by M. D. Cooper
A freighter, drifting insystem. Had it tried to break past the Transcend blockade? Did Isyra attack it, but not chase into New Canaan’s heliosphere? Was it damaged elsewhere and drifted across space? The possibilities were nearly endless.
Before she could respond, Sanderson continued.
Sanderson chuckled.
SAANVI
STELLAR DATE: 05.15.8937 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Stellar Pinnace
REGION: Carthage, 3rd Planet in the New Canaan System
The Andromeda lay beyond the orbit of Carthage’s two moons.
Tanis took a moment to admire the ship as her pinnace approached. Next to the Intrepid, the Andromeda was still her favorite vessel. Like her mothership, the cruiser’s lines were sleek and powerful, like a hunting cat—a carnivore that was purpose-built to seek out and destroy.
The main bay doors slid open, and within Tanis saw the wreckage of the freighter. The recovery teams had found two dead adults inside, along with one child in a stasis pod. They had not taken the child out of stasis, but they had removed the pod from the ship.
The fleet’s scientists were fascinated with the freighter. From what they could tell, it had suffered a failure of its gravitational systems while in the dark layer and had subsequently twisted when it had unceremoniously dumped back into regular space.
Few of the vessels in the Intrepid Space Force had ever entered the dark layer—other than the Intrepid itself—and none had experienced any sort of failure. The data they were gathering from the ship would prove invaluable in understanding the types of dangers they faced with FTL travel.
How long the freighter had been adrift was not yet known. Its computer systems had all been damaged, and their configuration was very foreign—nothing like Sabrina’s or any other ship they had encountered in this time.
Given the size of the Transcend, no one was surprised by this; a diversity of technology was expected. Tanis hoped that the child would have more details once she was brought out of stasis, though there would be some difficult conversations to be had first.
The pinnace passed through the Andromeda’s new grav shield and into its bay to rest beside the wrecked freighter.
Tanis rose from her seat and walked down the pinnace’s ramp to the cruiser’s deck where an honor guard of Marines waited for her, snapping off sharp salutes.
“At ease soldiers,” Tanis said after returning the salute.
“General,” Commander Usef said as he walked by her side toward the wreckage.
Usef continued, unaware of Tanis’s chat with Angela about her title, “The techs have determined that it was a grav drive failure that caused this ship to lose its hold on the dark layer and transition back to regular space. It’s what caused the twist here—you can see that the ship did not come out all at once, and the gravitational sheering force…well, it looks pretty awful.”
“It looks…almost organic,” Tanis said as she stopped to examine how the ship and stretched and twisted along its midsection. Parts of the hull had grown so thin they were transparent. She found it amazing that the plas had held at all.
“What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a rend in the rear of the ship, almost a gash of sorts. “That’s not in the reports.”
Usef shook his head. “It’s really baffled the techs. At first, they thought it was from a dark matter impact, but that doesn’t line up with what we know of it. Then they considered that it was from regular matter trapped within the dark layer, but the impact…it’s not linear.”
The commander led her to the back of the ship, where a group of ISF techs was examining another gash in the ship.
She sucked in an involuntary breath. “That looks like a claw mark,” she said.
“Yeah,” Usef chuckled. “Freaky, isn’t it? That’s why they don’t think it’s an impact. It’s too regular, and it starts shallow, gets deeper, and then goes shallow again.”
Tanis thought about the creatures living in the dark layer that Sera had spoken of back on Sabrina. She had not shared that information with anyone other than Andrews, Bob, and Earnest. Back when they were about to take the Intrepid into the dark layer for the first time it had seemed prudent to keep knowledge of giant, ship-eating dark layer monsters quiet.
She wondered if this freighter had fallen prey to one such beast—or whatever they were.
Tanis sighed in her mind,
“Where’s the girl?” she asked Usef.
“This way,” he replied and guided her from the wreckage and into a corridor that led toward the ship’s hospital.
“They think it’s safe to have her in there?” If this girl carried unknown pathogens, or was a trojan horse of some sort, she could sabotage, or contaminate the ship’s hospital.
