Damocles
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 S. G. Redling
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781611099652
ISBN-10: 161109965X
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012954517
DEDICATION
This book is for my first tribe, my siblings—Mary, Monica, and Matthew. You made me brave.
MEG
Meg decided that any word that started with
re
was evil.
Reanimation, rehydration, recalculation, restabilization, reatmospherication
—okay, maybe that last one wasn’t really a word, but that endless drone of the computer over every loudspeaker on the ship made her brain start to tack
re
onto every sound in her aching head. If the computer wanted to throw a few applicable words onto the list, why not discuss the urge to
regurgitate
her
reconstituted
meal of
reengineered
proteins? She pressed the heel of her hand into her left eye where an especially intense hammering had begun.
“Feel any undue pressure, besides the usual readjustment?” Elliot Cho, the bioscience officer, scrolled through several data screens beside her head. He had been the first roused from deep sleep to oversee the rest of the crew’s awakening.
“How long have you been up?” Meg’s lips felt thick and gummy.
“Couple hours.”
“You look like shit.”
He turned a bleary eye to her. “Want a mirror?”
Meg shook her head and reached for the water tube hanging beside her sleep sling. The water tasted like warm iodine with an undertaste of rock salt, but she sucked it down greedily. When the thin stream trickled out to only drops, she groaned.
“Pace yourself,” Cho said, “or BESS will pace it for you.”
She knew the drill of waking up from deep sleep, but it didn’t make it any easier anytime she did it. All of their bodies had been put into a suspended state, their brain functions lowered and their bodily functions maintained by BESS, the Biological Equilibrium Sustainment System. For the duration of their sleep, BESS had been doing the breathing, swallowing, and basic living functions for them. BESS had run the show, and BESS would decide when to hand the power back over. Meg decided she hated BESS.
“Everyone else up?”
Cho grunted. “Would you believe Wagner woke up with a hard-on?”
Meg laughed and then winced at the ache it caused. “Aren’t you violating his confidentiality rights by telling me that?”
“Report me.” He helped her to her feet, holding his hands out until he was sure she could balance. A few tentative steps and Meg turned her naked back to him, letting him whisper in her ear. “I like this part.”
“Shut up.” She laughed, tipping her head forward as he removed the thin netting of wires that branched out from her neck, down her back, and out to her limbs. She knew she’d have little red marks where BESS’s stimulators had kept her muscles from atrophying during the journey. Cho’s hand felt warm where he carefully peeled a glue pad from the back of her knee. “No wonder Wagner had a hard-on, if you were touching him like this.”
Cho wrapped the wires into a bundle around his hand. “I should have paid more attention to how he was wired up. Maybe I’m stimulating the wrong muscles.”
“Are you saying we’re not going to have morning sex?”
He watched her tie her robe around her waist. “Give me a light-year or two.”
Meg licked her still dry lips. “Yeah and a toothbrush. Morning breath takes on a whole new meaning out here.”
They were on schedule and on course, inasmuch as they had a schedule or a course. The
Damocles
and her crew followed instructions and star charts for a portion of the universe that no one in the fleet had ever ventured into. Launching off of Hyperion, the deepest of the deep-space exploration stations to date, their faster-than-light travel had been guided by directions some heralded as the ultimate leap of faith, others as a suicide mission. They followed directions that had arrived from deep space seven years ago, directions in an unknown language, directions that Meg had been instrumental in translating. If her translations had been correct, and it was too late to doubt them now, they followed directions from The Set, an ancient race that had originally seeded Earth and brought humanity into existence.
All of that was a moot point at the moment, since Meg’s biggest obstacle was getting her pants on. Deep sleep turned the cleverest, most agile space traveler into a mushroom-brained bowling pin for the first several hours of reawakening. She knew all she could do was ride it out. Resting on the edge of the cot, she tried once again to get her left foot into the left leg of the pants, all the way through to the opening at the floor. Finally, with one leg on, Meg began to feel confident she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life naked.
As the ship purred back to life, the sleep sling retracted into its case above her bunk and the systems around her rebooted themselves. The loudspeakers stopped their squawking as workstations came back online throughout the ship. The six crew
members deep slept in their own compartments on separate life-support systems, ensuring that should damage befall the ship during their slumber, the odds of at least one crew member surviving would improve. Meg tried not to think about what it would be like to be the only crew member to survive this far out into space, to wake up and find your companions dead and nothing but vast, empty space stretching out in every direction.
She tried not to think of it and failed every time. It really was a wonder she’d qualified for this mission or any deep-space mission at all. She didn’t know if it was possible for anyone to hate the vacuum of space as much as she did. Of all the crews she’d manned she was the only member who never, ever went to the observation deck when they weren’t in orbit around a mass. She heard others waxing and marveling at the wonders flying past them. All she saw was the void, the black, and all it made her feel was a deep twisting in her gut. They could keep it.
“On your mark, Officer Dupris. Phase Three recon drones at the ready.”
She flexed her fingers to limber them up before tapping on the display screen. After fat-fingering a few incorrect commands, she switched to full audio command. “Placement situation,” she said and paused, trying to remember what it was she was looking for. This wasn’t a standard trip to an outer colony. She searched her sleep-clouded mind to remember why the drones had been sent in phases in the first place.
“First phase, life signs,” the machine droned in the softly modulated female tones Meg had set during programming. “Cross-reference bioscan drones as per Officer Cho. Data uploaded to mainframe.” Meg nodded as if the machine could see her. The
Damocles
navigation system would have launched the first round of drones to check for life on the planet, environmental conditions, sustainability, and the like. Each planet
programmed into the ship’s navigational system was supposed to be compatible with human life. Of course, the data they had received was billions of years old. Planets change. Humans change. The journey to make contact with something that might be human was the ultimate crapshoot. If the biodrones returned with no signs of life or an environment that was too hostile to make contact with, this leg of the trip would have been in vain. The crew would remain in deep sleep and they would go on to the next set of coordinates.
Data streamed on several different screens as Meg rolled her shoulders waiting for good news. As her head cleared and BESS released more water into the drinking tube, she knew the biosigns had to have come back positive. Only good news would have kicked off the awakening procedures. Whatever planet this was, there was life, and the environment was not overtly hostile to human life. The signs had been so good, as a matter of fact, that Phase Two drones had been launched.
Phase Two drones collected research for everyone on board—engineering, bioscience, and cultural protocol. The drones assessed the life on a given planet or moon, determining levels of technology and mineral resources. Had this mission been in the corner of their known universe, the drones would also look for signs of colonization, since people had been terraforming moons and planets for decades. Here, however, the drones were working with a blank canvas. Any signs of human life on this planet might have little to no resemblance to human life that had been nurtured and launched from Earth. That meant the drones had been programmed to look for patterns of inorganic organization of material. In other words, the crew of
Damocles
, and Meg in particular, were looking for signs that the humanoid life on this planet would share that Earthly humanoid need to control their environment.
And they did.
When the initial data of the Phase Two drones began to stream past, Meg felt her stomach flipping from more than just hunger. Images and graphs of structures and roadways flashed by. Registered levels of inorganic noises and bursts clouded the airways, and never in her whole life had Meg been happier to read the long and convoluted list of chemicals and by-products being reported in soil, air, and water. Pollution. There was nothing more human than pollution.