A guard, more heavily augmented than most and maybe even linked directly to Hush, entered B5-3. The guard, at some point less than human rather than more, moved straight toward Ulrich.
Ulrich turn his head this way and that, and joints popped, hopefully into some place better than they had been, but it was a small hope. No augmentations for him. Fifty-nine years of age when he went into his sleep, most of his aches were just down to the inequity of age. The vastness of Hush didn’t feel much warmer than the sarcophagus and he felt the cold more keenly, it seemed, the older he got. He could take the aches without complaint, but it robbed his strength, too, and speed he’d once had was now more careful, more measured.
‘Ulrich Bale?’ asked the Aug. ‘Sergeant Ulrich Bale?’
‘Not for a long time,’ said Ulrich.
‘The ship requests your counsel, Sergeant.’
‘I told you, I’m not a Sergeant.’
‘Company policy, signed, witness, agreed prior to cryogen states...’
‘I know what I signed. Just...’
What use in argument or discussion with the Aug? He’d fought for their kind once, fought the Company. Ulrich had been on the losing side. This being before him wasn’t even something Ulrich could rightly consider a man any longer. Just meat and metal.
Company property now, Pal. Just like me. No better. No worse.
The Aug belonged to Hush, served Hush, and Hush was a Company ship.
Did the Aug have a human heart still, or a soul, or anything humane left? How long would such a thing live? Was Ulrich more or less Company property than the monstrous creature summoning him because he refused to let machines in?
Am I more humane, just because I’m human?
‘Whatever,’ he told the aug. ‘Let’s go.’
Probably not.
‘You may dress.’
‘What for?’ said Ulrich.
‘The ship is cold, Sergeant,’ said the guard. Lips, still human, didn’t smile, and half the skull was angry, lurid skin, joined and melded with machine. No thought to aesthetics. Just a thing, pure function.
Ulrich took the only clothing afforded him - plain black trousers, black boots, and a black fitted shirt. Tight, but good enough.
A spasm buckled his knees while he dressed.
‘Follow me,’ said the aug.
The drone watched him just as hundreds of others did, throughout the entire hangar-sized hold. They had no mouth or eyes or ears. The drones were just black, perfect spheres hanging in the air.
Still, Ulrich felt there was something inherently more honest, more right, about the drones than the aug.
There was no belt on Ulrich’s plain outfit so he tucked his knife, in the sheath he made himself, inside the band of his trousers. The aug didn’t mention the blade at all. If the augmented guard or summoner or whatever it was could managed to keep moving and functioning with the sickly rotten and infected flesh of a thing both metal and man, while each side constantly hated the other, a knife wasn’t going to be an issue.
‘Lead on. Not like I’ve got anything better to do,’ said Ulrich.
*
3.
Anna
Skywell Dockyard
Earth Orbit
2355 A.D.
Anna shuffled forward in leg and wrist bonds. They were only made of steel, but it wasn’t like she was superhuman. She reached the line, stopped when she was told to stop, moved forward when she was told to move forward.
‘Possessions?’ asked a man with a datapad who didn’t look up.
‘Not so far,’ said Anna.
‘None?’
‘If you like,’ she said.
She didn’t have anything else she wanted to say.
Later, they coded and chipped her.
As the temperature began to drop inside the sarcophagus and those things were inserted into her skin, her guard took away her bonds. The needles and tubes through skin and into marrow and organs would keep her floating some place just below the frozen surface between life and death.
Torpor stole over Anna while her guard moved away to whatever his life was. His job was done because she was going nowhere, and here, in her glass coffin, he probably figured she couldn’t hurt anyone...not even herself.
Anna moved her jaw from side to side like someone who grinds their teeth in their sleep. It was getting colder, but she wasn’t asleep. Anna didn’t pretend to know everything, but one thing, and only one thing she believed without exception, was that things could always be worse. They could be better, sure. But there was never, ever a situation or a time which couldn’t turn to shit in the space of seconds.
She was in space, on a ship called Hush, fired toward the unknown while frozen in some kind of half-death/half-sleep. She wouldn’t know anything for a long time. Or, maybe she would never wake, or wake burning, or she might just drift through space from a rent in some hull wall. Perhaps the ship would die or fail or tire and plunge her exiled cargo into a bright white star. Might fall through the blackness of space to someplace humans’ small minds could never imagine, or find a planet just like it was supposed to and then, when everything seemed like it might just land sunny side up that planet could expose them to disease, or violence, or force and aggression greater than the capacity for violence held in all the corpsicles of criminals and Earth’s human excrement combined.
Anything could turn to shit.
Her upper right incisor, held in place by a simple household adhesive, came loose under her patient efforts to dislodge it, and Anna tucked the tooth under her tongue carefully, as even now she could feel her ability to move the slightest muscle drained away from her.
Her saliva dried as her vision began to fade – to white, not black, like she was under avalanche snowfall. Anna held her loosened tooth beneath her stupid tongue, lips pursed.
Then, she slept.
