Vasily
Kind: Hollowship — a former comet, its interior scooped out and pressurised into a habitable vessel. Origin: Built “at the empire forge in Aerth space.” Operator: Galactic Human Empire. Fate: Destroyed in the orbit of Orb Ertia’s TZ star by a high-velocity TZ-exit artifact. See Vasily Incident.
Summary
A standard late-empire long-haul passenger hollowship. Crew ~120,000, “most in longsleep,” with only a hundred or so awake at any time to tend the ship’s systems. In transit from one orb to another when it entered the Ertia system to slingshot off the Thorne–Żytkow star on the way to its real destination — the routine TZ-slingshot manoeuvre that saves a hollowship “hundreds of years in journey duration.”
The interior visible after the disaster includes a cavern of longsleep chambers (hundreds, thousands of them, each with a clearly-visible sleeper) arrayed up an imperfect sphere’s walls under a seventy-foot laser-calligraphed epitaph beginning “Onto the stars with virtuous sleep we’ll pour…”; a resuscitation centre with fielded oxygen bubbles; labs and observatories and kitchens and libraries; and a bridge where a woman in the command chair died calmly with her palms on the armrests. Crew manifest on the bridge’s dust-image shows every occupant as “inactive” except one life signature — Ivan Tellinger in Lab 9 Phi, mid-deck.
The ship uses field-emitter “airlocks” — particle-net atmosphere containment with no solid door — and ordinary air inside. It has Willtech systems; a boarder with no onboard training can propel themselves through its corridors by thinking their intent.
Appearances
- Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: Destroyed at the start of the chapter; boarded in the middle of it.
Related
- Hollowship — the vessel class.
- Vasily Incident — what happened to it.
- Ivan Tellinger — its sole “survivor.”
- Orb Ertia, TZ Star, The Dictionary
Open questions
- Where was it actually headed? The surgeon never learns the destination.
- Did any of the ~100 awake crew survive? The manifest shows only Tellinger alive.
- Did the empire know the Vasily was the decoy-ship for the TZ-exit experiment in advance, or was it a hollowship of opportunity?