Chapter 2

Captain Nguye hasn’t slept in days. The long six month voyage of the spaceship has felt at times like forever and at times like no time at all. It was their last chance for a new life. The planet has been baking and dying and it was a matter of time before it was the end for Earth. Further off in the solar system was a sister planet, perfect for settling. It was only a question of how to get the remaining population to that planet with the quickly dwindling resources. Time was of the essence. It was devised by the best scientists to get a craft to one of the moons of Earth, and propel that ship towards the blue planet.

The ship was massive. In fact, it was a moon of their planet. Settled by thousands of stations with hundreds of thousands of people, propelled by massive nuclear reactors, away from a dying planet, towards the bright blue ball in the far off space.

First officer Curiye appeared at the flight deck. Flightdeck was atop the main structure on one side of the moon, connected to the thruster rockets on the other side wirelessly through satellites orbiting the moon. The ion thrusters gently pushed the moon towards the blue planet at a brisk 10,000 km/second. The people were bellow the surface, protected from the harmful radiation and meteors bombarding the ship.

Officer Curiye pressed a button near the corner of the deck and a little printerhead began to move, he starred at it with an absent daze while thinking of what would happen in just a few short hours. After a about a minute, he had a square piece of bread in his hand and a bit of cream cheese-like paste on the plate. He smeared the paste on the bread and walked over to the Captain, who had the same look except he was looking at the screen with the image of the slowly increasing planet.

“It’s so beautiful.” Captain said breaking the silence.

“This must be what Earth used to look like,” said officer. Curiye “How do we know that the same thing won’t happen to us again?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean” said Sgt Curiye “How do we know that we won’t turn Blue planet into a desolate Earth?”

“Right now I just wonder how we will survive.” said Nguye

“Why? We have the tools for survival.”

“It is never that simple. There is the lower temperature, the diseases, the lack of adaptation and then the unknown.. there’s always the unknown..”

The best leaders are never those who think they know everything, but those who know how much they don’t, and in spite of that, push on.