121: RESPONSE

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I don’t take a nap right away. I take a shower, being careful of my face, then pause to take a good look at myself in the mirror.

The face looks…

Well. A lot better than when it didn’t have skin, that’s for sure.

Strangely, my right eye is the most normal-looking part of the injury. The doctors had determined that the ruined mess of the real eye was more dangerous than helpful and taken it out, replacing it with a glass dummy so that the damaged skin and flesh around it could grow back in the correct shape. It’s not the exact colour of my real eye, but you have to look pretty closely to tell. And nobody’s doing that, with the skin to distract them.

The skin.

It’s very thin, and a little shiny under the transparent protective film holding it all in place until it bonds properly. It doesn’t hurt as much as I expect it to, even though I didn’t take a painkiller; it just feels raw. Strange. It’s the wrong shape, shiny and new and clinging elastically to the fat and muscle beneath, not thick enough to properly soften their shapes yet and missing a lifetime of wrinkles. Even when it grows in properly, the lack of wrinkles is going to make my face look lopsided. The doctors warned me that wrinkles aside, it might sit differently on the structures beneath, make my face look very slightly different in shape. Others probably wouldn’t notice, but I probably will.

Others will notice the lack of eyebrow and eyelashes, if I don’t get them put back in once everything heals up. The Friend was pretty emphatic that I should at the very least get eyelashes. Brows and lashes help protect the eye, apparently.

But the most startling thing about the new skin is the colour. Like all fresh-sprayed skin, it’s pale. Paler than Martian skin, paler even than the Friend. Pale like some newborns, pale like the “white” people so common in pre-Neocambrian footage, and flushed an unnatural red – well, a natural red, I suppose, since it’s the blood and muscle beneath the thin, slightly translucent skin. Looking very closely, I can even make out a couple of grey points where the doctors put careful, tiny stitches to hook damaged muscles and tendons into the right places and ensure that everything heals properly. I touch the skin over them and can barely feel them. Not bad, for ‘not surgeons’.

The skin will darken over time. Depending on how well the doctors managed to colour match it, the difference between old skin and new might be completely invisible, aside from the lack of wrinkles. But I’m not holding out too much hope for that; it’s usually not possible to colour match perfectly.

After everything we’ve been through, a random disconnected pipe booby trapped by a dead AI got me. Ridiculous.

I shouldn’t be touching it this much. It’s still fragile and unformed under the protective film, still setting down its dermal layers. I could break it and open up wounds again that’ll scar if the doctors don’t reapply it. I could cause weird deformations in it. I shouldn’t touch it so much.

I can’t help it.

Because it’s ridiculous when you think about it, utterly ridiculous that this is going to heal. That despite everything, this ship’s left barely a physical mark on me. Cuts glued together, bones cemented to heal near-flawlessly; even the synnerves in my body and brain are one drop through an electrostatic shield and an immune reaction away from complete removal. Dead colonists will donate eyes aplenty and the Hylaran colony down there presumably has surgical robots and soon the only evidence of this hell of a spaceship ride will be a healed-over port in the back of my skull, some scarring over my removes-and-replaced ID chip, and a bit of skin that looks too young. And if I kill off the synnerves, I could even have the port removed! Why not? It wouldn’t be attacked to anything but bone! The big un-healable injury I got on this journey? Happened before we even left, when I had my rib removed to leave with the Greaves cluster. Everything after that has just been…

Just been five years of intermission.

Just been forty years of intermission.

Just been a hundred and… thirty-ish, maybe?… years of intermission.

While we wait aboard a long-distance bus, couriers and cargo for someone else’s colony.

Stupid thing to think, that. I mean, it’s still our colony. The fact that there’s already colonists down there is a good thing. It means that basic facilities already exist, saves us a lot of work, a lot of risk. It’s not like I was super into the romantic notion of being the First Initial Settlers On A New Frontier or anything. Given that eighty per cent of our colonists had to be bought from prison, such people are probably in short supply.

But I can’t help but think about Tinera’s theory, about how we might be a resupply for an Antarctic colony that Antarctica tricked the rest of the world into paying for, and about the ridiculous supply of neurostimulators aboard and Captain Klees’ theory about the convicts as a disposable labour force, and about the kill switches in eighty per cent of our colonists’ hearts and the casual disregard with which two rings of colonists were engineered with presumably experimental life-extending therapies and given over to an AI experiment, and about the systems designed to kill us if we reached the planet under the wrong conditions – if, if Tinera was right, we reached the planet first, ensuring that we were destined to be somebody’s resupply, or nothing.

