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The data received from the messenger finally pushed the Mawa-rei into a new age, all the efforts of a people combined in making the technological advances required to study their enigmatic sister planet.

The once slow and recalcitrant civilization lurched into a different gear, every city played its part, in a matter of years slow and inefficient manufacture, was all but replaced by state of the art machinery, computing technology was endlessly advanced, huge simple machines were quickly superceded by faster smaller and more powerful ones, in a few decades technologies that took twice as long to develop on Earth were fully fledged, a constant stream of probes, orbiters and surveyors were sent off to the verdant planet.

Eventually it was possible to send people of their planet to this distant one, the risks were high, and the possibility of their return practically null, but the payoffs would be immense.

Just over thirty years since their first probe, the messenger, they sent a manned vehicle called the ascendant, it contained some of the finest minds of the time, their slow journey to the new lush land would be final, they would not return. The huge vehicle was the summation of a project greater even than the creation of the messenger.

The space vessel was constructed from many parts, all of which had to be combined in orbit, dozens of launches were required just to take up the materials required for its construction, countless more to provide the infrastructure required for such a project. After many years the vehicle was towed out to the furthest orbiting space station, from this point a complicated parabolic fall towards the home planet, and a slingshot from it would put it on the transfer orbit towards its destination.

The nozzles on the chemical thrusters glowed white hot, the almost cathedral like craft fell long the precise curves calculated for it, computers on board calculated orbits to within fractions of a millisecond of arc. Spears of white light lanced out of the drive units, hundreds of tones of propellant thrown out into the void of space, the acceleration building as the ship started its long journey.

The first burn took only a few seconds gravity would do most of the work in putting it on its transfer orbit, however this would not be enough to make the journey time suitably short, hundreds more tons of fuel would have to be burnt before the destination would reached, and more would have to be used to bring the vehicle into an orbit around the endpoint.

However amongst all of this fuel none was allotted for the return of the crew, they would take their chances down on the surface, their fate was in the hands of their god.

Data from the probes suggested that conditions would be suitable for the Mawa-rei, there was already copious vegetation and animals, and the environment did not appear to be hostile according to standard measurements, in fact it seemed better than their homeworld. A verdant paradise as described in the scriptures, it is hard to conceive that their God would create such a paradise, but make it deadly to those who landed there.

The launch was successful, thousands of tons of spacecraft ploughed across the void, the blue green dot forever ahead of them, the belief of the crew kept them focused and united against the hostile environment only a few centimeters on the other sides of their walls.