072: FREEZE

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I wake up the next morning with my arm all sore and tingly. I sit up in bed and try to rub some normalcy back into it. Through the flimsy walls of the bedrooms, I can hear the rest of the crew (the non-convict half, anyway) getting ready for the day. I lie back down and wait for everyone to leave – it’s not like I have important work to do today. Work is cancelled.

I stare up at the ceiling, and wonder which member of the second crew had this room. I wonder if they died in here, and what killed them. Then I stop wondering about that, because it’s fucking depressing, and I have enough living people to worry about.

I’m definitely late for breakfast by the time I get up, so I grab a protein bar from storage, rip open the packet with my teeth since my tingly arm is too clumsy to cooperate properly, and set off on my self-imposed project for the day (which definitely does not count as working, even though it’s technically a Logistics Officer job, because it’s self-imposed, so I’m still on the captain-ordered holiday).

I start checking cryofreezers.

Why am I checking cryofreezers? Am I suddenly fascinated by racks of stored embryos? Do I have a burning need to count specifically how many species of frozen insect eggs we have? No. I’m looking for incubators. I’m looking specifically for the little metal incubators that Richard Rynn-Hatson died attaching to the condensers. Because, see, while trying not to freak out about the whole ‘some of my only friends in the entire universe have been genetically engineered against their will and we don’t know what that’s going to do to them’ thing, a thought occurred to me.

Rynn-Hatson successfully engineered at least most of, and presumably all of, Chronostasis Ring 1. He successfully engineered most of Chronostasis Ring 5, before dying. That makes sense; those are the two rings closest to the exit airlocks, the two most accessible ones. He didn’t get any of the other rings (Captain Sands had the engineers check), but I can’t help but wonder: did he intend to? Who says he planned to only engineer rings 1 and 5? Maybe, had he survived, he would’ve made trips out to the other rings as well, genetically engineered the whole ship for AI brain hijacking. Why would he do such a thing? No idea – but I have no idea why he did the two rings he did, either. Clearing up whether he intended to keep going could tell us a lot about what the rotted root is going on.

Or maybe it’ll tell us nothing. I don’t know. It’s probably worth looking into, is my point. Not that I have much hope of finding anything – obviously, his little incubators aren’t listed in the ship’s equipment. They would’ve been smuggled in. If I’m lucky, they were filled with bacteria and stuck in the cryofreezers, which have limited capacity and are mostly full of tiny tubes of fluid, so are easy to search. If I’m unlucky, though, only the bacteria are frozen, in tiny tubes like all the others, probably falsely labelled as a soil microbe or something. There’s no hope of finding them in that case; I wouldn’t even know how to try. Instead, the smoking gun will be the incubators themselves, which could be hidden in the middle of any of the many, many crates of goods in our storage rooms designed to support a colony of five thousand. It would take me until we get to Hylara to find them, assuming they even exist – it’s entirely possible (likely even) that he was only intending to engineer two rings, and the couple he didn’t get to installing joined him being flung off into space.

So basically, unless I happen to very luckily come across the incubators already prefilled and jammed in the back of a cryofreezer, I’m just wasting my time.

I check anyway.

I slam shut a cryfreezer in Storage Ring 2 and take a moment to try to rub some feeling back into my fingertips. The -80C isn’t kind to them, and I started losing sensation three freezers in. (This is what thermal gloves are for, but I’m clumsy enough with a bad arm already. Anyway, I know the sensation will return fully within the day, two days at most.) So far, no luck, but there’s a lot of freezers left to go.

I’m not alone, I realise. Adin and Heli are looking at me, startled, from several metres away. Judging by their body language, they hadn’t noticed me there (I hadn’t noticed them either, busy digging through the cryofreezer), and only looked up at the sound of me slamming the door.

They’re also in a slightly compromising position. Heli has a hand on Adin’s cheek, another lightly encircling his arm. And his hands are on her hips.

Ooookay then. I definitely shouldn’t be interrupting them. I give the pair an awkward little wave, which Heli returns, and I leave quickly.

Hmm. Would not have picked that couple. I mean, to be fair, I don’t know Heli very well – she woke up and immediately buried herself in the mystery she was awake to solve, without taking much free time for socialising. But that’s kind of the point. Adin had always struck me as the kind of guy who would take his pairings pretty seriously, who wouldn’t rush into things and would only be interested in long-term commitments. As someone who had no interest in such relationships, I’d dismissed him as a sexual prospect out of hand based on that alone. (Well, that and the fact that he’s so damned timid sometimes. I don’t want to have sex with someone who I can’t be absolutely sure would tell me ‘no’ if they didn’t want something.) But maybe I was wrong. Or maybe Adin and Heli had felt that kind of ‘instant connection’ that pair bonding cultures liked to talk about.

Whatever. Not really any of my business. Man, it’s been so long since I’ve had sex with anyone. Tinera and Denish are monogamous so I haven’t been with her since they got together. Most of the old crew aren’t really compatible with me for one reason or another (just my luck to wake up a bunch of people who are almost entirely from pair bonding cultures, plus a Public Universal Friend, who’s off the table for cult reasons) – maybe I should take a page from Adin’s book and try to get to know the newcomers better. Our crew does now contain two Tarandrans, after all, genetically engineered to be exceptionally attractive.

Of course, one of them is my immediate superior and captain and the other is my immediate subordinate and psychologist, but if I exclude candidates based on that kind of criteria then I’m out of luck until we reach Hylara. Which isn’t the end of the world, but would be kind of a bummer on top of everything else.

I do a quick weed inspection on my way through Greenhouse Ring 1, and run into Sam in Network and Engineering Ring 1. I don’t know our resident astronavigator all that much better than I know our brand new geneticist, which is kind of a failure on my part – the rest of the new crew, Sam included, have been around for several weeks now. It didn’t take this long to get to know the old crew.

