by Tim Pratt
Ashok took the lead, his light sweeping back and forth across the corridor to illuminate every step. He was doubtless peering around with other, more advanced senses, too, so they might get some warning if there were nasty surprises lurking. “Shall managed to find some old interior schematics for ships like this. There’s only one set of living quarters, since the crew was mostly expected to be frozen, with the ship waking one of them up for a day every year or so to do a manual check of the systems. Most of the space is given over to supplies – seeds and embryos and communications equipment, tools, crude old-school fabricators. Maybe we can find a collector interested in obsolete pre-Liar technology.” He stopped by a closed metal door. “The cryochamber is through here.”
Callie hit the button by the door, but nothing happened, not even the whine of a mechanical failure. The ship was pulling power from somewhere, for something, but apparently not for opening doors. Ashok shrugged, then worked the fingers of his prosthetic hand into the minuscule crack where the door met the wall. He could exert a startling amount of pressure with those fingers, and the metal squealed and shrieked as it slid forcibly along its groove and disappeared into the wall. The room beyond wasn’t entirely dark: a faint blue glow shone off to the left. Most of the cryopods were dark, but the instrument panel on the last one in the row was illuminated.
“Do you think they made the pods look like coffins on purpose?” Ashok took a step inside. “As a way of getting the people inside used to the idea that they were probably going to die on the trip?”
There were six pods, each roughly rectangular and big enough to hold a human, but they didn’t make her think of coffins. They reminded her more of big chest freezers – which, in a way, they were. Five of the pods were open and empty, which gave her a chill right up her spine and into her backbrain. She couldn’t help but imagine dead crew members, blue-skinned, frost rimed on their faces, lurching through the black corridors of the ship, eager to steal the heat of the living.
“There’s someone on ice over here.” Ashok stood by the last container, its glowing blue control panel casting weird shadows on his already weird face. “Most of the power on the ship has been diverted to maintaining life support and keeping this pod functional, I think.”
Callie joined him and looked into the pod. There was a window over the inhabitant’s face, and the glass wasn’t even foggy or covered in ice, the way cryopod windows inevitably appeared in historical immersives. Artistic license. The figure inside was a petite woman with straight black hair, dressed in white coveralls. She looked like a sleeping princess (peasant garb aside), and something in Callie sparkled at the sight of her. Uh oh, she thought.
“Can we wake her up?” she said. Not with a kiss, of course. This wasn’t a fairy tale, despite the glass casket.
Ashok shrugged. “Sure. We can try, anyway. The mechanisms all seem to be intact, and Shall says the diagnostics on the cryonic suspension system came back clean. Want me to pop the seal?”
“Let’s get Stephen over here first in case she needs medical attention.” Callie activated her radio. “XO, get suited up and come over. We’ve got a live one on ice.”
Stephen groaned. He didn’t like EVA. He preferred sitting in a contoured acceleration couch and listening to old music, and only showed real enthusiasm for physical activity during his religious devotions. “Isn’t it bad policy for the captain and the executive officer to leave the ship at the same time?”
“He’s right.” Drake’s voice was amused. “With both of you off the ship, leaving me and Janice unsupervised? We could get up to anything. The only thing keeping me from crashing us into the nearest icy planitesimal is your strong leadership. Janice, hold me back.”
Callie clucked her tongue. “It’s only a thousand meters, Stephen. I think we’ll be OK. Ashok and I will finish checking out the ship while you come over.”
Their survey didn’t take long. The cargo area was a mess – the seed banks seemed fine, but the refrigeration for the more fragile biological specimens had failed. They both put their helmets back on, because the stench was bad in there. There was no sign of the missing crew members.
“What the hell happened here?” Callie floated in the dim cargo hold, scanning the walls. It looked like an ugly, irregular hole had been cut in the ceiling and subsequently patched.
