‘Good call, Tanya,’ he said closing the door’s access switch which brought the huge bulkhead shield down. ‘Do you know how to get that information?’
‘Aye sir,’ she nodded.
‘Do it,’ he said. ‘For now come with me. We’re checking the damaged compartments on the anchorage decks.’
‘What the hell for?’ she said over the loud thump of the heavy door finally anchoring down into its contour.
‘Do you remember that man on the screen? That red figure? I’ve seen it before somewhere. In briefing I think. I just want to check something out down there.’
*
Riffles of light shimmered across the surface of the piezoelectric floor, racing ahead of their steps and they reached the large air-chamber pressure lock, a permeable vault separating the passenger walkways from the vacuous exposures of space. Here, Max manually accessed the door’s locking mechanisms and then pumped the power handle several times. The moment new energy was stored he opened the door and it rolled gradually back to reveal the air-chamber. A pew of seats to the left and right of the chamber held a sense of preparatory arrangement previously taken up here, and quickly abandoned. The floor was littered with tools and scattered equipment boxes left opened and mounting its own containment trays in one corner. A Chrononaut space suit was left slumped on the seat, like the armour of a giant mechanical gladiator. A huge faceless helmet gazed back unblinkingly; head turned to their direction and slouched at some twisted angle.
‘That’s it,’ said Max, ‘that’s what we saw.’
‘It’s just a suit.’
‘It’s specialised,’ said Max, ‘Chrononauts have electro-gravity shielding and intense gamma ray resistance fields, top of the range protection from the intense radiation given out from the black hole.’
Tanya soon discovered the airlock had been sealed and patched up from the inside, and a gory splatter of blood had long ago dried around structural repairs as though someone had lifted a fist full of eviscerated animal entrails and pitched them full slap against the solidity of the airlock. They saw floor panels bolted and welded over the doorway, made now inaccessible.
‘Looks like they tried to seal it up,’ she said. ‘Structural leak?’
‘Possibly,’ Max adduced, ‘but that’s solid titanium, what the hell punctured through it?’
‘Asteroid?’
‘No, not at this angle, and with no further damage visible it’s highly unlikely. Until we look from the other side we’ll never know,’ he explained. ‘Let’s get a team together, see if we can get to the anchorage bay from the external access.’
‘Roger that.’
‘You get those foot finder thingies,’ he ordered, ‘it was a good suggestion.’
‘Oh you mean the ambulation pattern histories? Sure, I’m already on it. The Erebus investors have requested research teams to look into whatever they can so as soon as I have a full record I’ll send it to them.’
‘Good.’
‘But, sir, erm...what about the frozen crew members? Are we going to extract them from deep freeze?’
‘Certainly are,’ said Max. ‘Got a few questions, we should hope they’re not as insane as Professor Barnes.’
‘Lead the way, sir.’
*
Over the hours that followed, teams moved in and out of the Erebus on rotation, following the safe zones as mapped by Max and his team. From eight cryonic sarcophagus’s, only two were functioning, the two containing crew members Malik Serat and Captain Arthur Zemi. Like other locations on the Erebus, cryonic containers had been sabotaged and looted conspicuously for parts. The solid steel cylinders buzzed as minimum power fed morsels of life support to the freezing process. Max followed the glowing path through security layers and passed into the containment room. Tanya followed while opening and closing her fists to keep the static shock foci stimulated.
‘What’s their status?’ Max asked.
Tanya stepped up to Malik Serat’s cryonic sarcophagus and a window appeared across its arching chrome surface. She tapped a few options in the projection field and analysed the readout.
‘Preservation successful. Subject is negative one, nine, six Celsius and intact, Titan genetics stable, no crystallised cell ruptures, according to nanome feedback. There’s some radiation cell damage on one of these crew members.’
‘These men are generation two Titans,’ Max suddenly recalled, ‘I forget how old they are.’
‘Sir,’ said Tanya, stepping over to a forth sarcophagus. ‘Another subject.’
‘Condition?’
‘Containment failure,’ she explained. ‘Thawing fatality, subject is called Penelope Hurt, completely shattered, irreparable cell crystallisations. Barnes must have done this. There’s evidence of sabotage. Why did he kill this one?’
‘Start the reanimation treatment,’ said Max. ‘Let’s ask Serat.’
‘Can’t sir,’ Tanya claimed fingering the holographic digits ‘insufficient power. The aneutronic fusion hub seems to be in dormancy still. Minimum power supply only.’
‘Start it up,’ Max suggested.
‘Sir...no fuel...she’s completely spent. She’s burning on empty, sir. We’ll need a boost from the Orandoré exo-station.’
‘Fine,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’ll start my report and draft a request for power. Either way he’s getting revived. This mission went to hell and its investors are going to want answers.’
‘Right sir.’
‘As for you guys I want you back to Orandoré for radiation treatment.’
‘Right sir,’ said Tanya.
-7-
The oscilloscope was still showing a long green flat-line where every few hours a faint and rhythmic pulse would represent a reviving heartbeat. Max Elba folded his arms as the research team circled the cryonic preservation chambers on the Erebus, carefully monitoring power flow now channelling from the exo-tower. The extraction process was a delicate procedure that took several hours of cell restoration.
