by Anna Gaffey
Santos placed packages of crackers, dried fruit, and chicken-flavored TVP sticks into his hands. Santos in blue light, her face hard and unforgiving. Santos smiling, her dark hair loose and disheveled around her shoulders, her wink, her lips smirking, a hundred hundred different shades of expressions fluttering through his mind. How could a human mind and body handle becoming adrift in time? But then, he wasn’t purely human anymore. His human bits would have to catch up with the serum pieces before he could keep a handle on where and when he was.
“Sorry,” Santos said, pulling her hand away. They were in the Harmon mess, and she wore black, but Jake could still see all her former faces lurking beneath the surface. His present, hers, all of it seemed to be merging with past. And what was now? Hadn’t now become then? What if any now he tried to maintain, any sense of present was rendered irrevocably screwy by their temporal scoot or by the psychedelic clouds of residue? He’d never before spent much time thinking about temporal theory outside of passing fancies, but he could call on the haphazard nonsense plots of pulps and stories and fantastical collections. There was time as a set track, a decided thing despite attempts to change it. If one went back to kill Hermione Luccoco before she could invent cryostasis, one would not succeed, no matter how foolproof the—dry crumbs caught in Jake’s throat, and he coughed—timing.
Alternate or parallel universes, then? An infinite number, one for every choice ever? An interesting idea, but subject to mental overcrowding if one considered every choice ever made. It had held steady popularity with jumps and lulls in stories throughout human history. The different mechanisms of it were less steady. Machines like wheelbarrows, cars, the last seat on a rollercoaster. The crazy guy in the 2100s, what was his name? Who claimed he’d perfected “quantumovoltaic travel” before electrocuting himself in a copper tub of brine. There were pockets of temporal disturbance. Crossed wires. An unassuming door in a little-used alleyway. In one story, a genetically-engineered parsnip. A vegetable. His brain was racing.
How did the Leech see time?
“Eat up, or you’ll be ravenous on the other side.” A fleeting smile on Santos’ lips. “Can’t have you gnawing through your arms in your stasis cube.”
The protein sticks were especially tough but filling, and convincingly meaty. The empty packages disappeared from his hands—no, Santos took them, she was placing them in a wall chute. Reclamation, of course.
Cold chilly corridors again. The cryostasis room was a space near the size of the lab, but without the comfortable disarray of equipment and tables and egos. Lit with soft yellow light, cryo cubicle berths lined the walls. A pod of ten berths rose out of the middle of the room. Santos led him to one side, where four vacant cubicles were propped open.
“We’re already in vault cycle,” Santos said. She’d paused somewhere behind him. “Help me check the air recycling tubes? We’re prepping for full journey.”
They spent the opening cruise elbow-deep in berth tubing, fiddling and cleaning and thrice-checking final simulation sequences, setting the backup alerts that would first wake the pilots in their flight deck berths if the autopilot went haywire.
“Pajamas are inside.” Santos began stripping down. “We’re waiting on two, but Lindy could be a while. We may as well prep ourselves.”
Jake plucked the crap-issue, flimsy yellow pajamas from under the cryo berth pillows. The floor felt like ice through his socks. He put on the shirt, but the pants were a lost cause before he unrolled them; he’d forgotten, briefly, the mecha-leg.
Santos shook her head as he tossed the pants back into the berth.
“What, do you want to try? They’re not going to fit.” He gestured down at his tattered trouser leg. “These’ll be fine.”
“Jake, you were cleaning the bilge.”
“In scrubs, yeah.”
“Sure, foolproof. You want any of those stray molecules floating around cryo with you for a few months? I don’t think so.” She led him to a cramped, closest-sized bay smaller than the lab’s tiny head, shoved him inside, and bathed him in three times the normal wavelength of sterilizing containment.
The berth next to the containment bay was already frosted with condensation, obscuring the person inside. Jake sidled over and peered at the berth’s tag display.
Murakami, Kai.