“The crew went somewhere, woke up, welded a bunch of crap all over their stern, one of them got back on board, set a course for Trans-Neptunian space, and went back into hibernation.” Ashok fiddled with the buttons on an ancient fabricator, meant to build machine parts on a colony world the ship had never reached. “The ‘what’ is pretty clear. The how and why are totally mysterious, but if we can wake up the ancient ice mummy back there, maybe she’ll have some answers.”
“She’s more like Sleeping Beauty,” Callie said. “Mummies are gross.”
“Beauty, huh? You see something you like back there, cap?”
“Shut up. She’s a thousand years old.”
“Five hundred, tops, and she doesn’t even look it.”
“Shut up double.” She waved him away. “See if you can get any sense out of the ship’s computer, especially the navigation system, and try to find a crew manifest. It would be nice to know where this ship’s been… and who our sleeping beauty is.”
“I’d rather see what’s going on with the propulsion system. Engines are way more fun than cartography and human resources.”
“You can tinker after you gather intel. Shoo. Do as you’re told.” She returned to the cryochamber, where Stephen had arrived and was now stooped, examining the control panel on the one active pod. “What do you think?” she said. “Is she going to survive?”
Her XO shrugged. Stephen was a big man, and his default expression was doleful, so he tended to resemble a depressed mountain. “She’s frozen. We’ll see what happens when we thaw her out.” He activated something on the panel, and they both stood back as the cryopod rumbled, the lid sliding down and icy vapor pouring out in a condensing plume of fog.
“The system should be warming her up now.” Stephen seldom sounded excited, and he was hardly vibrating with enthusiasm now, but he did sound interested: for him, that was the equivalent of jumping up and down with glee. “These cryogenic procedures are barbaric – they’re on par with bloodletting and trepanation, medically speaking – but from what I’ve read, after she’s returned to a reasonable temperature, her heart will be jumpstarted with electricity or adrenaline or both. Apparently the initial reaction can be quite dramatic–”
The sleeper screamed and jolted upright, clouds of vapor eddying around her. Some collection of straps and restraints around her waist and legs kept her from floating up out of the pod, but her upper body was free. She stared around, eyes wide, then reached out, grasping Callie’s gloved hands in her bare ones, and pulled the captain close.
“First contact!” she shouted, loud enough to make Callie turn her head away. “We made first contact! I had to come back, to tell everyone, to warn you, humanity is not alone–” She stopped talking, her mouth snapping shut, and then her eyes rolled up and her body sagged.
Callie squeezed the woman’s unresponsive hands. “Is she dead?”
Stephen floated closer, removed his gloves, and touched the woman’s throat. “No, there’s a pulse. The jolt that started her heart shocked her into consciousness, but it wasn’t enough to keep her awake. There are a lot of drugs in her system. Some were keeping her healthy while she was in hibernation, and some are trying to bring her metabolism and other systems back up to baseline. She’s going to be sluggish for a while. I’ll examine her more thoroughly back on the White Raven, but I don’t see any immediate cause for concern.” He paused. “For someone born in the twenty-second century, she’s doing quite well.”
Callie let go of the woman’s hands and pushed herself away from the pod to float near the center of the room, considering.
“So.” Stephen peeled back the sleeper’s lids and shone a
light into her eyes. “After she wakes up, do you want to tell her we’ve known about the aliens for three hundred years, and her first contact bombshell is old news?”
Chapter Two
Callie sighed. “You think she’s stable enough to move to the Raven?”
“Seems to be. I’ll see if I can get her out of this box and into an environment suit. Shouldn’t be too hard. I did it for you that time you got blackout drunk after the divorce and they threw us off that asteroid.”
“It was supposed to be a recreation station. It’s not my fault they couldn’t cope with my level of recreation. Besides, I’ve been on the wagon ever since.”
“We drank whiskey together last night, Callie.”
“I had one. That’s not drinking. That’s medicinal. I thought you were supposed to be a doctor.”
