Resurrection (5 page)

“Mechanic.” The Captain greeted him warmly and gestured for him to have a seat. There was tea in a pot, and the Mechanic poured the Captain and himself a cup each.

The Captain had known the Mechanic since his earliest years in the space services on Herrod. The Mechanic had been in charge of the shuttle that ferried the Captain from Herrod to the asteroid belt during his years establishing a colony there, and he had served with the Captain on a dozen other missions. They were not exactly friends, for the Captain was certainly the senior of the two, but the Captain felt they were as close to being friends as two men in their relative positions could be.

“Oh, that’s very good tea, Captain,” the Mechanic said, leaning back in his chair and smiling as he sipped the hot, sweet liquid.

The Captain had brewed the drink himself. Making the perfect pot of tea was one of his special talents, something he never relegated to an assistant, and the Mechanic’s compliment pleased him.

“Tell me about the crew, Mechanic,” the Captain said after he had breathed in the aroma of the tea and taken several sips from his own cup. “What’s the general tone as we approach deceleration?”

“Good, I think, Captain. There is nervousness, of course, for who really knows what it will be like when we land? But they will follow your lead. They look to you to learn what their own reactions should be. They trust you.”

“Good, because I’m nothing but excited.”

“Then they’ll be excited,” the Mechanic said. “Especially when these damned checklists are done and we are allowed to get on with our jobs.”

“I heard you had a bit of an incident with the Engineer.”

“We’re all chafing a bit under his minute examinations, Captain. What can you expect?”

“Was there some problem with your station?”

“No, no. Everything’s in working order. But the Engineer has to find something he can order to be fixed. Otherwise, he wouldn’t feel it was his mission.”

The Captain smiled slightly at this. It was true, the Engineer had a proprietary—some might even say arrogant—attitude toward both the ship and the mission. “At any rate, the inspections will be done soon.”

“May the mother be blessed for that,” the Mechanic said, raising his glass and downing the remainder of his tea.

“Until then, you should be more careful.”

“Atmosphere entry in five minutes, twenty-four seconds,” the Engineer called out to the bridge at large. “Captain, I am taking the pilot chair.”

“Yes,” the Captain said, watching the projections in front of him on a foldout screen. He could see their approach line through Earth’s atmosphere.

The Engineer slipped into the low booth positioned at the front end of the
Champion
’s bridge. The booth had sat unused, except for weekly inspections, since initial take off months earlier. Inside was a chair and an array of controls that differed from others in the surrounding room. This was the chair for piloting the ship through atmosphere.

They had made the shift back into sub–light speeds without incident. For the past two weeks they had been decelerating as they neared their target. They had now been circling Earth for a full day and had chosen their landing site, within easy reach of the first civilization they would study. There was nothing left to do but land.

The Engineer strapped himself into the chair and slid his arms into the control mechanisms, which wrapped around his forearms and had levers for each of his fingers.

“Atmosphere shields, Engineer,” the Captain said.

“Yes, sir.” The Engineer’s left arm moved, sliding the shield lock into place. There was a faint vibration as the shields closed over the entire front portion of the ship, making it aerodynamic for its descent to the planet below.

In a moment, the whole ship began to vibrate. It was a shock after months of perfectly smooth motion, but the crew was prepared; on the bridge and throughout they were strapped into landing chairs.

The Engineer’s fingers and arms were manipulating the controls, guiding the ship through the window he saw projected before him, guiding it to a safe trajectory through the upper layers of atmosphere and then onto a dwindling heading that would take them to their target landing area.

“Stratosphere cleared,” the Engineer said softly, his quiet voice being carried directly to the Captain’s ear, just as the Captain’s was to his.

“Stratosphere cleared,” the Captain repeated.

The shaking abated as the ship adjusted to its new medium and began to brake.

“Course set and locked, Captain,” the Engineer said.

