As frigid vapor filled Blake’s lungs and the cold permeated his body, as consciousness failed and thought congealed, Blake found hope in Shackleton’s ultimate triumph.
This crew, too, would endure.
DETOUR
(About forty-five years later)
13
Indistinct, out of reach, something beckoned.
Light? Through closed eyelids, she sensed brightness. Space to move about? That, too. But most of all—and most enticing of all—warmth.
But how to enter the warmth? That mystery eluded her.
From the depths of an abyss, she sensed movement. Shaking? Convulsing? No, something between. Coughing. She was coughing.
And there was sound. Speech.
“Time to get up. Time to get up. Time to get up…”
Whose voice was that? How long had it been speaking? “Yes,” she said, only the word came out as an inarticulate croak.
“Good, you are awake,” the voice responded. The words had a flatness that belied the sentiment.
An AI. Marvin, she recalled. What else did she remember? A racking cough vanquished that thought. And did she hear someone else coughing?
Her eyes, like rusted hinges, resisted opening. Opening them anyway, she glimpsed through tendrils of white mist a frost-speckled clear dome. The dome canted at a steep angle.
So that I can get out. Laughing at the absurdity of even sitting, the first, sharp intake of breath set her chain-coughing again.
The spasm finally subsided.
“Mar…vin,” she rasped.
“You might want to take it slowly,” the AI said. “My readouts indicate that you may need a minute.”
I’ll need hours. As glacially as her thoughts churned, she had an insight. “I’m not heavy.”
“We are decelerating at one-third gee,” it said. “Endeavour is safe.”
Safe? Safe from what?
The whole panic/horror/insanity crashed down on her. Along with whom she was. And who was with her. And the billions who were gone, dead, fried.
“Blake!” The shout tore at Rikki’s throat, set her coughing again.
“Yea-ugh,” someone sputtered. It might have been him.
She remembered where his pod was, and turned her head. Even in Mars-like gravity, her neck muscles screamed with the effort. She found Blake looking back at her.
She said, “You look…” Wheezing preempted the description.
“Yeah, but we’re alive.” He attempted a smile. “I’ll grant it…doesn’t feel that way.”
Beyond Blake’s pod, Rikki saw the others stirring. There was Dana, blinking as though to clear her eyes. And Li, groggily turning her head from side to side. At the end of the row, Antonio had managed to sit up. With a hand raised to his face, he was stroking his chin scar. And in the middle—
“Carlos’s pod is still closed!” Rikki said.
Marvin said, “His readouts had drifted beyond the desired parameters. I thought Li should make the decision whether to interrupt his cold sleep, and be here to monitor the process.”
Dana struggled into a sitting position. “Marvin, report,” she whispered hoarsely.
“We avoided the GRB, and all major shipboard systems continue to operate within acceptable limits. As expected, radiation degraded external sensors as the ship’s speed increased. I kept sensors powered off and shuttered as much as practical to extend their lifetimes. The bridge also sustained radiation damage. I cannot quantify the impairment, beyond severe enough that diagnostic programs fail to run to completion. I believe we have the spare parts to repair everything.”
“What about life support?” Dana prompted. “Propulsion?”
“Both systems are operating within acceptable parameters,” Marvin said.
Rikki sat up and swiveled, dropping her legs over the side of the pod. The change in position made her head spin and she did not dare to stand. Her arms and legs trembled. The taste in her mouth was like old cardboard.
All from the cold-sleep process?
Once before, Rikki had been in a pod. She’d been researching the history of the ice industry. Getting miners at one of the oldest still-producing tunnel complexes to agree to meet with her had been a struggle. When the appointed time came, despite having felt queasy for days, she’d gone anyway. The queasiness became abdominal discomfort; having flown halfway around the world, she ignored the feeling as best she could to continue with the interviews.
But discomfort became soreness became pain. Stomach upset turned to nausea. When the vomiting began, there was no ignoring it.
Acute appendicitis, the miners’ medical AI had diagnosed. The miners popped her into a cold-sleep pod for transport to the nearest hospital.
Awakening from that pod in the OR, she had been in agony. But that had been a localized pain. Now she hurt—everywhere. And though she had felt feeble that time, she didn’t remember being so bone-weary, or confused about who and where she was. But that incident had involved only a few hours in the pod.
Rikki asked, “Marvin, how long have we been in cold sleep?”
“According to the ship’s clock,” Marvin said, “it has been almost forty-five years.”
14
Logic, thermostat readouts, and gushers of warm air from the bridge air vents be damned, Dana was freezing. The sensation was all in her head, surely, but she felt chilled to the marrow of her bones. She gulped from a drink bulb, burning her mouth and throat, but the scalding black coffee could not melt the cold fear.
Forty-five years? Something had gone horribly wrong.
She sat in the pilot’s acceleration seat, dying to rub her arms with her hands, and resisting. A captain did not hug herself for warmth.
No matter how shaken she was.
She had ordered Blake and Antonio forward to check out the bridge. In the minutes spent strapping Carlos into a stretcher and helping carry him to the infirmary—he limp and delirious, she and the other women lightheaded and wobbly—Blake had already begun repairs. Antonio perched on the outside armrest of the copilot’s seat, scrolling through data on the sensor console, uploading numbers from the ship’s files to the datasheet draped across his lap.
Blake squirmed, muttering, flat on his back on the sliver of deck between the acceleration couches. His head and both hands were deep inside the nav console. After years flying together, Dana had calibrated his cursing. She interpreted: he had found plenty out of kilter, the ship’s overall integrity was satisfactory, and he trusted his
