by Joe Vasicek
“Who said anything about war?” Isaac asked. “Perhaps this can be resolved peacefully. Surely the Gaians must be tired of fighting.”
“If you think they’re bringing out their armies and navies to make peace, you’re fooling yourself,” said Mathusael. “Our traditions, our way of life—it’s all anathema to them. Once they’ve conquered us, they’ll annex us to their empire and make the Outworlds no different than the Coreward Stars. Are you ready to spend your whole life living under a planetary dome? To have your fathers’ starship taken from you and turned into scrap metal? Right now, we take most of our freedoms for granted, but that won’t last much longer.”
“Oh, come on,” said Isaac. “They can’t be that bad. And besides, who could possibly tame the Outworlds?”
Mathusael drained his glass and set it down forcefully on the tray. “You’re right, of course. No one can tame the Outworlds. But the Gaians can push us off of every arable world and out of every habitable system. When there’s nothing left but ice and empty stars, where are we supposed to go? Further out into the vastness, until we’ve stretched ourselves into irrelevance?”
Stretched ourselves like the people of Nova Alnilam, Isaac thought, memories of dried skin and brittle bones coming readily to his mind. We can’t keep venturing into the void forever. Not without each other.
“How do you know all this?” he asked. “Who made you an expert about the empire?”
“Myself, of course,” said Mathusael. “When I left Delta Oriana, I headed straight for the Coreward Stars. Spent five standard years out there, learning things that most outworlders never even hear about. For example, did you know that the Temple of a Thousand Suns no longer houses the archives of Holy Earth? It’s true—the ancient data disks stopped working hundreds of years ago.”
“What does any of that have to do with us?”
“Absolutely nothing. But I’ll tell you this: Most of us outworlders don’t have the faintest idea what the Gaians are truly up to. It’s like a gamma ray burst just went off on the other side of the galaxy—all of us are dead, but none of us knows it yet. Those Alphans probably think that the Gaians see their system as another trophy, to rule in name only. Well, they’re in for a violent awakening.”
Aaron glanced over at Isaac, his eyes wide. “We need to go back,” he said. “Warn Mom and Dad to get out before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” said Mathusael. “By now, the Gaians no doubt have Alpha Oriana firmly within their grasp. Go there, and you’ll never come back to the Outworlds again.”
Goosebumps pricked up across Isaac’s arms in spite of his skepticism. The passion was so thick in Mathusael’s voice that it was getting harder and harder not to believe him.
“How did you get back here?” he asked.
“Oh, I left the Coreward Stars long before the wars were finished. The frontiers of the empire weren’t patrolled nearly as much as they are today. Slipped out with a band of smugglers and ended up here at Esperanzia. But I got lucky. I could never do it again now.”
He’s exaggerating, Isaac decided. There’s no way things could be that bad. The line between the Outworlds and the Coreward Stars had always been fuzzy. Trade ties were the force that kept them in orbit. Without it, they might as well be as isolated as Nova Alnilam. There was no way the empire would cut themselves off like that.
Though, come to think of it, he and Aaron had spent the better part of the last eighteen months wandering the Far Outworlds. A lot could have changed in that time.
“Listen,” he said. “Let’s not get too upset over this. We actually came to see you for a reason.”
“Oh?” said Mathusael, raising an eyebrow. “Not just to enjoy my company?”
“Well, that too, of course. But there’s something we were hoping you could help us with—something we’d rather keep a secret.”
“And what might that be?”
Isaac took a sip of his drink while his brother finished his. “Do you know anything about the Nova Alnilam system? It’s one of the stars on the edge of the Far Outworlds. The catalogue says it was colonized a few generations ago, but they haven’t really been in contact with anyone else for some time.”
“I’m familiar with it,” said Mathusael. “Haven’t talked with anyone who’s been there, but I know where it sits on a starmap.”
“Well, we just got back from there, and the place is dead. Absolutely dead. We jumped in to radio silence, found the station lifeless and derelict. We docked and boarded, and found nothing but dead old bones.”
