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Amber slid her duffel bag into the rubbery, vaguely unpleasant-feeling net and gave it a pull to make it retract, just like in orientation. She got into the Sleeper, wriggling over as far as she could and very much aware of Scott’s contemptuous stare as he watched her try not to overfill the narrow mat. Just watching.
“You waiting for a tip?” she asked, knowing she was blushing and hating him for seeing it.
“Your shirt’s pulled up,” he told her flatly.
Amber reached down, her face in flames and her chest in knots, to tug the stiff fabric down over the exposed swell of her stomach. There was no one to reprimand him for his huffy little laugh now; he made sure she heard it.
“Yeah, they must have been desperate, all right,” he said, dropping the lid on her. She never had the chance to say anything back. She heard the snapping sound of the lid’s locking mechanism, but not the hiss of the gas.
She was asleep when Scott held his middle finger up to the glass plate before her face and called her a bitch. She was asleep when her tube wormed its umbilicus under her tight shirt, asleep when it punctured her navel and began the painful process of rendering her dormant for the flight. She slept through the next four days as the rest of the colonists were processed and the ship steadily filled. She slept through the historic speech of Manifest Destiny’s charismatic leader as the Pioneer’s mighty engines fired up behind him on the video screen in the press room where he was still standing, very much on Earth. She slept through thirteen routine medical scans and six hundred thirty-three automatic maintenance cycles before she slept through the asteroid field that pierced the hull and pulled the active crew out into space through approximately seven thousand coin-sized holes. She slept through two hundred sixty-six years of Tu
4
Amber woke up on her side, which she knew only because she could sort of feel the hard mat under her cheek and the cold, curved glass panel of the Sleeper’s lid pressing on her nose and forehead. She tried to roll over, but couldn’t. Her limbs were dead; she was begi
She had always been a light sleeper and was used to coming up and alert at a moment’s provocation, but she couldn’t do it this time. The Sleeper’s computer had complete control and seemed far more concerned with talking about the process of waking her up than actually doing it. She could hear it through the speakers in its pleasantly androgynous, vaguely British-sounding voice: “—is estimated to complete in…five minutes seventeen seconds. Please remain calm. Your movements have been inhibited during Sleep. This condition is temporary and will be restored upon removal of the umbilicus.”
Right. She remembered now. The orientation seminar had explained all this. Although she couldn’t move, she could feel herself twitching as the computer systematically tested her muscles. She could also feel it where the vent was gently blowing on her ear. Why the hell was she on her side, anyway? The seminar had assured all of them that Sleep wasn’t really sleep and there wouldn’t be any dreams, but she’d had a real whopper. She didn’t understand how she could have thrashed around when she was supposed to have been paralyzed, but maybe that was just for the landing, not the whole flight.
And what had the big nightmare been? Why, a trip to the beach with her mother. Bizarre. Bo Peep Bierce did not take her babies on outings. Oh, they’d gone to the courthouse a couple of times, and when they were very young, they used to walk down to the childcare place together until Bo Peep failed a drug test and got kicked out of all the state programs. Other than that, Amber couldn’t think of a single trip they’d taken together, unless it was to get drugs.
‘Maybe that’s why you dream about it,’ she thought to herself, and would have rolled her eyes except that they were still kept shut and paralyzed.
It had been such a vivid dream, though. So vivid that she could still imagine the smell of her mom’s cigarettes. So vivid that she could still hear…
What…What was she hearing? Was that…people?
She was on her side…but she wasn’t really on her side, was she? The vent was blowing on her ear and the glass partition of the lid was right up against her face and her arms with all her weight behind it. She wasn’t on her side; the Sleeper was.
Amber could feel the fear leap into her, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even open her eyes. The computer kept stubbornly monitoring and testing, untroubled by the smoke it gently breathed in at her along with the oxygen and the screams she could hear behind the walls. It didn’t sound like a couple panicking colonists getting cold feet on their new planet. There were so many people screaming that they had formed a single, endless, ululating voice. That didn’t take just a lot of people. That took hundreds. Maybe thousands. Maybe…all of them.
