Space Colony One
Welcome back for another Saturday Snippet! This week we’re returning to humanity’s first deep space colony. I’m around a third of the way into the first draft of this novel, but today I’m posting a glimpse of chapter three. Last week, a bomb explosion endangered the life of Cariad, one of the book’s main characters. Here’s what happens when she wakes up.
Chapter Three
Cariad woke. She opened her eyes and gasped. She’d made it. She’d survived cryo.
The lights above her were bright, blindingly bright, and she closed her eyes against the pain. She tried to move, but her limbs were leaden. She recalled her last memory: she’d thanked the medical team and said goodbye before they put her to sleep. It had been a weird, sad parting after they had cared for her so well while preparing her to be frozen. By the time she woke up—if she woke up—they would all be long dead and buried.
They, too, had been emotional, though for some that had probably been because they believed they were euthanizing her. Yet despite the risks, despite the unproven process of cryonically preserving people for centuries, the chance had been too good for Cariad to miss. Public opposition to the launching of the Nova Fortuna had grown to fever pitch in the years and months leading up to her departure. If Cariad hadn’t taken the opportunity, another wasn’t likely within her lifetime.
As a world-class geneticist involved in the Nova Fortuna project, her application had been a formality. Though she had familiarized herself with the cryonic preservation process, she almost couldn’t believed she’d survived. After she’d been made unconscious, her blood was replaced with a non-aqueous, oxygenated solution that would not expand when frozen. External to her body, the solution was circulated and gradually cooled until she grew so cold that her breathing ceased and her heart stopped beating. She was lowered into a frozen slush that suspended her, avoiding pressure sores from the pooling circulatory fluid. Her body cooled her still further.
To all intents and purposes, Cariad had died. Along with one hundred and ninety-nine other scientists—some old friends, some strangers—she was sealed within an individual chamber aboard Nova Fortuna weeks before the ship left. She never saw the ship’s departure from Earth orbit, never witnessed the protesting mobs, never met the men and women who first embarked aboard her, knowing that they would end their lives in deep space—men and women who would create and care for children who were sentenced to share the same fate as before they were even conceived.
Now, the long journey was over. She had survived.
Cariad opened her eyes again and felt the smooth sheet beneath her. She moved her fingers and toes, and tried again to lift an arm. She winced as a bolt of pain came from it. Something seemed to have gone wrong with the limb. She tried to raise her head, and she winced again. She had the mother of all headaches.
To one side, out of her field of vision, a door opened, and she heard footsteps.
“Glad to see you’re finally coming around,” a voice said. “How are you feeling? You took quite a knock to your head.”
Cariad squinted and managed to bring into focus a man in red scrubs. He looked familiar. She remembered he was one of the infirmary medics. She thought he was called Alasdair.
She became very confused. How did she know the man’s name? He was six or seven generations in the future from her perspective. And what did he mean about a knock to the head?
Did you miss last week’s Saturday Snippet? Space Colony One Part II