“There’s no patients in med right now, so it’s the best place we have. If someone does scrape a knuckle, we can treat them in the field hospital in cargo one,” Usef said.
Tanis nodded. It seemed logical—something she could always expect from Corsia. She was glad that she had promoted her to captain of the Andromeda. An AI captain was against the regulations of the old Terran Space Force, but Tanis decided that restricting herself to the structure of a military that had ceased to exist millennia ago was foolish. Corsia was qualified and had proven herself.
Making her captain had been only logical.
Tanis replied.
The Andromeda’s hospital was unchanged from the last time Tanis had visited it to check on wounded fighter pilots after
the battle at Bollam’s World. Down a short hall, in the biohazard containment room, lay a solitary stasis pod.
Its construction looked nothing like the pods on the Intrepid, and even a visual inspection showed it to be less advanced. At least it wasn’t a cryo-stasis pod. If that had been the case, its inhabitant would not have survived the ship’s destruction or the prolonged exposure to interstellar cosmic radiation.
“The man onboard was probably her father, wasn’t he?” Tanis asked aloud, a long sigh escaping her lips.
Even though it was not her child in the stasis pod, a tendril of fear crept into her mind as she imagined that it been her and Joe dead on the freighter with their little Cary surviving them. It was a special kind of fear that only parents could understand, and Tanis resolved to give Cary extra hugs when she returned home.
Tanis blinked to clear the irrational worry from her mind.
“Governor,” Doctor Chrisa said as she approached. “We’ve worked out how to interface with the pod’s controls and can bring her out of stasis, if you approve.”
“Alone, in there?” Tanis asked. “Is that any way for a small child to come out of stasis?”
“There are security protocols,” Doctor Chrisa frowned. “Your security protocols, I might add. We don’t know what pathogens she may expose us to. She could be an attack sent in by the Transcend. Anything is possible.”
Tanis nodded. “That is true. It’s why I’m wearing skin-armor with pico-based defense.” As Tanis spoke a clear layer of skin-armor flowed up over her face, pulling her hair in tight to her head—a definite improvement over Earnest’s earlier models, which simply sheared any hairs off—not because it had to, but because he hadn’t thought it was a problem.
“It can stop anything that can be packed in that girl’s body—short of antimatter, and we’d be able to tell if she contained any of that.”
The doctor nodded slowly. “You know the risks, then—and I imagine I can’t stop you.”
Tanis shook her head. “You certainly cannot.”
She cycled through the airlock and into the room. The stasis pod was covered in scratches and some smears which looked organic in origin. Angela passed the control sequence to open the pod, and Tanis bent over the pod, examining the girl within.
She was Cary’s age, perhaps just a year younger. Her skin was darker, and she wore a Hindu charm around her neck. Her skin had the appearance of someone who grew up planet-side, under the light of a natural sun. It was interesting that she would be on a starfreighter at such a young age.
Tanis readied herself for what was to come. There would be no easy way to tell this girl that her father, and the woman on the ship—who clearly bore no familial resemblance to the girl—were dead.
She keyed in the sequence on the pod and prayed it would safely disengage the stasis field. From what the technicians had discerned, its power supply was reaching critical levels. Another decade and this girl would have woken up to cold vacuum inside the ship.
The pod ran through its sequences, and Tanis realized that the output scrolling past the display was an evolved form of Sanskrit. With Angela’s help, she translated it and breathed a sigh of relief that the sequence was proceeding without errors.
A minute later, the pod’s lid slid open, and the girl opened her eyes to the room around her. A look of confusion crossed her face and she turned, catching sight of Tanis.
“Where am I?” she asked with wide, frightened eyes.
The language seemed to match the text on the pod’s display and Angela helped Tanis extrapolate the necessary words and sounds.
“You’re on a ship. We rescued you,” Tanis replied. “Do you feel OK, were you hurt before you went into stasis?”
The girl frowned. “No, why do you sound funny?”
Tanis smiled. “Well, I just learned your language a minute ago. I’m not entirely certain how to say all the words yet.”
The little girl’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You learned how to speak in a minute?”
