About four hundred years ago (-227 AY), the three superpowers of Earth embarked on an ambitious project they called “The Great Journey.” They would send humans into space to colonize Tau Ceti, approximately 11.9 light years away. Unmanned probes had found an Earthlike planet in orbit, and it looked like a prime candidate for colonization.
The CT Pedro Cabral was built at the Rondon orbital yard. She was to transport 1,000,000 colonists to Tau Ceti in freezers, along with clone tanks and a vast technological library. The crew and officers were fairly evenly mixed between the superpowers with a small number of outside scientists, especially Russian mathematicians and physicists.
Thanks to her non-hull-conformal drive, sixty-eight other ships would accompany her on the Great Journey, bringing the total number of colonists to roughly two million. These other ships lacked their own FTL drives, and were manufactured by other nations and corporations. Everyone assumed Tau Ceti would have plenty of room for a population in the low millions (billions after terraforming), and more hands theoretically meant more could be done.
Because no crew members would be awake during the journey, the ship was outfitted with impressive self-repair systems. In hindsight this probably caused more problems than it solved because these same systems kept the ship flying far longer than originally intended.
After launch something odd happened in her stardrive. To this day the specific details are unknown, but that doesn’t stop warp physicists, parapsychologists, and conspiracy theorists from coming up with an endless torrent of bizarre explanations. Instead of making a five year, twelve light year journey from Earth to Tau Ceti, she stayed in warpspace for nearly two centuries at speeds much higher than ever anticipated before the drive finally fused.
The prevailing opinion is that the gravity lens “twisted,” somehow speeding them up as they were knocked off course. When the computer didn’t see Tau Ceti in its immediate vicinity, or any other known galactic features after five years, it decided to press on in search of another habitable world. By this time it was approximately 75,000ly off course and well outside the Milky Way galaxy. Since it was in intergalactic space that search took almost two centuries.
In that time, the FTL drive started to fail, its warp field slowly shrinking and losing capacity. Tens of thousands were lost as ships on the periphery of the field dropped out of warp into intergalactic space. Other ships, closer to the Pedro Cabral, held on longer, and were dropped inside the Triangulum galaxy. In some cases, they had sufficient power and good fortune to reach a habitable or at least non-hostile world before they ran out of power for their freeze tubes. Others weren’t so fortunate and were lost with all hands.
An exact figure of just how long the Pedro Cabral spent on its uncontrolled flight through warpspace is nearly impossible to calculate due to the unknown forces at work during that journey; for all anyone knows, they actually went back in time. The consensus of the Alliance’s historians and physicists is to accept the computer clock even though they assume it’s flawed – it’s their only real reference – and just call it 201 years, 7 months and 3 days.
After the drive fused, the Pedro Cabral’s computer roused Captain Ming-Zhi Huang and Lt Commander Jack “Biff” Dickson. They, in turn, instructed the computer to find the least offensive planet in the nearby solar system and get them there. In the six months it took to reach this planet, they thawed out many of the remaining crewmen (mainly science and security personnel) and began preparations for the landing. They also contacted the remainder of the fleet and transferred their crews to the Pedro Cabral before those ships ran out of power.
Unfortunately, some of those ships had inferior power and/or life support systems to the Pedro Cabral, and their freeze tubes had failed decades or even a century or more beforehand. When the boarding parties went aboard, they found thousands dead in their tubes. Those tubes were jettisoned, and the ships cannibalized to keep the others running.
By the time they reached their destination, the Great Journey fleet had been reduced to sixteen functioning ships, none of which were capable of FTL travel.
In AY 71, the Pedro Cabral’s landing site was converted into a museum. It has been open to visitors ever since.
Selected Lunatic Fringe Explanations For The Great Journey’s Navigational Errors
Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Alliance of Independent Worlds has its share of conspiracy theorists. Chalk it up to a defect in the human mind, a side-effect of deliberately assembling a highly-diverse group of colonists, or whatever else you want, but they’re out there spinning their bizarre tales and detaching themselves further from reality every day. As one of the most important events in Alliance history, the Great Journey has attracted these cretins in droves.
Oddly enough, none of these have or require a shred of proof to support them. Of course their proponents point to the lack of evidence as somehow proving them on the grounds that nobody can prove it didn’t happen that way.
Captain Huang sabotaged the drive so he could start his own empire. Great theory except for the fact that all records indicate he was completely ignorant of the exact workings of a warp drive – the science was in its infancy and the Pedro Cabral’s drive by definition an experimental model – and he was also a wet naval officer until his selection for the Great Journey. They believed his experience would be useful once they landed and the Pedro Cabral became an oceangoing vessel. His only experience with spacecraft had been a few familiarization flights before the launch. How a man who knew nothing of how a warp drive worked was supposed to have not only sabotaged it and not destroyed it in the process, but sabotaged it in such a way it would make an intergalactic flight nobody even suspected was theoretically possible, is simply baffling.
The whole thing was deliberate on the part of one of the superpowers (which one was behind it varies from theorist to theorist). This superpower didn’t want a shared part in a colony near Earth, they wanted their own empire. Since this theory assumes the government in question could build a warp drive with previously unheard-of performance, it makes one wonder why there has never been a follow-up ship.
Unknown aliens transported the Pedro Cabral to the Triangulum Galaxy for some unknown reason, using unknown means that left no trace of having existed.
Unknown aliens boarded the Pedro Cabral, examined the passengers and crew, and uploaded digital copies into a vast computer somewhere. The real Pedro Cabral is still in flight and will reach Tau Ceti sometime next year, but everyone and everything you know is actually an incredibly-realistic computer simulation indistinguishable from reality. Because the alien computers run so fast, the centuries of human civilization in the Triangulum Galaxy have only taken a few years to play out.