Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

She may have dodged most of the science meetings, but she’d seen Garson’s meticulously noted plans, cleverly rewritten so even the laymen among the Nexus crews could get it. The data had long since come back. There were habitable planets, welcoming space, lots to explore, to settle, to grow.

  They were pioneers, the first to travel to another galaxy, and by whatever gods among them, they’d get it done.

  Every last one of them believed that. Sloane did, too.

  A wrinkled stasis uniform wasn’t really on her list of priorities. But hey, whatever floated Garson’s prelaunch freighter was fine with Sloane.

  Garson folded her arms over her chest, drawing Sloane’s attention back to the woman nestled inside the comfortably detailed interior. “The other side,” she murmured, as if more to herself than to Sloane. “Andromeda.” Then, meeting Sloane’s gaze, she asked, “What do you hope to find there, Director?”

  She blinked. “Hmm… I haven’t much thought of it.” An outright lie, and at Garson’s crestfallen look, Sloane added wryly, “How about a cure for the common hangover?”

  That earned another bout of laughter, bright and genuine. “We can only hope,” Garson said, still chuckling, and gave Sloane the nod. That nod. The one that said the time for talk was over.

  Sloane oversaw the closure of the pod. She smiled at the leader of the Initiative through the small porthole, patted the pod twice in old habit, and waited until the indicators all showed cryogenic success and stability.

  “The other side,” Sloane echoed—and the advent of her real work.

  Rubbing the lingering effects of the previous evening from her temples, she began her own final inspection. For whatever reason known to whoever designed the procedure, Director Kelly had wound up with the strange honor of being the last awake.

  It was up to her to declare the station safe to fly. A ceremonial gesture, she reminded herself, but that little excited portion of her brain also reminded her that she wielded the power to stop it all. If anything at all was amiss, she could put the whole thing on lockdown.

  That meant something, didn’t it?

  “Not that anything could go wrong,” she said aloud as she walked the long, echoing corridors. The place was built by the top minds in the whole galaxy. Everything down to the last wire was the end product of countless hours of genius. If something went wrong now, it’d have to be an act of some pissed-off god.

  Sloane didn’t believe in gods. Or in dodging procedure. Not when it was this big, the stakes this high. The final walk was one of the few items on the departure checklist at which she hadn’t rolled her eyes.

  In truth she’d been looking forward to this ever since the plan had been made. A few hours of blissful silence and solitude to roam the halls of the station—her station. The place she’d sworn to protect and shepherd on its great mission. The place for which she’d given up her life in the Milky Way.

  Granted she hadn’t left much behind. Not really. No family, no responsibilities beyond that which she’d earned with the Alliance. There were pioneers who had given up much, much more. When it really came down to it, Sloane was only really leaving behind baggage.

  A galaxy’s worth of it. Old scars. Enemies made across old battle lines, and subsequent grudges lobbed diplomatically across political tables. Idiot officers far more concerned about the shine on the medals earned on the back of dead soldiers…

  The old, familiar anger welled in the back of Sloane’s mind. She gritted her teeth and shook her head again, which mostly served to set her hangover back into swing.

  Enough was enough. She’d landed the best job in the entire galaxy—soon to be two galaxies. She had the chance to make it right, and right now. Though even that was jumping ahead. First, the journey. Then the time for change. Which sounded a hell of a lot better to her than the poor suckers left tangled in the Milky Way’s red tape.

  Sloane went through her checklist with unwavering attention to detail. She didn’t care if it took her six hours or six days, she would make damn sure every last door was closed and locked, every supply crate was properly stowed, and no nefarious “rogue elements” were hiding in the air vents.

  Mostly, this meant a lot of walking. Which meant the perfect time to pull up Garson’s speech on her omni-tool. The speech, much like the woman herself, had zero preamble.

  “Tomorrow we make the greatest sacrifice we have ever—or will ever—make,” Garson began. Bold words, and confident as hell. “At the same time, we also begin the greatest adventure of our lives.”

