You might be wondering how you did that. You don’t have hands yet, or feet, or a face. You don’t even have a name yet. I’m going to wait and talk more to your mom before we decide that. There are so many things I need to talk to your mom about right now, but that’s not possible. I managed to make sure we would all survive for the first thirty-six hours of this disaster and right now she’s doing everything she can to make sure we live a lot longer than that. My whole job right now consists of staying awake, which is hard to do after thirty-six straight hours of terror and watching our main power relays in case they start to overload when your mom gets our fusion reactor running again. So I’m just going to talk to you a little longer if that’s okay.
So yeah. Today. Here’s what happened…
1
U.S.S. GALEN
Lieutenant Harry Kim had never been so cold.
He didn’t think he was dead. Pressing against the deck beneath him, he lifted his body and came to his knees. The darkness around him was near absolute. The faintest of orange lights emanated from somewhere behind him, as did a low murmur of pain from he knew not whom. The right side of his head burned with the pricks of countless tiny needles. Lifting a hand to it, he was rewarded with the shock of intense agony consistent with raw flesh meeting anything solid. A slick of blood now coated his fingers.
Where the hell am I?
Behind him, the murmurs became louder, approaching frantic cries.
“Harry? No! Please, no! Harry, help me!”
The thud of something solid hitting the deck was followed by the weight of a body meeting his back. Ice-cold hands groped over his shoulders. Someone was using him to stand up.
“Harry?”
The voice was Nancy Conlon’s.
“Harry, get up!”
He wanted to oblige her. Some distant instinct insisted that he follow her command. But somehow whatever was troubling her seemed very far away.
“God damn it, Harry. Get up! The baby is dying! ”
A jolt of pure adrenaline brought a moment’s clarity. His baby, his daughter, she was there with him. And something was terribly wrong.
A memory that could have happened a thousand years ago slammed into the forefront of his consciousness—he and Nancy standing in open space beneath countless stars, holding each other in an embrace that was as close to holy as he had ever known. Beside them, in a gestational incubator, their daughter, only a few weeks old, floated in fluid that would sustain her while she developed over the next several months.
The sheer joy of the moment returned to him, warmth rising from the center of his chest to the top of his head. Something important had just happened between them. Something unexpected and impossible existed between him and Nancy. For the first time since he had learned of her illness, he believed that they were finally in this fight together. Three had become one.
Now Nancy’s breath was random and panicked. She had moved away from him and was pounding on the solid metal door that separated the small space they occupied from the rest of the ship.
What ship?
The Galen.
“Nancy?”
“We have to get out of here,” Conlon screamed as she continued pounding her hands raw. “Help us, please somebody anybody please help!”
Rising on unsteady feet, he ignored a wave of nausea washing through him. Tripping past Nancy, he checked his fall by placing both hands on the bulkhead beside the door. Where the flat of his hands met the solid tritanium plating, searing heat shocked his flesh.
But it wasn’t heat.
It was cold.
A few new thoughts suddenly occurred to him. No room on a starship should ever be this cold. Environmental systems were offline and had clearly been offline for some time. That was bad. The door sensors were also offline, suggesting that main power might have been cut from this area of the ship. Also very bad.
On the plus side, he and Nancy were still alive. So there was enough residual oxygen present to sustain life. He had no idea how long that would last. Given the other catastrophic indicators, it was a good bet that the answer to that question was not very long, but in assessing any survival situation, it was important to focus on the positives as well as the negatives.
Spent and nearly hyperventilating, Nancy turned her back to the door and sunk to the deck. Her eyes were glued to the incubator where the baby floated. Power indicators on the side were already in the red.
“Main power is offline. We need power cells, backup batteries, anything,” she said, shifting past panic and trying desperately to simply work the problem.
The problem?
The baby was dying.
Nancy had moved across the small room and was searching the few cabinets for anything that might help. “Hypos, dermal regenerators, no, no, come on! Where are the emergency supplies?” she shouted.
Suddenly, literally nothing else mattered to Harry Kim. For weeks this child, his daughter, had lived in a wasteland in his mind, alive, but not meant to live, present, but not yet real. Nancy had all but decided to terminate the pregnancy for reasons that essentially boiled down to her unwillingness to bring into the world a child she would likely not live long enough to raise.
But before she could act on that choice, she had suffered a brain hemorrhage. The life of the embryo had been in danger, so it had been transported into
