An old man, dressed in a simple, dirty white frock, laid a set of scrolls on a small table. The room was lit by the light streaming through the open windows. Five children, in their mid-teens gathered around him. They were dressed in shirts and trousers, or dresses, considerably cleaner than his. His frock was not dirty, merely worn with use. He motioned for the children to gather around him as he pointed to the scroll.
"The language is referred to as pre-unified non-native Condrian. We have studied it, but called it 3rd era Exoc, as in exo-Condrian. I thought you might appreciate a story in that tongue, from the Old Days. About the last journey of the ..."
He stopped and a smile beamed through his beard. "Rather than have me tell you, why don't each of you, in turn read a section, in the original Exoc, then translate it. That will be our class for the day. We will save the discussion of this little story for another day. Jasha, you begin."
A girl with short, straight black hair walked up to the scroll. She looked it over and said, "It is handwritten." The old man nodded. She then focused on the scroll and spoke the words of the first paragraph in the original tongue, only pausing twice, briefly, to correct her pronunciation. Then she spoke the translation, "The four year tour of duty had stretched on..."
*****
The four year tour of duty had stretched on, as far as the distant star systems they traversed. The crew had been plagued by almost every possible problem, from faulty and broken down equipment, incompetent and unskilled crew members, to being dragged into an interstellar civil war. The ship Circle's Edge had become a sort of floating prison in an effort to snuff out some of the open hostilities between the two factions. And then there was the migration of the religious fanatics. Certainly every ship has a few of them, but when the high exalted leader managed to finagle a ride on the ship, that meant that the lunatics, or stellatics, were practically coming out of the woodwork, if the ship had had any woodwork. The Circle's Edge was supposed to be promoting peace, stopping wars, disrupting the increasing flow of contraband, and generally being the good guys. But it never seemed to work out that way. Still, they had managed to weather the storm of almost every possible problem. So by the time the impossible problem hit, they were so far beyond their capacity and capability to handle mundane issues, let alone cosmic-scale cataclysmic events, that they just gave up and called it a day.
Their impossible problem was an encounter with a white hole.
The ship had been traveling through T-Space, at roughly c*25. They had made many runs like that before. The stories varied. Some thought they were taking the X'tonu'u prisoners back to X'ton. Others said it was Y'valatic prisoners back to Y'valus. Another variation was that they were going to dump the whole lot of them on a moon of Phantos IV and let them sort it all out themselves in their own primitive way. And still others thought the pope or high star marshal or whatever he called himself was planning to bless some children on a barren wasteland of an asteroid. But the destination didn't matter.
With so little warning that the steering and drive computer could not compensate in any way, the curvature of the space-time continuum went completely non-linear, possibly even discontinuous. They had an uncontrolled drop out from T-Space into normal space with a subsequent excess of energy to release. Before the power control systems could arrange a path of least resistance that wound its way through non-critical parts of the ship, a firestorm of energy was shorting out systems all throughout the ship, even hardened, military grade, technology. The ship shuddered as key control and response systems blinked offline for a few moments, or some forever. No one knew if at that point, they collided with nascent matter ejected from the white hole or if it was all resulting from the deluge of energy that had been pushing the enormous ship through its own folded space-time crashing back in on them.
In either case, the results were devastating.
One of the main engines exploded in a colossal shower of light and energy. The aft section of the top decks were fried by the radiation, measuring in the hundreds of sieverts or more. The interior structure of the ship was damaged by sustaining more than 100 microseconds of load well past its design and testing limitations. A few sections had buckled, and when their bulkheads cracked and their atmosphere blew out, the situation started to look very bad. New damage reports kept filing in. The casualties numbered in the thousands. The sensor data reported that the white-hole existed, was spewing its primordial mix, and, completely contrary to how they should work, was at the same time drawing the Circle's Edge in towards the event horizon.
White holes are impossibilities, they can't exist in our universe, beyond lurking as a subtle consequence when some abstract math equations turned on their head. But the scientific details didn't matter. The ship was damaged. The initial near-C impact, or perhaps just the sudden N-Space reentry, did more damage in a few fleeting instants than a year and a half patrolling along the hot X/Y front line.
