Chapter Three

I PULLED MYSELF onto the side of the USS-Genesis II with caution. Last night’s rain had become this morning’s frost, and the ship rested at an approximate forty-five-degree angle. One faulty step, and I would be sliding face-first toward the nearest rock. Balancing carefully, I took a second look around. From this vantage, I could see more than before; and it was less reassuring than the first glimpse.

The ship lay against a gray-green outcropping of stone on the side of a similarly composed mountain. But to call it a ship was too generous. What remained of the USS-Genesis II was no more than a fragment. The hull had been shredded. My chamber, upon which I stood, was one of probably twenty or thirty left intact, stretching in either direction away from me. How the other occupants had fared, I couldn’t say, as the windows to their chambers were frosted over. In most cases, I could see no visible damage.

The Genesis II had been designed to house dozens of occupants in close quarters. My own room, though fairly compact, was one of the more generous accommodations afforded to high-ranking scientists, military specialists—and those who could purchase a room to themselves. As a special forces veteran and volunteer for the mission, I’d earned housing here.

They’d put a few of us in the area. The chamber over from mine had been assigned to Caspersen. She’d been a MARSOC Marine Raider, brought back from retirement for the assignment. Down from her were Russell and Cohen, both Rangers. Granges and Connor had been assigned the other side of the hall. They were Marine Force RECON.

And that was where the southernmost end of the ship vanished. Twisted metal, torn cables, and shattered glass were all that remained of what had been Captain Weidner’s chamber. Where he’d gone, I didn’t know. If anything remained of the rest of the ship, I couldn’t see it from my position. But Weidner’s room had been shredded. Which meant our best-case scenario already included casualties.

I slid down to the rockface, and for the first time since regaining consciousness, I stood unimpeded. It should have been a good feeling, but in the wake of discovering some inkling of the disaster that had befallen us, I hardly noticed. I scrambled as quickly as I dared in that thin air toward the southernmost end of the Genesis II.

Sidestepping loose rocks and ice pools from the rainstorm, I reached Weidner’s room. The cryonics capsule had vanished. Indeed, three quarters of the wall to which it had been bolted was gone, and the opposite side fared little better. Bare, blackened metal was all that remained of the walls, and most of the medical apparatus and cupboards had melted or gone missing.

Had Weidner’s room caught fire somehow? Was that what had caused the structural collapse? Maybe. But it still didn’t explain where the rest of the ship had gone or why the captain hadn’t initiated the cryonics reanimation sequence before the ship splintered.

Maybe he didn’t realize the fire had caused structural damage.

I skirted shredded metal and unrecognizable rubble to get to the other side of the room. The door frame had torn in two—one half remained, and another presumably had gone with the rest of the ship. But I had enough space to squeeze between the metal of the ship and the stone of the mountain behind it.

Gingerly, I poked my head into the near darkness of the passage beyond. The Genesis II had been constructed with rows of self-contained rooms on either side of a narrow hall. The idea was to maximize space while creating pods that would be entirely sufficient and contained. Each room was an airtight, fire-resistant, and structurally independent box, stacked into a row of identical units. Each had its own connections to the central power system, as well as built-in solar paneling sufficient to maintain the core life systems at 150 percent—one and a half times the power needed to maintain the cryonics equipment in each unit. The excess energy was diverted toward other boxes, through a so-called Smart Grid designed to detect shorts, failures, and interruptions, and bypass accordingly. The idea was that if one box’s power failed, the others would feed it, and also that no one unit could disrupt the entire system.

It had been created to be accident proof, to maximize human survival in disaster scenarios. At the time, people thought the engineers behind it had been overly cautious or downright paranoid.

They hadn’t been. The fact that I survived to marvel at their handiwork proved that. And the faint glint of greenish-blue light from the units on either side of the hall ahead of me only further justified their paranoia.

Just like the fact that Weidner’s room lay a charred and mangled mess and most of the ship had gone missing affirmed that even the best-laid plans could go awry.