Mathusael whistled. “That’s tough, man. No wonder you guys look like you’ve both seen ghosts.”
“Yeah, but that isn’t half of it,” said Aaron, interjecting with the enthusiasm of someone who’s had a little too much to drink. “We found a girl there, the most beautiful girl you’ll ever see!”
“A girl? You mean, her bones?”
“No,” said Isaac. “She was frozen in cryo. We’re not sure if she’s alive or not, but—”
“Can you thaw her?” asked Aaron. He took Mathusael by the arm and stared straight at him. “Can you wake her up so we can find out who she is?”
Isaac leaned forward to pry them apart, but Mathusael brushed off Aaron’s grip before he could intervene. “I’ll do my best,” he reassured them. “I can’t promise anything, of course, but if you’ll let me take a look at her, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Right,” said Isaac, resisting the urge to elbow his brother in the side. “Of course, we’d rather keep things a bit hush-hush, not let anyone else know.”
Mathusael laughed. “What, you think that the station authorities are going to treat her like contraband?”
“We just don’t want any trouble.”
“Of course, of course,” he said absent-mindedly. “Not that these asteroid miners are likely to give you any trouble. Most of them are just lost little boys pretending to be men.”
“Kinda like me, huh?” said Aaron, looking intently at Isaac with a tipsy smile. “Isn’t that right, Isaac? Isn’t that what you think of me?”
Definitely the leash next time, Isaac thought as he glared right back.
* * * * *
Fortunately, Aaron didn’t make too much of a scene on the way back to the Medea. Even if he had, they passed enough drunks that it hardly would have mattered much anyway. According to Mathusael, two major asteroid hauling missions had just come in, so the station was a bit rowdier than usual. All of that was on the upper decks, though. Down in the offloading bays for interstellar starships, things were fairly quiet.
“So I went into that room,” Aaron told Mathusael, swaying a little as he walked. “And that’s when I saw her. The most gorgeous girl I think I’ve ever—”
“That’s enough,” said Isaac. He palmed open the door to the offloading bay and ushered them in.
The bay was fairly spacious, with a large magnetic claw hanging from the ceiling and an opening about four square meters in the floor for the loading platform. Since they were docked, the platform was raised, with a control panel in the far right corner surrounded by a protective railing. They’d unloaded most of their cargo already, which stood against the walls in large blue crates. A series of caged lights along the ceiling provided illumination.
“So anyway,” said Aaron, steadying himself on the railing as they stepped down onto the loading platform. “I walked into this room, see, and I found this cryotank with the girl in it. Thought she was a ghost at first—freaked me the hell out. Isaac came running, of course, and he was just as shocked as I was.”
“Well, not quite,” said Isaac as he activated the lift. The platform groaned as it began to descend through the freight airlock back into the cargo hold of the Medea.
“Oh, don’t you try to deny it. He was all ‘we shouldn’t take her, we shouldn’t get involved,’ and I was all ‘what, you want to let the slavers get to her?’”
“Too many slavers in these parts,” Mathusael muttered. He sigh
ed and shook his head, while above them, the bay doors for the station slowly slid shut. “I wish I could say Esperanzia was free of them, but the system is too lawless.”
“Well, we aren’t selling her,” said Isaac. I’ll be damned before I sell a lost girl like that as a slave.
Mathusael nodded in approval. “Good. I’m glad you boys still have some moral sense about you. Far too many starfarers lose sight of what’s right and wrong when they’re out alone in the dark of space.”
“Yeah, well, if Isaac ever tries something, he’ll know that I can see him, and if I ever try something, I’ll know that he’ll kick me off the ship.”
That isn’t true, Isaac wanted to say. I’d never kick you off. Since Aaron was still a bit tipsy, though, there wasn’t any sense in arguing. Besides, he didn’t want to start another argument around Mathusael.
