122: INFORMATION

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“Why Dor Delphin?” Lina asks, frowning.

“Because,” the captain explains, “he’s probably got information, and he doesn’t have any authority. When we wake the astronauts, Captain Kae Jin is probably going to want to take command of the ship, being easily the most qualified person to do so; good for her, it’s absolutely the right move If we can trust her motivations, and we certainly wouldn’t have grounds to stop her. But I’m sure we don’t need to go over the many, many reasons we all have to be suspicious, or at least uncertain, of what her motivation and priorities are. We don’t know how aware she or her surviving crew were of anything that went on on this ship. We don’t know if they were aware that they’d be reaching an already settled planet. I’m sure she wants to get the contents of this ship planetside safely as much as the rest of us do, but the last thing I want to be responsible for is dragging these people across light decades of space only to hand them over to someone who’s going to drop them into a bunch of Hylaran labour camps for the rest of their lives or something. We need to know who knows what and what the plan was here, and I absolutely don’t want to be forced into a position where we need to consider mutiny again, not if we can help it. Captain Sands is going to be awkward enough to explain already. If we have to go against a legitimate captain obeying legitimate legal orders? We probably wouldn’t win, and even if we did… what do we do when it’s time to drop down? Convince the Hylarans to just ignore all that? I want to know as much as possible about what we’re getting into before waking up the astronauts, and Hylara’s not talking to us, leaving us only one option.

“Maybe Dor Delphin intends to take command of the colony or whatever, I don’t know. But what we do know is that on this ship, he has no legitimate authority. He can’t simply take command; he’s not an astronaut, he’s presumably not trained to work this ship, he has no authority. We can simply refuse him and take whatever measures necessary to prevent him from causing problems, without causing any future issues; at most, we might have to play things off as misunderstanding borne of ignorance. So he’s our safest bet, to try to glean what we can, and when we do have to wake Kae Jin’s crew, well, Delphin becomes her problem.”

And so we go to wake Dor Delphin.

The crew gather around an ordinary chronostasis pod in Chronostasis Ring 3. The doctors stand by with their stretcher and various emergency equipment, and Captain Klees starts the revival process.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this. The chronostasis fluid drains away as the lid unlocks and Denish pulls it open to reveal a man of average weight and height, tightly curled black hair tangled around his face and breathing tubes. I release the cable from his cerebral port, and it slides out easily. The doctors pull the lines from his body, and as soon as the breathing tube comes free, it’s clear he’s not breathing.

The Friend slips a portable monitor on his thumb. “No pulse.” Together, the two doctors haul him out of the pod and begin hooking up life support equipment.

“Okay no,” Tinera says. “He is not allowed to die on us.”

“Thirty seven per cent chance,” Tal shrugs.

“I don’t care! He knows too much! He dragged us out across sixty five light years of deep space and now he’s gonna chicken out and die here? No. Fuck off. He’s supposed to wake up and tell us what the fuck is going on.”

“What are his chances of waking up?” Captain Klees asks the doctors.

“It’s a failed revival, so same as always,” Lina says, replacing the chronostasis breathing mask with a new breathing mask. “It’d be a miracle.”

“Put him in the freezer, then. We need the beds for living patients and we’re not in a position to be doing undirected coma science experiments right now.”

The doctors stop messing about with life support equipment. The friend peels back an eyelid, examines Dor’s eye colour, and looks up into mine. But even from standing distance, I can tell that the colour is way off. Better to await another candidate.

“He can’t die,” Tinera insists. “He’s been taunting us with his existence for years and now he’s just not gonna give us any answers? That’s just it?”

“It is somewhat depressing, when you think about it,” I say. “Given that he was probably involved in putting so much of this into motion. To come all this way and then die practically at Hylara without ever seeing it. I feel a bit sorry for him.”

“Feel sorry for the people who died in chronostasis after being dragged out here with very little choice in the matter,” Captain Klees says. “I’m having difficulty shedding too many tears over this guy, all things considered. Of course, this does mean that we have no useful information for waking up the astronauts.”

“Are we doing that then?” Tal asks.

Captain Klees nods. “Twenty four hours to spring clean anything else you want spring cleaned before the professionals show up. If we haven’t heard back from the Hylaran colony by then… well, then there’s no point in delaying things any longer.”