Of course, Denish nearly died in CR1 within days of waking the old crew, so that crisis might’ve helped us along a bit.

Sam is sitting at a computer terminal, but they’re also surrounded by paper printouts. Starmaps, it looks like, with pen lines and notes on them.

“Working?” I jokingly chide them. “On a captain-enforced holiday?”

“Technically, I’m not working,” Sam says.

“Ah, an astronavigator looking at stars isn’t working. Of course.”

They flush. “I’m making constellations for Hylara.”

“You’re… what?”

“Our destination is several decades of lightyears from Earth. The stars are going to look very different from there.”

“Right. So?”

“So. Every early human civilisation looked up at the stars and saw stories. Constellations form the bedrock of some of our oldest cosmologies and folklore. Now, we have a little too much knowledge these days to look up and see gods in the nuclear fires above us, but humans will never, ever stop telling stories. Parents will show children bright patterns in the sky and tell them about the animals and people that they are. I’m trying to make some speculative guesses about what they’re going to be.”

“Oh.” I bite back the obvious question of ‘why?’, and instead ask, “Any cool ones?”

We actually have a very distinct turtle.” They point out some linked stars on a printout that do indeed look a lot like a turtle. “A lot of constellations have fairly abstract shapes, so it’s hard to predict them in advance since you can see many shapes in the same star group, but that one’s pretty clear, I think.”

“Oh, yeah. So there’ll be a turtle.”

“Assuming.”

“Assuming what?”

“Assuming Hylara has turtles. It may not be a viable environment for raising our turtle eggs, even if terraformation goes well.”

That’s something I hadn’t really appreciated – Hylara may not have turtles. It might not have slipfish, or violetwing butterflies, or parrots or tuna or a hundred thousand plant species. It’s very unlikely to have big game animals within our lifetime – the size of the livable sphere will depend on how much atmosphere we can generate and maintain, an entire planet’s atmosphere can’t be made breathable within any reasonable length of time, and big game animals require a lot of space – but it might never have them. Storage space for living organisms on the ship is limited; we don’t have anything even close to every Earth species aboard. Of the organisms we do have, our ability to create an environment for them depends on a lot of estimated but largely unknown factors; we know that Hylara is a carbon-heavy planet like Earth, but until we’re close enough and travelling slow enough to take detailed readings we can’t be sure how much water it has, or nitrogen or hydrogen or oxygen. Do we have enough to generate oceans? Do the planets tectonics or elemental makeup make oceans a good idea? Can we liberate enough oxygen from somewhere to ever have a full planetary breathable atmosphere? The Courageous has a lot of oxygen, but not a planet’s worth. Obviously.

I knew from the beginning that the world we were building was going to be relatively small, at least for the duration of my lifetime. It hadn’t really occurred to me that it might also be relatively lifeless. Hylara may very well not have turtles.

I shake the thought off. “Well, let’s hope they keep some.”

“Also, there’s this.” They point out another constellation. It’s a line of stars, oddly straight, with several stars above and below it. Sam has drawn a straight line down the central line of stars and used the rest to draw a horizontal cylinder, the line going through its centre. There is a particularly bright star almost exactly in the centre of the circular end of the cylinder.

I frown at it. It’s far less obvious than the turtle. “What am I looking at?”

Sam smiles. “That is the constellation ‘Courageous’.”

Ah. Yes. A tubular spaceship. “You think our descendants will turn us into a constellation?”

“Of course. Earth is sixty five lightyears away. They can’t contact them on any practical scale; there might be ceremonial transmissions but proper communication is impossible on that kind of time delay. We will be their origin story. ‘Where did we all come from, daddy?’ ‘Well, son, life evolved in a far away place, and then it came down from the sky, and all of the birds and the fish and the bugs and the people poured out into the world.’ Which is why it’s stupid that there’s so few cameras and microphones and stuff on this ship.”

“Um,” I say, “surveillance was kept light on purpose, to protect the mental health of the crew. It was thought that the barbaric overmonitoring that plagued early space travel would be particularly stressful over the course of decades, and since the crew would have to stay functional for decades, was deemed potentially dangerous.” This was a topic that Fir used to harp on about a lot.

Sam rolls their eyes. “They’re astronauts, they can handle it. But these are vitally important historical records that simply are not going to exist. We’re robbing our children so badly.”

I shrug. It hadn’t been my intention to make history when I’d gotten onto the Courageous. I mean, obviously, the colony is going to make history, but I mean personally. I guess all of our names are going to be in the Hylaran history books, though – the heroic reserve crew who managed to limp the ship home to Hylara. Assuming we make it.

I leave Sam to the constellations and head for Storage Ring 3. This requires moving through Chronostasis Ring 2, my own chronostasis ring, which still freaks me out a bit, to be honest. Especially at the moment, with Rynn-Hatson on the mind; I was one chronostasis ring away from CR1. One ring away from the one he engineered first, the ring where Tal and all those other people were engineered against their will, the ring where almost all of the brains had been hijacked, the ring where Reimann launched his axe assault, the ring that I ejected into space. I try to move quickly, try not to think about how for those people, the chronostasis pods really were the old world sarcophagi they always remind me of from watching too many horror movies. An astral burial among the stars in their grand, giant tomb.

I’m so focused on rushing through that I almost walk right past our dear captain. His back is to me, that confident, charismatic bearing obvious even in his casual stance, left hand with the missing nails curled around a cup of something, probably coffee. I mustn’t be making much noise, because I’m almost past him before he turns and rests those bright, commanding eyes on me, mouth automatically curling into his characteristic confident smile.

Except there’s something wrong with his smile today.

He looks like he’s about to cry.

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