COLONY 3000: THE STORY SO FAR

Several hundred years from now, two great spaceships depart from the vicinity of Earth and leave the solar system. One is named Faith One and the other, Faith Two. They are so named because they represent a great act of faith: the first attempt to found a Christian civilization on another planet. The starships are leaving Earth and the solar system behind, and heading towards an earth-like planet called Giannes, that circles a distant star.

The two starships are not identical. Faith One is a purely robotic ship. It is bigger than Faith Two and will accelerate to a greater speed, approaching that of light at its fastest point. It will arrive at Giannes long before its sister ship. Its cargo consists of a huge array of plant life and animal life, and many highly sophisticated robots. When the starship reaches Giannes, its robots will manage the landing of the cargo on the surface of the planet. Hundreds of ferry craft will leave the mother ship and descend to the surface, crammed with plant and animal life, building materials and the all-important robots. Following the plans made long before, on Earth, the robots will create enclosed bases and in those safe environments they will begin to create Earth-like conditions, towns and farms. Then they will begin the more ambitious task of terraforming the planet; of making the whole planet sufficiently like Earth to sustain human life.

Faith Two carries ten thousand human beings, and these are the dedicated Christians of all ages who will settle on Giannes and found a Christian civilization there. Faith Two is not designed to travel as fast as Faith One, although its speed will nevertheless be immense. It will arrive several hundred years after the first ship, its human cargo having slept in artificial hibernation throughout the journey. Robots watch over the ship until it reaches the target planet, and the plan calls for them to manage much of the landing. Once down on the surface, the settlers will occupy the bases that have already been created by the robots of Faith One.

Our story begins just before the settlers aboard Faith Two are awakened from their long sleep. Small robots called Amicus (or Friend) robots come out of storage and go to their assigned settlers, one robot to each settler. Their task is to help that person to readjust and move around in the starship. The engines have been shut down and everything is weightless.

One robot deviates from its plan. It travels through a maintenance tunnel to the main control room, where it encounters a security robot. The security robot challenges its presence in the control room, and the amicus robot uses a disintegrator weapon to vaporize the security robot. It reports that the security robot has malfunctioned. It then removes a unit from a control panel and replaces it with another. This accomplished, it travels back through the tunnel and goes back on station.

The settlers awake and, guided by their little amicus robots, the majority of them meet in the Star Dome, a huge area at the front of the ship where Giannes is now plainly visible. The cre members go to their various duties.

Two radio operators have the task of monitoring the signals coming up from Giannes. These are messages from the surface confirming that the bases are in good shape and ready to receive the settlers. One operator is a little concerned about the messages, and decides to investigate it a little.

October 24th, 2014: An intruder is in the doorway, listening to the conversation between the two men. Sensing something behind them, the radio operators turn round to see the intruder pointing a disintegrator at them.

November 14th, 2014: The radio operators have been killed. No-one knows about this. The commander tells the settlers, who are assembled in the Star Dome, that the robots from Faith One should have prepared farms and villages for them on the surface of the planet.

January 9th, 2015: A message is heard throughout the starship. It is the "safe to land" signal that they have all been waiting for. It is relayed automatically from the radio room. No-one knows that the operators are dead. The settlers all go to their landing craft, for a rehearsal of the trip down to the surface of Giannes. Joseph Cafasso is in Lander Six, with the rest of his family. The commander of number six is called Captain Raven. Captain Raven is as amazed and alarmed as everyone else when Lander Six suddenly begins moving away from the starship without anyone having given it any commands! It seems to be under some outside control. All communications to the outside have gone dead, and then the main engines of Lander Six begin to fire, driving it right away from the starship.

February 13th, 2015: Lander Six is unable to regain any communication with anyone or anything outside the lander. It is not under the control of its pilot, Richard Raven. Nevertheless, the lander is under the control of something, because it begins to follow the planned landing sequence. It approaches Giannes and enters its atmosphere. Then, when the lander is not far above the surface, an emergency program is triggered. All of the individual pods on the lander are sealed shut and then ejected. Each person falls towards the surface of Giannes in his or her own survival pod, cut off from everyone else.