The groan of the machinery dropped in pitch, and the platform gradually came to a stop in the center of the Medea’s hold. When the lift was fully retracted, Isaac powered down the controls and stepped around the rails onto the crisscrossed metal grating of the floor. Aaron stepped down next, almost losing his balance but recovering quickly. Mathusael followed close behind them.
“Here she is,” said Isaac, leading him to a small alcove in the corner with an ad-hoc partition blocking it from view. He pulled back an EVA tarp made of reflective foil that they’d used to shield her from cosmic rays and let Mathusael take a closer look.
“Interesting,” Mathusael muttered, stroking his chin as he peered in at the girl. Isaac did as well, just to make sure that nothing had changed about her. They didn’t have access to the cargo hold mid-voyage unless they went outside the ship in EVA suits. She looked exactly as she had on the derelict station, except that the lights in the hold gave them an even clearer view of her. The henna tattoos accentuated the curvature of her hips, drawing Isaac’s gaze to the cleft between her legs. He bit his lip and tried not to blush.
“Stars, she’s practically a goddess,” said Aaron. “And those tattoos—what do you think they mean?”
“I don’t have a clue,” Mathusael said absentmindedly as he crouched to examine the cryotank. He ran his hand over it, fingering the crude rivets and weld joints. “Is there a control panel here somewhere?”
“Not that we could find,” said Isaac. “What do you think?”
“It looks pretty crude, like something hacked together from spare parts. Still, it seems functional enough. From what I can tell, the girl is frozen in perfect stasis.”
“How can you tell?” Aaron asked.
Mathusael rose up and pointed at the glass. “The uniform color of her skin, mostly. If the tank had failed, she’d be breaking out in splotches as parts of her body warmed up more than others. Also, the inside of the glass hasn’t fogged up or anything—that’s usually the first indication of a crack somewhere.”
Isaac peered through the glass at the girl. She looked so peaceful, with her eyes closed and her hair flowing smoothly around her shoulders. Even though she was naked, she didn’t seem uncomfortable or self-conscious about it at all. In fact, she seemed to radiate an air of confidence that defied the fact that she was powerless and exposed. He’d missed that subtle nuance at Alnilam Station.
“Well, that’s interesting,” said Mathusael.
Isaac blinked. “What?”
“This down here. See the grooves around the front of the tank?”
Isaac and Aaron both peered where Mathusael was pointing. At the front part of the tank, near the girl’s head, a circular channel was inlaid just around the lip, like a groove for a lid. Circular holes about two fingers wide were spaced at periodic intervals just on the inside of the channel. Aaron poked at one, but he couldn’t get in any further than his first finger joint.
“Yeah,” he said. “What about ‘em?”
“Those grooves are for transferring the subject to a mass thawing unit without altering the environment within the tank. I can’t tell for sure, but it looks to be built to standard Gaian specifications.”
“What are you talking about? We found her in the Far Outworlds.”
“I know,” said Mathusael. “And obviously, the tank itself wasn’t made by the Imperials; otherwise the quality of the engineering would be much better. But those grooves … I’d bet just about anything that they’re Gaian.”
“So what does this mean?” Isaac asked.
Mathusael stroked his chin. “Well, it means a couple of things. The people who froze her probably had access to the knowledge for building this sort of machinery, but lacked the tools or resources to build a fully functioning cryotank. Instead, they took what they knew about Gaian Imperial design and built a tank that would be compatible, figuring that whoever found her would have better access to the thawing equipment than them.”
“Access to what?” asked Aaron. “Can’t we just thaw her ourselves?”
“The way this cryotank is designed, probably not. This is just a holding tank, to keep her in stasis until another machine can thaw her.”
So they did plan for someone to discover her, Isaac thought to himself. They did everything they could for her to be safely rescued and revived.
“What sort of machine do we need for that?” he asked.
