by Tim Pratt
“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?”
