Resurrection

  “Pruit, Niks’s crib reports that Niks is no longer alive.”

  Pruit’s head was in her hands, and she was looking down at the dried body in the crib. Her eyes were burning.

  “I know that, Central,” she said quietly. “Tell me why.”

  “It happened ten months and fifteen days ago,” Central said, reviewing the data. “It was not a malfunction in the crib.”

  “Then what?”

  “It appears Niks left his skinsuit on when he entered stasis.”

  “Saving Father…” she whispered.

  She and Niks were both fitted with skinsuits, a web of cells that lived in the upper layers of their skin and could retreat back into their bodies or rise to the surface to provide an additional layer of “skin” as needed to protect them from microorganisms in strange environments.

  They activated their skinsuits as a matter of course upon waking, to protect themselves from any radiation or stray organisms in the ship. They had to be deactivated prior to stasis, however, for they would, by their very nature, repel the advances of the crib and treat the bioarms as a threat. Since their earliest training for this mission they had drilled the simple procedure for deactivating the suit before stasis. It should have been second nature to Niks.

  She could imagine what had happened. The crib had tried to activate. Niks’s skinsuit had repelled it. The crib had continued its standard functions and begun to assume control of Niks’s body. This would have caused the skinsuit to draw more heavily on the resources in his body to put up greater resistance, acting on the erroneous assumption that his body was under heavy attack. Ultimately, the skinsuit would have drained him in a misguided effort to save him. As the scenario played out in her head, Pruit felt a great surge of impotent frustration. After all their worries about the hazards of the stasis cribs, Niks had been killed not by his crib at all, but by his skinsuit, a mechanism designed solely to enhance his life.

  Niks must have realized that something was wrong as he was falling into sleep. He had tried to pry open the plantglass, but by then he must have been half in stasis with his body half dead. It had been too late. Those who had designed the ship could not anticipate every possible crew error.

  Pruit pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to wipe out the thought of Niks struggling in the biofluid. She couldn’t avoid the image. She pushed herself away from the crib and stood up.

  “Central, take control of the life-systems computer,” she ordered. “Fill Niks’s crib with biofluid.”

  “May I ask why?” Central said, still using the quiet tone.

  “I want all ship life-systems resources used. We are going to regenerate him.”

  There was a long pause as Central scanned through its vast databanks of programming instructions, looking for an appropriate response to this irrational request. After several long moments, the computer spoke.

  “Pruit, that is not possible.”

  “It is possible!” she yelled, looking down at the remains of Niks. “Fill the crib!”

  At her command, biofluid poured into the crib. Niks’s body was so light it began to float. Pruit’s stomach turned again, and she averted her eyes. That was Niks in there; that was him, hollow and dry…

  “Pruit, what you ask is not possible,” Central said slowly and clearly. “We have no such resources on this ship. It is doubtful such resources exist even on Herrod.”

  Pruit did not respond. If only she could shut his crib, go back to sleep, and wake in a year to find that none of this had happened. She stared at a corner of the tank, watching it fill, avoiding the sight of the floating husk within.

  She knew that Central was right. Niks’s was gone. He had died ten months ago, from a stupid mistake, a mistake that was easily avoidable. And it was her fault. If she had insisted on following their sleep protocol, they would have caught his error before it was too late. She had been flattered by his code-breaks, and that had cost him his life. She sank down to the floor and began to cry.

  Several hours later, Pruit had dressed herself. She was not wearing her coveralls. She had put on her dress uniform, a slim red jacket and tan pants, silver braid twisted around either arm as a sign of her rank, and several medals ranged on a vertical band along her upper sleeve.

  Niks was wrapped in a blanket in her arms. He weighed almost nothing. She stood in front of the sentient tank, the large, dark box situated at one end of the ship that had sat unused until now.

  “Central,” she said, “fill the tank so the ship can reclaim the body.”

  The door of the tank sat at waist level, and it slid open to reveal a long, flat tray, large enough to hold two adult humans lying side by side and about nine inches deep. The tray was filling with biofluid.

  Pruit pulled out the tray and carefully set Niks’s blanketed body upon it. Then she touched the panel and watched the tray retract and the door slide shut. The tank would break down the body and reclaim the chemicals into the ship’s life-system.

  “Central, open log.”

  “The log is ready for your entry.” The voice was still gentle, and Pruit hated the computer for knowing she was vulnerable.

  She stared at the tank. That was not Niks inside. Niks, the spirit, the man, had left his body here ten months ago. Where was he now? Had he returned to their home on Herrod? Was he already a child in his next life, thinking of her, wondering about her?

  “I, Sentinel Defender Pruit Pax of Senetian, report the death of my shipmate, Sentinel Defender Niks Arras of Telivein. I am assuming command of this mission. Central, please post time and date. Close log,” she said quietly.

