2291 A Ship Family - Issac Smith Ventura

Act I – 2290: The Last of the Slow Sons

The corridor lights of the FS Morning Speeder MMCCXXXVII flickered to the rhythm of the old coolant pumps, a heartbeat Isaac knew better than his own. It was a sound he hadn’t heard in five years, yet his muscles remembered its cadence, tensing with each low thrum. He stepped from the sterile docking tube back into the familiar, humid air of the ship, a scent rich with recycled water, ozone, and the earthy tang of the hydroponic gardens. He was home, and he was a stranger.

Born here, raised as a young child in the gravity rings of Deck C, he had been fostered out at age twelve to the family’s terrestrial base of operations, the Smith-Ventura Tower on Oberon Station. A “Family Tower” was a polite term for a vertically-stacked vault of apartments, offices, and warehouses that coordinated the logistics of their small fleet. He was given into the careful hands of aunts, uncles, cousins, and other elders—the landed part of a family forever in motion. Now, at twenty-two, he returned with a university flight patent clutched in his data-slate, a piece of paper that made him an outsider with an impressive title: Second Captain, master of the night shift.

He joined the crew mid-course, a delicate transfer from a station-hopper while the Morning Speeder made its ponderous inward journey from Neptune’s Main Station down to Jupiter’s Ganymede. He found his assigned quarters, a small but efficient cabin identical to the one he’d left, yet it felt wrong. The bunk was too neat, the walls bare of the personal trinkets and media-stills he’d once plastered them with. This was a room for an officer, not a boy.

His father, Elián, the ship’s First Captain, remained a distant, gravitational force. Isaac saw him only during the brief, formal shift changes on the bridge. Elián, a man whose face was a roadmap of stellar radiation and quiet frustrations, would nod curtly, his eyes scanning the navigation logs Isaac had just completed.

“Status?”

“Nominal, Captain. Course steady, all systems green,” Isaac would reply, his voice more formal than he intended.

Elián would grunt, a sound of minimalist approval. One cycle, after a particularly smooth micro-correction around a patch of solar-wind turbulence, Isaac found a short, encrypted text on his console. A single word from his father’s terminal: Good. It was the most effusive praise he’d received in a decade. Whatever it meant, he took it as a compliment, re-reading the single word until it blurred on the screen.

The ship itself was a world unto its own, a flying mini-station that operated on a relentless 24/7 schedule. Time was marked not by suns, but by the cycling of the four shifts that kept the vessel alive. The crew, a core of twenty family members, moved with an ingrained efficiency, their lives interwoven with the eighty-odd working passengers who paid their fare with labour. There was no private cooking; the massive communal kitchens were the heart of the ship, filled with the noise and smells of a dozen different culinary traditions, a constant negotiation of shared space and resources. Life support was a closed loop, from the humming water reclaimers to the lush, vertically stacked hydroponic gardens that provided the ship’s food and air, their green glow a constant, living presence in the ship’s core. Everything was managed by a redundant ship AI, a calm, female voice that was more a part of the ship’s atmosphere than a distinct personality, but the family trusted their own eyes and hands above all else.

The stop at Titan-station was a whirlwind of controlled chaos. The ship didn’t truly dock; it matched orbit, a ballet of thrusters and magnetic clamps. Isaac, from the bridge, watched the shuttles ferry back and forth. They off-boarded a handful of officials from Neptune’s unified moon government, their crisp uniforms a stark contrast to the worn jumpsuits of the crew. They took on a new group: a team of xeno-botanists on contract, and a medic with her two young children. The medic was an always-welcomed addition, a short-term associate who would bolster their own small medic-bay for the next leg of the journey. The children, however, were the true prize. Within hours, their laughter echoed down the corridors of Deck C, a sound that made the old ship feel younger. But the main purpose of the stop was fuel. Massive hoses snaked from the station, pumping liquid methane into the Morning Speeder’s vast tanks, enough for the next two rounds of their long, slow route.