March 20th, 2015: The parchutes on Joseph's survival pod open and slow his descent. He lands amid a strange kind of forest. He is still unable to communicate with anyone else. He initiates the emergency program in the pod. This sets a radio rescue beacon working, and it also activates a humanoid robot that is stored in a compartment below Joseph's seat. The robot, P-75, goes out onto the surface of Giannes and reports back to Joseph. As night draws on, sensors in the robot and in the pod show that some kind of animal life is stirring nearby. This suggests danger, and under mission rules, the robot has to go back into the pod and seal the entrance tight. After he does this, the creatures that have been detected seem to be coming nearer.

June 5th, 2015: Joseph is frightened during the night, when creatures approach the pod and bang on its outside surface. However, they cannot harm the pod and they leave before daylight comes. The following day, P-75 goes out first and he picks up a message from Richard Raven and the crew of Lander Six. The control deck of the Lander is being transformed into a base on the surface, and the crew is attempting to contact the scattered pods. However, communication is only one way. No replies from the pods are reaching the base. Joseph leaves the pod and sets out to explore a little while P-75 transforms the pod into a land vehicle. The transformation is completed at nightfall — which is just as well, because the creatures are reappearing. Joseph is glad to get aboard the vehicle.

July 24th, 2015: The creatures gather around Joseph and P-75, but when Joseph begins to drive, they lose interest and wander away. Joseph follows the navigation beacon that is being transmitted from Lander Six Base, and heads deep into the alien forest. The crew at the base work hard on the communication problem. Things are complicated when a storm blows up and a strange kind of "snow" begins to fall. It makes it more difficult still for Joseph to make progress toward the base. Throughout all this time Benedict Carson, the radio operator, works to solve the breakdown in communications, and at last he succeeds. Two-way communications are restored to all of the scattered settlers.

August 21st, 2015: Benedict Carson, exhausted, collapses with tiredness and robots help him top bed. Meantime, messages begin to flood in from all of the scattered settlers. Now that full communications have been restored, it becomes possible to find out where each of the settlers is, and how far he or she is from Lander Six Base. Captain Raven and Peter Thorn wake from their sleep to find that the robots are sending automatic responses to the incoming messages. Richard Raven makes personal contact with the nearest settler. This is Presbyter Daniel Dolan, who is the chaplain for Lander Six. Daniel reports that he is driving his vehicle through the edge of the forest onto the open plain where Lander Six Base is situated. He is having problems, though. He is being hindered by the strange "snow," and also by creatures similar to the ones that Joseph encountered.

December, 2015: After Benedict Carson's success in restoring communications, all of the settlers are able to make contact and (with the help of their robots) travel to Lander Six Base. However, most of them encounter interference from the creatures. Joseph Callixto is the last in, and he comes under such severe attack that he has to be rescued by a party sent out from the base. His robot, P-75, is damaged during the attack.
   Then, bad news comes in. Benedict Carson is able to make contact with other groups of settlers. They have experienced the same troubles as those of Lander Six. They, too, are holed up in temporary bases. But, they are in even worse shape. They are coming under attack from hordes of hte creatures. Richard Raven decides to protect Lander Six Base before any attack happens there. He sends out every robot, armed with disintegrators that are set to "stun" (rather than "kill"). He sets them in a great defensive circle around the base. He does this just in time, for shortly after, masses of the creatures appear, and close in on the base. They attack the defending robots.

February, 2016: The defending robots come under sustained attack, but they hold there own. Then, there are two developments. One is that they creatures seem to be increasinly under definite, organized direction. The other is that a robot sustains damage from the creatures that can only have been cuased by a disintegrator-type weapon. Sure enough, the robots capture a creature who is carrying just such a weapon. Captain Raven and his crew discover that this particular creature has some kind of an antenna fixed to its head. Benedict Carson is able to detach it and is stunned to find that it has Earth-type connectors.

May, 2016: They let the creature go when it recovers, but they discover that the antenna is receiving signals from some source in the nearby forest. Richard and Benedict set out with some robots to investigate the source. They take Joseph by accident: he was sleeping in the vehicle that they use. They find the source and, beside it, a deserted flying machine. They enter the machine and it flies away with them, and P-75, helpless inside it. It takes them to one of the permanent bases that was built by the robots of the starship Faith One. However, it is under the control of a hostile source, and Richard, Benedict and Joseph are taken as prisoners to join many other settlers who have also been taken prisoner.