The Solar Federation slowboat, the Periwinkle, drifted through the Light, surrounded by stars, at a sedate 20% of lightspeed. She and her cargo of stasis locked humans (a temporal field control technology) were but months from Landfall when the unthinkable happened.
If Staff Technician Luis Bollingsworth had listened to the safety manuals instead of his own laziness, and the yelling from his bosses who never said 'ignore safety, but get the job done', but that's exactly what they meant with their insistent lectures about working faster, things would have been fine. But he trusted the map, and did not go out and personally check one in ten self-wielding nuts on the exterior of the Ion Drive as he was supposed too. Instead, he signed off on it, and went on to the next job.
So twenty-seven AU's from Landfall, the Ion Drive fired again, and it with all its massive thousand tonne weight began to spin on its axle without control from the slider bars which Luis had been supposed to check. In the long centuries of flight, the few improperly wielded had vibrated, and induced stress fractures in the proper welds. Now, what was supposed to hold the drive in place as it rotated, instead rested its whole weight on the rotator pin.
The ship woke up the Emergency Crew. They freaked. The engine needed to be fired just so, so that they would arrive in a nice, stable orbit. Just so, was to measurements of a half of an inch, and one second in time.
It was a fact not appreciated at the time that stasis did not affect the quantum part of a human, that dreams began to build up, and that excess emotionality was common to Wakers.
The Captain, Helena Morgan, was just as crazed as the others, but she realized she needed to get everyone under control. So she flipped through the research files for the craziest, most far-out ideas, merged them together with a prayer and a touch of insane genius that was more poetry than science, and injected herself. She expected to die.
Instead, it rewrote her genome. She was taller, smarter, better looking, and telepathically dominant. She used her new gifts to force everyone else to shape up. Then she dosed them. Then she woke up everyone she thought who might have an idea since no one still had one.
One nerdy fellow suggested ropes. And pyramids.
So it came to be that everyone was woken up, and the new Dominarchs used their powers to get them in line next to the Ion Drive with various teams of them assigned to the differing ropes on either side of the drive. There were the main puller teams who moved the drive by brute force great distances, and the more fine control puller teams who also used brute force, but more precisely controlled.
By a type of tug of war, the crew of the Periwinkle dragged the Ion Drive back and forth as needed for the next week until the ship reached orbit in safety.
By this time, it was clear. The old social order was largely overthrown. Plans for building an outer space factory society which would create what was needed on the planet below were shelved. For without an easy to use Ion Drive, such plans were out the window.
There had always been a political division in the crew between those who favored a microgravity based economy, and those who wanted an agrarian economy on the planet. The original compromise had been to allow the food on the planet and the factories in orbit with the clear understanding that the factory men would be the leaders of the new society. But, now there was a chance.
The agrarians went to the Dominarchs, who with their powers had turned the ignored group, the Emergency Crew, into a new power base, and cut a deal. Agrarian economy with Dominarch rulership. And thus civil war came to the Periwinkle and to Caliburn's Planet.
In the end, the small manufacturers could not compete against the Dominarchs powers. And as some of them rationalized, perhaps it was for the best. Perhaps the society was not ready for an entrepreneurial small business class. A dragon cannot fly before it hatches, they said. But one of them looked to the future, and knew that the new aristocrats would not always be needed.
And so he sowed a gene-fixed weed all over the Northern Continent, in patches, here and there. Meanwhile, on the Southern Continent, farms and ranches were being built, and in the asteroid belt the Free City was being built.
And time rolled on....
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