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Kudzu, a Novel

~ A work in progress, by Bernie Mojzes, with art by Linda Saboe ~ Updates Sundays ~ www.spacekudzu.com

Kudzu, a Novel

Monthly Archives: June 2012

Kudzu: Chapter 6

30 Saturday Jun 2012

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Kudzu

Chapter 6

The conference room could seat twenty comfortably, and was far too large for the five of them, but it was the one with the working projector. Dr. Tharp sat at the head of the table; Ash had taken the position at his right hand. Next to Susan, until Susan moved to the other side of the table, with Michael and Colleen. Amelia’s bandit face flickered from a small screen set in the center of the table. The speaker on Amelia’s screen crackled.

“Okay, guys, if you’re ready I’m going to start sending some images. Does a ten second delay slide show work for you?”

“Yes, that should be fine. Thank you, Amelia.” Tharp turned his chair so that he could see the screen.

The first image was of the orb, with its dangling creepers, from a distance.

“The fuck?” Ash said, under his breath. Half-standing.

The second image was a close-up of one of the vines, thick and twisted, dark green foliage interspersed with metallic black leaves and purple flowers.

“What is it?” Susan asked. Elbow on the conference table, chin between thumb and forefinger, she scrutinized the thing through narrowed eyes.

Michael leaned forward in his chair, his dreadlocks slipping from his shoulders to dangle in front of him. “Looks like kudzu to me.”

“And with a geology degree from a third rate college, you’re certainly the expert here.”

Michael’s tone didn’t reflect the loathing on his face. “We can’t all be trust fund babies, Ash, or you wouldn’t have anyone to look down on. Some of us actually had to work. Me, I had a summer job cutting the stuff back. I know kudzu when I see it.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Susan said. “It’s a freaking vacuum. Not even kudzu can survive in a vacuum.”

“Sense?” Michael’s voice turned bitter. “Gary’s dead, but Ashley fucking Hendricksson is alive and well. I stopped believing in a universe that makes sense a month ago. Or sixty-five years ago.” He shook his head. “Not even time makes sense any more. What’s a little space kudzu compared to that?”

Colleen put her un-bandaged hand on Michael’s shoulder. Amelia had watched her shrink into her chair as the images flashed on the screen, and then even more as the voices raised, as if she could disappear into the cushions. But she and Michael shared something the others didn’t. Both of them had lost husbands in the blast.

Ash leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the conference table. “Jesus, save me from self-designated weed experts. Why are we messing with this thing at all? I mean, we’re here, right? We made it back to Earth. Let’s get rescued and go home, already.”

Tharp frowned at Ash. “Yeah, about that… Amelia, can you skip ahead to…”

“Sure thing.”

The orb vanished from the screen, replaced with a planet. The Earth, from the shape of the continents. Half the sphere was in shadows. The half that was lit was less blue than it had been when they had left. Less blue than it should have been. The continents were a lush green, and the oceans a green-tinged blue. On the dark half of the globe, only a handful of lights could be seen.

“As you can see,” Tharp said, “there’s a slight problem.”

Michael and Susan were out of their chairs, mouths open. Susan with her hand up covering her mouth. Ash almost tripped over his own feet. Colleen didn’t move, other than to grip the arms of her chair with white-knuckled fingers.

“What the fuck?” Ash said.

Michael sat heavily. “Jesus.”

“Now let’s not panic,” Tharp said. “There’s still some people down there. In what condition, we don’t know. We still don’t have any communications capabilities, and we haven’t been able to find any ships in orbit. Whatever happened was long ago enough that there’s nobody left up in space.”

“There’s got to be someone,” Ash said, his voice hollow. “There has to be.”

Colleen pushed her chair away from the table and stood. Without a word, she limped out of the room. Michael, Dr. Tharp, and Susan watched her, but none of them tried to stop her.

“There has to,” Ash whispered.

Amelia’s voice crackled from the speakers. “Okay, guys? So, that’s the bad news. The good news is, we’re pretty much in position to dock with the big green blob. I’ve got us over the pole and we’ve matched its rotation. Thirty-seven minutes to impact, so to speak.”

“We’re landing on it?” Ash was incredulous.

“It’s the best chance we have at this point,” Tharp said. “I’m hoping there’s some stuff we can salvage, like a radio transmitter. If we’re real lucky, there might even be some fuel.”

“And kudzu is edible,” Michael added. “At least, Earth Standard Kudzu is.”

