From the Parliamentary Record of Albion Space, Educational Broadcast, House of Resources 

[The following is an excerpt from the public educational archives maintained by the House of Resources, originally recorded for Terra-side distribution. Transcript lightly edited for readability.] 

There is a particular kind of ship that defines life in Albion Space. Vast, irregular, scarred by decades of active service, the marcher-ships are easy to take for granted. They have always been there. It is worth remembering that they were not always meant to be. 

Ships Without A Destination 

The marcher-ships were not designed for the asteroid belt. They were designed to leave it. 

When the original planners of the Hector-Sabrina settlements looked outward toward the Copernicus system, they understood that the journey would require something more than a transport vessel. Crossing interstellar distance demands a ship capable of sustaining life across generations, carrying not just people but the biological heritage of Terra: its plants, its animals, its ecosystems. The greenspaces at the heart of every marcher-ship were not an amenity added for crew comfort. They were the point. A living seed bank, a portable fragment of Earth’s biosphere, intended to take root in a new star system. 

The asteroid-breaking weaponry came from the same logic. Any vessel pushing through the outer solar system and beyond would encounter debris, ice, and worse. The same ordnance that can destroy a wayward rock in Hector-Sabrina can clear a path through an unknown system’s hazards. Defense and exploration, in a marcher-ship, were always the same capability. 

And the teleportation drives, capable of jumping up to 7.7 light-seconds in half a second of subjective time, were the mechanism by which the journey would actually be made: not a slow drift across the void, but a series of precise, rapid steps, each one carrying the fleet a little further from home. 

Continue reading “The Marcher-Ships: Guardians of Albion Space “ →