Their approach to Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was a lesson in celestial mechanics. They didn’t fly straight in, but performed a slow, retrograde insertion from the outwards-lying Carme Group of moons. The route never aligned perfectly, the ship a tiny needle navigating a cosmic haystack. They would never stop at any of those outer moon stations; the Morning Speeder was larger than most of them. A station like Himalia might hold a few thousand souls, where the Speeder had room for just over a hundred, but their ship was a titan of mobile freight. It was a hybrid of spinning gravity-rings for passengers and bio-freight, and a massive, non-spinning mainframe spine with zero-gravity cargo holds clamped to its back. They were a microcosm of the system itself: a core of life surrounded by a vast emptiness filled with purpose.

As Isaac was pre-calculating the final approach vectors, he saw it: a physical note, made of real recycled paper, stuck to the main console with a piece of magnetic tape. A rare and significant gesture.

Tomorrow, inter-mid 0.30, @office. Kiss ♡ Gran.Yol.

The first real meeting with his grandmother, Yolanda Smith Ventura, Shipmaster and undisputed heart of their freighter, took place in her private compartment, a cosy annex attached to her bustling, open-plan office. She greeted him with a short, powerful embrace that smelled of cinnamon and machine oil. Her eyes, dark and sharp, studied him with the same intensity she applied to soil acidity levels or complex freight contracts.

“You’re thinner,” she declared. It wasn’t a question. “That’s education for you. All data, no substance.” She gestured to a low table. “Sit. We’ll have tea.”

In her quarters, surrounded by physical books, intricate ship models, and media-stills of faces he barely recognized, they performed a full tea ceremony. It was a ritual of patience and silence, of stirring hot water and waiting for the leaves to unfurl. It was the family’s way of slowing down time, of creating a space for significant conversation. As the steam rose, she began to open up the family history like a captain’s logbook, her voice a steady, calm narrative against the hum of the ship.

He started by reporting on the event that had necessitated her summons: the death of her elder sister, the “old dragon” of Oberon Station. As Station-Master, she had been the terrestrial anchor of the family, coordinating their smaller planetary ships and the three larger interplanetary freighters. From her high-tech office in the Family Tower, she had ordered ship-rebuilds, brokered freight depositions, planned future routes, and navigated the treacherous currents of station politics. She was the architect of their family’s education plans, the reason Isaac had a university patent at all.

“I’m sorry,” Isaac said, the words feeling small and inadequate. He recalled the message from his elder step-cousin, the one who had been at her side. No warning, no attack. At ninety years old, she had taken a last, deep breath in her command chair and simply… stopped. The heart stopped beating, the lungs breathing, the brain thinking. “Old-Age,” the official medic’s statement had read. A systems failure with no single cause.

Yolanda’s gaze softened. A single tear traced a line through the fine wrinkles at the corner of her eye. “You don’t have to feel sorry, Isaac. Besides,” she added, a faint, sad smile touching her lips, “I am glad that you do. It means they taught you more than just orbital mechanics.”

She sipped her tea, the silence stretching before she continued. His own maternal grandmother was now one of the new Station-Masters on Oberon, a duumvirate with his step-uncle. The story of his “step-uncle” was a classic ship-family tale. He’d come aboard as a passenger, a short-time ship-mechanic paying his way. He never left. He worked his way up—Master Engineer, Second Captain, Freight Master—before finally moving to the Family Tower as a business assistant. He was not an uncle by blood, not married to anyone of “original” family, but his own family had been absorbed into the larger Smith-Ventura clan, their surname changed, their loyalty proven through decades of shared work and travel. “He’s a Smith now,” Yolanda said, a statement of ultimate acceptance. “And a better businessman than my sister ever was, bless her stubborn heart.”

Buoyed by her openness, Isaac dared to ask the question that had been a silent void in his life. “And my mother?”

Yolanda’s face, ever the realist’s, stilled. She paused, the steam from her cup swirling between them. A long, audible sigh of sorrow escaped her lips, a sound that commanded the same silence his father’s glares did. She reached across the table, her work-roughened hand gently touching his hair. “Sorry, Isaac,” she said, her voice soft but final. “We never will know.”