*
4.
Pioneers and Exiles
Skywell Dockyard
Earth Orbit
2306-2355 A.D.
Interstellar ships were built at either of four major dockyards in high orbit above Earth - Skywell, Windward, Ashok or Hibaku.
Ashok and Hibaku, once owned and operated by the Asia Inter-Nation Co-operative Space Corporation, fell under the Company’s umbrella before the first interstellar ship, Hush, was even launched. Hush was commissioned in 2306, and work began in 2311. The stars were put on hold, though. The war, long-brewing, finally boiled over and when it did it broke the Earth. Not completely – what can break a planet? Humanity and life are far easier, more brittle, creations to snap. The Aug War couldn’t stop space, and with it all the hope promised out there among the stars, but it did put that hope on hold.
Capitalists loved war because war was business, and business was war. War was progress too, though, wasn’t it? And what was progress but upgrades and remodelling? Old age, degeneration, obsolescence swept aside for the dawn of new ages, new technology, new ways. Not better things, not necessarily, but new.
The world itself was rebuilt atop the ash of the old and it grew again. Until mankind were done and gone and long forgotten by the planet they called home, so it would be. While those builders remained, some among them would flourish just as others were destined to fall.
After the Aug War, it was AIN Corp which fell, to be utterly crushed underfoot by the victor. It was the Company which won, survived, and thrived and in the wake of the war it was the Company which rose triumphant and stronger than ever.
Ashok and Hibaku Dockyards weren’t given to the Company, or bought, but won.
Work on Hush resumed up in high orbit where dust and fire couldn’t reach, but this iteration of Hush which the Company envisaged would be larger, grander, and a further reaching dream than any which came before. Just what could mankind achieve if they only chose the winning side? Not capitulation by threat, this, but by promise. Perhaps this dream was just a toy dangling from an unseen hand before kittens, or fools, but the dream was real, if no
t the motivations.
Space.
Hope.
People could buy into that, couldn’t they?
The Aug War ended in 2335 and Hush was only a carcass, another dream felled by conflict...nearly. This dream, the one represented by the pioneering ship, might be unfulfilled, but it was, at least, untouched and unscathed, having seen out the destruction meted out in a catastrophic war from far above an Earth whose distant lights were once more forever changed in the aftermath of humanity’s lust for gain, and the fury with which they pursued it.
Still, quiet, she waited.
*
Even in her skeletal form Hush was too broad and heavy for Earth or any planet. Such ships were never intended for atmospheric entry. She was 857 metres in length, with a beam of 195 metres. A true leviathan, she was worth too much to simply scrap, or to allow her to be forgotten.
Work resumed, and Hush grew far beyond AIN Corp’s modest dreams. She was created to be a colony ship, and so a beacon of hope to a world tired and battered and surrounded by the debris of a global war. At first the Company imagined a ship full of those wealthy enough to pay, but why would they? Who would pay for such a slim chance to reawaken? No. This was a loss maker. Payment...that would come later. Hush wasn’t altruism in practice. She was a billion dollar advertisement of what was to come.
The rich were not pioneers.
Pioneers sought out a life which might be better than that they knew. The rich already had what they wanted and even were Hush and her journey into the unknown black sold on fear those rich folks weren’t about to abandon their towering mansions far above the needy and the poor. The dregs, though? The war veterans and the homeless who huddled down in the mud, hoping for shelter from poisoned rain?
Sure. They’d buy a dream and if they couldn’t raise a cent to pay for it, well...
There was always room for bit players in an advertisement.
‘Pioneer Class’, they called her. First of her kind. In truth, she was a prison ship.
They would fill her with those who had no choices and so Hush would sell that fickle dream of something better to come to those who might come later and choose to pay for it.
Nobody cared if exiles died in space, or if Hush was never heard from again those exiles had no rights in law. If those frozen inside the ship never thawed, who were they going to complain to? The universe?
The unwanted relics of war went on Hush, along with all manner of Earth’s undesirables.
Among murders and war heroes and the paupers of Hush’s slumbering cargo were the enemies of the Company and those whose existence offended a burned and scarred world.
Some Net wit took to calling it the First Interstellar Church of Redemption. It wasn’t such a stretch.
*
Hush, as all Pioneer Class ships to come thereafter, was laid out like an archaic church. Structurally, it was an anachronism in the pinnacle of progress.
Most of the ship was necessarily given over to drive space, and those gargantuan engines she boasted were housed in the main body of the Church of Hush, that part called the Nave.
Perhaps those who named her passages and halls thought to name her drives after a church’s congregation a joke, or perhaps they understood that on Hush the truly devoted were not the sleepers, but the drives. It was the drives to which Hush preached from her place at the helm - the Chancel.
Atop the Nave would be the Clerestory, where Hush’s compliment of smaller craft were stationed. Shipboard intelligence would run all functions in transit and oversee any and all operations and Hush would use that vast intellect to explore newer, faster technology for propulsion, too. Hush was an independent AP – artificial personality – and she was larger than any ever constructed. Working over a period unimaginable, unfettered by morality or finance or any need to rest, with nothing but time and pure purpose, just what might she achieve...?