The ship made a long, long, falling arc through the atmosphere for several hours, until, as they approached their destination, they were only a few miles from the surface.

As the ship entered the final stage of flight, its engines released a great blast of heat and light, diffusing the excess energy still left over from the Eschless Funnel drives.

On the ground below, city-dwellers, farmers, artisans, noblemen, and servants living along the Nile River turned their eyes to the sky and caught a glimpse of a large metallic bird with a taillike fire and a cry like thunder splitting the heavens.

The survey crew had arrived.

One Year Ago

The last curtain of gray rolled back, and Pruit opened her eyes in the biofluid of her crib. She was awake again. And this was year seventeen.

She brought her eyes into focus as the biofluid began to drain. Niks was not sitting over the crib. This should have been surprising, but in her barely conscious state, all Pruit felt was a sense of relief. He had reverted to regulation waking protocol, she assumed. He was lying in his own crib and waking simultaneously with her. The life-systems monitoring computer was controlling the cribs automatically, just as it should.
But why now?
she wondered, as full consciousness began to return.
Why now after seventeen wakes?

The plantglass slid back, and the colder air of the ship washed over her. The crib’s arms withdrew into the wombwalls.

Pruit grasped the top of the crib with her hands and pulled herself to a sitting position. She expected to find Niks emerging from his crib at the same moment, his hair dark and wet from the biofluid, his face weak but smiling. Instead, she found herself staring at the closed top of his crib.

No. She saw after a few moments that it was not completely closed. The plantglass was slightly ajar.

She felt a surge of panic. Her mind cleared of sleep, and her eyes whipped to the manual controls above Niks’s crib. There were four blue lights glowing on the panel. Blue meant danger. Or malfunction.

Pruit hauled herself to her feet. The final bloodarms, snaking out of the veins of her legs, snapped out of her skin and recoiled against the wombwall with her sudden motion. She steadied herself against lightheadedness, then swung out of the crib and reached for the controls.

She hit the button to retract his glass. The glass did not move. She pushed the button again, holding it in to reset its function. Slowly, the plantglass slid back.

Pruit stared into the crib. Inside was a shell, a husk. Where Niks’s body should have been lying, encased in biofluid and nurtured by the crib’s arms, there was a dry crib and, resting within, a desiccated human form.

Pruit’s legs gave out beneath her, and she fell onto the edge of his crib.

“Blessed Life!” she breathed. “Niks…”

For it was Niks, without doubt. She touched him. His face, despite it’s contorted appearance, was recognizable. His body was as dry as a reed, thin and tiny, all fluid gone, all life gone. One arm was out of place, as though Niks had reached up toward the plantglass, tried to pry it open.

Before Pruit could control her body, she was turning her head aside, and a wave of nausea hit. She retched and threw up the biofluid left in her stomach.

“Central, wake!” she yelled.

“I’m here.”

“Central, Niks is…Review his crib data!”

“The life-systems computer has not given the data to Central yet.”

Pruit clenched her teeth in frustration. The life-systems computer was an autonomous subsection of the Central computer system. It had been designed that way so a malfunction in the overall ship would not necessarily impact the health of the crew.

“Central, override! Tell me what happened.”

There was a brief pause, and then Central spoke. The computer’s voice, usually blandly pleasant, had dropped to a quiet, firm tone. The voice programming would only do that in situations where the data it had to impart, based on the instructions of its programmers, was judged to have potential emotional impact on the crew.

“Pruit, Niks’s crib reports that Niks is no longer alive.”

Pruit’s head was in her hands, and she was looking down at the dried body in the crib. Her eyes were burning.

“I know that, Central,” she said quietly. “Tell me why.”

“It happened ten months and fifteen days ago,” Central said, reviewing the data. “It was not a malfunction in the crib.”

“Then what?”

“It appears Niks left his skinsuit on when he entered stasis.”

“Saving Father…” she whispered.