  Sloane agreed with that. The lure of the unknown wasn’t her drug of choice, but she appreciated the excitement.

  “Many have weighed in. The gossip, the media coverage, even threats, have had more than enough to say.” She spread her hands, as if she could hold the weight of all the thousands of hours of committees she’d attended. “Some claim this plan is nothing more than an attempt to flee the galaxy we helped shape, taking our very expensive toys—” Her eyebrows lifted.

  Sloane chuckled.

  “—and going somewhere else to play. Others decry our mission as the most expensive insurance policy known to any sentient species.”

  Sloane would’ve been happy to punch out this metaphorical they. Instead, she had to settle for muttering a terse epithet, and continued on her path. At least there was no one to hear her talking to her omni-tool.

  “The message I left with the Hyperion is similar to the one I’m saying to you now. You are about to embark on a journey unlike anything ever attempted before. And make no mistake…”

  The holographic Garson paused, looked into the camera for a long moment. Sloane’s step faltered as she watched. She felt a chill run up her spine, crawl across her scalp. In that deliberate pause it felt as if Jien Garson stared right at her.

  Focused on her. Really saw her.

  Her and the thousands of pioneers like her.

  “This is a one-way trip. What all those politicians, naysayers and threats don’t understand is that we are here, together, because we believe in something they don’t. We put our effort and our faith into something those people can’t imagine, can’t even begin to understand. In other words, they,” Garson said flatly, “are wrong.”

  Sloane nodded. Firmly. Hell to the yes.

  “The circumstances that have led to the creation of this magnificent station are vast and varied, that much is true. We all know some of these reasons.” But with this, Garson smiled faintly. Reassuring or rueful, Sloane couldn’t tell. “None of us can know them all, not even me. Yet they are only part of the equation. You and I,” she said, gesturing to Sloane—to the audience, “are the other part.”

  Sloane found herself nodding again. Silently shouting another hell yes! She was another part. A big part. Sloane had plans. Ideas. And Garson had already made it clear she liked that. A new way for a new hope, right?

  “Each and every one of us has our own reasons for volunteering to go,” she continued, “and those too are legion. Some of us feel a sense of duty. Some of us do indeed fear what the future has in store for the Milky Way. We flee our past, we seek a future. We wish to begin anew. We crave the unexplored wonders that no doubt will reshape all that we know.” Garson smiled, encouraging. Warm. “All equally valid, in my estimation—but that’s not important here. What is important as we depart, what I want to be sure you all know as you prepare to cross this ocean of time and space, is this…” She held her breath a moment.

  Sloane couldn’t help but admire the woman’s skill, especially compared to her own. Sloane’s speeches tended to be short and to the point. Things like get it done or put them down. Things you could say fast and on the ground.

  But the camera loved Jien Garson. Her force of will, her trust, radiated out through every pore. “None of those reasons,” Garson said plainly, direct and without so much as a shred of humility, “matter anymore. Not for us. What matters now, for you and me, is what we do when we arrive. Who we become, and how we carry ourselves in Andromeda.”<
br />
  Sloane halted as she stared at the image. Yes. Yes! Garson got it. More than she’d ever hoped, the Initiative leader got it.

  “We journey in one of the most incredible marvels our species have ever created,” the founder reminded them, “built in a spirit of a cooperation that is without precedence in our galactic history. We carry with us, collectively, centuries of culture, millennia of government, beliefs, of languages and art, incredible knowledge, and incredible sciences. Hard-won things, the result of endless work, unfathomable suffering and, most importantly, the efforts of countless billions of sentient beings over millennia and across dozens of worlds.

  “We carry all these things like the honed tools of an artist, to our great empty canvas. To Andromeda.” Garson’s hands came together. “We go,” she said intently, “to paint our masterpiece.”

  Sloane leaned against the wall, staggered by the power of the woman’s words. Just words, and yet Sloane knew without a shred of doubt that if Garson commanded her to stride into hell, Sloane would. In a heartbeat. Because that was Garson’s strength, she thought.

