123: SIENNA

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The atmosphere around Sienna Kae Jin’s chronostasis pod is… tense. She has a sixty two per cent chance of waking up.

A thirty eight per cent chance that she won’t. A thirty eight per cent chance that we’ll be completing this mission without any trained captains.

“Do it,” Captain Klees says. Lina pokes at the interface, and the pod opens.

Captain Kae Jin isn’t tall. She’s a little bit taller than me, perhaps, with skin nearly black and a significant amount of grey in her tightly curled hair. She’s older, I remember, than the rest of us; all the astronauts are. An extra ten years of service on the ship.

The fluid finishes draining away and the Friend reaches down to carefully disconnect the cerebral stimulator. It comes away clean and easy, of course; no reason it shouldn’t. But I for one breathe a sigh of relief when it does.

Together, the doctors get to work removing inputs and outputs, and we all hold our breath as they carefully remove the oxygen mask.

Her chest continues to rise and fall. Independent breath.

It’s rapid and shallow, but it is independent breath. We all cheer a little as the doctors lift her out of the chronostasis pod and get another oxygen mask on her. I glance at the readouts – all green lights. Successful revival.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Lina tells us, but there’s relief in her voice. “She could have all kinds of dangerous health complications.”

Captain Klees nods. “Everyone is, of course, at the disposal of the doctors. Sienna Kae Jin’s welfare is top priority. Doctors, let me know of any developments as soon as you have them.”

“Yes, Captain.” The Friend’s smile is amused. “Presumably, the whole crew will find a way to be appraised of any medical developments as soon as they happen.”

“I’m sure they will,” Captain Klees agrees. “No need to wake anyone else until we’re sure the captain is stable. We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin here and put any of the astronauts at risk.”

I send another polite query to Hylara about why the fuck they’re not answering our messages. No reply, as usual. What did we do, show up right before everyone down there died? Or irreparably broke their radio equipment? I’ve taken to listening to our record of their initial transmission occasionally, just to make sure I didn’t imagine it. Hearing Cattail say my name, proof that it’s not some prerecorded prank or something. Some people have floated wild theories about how it was synthesised by Amy, still alive in the system somewhere; Tal explained with full conviction that while there are still unexpected little dangers in the system left behind by Amy, the idea that there’s any AI in there aware enough to plan such a thing, and to put together a realistic response based on information the AI didn’t have when CR5 was ejected, is simply not possible. There are at least two people down there; Cattail and their unmet superior. They spoke to us once. They haven’t spoken to us since.

Oh, that raises a good point. Maybe it is only two people down there. Maybe they are out of resources, having lasted so much longer than planned without their Javelin Program resupply. Two people dying suddenly after contact, or being unable to repair their equipment… that I can believe.

The timing is a little suspicious, though. ‘Not talking for unexplained reasons’ still makes more sense than ‘suddenly rendered unable to communicate at this specific worst possible time’.

“I bet we’re a political problem,” Sam suggests. “Coming out of nowhere unexpectedly like this. We probably have a much higher population than they do. They’re probably fighting about what this is going to do to their society and power structure.”

“They’d still send some kind of message,” I point out. “Even a vague one. We’re going to reach their plant no matter what; wouldn’t they want to know about us as much as we want to know about them?”

Sam shrugs. “Maybe it’s been one single committee meeting about the reply that’s just taking a really, really long time. They’re getting snacks brought in. Have sleeping bags in the conference hall.”

“I’ve been in university faculty meetings. I’d believe it.”

We get a basic report in Sienna’s health at breakfast the next morning. “She’s mostly alright, so far as we can tell,” Lina says. “Unusually severe muscular atrophy, mostly in the legs… we suspect some nerve damage caused by the invasive synnerves. Fairly extensive lung damage, nothing an oxygen tank can’t compensate for. The major problem, although we can’t be certain at this stage, is that the lung damage might be symptomatic of an organ collapse cascade.”

“Like with Celi,” Captain Klees says.

“Like with Celi. It might be severe, it might clear itself up with no further damage. Impossible to be sure. The less strain on her body, the better her chances, so we’ve got her on oxygen and in a coma right now. If her lung function drops too low for the oxygen machine to compensate for, that’s pretty much fatal. The choices then are to put her on artificially oxygenated blood, which would put the kind of strain on her body that practically guarantees the collapse of other organs, or a lung transplant, and to be perfectly honest I don’t think the Friend and I can do that without killing her. We’ve been toying with the idea of relieving some of the pressure of blood filtration by putting her on partial dialysis, taking strain off the liver and kidneys, but that creates other potential issues with blood pressure that lowers the total risk but puts more risk on the heart, and heart failure is worse than lung failure.”

“At the moment,” the Friend adds, “there’s little we can do but let her rest and give her oxygen. Doing anything else prematurely creates other risks, and might do more harm than good. We can only trust the body to do its best to take care of itself.”

“Which is what most of medicine is,” Lina adds. “And brings us to a very difficult decision.”

