Space Colony One Books 1 - 6

The Concordia Deception-5

CARIAD WOKE. SHE OPENED her eyes and gasped. Where was she? Then she remembered. She was aboard the Nova Fortuna. She’d made it. She’d survived cryo.

The lights above her were bright, blindingly bright, and she closed her eyes against the pain. She tried to move, but her limbs were leaden. She recalled her last memory: she’d thanked the medical team and said goodbye before they put her to sleep. It had been a weird, sad parting after they had cared for her so well while preparing her to be frozen. By the time she woke up—if she woke up—they would all be long dead and buried.

The team had been emotional too, though for some of them it was probably because they believed they were euthanizing her. Yet despite the risks, despite the unproven process of cryonically preserving people for centuries, the chance had been too good for Cariad to miss.

Public opposition to the launching of the Nova Fortuna had grown to fever pitch in the years and months leading up to her departure. If she hadn’t taken the opportunity offered to her, another wasn’t likely within her lifetime. As a world-class geneticist involved in the Nova Fortuna Project, her application had been almost a formality.

Cariad had familiarized herself with the cryonic preservation process and knew it should work, yet she almost couldn’t believe she’d survived. After she’d been made unconscious, her blood was replaced with a non-aqueous, oxygenated solution that would not expand when frozen. External to her body, the solution was circulated and gradually cooled until she grew so cold that her breathing ceased and her heart stopped beating. She was lowered into a frozen slush that suspended her, avoiding pressure sores from the pooling circulatory fluid. Her body was cooled still further until she was entirely frozen.

To all intents and purposes, Cariad had died. Along with one hundred and ninety-nine other scientists—some old friends and acquaintances, a few strangers—she was sealed within an individual chamber aboard Nova Fortuna weeks before the ship left. She hadn’t witnessed the ship’s departure from Earth’s orbit, never seen the protesting mobs, never met the First Generation men and women who embarked aboard her, knowing that they would end their lives in deep space—people who would create and raise children who, before they were even conceived, were sentenced to share the same fate.

Now, the long journey was over. Cariad had survived.

She opened her eyes again and felt the smooth sheet beneath her. She moved her fingers and toes, and tried again to lift an arm. She winced as a bolt of pain came from the limb. Something seemed to have gone wrong with it. She tried to raise her head, and she winced again. She had the mother of all headaches.

To one side, out of her field of vision, a door opened, and she heard footsteps.

“Glad to see you’re finally coming around,” a voice said. “How are you feeling? You took quite a knock. How’s your arm?”

Cariad squinted and managed to bring into focus a man in red scrubs who looked familiar. She remembered he was one of the infirmary medics. She thought his name was Alasdair.

She became very confused. How did she know the medic’s name? He was six or seven generations in the future from her perspective. And what did he mean about a knock?

Alasdair was fiddling with the infuser that was attached to her inside elbow.

“How are the others doing?” Cariad asked him, hoping that the rest of the scientists in cryo had also been successfully revived.

Alasdair replied, “There were fourteen deaths and thirty-two injuries, I’m sorry to say. You’ve been out around fifty hours, in case you were wondering.”

“What?”

“Dr. Montfort put you into a coma to give your brain a chance to heal from the concussion. We withdrew the sedative a couple of hours ago.”

“What?” Cariad repeated.

Now completely confused, she tried to sit up to get a better look at her surroundings. Maybe she would see something that would help her make sense of what the medic was saying.

Alasdair laid a hand on her shoulder. “Just relax for now. You’ll be feeling the effects of the sedative a little longer. I’ve told the doctor you’re awake. He’ll be along in a moment. After he’s checked you over, maybe you can sit up and have something to drink.”

Now that he mentioned it, Cariad realized her mouth and throat were dry and sore, as if she’d been sleeping with her mouth open. She gave up trying to move and instead tried to make sense of what was happening.

A memory of an explosion flashed into her mind. She recalled flying through the air, then nothing. She worked back from the explosion. She’d been in a stadium and resigning herself to listen to a boring speech, then... Everything came flooding back. She’d woken from cryo two years previously. The Nova Fortuna had reached her destination. They’d held the Arrival Day celebration, and then after that there had been the First Night Attack.

She gasped again.

“Is something wrong?” Alasdair asked. “Are you in pain?”

“Ethan,” Cariad said. “Is he okay?”

Alasdair smiled. “He’s fine. He pulled you from the wreckage, in fact.”

As Cariad closed her eyes, Dr. Montfort arrived.