A lot of people have tried to manipulate or coerce me, in my life. Some of them have succeeded. But I’ve never felt as used as I do right now, herded onto this ship with lies from the mouths of people who almost certainly thought they were telling the truth (everything about the setup suggests subterfuge, the Javelin Program creators and workers as a whole almost definitely believed in their vision), to carry sheet metal and dome canvas and frozen goat embryos for a colony launched on ships that probably didn’t even exist yet when we said goodbye to our old world forever.

No matter. We are here, and we’re alive. And two months away is our new home. Nothing to do now but make sure we get everyone down as safely as possible, into a society where everyone can be as well treated as possible. And in a few hours, we’ll have the information we need to do that.

In a few hours, we all find ourselves gathering in the engine room once again, to receive something more surprising than any of us could have predicted.

Nothing at all.

“They’re doing what we did,” Captain Klees suggests, pacing. “Taking time to put together a proper message. Organising things. There’s probably a whole lot of scrambling and bureaucracy involved when the long-thought-dead resupply ship shows up out of nowhere and messages you under a name that’s not supposed to be on the crew.”

Sam nods. “It’s a big moment. Might take them a few hours.”

A few more hours pass.

“You know,” Lina frowns, “if I had suddenly re-established contact with a long-thought-dead resupply ship, especially if I was only set up as a small colony awaiting said supply ship like Tinera suggests and everything we had was well past its due date and we might desperately need said supplies, I would’ve sent a courtesy response immediately after their message so they knew it was received. I mean, this is kind of important.”

“No it isn’t.” Tinera shakes her head. “We’re coming to Hylara no matter what. There’s no loss in not talking to us until they have to. This is the kind of disregard I was talking about.”

“I think you’re reading a lot of maliciousness into a simple failure to respond,” Captain Klees says. “Even if they don’t care about us, they’ll want friendly relations until we land, and they presumably have a lot more questions about the condition of the ship. That part is kind of important to everyone involved. Aspen, Tal, send another message asking what the fuck is up. But politely.”

We send another message asking what the fuck is up (but politely). We await a response.

A day passes.

Another day.

On the third day at breakfast, Denish speaks up. “I have checked over and over again, with computer assessments and hull robots. They say, transmission hardware is working, they say dish is working. Tal checks software and is working. But it makes no sense that they do not talk to us. Something must be wrong with transmitter or receiver. I go out on the hull today and look manually.”

“No.” Captain Klees shakes his head. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t have to do that kind of stuff any more, we’re slow enough for the robots now.”

“They are not finding the problem. If something is broken – ”

“With this specific timing? Unlikely. It’s not worth your life, ‘Nish. When we make it to orbit, if they’re still not communicating, we can start to take risks double-checking things, but for now we have plenty of time. We wait and see if they respond.”

“It might be a problem on their end,” I suggest. “We don’t know much about their climate. Maybe some sort of persistent storm or, I dunno, electromagnetic event?”

“Good point. Sam, check for that with whatever relevant means we have. You can turn the engine off if you need to, but warn us first.”

“It is also possible that they are experiencing a routine equipment failure,” the Friend points out. “They thought we were dead, and we didn’t detect any radio activity before contacting them, suggesting that they don’t have long-range radio communications with anything. It’s entirely possible that their radio equipment hasn’t been maintained for decades. We’re lucky for getting our initial transmission through. They might simply be upgrading their systems, or something might have broken.”

“Hell of a time for something to break,” Tinera growls. “And the polite thing to do would be to tell us in advance if they’re taking their systems offline to fix or upgrade them.”

Sam does the readings. They reveal no unusual weather or electrical activity.

We receive no messages.

After a week, Captain Klees calls a meeting. He clenches his newly healed jaw and declares, “That’s it. We need information. Nobody on this crew has any fucking clue what we’re flying into and it seems that Hylara has decided not to tell us. We need somebody who might.”

“Sienna Kae Jin’s crew,” Lina says.

The captain nods. “We don’t know how much they know, but they can’t possibly know less than we do. There’s a chance that Captain Kae Jin, or at least some of her people, were aware of this Antarctic colony. If we’re lucky we might even revive a living conspirator from the brain thing; they have to know about this, it’s the only thing that makes their experiment make any sense. And we have to revive the crew eventually. I was hoping to wait until we were in orbit, but this existing colony thing throws all that out the window. We need answers and we need someone who might be better equipped for making landmark diplomacy decisions, depending on how this goes. But I don’t want to wake Captain Kae Jin right away. Not without more information on what her plans might be. Doctors, get the usual revival medical stuff ready. Denish, put a normal atmosphere in Chronostasis Ring 3. We have a chronostasis patient to revive.”

“Ring three?” Denish asks. “Are you waking…?”

“Yep.” He grins. “Dor Delphin. Let’s go wake ourselves a billionaire.”

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