Sloane halted as she stared at the image. Yes. Yes! Garson got it. More than she’d ever hoped, the Initiative leader got it.
“We journey in one of the most incredible marvels our species have ever created,” the founder reminded them, “built in a spirit of a cooperation that is without precedence in our galactic history. We carry with us, collectively, centuries of culture, millennia of government, beliefs, of languages and art, incredible knowledge, and incredible sciences. Hard-won things, the result of endless work, unfathomable suffering and, most importantly, the efforts of countless billions of sentient beings over millennia and across dozens of worlds.
“We carry all these things like the honed tools of an artist, to our great empty canvas. To Andromeda.” Garson’s hands came together. “We go,” she said intently, “to paint our masterpiece.”
Sloane leaned against the wall, staggered by the power of the woman’s words. Just words, and yet Sloane knew without a shred of doubt that if Garson commanded her to stride into hell, Sloane would. In a heartbeat. Because that was Garson’s strength, she thought.
People. Knowing them. What moved them.
What they hoped for.
Garson allowed a moment, then once again fixed her deep, knowing gaze straight ahead. “So I say to you now what Pathfinder Alec Ryder just said to me.” Her smile, Sloane thought, could power Ilium. Another oratory skill Sloane had never bothered with. Why should she, when people like Garson had that on lockdown?
“I will see you all on the other side.” A pause, and the light caught the high shape of her cheekbones as her grin deepened. “When the real work can begin.”
The recording ended. Silence descended in its wake, heavy as fog and still as ice. It was cold in the halls, and would be for another six hundred years. But Sloane? She didn’t feel the cold.
She’d been a soldier for a long time—her whole life, really. She’d witnessed speeches made to celebrate victories, others intoned to condemn atrocities. War had been her path for so long, the life of a soldier her only way, that she’d forgotten what a speech about hope could do to the brain. A new start, huh?
Sloane shook her head, laughed aloud. It rolled back at her from a thousand echoes in the barren corridor. “Andromeda,” she said aloud, trying the word out. Andromeda, the echoes whispered back.
The other side.
She stood there, leaning against one bulkhead out of a million, not even really sure exactly where she was, and took that moment to feel the ship. Listened to it breathe in its own mechanical way. The whirr of systems engaged and ready, the constant dry whisper of circulated air. That one would stop soon enough—there was no need to waste the power when nobody needed the air.
Next, Sloane would sleep. For hundreds of years. Across that eternity of cold nothingness, the Nexus would reach its destination guided by meticulous programming.
Sloane pushed away from the bulkhead and continued her rounds. She passed through the hydroponics farm, the machine shops and the archives, the sterile places that would become the great plazas once the station unfolded into place. Over there would be the cultural offices, and her own security headquarters—the best, she thought with fierce determination, there ever was.
She made sure everything was where it should be, and as it turned out, everything was. It was perfect.
The Nexus was perfect.
Sloane checked a box, and the station lit its engines and set off. Simple as that. So smooth, she barely felt anything. She grinned, pleased with the ease of it all, and returned to crew storage to shed her omni-tool, stow her gear, and prep for her own cryo. Soon enough, she returned to cryostasis chamber 441. The small room was one among countless others on the Nexus, each identical to the last. Eight pods, a surgical couch for post-revival certification, terminals, and little else.
This was it. The final step.
Sloane lowered herself into her stasis pod, and found herself adjusting her uniform. The same way Garson had. With a sudden snort, she gave up and pulled the hatch closed.
“Cryostasis procedures logged,” a mechanized voice said. “Rest well, pioneer.”
Naptime, huh? Smiling, Sloane closed her eyes.
Within minutes, she—and everyone aboard—slept.
CHAPTER ONE
Thawing from stasis was meant to take time. A gentle process. Warmth gradually applied to cells dormant for centuries, neurons carefully coaxed back into firing.
Synthetic fluids mixed with precise amounts of the sleeper’s blood, a ratio changing by the smallest of fractions over several days until, finally, the body crossed a threshold, becoming whole again. Vitals checked, and then, only then, would the final mixture of drugs be injected under expert supervision.
Or something like that. Sloane Kelly didn’t really remember the specifics. How much time, when the process was supposed to begin—these were things left up to the techs who built the stasis pods. They knew better.
At least they were supposed to.
Whatever the instructions had been, Sloane was damn sure that abruptly launching from deep stasis into six shades of hell wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
Alarms.
Lights.
Everything heaved. A deafening noise, an aggressive shriek like rending metal, assaulted her ears, physically squeezed her entire body.
She opened her eyes.
Disjointed wires cast sparks over the pod’s view-port, forcing her eyelids closed again as her spinning brain popped aftershocks across them. Everything crashed together in a disjointed cacophony of light and thunder and motion and adrenaline. The small pod whirled around her, momentum shifted side to nauseating side as she flattened both hands on the pane, elbowed out in reflex and hit solid metal.
Pain ricocheted up her arm and helped jerk her foggy brain back into alignment. Out. She needed out. Her pod was failing. Torn free of its moorings maybe, rolling around in the chamber. Had to be. The air stung her nose and lungs, the wrong mixture and far too warm. It stank of chemicals and old sweat.
She slammed a tingling foot against the front of the stasis pod.
“Failsafe,” she shouted into the cramped space, as if the word might crawl back in time and remind the engineers of this stupid metal coffin to include an eject latch.
As if on cue, a calm mechanized tone sounded, at odds with the world into which she’d awoken. The pane sealing her within protective transport unlocked with a hiss of air almost as loud as the klaxons that shrieked through the open seam. She felt the breath being sucked from her lungs, replaced by the cold bite and stale taste of the outside.
Then a new smell. Ash.
Double vision slowly gelled into horrifying truth: smoke. That was smoke pouring in from the outside. Fire flickered somewhere to her left.
Shit. It’s not just me. Which means—
Slam-dropped out of stasis meant the rest of her body needed time to remember how to function. Her brain couldn’t process it all. Every cell screamed to fight, to respond to the skull-rattling alarms of the Nexus under fire, but the adrenaline surge to her limbs only made her twitch violently as feeling came back into them.