“Everything you will need will be in this box…”
When you first go into space it is the most desolate and strangely beautiful thing you’ll ever see. There are vast tracts of inky emptiness, pin pricks of light shimmering in the infinite distance but every so often you see something wonderful that sears itself into your consciousness forever.
Now, I can’t even bring myself to look out of the window at the gaudy lights and boiling gas of the nebula beyond the station: it looks fake, like a bad holo-show. The medical centre is a vast, cold tundra of healing. All the staff are methodical and pleasant enough yet at the same time brash and thoughtlessly noisy. My room is a painfully clinical, porcelain white cell with sharp edged lighting. Even the bed sheets feel hard and unforgiving, scratching against my survivor’s guilt at each slow turn of my tired body.
I had been in cryo-sleep for just over 65 years when the crew of the Anagolay found me. Once the cryo-bed had been cleared to enter the station it had taken the Techs over a standard week to work out how to open the chamber without killing me: technology like this doesn’t exist anymore, not since the “hyper-lanes” were discovered.
They tell me that, according to old medical databases, disorientation is common after a prolonged cryo-sleep. They also mentioned that I missed the record for longest sleep by 2 months – helping my unwanted celebrity status to wane more quickly. The physical effects don’t really bother me. They’re slowly passing and I feel stronger every day. I’m now well enough to walk around unaided. I’m slow and shambling, I am technically nearly a hundred, but it is good to feel my body move again. The food here is good, much better than the ration tubes on the Ampelos, and the water tastes a lot fresher. I’m looking forward to my first real cup of tea.
I need to concentrate so much when I walk it stops me remembering, thankfully, stops me grieving for my mothers. Bev and Anika were both lost decades ago never really knowing what had happened to me. They must have grieved and, I hope, found ways to move on.
At least they had each other.
The Ampelos had been eighteen standard months into the survey mission when we were woken from cryo-sleep. The ship, as planned, had manoeuvred us alongside the class three asteroid. The captain reviewed the mission logs and deemed the risks to be within acceptable parameters so set us all to work. I spent most of the next two days in the tech bay running the diagnostics on the mineral probes we’d soon be firing into the slowly twisting lump of unremarkable looking rock.
I was intent on the telemetry readouts as the probes hurtled toward the asteroid when the warning alarms started to blare out. The displays in front of me started to shudder and vibrate, the screens fizzing with static. Then the support struts and wall panels undulated in a nauseating ripple along the tech bay and I was plunged into a furious darkness. My earpiece that had been filled with a melee of shouted commands, bursts of white noise and terrified questions abruptly snapped into silence.
It was over in seconds.
By the time I regained consciousness Harper and I were the only two left.
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