Birthdate: 04 Mar 2206
Rank: Assistant Head of Science
Selas Station, United Worlds DS 2075-5
There was more, mostly monitoring information, but Jake skipped it and wiped at the cold polymerine until he could see inside the berth. Containment and plastic restraint strips ringed Kai’s wrists, loose enough to allow circulation but unmistakably restrictive. Lindy had spliced more than the usual bombardment of tubes into his arm ports. He looked small and wrinkled, a shriveled no-hoper unlikely to shake off the interminable cryogenic repose.
“Glucose reservoirs are clear for IV feeding,” Santos said over his shoulder. “We need to turn in.”
Jake turned away from the berth, and followed her back along the others, other names and bodies. No Griffin, Connor Reyes, noticeably. But Con was probably still calculating vault feedback.
Carmichael, Tobias.
He ran a hand over the berth. Carmichael looked like a statue, his eyes cracked slightly open in sleep, his frozen lips pursed for a reprimand. Enough screwing around. Jake wished he could see the blue beat of Toby’s heart. The tag showed a steady monitor of all life functions, all within the safe range. He looked away and found that Santos had turned back. She did not flinch from his gaze nor did she look into the berth, but her expression made him desperate to speak, and not about Carmichael.
“Will Kai survive?”
Santos shrugged. “Physically, yes. But we’ll need to watch that, too—when they found him, he was so drained that Lindy decided it was too dangerous to give him the serum. All I can guess is that, in addition to the immuno benefits, it gave us some sort of ability to deal with the—ah—”
“Temporal instabilities?”
“We monitored him first, slowed him down a bit so his heart could keep up with his brain. It was easy to transfer him to cryo. He’s alive. But as long as he’s infected with that thing, we need to keep him restrained.”
“‘That thing’ coming with us to Marathon is a bad idea.”
“What do you want me to do? Shove Kai out the airlock? Never mind, don’t answer that.” She cracked the seal on Jake’s oxygen tanks and watched as he pulled back the berth’s warming sheet, stepped into the soft, cool padding and wriggled until he was reasonably comfortable. She helped him attach the oxygen cannula under his nose.
A thought occurred to him, belatedly. “My new leg might freeze. Crack even.”
“Should’ve asked Lindy.” Santos tsked. “But I doubt it. It’s stellarcore, for crying out loud.” Behind them, the door to cryo whuffed open. Santos straightened, and her eyes narrowed. “Relax, all right? I’ll be right back.”
“I am relaxed. I did it preemptively just for you.” Jake craned his neck to see who it was, but all he heard was a shuffling cadence of feet. Two or three pairs, probably. Moving around the other side of the berth circle, toward the empty one to his right. Santos appeared and knelt to inspect the tubing relays and conduits.
“Already checked ’em,” Jake told her. “You saw me do it…”
He trailed off as Natalia Ticonti, small, dark, and delicate, her eyes downcast, appeared beside Santos. She wore green crap-issue pajama, and clutched a vial of KO, probably one of Lindy’s stronger concoctions. Her brown hair had been trimmed close against her skull. A deep-tissue bruise faded under her chin. She looked up and met Jake’s gaze.
A surge of angry terror suffused him. Jake swallowed and managed to not to cringe.
She licked her lips. “I hoped this would be less awkward.” Her voice was hoarse and rusty.
Santos dusted off her hands. “It’s all right.”
“Sure it is.” Jake struggled to turn away from Nat and fe
lt Rachel’s hand on his shoulder, light and warm through the thin fabric.
“We’re on the same side, Jake.”
Her touch invited him to stream through an endless, coiling perspective of the station, of Nat laughing, Nat in her gypsy costume. Bad tactics on Rachel’s part, trying to predict what would soothe him. But he could feel the thread of her stretching from her fingers against his skin and up into his brain. Rather than cutting the connection, Jake followed it back. He gave her Mick’s hair like an orange explosion, a flashpoint in the void as he and Mei drifted to death. He gave the look on Nat’s face as she descended upon him with the wrench, the long smear of blood on the cargo bay floor, the feel of Mick’s pulse under his fingers even as Mick jammed the frygun underneath his chin, his own sickening fear, his useless grief—
The mental door clapped shut as Rachel Santos broke the connection and rubbed her hand down her trousers. Jake wanted to sink deep into the berth, but he wasn’t sorry. “The same side. If you say so?”
