Chickens In Space - E-book - ePub

The Extra Solar Colonization And Planetary Exploitation Initiative planned for every possible contingency. Hot planets, cold planets. Worlds teeming with life, worlds dead and sterile. Abundant resources, scarce resources, and even hostile intelligent aliens. They planned for everything they expected to find. They had to, really. Faster Than Light Travel, when it was discovered, came with one very unfortunate limitation; every single trip was one way.
To get back, there had to be a Faster-Than-C Field generator, or Slingshot, on the other end. And because a Slingshot was by necessity much larger than the ship it launched through time and space, it couldn't be brought along for a return trip. It had to be built on the other end. Even if everything went according to plan, the timetable for finding, extracting, and processing the resources on a new world, then launching the parts into orbit and assembling a new Slingshot capable of reaching back to Earth, was ten years.
Once a colony ship was on its way, there was no chance of rescue if things went wrong. Colonists and their equipment and their carefully preserved specimens of Earth life had to be ready for anything and everything they might find. One colony ship unfortunately didn't find trouble on their new world. They brought it with them.