Elena walked into the corridor, and could tell from a glance at the pale smooth walls, the lightwells filled with growing green plants, and the embedded “skylights” that mimicked full-spectrum sunlight, that this ship was more sophisticated than her own, which made sense: five hundred years made a big difference in everything from materials science to the aesthetics of space flight. The floors and walls were firm but slightly springy, like the artificial surfaces that some playgrounds had on Earth, and they would be a lot more pleasant to bump into in low- or zero-gravity than the brutal metal planes of the Anjou. The AI called Shall murmured to her in a low voice, telling her where to turn left or right, and she didn’t give in to her curiosity about the doors, ladders, and corridors she passed. Her mind felt fragile enough just dealing with the things that were definitely in front of her, without speculating on what lurked around corners.

“They’re in the galley,” Shall said.

Elena nodded, hearing voices from an open doorway just ahead. She started for the opening, pausing outside when she got close enough to make out the words:

“…were suicide missions,” a woman’s voice was saying. “Traveling at, what, maybe a tenth of the speed of light, launched at distant star systems, just hoping to find habitable worlds when they arrived?” She sounded more amazed than scornful, at least.

A deeper, gravelly voice replied. “It’s not as if they launched themselves at random. They used the best data they had at the time to choose systems with a high likelihood of habitable worlds – rocky, Earthlike planets in the goldilocks zones around their stars, neither too hot nor too cold to rule out the presence of liquid water and the ability to support life.”

The woman said, “Sure, but even in the best-case scenario, they’d be a tiny crew living alone on a rock somewhere, trying to build a society out of frozen embryos and seeds and fabricators, knowing even if they found a paradise planet it would be centuries before anyone back home could make the same journey to join them. They’d be dead before the colony even got a real foothold. Most of them probably just ended up nowhere, orbiting planets that couldn’t even support life, with no way to come back. Hell, Venus is in the goldilocks zone of our solar system, and it’s a hellish acid pit.”