Cold Sleep, page 1
COLD SLEEP
By Luke Hindmarsh
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press digital edition 2023
Copyright © 2023 Luke Hindmarsh
ISBN: ePub Digital Edition - 978-1-63789-712-6
ISBN: Trade Paperback Edition - 978-1-63789-734-8
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
Luke Hindmarsh was born in Oxford before being dragged all over the world by his parents, courtesy of the UK armed forces. Before starting to write full time, he worked as a Criminal Barrister in London for ten years. He now lives in the Scandinavian wilds with his wife and their half-Viking children. When not writing, Luke teaches Shinseido Okinawan Karate and drinks far too much coffee.
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For Freyja and Rufus.
Aim for the stars.
Table of Contents
* * *
PART I
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
PART II
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
Acknowledgements
PART I
CHAPTER 1
* * *
I’m stolen from dreams of angels.
“Easy, Kara. Easy. The cryo-shock will wear off,” a man’s voice… sounds like it’s coming from underwater as I swim back down a tunnel of light. Is this the academy? Have I just come out of psychosurgery again? All emotions feel muted, it must be…
Drag one shuddering breath in, my throat itching and stinging from where I’ve been intubated. No—place and time snap back into focus—not navigator conditioning. That’s a distant bad memory.
Coughing, I rasp blue phlegm onto the warming deckplate beneath my feet—speckles of my blood lie plain against the dull grey metal. This is how it feels to be resurrected—being revived from a frozen grave, memories of life flooding into the hollow void and bringing identity back.
“Zed?” I ask. “How come you woke first?” The details click together as the last of the cold-sleep tranq—DreamSafeTM, nothing less than the best—wears off and the triple cocktail of synth-amines he’d shot right into my carotid artery lights up my brain like a supernova. Everything takes on a crystal clarity, and the faintest tickle of air moving over my skin sets my nerves sparking.
He takes me by the shoulder, squeezing gently. The heat of his hand, its strength, sets a shockwave racing from the point of contact all through my body. “You told me you’d programmed in a surprise, remember? Or did you mean something else?”
The heartrush of the stimulants pushes through the haze and drives out everything but the animal. Pressing against him, my mouth seeks his. Ignore the taste of the cold-sleep chems on his breath. Seize life. The kiss makes my chest tighten with a flush of adrenaline—and warmer hormones. But I’ve crested the wave of the stims and begun the crash back down, so nausea and a bone-deep ache begin to show through. I pull back to catch my breath.
“Waking out of sequence wasn’t meant to be the surprise. Thought I’d synced us better than that.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” Zed says. “So long as you can hack the records, we’re in the clear.”
“Zed, baby, even you could do it.”
Can’t help but laugh and touch his face, not even the shadow of approaching pain able to blunt the sheer animal joy of being alive. I’m still reveling in sensation. Makes me want to drag him over to the revival couch right now but there’s that edge of nausea building. And he’s right. The sooner we cover our tracks the better.
Can’t deny there’s a thrill at the hunger in his eyes as I walk to the simple greenlit terminal of the medicomp. He’s so easy to toy with.
“How far along are we, anyway?”
“Still just short of the midpoint,” I say, not looking up from the screen. “Something like eighteen-point-seven years out, objective time.”
“What’s that subjective?” Zed asks, leaning in the hatchway while I fish a link-key out of my wearall’s thigh pocket.
“Assuming we reach maximum safe speed within a day or so that’ll take us another eight-point-four-four years to reach Gliese 892. Factor in deceleration and we’re looking at another eleven-and-a-quarter-years flight time.”
“Eleven, subjective time?”
“Yeah, subjective.” First: slide key into medicomp. Second: trigger QI upload.
“And you did that calculation in your head?” He shakes his own, whistling softly.
“That’s why I’m ship’s navigator, baby.” He doesn’t understand. And what they did to me so I can calculate astronomical equations at speeds close to that of a computer is none of his business.
He grunts. “Don’t remind me, ain’t supposed to fraternize.”
What he means is the Spacer’s Union would see it as a betrayal of its principles and blackball him, maybe bust a kneecap. Nothing compared to the fun I’d face. But, you know, risks make life worth living. And I need him.
“Come on. Let’s do what we planned, then we go somewhere and get on with a little more of that ‘fraternizing’ you’ve been promising me.”