‘I’ve never seen this kind of preservation for deep space,’ said Tanya, walking behind him to get a better look at the lit up chamber of the sarcophagus. Engineers and science officers went about their revival protocols, using holographic screening devices and probes set to a hundred and ninety below zero Celsius as not to rupture the surfaces of the cryonic chambers.
‘Me neither,’ said Max.
‘You both ought to know it’s an old process,’ said Rufus, leaning forward on one of the inactive terminals. ‘I studied macro-biology.’
‘You studied biology?’
‘Specialised in it,’ Rufus smiled boastfully. ‘Studied biomechanics too, wanted to be a programmer for medicinal nanoctors. I had some good ideas for start-up applications, but the assholes said I had to afford some certificate to use intellectual property like the nanomes. Back then I just didn’t have the Atomons. Now I just know how to break bones instead of mend them. Pity that.’
‘Yep,’ said Max stolidly.
‘Course they can’t just freeze anybody. There’s a whole genetic process to it. Do you know amphibians freeze during the winter? Frogs can freeze and thaw out again for spring.’
‘Is that right?’ said Max, offhandedly for the sake of saying something as he watched the pulsing light beat of the sarcophagus in the other room.
‘Funny thing, back in the age of late capitalism, maverick scientists used to theorise all sorts of crazy shit. They ripped off a ton of millionaires by promising them that in the future they could be revived if they froze themselves. Dumb ass bastards used to buy their cryonic preservation tanks and freeze their heads.’
‘Can’t we bring them back?’ Max said with slight surprise.
‘No,’ said Rufus, ‘Cells are ruptured by the ice crystals, longer the preservation the worse it gets. Best you could do is clone the person and try to imprint an improvised memory that matches the person’s most noted characteristics regarding their hobbies and interests. That can be done, but what’s the point? No
body would bother with this extraction process. So for those frozen heads back in the past…there’s no bringing those assholes back.’
‘Doctor Rufus?’ Max sniggered. ‘Imagine you as a doctor.’
‘I never finished my doctorate, Colonel.’
‘Too bad, egg head.’
Rufus play punched Max hard in the shoulder and Max laughed and shadow boxed with him, sparring into the air just under Rufus’ chin and they feinted on their toes.
‘So what’s different about these guys, Rufus?’ said Tanya, looking in through the observation window at the pulsing cryonic sarcophagus. ‘Why can these guys freeze?’
‘These guys? These guys are still Titans, just early generation. You can see it on the scans…Titan genetics intact, that means they genetically respond to the freezers. Specifically grown to do this very thing.’
‘By who?’ Tanya asked.
‘Their parents,’ said Rufus with a shrug. ‘People with money who enlisted their unborn children to the task of making history. Astro-glory, they called it. Their genetic pre-sets had to be configured before conception.’
‘You-what?’ Max asked.
‘Hell yeah, it’s true. Their parents made the genetic changes. Before the insemination process the eggs were encoded and designed with certain characteristics. In their case, unusually high levels of glucose production harmonised into their body, it would kill a normal person. These folk were fitted with it, as well as a fast metabolism to burn off the excess adipose when they are active. These were the requirements specified for this mission. So the people who had the money at the time signed up to the experiment and wanted their children to be the first Chrononauts.
‘These Titans can survive a cryonic freeze because of high glucose levels in their blood, helps the vitrification and acts as a kind of anti-freeze so crystals don’t expand within their cells, they just get cold and their internals keep wet.’
‘Jesus,’ Max uttered, ‘imagine a blood transfusion with one of those. Talk about a sugar rush.’
The Sarcophagus’s continued to pulse with paling light, strips of concentrated photons sweeping across the solid surface of the frozen body within, slowly returning it to the normal properties of life. Nanoctors flushed through the veins and stimulated the hearts, circulating the cold blood beneath the skin. First there was a beat every hour for at least three, and then the tandem beats began to increase, once every fifteen minutes, a slow crushing pulse. Before long their hearts were beating once every six minutes, compressing the gradually warming blood through their arteries, reviving a full circulation. Nanoctors began to simulate chemical reactions, regenerating other vital organs.
Malik Serat opened his eyes. They stared gracelessly from the tomb to see blurred objects moving outside the fields of pulsing light. A string of painful memories began to awaken. He was not sure for a while who he was, where he was, but as the nanomes reignited his neural activity a network of pulses returned those last painful months to him aboard the Erebus.
Once Malik had been recovered, research technicians helped him from the cryonic sarcophagus. He was shivering violently and reaching out for people around him, his skin still damp and silvery like some pale aquatic creature being hoisted from an egg. He was a lank and morose man, his body completely vacant of hair, zapped away before his last freezing cycle. His sea green eyes drawn in to a long straight nose under his heavy brow, his enfeebled muscles struggling to work after the thaw.
‘Sit there a minute, sir,’ one of the technicians instructed as various green lasers swept over his skin. ‘You’re still fatigued, may take a while before your muscles can work.’