She and Niks were both fitted with skinsuits, a web of cells that lived in the upper layers of their skin and could retreat back into their bodies or rise to the surface to provide an additional layer of “skin” as needed to protect them from microorganisms in strange environments.

They activated their skinsuits as a matter of course upon waking, to protect themselves from any radiation or stray organisms in the ship. They had to be deactivated prior to stasis, however, for they would, by their very nature, repel the advances of the crib and treat the bioarms as a threat. Since their earliest training for this mission they had drilled the simple procedure for deactivating the suit before stasis. It should have been second nature to Niks.

She could imagine what had happened. The crib had tried to activate. Niks’s skinsuit had repelled it. The crib had continued its standard functions and begun to assume control of Niks’s body. This would have caused the skinsuit to draw more heavily on the resources in his body to put up greater resistance, acting on the erroneous assumption that his body was under heavy attack. Ultimately, the skinsuit would have drained him in a misguided effort to save him. As the scenario played out in her head, Pruit felt a great surge of impotent frustration. After all their worries about the hazards of the stasis cribs, Niks had been killed not by his crib at all, but by his skinsuit, a mechanism designed solely to enhance his life.

Niks must have realized that something was wrong as he was falling into sleep. He had tried to pry open the plantglass, but by then he must have been half in stasis with his body half dead. It had been too late. Those who had designed the ship could not anticipate every possible crew error.

Pruit pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to wipe out the thought of Niks struggling in the biofluid. She couldn’t avoid the image. She pushed herself away from the crib and stood up.

“Central, take control of the life-systems computer,” she ordered. “Fill Niks’s crib with biofluid.”

“May I ask why?” Central said, still using the quiet tone.

“I want all ship life-systems resources used. We are going to regenerate him.”

There was a long pause as Central scanned through its vast databanks of programming instructions, looking for an appropriate response to this irrational request. After several long moments, the computer spoke.

“Pruit, that is not possible.”

“It is possible!” she yelled, looking down at the remains of Niks. “Fill the crib!”

At her command, biofluid poured into the crib. Niks’s body was so light it began to float. Pruit’s stomach turned again, and she averted her eyes. That was Niks in there; that was him, hollow and dry…

“Pruit, what you ask is not possible,” Central said slowly and clearly. “We have no such resources on this ship. It is doubtful such resources exist even on Herrod.”

Pruit did not respond. If only she could shut his crib, go back to sleep, and wake in a year to find that none of this had happened. She stared at a corner of the tank, watching it fill, avoiding the sight of the floating husk within.

She knew that Central was right. Niks’s was gone. He had died ten months ago, from a stupid mistake, a mistake that was easily avoidable. And it was her fault. If she had insisted on following their sleep protocol, they would have caught his error before it was too late. She had been flattered by his code-breaks, and that had cost him his life. She sank down to the floor and began to cry.

Several hours later, Pruit had dressed herself. She was not wearing her coveralls. She had put on her dress uniform, a slim red jacket and tan pants, silver braid twisted around either arm as a sign of her rank, and several medals ranged on a vertical band along her upper sleeve.

Niks was wrapped in a blanket in her arms. He weighed almost nothing. She stood in front of the sentient tank, the large, dark box situated at one end of the ship that had sat unused until now.

“Central,” she said, “fill the tank so the ship can reclaim the body.”

The door of the tank sat at waist level, and it slid open to reveal a long, flat tray, large enough to hold two adult humans lying side by side and about nine inches deep. The tray was filling with biofluid.

Pruit pulled out the tray and carefully set Niks’s blanketed body upon it. Then she touched the panel and watched the tray retract and the door slide shut. The tank would break down the body and reclaim the chemicals into the ship’s life-system.

“Central, open log.”

“The log is ready for your entry.” The voice was still gentle, and Pruit hated the computer for knowing she was vulnerable.

She stared at the tank. That was not Niks inside. Niks, the spirit, the man, had left his body here ten months ago. Where was he now? Had he returned to their home on Herrod? Was he already a child in his next life, thinking of her, wondering about her?