After examining her, the doctor said Cariad could sit up. He wanted her to stay in the medical bay another night just in case of any after effects of her concussion. Her broken arm would be mended in about a week, the doctor said, and then she could return to work.

Montfort paused. “A Guardian, Strongquist, has been asking about you. He wants to speak to you about the explosion. I can put him off another few hours if you don’t feel up to talking to him, but... ”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll speak to him.”

Cariad had a burning desire to find out who or what was responsible for the disaster. Though she had her reservations about Strongquist, she was willing to put them aside for the sake of a successful investigation.

The Guardian came into her room. “I’m glad to see you looking so well, Cariad.”

“Thanks. I’m lucky I didn’t suffer worse injuries, but you’re even luckier than me. You weren’t hurt?”

“I have to confess I’m not one for long speeches. When the explosion occurred, I’d already left the box.”

“Good timing.”

“Yes, indeed. I’m sorry for being so impatient to see you, but I want to catch the person or people who did this, and quickly, before they do something else.”

Cariad sat up higher in bed. “Then it was a bomb?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“The Natural Movement again?”

“We can’t think of any other explanation.”

Cariad digested the information dejectedly. After the Guardians had apprehended and executed the person who was responsible for the First Night Attack she’d thought the threat to the colony was over. She hadn’t imagined there might be more than one Natural Movement fanatic among them.

“Whoever is masterminding these attacks, it could be a Woken or a Gen,” Strongquist said.

“It’s more likely to be a Gen, don’t you think?” asked Cariad. “Though I hate the idea. The saboteur who you executed was a Gen.”

“We aren’t ruling out the possibility that it’s a Woken. The First Night Attack saboteur could have been persuaded to turn off the electric fence by someone else. She said she’d acted alone but she must have been lying of course. Conversely, she could have been a member of covert Gen cult that’s existed since the Nova Fortuna departed Earth.”

“You mean like a secret tradition, passed down the generations?” Cariad asked.

“Exactly.”

“If that’s the case, we could be talking about more than one or two people. We could be talking about tens or hundreds.”

“I doubt that it’s hundreds. If there were so many, it would be difficult to keep their beliefs secret, and they wouldn’t be confined to single, small acts. They could do something much bigger and more damaging. A few hundred can overwhelm a couple of thousand with a little planning.”

“But if the Natural Movement followers are Gens, there could still be quite a few of them.”

“We already know there’s more than one,” said Strongquist.

Cariad sighed. The colonization was going to be hard enough without contending with a secret, subversive faction. “We seem to have lost track somewhere. How can I help with the investigation?”

“Ah, yes. I’m enlisting the help of the Woken because you may remember things from the development of the project that aren’t recorded. We’ve analyzed the bomb residues at the site, but the chemicals used aren’t particularly difficult to acquire. Anyone could have stolen small amounts while we were bringing down the supplies. So we turned our search to historical records, hoping to discover Natural Movement affiliations among the Woken or the original Gens. But we haven’t uncovered anything useful so far.

“Then it occurred to me that the project scientists are living, talking historical documents. People like you, Cariad, are a source of knowledge and memories... I’ve been asking all the Woken to watch the news recordings from the protests and read the reports and other documents. Perhaps you’ll see a face or read a name that you recognize and you may make a connection. Would you mind going over a few things and telling me of anything that strikes you as possibly relevant, however insignificant or tangential it might seem?”

“Yes, I can do that.”

“Thank you.”

“And when I’m up and around again, in a day or so according Montfort, I’ll help with the investigation too.”

Strongquist looked less happy about this proposal. “Thank you for offering, but I don’t think there’s any need—”

“We can’t continue to rely on you Guardians all the time. We aren’t babies, and now that my work with the actual babies of the colony is coming to an end, I’ll be able to devote some time to ensuring justice for those who were murdered.” She gave Strongquist a fixed smile.

The Guardian didn’t buckle under her gaze, but he seemed to concede the fight was one he wasn’t going to win. “As you wish. I’ve sent links to the relevant files to your account.” He rose to leave.

“I want to thank you for everything you and your colleagues have done for the colony, Strongquist,” Cariad said. “It isn’t that I don’t appreciate it. I just think the sooner we learn to stand on our own two feet the better.”

“I understand perfectly.” He nodded to her and left.

Cariad reached toward a nearby interface with her broken arm, winced, and swapped to her other arm. She pulled the screen in front of her and swiped it open. Strongquist’s list was at the top of a string of messages from friends wishing her well. She opened the first of the Guardian’s links, a vidnews report.

