Nicci looked at Amber. “Do I…just get in?”
“Yeah, that’s what they said at the seminar.”
“I don’t…I mean…Do I take my shoes off?”
“You can if you want,” said Amber, and Scott said, “No, you can’t. No loose articles in the cabin.”
“She can put them in her bag
,” Amber told him.
“I already secured her bag
.”
“You can unsecure
it and secure it again with her shoes inside!”
“I’ll just wear them,” said Nicci, looking and sounding right on the edge of tears. “Okay?”
Amber looked at her, feeling her temper at full throb right behind her eyes, and then turned that look on Crewman Everly Scott. “Listen, Space-Scout.”
“Amber, please!”
“You got a problem, you take it up with me, you don’t take it out on my sister.”
Scott
gave her a cold look and a wide smile and said, “Just lie down, Miss Bierce, and we’ll get you all tucked in!” in a voice like preschooler’s poison.
Nicci slunk past Amber, her head bent and lips trembling. She sat on the edge of the Sleeper, kneading at its hard sides as she looked one last time from Amber to
Scott and back to Amber. “Please,” she said, but whether it was
please say we don’t really have to do this
or
please don’t fight
, she didn’t know. Scott put his hand on the Sleeper’s lid and Nicci lay obediently down, even as she gasped out the first hoarse sob. The lid shut, snapped, hissed, and the single panicked, silent cry that Amber saw her sister make faded into sleep. Or into Sleep, she guessed.
The snake-like cable of the umbilicus slipped out of its port inside the tube and slithered under
Nicci’s shirt. She watched it tunnel across her sister’s unmoving body until it reached her navel. The stiff fabric of her clean, white, colonist’s shirt bulged and then slowly deflated. In almost the same instant, the panel above the Sleeper lit up, all its many systems diligently engaged. Amber could look at that panel and see that her baby sister’s heart was no longer beating, her lungs were no longer working, her brain was no longer thinking, and all this, according to the Sleeper, was perfectly normal.
S
he looked dead.
“Any time,” said
Scott, waiting in the hall.
Amber backed up until the door hissed shut on the sight of
Nicci in her (
coffin
) tube. She told herself they had nowhere to go, no one to take them in. This was the only way out. It was the only choice.
‘I just killed my sister
,’ she thought.
“Your turn,” said
Scott, printing out a nameplate on his scanner and inserting into the protective sleeve on door WA-0003. He did not pick up her duffel bag. He opened up her Sleeper and stood back against the wall.
This was really it.
She was going to close her eyes and it would be over and either she’d wake up on Plymouth and she’d be fine, or…or she wouldn’t. And that would also be fine, she supposed. At least, it’d be just as over.
Amber slid her duffel bag into the rubbery, vaguely unpleasant-feeling net and gave it a pull to make it retract, just like in orientation. She got into the Sleeper, wriggling over as far as she could and very much aware of
Scott’s contemptuous stare as he watched her try not to overfill the narrow mat. Just watching.
“You waiting for a tip?” she asked, knowing she was blushing and hating him for seeing it.
“Your shirt’s pulled up,” he told her flatly.
Amber reached down, her face in flames and her chest in knots, to tug the stiff fabric down over the exposed swell of her stomach. There was no one to reprimand him for his huffy little laugh now; he made sure she heard it.
“Yeah, they must have been desperate, all right,” he said, dropping the lid on her. She never had the chance to say anything back. She heard the snapping sound of the lid’s locking mechanism, but not the hiss of the gas.
She was asleep when
Scott held his middle finger up to the glass plate before her face and called her a bitch. She was asleep when her tube wormed its umbilicus under her tight shirt, asleep when it punctured her navel and began the painful process of rendering her dormant for the flight. She slept through the next four days as the rest of the colonists were processed and the ship steadily filled. She slept through the historic speech of Manifest Destiny’s charismatic leader as the
Pioneer
’s mighty engines fired up behind him on the video screen in the press room where he was still standing, very much on Earth. She slept through thirteen routine medical scans and six hundred thirty-three automatic maintenance cycles before she slept through the asteroid field that pierced the hull and pulled the active crew out into space through approximately seven thousand coin-sized holes. She slept through two hundred sixty-six years of Tunneling as the speakers above her bed blatted a polite, unheard alarm. She slept through the crash. In the last eleven minutes, as her umbilicus began to retract its countless filaments and her Sleeper gently reanimated her long-static cells, Amber dreamed of the beach and her mother was there, smoking one of her endless cigarettes, and they stood hand in hand together to watch the sun set so red over the ocean, and all the gulls were screaming…
4
A
mber woke up on her side, which she knew only because she could sort of feel the hard mat under her cheek and the cold, curved glass panel of the Sleeper’s lid pressing on her nose and forehead. She tried to roll over, but couldn’t. Her limbs were dead; she was beginning to register the discomfort of her arms crossed and crushed against the Sleeper’s wall, but she still couldn’t do anything about it. God, how annoying.
She had always been a light sleeper and was used to coming up and alert at a moment’s provocation, but she couldn’t do it this time. The Sleeper’
s computer had complete control and seemed far more concerned with talking about the process of waking her up than actually doing it. She could hear it through the speakers in its pleasantly androgynous, vaguely British-sounding voice: “—is estimated to complete in…five minutes seventeen seconds. Please remain calm. Your movements have been inhibited during Sleep. This condition is temporary and will be restored upon removal of the umbilicus.”
