It had been years, in fact decades, and yet it was finally about to happen. Mankind's first trip outside of the solar system. Colonization of the planet Cethegus was about to begin. The Government of course told the people that it was to alleviate the population problem, but a few of us knew the truth. The Earth was dying. Our drilling and mining of the Earth had gradually worn the planet down, and in the past fifty years volcanoes and earthquake occurrences had tripled. Five million people had been killed in the eruption of Mt. Rainier about ten years ago. I remember being in school at the time, we held a five minute silence for the victims of Seattle.
The Government predicted that the planet had at most a hundred more years before the crust gave way entirely. At that point all life would end as the world would wash itself in magma, cleansing its surface of the menace of humanity. Thus stood our last, best hope for survival, the Helix Temporal Gate. Over a mile in diameter, the massive Helix was the largest structure ever completed in space, larger even then the INSEO, or the Imperial Navy Shipyard in Earth Orbit. Built by the American Empire in cooperation with the European League, the Helix had cost the two governments a combined total of nearly eight hundred billion dollars. Expensive, quite, but the price was worth the survival of mankind.
We, my family and I, sat aboard a star cruiser, the Vesteria, to watch the first ship pass through the Helix Temporal Gate. This ship was none other than the A.E.S. Missouri, a massive dreadnaught whose original namesake had been the site of the Japanese surrender and the end of World War Two. That had been three hundred years ago. Since that time two more battleships had been given the name Missouri after the former state of the union, now part of Sector Three. The first had served in the Third World War against the Asian Confederation made up of Japan, China, and India. The second had been the first large gun platform in space, and had fought bravely in the Lunar War some hundred years earlier. It was now permanently docked at INSEO.
This new Missouri was state of the art. Her fusion reactor chain could power the ship to speeds unattainable by conventional nuclear propulsion, and with a massive complement of railguns, gauss cannons, and particle projection weapons, the ship could take on nearly an entire fleet. The perfect ship to go through the Gate first. Enough cargo space to carry the colonists, and enough firepower to decimate any opposition it met.
The ceremony was lavish, nearly one million people had shown up to see what would surely be one of the greatest events in scientific history, the first manned trip outside of the solar system. The Helix technology was quite simple actually, just hard to harness into a working system. The Helix shape of the Gate itself was a giant electromagnet which would accelerate particles around its rings to the speed of light. At its center a warp field would form, bending timespace and creating a temporal gate through time to nearly any place in the galaxy. The only limit was the targeting/navigation laser's range.
Testing had taken only a week, and was conducted by sending various probes and drones to those planets that we saw fit for colonization. The Government had ultimately decided upon Cethegus, a lush green planet much larger than our own. In our solar system such a size would have meant arid deserts at the equator and frozen tundras at the poles, but the system in which Cethegus resided was a double-star system, and the heat provided by both stars was apparently at just the right proportion, turning the large sphere into a warm tropical planet. The climate, They told us, would quite resemble the sunny beaches of Flagstaff.