Their first voyage together as officers concluded the 100 AU loop: Ganymede, Titan, Oberon, Neptune. A half-year journey down, a half-year journey back up, all at a proud 0.011c—a full ten percent faster than the standard freighters of their class. They carried settlers bound for the outer moons, crates of compostable architecture, precious ores, and protein-seed banks for new colonies. The passengers worked to earn their berth, their varied skills a temporary boon to the ship’s ecosystem, while their children turned the echoing corridors of the cargo decks into playgrounds.

The ship moved slowly, a steady, reliable constant. But outside the viewports, in the silent, star-dusted dark, the universe was beginning to shift. A revolution was coming, a wave of speed that threatened to wash away their entire way of life.

Act II – 2295–2310: The Seeds of Light

The next five years were a blur of constant motion, a looping dance between the gas giants and the icy outer worlds. The Morning Speeder went “up and down and up again,” but it was never the same ship twice. After their first voyage together, Yolanda had initiated a series of aggressive, incremental upgrades. Isaac watched, fascinated and a little unnerved, as the ship he knew was methodically altered. The old, singular fusion reactor was unceremoniously kicked out, its vast housing replaced by the thrum of two more powerful, efficient cores. The first ITT-buffer grids were installed, massive, energy-hungry arrays that ran down the ship’s primary mainframe, blocking off essential sections of the zero-gravity cargo holds. They sacrificed raw tonnage for a taste of the new speed.

To compensate, another gravity-freight ring was added, a delicate and expensive operation that required months of work at the Charon shipyards. New balance thrusters bristled from the hull, and the ship’s head was retrofitted with an enhanced shield and a new suite of radar “eyes.” It was a frankensteinian effort, a constant trade-off. “How are we paying for this?” Isaac asked his grandmother during one late-night review of the ship’s finances.

Yolanda’s answer was a single, cryptic sentence that explained everything. “We fly outwards, my boy. Never inwards again.” The unspoken “why” hung in the air: the inner planets, with their shorter distances and established routes, were a bloodbath of competition where speed was king. The future, their future, lay in the dark, distant spaces where reliability still held value.

By the time they returned to Uranus in 2301, the revolution was no longer a whisper. The X-ship Horizon Voyager had already crossed the legendary 0.1c barrier. Dockside chatter was filled with tales of the Horizon Vanguard, a new prototype from the shipbuilders at CHV, already pushing for 0.3c. The rumours that spread through the stations were no longer old sailor songs but hard, economic realities. Stations began adjusting their tender timings, prioritizing the faster ships. Long-standing freight contracts were retracted with polite, digital apologies. Ships like the Morning Speeder—generalists built for a slower age—were finding themselves at the bottom of the priority lists. Not enough passengers, not enough tonnage, not enough speed. Not specialized enough in the rare, urgent, or necessary goods that the new, smaller courier ships couldn’t carry. Their proud vessel, once a titan of the outer routes, was suddenly at risk of becoming a relic, an all-rounder in an age of specialists.

Isaac saw the Horizon Voyager for himself at a dusty station in the inner Kuiper Belt. They’d taken this station into their route as part of their new “outwards-only” strategy, a necessary extension now that they were effectively barred from the Saturn-Jupiter run. Contrary to his expectation of a sleek, narrow vessel, the X-ship was a monster. It was bulkier than a standard tug-boat, a squat, powerful design that was all engine and buffer-grids, a burst of pure, raw power.

“Damned thing looks like a fist in the eye,” he muttered to his father as they watched it manoeuvre with an impossible agility. Elián just grunted, his jaw tight. Isaac could see the ship’s design philosophy clearly: a small gravity ring with only three swing decks for a minimal crew, hidden behind massive side-frames housing the ITT-buffers. Huge plasma afterburners and a head that was little more than a giant, shielded ITT ring with a triple-array radar eye. It was a machine built for one purpose: to erase distance. The sight of it was a visceral confirmation of their new reality. Humanity was moving outwards, shockingly fast, and the Venturas were in danger of being left behind.