I crawled into a narrow hall. From what I could tell by the glow emanating from each room, the way forward lay unimpeded. The entire structure sat at the same forty-five-degree angle I’d observed in my pod, so I made my way up hunched over, with one foot on the floor and the other on the left wall.

The unit opposite Weidner’s had been severed in similar fashion. The door remained, but everything past it was gone. I went up the hall toward Granges’s and Connor’s quarters.

A thought hit me. The doors in the Genesis had been fitted with toxicity sensors that locked them in place in the presence of toxic substances. Those sensors were considered a part of the life systems and would be powered at all times.

It hadn’t occurred to me last night when I assumed my own had been the only breached unit. But now I considered the possibility that perhaps my door didn’t budge because the system detected traces of toxicity. I wondered what kind of gases or other substances might be circulating in the air. Had something tripped my tox sensor?

There should have been an alarm if the sensor had gone off. But maybe the alarm was the piece that wasn’t working and not the door mechanism.

I decided not to linger too long on the thought. Our journey across the lightyears had already hit some significant snags. I didn’t want to think the rest of the crew and I had made this hellish trip just to be poisoned by the air.

I reached Granges’s door, took hold of the latch, and pressed it.

It slid open. A wave of relief and stale air assailed me. The air might have been stale, but it carried a flood of oxygen too. I stepped past the door, breathed deeply, and then realized I should reseal it as quickly as possible. There might not be toxic substances in Kepler-186f’s air, but there weren’t Earth-levels of oxygen either. This unit might be one of the few spots left, and it made no sense to needlessly disperse something that precious.

I slipped into the chamber, and pulled the door closed after me. The room was dark—very dark, as its windows faced the mountainside. The little, internally facing pane on the door remained unobstructed, and it admitted only the faintest light from the already darkened hall. Still, I crept toward the cryonics mechanisms, using my hands as much as my eyes to guide me to the spot.

The controls were, by design, extremely simple: a button to kick off the process and a button to reverse it. I saw diagnostic tools as well. But I was a soldier, not a doctor, so they were completely foreign to me. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use them because I doubted I’d be able to do so.

A screen near the cryonics capsule lit up after I pushed the button, displaying a data read. Columns for heart rate, body temperature, breathing rate, and other vitals indicators sprang up. The one entry that really meant anything to me, and so caught my eye, was an estimated time—four hours.

In that case, I had plenty of time to rouse the rest of the crew. Or what remained of us.

I threw a final glimpse at Granges—his capsule was sealed, and he looked much as I’d seen him yesterday.

Not yesterday, I reminded myself. He looked much as he had before we entered the deep freeze. Through some accident of providence, Granges had been born with the ideal features for someone in military intelligence: pleasant enough to go unremarked but average enough to look at once like everyone else and no one in particular. Now, those features sat in a suspended state, in the familiar, unconcerned expression he wore no matter the circumstance—whether he was getting his lights knocked out in training or being locked into a timeless cooler. Other than the little flecks of ice on the stubs of blond hair cropped close to his skull, he looked exactly as I remembered.

Repressing a shiver, I headed for Sergeant Connor’s unit. This time, I closed the door as quickly as possible behind me. Connor’s room was better illuminated than Granges’s had been as her windows, like mine, faced the sun. Well, Kepler’s sun. Ice still covered the hull, but reddish light filtered through and cast the sterile interior of the pod in an eerie, sort of blood-red glow.

The usual pugnacity had eased out of Connor’s expression. Her fierce eyes had shut on the world, and her jaw relaxed. The only reminder of her personality was the scar that stretched the length of her cheek, from her left eye down past her mouth. Connor, like the rest of us, was a vet, but the scar hadn’t been from her war days. Somehow, she’d made it out of that hell without a scratch. The scar was a token from a drunken bar fight after she’d gotten home, in which her face had become intimately acquainted with a whiskey bottle. She’d walked away with a scar that would last her a lifetime. By all accounts, it was months before the other guy was walking at all.