Stretching out the stiffness, my joints pop and crackle. One of the problems with lying in cold-sleep: you wake up feeling like arthritis has set in. With the synthetic dopamine and endorphins fading, I’d probably just want to curl up somewhere but good old synth-phenethylamine’s still getting me going. A few seconds more for the upload of the quasi-intelligent virus to the ship’s system to finish.
Speaking of risks, getting caught with QI tech would see me court-martialed and spaced before any appeal notice could reach Earth. But this gig is worth it; it’s not for the thrill, it’s for what the payoff will get me.
Upload complete. And the ship’s systems stop registering our unscheduled revival.
A quick check back through the records shows all evidence of disruption to the normal cold-sleep routine has been erased. My little QI viral hitchhiker is back safe in the link-key, its work done for now. Of course, a full virtual forensic check, stripping away every level of the programming and examining the source code, will make my tampering as obvious as a cometary impact. But the QI virus has laid the same evidence trail to each of the eighteen crew, four officers, and one hundred thousand passengers on board.
If you can’t hide your crime, make sure the evidence points to someone else. Better yet, everyone else.
For now, we’re ghosts aboard a sleeping ship.
“I’m done,” I say, withdrawing the link-key with its QI hitchhiker asleep once more.
Have to ditch the key as soon as I sterilize it, but the thing had cost me in risk, and new-Jiao, and the loss of face of being officer class dealing with a street-fixer like Stengler to get this gig. The cost makes the shard of crystal nanoprocessor not something you get rid of before the job is done.
“Impressed with yourself, ma’am?” Zed asks.
“Cut the chatter, Warrant Officer Hong.” I mean for it to come out with mock authority, but Zed squares up and salutes.
“Aye, ma’am!”
“You can stand to attention later.”
He relaxes. But it’s there, in his eyes. We might joke about it, we might, as he put it, “fraternize” but there will always be that gap between us. Officer class doesn’t mix with the ranks—no matter what feelings Zed
Leaving the crew cold-sleep bay, we start down towards the cargo service area where the passengers were loaded from one of the many Earth-orbiting arrays and will be unloaded with even less ceremony at the colony drone-built dry-dock.
Normally, they’d get little more than a basic check-over of their systems before being stored in a cargo bay—no one important gives a shit about the increased risk of death in transit from such cursory measures. No change this time. Another milk-run. For us, anyway. For them, different story. Five percent “spoilage” is factored into every Corporate-sponsored stellar crossing. At least, these colonists are being sent out with a crew to up their chances of survival. Not like those poor bastards on the first-wave ships.
This is the second run I’ve been on with a cluster of VIPs on board. The bigshots have better facilities than the crew, for fuck’s sake. But it’s given us this opportunity. Our chance for a life-changing score.
Refocus. Air purification system is idling—it sets a hard limit on our active time.
“How long have we got for this, you know, before the deceleration phase kicks in and turns us to paste?” Zed asks.
He has got to be joking. “Better part of two days I’d guess before we’d have to suit up ’cause of the air. We don’t want to have to do that.”
“Sure, I get it—we’d have to use our own suits.”
“Precisely.”
“You could hack the records on all the crew suits.”
“Yeah, but come on, Zed, think about it. We’d limit the suspect pool to the crew roster; it’s not like passengers can access the voidsuits. Anyhow we’d have to purge the suits to hide the physical signs of usage, not to mention doing it to all the other suits so they’d all be the same. Don’t know about you but I don’t want to risk the captain spacing all non-essential crew and docking Charon herself. It’s not like she couldn’t. Not like she wouldn’t either.”
His eyes flash a bit wider. “You’d be alright. She’s got a soft spot for you.”
“Bullshit. That’s scuttlebutt, mister. She’s on her third husband.”
“Whatever. So… we got two days before the air starts getting thin.”
“No. Fuck it, Zed! Didn’t you pay any attention when we discussed this?”
“Kara, my mind might have been somewhere else—we were holed up in a room at YaoYao-san’s, remember?”
I remember.
A flea-bitten dive with flickering company holos out front sending their glare into the grubby room no matter how high we dial the windows’ opacity. Our sweat mingling and soaking through the sheets Zed had brought to cover the stained mattress. Leaving some part of us—of me—sunk into the mattress. Stray skin cells. More intimate essence. Evidence, maybe, particularly given the sudden prevalence of nanotech everywhere. Something which’d been a preserve of cutting-edge labs sixteen years before on my previous furlough Earthside.