Right. She remembered now. The orientation
seminar had explained all this. Although she couldn’t move, she could feel herself twitching as the computer systematically tested her muscles. She could also feel it where the vent was gently blowing on her ear. Why the hell was she on her side, anyway? The seminar had assured all of them that Sleep wasn’t really sleep and there wouldn’t be any dreams, but she’d had a real whopper. She didn’t understand how she could have thrashed around when she was supposed to have been paralyzed, but maybe that was just for the landing, not the whole flight.
And what had the big nightmare been? Why, a trip to the beach with her mother
. Bizarre. Bo Peep Bierce did not take her babies on outings. Oh, they’d gone to the courthouse a couple of times, and when they were very young, they used to walk down to the childcare place together until Bo Peep failed a drug test and got kicked out of all the state programs. Other than that, Amber couldn’t think of a single trip they’d taken together, unless it was to get drugs.
‘Maybe that’s why you dream about it,’ she thought to herself, and would have rolled her eyes except that they were still kept shut and paralyzed.
It had been such a vivid dream, though. So vivid that she could still imagine the smell of her mom’s cigarettes. So vivid that she could still hear…
What…What was she hearing? Was that…people?
She was on her side…but she wasn’t really on her side, was she? The vent was blowing on her ear and the glass partition of the lid was right up against her face and her arms with all her weight behind it. She wasn’t on her side; the Sleeper was.
Amber could feel the
fear leap into her, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even open her eyes. The computer kept stubbornly monitoring and testing, untroubled by the smoke it gently breathed in at her along with the oxygen and the screams she could hear behind the walls. It didn’t sound like a couple panicking colonists getting cold feet on their new planet. There were so many people screaming that they had formed a single, endless, ululating voice. That didn’t take just a lot of people. That took hundreds. Maybe thousands. Maybe…all of them.
Amber tried again to break the paralytic hold of the Sleeper on her body, but the only result of all her invisible efforts was a mild musical tone before the pl
easant voice interrupted itself to say, “Heart-rate elevated. Please remain calm. Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…three minutes eleven seconds. You are not paralyzed. Your movements will be restored when the umbilicus is withdrawn. Please remain calm.”
Three minutes? Something was burning. People were screaming. How much worse could this get in three whole minutes?
Again, she fought to take back possession of her body, but focusing all the willpower in the world couldn’t even open her eyes.
“Please remain calm,” said the voice after another censuring chime in her ear. “Your reactivation is
proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute fifty-seven seconds. You are in no physical danger. If a medico must be dispatched to attend you, you will be liable for the cost of any restraining measures. Please remain calm.”
The fact that she could smell the smoke at all—and now feel it itching at her nose and throat—meant that the fire was somewhere in the ventilating system. Or, even worse, that the Sleeper wasn’t airtight the way it was supposed to be, and if it wasn’t, what else wasn’t working right? Where were they? Dear God, was the ship burning in space? No, no
surely not. The false gravity the ship used during flight pulled everything straight toward the floors, no matter how the ship itself was tipped. She was on her side, so there had to be real gravity, meaning that they’d landed.
Only she was on her side. So they hadn’t landed. They’d crashed.
“A medico has been notified of your distress,” the voice informed her. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute eleven seconds.” A short pause and that musical tone again. “The umbilicus is about to be withdrawn. You may feel some discomfort.”
She didn’t or perhaps simply couldn’t notice
against the prospect of the ship burning all around her, but she could hear the whispering sound as the cable slithered out of her clothes and back into its port.
“The umbilicus has been successfully withdrawn,” the computer said. “You will sho
rtly begin to recover mobility—”
Amber’s hands twitched. Then her lips, although she couldn’t manage to shape the word she wanted, which was just as well since it was nothing but a swear and no one was there to hear it anyway.
“—will not open immediately. Please remain calm. Your Sleeper is in perfect working order and will unlock as soon as its final maintenance scan has been completed.”
Amber’s eyes opened at last, but showed her only the glass plate against her face, fogged over by her own breath. She saw no smoke, except the thin ribbons sneaking in through the vent. She was able to see only by the light of the monitoring bar as it finished its sweep down by her feet; the overhead lights had not come on the way the seminar had said they would. Her room remained perfectly black.
She rolled over, her numb arms falling limply across her stomach, slow to respond after being crushed up between her and the Sleeper’s wall. The computer was still talking, telling her that she should report to the recreational area of her housing unit as soon as she was released by a member of the crew. The disembarking stations had been alerted and someone would be here shortly to release her. Did she want directions to the recreational area now?
“No,” croaked Amber. She got her arm up, groping clumsily at the underside of the Sleeper’s lid until she hit the medico alert switch. “Hello?” she said and coughed. The air coming in through the vents suddenly seemed smokier. And hotter. “Hello? This is Amber Bierce in room…um…
three. In the women’s dorms. Mod A. Or WA, I guess. I’m okay, but there’s something wrong with my Sleeper. I can smell…smoke…hello?”
No answer. If she held her breath to listen, she could hear the faint hum of empty air in the speakers, so they were probably working. But no one was answering. Of course, they might all be away from the alert station, if every screaming person Amber could hear had their own medico dispatch, but Amber really didn’t think so. There weren’t enough medicos on the ship to answer all those screamers.
“Hello?” Amber pushed the switch again, and again, and then really leaned her thumb on it and kept it there, but no one buzzed through and told her to get off and quit being a bitch. No one told her she was on the list of panicky people to deal with and she’d be charged a fee or even arrested for making a nuisance of herself on her first day awake. No one told her anything. Because no one was there.
“Bullshit,” said Amber, badly frightened. But she stopped playing with the alert switch at once and started hunting for the latch.