The Ship with Red Hair

By Derrick Hopkins

As a new communications officer, Darius Lever was in over his head as soon he arrived at the navigation deck on one of the few ships holding the last survivors of earth. In a fleet where each ship is home to millions of people, every decision is life or death...until a single ship makes a choice that may doom the remainder of the human race. That ship is controlled by a twenty-two-year-old girl. Darius must choose to save humanity, her life, or his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886855890

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The Ship with Red Hair

Derrick Hopkins

ISBN 979-8-88685-588-3 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88685-589-0 (digital)

Copyright © 2023 by Derrick Hopkins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

About the Author

Chapter 1

As soon as I put on my headset, all I hear is screaming. Well, yelling to be more precise. There's a very clear, very loud voice threatening to kill everyone on this ship. All seventy-five million of us. I hit the mute button and nervously looked over to my training officer, Barry.

I think this one needs to be moved up the chain to someone higher up. I may have just been promoted, but still, handling genocidal threats seemed above my pay grade.

Barry slides his chair over to my station and looks at my comscreen. "Nah, that's a milship. Let me guess. They're demanding we change course, or they'll open fire?'

Pretty much. I hand over the headset, hoping to distance myself from possibly starting a war on the first day of my new job.

Barry refuses to take the equipment. Empty threats. There hasn't been ship-to-ship warfare in centuries. It's just bravado. That's the only way they know how to talk on milships. I bet they greet each other each morning by threatening to eviscerate their loved ones. Find out what they actually want.

I slide the headset back on. After the initial shock of being told we're all going to die, it dawns on me just how ridiculous of a threat it was. This ship, Cassian, was created eight hundred years ago by hollowing out an asteroid. Even at its thinnest point, it would take ten times the ordinance a milship could carry just to leave a noticeable mark.

As calmly as I can manage, I ask the voice on the other end to restate their request. The response is just as loud as the previous one. "Unless you modify your heading plus 0.13 by 0.023 by 0.11 degrees immediately, you will be violating the sovereign area of the military vessel Angel Ford. We will be forced to open fire with a defensive salvo to protect our citizens from your reckless actions."

I check the nav computer even though I already know what it will read. The Cassian is perfectly on course. Before I moved up to communications officer, I spent two years in the navigational bay. Keeping a ship the size of the Cassian on a steady course was a task that took three shifts of fifty people working full time plotting and inputting corrections into the 2300 thrusters fastened to its rocky surface. That's before you take into account the two massive ion drives that move us through space. The navigational bay is an important job, but it's also intensely monotonous. A row of ten workers would plug in the same equations into their terminals to make sure the results matched.

Then those results were sent to the thruster simulators, and we got a new set of results. And if those matched then the updates would go to the next team who would repeat the process. By the time any of the thrusters were actually fired for even a tenth of a second, the procedure had been checked hundreds of times. It was tedious. But when you are moving the home to seventy-five million citizens through the galaxy, it's important to not make a mistake. And Cassian was just one of 225 ships in the fleet, all traveling within a hundred thousand kilometers of each other. So precision was key.

That's why I knew there was no way that the Cassian was violating the sovereign area of the Angel Ford. I had a good guess about what was going on. I've never been on a milship. In fact, I was like most citizens and never traveled outside of my home ship. When it comes to other ship types, each has its own stereotypes that go with it. In communications training, we were told not to fall prey to those misconceptions. But I had a feeling that the stories about milships using outdated nav boxes, minimal food plots, and undermaintained thruster because they spent all of their time training and loading up for a war with nonexistent aliens were true. Why increase the efficiency of your navigational computers when you can research new sonic rifles? What was more likely, their two-hundred-year-old nav box being slightly out of sync or the Cassian's deck full of workers forgetting to carry a one?

"Angel Ford, we are tracking our course as nominal as of 0.05 seconds. Request that you recalibrate your navigational system with the updated data. I am sending a pulse file of the needed mapping updates so that you may check them against yours. The mapping data can be used to verify courses on nav boxes, and it can also replace entries that may have been corrupted by gravitational waves."

Barry looks at me quizzically. How can something be corrupted by gravitational waves? Is that even a thing?

I have to give them an out, so they have some kind of excuse instead of having to admit they're on a ship with obsolete equipment and obsolete data. At least this way they can update their mapping information. I still wanted to avoid giving the voice on the Angel Ford any provocation to open fire on us, no matter how useless it would be.

After a few tense minutes, the voice on the headset spoke, "Affirmative, Cassian. We have received your data pulse and will confirm that it matches with ours and repair any possibly corrupted mapping coordinates."

Barry put both hands on my shoulders and gave a victorious shake. Interstellar war averted. That's a good way to start the day.

For a minute there I regret the promotion that I had been working so hard for. After the tedious, boring, day-to-day work navigating the Cassian, I thought communications would be a cushy job. I'm mistaken. It turns out there's nothing cushy about dealing with 224 other ships with between one million and one hundred million citizens on board.

There are four major classifications of ships in the fleet.

You have bot ships that are pretty much run by computers and robot attendants. The citizens on these ships have almost nothing to do with the operation of the vessel. They make up the majority of the vessels in the fleet, but each ship is small. No bot ship has a population over five million, and most are less than a quarter of that size.

Milships are fewer in number but slightly larger. They were first manned by the militaries of the final governments on old earth. Their mission was supposed to be to protect the colony ships from all threats, from without or within. It's more likely they were built to attempt to enforce the might of whichever government built them. Those ties have long since melted away, but the military philosophies have been maintained. They still prepare for the day that they will go to battle with an invading alien force. Never mind that in the centuries since the Journey began, nothing more dangerous than a sour fruit on a nearly barren planet has been discovered.

City ships, like the Cassian, were the original colony ships.