Earth, the Company, humanity were in no doubt. Succeed or fail, Hush would expand her capabilities and what came after would stand on her sloping, giant shoulders to see even further into the myriad distant suns out there. Even should she die, and her exiled cargo along with her, Hush would serve mankind in some capacity. Her discoveries, her experiences, would be forever saved for posterity like an old orator’s journal in a network of commsats which would float like buoys in space in her wake, transmitting a constant stream of data home, buoys which would serve as breadcrumbs along the trail she blazed for others to follow behind.
Her cargo of frozen black and dead corpses would wait through what might come in her bowels for reanimation. They were not primary, nor secondary, to Hush, but a tertiary consideration. Her human charges were only something kept just in case. A forgotten spice in a cold steel cupboard, which might be used, or might be found, dusty and congealed, long after anyone might think to use it. The exiled would sleep in Hush’s lower decks, and there would be thousands.
The cryogen cargo holds below the Nave were named The Crypt.
There was no room for living quarters, or any form of comfort. Any woken cargo would not live on Hush but be left upon a planet to establish a colony or outpost. The ship was a giant sleeper, not a home. She was only ever intended to be an explorer, but one full of humans who had two choices left to them: execution, or servitude.
Only when and if Hush deemed it prudent would she wake her cargo. Those travellers, those exiles and pioneers, were at a machine AP’s mercy – and whimsy, perhaps.
A dichotomy, yes. A symbol of hope in the hands of those damned. Hush was their minister, or cleric, or priest, who would spread the good word of forgotten religions through the mouths of exiles to a disinterested galaxy.
Each possibility, a billion divergent outcomes and events which might never happen at all.
Hush did not fail, though.
The great ship that was once a forgotten sketch broke the heliosphere in one year, four months, and one day as she set an unknown course to take the good news of humanity anyplace but Earth.
*
5.
Something to Hold in your Hand
The Crypt/Hold K-1
Hush
2472 A.D.
Anna imagined waking from death would be more spiritual. It wasn’t. There was pain, plenty of it. It felt as though ice snapped into sharps in every muscle fibre, right down to the marrow in her bones. Agony echoed round the hold, and the halls of the Crypt, the sound intense as the ship herself was immense. Maybe this was the entire cargo waking – thousands coming to understand what they’d done and what it was precisely that they had sold to the Devil.
So the Crypt reawakened, the dead brought to life again to serve the Company with body and soul.
Thoughts were slow to thaw, too.
This isn’t Hell. It’s too cold.
Maybe not, but it was uncaring. The frosted glass encasing her, the cold metal hull, the halls, none of it gave a shit for pain or wailing.
The glass lid on her shell – her sarcophagus – cracked open and hissed and she breathed for the first time. Breathing hurt her as super-cooled air hit her defrosting lungs. Hearing, too. Free of her shell wave after wave of sound hit, screams and cries which had nowhere to go. Hush just bounced it all back, like echoes of all the things they’d done on Earth.
Anna groaned, pushed herself upright, crying sluggish tears at the pain, and the stench all around breached the stupor. A smell she remembered from Low Angel City, like the homeless dead.
Her vision was still hazy, but she saw others like her who stepped from their tombs when they woke. She watched them while she blinked and cried and everything was blurred, indistinct, confusing. Those resurrected before her were observed by drones as they rose, and then escorted away by horrific men and women, constructs more machine than flesh and bone.
Anna wasn’t afraid, and she wasn’t going to move unless someone made her.
She had no drone to watch over her. No Aug came to escort her.
Nobody wanted her, perhaps.
The screams, after a time, quieted. She listened. The last of the dragging footfalls – Augs and the shell-shocked resurrected – receded. The inane, slow hum of the drones faded out to nothing.
No human sounds, then, but a presence remained, some ghost of the ice which spoke in drips, creaks, and matter which cried out with groans of expansion.
She closed her eyes and rubbed at her eyelids until she saw fractal shapes. Those shapes lingered when she opened her eyes again, and she saw a springtime without promise dancing with worms and vines and blotches of colours she didn’t know, her retinas struggling to understand.
The drone-glow was gone, and the lights of empty sarcophaguses left an eerie sense of clouded moonlight on ice which hung low over the Hold K-1. Pods, fallen snowmen, black shapes among them. They were the stench, weren’t they?
Those who weren’t so good at waking.
A smell like vomit and shit and death came from those tombs which had failed their sleepers. Frozen hobos forgotten forever atop some city grate people had hoped might be warm.
She pushed herself upright on weakened, stupid feet. It took a while, maybe as long as half an hour, trying to stand, hobbling, resting. She cried at each indignity. Pain in her feet, and calves, and thighs. A sickening stab like a urinary tract infection in her lower gut. Her back, her kidneys. Every movement was an agony and every new weakness humbling.
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