A break in our sexual marathon to navigate the network of back alleys to Stengler’s lair. All the time, leaving a route the Company or the Interstellar Naval Corps might piece together. Hood obscuring my features, wearing a slum-rat disguise, padded here and there to change my profile and boots with one missing a heel to give me a limp. Paranoid? Not nearly enough. But maybe, if they ever looked, they’d only discover our liaison and not the thing with Stengler.
Zed navigating the street as if nothing had changed. Time doesn’t change its nature—dirty, dangerous, without a hope—even as the datastreams are filled with a blur of events, tech speak, and trends bearing almost no resemblance to the world left behind when I’d last shipped out. Leaving me with little notion of how the World now works outside the framework of the Service. But as it always had, as it always will, the training takes over. Lets me see past the irrelevant to those things which will never change—can never change.
Oh yes, Zed. I remember. The risk, meeting with him, even on leave. The thrill it gave me, still does give me, knowing if the captain finds out, she’ll ditch me as her XO and I’ll wash out of the service altogether. You didn’t cross the line with the crew and expect a career if anyone found out.
It tightens the tension in my relationship with Zed. He’ll always have something to hold over me, if ever our thing goes south. Worst he can expect might be a flogging. I’d lose a chance at the only thing I’ve ever dreamed about.
Still, those stolen hours had been worth it. If nothing else, the thrill of the forbidden made the sex primal, intense… breathtaking.
“OK, one more time. It’s not the lack of air. It’s that after two days we’ll have left enough of our own genetic markers in the air composition for an investigation to reveal the imbalance between our breath and that of the rest of the crew. Without air processing we’re stuck with the mixture we leave when we go back into cold-sleep. Same reason you can’t smoke. Changes the atmo mix too much.”
“But we’re not going to get squished by the deceleration?”
“No, forget the fucking deceleration.” A long sigh tears its way out of me despite my battle to hold it in. Fuck me, he’s dense.
I am not about to go over it with him yet again. We’ve reached optimum acceleration—it’s why we’ve got close to standard gravity right now—but it’ll slacken off to the zero point before we exceed the maximum safe velocity. Then at midpoint, reverse thrust will start slowing us at a deceleration curve from one g down to the limit of the ramscoop’s ability to gather fuel. Only when we’re in the Gliese 892 heliosphere will the fusion rockets fire. That’s what’d squash us. Not difficult to grasp now, is it?
“We won’t do the hard burn until we’re almost there, for fuck’s sake, Zed.”
“I don’t get it.” Of course he doesn’t. “So we’ll keep pushing all the way?”
“No.” I wipe my hands over my eyes, ignoring the edges of my comedown headache from the synthphenethylamine, and slow my words as if speaking to a stupid child. Well, he is a wrench-monkey after all. “We’ve nearly reached our maximum safe speed. The energy cost of generating a strong enough magnetic cowl to travel beyond it is unnecessary and it’d shave only a month or two off our crossing time. So what would be the point of wasting reactor fuel? It’s expensive stuff.”
“You sound like a fucking Corporate now,” Zed growls, nudging the door release to the VIP lounge with his elbow.
“Screw you. You wanted in on this and now you’re getting nervous.”
Now I’ve done it. Flash of temper in his eyes; his male pride’s been wounded and now he’ll have to assert some kind of dominance over me—rank or no rank. It’s all you can expect from a lowbrow gorilla like Zed.
“You listen to me…” he shouts as the door slides open.
Whatever it is I’m supposed to listen to stops mattering as we take in the scene in front of us. Two caskets open. The occupant of one missing but the other still there—wouldn’t be going anywhere ever again.
“What the unholy fuck…” I breathe, adrenaline picking up where the stimulants left off.
The woman must have been about thirty-two years old, subjective. She’d been beautiful in life with honed features—classic North African, I’d say—probably gen-hanced but physically perfect, nonetheless. The amount of new-jiao it’d cost to look so good would cost me a lifetime’s salary and then some. But beauty means nothing on a corpse.
Her throat’s been torn out. Blood streaks the VIP casket’s pristine white ceramic shell. Crimson handprints mark the controls and edges of the casket’s lid. Bright red spray mars the shining surface of the nearest casket and trickles down across its viewport. The deckplate’s smeared here and there, but the marks aren’t clear enough to make out any footprints.
“No one else in here,” Zed says.
While I’ve been gawping at the corpse, he’s secured the room. There’s more to him than being a reliable bit of rough. It’s become too easy to dismiss him—the man is capable enough.
“I don’t understand. How could one of the passengers get out of storage?” I ask.
