False Spring

Anastacia woke alone.

It was cool and dark in the Den, the pods around her still and silent. That was wrong. Some should be out by now, aglow with pre-revival routines. Others should be awake. She should not be the first. Not if everything had gone as it should.

Wake up, Canary, she thought, with a tight feeling inside. She unfolded from her sleep on unsteady legs, every inch of her trembling. An inquiry to the ship’s computer revealed the problem. A triggered perimeter alarm. But the numbers that should have told her where and when were a mad jumble, devoid of meaning, until she realized that whatever had approached them was close. More than close.

Everywhere.

That was when the Seek found her.

That was the name they gave, though if it identified the one who spoke or all of them together, she could not say. The Seek who addressed her was a Keeper, one who still knew the old tongue. They took charge when lost ones were found, the old stasis ships launched long ago, who had all had gone astray and never called back home.

“Lost?” Anastacia said. “We were lost? How long?”

The Keeper gazed at her with unreadable eyes.

“Long,” they said.

Something else tickled the back of her mind.

“Wait, you’re… human?”

Anastacia could not believe that. Standing at an unnerving height, the Seek were hard and thin, with spider-quick limbs and large eyes made for gazing into the deep. She could not even tell male from female, and when she tried to ask, they either did not understand the question or did not consider it worth answering. Or perhaps the silence itself was an answer she could not fathom.

“You’ve recovered other seed ships… other… lost ones?”

They had, but the Keeper would not speak of what they found on those sad derelicts. They seemed afraid and, when pressed, would say only that this was the first ship they had recovered intact. That was why they had not remembered or anticipated the protocol that woke Anastacia.

“I should alert the crew,” she realized out loud.

“No,” the Keeper replied. “The sleepers must only wake on the planet surface.”

“Planet surface? You mean Kore, or… another?”

Another, she learned. The ship was not on course to their planned destination. Had not been so for a very long time. Soon after this revelation, the Seek seemed to lose interest in her. The Keeper melted into the swarm and the others went about their business. At first, she did not understand what that was, until she saw them pulling apart a bulkhead.

“No!” She shouted, trying to push them away, though the chilly rubber touch of their skin made her shudder. Her alarm did not move them any more than her hands could. They went on and on. Pulling everything apart and, after a time, putting it back together, all the while murmuring to each other in low hissing tones that reminded her of the sea.

It was when she finally gave up that she remembered she was cold and tired, and half-dressed besides. At last, she sought out the Cage. She remembered it from the tour, the special one given just to her and her fellow canaries, during the final days of their training. Each had looked around that tiny space uneasily, imagining what it might be like, to live out the remainder of their days there.

Later, they passed around a bottle in that room during a stolen hour, when Devon overrode the security. They weren’t supposed to know how many rations had been set aside for them in the event of an activation, but Josiah found that for them, tucked away in restricted files on the ship’s computer. They spent a lot of time constructing different scenarios and timeframes, calculating how long the rations would last in each case. How close they would get to the new planet before their time ran out. Then they spent a lot of time drinking.

It made sense that they would stick together, the canaries. None of them had made the cut for regular crew, so they had that in common, and the others generally avoided them. Out of snobbery or embarrassment, she did not know. In any case, it was probably thought best not to get too attached.

“See you in the spring,” the others called to each other, just before it going into their long sleep. No one said this to Anastacia, least of all the other canaries.

“Sleep tight,” they murmured instead.

The Cage was furnished with everything she would need in her time left on the ship. A place to sleep and eat and wait. A place to step into when she decided she was done waiting, which would send her on her own long journey through the void. Even a little port window. Anastacia used the washing station and found spare garments, then pulled down the tiny bunk and lay gazing at the stars. Not just stars, she realized. Strands of some gossamer material seemed to shimmer in and out of view between the window and the points of light beyond.