Back in her office, Yolanda was unsurprised. She seemed to have anticipated it all, her calm a steadying presence amidst the rising tide of anxiety. “Everything fast forgets what fed it,” she muttered, pouring Isaac another cup of tea. She revealed the full scope of the family’s strategy. For years, the Smith-Ventura ship- and station-masters had been allocating funds not into emergency coffers, but into “upgrade vouchers”: pre-paid contracts with shipyards for modular retrofits, next-generation reactor coils, and partial buffering systems. It was a long-term, high-risk investment in a future they could only guess at.

“I’m glad you are worried,” Yolanda said, a rare giggle escaping her. “It means your education is working. So, what’s your idea, Second Captain? Do we try to compete on speed? Chase new ore routes between the Asteroid Belt and Jupiter? Or do we lean into our strengths?” She gestured at a manifest on her screen, a list of potential contracts. “We could specialize. More passengers and bio-freight. Assets, Isaac. The things that fast ships can’t carry. What’s your gut tell you?”

“Bio,” the word dropped out of his mouth before he could think, the memory of the hydroponic gardens’ earthy smell suddenly vivid. “Bio-conversion. We carry the starter kits, the waste, the processors. We become a factory.” He paused, suddenly self-conscious. “But… we should hold a ship-council, at least. Let everyone have a say.”

“Yeah,” Yolanda nodded, her eyes twinkling with pride. “We should.”

The ship-council was a tense affair. It was held in the largest communal kitchen, the entire family crew gathered, their faces grim. Isaac, with Yolanda’s support, laid out the plan: to become a specialized bio-freighter, a mobile soil factory.

His father, Elián, was their fiercest opponent. “I won’t fly a sewage tank,” he grunted, his voice echoing in the silent room. “We are freighters, not garbage haulers. We carry settlers and technology, not waste.”

But others spoke up. A cousin who worked in life support pointed out the immense profit margin on processed soil. An older engineer noted that the slow, steady heat from their new reactors was perfect for the conversion process. The debate was fierce, but in the end, Yolanda’s pragmatism and Isaac’s vision won out. The council voted in favour.

The final, major upgrade transformed the Morning Speeder. They ripped out entire cargo bays to install massive bio-converters. The ship’s new top speed was a respectable 0.11c. It wasn’t a racer, but it was no longer obsolete. It was something new, something special. A ship that operated as an extension of its clients’ life support systems, a flying trainee station, a soil-builder. Outwards, they would carry the fresh new instalments for burgeoning colonies. Inwards, they would carry not just passengers, but freshmen trainees on contract, along with medicine and the luxurious, rare goods from the Kuiper Belt—enough to pay for the return flights and make a small fortune with each outward journey. Soil, as Yolanda had predicted, was wanted everywhere.

In the year 2305, on one of these long, slow, and now highly profitable journeys, Yolanda passed away in her sleep. She was eighty years old. She had navigated her family and her ship through the storm of the Speed Revolution and set them on a new, sustainable course. She left a void at the heart of their family, but she also left a clear path for Isaac, the last of the slow sons, to step into the role he was born for.

Act III – 2315–2324: The Garden in the Void

The year 2315 found Isaac Smith Ventura as a man remade by the void. At forty-seven, the last vestiges of the university student were gone, replaced by the quiet authority of a seasoned captain. He was the Shipmaster of the FS Morning Speeder, a title he had earned through a decade of navigating not just asteroid fields, but the treacherous currents of a rapidly changing economy. Their niche as a specialized bio-freighter had been a stroke of genius, a perfect counter-move in the great game of speed. They were the patient gardeners in a galaxy of sprinters.

But the galaxy kept accelerating. While their 0.11c speed was respectable for their specialized work, the inner-belt routes were now dominated by ships running at a minimum of 0.2c. The outer Kuiper contracts, their bread and butter, were beginning to demand 0.3c. The profits, once a reliable torrent, were tightening. The Kuiper Belt, which they had gambled on as a slow-growth frontier, was consolidating faster than anyone had anticipated, with new stations and faster supply lines knitting the dark into a coherent economic zone. Time, Isaac knew, would eventually render even their clever strategy obsolete.

The news of his grandmother’s death reached them mid-voyage, a single, prioritized data-burst that cut through the routine chatter of the ship’s AI. Yolanda Smith Ventura, ninety-nine years old, had passed away on Oberon Station, as she had lived: sitting in her command chair, reviewing freight manifests. There was no single cause, only a quiet, final cascade of systems failure.