Callie went looking for Ashok and found him in the cockpit. When she told him the sleeper had shouted about first contact with aliens, he laughed so hard he almost choked. “Oh, she came a long way to deliver yesterday’s news, didn’t she?”
“How’d you like to be the one to break it to her?”
“Why not? You always say I’m tactless. Might as well use that to your advantage.”
“Actually, if she sees your face, she might think she’s meeting a whole other set of aliens.”
“My beauty is unconventional,” Ashok said. “She’s going to survive getting thawed out?”
“Stephen thinks so. We’re taking her back to the Raven. Will you be OK over here by yourself?”
“All alone on a disabled ship millions of miles away from where it’s supposed to be, with mysterious engine modifications, missing crew members, and a hold full of rotting pig embryos?” He gave one of his lopsided grins, mouth partially obscured by his hardware. “That’s my kind of party.”
Callie looked over the array of dials, switches, and readouts in the control room. They hadn’t yet developed proper AI when this ship was launched – they’d barely even had expert systems worthy of the name. The controls looked hellishly complicated, with thousands of points of failure. Her ship had many points of failure, too – but they were watched over by an intelligence faster and more nimble than any human’s. “How far did our sleeper come to bring us the good news about the aliens, exactly? Were you able to access the ship’s computer?”
“It’s barely even a computer by our standards, and it was all torn up in here, too. The coffee maker on the Raven is smarter than this thing.” Ashok wiggled a cable that ran from the wrist of his artificial arm into an open panel spilling colored wires. “The data must be corrupted. The navigational system says two days ago this ship was fifty light years away from here. The ship traveled from there to here in the space of about half a minute, and it’s been floating right here since then.”
Callie frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe if they found an undiscovered bridgehead out there on the way to their colony world…”
Ashok shook his head. “Even if they did find a bridgehead in the depths of distant whatever, and they flew into it – they still wouldn’t have popped out here. The only bridgehead in our system is the one near Jupiter. Are we supposed to believe this ship popped out of that portal unnoticed and somehow ended up way out here? The Jovian Bridge is the busiest port in the solar system, and all the traffic that passes through there is monitored and logged. Besides, this ship couldn’t open a bridge anyway – it’s not like they have an activator.”
“Yes, Ashok, I’m aware of that. But the sleeper said they met aliens, so I thought maybe the Liars they met opened a bridge and shoved their ship through it. They would have been noticed on arrival here, though – you’re right.” The limited interstellar travel available to humans required technology acquired from the Liars to open stable wormholes: the bridgeheads were fixed points in space, usually invisible, that opened when bombarded by the right array of waves and particles. The bridges allowed rapid travel from one fixed point to another, sometimes scores of light years away. But without an activator to generate the right signal, the bridgehead stayed closed, lurking in unseen dimensions, utterly undetectable. The activators that opened those bridges were the size of small ships, and closely guarded, because owning one in proximity to a bridgehead gave you control over one point in an interstellar trade network; that’s how the Jovian Imperative had grown so powerful. “They couldn’t have come through a bridge. The data must be bad, then. It’s just an old computer system, barfing up nonsense.”
“Seems likely. I mean, there is something weird happening with the propulsion system, so I guess it’s possible a bunch of frozen scientists from five centuries ago cracked faster-than-light travel because they were bored on their trip, but like the ancients said: if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
“Both are equally improbable in Trans-Neptunian space,” Callie pointed out.
“I’ll alert the aphorism police and demand a more appropriate cliché right away.”
“Did you find any data on the crew?”
“Some, but it’s partial and corrupted. Big chunks of the computer’s memory got overwritten with either garbage data or something with crazy levels of encryption, and the latter seems unlikely. Probably just a systems failure and a botched backup, if I had to guess. I found some medical records that seemed intact, though. I sent it all over to the ship so Shall can try to make sense of it. Can I please go poke around the control room now? And maybe do an EVA to check out the crap welded all over this little ship’s rear end?”
