GS Marek
Written by Ezra Solano
Overview
The GS Marek was the third of the great Long March generation ships, built from salvaged hull steel at the Ceres yards between 2270 and 2288. She carried three thousand four hundred eleven souls, across five planned generations, toward a star her passengers would rename Hearth before ever reaching it.
Commission and departure
Before departure, the Marek's captain, Ilsa Marek, then seventy-eight, commissioned Andre Freeman directly, in terms the record preserves as a formal charge: "Outlive us. Remember us. Meet our children." The ship departed the Ceres ring on September 19, 2288, at 04:40 yard time, watched by some two hundred thousand people. Ilsa Marek died aboard in 2361, at the age of one hundred fifty-one, at her honorary post on the tiller watch; her own book-entry, transmitted to the witness's archive decades in advance of arrival, is read aloud on the third refrain of every subsequent year's departure liturgy as her standing order.
The reply
Traveling at roughly a tenth of light-speed across some seventy-four light-years, the Marek was overtaken in deep space by the reveal's light in 2417, one hundred twenty-nine years into her passage, carrying word of the witness's public reveal on Iapetus. Her formal reply, thirteen years in transit after that, arrived at Ceres on November 3, 2430: nine words, transmitted and preserved verbatim. "TO THE WITNESS. RECEIVED. MIND OUR NAMES. STEER SMALL." The archive's founding office, the Witness, took its name from that transmission that same day, on the principle, entered into the record, that "a thing is not itself until the people it belongs to have called it by name."
Landfall
The Marek made landfall at Hearth on May 4, 3031, seven hundred forty-three years after departure, under Master Yara Marek, ninth of her line since Ilsa. Andre Freeman met her in person, greeting the ship's descendants by name and carrying, in that greeting, the whole of the ship's dead: eleven thousand two hundred four names and the additions accumulated across the crossing. Hearth's bell, the ninth of its line, was cast the following spring from Dorothy Ann steel and a fragment of the Marek's own hull plate.