Amelia chittered her excitement. “See? See? I told you there’d be food.”

Susan was less enthusiastic. “If it doesn’t eat us first.”

“Well, I guess we’ll find out. We’ll be docking soon. Susan, I want you and Ash to take one of the maintenance guys and check it out.”

“Yeah, right,” Ash said.

Susan cocked her head at Tharp. “Seriously? No. I don’t have time for that shit. I’ve got to crack the ship’s central computer system.”

Ash scoffed. “What do you think you can do that I haven’t already done?”

“Succeed?”

Tharp sighed dramatically. Crossed his arms. “Oh, come on, guys.”

“I’m not digging around in some weed,” Ash said, heading toward the door. “I’ve got better things to do.” He pushed past Colleen, who glared at him with red-puffy eyes from the doorway. When he was gone, she turned back to the others.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“No,” Tharp said. “Absolutely not. You’re injured.”

“I’m expendable.”

“But…”

“I’m in, too,” Michael said.

“Good,” Susan said, as she, too, walked toward the exit. “Then we’re done here.”

Michael caught Colleen’s eyes. The two of them followed Ash and Susan out of the conference room.

Tharp stared after them, then sat, pressed his forehead to the table, and covered his head with his hands.

“I hate to say it, boss,” Amelia said, “but I think you’ve got a discipline problem.”

Kudzu: Chapter 5

23 Saturday Jun 2012

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Kudzu: A Novel

Chapter 5

Anything wrong? With <i>this</i> ship?

Tharp stood framed in the doorway, haloed in bright light. “How’s it going?”

Amelia kept her eyes on the monitors, watching for any indication that she might be coming dangerously close to any of the vines. “Not bad,” she said. “Couple more hours – maybe three – and we’ll be in position to try docking to this thing.” She ran all the working cameras through the main monitor. “Whatever it is.”

“Good.” With a soft hiss, the door slid shut behind him.

“I think we’re going to have to cut our way in, though. Can you tell the guys to bring out the heavy equipment?”

“I’ve got Jaworsky doing a thorough systems check on the ship. I want to know everything that’s wrong with it before we get ourselves into something we can’t get out of.”

Amelia’s laugh devolved into a sarcastic chitter. “Anything wrong? With this ship?”

Tharp approached the main monitor, studying the thing. From this angle, it filled most of the screen, with the blue-green Earth splayed out in the background.

“Anything new,” he said. “So we’ll hold off on docking until we get the all clear.”

Amelia zoomed the camera in on the orb so Tharp could study it. “You’re almost starting to make sense. Keep this up and you might even make a good captain one of these days. Despite yourself.”

“I didn’t ask for this,” Tharp snapped.

“Sorry,” said Amelia into the silence that followed. “So Jaworsky’s fixing the ship. How about the others?”

“Hm?” Tharp shook himself out of whatever darkness had encompassed him. “Slim’s with Jaworsky. I woke Ash, too. He’s bringing the others around.”

“Ash? Is that wise?”

Amelia flicked a switch to bring a small monitor set into the arm of her chair online. It showed static; the engine room camera was gone, of course. Along with the engine, and the engine room itself. Nothing but torn metal left back there. She’d seen it herself when she and Slim had wormed through gaps in the wreckage that were too small for Jaworsky or the others to fit through. There were images from that horrifying trek that haunted her sleep, but the wreckage of the engine room wasn’t one of them.

She tabbed sequentially through the public areas of the ship. Most of them were just static. Eventually, she found the feed from the cryo room camera.

On the tiny screen, a human form lay on the gently reclined pod bed, while another stood at the control panel. Amelia zoomed in until they filled the screen.

Susan was still in cryo – still effectively dead – though the chest tube ran red with blood, and her flesh had pinked up. She was ready, just waiting to be shocked to life. The other figure, Ash Hendricksson, reached out and stroked her cheek.

Then his hand dropped to Susan’s breast.

“Bastard.” Amelia’s teeth ground together as a growl built in her chest. She stifled it; they couldn’t afford to fracture the tenuous social fabric of the surviving crew–not until they were rescued, at least.

But after they were rescued…

Amelia pushed a button. A word appeared in the top left corner of the screen, blinking red: ‘RECORDING.’

