the engine. This makes me sad when I think about her. But all her water was taken out first, so I guess there wasn’t really very much left.

Y129:D313—Dear Diary:

Some of us question the wisdom of having an all-girl space crew. Well, Vienna explained that it makes complete sense since the characteristics of ego, independence, assertiveness, self-confidence, and sexual aggressiveness that men seem to have in glorious abundance are completely worthless on long space voyages. In the early days of space exploration, there were some really disastrous missions where men instigated bloody fights and caused a real mess, like on the early voyages from Earth-to-Mars and Mars-to-Europa. Several of us laughed because we knew the story of those voyages, although they weren’t funny at all. But the lessons had been learned and it became common practice that men were deployed…birthed…only when they were needed. And then they’d have to be raised nearly to adulthood before they were very useful. Damned. A girl can’t catch a break.

Our men are supposed to be birthed when planetfall is close, kind of like our secret weapon. And from then on, the ratio of sexes on the ship will be held at 50-50. For us, that will be in about a century.

We get together sometimes and figure out names for baby boys. My favorite name is Paladin, although Kyle seems the most popular for some reason.

Y129:D313—Dear Diary:

We have a skinny laser link sticking out from our stern-ring that sends signals back to Earth. It’s used to relay telemetry, crew reports, and it keeps us updated on technical developments. In the first few years we used it for two-way communication. Now, because of the relativistic time lag, we can’t even be sure anyone is listening to our transmissions. There was a period of nine years when nothing at all came from Earth despite many inquiries, which of course, are still in transit because it now takes 30 years to send a message and get a reply. And that meant for nine years we were transmitting jibber-jabber and nobody was listening. The comm manager claimed it was because