Jason Halstead - New Beginnings

“ She was more than a friend,” Kira whispered. She was shocked. She’d never known. Another woman? She wondered if there had been any others.

“ Sorry,” Tarn shrugged, clearly anything but sorry. “Older I get, smaller the universe ends up being. You want some payback you come and get it. Maybe I’m old and fat and out of shape, but I still got what they put in me. Might be a good way to go — better than waiting for us to run out of food or die in my sleep.”

“ I’m not going to kill you.” Kira put the memories of Emily’s long lost friend away. That had been over sixteen years ago, she realized. Seventeen now, considering their prolonged sleep. “I think you’re kind of a loser, but my social options are limited.”

“ I’ll drink to that,” Tarn said.

Kira spared him a withering glare then turned back to her station. With nothing else to do but wait for the end to come she figured she might as well figure out what their future held.

Each member of the Rented Mule’s crew recorded their messages privately. When it came Kira’s turn she realized she had no one left behind her. No family and no friends. She’d only had herself and, though she’d searched her memory long and hard, she could only find one resemblance of a relationship and that had been to Angela. Emily’d enjoyed a few trysts here and there — with men, Kira was happy to remember — but that was the end of it. Instead she rattled off instructions to have her various accounts, over a dozen of them, donated to charitable organizations that specialized in helping to provide aid and assistance to troubled children.

With that finished, the crew gathered on the bridge to plan what would become of the rest of their lives. It was a somber meeting, with none of them saying much. Eric stood next to her station but they did not reach for one another. Kira longed for the comfort of human touch but she thought it would be cruel to the rest of the crew. They had no one to turn to for solace.

“ All right, with any luck our messages will be received in a year or so. We’re broadcasting a distress signal, but we’re also stuck travelling away from help faster than most ships would risk going. A military vessel is our only hope for a quick recovery, and by quick I mean about three years.” Sharp looked around the bridge at his crew. He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a sorry lot of castoffs from society, but I guess I can’t think of anyone better to fly into the great unknown with. Well that’s not true, maybe some gene-bred triplets trained by a courtesan service might be a little more enjoyable…”

“ Sir,” Kira spoke up after giving everyone a chance to pretend they were amused by the Captain’s joke. “I’ve been studying the new readings our sensors are pulling in. It’s light years away still, but there’s a star close by. The other charts don’t make mention of it but that could be because of the angle we’re at, it looks like there’s a particularly dense asteroid belt ringing the system.”

“ Close by and light years away?” Sharp asked, pointing out her contradictory terms.

“ Sorry,” she said, seeing his point, “but yes, it’s less than 4 light years from us. That’s a little under eight years.”

“ Then what?” Tarn snorted.

Kira refused to favor him with even a glance. “Then we see what they’ve got there. Maybe we can find a planet big enough to hook us in orbit and sling us back around. We might even pick up some speed so that we head back core-ward at a faster speed.”

Tarn grunted derisively. Sharp stared at the display and then at her, nodding his head as his eyes lost focus. She glanced up at Eric and saw him staring at her with a hint of a smile on his face. “Eight years?” Sharp muttered. “Another eight years back…”

“ It’s a long shot, Sir,” Kira reminded them all.

“ But it’s better than anything else we got,” Sharp finished for her. “All right, do what you have to so we can get there. It’s not like we’re using our fuel for anything else. Then we’ll get the ship ready for a deep sleep and go for it. Our engines will run for a couple hundred years, but that’s just energy. We’ve got the chemicals on hand for a couple months of food and water, more if we go sparingly, and probably twenty years worth of cold sleep chemicals and nutrients.”

“ You’re talking about a deep sleep, not just a few months at a time?” Eric asked. Kira glanced up at him and, in spite of her earlier concerns, reached out to take his hand in hers.

“ Yeah, and it won’t be easy coming out with all of us down but as long as nothing messes up our computers again we should be able to do it.”

Kira nodded. She felt her heart beat faster in her chest. It excited her to have a plan. To have hope. It was a slim chance but it was a chance and that’s what mattered. “So what are we waiting for? I’m looking forward to putting another eight years under my belt!”

“ Can we wait a few hours, at least?” Eric said. He squeezed Kira’s hand and then admitted. “Risky stuff, going in deep like that. Just in case anything goes wrong I’d like to get under her belt too, if you don’t mind?”

The others all laughed, causing Kira to blush. Most had the good grace to let it alone but Tarn added to it, “Sounds good to me, you starting the line?”

Kira displayed a small but very wicked looking knife and said, “Tarn, you can touch me with anything you want, as long as you can get it passed this first.”

Sharp whistled while Kevin chuckled. Tarn stared at with wide eyes then grinned. She squeezed Eric’s hand to reassure him then fed the necessary commands into the nav station to steer the ship towards the unnamed system. That finished she stood up and then gasped as Eric picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder. Catcalls from the rest of the crew made her face burn but at no point was there any way she could deny the grin that split her lips.

The display blinked, shifting from an unpowered darkness to a black non-light that nevertheless revealed shapes in the room. A moment later colors and lines sprang into existence, casting shadows from the dust covered stations, chairs, and other objects on the bridge of the Rented Mule. The display quickly coalesced into lines of text. A window displayed the sensor readings collected automatically, indicating the layout of the solar system the Rented Mule was entering.

Colored lights sent shadows fleeing their prismatic brilliance in the cold sleep chamber. Chemicals released into controlled intravenous lines, introducing countering agents to the stasis inducing drugs in their systems. With heartbeats reduced to single digits in the span of a minute the absorption took the better part of two hours before the lights changed again and announced the next stage of the process.

Electrodes activated, triggering stimulus to the atrophied muscles of the nearly flatlined sleepers. As the heart rates began to climb into the double digits basic nutrients and simple sugars filled the IV lines, restoring glucose and energizing the depleted muscles. Once the changes were made the system resumed a standby state, administering the new changes over a span of several days.

When next the lights changed it was not only to signal the introduction of a gas into the enclosed chambers, but also to engage the overhead lights and raise them to a low level. Intubation tubes, filled with fluids siphoned as the bodies warmed and returned to life, retracted. A final injection, this one purely synthetic adrenaline, was delivered before the electrodes were triggered with a powerful jolt. Each body convulsed, breath exploding from dry mouths as eyelids opened. The cover of the chambers popped open, hissing as the low pressure maintained internally was equalized.