  Her hand was touching the tank, and she imagined that she was touching him. Clasped within her hand was the small crystal that had hung around his neck. She wore an identical crystal around her own. The crystals were ancient. They had been a parting gift from the commanders of the Sentinel. They were small, no longer than her little finger, and of similar girth. They were of a clear orange cast, with two blue data bands. They were both partially damaged, with cracks here and there from being crushed at some point in their history. But with an ancient crystal reader, parts of the data they held was still decipherable. They contained several poems.

  Her favorite ran thus:

  Yea for we are the conquerors

  And all that is lies before us

  A black domain of stars

  And we the brightest lights within it

  She loved that poem. It expressed the naïve, exuberant sense of destiny of those ancient Kinley who were reaching for the stars. It was a simple, beautiful, and proud view of the universe and the Kinley place within it. Such childlike certainty of place could have only occured before the Great War, before they were pounded to near oblivion. She and Niks had shared that poem with each other, had taken it as their personal mantra. It reminded them both of what their race could be and tied Pruit even more strongly to the heart of herself that said to the Lucien, “You won’t win…”

  Now the meaning of the poem seemed hollow without him by her side to share it. She crushed the hard surface of the crystal into her palm as she leaned against the tank.

  Niks. She remembered their first kiss, years before. They had been standing in the park with the light of late afternoon trickling in through the city dome. Their lips had touched, and it had been right. She had loved him immediately. She had always loved him. Her mate. Her partner for life.

  She knew she should say good-bye. She should open her mouth and tell Niks good-bye. But she could not. She was thinking of the way he liked to kiss her belly button, of his hands when the touched her, of his face. She was thinking of the intimate moments they had shared in their years together.

  She found that her head was against the tank and she was crying. His body was probably dissolved by now. There would be no trace of him, just a blanket floating in the biofluid. After another year of sleep she would be at their destination. Their whole mission lay ahead, and she was alone.

  She moved to a
putty control pad and found herself accessing Central’s speech controls. Almost in a trance, she commanded the computer to assume Niks’s voice. Central had hundreds of hours of records of them speaking, and it was a simple matter to execute her command.

  “Central?” she asked tentatively after withdrawing her hand from the controls.

  “Yes?”

  Pruit’s heart jumped, because it was Niks’s voice coming from the walls. Some objective part within her recognized that she was not thinking rationally. It did not matter to her at this moment; she wanted to hear him, to speak with him, to know that she was not by herself.

  “Niks,” she said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this without you.”

  “I—”

  “Just let me talk, Central,” she said quietly.

  Central fell silent.

  Pruit took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I know how to live if you’re gone,” she whispered, embarrassed that she was speaking to the computer, but somehow still comforted. Even as she spoke the words aloud, she knew that they weren’t true. Without Niks, she could not see herself being happy, for he was the one who had taught her happiness. But that did not alter the purpose of her life. There had been a core of steel in her since she joined the Sentinel.

  Her hand strayed to her arm, and her fingers moved over the medals pinned there. There were several for space missions she had flown prior to this one, most with the purpose of locating precious metals from asteroids. One medal was for finding a potential breach of the main city dome before a leak could occur. Her vigilance had saved thousands from radiation exposure. Her fingers moved to the topmost medal. This was a Star of Valor, for tracking down that Lucien spy.

  She felt the grief of Niks’s death, but she knew this would not incapacitate her. The grief was real, but her determination was stronger. She would give her whole life to fight for her people’s survival. She thought of the words of their poem, and she knew her own heart.

  “Pruit…” It was Central, with Niks’s voice.

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t mean it. I can live. There is a chance for us, and I will take it. Even alone.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Present Day

  “Africa. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania…” Pruit recited the names as she jogged. The treadmill faced a large screen that displayed a map of the planet Earth.

  Her ship was in orbit around the fifth planet of the system, a gas giant named Jupiter by the inhabitants of the third planet, Earth, her target.

  She had reached her target star system and come out of stasis six months ago. Her mission was now in its second phase. From one of the control stations at the middle of the ship, she could hear the alternate crackle and blare of the frequencies Central was monitoring. Earth had fared reasonably well in the last five millennia. The planet was in a slightly more developed state than would have been ideal for Pruit’s mission, but the availability of fast transportation technology would be helpful.

  She was allowed to make no transmission to Earth until her body was in shape and she had learned the languages she would need for the remainder of her mission. She had selected two languages: English, because it was the dominant language of the planet as a whole, and Arabic, because it was the dominant language of her target area.

  With the help of Central’s language-learning facilities, she had achieved a good fluency in both over the past months. The languages had no common root and entirely different alphabets, so this had been no easy task. But Pruit had honed her language skills on Herrod, where the soldiers in the Sentinel learned up to five ancient Kinley languages as training. These languages, dead for thousands of years, with odd syntax and varied pronunciation, were used by Kinley to speak in codes that the Lucien who barricaded had difficulty breaking.