The crew tried coax the ship away from the white hole, whose pull the scientists repeatedly said cannot exist. The mathematics clearly showed that things only move away from a white hole. But the mathematics also showed that they don't exist, so by that point the captain was considering the advice of her science team with large amounts of skepticism. The other main engine blew as the great ship tried to escape from the pull of the hole. Once the pyrotechnics show abated, it became clear that not only were they facing an impossibility, in the form of the white hole, but they were facing an impossible situation. They had managed to avert a direct collision course by putting themselves in a decaying orbit around the hole and had no way to move further out.
More meetings and consultations, surveying, scanning, planning, and preparing. They only had days to make their decision. It took them less than an hour.
Survival was the highest priority—they would abandon ship.
Klaxons wailed throughout the ship, adding a new sound of urgency to the alarms and warnings that had been reverberating throughout the corridors. The detachable sections, the explorer vessels, the escape ships, the shuttles, even the small escape pods that would hold less than a dozen people were used, at least the ones that were functional. The command crew, the officers, the enlisted, the pilots, workers, the scientists, the surveyors, the builders, the cleaners, the political representatives, and more, even a small set of politically important, well-connected, or non-violent prisoners from both the X'tonu'u and Y'valatic left the ship on the fleet of escape vessels. The momentum of the Circle's Edge provided an extra bit of boost to the smaller vessels, letting them escape the local space's gravity well, at the cost of bringing the parent ship's doom that much sooner.
The fleet of refugees rendezvoused a safe distance away from the disaster, regrouped, and then went into maximum high-C burn to get the hell out of there, with the lesser ships hitched to the more powerful ones. The best and the brightest knew not only how to read the hand they were dealt and fold, but when to leave the table, walk away from the casino, check out of the hotel, get out of the city, and skulk their way back home. And they were the best and the brightest. Using a variety of methods, they had managed to allow almost eight thousand people to escape, which was quite an accomplishment.
Though not all would agree.
Certainly, the eight thousand aboard the escape ships would be of one opinion. However, it is quite likely that the almost two thousand people who remained aboard might have a different opinion. Some had no choice. The security officers were concerned about the almost 100 prisoners that were saved, but they were the most "enlightened", understanding that it was in their best interest, as well as that of their cause, to live, and more importantly, let live. And the two factions were in completely separate ships, and did not know which ships held their comrades and which held their adversaries. That left 400 prisoners locked up on the ship, and they were among the ones that would have happily killed a shipful of their own just to get at one of the enemies.
Then there were the pilots and workers who were too drunk to answer the call. The various factions that for whatever reason found it too hard to get to one of the egress points on Section A of the ship. And there were those who simply misunderstood the directions, straightforward as they were, such as "all escape vessels will depart at their scheduled time, no exceptions."
And finally, there were the religious fanatics. The cult leader had said that he would stay aboard "for some time" while he would "commune with the star." All attempts to reason with him failed. And once word spread that he was staying, over 1000 members of the Children of the Expanding Light, otherwise known as the Star Cult, decided they would remain on board as well.
The captain was in a quandary. There were too many of them to force into the escape ships. The escape fleet had sufficient capacity for them, since when the escape plan was designed, the assumption was that most of the religious order, and especially the leader, would want to leave. In the end, there was not enough time for discussions or negotiations. The rules were laid out and whoever was not on board an escape ship at the appointed hour would remain on the Circle's Edge. The significant extra capacity on the fleet meant that the transfer ran without event. In theory, the big ship would be in a position to have enough momentum for at least a day to spin off a few more small escape vessels, if any could be salvaged.
And then there was the matter of "the captain always stays with his (or her) ship." No one expected the captain to stay on board a ship that was heading for certain destruction. However, abandoning ship while more than a thousand souls remained would not be viewed favorably.
In the end, the captain settled on being the last one to board the last escape vessel after trying to ensure that she was indeed the last one trying to leave. This was after making sure her first officer had returned, having destroyed all significant ship's logs and any information that could tarnish what was up till now an exemplary service record.
They left a few drone-beacons to record scientific data from a safe distance and also send a beacon if anyone else made it out. They weren't monsters, they just wanted to survive—apparently more than the others. They were the best and the brightest, the most ambitious, clever, kind, reasoned, reasonable, and thoughtful.
Those who remained were, by definition, not.