“I, Sentinel Defender Pruit Pax of Senetian, report the death of my shipmate, Sentinel Defender Niks Arras of Telivein. I am assuming command of this mission. Central, please post time and date. Close log,” she said quietly.

Her hand was touching the tank, and she imagined that she was touching him. Clasped within her hand was the small crystal that had hung around his neck. She wore an identical crystal around her own. The crystals were ancient. They had been a parting gift from the commanders of the Sentinel. They were small, no longer than her little finger, and of similar girth. They were of a clear orange cast, with two blue data bands. They were both partially damaged, with cracks here and there from being crushed at some point in their history. But with an ancient crystal reader, parts of the data they held was still decipherable. They contained several poems.

Her favorite ran thus:

Yea for we are the conquerors

And all that is lies before us

A black domain of stars

And we the brightest lights within it

 

She loved that poem. It expressed the naïve, exuberant sense of destiny of those ancient Kinley who were reaching for the stars. It was a simple, beautiful, and proud view of the universe and the Kinley place within it. Such childlike certainty of place could have only occured before the Great War, before they were pounded to near oblivion. She and Niks had shared that poem with each other, had taken it as their personal mantra. It reminded them both of what their race could be and tied Pruit even more strongly to the heart of herself that said to the Lucien, “You won’t win…”

Now the meaning of the poem seemed hollow without him by her side to share it. She crushed the hard surface of the crystal into her palm as she leaned against the tank.

Niks. She remembered their first kiss, years before. They had been standing in the park with the light of late afternoon trickling in through the city dome. Their lips had touched, and it had been right. She had loved him immediately. She had always loved him. Her mate. Her partner for life.

She knew she should say good-bye. She should open her mouth and tell Niks good-bye. But she could not. She was thinking of the way he liked to kiss her belly button, of his hands when the touched her, of his face. She was thinking of the intimate moments they had shared in their years together.

She found that her head was against the tank and she was crying. His body was probably dissolved by now. There would be no trace of him, just a blanket floating in the biofluid. After another year of sleep she would be at their destination. Their whole mission lay ahead, and she was alone.

She moved to a putty control pad and found herself accessing Central’s speech controls. Almost in a trance, she commanded the computer to assume Niks’s voice. Central had hundreds of hours of records of them speaking, and it was a simple matter to execute her command.

“Central?” she asked tentatively after withdrawing her hand from the controls.

“Yes?”

Pruit’s heart jumped, because it was Niks’s voice coming from the walls. Some objective part within her recognized that she was not thinking rationally. It did not matter to her at this moment; she wanted to hear him, to speak with him, to know that she was not by herself.

“Niks,” she said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this without you.”

“I—”

“Just let me talk, Central,” she said quietly.

Central fell silent.

Pruit took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I know how to live if you’re gone,” she whispered, embarrassed that she was speaking to the computer, but somehow still comforted. Even as she spoke the words aloud, she knew that they weren’t true. Without Niks, she could not see herself being happy, for he was the one who had taught her happiness. But that did not alter the purpose of her life. There had been a core of steel in her since she joined the Sentinel.

Her hand strayed to her arm, and her fingers moved over the medals pinned there. There were several for space missions she had flown prior to this one, most with the purpose of locating precious metals from asteroids. One medal was for finding a potential breach of the main city dome before a leak could occur. Her vigilance had saved thousands from radiation exposure. Her fingers moved to the topmost medal. This was a Star of Valor, for tracking down that Lucien spy.

She felt the grief of Niks’s death, but she knew this would not incapacitate her. The grief was real, but her determination was stronger. She would give her whole life to fight for her people’s survival. She thought of the words of their poem, and she knew her own heart.

“Pruit…” It was Central, with Niks’s voice.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t mean it. I can live. There is a chance for us, and I will take it. Even alone.”