The Spacebus Chronicles

These are the annals of the search to reunite humanity after the Earth's immolation as the sun swells to a red giant star. The history takes place in the early to mid-8000's.Oscar, the central character, has engineered a spaceship with an anti-quark engine that can move through space-time at close to the speed of light and use the gravity wells in the fabric of space. Riding these wave crests of folded space, the ship's displacement is many times greater than travel at the speed of light.Oscar's ship, Ethyl, is completed too late for transporting the colonists fleeing Earth to distant planets during the diaspora of hundreds of years and thousands of ships. The journeys themselves endure centuries of flight at pitiful sub-light speeds. The gamble was that a scant number of those ships might seed exoplanets where humans might survive. Those still alive are lost to each other by the rigors of hopelessly slow light-speed communications.Having failed in the original mission of evacuation, Oscar's new goal is locating survivors.