Chapter 24 The Rescue

The rescue operation ran for nine weeks, and Kael would remember it afterward less as a single event than as a long, grinding campaign against the decay of a dead ship. The first problem was the Somnium itself. The derelict had to be brought into the colony's orbit, which meant restarting propulsion systems that had not been exercised in decades, coaxing navigation back to life long enough to fire the ship's engines under the supervision of the Aethelgard's own ancient computers. Elara ran the operation from the shuttle, her voice steady over the comms while the Somnium's hull groaned around them and the colony below watched the slow burn on the horizon. It worked. It took three weeks, and it worked, and when the Somnium finally settled into a stable orbit beside the retired Aethelgard, the two ships hung side by side over Proxima Centauri b like two halves of the same story. The second problem was the pods. Amara had been right about the numbers — roughly four thousand viable, and dropping. Each day, one or two more crossed from viable to critical, the telltale light on the cryo control board shifting from amber to red, and each one was a name. Kael had taken the Somnium's manifest and cross-referenced it with the pod identification codes, and he had spent the long hours of the operation with a pad in his lap, marking off the names one by one as the pods were brought across. No pod would be transferred without its name. No sleeper would be rescued as cargo. It was that principle that nearly killed the operation. The transfer corridor was a sealed tube strung between the two ships, built by the colony's engineers in the first weeks — a fragile metal artery through which the pods moved, one at a time, on a motorized rail. On the forty-second day, three weeks into the main transfer, a pressure sensor in the corridor's midsection began to read wrong. Amara caught it first, and Elara was through the airlock before the alarm finished sounding, and Kael followed because there was a pod on the rail in the middle of the tube and it was marked with the name of a child. The child's name was Ilsa Chen — no relation to Elara, or perhaps a distant one, some echoing branch of a family tree that had been split by a hundred years and an ocean of dark. She had been three years old when the Somnium left Earth. She was still three years old now, frozen in the moment between her last breath of Earth's air and everything that would come after. The manifest listed her parents, Tomas and Lena, as also aboard the Somnium, both in pods that had already been transferred, both of them sleeping through the rescue of their daughter. The failure was in the corridor's heating element — a fractured weld that had been leaking thermal energy into the structure and was now, in the thin cold of space, contracting the metal around it. Elara worked with her hands in the tight space between the rail and the hull, her suit lights painting the tube in harsh white, while Kael held the child's pod steady against the vibrations and read her name aloud, over and over, as if the words themselves were a kind of anchor. He did not know why he did it. He only knew that the pod was small and cold and had been waiting a hundred and fifty years, and that no one had said the child's name aloud in all that time, and that someone should. The weld held long enough. Elara's repair took hold, the corridor's pressure stabilized, and the pod moved on down the rail toward the Aethelgard's hold, where the colony's medics were waiting. Kael watched it go, and when he finally let go of the rail, his hands were shaking. "That was close," Amara said over the comms, her voice carefully level. "It was," Elara said. "Kael, you all right?" Kael looked down at the pad in his hand, at the line where the name Ilsa Chen still waited for its mark. He made the mark. "I'm fine. Log it — the corridor's heating section needs a full replacement before the next shift. And Mnemosyne, note the transfer time. If the timeline holds, the last pod will come across in —" He did not finish. Somewhere below them, on the planet's surface, the colony's communication network was carrying a new sound — the sound of a pod's life-support system, transferred successfully, resuming its long-dormant cycle. It was not a sound the colony had expected to hear for another ten days. It was the sound of the first of the Somnium's sleepers beginning to wake. "Amara," Elara said. "Check the pod manifest. Which pod is that?" There was a pause, and then Amara's voice came back over the comms, and it was strange — part fear, part wonder, the voice of someone who had just watched a story turn. "It's Ilsa," she said. "The child's pod. Her parents' pods were transferred first, and the medics — they were monitoring the family units as a set. The parents' pods started their wake sequences early, to prepare the family unit, and the child's followed." Kael stood very still in the transfer corridor, the pad in his hand, the names of four thousand sleepers in his care. Somewhere in the old ship's hold, a three-year-old girl was waking up into a world that was not the one she had been promised, and her parents were waking beside her, and the first thing they would learn was that a hundred and fifty years had passed in the time it took them to dream. "Mnemosyne," Kael said. "Get the family-unit counselor to the hold. And tell them to take it slowly. Tell them —" He stopped, searching for the words. "Tell them that the ship they were supposed to land on is gone, and that this is not the world they were promised, and that it took them a hundred and fifty years to get here, and that we are sorry, and that they are welcome." "Understood, Chief Archivist," Mnemosyne said. "The message is being composed. Shall I record your exact wording?" "No," Kael said. "I think that's the one thing I want to get right in person." He began the walk back through the corridor, toward the hold where a family was waking from a century and a half of night, and behind him the rail carried on its patient work, pod by pod, name by name, the long rescue of the last crew of the Somnium.