The Vote
The assembly lasted fourteen hours. Four thousand people in the ship's central atrium, standing and sitting and leaning against the railings of the upper decks, their faces lit by the bioluminescent panels that lined the walls in the pale blue-green that was the only colour the Caracara's children had ever known as natural. Captain Alejandro Vega, seventh of his line to hold the rank, stood on the dais and read the transmission aloud, and the silence that followed was not the silence of shock but of recognition — the sound of a people hearing confirmed what they had, on some level, always feared: that the universe had moved on without them.
The debate that followed was the most honest conversation the ship had held in a generation. The pragmatists argued for docking at Nueva Esperanza and integrating into the colony — four thousand skilled engineers, farmers, doctors, teachers, all trained in the hard school of closed-system survival. The traditionalists argued that the Caracara was not a vessel but a civilisation, and that docking would be not arrival but dissolution, the end of a culture that had evolved its own music, its own cuisine, its own dialect of Spanish that no one on the colony would understand. The young spoke of curiosity. The old spoke of rest. The children, who had no context for the word "planet," watched with wide eyes and said nothing.
Isabela cast her vote