“Obviously some of us survived.” He waved his own grafted hand, and winced when he noticed it. “More or less. You said I was the first awake.”
“Yes.”
“Am I the only?”
“So far,” I said, having checked that it was true. “Biologist Cirocco Oni is undergoing treatments for cryoburn before awakening, and Specialist First Rank Jones should be awake in the next dia or so.”
There was no flicker of recognition in his face when I said either name—but with over ten thousand crewmates, I would not expect anyone to know them all personally.
“There are thirteen more of your crewmates at the hospital already, and more on the way.”
“Will all of them live?”
“It is”—I searched for the right word—“unlikely.”
“How many more will make it?”
“I can’t be sure.”
He stared at me. “How many more are being retrieved now?”
“I also can’t be sure of that.”
“God damn it to hell, Doc, why the hell are you bothering to talk to me if you’re not going to tell me anything?”
There was the toddler. I flinched, but he didn’t come at me. Just as well. In his current state he wouldn’t have stood much of a chance, and I would have felt bad hitting him. And my whole body would have hurt even more afterward than it usually did.
I sighed and said, “Your ship is an extremely long way away. Lightspeed communication—pulsed lasers, for example—lags significantly behind simple ship travel. They’ll be back here centuries before any direct message they could have sent.”
Bit by bit, I watched Master Chief Carlos relax against the pillow. I was confident that he was forcing himself to. I was impressed that he had the ability.
“Awkward for RSVPing to parties,” he said. “You might as well drop by with regrets.”
“Or they can find out you’re not coming after you’re dead.”
I must have gotten the deadpan right, because he laughed.
“So you have faster-than-light travel.”
“Not me personally… but yes. Or sneakier-than-light, anyway.”
“Warp drive.”
“More or less. I can get you some books on it if you want? There are virtual classes.” And nothing is more boring than sitting in a hospital bed, listening to the outside world spin.
His mouth twitched, as if he was about to say something important. Then he settled back and folded his arms. “I’d be very grateful.”
“There’s another thing,” I said. “We’ve been limiting the staff treating you so far. But the cryonics docs—the real specialists—well, I should warn you that they’re not human.”
I saw his lips soften as his jaw slackened, though it didn’t quite fall open. “Aliens?”
“We call them systers. Some of them look… very different.”
“Do they farm humans for meat?”
“No,” I said, categorically. “Most of them couldn’t digest us. Amino acids all wrong, sugars backward. You know how it goes.”
He laughed. “So you’re not a cryonics specialist?”
“I’m a rescue specialist.” I smiled. “I got you here. And turned you over to Dr. Tralgar and Dr. Rilriltok.”
“Those are some names.”
I laughed. “Wait until you meet the beings that belong to them.”
His smile was more like a flinch, and quickly faded. “So you can’t promise me anyone else will live.”
“Not in any honesty,” I said, as gently as I could. Dammit, I went into rescue so that I wouldn’t have to give people bad news. Everybody I deal with is supposed to be in the middle of a crisis, not weathering a series of emotional blows. I hate this part of the job. “The cryonics specialists feel that we can expect about one in three of your crewmates to survive.”
He breathed out, slowly. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He shook his head. “We knew it was a crazy risk—oh God! The influenza virus, there was some kind of superbug wiping out the ship, you might be exposed—”
“We’re all inoculated,” I said. “And we engineered an antiviral to support your immune system and administered it before we woke you up.”
“You’ve cured the flu.”
“We’ve cured a lot of things.” I squeezed my hand closed, the familiar ache of joints reminding me that we hadn’t cured everything. “Part of your ship’s core is here. And she’s very eager to meet you.”
“You rescued Central?” he said hopefully. Then he must have remembered what I told him about Central, because his mouth contracted with dismay.
“Helen,” I answered.
“Oh. That thing.”
Perhaps it stung because his response was so similar to what mine had been. And because I was beginning to appreciate Helen as a person, rather than an ill-considered toy. I was struck silent for a moment.
Carlos tugged the sheets up. “I hope you’re not going to judge us all by that joke.”
“Since the moment we made contact with her, she’s been absolutely dedicated to your well-being,” I mentioned. “And that of the rest of her crew.”
“Some of the guys thought it was amusing,” he said. “I didn’t—my wife told me how dehumanized it made her feel, and I was never comfortable around it, after.” He frowned deeply. “My wife…?”
“I know she’s not among the patients we’re currently working on. Helen might be able to guide us to her cryo unit, though, and we’ll prioritize retrieving her.”
His mouth twisted again.
I said, “You do know your AI is self-aware and self-willed, right?”
“Helen?” He shook his head. “It’s a peripheral. Central has a personality module, but the Helen bot is just a bot. It can talk, and carry out assigned tasks, and keep you awake through a swing shift… but that’s all.”
“Well,” I said, settling back in my chair. “You’ll be surprised to discover that some things have changed.…”
I had been wrong about Oni: there were complications treating her cryoburn, and her awakening was put off. So specialist Calliope Jones was the next to awaken, and I recalled that she was the historian. She was also the individual in the anomalous cryo pod, which made me hope she might be able to provide some answers about it.
Or maybe the Goodlaw was right, and she was a Freeport pirate hiding from justice amidst ten thousand identical corpsicle coffins.
It had to be kidding, right?
How do
