BooksBarbecue
Back Daughter of Eden
Chapters (68)
  1. Title page
  2. Dedication
  3. Part I
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 20. 20:25 MT.
  30. Part II
  31. Twenty-six
  32. Twenty-seven
  33. Twenty-eight
  34. Twenty-nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-one
  37. Thirty-two
  38. Thirty-three
  39. Thirty-four
  40. Thirty-five
  41. Thirty-six
  42. Thirty-seven
  43. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 22. 20:05 MT.
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine
  46. Forty
  47. Forty-one
  48. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 25. 15:30 MT.
  49. Forty-two
  50. Forty-three
  51. Forty-four
  52. Forty-five
  53. Forty-six
  54. Forty-seven
  55. Forty-eight
  56. Forty-nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-one
  59. Fifty-two
  60. Fifty-three
  61. Fifty-four
  62. Part III
  63. Fifty-five
  64. Fifty-six
  65. Fifty-seven
  66. Fifty-eight
  67. Also by Chris Beckett
  68. Copyright page

It groaned and shuddered. It threw out purple lightning from its great pylons, only to suck it back in again with equal force, so that it coiled like a fiery whip round the ship’s cylindrical core. To fuel its titanic feat of strength, the ship was consuming more energy than would power the entire Earth, and it was eating itself up in the process. When – or if – we ever returned, our engine, that absurdly costly thing that had taken almost a century to fund and construct, would have to be built again, almost from scratch, if anyone was ever going to repeat what we had done.

Metal shrieked. The engine screamed. The panels round us snapped and creaked. It felt like the ship would burst in two. But then suddenly, with a judder, we were through, and the din of the engine dropped to a steady hum. We were outside space now. We were in a miniature universe of our own. We looked out of the little portholes, and there were no stars, no Earth, no moon. We saw the faces of demons peering back at us from weirdly shaped windows set in a kind of silvery, molten wall. But they were only our own faces, distorted and reflected back to us by the tangled space of a miniature universe that our engine had created and now sustained. They were no further away from us than the far side of a city thoroughfare.

The ship turned and twisted, as its drew on the four-century-old records of the Defiant, its famous predecessor, and felt about itself for the correct hold, like a climber on a rockface.

The lightning flashed out again, and once more the ship shuddered convulsively and began to groan and roar. Our glowing screens, with their diagrams and numbers, their calm lists of options, told us a story of order and mastery, but we knew this was an illusion. We were like those parachutists who jump off cliffs: there was no margin of error, there was no going back and starting again. A tiny mistake now and we would emerge in some region so remote that we would never be able to find our way home. A slightly larger error and our ship would be crushed like a tin can. It was hard to know which would be worse.

Another shudder that felt like the ship breaking in half, and then we were through again, like a cork released from underwater, shooting upwards to bob on the surface of the ocean. Outside our portholes we could see the great Catherine wheel of the Milky Way.