Spacer versus Hijacker
In the The Plague Years, I had a story idea:
A story arc might be a hijacked ship going close to where a spacer ship goes. During the long journey, the two crews keep in contact to pass the time. The spacers help the hijackers deal with emergencies. The crew disgorges the popsicles on the planet and decide they have more in common with the other ship. They leave to be with their friends.
In thinking about this some more, I want the two ships starting out as antagonistic to each other - nothing more than the stress of opposing each other during the Plague Years. The crew of the hijacked ship should be about 500, which will be much less than the 10,000 on the spacer ship. And there should be about 20,000 popsicles.
The hijackers will need help.
Also, the crews should start to share entertainment between each other, gossip, etc.
At some point, the hijackers will make a breakthrough and cut 5 years off of the journey. They share this engineering feat with the spacers.
The two crews think that they are going to end up in different systems, but they both end up in the same one. The spacers occupy an asteroid belt and the hijackers land their cargo on a planet. When they wake the sleepers, they discover that while they have changed in their outlook, the sleepers have not.
Also, perhaps the sleepers were not the people the hijackers thought they were. Instead of a democracy, a dictatorship is set up.
The crew decide that they are not going to stay. They ask the spacers to rescue them. The spacers have to decide if it is a trap or not. In any event, they do not want to be in the same system as the dictator. They need to capture the other asteroid ship or destroy it at a minimum.
Or perhaps when they board the ship to destroy it, the crew sides with them?
In any event, the two asteroids take off to the next system.