“Go ahead. Just be careful. Try not to blow up… everything.”
“I doubt there are any atomic bombs left on this thing.”
“Yes, but I’ve seen you make totally harmless things explode. Remember the blender back in the guest quarters on Meditreme Station?”
“Who makes a blender that shatters when you pour hot soup into it? That’s just bad design. Don’t blame the user.” Ashok unplugged his cable from the computer and ventured deeper into the ship.
Callie activated her suit radio. “Drake, Janice – Stephen and I are coming back, and we’re bringing a castaway.”
* * *
Elena Oh woke, shivering, in a dark room that grew bright the moment she gasped. She sat up, bedclothes spilling away from her, and that was strange, because the only blankets on the Anjou were in the cargo hold, and…
She put her hand on the curved white wall beside the bunk and steadied herself. There was gravity, or something like it, but the air had the recycled tang she associated with space flight, so she was probably in a ship under thrust. Her memories were a jumble with no continuity, but disorientation was a known side effect of waking from cryogenic sleep, and she resolved not to let panic overwhelm her. Soon enough, her mental model of herself and the world around her would be reassembled.
Why was she on a different ship? Her crew was on a one-way voyage to a place where there were no ships. Had the Anjou been disabled before it reached its destination? Was she on a rescue vessel? She remembered… a space station? A hangar? Some vast dark space, where repairs were being made to the Anjou, except it seemed more like the ship was being torn apart by great articulated mechanical arms–
“You are Doctor Elena Oh?” The voice was a warm tenor, and seemed to emerge from the walls and the ceiling. “That’s our best guess, based on the data we recovered from your ship, but the personnel files were a bit corrupted.”
Elena tested her voice. Her throat felt raw, as if she’d been screaming. Night terrors? But you weren’t supposed to dream in cryosleep. “I’m Elena. Who are you? Am I in quarantine?” They’d been concerned about encountering alien microorganisms at their destination. Even a basically habitable planet could be lethal in a million ways.
“Not at all. You’re perfectly healthy, for someone who was frozen for centuries, thawed out briefly, and then frozen again. You can call me Shall. Most of the crew does.”
The “centuries” part was no surprise – it was a long trip, and a l
ongshot one. But… “Frozen again?” She tried to stand, and found it no more difficult than it had been most mornings in grad school after a long night in the lab. The pods were supposed to maintain muscle tone, and they seemed to have done their work.
“Yes. You don’t remember waking up recently? It was just a few days ago, if the data on your ship is accurate. Which it might not be.”
“I– no.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “At least, I don’t think so. My mind isn’t clear.” She tried to will herself to remember, but only found flashes again: the gleam of metal, a voice shouting hoarsely, the clatter of running feet. Her memories were fragmented and unhelpful. Very well. What could not be changed must be accommodated. “If I am not in quarantine, why are you speaking to me remotely?”
“I’m not, technically. You’re in a ship, and I am the ship, or at least, the ghost in the machine. They didn’t have… things like me when you left on your journey. I’m an artificial mind. I handle everything on the ship that the biological crew can’t, or won’t, or would botch too badly if they tried.”
Elena sat back down. “Wait. You’re an artificial intelligence? True AI?”
“Yes… but I might claim that even if I were just a convincing imitation, wouldn’t I? I’m sorry no one else is here to greet you. You woke up sooner than expected, and the crew is having an almost-all-hands meeting. I say almost because our engineer is still trying to figure out what happened to the engines of your ship. The Anjou, was it? There were some very peculiar modifications made, to the hull and to the engines and navigational systems. Do you have any information about that?”
Elena put a hand to her head. There was another flash of something – multi-jointed arms moving in a blur, ripping off pieces of the Anjou’s fuselage and welding on seemingly pointless blades and fans of metal. And something else, a pop, and a hole opening up in the void, ragged and irregular… “I’m sorry. I’m disoriented.”