Tanis smiled. “My AI, Angela, helped a bit. My name is Tanis, what’s yours?”
“Saanvi,” the girl replied while glancing around with concern at the sterile room. “Where’s my father? Is he OK? Is Karen here?”
Tanis tried to keep her expression neutral, but she knew that her eyes showed sadness and Saanvi could see it. She wanted to sugar-coat the news, but there was no way to do it. This girl needed to hear the truth—even though it would devastate her.
She crouched down to come eye-level with Saanvi. “Your father and Karen didn’t survive the accident your ship had. You were the only one in a stasis pod.”
“What do you mean they’re not in a pod?” Saanvi’s voice grew frantic. “Did you check the ship? They were on the ship with me!”
“We found them,” Tanis replied, her voice soft and eyes filled with tears. “They…they didn’t make it to stasis pods in time.”
Saanvi’s eyes began to fill with tears and her lips tried to form words for a moment before she screamed. “Dead? They’re not dead! No! No! No! NO! Karen was just here! She said she was coming back, you’re lying!”
Her little fists beat against Tanis’s chest and she reached into the pod and lifted the small girl out gathering her in an embrace as the child continued to rail against her.
There were no words of comfort that could make things better, but she knew Saanvi needed to hear something, so she spoke softly of what she knew of Hindu religion and what it said about where her father and Karen’s spirits would go, and how she would be all right, and how Tanis had a little girl who would love to be friends with Saanvi.
Eventually, Saanvi began to calm down—mostly from exhaustion, Tanis suspected—and asked if she could see her father and Karen. Tanis looked out of the room at the tear-streaked face of Dr. Chrisa, who shook her head slowly.
Tanis had feared as much. Even without what the unexpected transition from the dark layer may have done, spending centuries in cold vacuum would not leave the bodies in a presentable state—especially not if they had been re-exposed to air.
“I’m sorry, Saanvi, not yet, we need to get them…ready to be viewed,” Tanis said, stumbling to come up with something to say.
Her response set off a new wave of sobs, and Tanis felt her heart go out to this small girl who had likely looked at the world as a place filled with hope and promise just minutes earlier—relative to her mind.
Now, everything was fear and unknowns.
“I know, I know,” she whispered. “I know…”
DETERMINATION
STELLAR DATE: 05.15.8937 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Andromeda
REGION: Carthage, 3rd Planet in the New Canaan System
“I don’t think this was any sort of attempt at infiltration,” Tanis said. “It was a legitimate cargo ship, and I don’t think that it slipped past the Transcend blockade per se. It only gave off enough EMF for us to pick up because some auxiliary solar panels eventually pulled in enough light from our star to kick things over.”
“That’s good news,” Sanderson grunted.
“For us,” Tanis shook her head. “That little girl has lost everything. We did manage to pull a date from the stasis pod after we had her out. She was adrift for over twelve hundred years.”
Sanderson whistled. “Well, given how long these people live, she could still have relatives.”
> “I know,” Tanis nodded. “We’ll need to reach out to the Transcend.”
“It’ll take a while for them to get here,” Sanderson replied. “More if they try to find her family first. What are you going to do with her?”
“Well…” Tanis paused. “I haven’t chatted with Joe about this yet, but I was thinking about bringing her home with me. She’s planet-bred and could use some companionship. I happen to have this little girl down on a planet….”
Sanderson chuckled. “I know what you mean, Mina and I are expecting our first soon…who would have thought that I would ever have kids again.”
“Do you want me to ping Admiral Isyra, or shall you?” Sanderson asked after Tanis didn’t respond for a moment.
“I’ll do it,” Tanis said. “I want to bring Saanvi to the surface first—give her some time for normalcy before craziness sets in again.”
“OK, but don’t wait too long.”
“I won’t,” Tanis replied and closed the connection. The holographic image of Sanderson disappeared and she let out a long sigh, preparing herself to face Saanvi again. She had to explain to the sweet young thing that they were going to go to the planet without seeing Pradesh and Karen’s bodies.
She hoped that the idea of getting down to a planet and meeting her daughter would help, but it was just as likely to set her off.