Their last flight down to Uranus was a sombre, silent affair. The ship felt hollow without her anticipated presence at the end of the line. On Oberon, the family gathered at their terrestrial anchor, the Smith-Ventura Tower. The funeral took place on the top-deck, a vast, domed greenhouse that served as the family’s graveyard, a tradition long kept from the distant memory of Earth. They buried her ashes in rich, dark soil—soil their own ship had likely helped create—and planted a young apple tree beside the marker. Isaac stood beside his father, Elián, who stared at the sapling with an unreadable expression, his stoicism a wall Isaac had never learned to breach.

A week later, the entire voting membership of the Smith-Ventura clan convened in the Tower’s long, sterile conference room for the “Master-Shuffle.” It was a formal council to re-balance the family’s power structure after Yolanda’s passing. The elder station-masters from Oberon, Isaac’s maternal grandmother and step-uncle, presided. Captains and officers from the other two family freighters were patched in via 3d-stream, their images shimmering and occasionally stuttering due to the light-minutes of delay.

Isaac’s father, Elián, was given the floor first. He stood, his physical presence dominating the room. His voice was hard, formal. “As First Captain and Freight-Master of the Morning Speeder,” he began, his eyes finding Isaac’s across the long table, “I have a personnel change to announce.”

Isaac’s stomach tightened. He felt the familiar dread of his father’s disapproval.

“Isaac Smith Ventura,” Elián continued, his voice ringing with authority, “can no longer serve as Second Captain on the ship.” He let the words hang in the air, a cold, heavy silence. Isaac’s face burned with a confusion that bordered on humiliation. Next to him, his partner, Soraya, a brilliant engineer who had joined their crew as a trainee years ago, placed a reassuring hand on his arm.

After an agonizingly long pause, a slow grin spread across Elián’s weathered face. “His newly assigned duties as The Shipmaster of the FS Morning Speeder require him to manage mixed schedules, fleet-wide logistics, and long-term strategy. That doesn’t align with any standard navigation duties.” Elián’s grin widened, and his eyes, for the first time in years, met Isaac’s with raw, undisguised emotion. He muttered, just loud enough for the room to hear, “I am so proud of you, Son.”

The tension in the room broke. A wave of applause and congratulations filled the space. It was a classic Elián manoeuvre: a test, a public challenge, and a promotion, all wrapped in a single, gruff package. Isaac, stunned and deeply moved, could only nod as the title settled onto his shoulders.

The council then turned to the real issue. One of the newly appointed station-masters, a cousin with a reputation for caution, brought it up. “Our strategy has served us well, but the numbers don’t lie. 0.3c is becoming the new standard. Ships are making the Charon-to-Kuiper run in half our time. We are being outpaced.”

“It’s time for new strategies,” another elder agreed. “Rethink our plans. 0.3c is a threat. We need to update at least two of the ships, but the cost…”

That was the way of these councils. The elder masters would step down by posing a problem their successors had to solve. “Who does disagree?” the station-master asked, his eyes sweeping the room.

It was Elián who spoke, his voice surprising everyone. “We go outwards. Permanently. The long runs between Charon and the new Nova Arcis station. The farther the route, the more valuable our specialized bio-conversion process becomes. It requires a full upgrade.”

Isaac stared at his father. For years, Elián had resisted the most aggressive outward expansions, clinging to the familiar routes. Now, he was championing the most radical leap yet. Meanwhile, Soraya was smiling at Isaac, her eyes alight with the challenge. She had come aboard as a trainee, and now she was engaged to the Shipmaster of the vessel that would become her home.

The decision was made. They would split the family tree. One of the freighters would remain on the familiar planetary routes, servicing Saturn down to Charon. The other two, including the Morning Speeder, would be retrofitted for the new, long-haul outer-belt trade. It took half a year of intensive work at the Charon shipyards. They upgraded the Morning Speeder to a powerful 0.25c, tearing out more cargo space for bigger reactors and more robust buffering systems. The ship became a “fat mother,” as the engineers joked—less tonnage, but with the power to cross the vast distances to Nova Arcis with ease.