  People. Knowing them. What moved them.

  What they hoped for.

  Garson allowed a moment, then once again fixed her deep, knowing gaze straight ahead. “So I say to you now what Pathfinder Alec Ryder just said to me.” Her smile, Sloane thought, could power Ilium. Another oratory skill Sloane had never bothered with. Why should she, when people like Garson had that on lockdown?

  “I will see you all on the other side.” A pause, and the light caught the high shape of her cheekbones as her grin deepened. “When the real work can begin.”

  The recording ended. Silence descended in its wake, heavy as fog and still as ice. It was cold in the halls, and would be for another six hundred years. But Sloane? She didn’t feel the cold.

  She’d been a soldier for a long time—her whole life, really. She’d witnessed speeches made to celebrate victories, others intoned to condemn atrocities. War had been her path for so long, the life of a soldier her only way, that she’d forgotten what a speech about hope could do to the brain. A new start, huh?

  Sloane shook her head, laughed aloud. It rolled back at her from a thousand echoes in the barren corridor. “Andromeda,” she said aloud, trying the word out. Andromeda, the echoes whispered back.

  The other side.

  She stood there, leaning against one bulkhead out of a million, not even really sure exactly where she was, and took that moment to feel the ship. Listened to it breathe in its own mechanical way. The whirr of systems engaged and ready, the constant dry whisper of circulated air. That one would stop soon enough—there was no need to waste the power when nobody needed the air.

  Next, Sloane would sleep. For hundreds of years. Across that eternity of cold nothingness, the Nexus would reach its destination guided by meticulous programming.

  Sloane pushed away from the bulkhead and continued her rounds. She passed through the hydroponics farm, the machine shops and the archives, the sterile places that would become the great plazas once the station unfolded into place. Over there would be the cultural offices, and her own security headquarters—the best, she thought with fierce determination, there ever was.

  She made sure everything was where it should be, and as it turned out, everything was. It was perfect.

  The Nexus was perfect.

  Sloane checked a box, and the station lit its engines and set off. Simple as that. So smooth, she barely felt anything. She grinned, pleased with the ease of it all, and returned to crew storage to shed her omni-tool, stow her gear, and prep for her own cryo. Soon enough, she returned to cryostasis chamber 441. The small room was one among countless others on the Nexus, each identical to the last. Eight pods, a surgical couch for post-revival certification, terminals, and little else.

  This was it. The final step.

  Sloane lowered herself into her stasis pod, and found herself adjusting her uniform. The same way Garson had. With a sudden snort, she gave up and pulled the hatch closed.

  “Cryostasis procedures logged,” a mechanized voice said. “Rest well, pioneer.”

  Naptime, huh? Smiling, Sloane closed her eyes.

  Within minutes, she—and everyone aboard—slept.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Thawing from stasis was meant to take time. A gentle process. Warmth gradually applied to cells dormant for centuries, neurons carefully coaxed back into firing.

  Synthetic fluids mixed with precise amounts of the sleeper’s blood, a ratio changing by the smallest of fractions over several days until, finally, the body crossed a threshold, becoming whole again. Vitals checked, and then, only then, would the final mixture of drugs be injected under expert supervision.

  Or something like that. Sloane Kelly didn’t really remember the specifics. How much time, when the process was supposed to begin—these were things left up to the techs who built the stasis pods. They knew better.

  At least they were supposed to.

  Whatever the instructions had been, Sloane was damn sure that abruptly launching from deep stasis into six shades of hell wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

  Alarms.

  Lights.

  Everything heaved. A deafening noise, an aggressive shriek like rending metal, assaulted her ears, physically squeezed her entire body.

  She opened her eyes.

  Disjointed wires cast sparks over the pod’s view-port, forcing her eyelids closed again as her spinning brain popped aftershocks across them. Everything crashed together in a disjointed cacophony of light and thunder and motion and adrenaline. The small pod whirled around her, momentum shifted side to nauseating side as she flattened both hands on the pane, elbowed out in reflex and hit solid metal.