“I do,” she said, firm and calm. But her eyes were stricken. At least she gave him that.
“All right.” Jake shook his head. “We’ll see.”
“I’m tired…” Nat began, but she petered out. She rubbed her temple with slow, confused fingers. Santos guided her into the berth, and adjusted the controls to feed them a deep unbroken sleep.
“Emergency wake trigger is armed. Sleep well, both of you.” She patted Jake’s shoulder again. A muted laugh, Nat’s, echoed in his head.
“Maybe we’ll meet in our dreams,” he said. Nat did not respond.
“In your dreams, maybe,” Santos said with a return of her old archness, and dropped their berths.
Jake closed his eyes. The cryo gas smelled like sickly prunes, nothing like Selas, nothing like it at all. It whirled into him, and he swam into it. He tried to forget that Nat was beside him, just an arm-length away. Before he sank completely down into darkness, he prayed he wouldn’t dream.
But he did, of course. Everyone dreamed in space sleep.
He dreamed he woke from cryo, but when he pushed up on the berth lid, it would not open because he was not really in the berth. He was under the translucent icy floor deep in the heart of Selas, the alien engine, and as he beat his fists against the unyielding cold, a shadow loomed over him. He cried out, and the shadow fragmented into a mist of suffocating grey, into Leech.
Did you think you could run away from us? We are in everything. We are everywhere. We could be waiting for you at your Marathon. Or you may bring us there.
He dreamed he was working through the almost-but-not-quite-his encryption from Marathon on a tablet covered in black velvet, and the greenish mass of code skittered across it and away from him like insects. Then the tablet shivered and chimed, and the insectoid code squirmed into a resolution, into letters.
Come and see
The code broke into pieces and chittered up his hands and into his mouth, and he could feel it scurrying down his throat with its thousands of legs, fitting itself under his skin, lodging between organs and bones and blood cells. He could not open his mouth to let it out. Plague and death and destruction, and all within him. A fleeting outline of a shuttle pod, of light. He pressed for the fragments and found only a hank of broken pathways, and Rebecca writhing in her chair, as quiet and faraway as a painting. She faded, and then glimmered into being beside him. “Bothersome.”
“Why are you still here?” he asked. “Aren’t you part of the Leech? Shouldn’t you have gone wherever they went?”
She looked offended. “Who says I am? Maybe I’m a ghost. Out of time and adrift.”
“I only have enough headspace for one. And I already know you’re hell to live with.”
“Hey, you called me to you, Jake. Now you’re stuck with me.”
He considered that, but it wouldn’t make sense. “Okay. Fine, whatever. But why doesn’t Con know me, and I can remember him?”
“I don’t know.” Rebecca put her chin in her hand and blew out a disappointed breath. “I suspect your chip, somehow. It protected your memory, Lindy says, but I think it also gave them a way in, to feed on you. Make you amenable. But maybe the serum doesn’t stop them from feeding, either. Maybe it just gives you a rotten taste. Like sardines!”
He cuffed her shoulder, and she began to fade out again. “We should study it, Jake. Especially if it’s only fine for now.”
A hand drifted over his forehead. Jake scowled. “Just a few more minutes.”
“You have to wake up soon.” Connor Griffin’s voice. The hand turned heavier. “For briefing.”
“Santos already did that. Although she didn’t want to.”
“My briefing, I mean.”
“Because you don’t know who I am.”
“Right.” Con sounded sad. “It’ll take more than a handshake. Though I appreciate the direct approach.”
“You knew me just fine back when I was an asshole.”
“Back when?”
“Shut up. I’ve got my memories.” Confidence threaded through him, surprising him, a hidden fissure of gold. “So I’m renewed now. Jake the Renewed, Jake the Repentant, Jake the Reformed. The Restored. But I can be an asshole again, if you’d rather. How hard can it be?”
“Somehow,” Con said dryly, “you’ll find a way. I’m sure of it.”