I knock my hip against a chronostasis pod on the way out, because apparently an entire week isn’t long enough to adjust to one eye. ‘You’ll get used to it pretty fast’, the doctors had told me, ‘and before you know it it’ll be time to get used to two eyes again’. At least the skin is thickening up properly. Captain Klees says his jaw feels almost normal, he just has to be careful not to slam his face into anything.

There’s not really anything for anyone but the doctors to do, waiting to revive the crew. Everything that can be spring cleaned has been spring cleaned already. I could clean the kitchen area, I guess. Try to… will my skin to… finish healing faster? The minor damage below the skin has healed completely, so far as I can tell, not counting the eye of course. Modern medicine is amazing.

I find myself in the greenhouse ring, just… kind of not doing anything. Staring at some weeds and wondering if they’re better in the ground or out of it. Clearing the path across the ring from airlock to airlock; we try to keep that smooth and clear for the occasions when we have to wheel stuff through there, and we’ve been neglecting it a bit since this ring became the back of our in-use part of the ship. We’ll probably need to wheel patients from chronostasis rings through there tomorrow. And bodies. I can see wheel impressions in the dirt and overgrown ground cover where Dor must have been wheeled through. I clear the path properly.

Feed the chickens. Check the bees. Visit the graves. I’m not sure I like this practice of burying the dead. On Arborea, the dead feed the fish and the trees immediately and directly, and their less decomposable parts are tied into the roots by divers wherever they’re needed; the dead become part of the whole ecosystem very quickly. There’s no spot you can go to and see where their remains were put, no ‘this is the place where they are decomposing’. The divers don’t even advertise where the bones are, except to take care to make sure they’re in the right cluster’s territory. But here, my dead crewmates are just… there, under the dirt. Being very, very slowly eaten by bugs and bacteria. Right there. Where those lumps are.

As usual, there’s a smattering of paper flowers on the graves. As usual, there’s rather a lot in Sunset and Celi’s in particular, and a handful on most of the others’. Sands’ is particularly neglected (he did try to kill all the people who are leaving the flowers), and Heli’s only has a couple folded in the captain’s careful hand.

I stare at those for a bit, thinking.

Then I poke around my stuff to see if I have any old scrap paper. Most used paper goes into recycling, but I do find the printout of the speech I made to the planet last week. Sam would probably claim it’s a historical document and of sacred importance, but I don’t agree; the speech is in the computer both written and as a vocal recording. We can print out as many copies of it as we want.

I fold a clumsy, unpracticed flower. It’s a simple design, one of the few I know, and I don’t really know how the folds work so the end result is a bit lopsided, but it’s a flower. I stalk over and drop it on the grave of the woman who held me to the ground and tried to convince me to let my friends die for political favours from a murderer captain.

“Just so you know, I still hate you,” I tell the lump in the ground. But then, nothing we do for the dead is really for the dead, is it? It’s for the living. Sometimes ourselves. Sometimes other people.

A chicken pecks my ankle, even though I fed her less than ten minutes ago. I lead her back to her food. She stares at it, then stares at me. She squawks indignantly.

“I’m not going to give you treats,” I tell her. “You’re a strong, independent chicken. Forage your own.”

She squawks again.

I sigh and go looking for some bugs or peas or something.

I should probably be hoarding peas; the fresh fruits and vegetables are going to have to go around more people, once the astronauts are awake. And once we land, well, there probably won’t be any for quite some time. It’ll be old preserved food while we scramble to get algae farms or something similar up as quickly as possible. I don’t foresee any critical shortages, provided we can land everything safely – we were planning for five thousand and we’ll have significantly less than that even when everyone is revived; I don’t know how many Hylarans are in the colony already but they must have been a small group if they made it here in a ship light enough to beat us and then managed to supply themselves for the extra decades it took us to get here. I don’t think we’ll starve, unless something really, really bad happens. But I’m not looking forward to going back to a fully preserved diet.

The Hylaran colony presumably has food production, given that they’ve survived. Maybe we’ll end up waking people really, really slowly, in lockstep with increasing production, using the stores as an emergency food supply. That’d be the sensible way to do it. Then we can stay on fresh food; our food might even improve upon landing. That’s something to look forward to.

If only the colony would actually call us back so we can learn about the situation!

If only Dor Delphin had had the common decency to survive revival and give us some answers!

I find some bugs for the chicken, who eats them without showing a hint of gratitude. Tomorrow, we’re waking astronauts. And at least some of them will surely survive.

Tomorrow, surely, we’ll get at least some answers. We can’t go this far and end up with none.

Even we aren’t that unlucky.

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