And it’s really exciting! I talked about it a little in the last post, but it’s coming together a lot more as I’m thinking about the characters. Let me share what I’ve got so far:
My idea right now for the main character is that he doesn’t know it, but he’s the son of a space pirate who lives on the outskirts of a giant nebula and raids the star systems bordering it. Because of a difficult political situation, and several wars and other stuff, the mother sent out her son as a young boy on an interstellar freighter, trusting the captain to deliver him safely to some of her relatives, but the captain betrayed her and uses the boy for cheap labor. The boy grows up on the freighter doing heavy work and not knowing anything about his mother or father.
The boy gradually learns that the captain is taking advantage of him and tries to get the captain to sign a work contract that will protect him. However, the captain tells all these lies to get the boy to think that he’s actually being very kind to him, until one of the boy’s friends dies on the job and he decides to run for it.
He smuggles himself onto an interplanetary freighter (basically, the interstellar freighter transfers goods between star systems and the interplanetary freighter stays in-system and ships goods from planet to planet), and is taken in by the captain of this smaller ship. The captain there is a very kind man, who takes care of the boy and hires him on at full wages. There are two other members of the crew: the captain’s son and daughter.
The good captain is a member of a new religious movement that fled from the system due to wars, persecutions, and other turmoil. The main body of the church made a mass exodus into the heart of the nearby nebula, towards an uninhabited planet several light years inside.
At this point you need to understand something of the technology in this universe. The main mode of FTL travel is through jumping from point to point, like in Battlestar Galactica. However, there are more costs than in BSG, such as low jump accuracy and very high energy costs. Most ships just use starlanes where gigantic stations will jump you from point to point until you make it to the next planetary system and use conventional methods of propulsion (I got all of these ideas recently while writing The Lost Colony). However, this only works in (relatively) open space–it’s dangerous to jump into the heart of a nebula because you materialize in the middle of (relatively) dense gas and matter. Basically, all of that matter is going to end up under your skin, which will kill you and destroy your ship. Instead, while inside of a nebula people use a variant on the Bussard ramjet to get around–a giant scoop that uses the ship’s forward momentum to gather and compress the gas and plasma into a fusion reaction that accelerates the ship forward.
The advantage to this method of travel is that it’s cheaper, so that the poorer classes (where the church gains most of its converts) can afford this more than the fusion generator. Also, by fleeing into a nebula, the church effectively isolates itself from those who would persecute and destroy them (like the Mormons fleeing to Utah). One of the disadvantages, however, is that it takes years and years to make the journey, meaning that if this propulsion device hits near-light speeds (.999c), you have all the problems with time dilation, etc.
So, basically the main character of this story (the boy taken in by the good captain) finds out that the good captain is a member of this church, and that the rest of his family (his wife and other children) have taken off on one of these ramjet ships to emigrate to the planet that the church is colonizing. The problem? The main exodus only left twenty years ago, which means that they haven’t actually arrived at the planet yet. The planet hasn’t actually been colonized yet–which means that if anything goes wrong with the first landing and the colony dies, this guy’s wife and kids are going to die with them. The only reason he hasn’t gone is because he’s trying to raise enough money to bring the rest of the family out.
This puzzles the boy, who doesn’t understand how this family can be so kind to him, or how they can have so much faith in this church. He gradually comes to realize how the other captain was abusing him, and becomes really angry and disillusioned. What’s more, he hates his parents–he thinks that his mother sold him into slavery, and that his father was just some kind of irresponsible jerk that abandoned his mother after spending a few nights with her.
Well, things happen in the planetary system (I haven’t figured all that out yet–wars, turmoil, economic hardships, etc), and they all end up getting captured by the space pirate who is the boy’s father. The boy finds out about his mother and father, a bunch of stuff happens that I haven’t figured out yet, and he gradually comes to cope with his wounded feelings and grow from the experience.
I haven’t figured out the ending (I have yet to write the ending for The Lost Colony!) but I think it ends with the boy joining the religious movement and going to the planet with the good captain, and somehow developing a relationship with his daughter. The big thing is that he makes peace with his father.
And now I have class, so this is going to be all for now. But I’m really excited about this one! I’m hoping I can figure it out, write an outline, and start it before too long. More on that as it comes.