She checked the date. It was the day that the Nova Fortuna had begun its maneuvers to break free of Earth orbit: the official departure date. By that time, she had already been frozen in slush for several weeks, and she’d missed the response of Earth’s population to the ship’s departure.

It was quite the reaction. The recording showed massive crowds in the world’s capitals and major cities. Protesting millions surged through the streets of Beijing, Washington, Moscow, London, Cape Town, Nairobi, New York, Sydney, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires. Cariad’s hand rose to her mouth as she watched the rioting, fires, water cannons, and the effects of exploding nerve gas canisters.

Leading up to the final preparations, she’d been aware of the growing popularity of the Natural Movement, but she’d been working around the clock and hadn’t followed current affairs closely. She also hadn’t been very interested in them. As a scientist, the objections of the movement toward deep space colonization had been hard for her to understand. She’d rarely bothered to think about them. She would have better understood an angry reaction to the fact that so few were able to come along.

She wondered what she was supposed to be looking for. Did Strongquist expect she might see something significant in the mobs? After witnessing a particularly violent confrontation, she gave a shudder and silent thanks that the Nova Fortuna had been built in space and out of the reach of the Natural Movement followers. Otherwise, they would probably have tried to blow up the ship.

The next link led to an interview with some Natural Movement leaders at the scene of a protest. Cariad leaned closer to the screen. Here was something that might yield useful information. She scanned the faces in the background. Prominent figures in the movement wouldn’t have been so foolish as to try to infiltrate the colonization project, but individuals who were behind the scenes had a greater degree of anonymity. Yet no one looked even remotely familiar.

The scene shifted to a studio interview, and Cariad’s heart skipped a beat. What had moved her wasn’t any of the debaters, who were Natural Movement leaders and politicians with global influence, but the large image that hung behind them. It was a portrait of a scientist. Though she looked younger in the photograph than she’d been when Cariad knew her, she recognized the woman right away. It was Dr. Crowley: the first victim of the First Night Attack.

Poor Meredith, Cariad thought. Always so warm-hearted, so ready to see the good in others, so trusting. Too trusting, as it turned out.

Cariad had warned her friend that the Nova Fortuna Project’s ambition of creating a society free of violence was too lofty; that human aggression was innate and not a product of social conditioning. Cariad would have given anything to have been wrong and having her friend back again.

Sickened by the brutality of the riot scenes and the anger from the Natural Movement leaders, Cariad closed the recording and opened another of Strongquist’s links. It was a list of members of the subversive society. The Guardian had attached a note explaining that in Cariad’s time, the document hadn’t been in the possession of the authorities. It was a secret list uncovered by historians centuries later. He wanted to know if any of the names meant anything to her.

Cariad scanned the list. The names numbered in the thousands. For several minutes, she saw nothing familiar. She yawned. After the surge of adrenaline when she woke up, her injuries were catching up with her.

She drank some water to help her stay awake, but her mind drifted. One hundred and eighty-four years had passed while she’d been in cryonic suspension, and she had only lived through two since being revived. Yet her time on Earth seemed a lifetime away.

Memories that she’d successfully suppressed up until then began to surface. Memories of saying goodbye to her parents and two sisters, knowing that she would never see them again; recollections of the sharp sting of guilt at seeing the stoicism on her family’s faces. Their parting was something she would never forget. Effectively, in her terms and theirs, they had all died at that moment.

Cariad wiped away a tear with the heel of her hand. Her family, friends, and acquaintances had all passed away while she’d been in suspension, and by the time she was revived they were turned to dust and long forgotten by anyone but her. She swallowed, trying to force down the emotions that threatened to overwhelm her, but it was no use. For the first time since she’d been brought back to life two years previously, she gave in to the grief and sorrow she had been denying for so long.

It was some time before the edge of her feelings softened and she returned to browsing the lists of Natural Movement members. Almost immediately, a name caught her eye: Frederick Aparicio. She frowned. She wasn’t sure why the name was familiar. She couldn’t place him in her memories of everyone she’d known on Earth. Yet she knew the name, unless her mind was playing tricks on her.

Cariad opened her personal files of vids, mails, and images from her previous life. She rarely dared to look at them, but perhaps because she’d vented her feelings, viewing the files didn’t upset her as much as she’d feared. In fact, it gave her pleasure to remember all the people she’d left behind and read their messages.

She searched all the files for the name Frederick Aparicio but turned up a blank. As she was puzzling at the problem, deep in concentration, a new mail arrived. It was from Ethan.

Heard you’re awake and feeling better. Glad to hear it! I’m going to see my farm tomorrow. Do you want to come along?

Chapter Four

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