11049 1. Ghost Ship The Earth was gone. “Damnification and pestilential pustules. You’d better be dead wrong on your dead reckoning, Blackie.” The nigh-to-lightspeed starship Emancipation hung in space in the spot where Tellus, the home of man, was in theory supposed to be. Sol hovered to one side, an endless roar of radio white noise and high-energy particles. “Restrain your ire, my dear smelly Cowhand. With the navigation beacons wiped out, our precise position is hard to determine. But the sun is at the correct size and distance, and the other planets also. This is where Earth should be.” “Blackie! You think the enemy done her in?” As a ship, the Emancipation was a titaness: one hundred thousand metric tons displacement, her overall length twice that of a skyscraper’s height from the First Space Age, with a sail spread of five hundred miles, requiring seventy-five thousand terawatts of laser energy to propel. With her sails folded, she looked like the skeleton of an umbrella with absurdly long and spindly arms, or perhaps like some microscopic marine animal.