Jake felt an odd pressure against his forehead and then his mouth. The pressure vanished, and he was unreasonably panicked at the loss. “I just want you to remember. I know what it’s like, to not remember. If you don’t—”
“Yes.” Con’s face was so close Jake could count the pores of his skin, the slivers of lines around his eyes. “I know you’ll do what you can.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“…settlements. We’re getting a clean shot with the probes in position and all our analysts are in agreement. These are signs of life, intelligent life. The settlement units are laid out in a rectangular pattern extending over a forty-mile radius along the coast of the southern continent, but we can’t tell yet how far it extends over the planet. We are also unsure whether or not the settlements are actually inhabited.
We are, however, absolutely sure of the transmission. Repeat: we’re sure. The decoded message is in Regulation. Repeat: Regulation. It reads: Welcome, People of Earth. Your salvation is at hand. Degradation makes any further decoding difficult. Request instructions and permission to proceed…”
Excerpt: streaming commtext, priority immediate
01 December 2242
Captain J.L. Fletcher
Rations Freighter (Brooks class) S. Gunaji
United Worlds DS 2155-12
Marathon, Beda System
8 March 759 BCE, EEC
15:30 IST
Jake awoke to flickering blue light. He batted at it, and his knuckles cracked against cool, opaque solidity: the cryo berth lid. He pushed. It didn’t move, and he realized then that it was too heavy to be the berth lid, that his dream of the engine cavern on Selas, of being suspended in the deep icy floor was real. Any moment now, the Leech would creep back to obscure the light with slithering, silvery mist…
He jolted up and bonked his forehead against the hard smooth surface. The movement tugged at his elbow, and he looked down to see a twisted spray of tubing threading from his port. Before he could wonder at that, the berth lid trembled and slid open to reveal the darkened cryo bay, the rows of quiet berths and the unfussy hum of respiration, food processing, and bodily function regulators.
This was reality. He had to believe it.
I know you’ll do what you can.
Jake fought a hysterical laugh. The cool, low-grav air curled into the berth, and he shivered until his nerves settled.
Odd that he had awakened in the dark. Generally someone like Santos was supposed to wake first and monitor what they called “the melt” and what cryogenics called the thawing process. But apart from the blue running lights, the hibernation room was dark, the rest of the berths still sealed and uni
formly fogged with the condensation from slow, frozen breaths. Jake checked his wake-up program. It was still set to the standard spec, but somehow he’d come out of sleep early.
He eased his aching body up and out of his berth. He spent the better part of an hour moving and stretching, trying to coax feeling back into his muscles. His mecha-leg creaked with every motion, but it felt good, strong. Better than his left leg, in fact.
Still no motion from the other berths. For a moment, he imagined they were still because they were empty. Or worse, that they were full but nonfunctioning.
We’ll end up a floating crypt.
He had to walk half the room before he convinced himself; the berths were fine, in fine working order, still huffing and sighing with cold and oxygen and monitoring.
The chill of the ship rendered his pajamas completely useless, but someone—again, probably Santos—had thoughtfully stowed his clothes under his berth in a roll. He pulled on the thermals over the pajama shirt, and warmed his feet in his heavy socks and mismatched boots. It felt obscurely pleasant to flex his fingers, to feel gooseflesh rising all over, to be chilly.
As he unrolled the uniform jacket, something fell out and clattered under his berth. He knelt and, wincing at the bend required by his back, felt around on the glacial floor until he touched something small and ovoid and hard: a blue memory gem. The gem, from Kai, from Con, from young vid-Jake, still half-dark with data. He rolled it around in his palm, and then pocketed it alongside Silverman’s. A pocketful of gems, of confessions and confusion. But he could not discard them. Not yet.
At first, the ship flooring burned cold through his boot soles, but after Jake tramped down a few corridors, the chill faded. He wove around the third deck to the lab and judged the quality of the containment and the instruments, and admired the dark sparkle of the glass vessels. A quick, preemptory poke around the equipment cabinets revealed that all were locked and required a specific security code, not his, to gain access. Vanna. Another control freak. Jake buffed the counter top idly with a sleeve and stalked back out into the corridor. Kai would be so disappointed—and motivated, if he ever woke up.