Amber tried again to break the paralytic hold of the Sleeper on her body, but the only result of all her invisible efforts was a mild musical tone before the pleasant voice interrupted itself to say, “Heart-rate elevated. Please remain calm. Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…three minutes eleven seconds. You are not paralyzed. Your movements will be restored when the umbilicus is withdrawn. Please remain calm.”
Three minutes? Something was burning. People were screaming. How much worse could this get in three whole minutes?
Again, she fought to take back possession of her body, but focusing all the willpower in the world couldn’t even open her eyes.
“Please remain calm,” said the voice after another censuring chime in her ear. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute fifty-seven seconds. You are in no physical danger. If a medico must be dispatched to attend you, you will be liable for the cost of any restraining measures. Please remain calm.”
The fact that she could smell the smoke at all—and now feel it itching at her nose and throat—meant that the fire was somewhere in the ventilating system. Or, even worse, that the Sleeper wasn’t airtight the way it was supposed to be, and if it wasn’t, what else wasn’t working right? Where were they? Dear God, was the ship burning in space? No, no surely not. The false gravity the ship used during flight pulled everything straight toward the floors, no matter how the ship itself was tipped. She was on her side, so there had to be real gravity, meaning that they’d landed.
Only she was on her side. So they hadn’t landed. They’d crashed.
“A medico has been notified of your distress,” the voice informed her. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute eleven seconds.” A short pause and that musical tone again. “The umbilicus is about to be withdrawn. You may feel some discomfort.”
She didn’t or perhaps simply couldn’t notice against the prospect of the ship burning all around her, but she could hear the whispering sound as the cable slithered out of her clothes and back into its port.
“The umbilicus has been successfully withdrawn,” the computer said. “You will shortly begin to recover mobility—”
Amber’s hands twitched. Then her lips, although she couldn’t manage to shape the word she wanted, which was just as well since it was nothing but a swear and no one was there to hear it anyway.
“—will not open immediately. Please remain calm. Your Sleeper is in perfect working order and will unlock as soon as its final maintenance scan has been completed.”
Amber’s eyes opened at last, but showed her only the glass plate against her face, fogged over by her own breath. She saw no smoke, except the thin ribbons sneaking in through the vent. She was able to see only by the light of the monitoring bar as it finished its sweep down by her feet; the overhead lights had not come on the way the seminar had said they would. Her room remained perfectly black.
She rolled over, her numb arms falling limply across her stomach, slow to respond after being crushed up between her and the Sleeper’s wall. The computer was still talking, telling her that she should report to the recreational area of her housing unit as soon as she was released by a member of the crew. The disembarking stations had been alerted and someone would be here shortly to release her. Did she want directions to the recreational area now?
“No,” croaked Amber. She got her arm up, groping clumsily at the underside of the Sleeper’s lid until she hit the medico alert switch. “Hello?” she said and coughed. The air coming in through the vents suddenly seemed smokier. And hotter. “Hello? This is Amber Bierce in room…um…three. In the women’s dorms. Mod A. Or WA, I guess. I’m okay, but there’s something wrong with my Sleeper. I can smell…smoke…hello?”
No answer. If she held her breath to listen, she could hear the faint hum of empty air in the speakers, so they were probably working. But no one was answering. Of course, they might all be away from the alert station, if every screaming person Amber could hear had their own medico dispatch, but Amber really didn’t think so. There weren’t enough medicos on the ship to answer all those screamers.
“Hello?” Amber pushed the switch again, and again, and then really leaned her thumb on it and kept it there, but no one buzzed through and told her to get off and quit being a bitch. No one told her she was on the list of panicky people to deal with and she’d be charged a fee or even arrested for making a nuisance of herself on her first day awake. No one told her anything. Because no one was there.
“Bullshit,” said Amber, badly frightened. But she stopped playing with the alert switch at once and started hunting for the latch.
It opened without incident, dispersing the fear that she would be burnt to death right here in the tube, but it didn’t go far. She could still be burnt to death in this room. She rolled out and onto her feet, but kept her hands on the Sleeper to help keep her balance until her head was together. The floor was definitely slanted, but not as much as she’d thought inside the tube. Maybe it was a little steeper than the average incline on, say, a wheelchair access ramp, but not much more. She could walk just fine.