  Pain ricocheted up her arm and helped jerk her foggy brain back into alignment. Out. She needed out. Her pod was failing. Torn free of its moorings maybe, rolling around in the chamber. Had to be. The air stung her nose and lungs, the wrong mixture and far too warm. It stank of chemicals and old sweat.

  She slammed a tingling foot against the front of the stasis pod.

  “Failsafe,” she shouted into the cramped space, as if the word might crawl back in time and remind the engineers of this stupid metal coffin to include an eject latch.

  As if on cue, a calm mechanized tone sounded, at odds with the world into which she’d awoken. The pane sealing her within protective transport unlocked with a hiss of air almost as loud as the klaxons that shrieked through the open seam. She felt the breath being sucked from her lungs, replaced by the cold bite and stale taste of the outside.

  Then a new smell. Ash.

  Double vision slowly gelled into horrifying truth: smoke. That was smoke pouring in from the outside. Fire flickered somewhere to her left.

  Shit. It’s not just me. Which means—

  Slam-dropped out of stasis meant the rest of her body needed time to remember how to function. Her brain couldn’t process it all. Every cell screamed to fight, to respond to the skull-rattling alarms of the Nexus under fire, but the adrenaline surge to her limbs only made her twitch violently as feeling came back into them.

  Sloane gasped for breath, pounded at the viewport. Red lights flashed.

  The Nexus is under attack. No other explanation made sense. The thought finally pushed through her overwhelmed mind. Served to focus her.

  That was the only reason she’d be woken up in this manner from the centuries-spanning sleep the Nexus had been programmed to take. Or maybe it had only been a few years. Hell, it could have been hours. No way to know, not yet.

  As head of security for thousands of pioneers, Security Director of the goddamn Nexus itself, she needed to pull herself together and find out.

  Her body got the message. It just didn’t react very well to the command. Sloane fell out of the stasis pod before it had completely opened, her limbs a twitching mass of hypersensitive pins and needles. Her lungs expanded, took in air laced with sparks and smoke.

  It seared all
the way down.

  Sloane coughed. Her eyes burned, streaming already from ash and the acrid sting of burning chemicals, but she didn’t have the time to waste choking on it. She staggered to her feet, forced her leaden body to move.

  It may have felt claustrophobic in the small pod, but it was a thousand times worse out here. Half of the room remained hidden in shadow, dimly lit up by emergency lights that winked and flickered. Emergency lights aren’t supposed to do that.

  Fire and smoke roiled amid shattered debris.

  Sloane cursed, half staggering toward and half falling against the stasis chamber beside hers. The interior was miraculously clear, which left plenty of room for a hardened turian fist to pound against it in mirrored panic. Kandros, one of her best officers.

  “Hang on!” Sloane shouted, her voice guttural from smoke. She slapped the viewing pane twice, and furious pounding from inside ceased. A muted voice barely broke through the barrier, but she got enough to catch the drift.

  Hurry up.

  Possibly with more profanity.

  These pods were supposed to be opened by timer, not manually. At least not by her. Sloane didn’t have the first clue about how to operate this tech, but she didn’t have much choice here. The closest terminal lay somewhere beyond the shower of sparks, and based on the backlit wreckage, she didn’t think it’d be much help, anyhow.

  She didn’t have her omni-tool, either. She’d stored it, as per procedure. Personal belongings weren’t supposed to be returned to their owners until revival had been certified and they’d been briefed by their supervisors.

  “Damn it,” she hissed through clenched teeth. She pushed herself fully upright, casting around her for something, anything that would get this oversized coffin open.

  The fires painted the chamber in hellish orange, black, and gold. Through the stinging smoke, silhouettes struggled—personnel caught inside pods and trying frantically to get out. Some of the pods had already cracked, but whether their occupants had survived, Sloane couldn’t tell.

  Every second mattered.