“A mass cryothaw device. You can find them on most Imperial military transports, as well as some of the larger civilian craft. Having a separate machine for freezing and thawing makes it more efficient to handle, say, a thousand people at a go. Here in the Outworlds, we don’t typically do that since it’s only ever a handful of people going into cryo, but back in the Coreward Stars, they have much larger populations to manage.”
“How did they freeze her, then? Do you think they had a cryothaw device on the station?”
“I doubt it. Freezing is easy—thawing is the hard part. My guess is that they put all their energy into building a device that would freeze the girl and put her into stasis, and leave the thawing to someone else.”
“So how do we thaw her?” said Aaron. “Where do we have to go?”
“That’s just the thing,” said Mathusael, folding his arms. “These machines are too complex for any of us to build. You’ll have to find someone who has one, probably in the Coreward Stars—that, or find a Gaian battle cruiser with a friendly captain. Good luck with that.”
Aaron’s face fell, and Isaac scrunched his eyebrows in thought. “Are you sure? We found her in the Far Outworlds—surely they wouldn’t have built something that would require us to take her more than a few parsecs.”
“They didn’t have much of a choice. You can’t transfer a person in stasis without a very specific machine that no one in the Outworlds has.”
“No one?” said Aaron. “Come on. I don’t believe that.”
“The New Pleiades,” said Isaac, his heart skipping a beat. “Weren’t they originally settled by huge Gaian colony ships? I heard that some of them carried more than a thousand people, most of them frozen in cryo until the first group could establish enough of a foothold.”
Mathusael shrugged. “Maybe. It’s been a few generations, but you might still find some of the equipment from those old colony missions. If you do, chances are good that it’ll still be in working condition. The Gaians generally build that stuff to last.”
“We’ve got to do it, then,” said Aaron, practically radiating with excitement. “If any of those machines still exist, we’ve got to find one and use it to thaw her.”
“If we can, that is,” said Isaac. “If we can’t, well, maybe we can find someone who—”
“No way,” said his brother, his face suddenly grave. “We’re the ones who found her, and we’ve got to be the ones who rescue her. Do you know anybody at the New Pleiades you’d trust with this girl? Yeah, neither do I.”
Isaac frowned. If it turns out we can’t help her, there’s no sense holding onto her, he thought about saying. The intensity of Aaron’s expression told him that would only bait him into another fight, though, and he didn’t wa
nt one of those—not while they were in port.
“I think it’s a good idea to take her to the New Pleiades,” said Mathusael. “They’ll be able to help you out a lot more than I will.”
“So there isn’t a mass cryothaw device anywhere in Esperanzia?”
“I’m afraid not. The New Pleiades are probably your best shot.”
“Then let’s go,” said Aaron, perking up again. “What are we waiting for?”
I just know we’re going to get a couple light-years out of Esperanzia and you’ll be wishing we were back.
“First things first,” said Isaac. “We’ve got to sell our cargo and pick up a new load. Do you have any idea what sorts of goods the Pleiadians deal in?”
Mathusael shrugged. “Beats me—I’ve never been there. But there’s plenty of other starfarers in the station cantina who have. Strike up a conversation, buy someone a drink, and I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
“Yeah!” said Aaron. “You finish up with the ship, and I’ll go hang out in the cantina and see what I can find.”
“Don’t worry,” said Mathusael. “I’ll go with him.” He gave Isaac a disarming wink.
“Well, okay,” he said, still a little uneasy. Giving Aaron a little time to decompress probably wasn’t a bad idea—it would be good to give him some space. Once they left port again, it would be just the two of them and the Medea.
Without Mathusael there to make sure he didn’t get into trouble, though, the answer would almost certainly have been ‘no.’
Promises Unforgotten
The station was full of death. Isaac could smell it, even though he breathed from the oxygen tank in his EVA suit. The glass faceplate wasn’t enough to shield him from the vileness of the stench, and the headlight on his helmet wasn’t bright enough to pierce the awful darkness. He coughed, but the sound was muffled, traveling no further than his suit.