He seemed like he was unable to hear them, unable to realise fully what was happening to him.
‘Doctor Serat,’ said another technician, ‘do you understand my words? Do you recognise this language?’
Malik looked up and nodded, still drowsy and confused.
‘Can you speak?’
His lips perched and he attempted some mumbling but quickly surrendered and shook his head dejectedly.
‘Get him aboard the station,’ Max ordered through the Erebus quantics on the observation decks. ‘Find him a room, something warm to drink and make him comfortable. How’s the other doing?’
‘Almost restored,’ said one of the technicians squatting by the sarcophagus and showing him the thumbs up. ‘Another hour maybe two I’d say.’
‘Good as gold,’ said Max, ‘let’s not beat around the bush here, station masters and Ambassador Felix are all going to want some answers as to what the hell happened to the Erebus and her crew. Chop, chop!’
*
The towers of Orandoré hung high above the earthly land, a long orbital elevator conceived over centuries as the greatest architectural feat yet achieved by mankind. While attached to the carbon nanotube-ribbons, stemming from the clouds far below, the Orandoré station’s lenticular counterweight structure aligned in a geosynchronous orbit with its base command anchor down in the North American sea. The station’s domed surface burgeoned into space like a huge mushroom head, plated with solar panels and a translucent shielding. Its outer rim acted as a docking harbour for starnavis. Earth hovered above for the station occupants, like a large beautiful opalescent lamp, distant and serene.
Max, Tanya and Rufus marched orderly through the various gardens and sterile, uniformed looking hallways.
‘Forensics is all over the Erebus,’ Rufus had been saying. ‘They said there’re some weird things happening with the communicators. Some kind of radiation leak they can’t quite locate.’
‘That whole place is a radiation hazard,’ Medina chirped.
‘You’d have thought that Scott Barnes would have been killed in all that, right?’
‘Well, he’s been sleeping throughout most of it,’ Max said back over his shoulder as they walked. ‘What I wanna know is how in the hell he woke up.’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ said Rufus.
‘He’s slightly insane as you’ve noticed,’ Max said, ‘his information isn’t reliable.’
‘How about the other guy?’ Medina said as they came to the end of their helical path and walked into the gardens. ‘Did he fully recover yet?’
‘Who, Doctor Serat?’ Max said. ‘As a matter of fact that’s who we’re going to go and visit.’
*
Malik Serat was febrile, his pallid countenance gaunt, his breathing heavy. His fierce and predatory eyes came close together on his lean face, a nose thin and long, lips narrow. He gazed ahead at his own ghostly reflection in the mirrored window before him. Not a hair on him, all of it burned away from radiation exposure on the Erebus. He was wearing some sort of medical garment, he felt the silvery insulation on the inside slowly warming his skin. The revival from cryonics was a brutal and long event. He remembered parts of his consciousness slowly waking, slowly becoming more and more aware of things. At one point it was possible to remember his traumatic mission before he could remember his own name. He had struggled to move for what felt like far too long a time. The room he was in was small, padded, and there was one window in front of him, the mirrored one. On the other side he heard a woman’s voice filter into the room. She introduced herself as Yerma Holts and said she was a cognoputic analyst. He had no idea what that meant. They’d been asking him questions, mundane, monotonous. He was tired as hell and wanted to roll into his bed for a decent sleep without feeling so goddamn cold.
‘Red,’ said the voice.
‘Colour,’ Serat breathed effetely, bored.
‘Domicile.’
‘Why do I have to do this?’
‘Please follow the test proceedings,’ Yerma instructed. There was a pause before she continued. ‘Domicile.’
‘A house,’ he followed.
‘Ocean.’
‘The sea.’
‘An hour.’
Serat drifted off.
His eyes were open but he was suddenly gone.
‘An hour!’ Yerma repea
ted.
Serat licked his lips, eyes returning from whatever void the word had prompted him to venture.
‘…time…’ he managed.
‘An hour?’
‘A unit of time.’
‘Very good.’
‘…appraisal.’ Serat said dryly.
Yerma Holts made the window transparent and Serat could finally see into the other side. She was shorter than he was expecting, slim and he wondered about the strange tattoo markings on the nape of her neck and her temples. She smiled genuinely at Serat and crossed her arms.
‘We’ll have you out of these soon, I promise.’
Serat began to cough. He had made an attempt to speak but his lungs denied him.
‘Would you like a glass of water?’
‘A marker,’ he said, looking up at the window. ‘I’d like a pen. A marker of some kind.’
‘Is there something you need to do?’
‘Please…I’d like a pen…it helps me to think.’
There was a long pause while Yerma fetched a pen. Then a green light activated by the door and the collection point rattled as the pen dropped into the room. Malik got up slowly and staggered to the collection box by the door. He put his jittering fingers into the post-flap and retrieved the pen. It was a fat black marker. He popped the lid to reveal the felt tip. Yerma watched as he ditheringly lowered to his knee, raspy breaths made audible from his nostrils. The pen squeaked as he lined an X onto the floor and Malik watched it intensely.
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