Jack of Harts

Before Contact, we rarely traveled more than a year away from home.  It took large stores in food and spare parts to keep a ship flying that long.  Magellan Seven’s forty-year mission to The Wall was the greatest undertaking ever made by the greatest alliance of nations in all the worlds.  It limped home on one engine, with half of the particle shielding shredded after flying too close to The Wall.  That was the state of our technology when the Peloran came.