She couldn’t complain. It was the only reason she was on the ship. Canary Protocol. Special berths for a handful of expendables, rejected during selection but holding knowledge useful in resolving a mid-transport hiccup. Ones who would not be missed from among the elite crew put together to give a new colony its best possible start, and yet could at least be put to useful work should they make it to the end and awaken with the rest.

The computer was supposed to pair canary to crisis as best it could, but it was not foolproof. That’s why they had cross-trained together. One could even activate another, if it would spare a real crew member. Clearly the computer had been unable to interpret the nature of the threat when it activated her. Anastacia was Biotech, but she had been awakened for a perimeter alert, meant to give early warning of dangerous debris. That should have been Devon. A confused algorithm and her bad luck, she supposed. Unless, of course, Devon had already been tapped.

She sat up.

It had not occurred to her to check for previous activations. Had this happened before? Anastacia opened the computer console at her station, entered the code to look up berth assignments, and found the locations of her fellow expendables.

She couldn’t check their status from here. Ada was the closest, so Anastacia headed toward the Den she had been assigned. She encountered the Seek in corridors, dozens of them, still pursuing their inscrutable mission. They were all alike, and alike they ignored her. When she entered the Den, she was confronted by a tableau of three, handling the body of a regular crew member. She recognized him as the next tier contact for Medical. Her contact. Gregory Sim, to be wakened in the event of crew health or stasis problems. Anastacia remembered him as one of the few who had made a special effort to introduce himself before launch, along with his family of five.

“Now you know what you’re protecting!” he declared cheerfully, though his eyes did not belong with his smile. So don’t get trigger happy, okay?

They were stretching Gregory out on a device, hooking hands and feet and head to the ends of extensions that seemed to defy geometry and hurt her eyes when she focused on them. One of the Seek turned to regard her impassively. The other two continued tinkering, and after a moment stood back. In the corridor beyond she saw more Seek, more devices, more crew stretched out like piglets on silver trays.

The machine before her began to emit a low humming sound.

Gregory tensed. His eyes flew open, and his mouth peeled back in a frozen rictus that made Anastacia’s heart thump hard against her chest. After a moment, his eyes closed again, his face relaxed, and his body began to… unravel. That was the only way to describe it. Starting at the attachment points and extending in toward the center of his torso, the biotechnician separated into a mesh of bloodless ribbon. When the machine came to a stop, he collapsed into a boneless red heap on the table.

Anastacia threw up.

The remaining creatures turned their pupilless eyes toward her and observed in silence.

Anastacia dreamed.

She dreamed she was coming apart. First one arm, and then another. She looked down, expecting to see shredded stumps. Instead, her limbs were still there, only overly long and oddly jointed, with skin that felt like steel.

Euphoria swelled through her. She was strong. She could do anything with these arms. She could punch through the hull. She could climb around the outside of the ship. But then her strong new arms began to spin apart.

No, she thought. No, I need them.

Her legs were next, the right, then the left, and then everything all at once. She was suddenly everywhere and nowhere, above and around and expanding out and out as slender fingers combed through the core of her.

All things made of parts come apart, said her grandmother, long ago, who was a physicist and knew these things. Everything dies. It’s okay, little one.

It wasn’t, though. There was something else out there with her. Something between the parts. Something that swam endlessly, mindlessly. Something that hunted and was always hungry. And there, in that space between her parts, it turned to look at her, and Anastacia screamed.

She woke in her bunk.

Anastacia jumped from the narrow mattress. She thought only a moment before sprinting into the corridor. The Seek were not in sight. She ran back to the Den where she had seen Gregory, only to find it empty as well, the pods stacked neatly in storage configuration, like eggs in a crate. Anastacia used a console to locate Gregory’s berth, and the computer rolled his pod out with the conveyor system. She stared at his peaceful, slumbering face. All the read-outs were nominal. He breathed, though slowly. Slowly, she punched in her access code.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I need you here.”