It was during the final stages of the refit, in a quiet, climate-controlled “greenhouse” compartment filled with the genetic samples for their next contract, that his father found him.

“We need to talk,” Elián said, his voice softer than Isaac had ever heard it.

He told the story in blunt, painful bursts. He spoke of Isaac’s mother, a brilliant botanist with a fierce laugh. He spoke of Mars, of a business deal gone wrong. And he spoke of her murder—a violent, brutal act of sexual abuse that had left him shattered. Suspicion had immediately fallen on him. “Traders are traitors,” he spat, the old gipsy slur from a xenophobic Martian culture. “I was an outsider. It was easy to blame me.”

The case went cold. No one on Mars wanted to touch it, to expose the rot in their own society. And so, the Ventura-Smith family had made a choice. They had exiled themselves from the inner planets, not for business, but out of fear and grief. They had created a wall of light-years to protect a man they believed to be innocent but could not prove it.

“Two years ago,” Elián said, his voice breaking, “I received a secret message. An old detective, retired, cleared his conscience before he died. He’d found a new trace, a genetic marker they missed. He found the real killer.” He looked at Isaac, his eyes clear for the first time. “It was her father. Your grandfather. The one who welcomed me to Mars.”

The air left Isaac’s lungs. He was four when his mother died. All this time, his father had carried not just grief, but the weight of a false accusation, a burden that had defined their entire family’s trajectory. Now, at seventy-five, he was finally free.

“Well, Son,” Elián said, composing himself. “There is one thing more.”

Isaac already knew. “You are with Ruanda, aren’t you?” Ruanda Ragjeff, a sharp, thirty-year-old agriculture specialist who had signed on as a passenger three years ago and had become an indispensable member of the crew.

Elián nodded. “Well, yes, but there is more. We are leaving the ship. At Nova Arcis. We’ve both signed contracts as bioconversion specialists. It’s time for me to settle down, to build my own little family.” He smiled, a genuine, tender expression that reshaped his entire face. Isaac could not disagree. He and Soraya were engaged now; his father deserved the same peace.

Their arrival at Nova Arcis was the dawn of a new era. Elián and Ruanda off-boarded, leaving a void in the crew roster and in Isaac’s heart. “The Freight-Master position is vacant for this return trip,” was Isaac’s first command as the undisputed Shipmaster. “And we need a new Second Captain.” Sometimes you run on tight resources.

He spent the layover in a flurry of calls and meetings—down to the family on Charon and Oberon, and long, strategic talks with the Nova Arcis council. The long plan his grandmother had set in motion enfolded. Nova Arcis, the bustling new hub of the outer belt, would become their ship’s new centre of operations. No more Family Towers. Now, they would have Family Flats. No old, haunted routes. Just brand new chances, and a future for a family that had finally outrun its ghosts.

Act IV – 2336: Faster Than Home

The year 2336 found Isaac Smith Ventura, now sixty-seven, a man defined by the gravity of a station rather than a ship. He was the family’s Station-Master on Nova Arcis, a role that felt both like a promotion and a quiet exile. His days were a blur of logistics, a constant juggling of manifests, crew rotations, and the complex dance of docking rights. Life became a series of arrivals and departures, each ship a self-contained world arriving with its own time-dilated stories. He aged in steady, predictable station-cycles, while his family, scattered across the routes, aged in relativistic stutters. An old ship’s adage proved true: you aged faster than news from Earth, but then, nobody much cared for news from Earth anymore.

The nature of their trade had changed, too. Passengers now stayed aboard for longer hauls, sometimes two years or more for a full, winding voyage from Charon all the way out to the newly established Oort Cloud Main Station. They worked, lived, and celebrated together, the ship a temporary, intense community. Deep friendships were forged in the shared isolation of the void, but so too were tensions and fractures. Long travel meant long memories and, sometimes, even longer grudges. Isaac spent as much time mediating shipboard disputes via time-delayed comms as he did negotiating freight contracts.

