The Spacebus Chronicles

Earth’s immolation was imminent as the sun swelled to a red giant star. A diaspora lasting hundreds of years launched thousands of ships fleeing Earth and setting sail for distant planets. Those colony ships endured centuries of ship-bound generations at pitiful sub-light speeds The gamble was that a scant number of those ships might seed M-class planets where humans might survive. A few made it, but they were lost to each other by the limits of pitifully slow light-speed communications. Oscar, an iconoclast apart from the Space Registry bureaucracy, had engineered a spaceship with an anti-quark engine that could move through space-time at close to the speed of light and glide over the gravity wells in the fabric of space. Riding these wave crests of folded space, the ship’s displacement was many times greater than light speed. But Oscar’s ship, Ethyl, was completed too late for transporting colonists Having failed in the original mission of evacuation, Oscar’s new goal was locating the survivors.