He couldn’t do anything about the Seek himself, but he had the access codes to wake others, people too vital to the success of a new colony to entrust their fate to a canary. People who could make big decisions, people who could defend the ship. Maybe the Seek were only doing exactly what they said, getting them to a safe planet after being bumped off course by…

By what? She thought of the thing in the dark. Thought of how a shark sometimes bumped against possible prey before attacking. This was above her pay grade. She would wake up the others. It was her job. It was the only job she’d been put on this ship to do.

The computer asked her one last time if she was sure she wanted to initiate the revival. The process was irreversible, it warned.

Have you thought of everything, little Canary? Are you sure it’s necessary to sacrifice a real crew member?

“Damn you,” she whispered, confirming the order.

Nothing happened. She typed in her access code again and went through the prompts. Confirm Revival. Again nothing.

“You have questions.” Anastacia jumped and spun. The Keeper stood behind her.

“What have you done?” She shouted in her surprise, startling herself all over again.

“The sleepers will waken on the new world,” they said. “They cannot know what happens now.”

“What is happening now? What’s that thing out there?” She gestured inarticulately. “In… here.”

“You have seen it.” That seemed to be the whole of their answer.

“Does it protect you?” She said, gesturing at the Seek’s hardened body. “This?”

“Sometimes,” they replied. A pause, then: “No.”

There was more after that, but understanding the words was like swimming through endless green water, trying to see the ocean. The Seek would plant the humans in new soil to watch them grow. It was less clear why or if they saw some future use for this ancestral stock. Finally, the Seek left her, alone and surrounded by stack upon stack of silver white coffins.

She could not wake them. She tried, again and again, pod after pod. All the people she was authorized to wake. All the people she was not authorized to wake. Anybody. She tried to initiate a ship-wide alert, which might trigger another canary activation. It was useless. They had taken it all apart and put it all back together. Everything. Everyone.

They cannot know.

Anastacia raised her head slowly from where it had been resting it against the console. She knew, and she could not be allowed to let the others know. She looked at the banks of stasis pods, gleaming pale in the ambient light. Poor canary. She would sing and sing and no one would hear. She would die, and no one would fathom the warning her little life had bought.

No.

Anastacia sat up. She could not wake the others, but she was not helpless. The Seek had locked her out of the computer, but she knew how the pods worked. She knew about the power supply, the backups, the safety protocols. The blind spots. She couldn’t put it back together, but she could finish unravelling it. She was an expert in long-term hibernation technology, and a specialist trained on these machines. She was good. Not good enough to help start a colony, maybe, but good enough for this.

It was not difficult. Destruction was never as hard as creation. She couldn’t get to the entire ship from here, but she would free these ones first. When it was done, she felt the silence fall in all around her as a high noise she had not been aware of faded slowly away. She sat in the quiet and the dark, her skin growing cool and hard, as the stars all around her winked out one by one. Then she turned toward the exit and the rest of her crew.

The Seek were there.

Anastacia woke in her bunk, this time from a deep and dreamless sleep. The door did not open at her command. Neither the one that led into the rest of the ship, nor – she learned a little later – the one that led elsewhere. The Keeper did not visit her again.

Anastacia stared out her tiny port window after that. From there she could study the long, elegant limbs of the vessel that surrounded her ship like a spiderweb. Food came occasionally, but she ignored it. Sleep sometimes took her, but less and less often. She never felt the ship move, but after a time one of the bright points in the distance began to unfold to her right. She watched the new world swell in her vision. Larger day by day, like a flower opening in the sun. A first bloom. She devoured it and grew hungry.

The others would wake on that new world, baffled at ship readings describing where and when they were. They would send messages home and hear nothing back. They would also find, to their dismay, that they had lost an entire Den to a stasis malfunction, and that one of their canaries was missing. She’d been wakened to deal with the problem, it would seem, and she had failed. Well, that’s what came of packing second-rate equipment.

Ultimately none of that would matter. They had made it to a new planet, and there would be nothing to do but what they been trained to do, what they had crossed oceans of time and space to do. Build a colony. Grow. Thrive. They had slept too long, all of them, but spring had finally come.

Anastacia had just woken too soon.