“What decision?” Captain Klees asks.

“When we should wake her up.”

Captain Klees frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Well. The thing about this kind of recovery is that one is never completely through the mire. It’s a bit like cancer in that way; you can treat it and minimise the chances of remission but it’s very, very rare that one can say a cancer is definitively beaten. Induced comas come with their own risks even outside a chronostasis pods – far lower risks than previous generations had to deal with, with modern medicine – but risks all the same, not least of which is you’re spending part of your finite lifetime in a coma. So one might say that the ideal time to wake her up is when the risks of the coma start to outweigh the risks of the strain that being awake would put her under. But, well. In this case, that point is probably when we have access to proper surgeons and properly outfitted surgery. Which is when we reach Hylara.”

“And we need her before then.”

“Yes. Now, we could wake other astronauts and work with just them, but…”

“But?”

“If you had chosen the responsibility of captaining this ship, if you’d given the rest of your life in a choice free from coercion to see these colonists safely to a new home and help them establish it, and difficult situations that were your responsibility developed in the eleventh hour, would you want to sleep through it? She has both a responsibility and a right to do her job, if she’s capable of it, surely?”

“Well, you’re the doctors. What’s the normal way to handle a situation like this?”

Lina shrugs. “Ideally, we’d get the patient’s wishes in advance. If that’s not possible, we ask the next of kin. But Captain Kae Jin’s not capable of advocating for herself and she doesn’t have a next of kin. My suggestion? Start waking the other astronauts, and let them decide when to wake her. They worked with her for 20 years, they presumably know each other well.”

“If I was her,” Sam says, “I’d want to be woken before the rest of the crew. She’ll probably want to be there for them when they wake up.”

“They’re trained astronauts,” Tinera says. “They don’t need their injured captain to hold their hands. Anyway, wouldn’t it be less stressful to wake her last? If you take her out of the coma now, she has to watch all her surviving crewmates get revived, and wonder who’ll live and who will die. I mean, some of them are going to go through that no matter what order we wake them up in, but we should probably make people with less medical complications deal with that stress.”

“They might all have medical complications,” Denish points out. “They are all too old for chronostasis. Computer said that revival chances are the same as everyone else, but computer also said that hijacked colonists had ten per cent chance.”

“I guess we won’t know until we revive them,” Captain Klees says. “But if I were in her position, I’d want to be woken up.”

“Me too,” I say. “If I were in a coma like this and there were problems reviving the people I was responsible for, I’d spend the rest of my life thinking I should have been there. Besides, the rest of the crew are going to find revival a lot less disorienting if the captain they’ve served under for 20 years is there to help explain things.”

“She can regret crew deaths as much as she wants later,” Tinera shrugs, “but her job is to stay alive long enough to help us get the contents of this ship down. If that means sleeping a bit longer, she’ll just have to get over it.”

“With regards to the induced coma, what sort of timeline are we talking?” Captain Klees asks. “I mean, how much does it improve her chances to wake her later rather than now?”

“The stress of waking her crewmates is potentially a relevant factor,” Lina says, “but other than that, the benefits are fairly long term. In a couple of weeks, maybe a month, we could see if her body’s sufficiently prevented a cascade. But if you want her available to advise on the lack of response from Hylara, then there’s not really any point in waiting – waking her tomorrow isn’t any more dangerous than waking her in a week.”

“So if we don’t want her to sleep basically until orbit, there’s no real reason not to wake her immediately. Aside from the stress of reviving her crew.”

“That’s right.”

“We need her for the whole Hylaran contact thing, and she has a right to be involved. So we might as well wake her right away. She has a right to be there for her crew, too.”

“Also,” Tal points out, “we have limited hospital beds and stuff. So there’s probably a best order to revive the crew in; getting everyone will take time. She probably knows the best order.”

Captain Klees nods. “We’ll wake her, then. Any reason to put off doing it now?”

“We should finish breakfast,” Tal says.

The captain stares down at his plate like he’d forgotten it was there. “Right. Yes. Of course.”

So about an hour later, four of us – Captain Klees, myself, and the two doctors – gather in the medbay. It was decided not to overwhelm Captain Kae Jin by cramming the entire crew in there, and the presence of the doctors and captain is obvious, but I’m not really sure why I’m there. I’ve somehow become the Token Non-Convict Representative for talking to new people, even though Sam and Denish are both perfectly capable of fulfilling that role. It’s not like I did a great job of it with Sands.

Captain Kae Jin looks about how she did in the pod, if cleaner and covered in blankets. Her matted hair has been cut off, the lines taken from her arms and their sites covered in antiseptic and little dressings. A single IV line still runs into her arm. The oxygen mask she wears is one of the light models designed to provide a higher concentration without being the whole intake, unlike the complete air masks used in the pods, so a lot more of her face is visible. I try to scrutinise from it what kind of a person she is. Is this someone we can trust?

I don’t learn anything, of course. She’s asleep. It’s just a face.

The Friend injects something into the IV line, and we wait.

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