Engineering officer Tess Megarith took a deep breath—the first she’d taken in eighty-seven years, four days, and six hours. Her first thoughts were fuzzy; a kind of euphoric massage in the back of her mind. She didn’t notice the microneedles punching her in the shoulders, injecting the chemicals that would bring her heart rate into a stable pattern without sending her into cardiac arrest. She was just conscious enough that she knew she was awake, but not enough to do anything rash.
Her pod—some part of her knew it was a
pod—shifted into an upright position, but slowly so as not to jostle her or generate any unnecessary stress.
Please remain still.
The voice was soft and feminine. No doubt engineered to trigger just the right emotional synapses to ensure a relaxed response.
It worked. Tess remained still.
You have been asleep for eighty-seven years, four days, and six hours. Let me help you.
Just then, the cocktail of chemicals being fed directly into Tess’s bloodstream reached her heart. Her eyes shot open, and she became dimly aware of her surroundings. Her left arm reached out for something to grab, finding the cold metal cusp of her pod. The residual frost left by the cryofreezing process retreated from her fingers. Her vision remained fuzzy from years spent in a near-death state, her body sluggish and slow to respond.
We are fifteen years, seventeen days, and three hours from our estimated interception with Erebus III. You are scheduled to perform routine maintenance on critical ship systems. Do you understand?
“Yes,” Tess said.
Okay. Let me help you.
The last layer of cryogenic permafrost slipped away, leaving Tess marginally warmer. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the computerized female voice designed for maximum comfort and efficiency was somehow watching her. In the formfitting grey bodysuit she’d worn into cryostasis, she felt naked. Warm and regulated, but nude. Even light-years away from Earth and its boundless problems, she still felt the eyes of strangers.
And then her pod opened.
The air around her hissed as the rubberized seal broke. Her view of the world, previously limited to a fogged up porthole built from glass just thick enough to protect the occupant in the event of power loss and depressurization, expanded. With the auto-mechanical groan of a sleeping machine, the top of her pod lifted and retreated overhead, and the innards of the
Sagittarius opened up before her. It was not the ship she remembered, the one filled with scientists in grey lab-coats mumbling vague reassurances about the safety of cryogenic freezing, that they’d tested it numerous times and that the failure rate was minimal. So minimal, in fact, that they didn’t feel like disclosing it.
In the old world, there were banners and well-wishers. Family members crowding around to reassure family members that they wouldn’t be forgotten, that they would continue on into a glorious future far beyond the stars. In this quiet new one. In this new world, there was a cold room of steel iron composite. Tess lurched from her pod with the ungainly steps of a toddler stumbling into a walk by accident. She took three steps, tripped, and threw up.
These symptoms should pass shortly. Please let me know if you feel any further discomfort beyond twenty-four hours.
Tess wiped the vomit from her mouth.
“Noted,” she said between coughs. Then she looked up and felt like throwing up all over again.
Hundreds of other pods; hundreds of crewmembers all part of the same one-way journey. She couldn’t see their faces, but she could feel them. She’d trained with most of them.
“I’m the only one awake?” she said.
Yes. We are still fifteen years, seventeen days, and three hours from our estimated interception with Erebus III. In order to preserve supplies and accommodate for eventual settlement strategies, crewmembers are to be removed from cryostasis only to conduct essential duties.
She looked at her vomit. “Is—can I clean this up?”
It felt a stupid question.
This area will be sanitized. Do not worry, Lieutenant Megarith. I am here to accommodate all your physical and nutritional needs.
Finally, Tess stood. She stood up in a room filled with hundreds who she could not touch or speak. In the background, the constant low-pitched hum that indicated that everything was running normally. It meant that life support was firing away in the deep in the throes of the ship. It meant the sub-light fusion engine over which she’d been minimally briefed was continuing along its pre-programmed route with a minimum of fuss.
Tess balled her hands into fists and tried not to think about it. She shoved those anxious thoughts into the back of her mind where they could be decompressed and panicked over later.
Soft green lights flashed slowly across the floor, forming a narrow line that led through a bulkhead and further into the sleeping ship.
Please follow the illuminated path to the dining area.
She did. Despite reassurances from Mars’ top scientists that the cryostasis process was totally safe and offered no “significant” side effects, Tess’s legs felt like jelly. She hobbled across the cold steel of the crew’s near-permanent sleeping quarters, trying her best not to look around and risk seeing someone she recognized. Despite the persistent and low hum of reactors and engines and dampeners milling about quietly in the distance, there was a distinct silence to the world. She heard each patter of her bare on the floor.
Gentle orange arrows flashed in slow, obvious patterns beneath her, no doubt designed to reduce strain on the eyes following prolonged stasis. Even still, Tess’s eyes watered from the effort. Twenty-four hours of these symptoms sounded nightmarish. The bulkhead—thick and monstrous, designed to act as an airlock in the event of catastrophic decompression of this or other sections of the ship—hissed as rubber seals peeled apart to allow access. Somehow, it was comforting and disquieting for the passageway to lead to something as normal as a hallway.
And a window.
Tess’s eyes widened, and for just a moment her legs worked just as well as they needed to. She straightened up, all the pain and soreness and side-effects suddenly a million miles away. They were the problems of someone with their feet planted squarely in soil, with an atmosphere that existed independents of oxygenators and CO2 scrubbers.
Behind more than a meter of a transparent glass-titanium alloy was space.
Stars.
The void so close that Tess could reach out and touch it—reach out and lay her hand against the glass. Despite all the training and the simulations, it was another thing to feel it. Despite the millions of pinpricks of light reaching out to her, it was another thing to know that each of those lights were probably dead and gone.
Tess stood there more than a minute before the ship’s computer said anything.
Are you alright, Lieutenant Megarith?
“I’m…” was all she managed at first. Some part of her—a part of her not at all small—wanted to curl up and look away. Although the glass was warm to the touch, she felt cold. “I’ll be okay,” she said. She had to be.
