Barely fifty percent in favour and almost the same against. The vote for their mission had been close. All those members of the Order who weren’t going and plenty more people besides. An audience of billions: every Assumptor church on Earth that had a working TV. Their departure was being televised, with micro-cameras scrutinising her every move, from flickering eyelashes to scrubbed, nervous fingernails. The entire ship was watching her – in fact everyone on Earth. Was there anything she should have done and hadn’t? Or something she had done and shouldn’t have? What if the thrusters proved too powerful and the ship lunged like a bolting mare? Or they were too soft and the ship failed to move? Everything had to be exactly right, down to the nut and washer on the last bolt. Nothing could go wrong – and nothing would go wrong because she’d checked every single system a hundred times.
They’d be blasting out of their high polar orbit and heading to the stars. She’d been too busy, however, preparing the ship for launch.
Or else send out a drone and train its lens on their wake. If Bee wanted an external view she had to activate a camera on stern and display its image on her screen. The asteroid it was made from was entirely enclosed, the hull thick and opaque. She’d expected to be sad, even frightened, but with her duties as Helmsman she’d not even had time to say goodbye to the vanishing blue globe – not that she could have seen it anyway, since the ship didn’t have portholes. Excerpt from Brightest Star Photo by Pixabay on īEE MCKENZIE would never forget the day the ship had departed from Earth.
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