Category: Sons of the Starfarers

Who are these people? she wondered. Clearly, the older man was a doctor, which meant that the younger was probably his apprentice. The room itself seemed like a bathroom in a medical facility, though not at all like the one at home. But that was what her father had told her, wasn’t it? That when she awoke, she’d be far away from everything she knew?

“Hello,” she said again. “My name is Reva. Can you understand me?”

From the stupid way the young apprentice smiled at her, it was clear that the answer was “no.” As if to confirm this, the doctor spoke to him in a language she’d never heard before. His words sounded so foreign that she couldn’t make any sense of them.

So I am far from home.

The doctor took her by the arm and gently led her through a tall doorway. They walked down a short corridor to a boxy, windowless room with a screen on one wall and a series of modular compartments in the other. He pulled out a retractable table and motioned for her to sit. As she did, a spiderlike medical bot descended from the ceiling and unfolded its spindly arms. She flinched, but the doctor snapped his fingers and it retreated into the far corner.

The apprentice came in and pulled a piece of folded fabric from one of the wall compartments. He unfolded it and held it out to her, and she saw that it was a body covering like the ones they wore. She shook her head and waved it away, but he held it out insistently.

“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want it, thank you.”

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The shower door opened and she stepped out, holding weakly onto the wall for support. The room outside was narrow and windowless, with walls and floors that were immaculately white. There were a number of gray stalls lining the wall to her right, with a wide sink facility in the far corner.

Two men stood by the entrance to the shower. Their bodies were covered in blankets, leaving only their hands and faces bare. It puzzled her, since the air in the room was not particularly cool.

“Uh, hello,” she said. She wasn’t sure what else to say, so she smiled and waited for them to respond.

Neither of them spoke to her, but the younger one handed her a towel. She took it gratefully and wrapped it around her hair. From the puzzled looks on the young man’s face, she gathered that wasn’t what he had expected of her. She looked at him closer and realized that he wasn’t covered in blankets at all, but some sort of skin covering that was fitted to his body. The same was true of the older man. His second skin was long and white, a bit like one of her father’s aprons.

Back home, no one had covered their bodies unless an unusual circumstance required it. Her father would sometimes wear protective gear while at work, but when he was home in the apartment, he went bare just like everyone else. She’d always been taught that the body was sacred, the highest pinnacle of creation. Just as children were born pure and shameless, so too were they to honor their bodies and not be ashamed of them. But these men—with their blanket-like skin coverings that served no obvious purpose—seemed to believe otherwise.

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It was all coming back to her now—the events that had brought her to this place. The famine at Anuva Station, the long fearful months as the crisis became a catastrophe, and her father’s secret project to save her.

“You are my youngest child,” he’d told her. “You have a greater chance of surviving the cryofreeze than any of your siblings.” As usual, his obsession with efficiency as the station’s chief engineer came before his emotions. But when she’d looked into his eyes and saw the sadness there, she had known that he did this because he loved her.

“What will it feel like?” she asked. Even if going into cryostasis was the only way to survive, the thought of it terrified her.

“The thawing and freezing process will put quite a strain on your body, but while you’re in cryofreeze, you won’t feel a thing. Years could pass—centuries even—and you wouldn’t know it until you wake up.”

She stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Centuries?”

“Yes. There’s no telling when the next ship will come, or what they’ll find when they get here. But there is an upper limit to the timeframe for revival. In eight hundred standard years, Anuva Station’s correctional jets will fail. Orbital decay will crash it into the surface anywhere from one to three hundred years later.”

His brutally efficient analysis had never given her much comfort, but at least she knew that he wasn’t hiding anything from her. He’d never hidden anything from her, not even the hardest truths.

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At first, Reva had no perception other than a vague sense of falling. It was neither dark nor light, neither cold nor hot, and she couldn’t tell whether she was the one falling or the world all around her—if you could call it a world. Time, space, and consciousness were all beyond her immediate awareness. And yet, the void filled her with a strange restlessness, as if something important were about to happen—as if she were about to experience rebirth.

Short streaks of multicolored light flashed past her as she fell, stirring her to awareness. She had a very distinct and powerful feeling that she was going somewhere. In a few moments, she would find herself in a strange place far from home, and she had to be prepared for anything. The thought seemed so important that she held onto it like a lifeline as the flashes grew in length and intensity. Her mind began to stir, her consciousness to awaken; time and space unfolded before her mind, and the void gave way to darkness.

Cold darkness.

She gasped, and the air felt like knives. Her whole body burned like fire and ice, as if her heart were pumping poison through her veins instead of blood. She arched her back and fell into wild convulsions.

Hot steam bathed her body, seeping through her skin like a healing balm. There wasn’t enough of it, though—not nearly enough. She gasped desperately for breath, filling her lungs with the blessed warmth. The convulsions stopped, and her muscles turned to water. She slid to her ankles just as her stomach began to heave.

The next few moments passed in a blur. A sharp hiss filled her ears, followed by voices speaking an unfamiliar language. Hands reached out to her, touching her all over. She gasped again, tears streaming from her eyes as she vomited cold bile from her empty stomach. It was more than she could bear. All she could do was surrender to the pain and hope it didn’t kill her.

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Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III) is now available as a $2.99 ebook! You can pick it up from the following sites, or if you haven’t read the other two books yet, you can find links to those in the sidebar. I’ll post about ten or twelve short excerpts from Strangers in Flight over the next few days just to give you a taste of it. Enjoy!

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