His office, a modest flat in the family’s designated block on Nova Arcis, overlooked the main docking ring. It was from here he watched his second daughter, Sorana, carve her own path through the stars. She had attended Nova Arcis University, her mind too sharp for the slow pace of a freighter’s life, and was now a fully-fledged warp-field engineer for CHV—the very company whose innovations had once threatened to render their family obsolete. Poetic justice, Isaac often thought, or perhaps just the universe’s love for a closed loop. Sorana was part of a team building the next generation of ships right here in orbit: small, powerful 0.5c line shuttling interplanetary spaceships designed to zip between Nova Arcis and Oort Cloud Main Station.

He met her for lunch at a small sushi udon bar overlooking the docks, her choice for her permanent food subscription. The concept still amused him. Family members on food subscriptions. But when Sorana explained the exorbitant tax the station levied on private kitchens to encourage communal living and conserve resources, he burst out laughing. It was the same logic his grandmother had used on the ship, scaled up to a city of millions.

“It’s perfectly fine, Dad,” Sorana said, her eyes sparkling with the same pragmatic intelligence as her great-grandmother. They clinked their teacups, the hot water softly stirred, the familiar ritual a constant in a life of change. Through the vast viewport, the docks of Nova Arcis were a silent, mechanical ballet.

Isaac gestured with his chin towards the void. “Saw some new ships pop up on the long-range scans last cycle. Near the Oort station. Bigger than yours, less bulky than the old X-ships. No rings.”

Sorana followed his gaze, her expression sharp and professional. “You’re right. Those are unmanned probes, 0.4c max. Most are heading for Proxima Centauri, a final survey run. The one you saw, though, is NA/BS-p00B3—the third deep-space probe to Barnard’s Star. We’re getting the first light-speed ‘talk back’ from the lead probe in about sixteen years. It has an embedded return vehicle, a little one, that might make it back with physical samples in forty.” She smiled. “Another marvel of engineering. We’re mapping the neighbourhood.”

“When will we see 0.7c? Or is that still a secret?” Isaac asked, the old captain in him always curious about the next horizon.

Sorana’s smile faded slightly. She took a slow sip of tea. “It’s not a secret, Dad. It’s a wall. We stabilized 0.5c beautifully. But 0.7c… that’s a stab in our back. The dilation effects on complex systems, even with the best buffering, become exponential. The math breaks down. We’re working on it, but the consensus at CHV is that it will take time, or another huge breakthrough. The kind of breakthrough that only comes along once a century.”

Isaac felt a strange sense of relief. For a moment, the universe had stopped accelerating.

That evening, back in his office, Isaac called a family council. He felt like he was playing a role, channelling his grandmother’s foresight. He felt old. He felt like he was being “fired again,” as he joked to Soraya—pushed up the ladder into a position of greater responsibility and further from the hands-on work he loved. He had become the Station-Master, and it was time to act like one.

With the family’s pooled resources and a hefty loan co-signed by the entire Oberon tower, he split the family’s routes and assets once more. His own son, now a capable and ambitious young man, was given captaincy of a brand new ship, the “新希望之光 Aurora”—a sleek, 0.5c service-ship built right here at Nova Arcis. Its purpose was speed, running the lucrative, high-priority loops between Nova Arcis and the Oort Cloud.

But Isaac couldn’t let go of the old way entirely. He decided to keep the FS Morning Speeder MMCCXXXVII, their ancient, stubborn heart. Under a new captain, a distant Smith cousin, they improved the old ship slightly, pushing it to a stable 0.33c. It would continue to run the flexible, slower “Charon-to-Nova Arcis” tour, hauling the things speed couldn’t replace: delicate rootstock, complex bio-converters, and families with more patience than credits.

In one of his final station-logs, looking out at the Aurora and the Morning Speeder docked side-by-side—one a silver needle, the other a scarred, familiar workhorse—Isaac recorded his thoughts, his voice quiet and filled with the wisdom of a lifetime spent in motion.

“We were once a house. Now we are a network. Speed didn’t kill our family. It gave it motion. I don’t captain a ship. We shepherd a legacy.” On his grave, years later, there would grow a cherry tree, its seeds carried from a moon of Saturn to a station in the deep, its roots nourished by the soil his own ship had helped to create.