So whatever wounds Connor had taken during the war, it seemed that they weren’t the kind you could see. Rumor had it that she’d almost been passed over for the mission because of her psych eval. But she’d worked hard to get her act together, and when it came to the work, no one surpassed her. So, in the end, she’d made the cut.

In this light, her face appeared gentle and peaceful, and the scar out of place—all the more pronounced. Bathed in that red light, it looked almost like a fresh wound, seeping blood. I shivered at the sight.

I didn’t scare easily. But something about waking up in a crimson hellscape surrounded by human popsicles, each tucked neatly in a cryochamber, put a shiver up my back. It was like waking up in a high-tech serial killer’s lair, where even the lighting was designed to be evocative of death.

Except—my mind kicked in impatiently—there’d been no killing involved. And the popsicle business had been voluntary and self-imposed, with the idea that we’d all be woken up at a future time and place. So, not at all like a serial killer.

Still, irrational or not, the sight gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I moved as quickly as possible. The sooner my human companions were out of the deep freeze, the better I’d feel. Scrambling up the incline, I activated Connor’s resuscitation routine. The stats display flickered to life, and the countdown began.

I moved on. The next stop on my way was Caspersen. Back in training, we’d been partners, prepping for the mission together. Which had been interesting for both of us. Caspersen was one of the most decorated officers in the Marine Corps special forces and was equal parts hard-ass and bad-ass. She was probably the best I’d ever met—at pretty much everything. Still, I was a Ranger. So, when pressed, I’d say she wasn’t bad…for a Marine.

Not that I’d ever let on, but the day I’d overheard her remark similarly that I was pretty good for a soldier, had been one of my proudest moments. I didn’t really know anyone else on the launch, but in Caspersen, I felt I had a friend.

And there she was, blue and still in that frozen limbo. I pressed the button and waited for her stats to display. I squinted at it, reading off the numbers. There were a lot of zeroes, but everything displayed as green. We were okay, I guessed.

I frowned. This was wrong. All wrong. I had no idea what I was doing. Suppose something happened? Suppose one of these cryo-units malfunctioned? There were procedures to bypass the main power unit. I didn’t know any of them. I wasn’t trained in any of them. Hell, I didn’t know if they were still applicable now that the ship was torn in half.

Where the hell is the captain? What the hell happened to us? This was his job, or hers—whoever had inherited the rotation when we reached Kepler-186f’s atmosphere.

There’d been fifteen flight captains on board. Of the entire crew, they were the only ones set to wait out the duration of the trip awake. It was essentially a suicide mission: pilot the ship for fifty years, or until ill health intervened. The captains in deep freeze had been set to wake on a series of fifty-year timers. We’d taken off under the stewardship of Captain Lee. Captain Baker had been set to wake up in fifty years’ time, and Captain Miller after her; and so on and so forth. Captain Lee had daily automated health check-ins. If the system detected health issues, or if he failed to check in, it would wake Baker. Lee would go into a cryonics chamber; Baker would authorize a time shift, set to wake Miller in fifty years from that date; and the ship would continue.

We in the crew had even heard rumors of a kill switch implanted in the pilots. Fifty years of solitude would take a heavy toll on anyone. The Genesis II pilots had been chosen for their mental fortitude as well as their skill sets; they knew the cost of their journey, and they knew the perils. But mission command wasn’t taking chances; rogue behavior—failure to check-in, unauthorized crew resuscitation, etc.—would trigger the release of a deadly and fast-acting toxin; in twenty-four hours, the old captain would be dead and replaced.

Or so the rumor went among the passengers anyway.

Everything seemed to have been accounted for, from illness to aberrant behavior. And yet, here I was, doing the job that the captains had trained for, waking my fellow settlers. And the Genesis II captains? They had vanished, along with the rest of the ship and the bulk of her passengers.