  English and Arabic had unique personalities; though Arabic struck Pruit as the more sensitive and civilized of the two, English was the more expressive.

  She checked her heart rate and distance, and saw that it was time to cool down.

  “Screen off,” she said, and the screen went blank, the fibers that made up its surface returning to their neutral smoothness and light-tan color. The screen retracted into the wall at her side.

  She grabbed a towel, sat on the exercise mats nearby, and began the cooling stretch routine.

  There was a jump in volume from the control station. Central was scanning up and down on Earth’s broadcast frequencies, looking for an ancient beacon that did not seem to exist any longer, or if it did, was drowned out by the cacophony of transmissions from the rest of the planet.

  She waited to see if Central would comment on the abrupt noise, but the computer remained silent. Nothing new to report. Probably an entertainment program starting its broadcast. This world Earth was inundated with entertainment programs. Having few real worries of their own, in Pruit’s view, the natives delighted in make-believe ones.

  Earth was an interesting world in terms of natural resources. In addition to huge bodies of water, it appeared to have an almost unlimited supply of metals. Herrod was the opposite. It had almost no naturally occurring metal ores. Metals existed on the atomic level, bound up with other substances, but copper, gold, silver, tin, aluminum, and their ilk were virtually nonexistent in their naturally extractable forms. As a result, the Kinley civilization had matured without metals to mark their development. There was no Iron Age or Bronze Age in their history. The result of this was a science based almost exclusively in organic compounds and biological material.

  As Pruit spread her legs out to either side and laid her chest on the floor, she was aware of the pleasure of having her body fit again. She had been so drained upon waking the final time that it had taken her a full six months to regain muscle tone and strength. She had achieved them at last, and her muscles were now long and lean, her skin healthy and less ashen. Her hair had even regained much of its former shine. She was physically ready to begin the next phase of the mission.

  When her stretches were finished, she performed a brief fight routine, landing kicks and punches into a heavy target dummy. Then she showered and changed into her coveralls. She took a seat at the medical station and slipped the medical reader around her wrist.

  “Central, please confirm my medical check. I’m ready to move the mission into the third phase.”

  There was a pause as the computer examined her readings.

  “You’re ready, Pru,” the computer agreed. It was still using Niks’s voice, and it had developed his patterns of speech more and more since her final waking. Pruit supposed the computer was continually drawing on recorded conversations between Niks and her. Central even altered its voice tone based on Pruit’s attitude, much the way Niks would have done.

  “Good,” she answered, peeling the reader off her wrist. She felt the glow of anticipation pushing out the sadness that had lately occupied her mind. “Let’s get to work.”

  She slid into a chair in front of the primary control station and pulled down three books from a shelf on her left. The first was her mission Master Book of contingencies. She opened it and flipped to the current page. It read:

  Using reference material 20.-c, transmit to beacon location.

  She opened her reference book and confirmed the transmission frequency and target location. She had rehearsed this a dozen times in the last six months, and already knew that she would be targeting an area on the Nile River, but she went through the motions of confirmation nonetheless.

  She opened the third book, the book of background materials, and flipped to the page marked “Final Transmission from Survey Crew.” On this page was a copy of that final ancient transmission. Written in the script of a long-dead language was the information she needed: the frequency and code words she must use—“Rescue has arrived.” In addition, there were several entry combinations she would need later.

  She sank her hand in the putty control pad and entered the frequency and code words into the ship’s computer.

/>   “Central, I’m ready to send transmission.”

  “Acknowledged, Pruit.”

  She moved her hand and executed the transmission. She was sending her message in a single, compressed nanosecond to avoid detection by anyone on Earth. If the beacon set up by those long-dead members of the Kinley survey team was still there, was still operable, her message should provoke a reply.

  The chances were slim, but she had her contingencies. If this did not work, she would move to the next plan on her list and begin a search for the beacon on the ground. She wondered how long they had lasted, those survey crew members who had entered stasis. Had they slept fifty years? A hundred? Two hundred? Did they die quickly in the first few years, or did they live a long time and eventually give up hope and rejoin the world around them? Could a beacon survive so long? Doubtful.

  An hour passed, ample time for the signal to reach Earth and a reply to be sent. None came.

  “Central, resend every hour and continue monitoring all traffic.”

  “I will,” the computer responded in Niks’s voice. But the response was far more patient than Niks ever would have been.

  Pruit looked again at the final transmission from the survey crew. It was a last desperate plea from six people who wanted to return home:

  …in stasis we await your return. Do not forget us…

  There was no way they could have known how little of their home was left when they sent that message. They had planned to go to sleep for a few years, but Herrod itself had almost gone to sleep forever.

  CHAPTER 8

  2606 BC

  Year 1 of Kinley Earth Survey

  Then the earth shook and quaked; and the foundations of the mountains were trembling and were shaken, because He was angry.