Departure: 2149
Original projected crossing: approximately 43 years
Actual crossing: approximately 61 years
Arrival in Epsilon Eridani: 2210
Recovery Convoy Seven possessed good propulsion technology for its era, but the ships were extremely heavy.
The Morrow's Wake alone carried thousands of tonnes of machine tools, spare components, structural material, reaction mass equipment, and industrial machinery.
The convoy departed expecting a difficult but manageable forty-three-year crossing.
For the first fourteen years, that expectation seemed justified.
Then the convoy found the Caliban Star.
The Caliban Star had launched three years before Recovery Convoy Seven.
When GRIM encountered it, the ship was still moving toward Epsilon Eridani but had lost most electrical power.
Its crew was dead.
Its propulsion system, however, was intact.
The decision to recover the vessel was obvious.
What followed became the defining catastrophe of Grimwake history.
The Caliban Accident
While maneuvering around the derelict, one of the convoy's tugs detected structural damage around the Caliban Star's propellant system.
The warning came seconds too late.
A containment failure destroyed two recovery craft and showered the Morrow's Wake with debris.
One fragment penetrated a major propulsion-control conduit.
Another damaged part of the drive's magnetic confinement system.
Eleven people died immediately.
The Morrow's Wake survived.
Its primary engine did not.
The convoy possessed the tools to repair almost anything humanity had built.
It did not possess a spare interstellar drive.
For the next nine years, its crews dismantled sections of their own ship attempting to rebuild one.
Entire cargo bays disappeared.
Bulkheads were removed.
Secondary power systems were cannibalized.
One of the habitation drums was partially dismantled.
Two recovery tugs were stripped until only their pressure hulls remained.
The convoy's population began calling the process eating the ship.
The replacement drive eventually worked.
Barely.
The Morrow's Wake resumed acceleration at a fraction of its original performance.
The projected arrival date moved nearly two decades into the future.
The Lean Years
The original ecosystem had been designed for forty-three years.
It now had to survive more than sixty.
It didn't.
A fungal contamination entered several hydroponic systems in 2181.
Crop yields collapsed.
Protein cultures were rationed.
Atmospheric processors accumulated failures faster than replacement components could be manufactured.
The engineering crews responded the only way they knew how.
They salvaged.
Storage lockers became feedstock.
Furniture disappeared into fabrication furnaces.
Unused corridors were depressurized and dismantled.
Personal possessions containing useful metals became subject to compulsory purchase.
Entire compartments vanished from the ship.
A generation grew up watching the vessel physically shrink around them.
Nothing could be wasted.
Nothing could be kept merely because someone liked it.
Everything had mass.
Everything had function.
Everything could eventually become something else.
The Wake Law
Arguments over what could be taken became violent.
People hid machinery.
Departments hoarded components.
Families concealed copper wiring, processor boards, tools, and medical equipment.
Three engineers were killed during what later became known as the Deck Forty Riot.
Afterward, representatives from the surviving work crews created the first version of the Wake Law.
Its central principles were simple.
Human life came before property.
Functional life-support equipment could not be taken without replacement.
Personal survival equipment belonged to its user.
Everything else could be claimed when its owner could no longer demonstrate active use.
The law was brutal because the circumstances were brutal.
But it worked.
The Last Captain
By 2189, the original command structure had almost disappeared.
Captain Bohuslav Moravec attempted to retain centralized authority over the convoy's remaining resources.
The work crews refused.
There was no dramatic mutiny.
Nobody stormed the bridge.
The machinists simply stopped accepting his allocation orders.
Tug crews ignored command assignments.
The fabrication halls refused requisitions.
Without the industrial crews, Moravec's authority existed only on screens.
Representatives from twenty-seven major work sections formed the Union Moot.
Moravec remained nominal captain until his death six years later.
He was the last person to hold that title over the entire convoy.
The Grimwake Salvage Union considers its founding date to be 2190.
The Long Wake
The final decades of the crossing transformed the convoy completely.
Children stopped describing compartments by their original names because many no longer existed.
Deck plans became temporary things.
A workshop might become housing.
Housing might become storage.
Storage might be cut away entirely.
Every generation inherited a different ship.
People learned hundreds of incompatible technical standards because their equipment had been assembled from generations of unrelated machinery.
Improvisation became cultural instinct.
A Grimwake mechanic did not ask what a machine was designed to do.
They asked what it could still be made to do.
When the surviving convoy finally reached Epsilon Eridani in 2210, only the Morrow's Wake, three yardships, and nine of the original recovery vessels remained recognizable.
Several others had literally become parts of them.
Of the 9,200 people who departed Sol, approximately 6,400 were alive when the convoy reached Epsilon.
Most had never seen Earth.
