Andres held her hands up to quell the muttering. ‘Of course such a journey is far in excess of what we planned. No generation starship has ever challenged such distances before, let alone achieved them.’ She stared around at them, fists on hips. ‘But if we can manage a thousand years of flight, we can manage ten, or fifty - why not? We are strong, we are just as determined as the Coalition and its drones - more so, for we know we are in the right.’

Rusel wasn’t used to questioning the pharaohs’ decisions, but he found himself wondering at the arrogance of the handful of pharaohs to make such decisions on behalf of their crew - not to mention the generations yet unborn.

There was no serious protest. Perhaps it was all simply beyond the imagination. Diluc muttered, ‘Can’t say it makes much difference. A thousand years or ten thousand, I’ll be dead in a century, and I won’t see the end . . .’

Andres restored the images of the Ships. Jupiter was expanding rapidly now, and the other Ships were swarming closer.

Andres said, ‘We have discussed names for our vessels. On such an epic voyage numbers won’t do. Every Ship must have a name! We have named our Ship-homes for great thinkers, and great vessels of the past.’ She stabbed her finger around the Virtual image. ‘Tsiolkovsky. Great Northern. Aldiss. Vanguard.’ She looked at her crew. ‘And as for us, only one name is possible. Like an earlier band of pilgrims, we are fleeing intolerance and tyranny; we sail into the dark and the unknown, carrying the hopes of an age. We are Mayflower.’

You didn’t study history on Port Sol. Nobody knew what she was talking about.

At the moment of closest approach Jupiter’s golden-brown cloudscape bellied over the upturned faces of the watching crew, and the Ships poured through Jupiter’s gravity well. Even now the rule of silence wasn’t violated, and the five Ships parted without so much as a farewell message.

From now on, wherever this invisible road in the sky took her, the second Mayflower was alone.

III

As the days stretched to weeks, and the weeks to months, Rusel continued to throw himself into work - and there was plenty of it for everybody.

The challenges of running a generation starship were familiar to the crew to some extent, as the colonists of Port Sol had long experience in ecosynthesis, in constructing and sustaining closed artificial environments. But on Port Sol they had had external resources to draw on, the ice, rock and organic chemistry of the ice moon itself. The Ship was now cut off from the outside universe.