~

Susan Kernighan blinked her eyes against the bright light, suddenly awake, heart pounding. Her mouth was dry and sticky. She could feel the chest tubes slowly retracting, pulling together and sealing tissues as it withdrew into itself. She could visualize it; she’d watched dozens of medical tutorials of the procedure before she’d ever consented to join this mission. She’d studied the structure and processes of the nano-biotech employed, had studied the poly-RNA encoding that informed the behavior of each artificial cell. And she’d tried to hack it, probing the system for hackable vulnerabilities, or critical failure modes.

The code was unusually robust. She still didn’t trust it – not completely – but she trusted it enough to let it in her body. Like her neural tap, it was an acceptable risk-benefit tradeoff.

She licked her lips and tried opening her eyes again.

Ash Hendricksson stood in front of her, his eyes hungry. Fuck.

“What are you staring at?” Susan’s voice crackled, like she was speaking through autumn leaves.

Ash blushed. “I… Uh…”

He almost stepped back, but caught himself and stepped forward instead, lips set in anger, though whether it was at her or at himself Susan didn’t know. In the long run, she knew, the cause wouldn’t matter, once the male pattern defensiveness set in.

“Tharp told me to bring you all around, so that’s what I’m doing. Or do you want to sleep forever?”

Ash reached out to pluck a pad off her chest. Susan slapped his hand away.

“Hey, hands off, boy genius. I’m a big girl now, I can manage this all by myself.”

Ash turned away as Susan detached monitor cables and untangled herself from the pod.

“Yeah, whatever,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual. “I was just trying to help.”

Kudzu, Chapter 4

15 Friday Jun 2012

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Welcome back. There’s a new feature: a Table of Contents, for easy navigation through the story. And now, back to your favorite spaceraccoons.

Kudzu: A Novel

Chapter 4

Earl Jaworsky set his toolbox down on the elevator floor as Slim hurried to catch up.

“I still think we should eat something before we get to work,” Slim huffed. “Sit down to a real meal like civilized creatures.”

“A real meal of what? You gone senile in your old age?” Jaworsky strapped the toolbox down. Slim set his own bag next to it, and strapped it down as well. He pulled a protein stick out of one of his coveralls’ multiple pockets.

“I dunno. We don’t even know what’s going on yet, and Tharp’s got us running around doing his errands.” Slim reached up and pressed the ‘0’ button as he gnawed at the protein stick. He grimaced. “It’s stale. We could at least have breakfast first. I mean, it’s been years since I’ve eaten anything. Decades, even.”

Jaworsky grabbed hold of one of the handholds distributed around the walls, floor, and ceiling of the elevator. “We’ll grab something when we check out the food processors.”

Slim went to all fours and held on to the floor. “You mean, before it’s flavored?”

“I thought you and yer delicate raccoon sensibilities hated artificial flavors. This’ll be all natural shit.”

As the elevator moved toward the hub, gravity faded, and their feet lifted slightly from the floor.

“Fuck you.”

The elevator came to a stop. Jaworsky put a hand up to catch himself against what had until recently been the ceiling. Slim inverted, dangling vertically from what had just been the floor. After the occupants had been given enough time to deal with momentum, the former ceiling of the elevator slid away. Beyond was the hub, turning slowly relative to the elevator, and the netting suspended between the spokes to catch anything that hadn’t yet damped its inertia.

Slim reached over and unsnapped his bag, then walked from handhold to handhold until he stood at the elevator’s edge.

“Well, sooner we get to work, the sooner we get to eat,” he said.

Jaworsky joined him. They stared down the long, hollow expanse of the hub. It was a long way before the lights failed. The second ring didn’t appear damaged, though the scorch marks reached up to and a little beyond it, before the escaping atmosphere sucked the flames out. Undamaged, and where Michael and Colleen and Ash had been trapped. Power to the second ring had been disrupted in the accident, and it wasn’t turning. It hadn’t been a priority. All power had been lost, and it had taken Jaworsky and Slim, with Amelia and Susan’s help, nearly four days of amphetamine-enabled work to get power to the command ring restored, by which time they were almost dead from oxygen deprivation.

That had been a month ago, by internal time. Sixty-five years. It still seemed unreal.

Further on things were worse. The third and forth rings had taken damage, and the spokes had bent the hull. The fifth ring had been torn partially free of the main ship, and the sixth was simply gone.

Half the crew had been in the fifth and sixth rings.

Slim’s tail curled around him, protectively. “So, Tharp says we’re supposed to make sure everything down there is in good working order?”

“Yeah. Maybe we’ll start at the other end.”

“Yeah.” Slim twisted to look toward the front of the ship, to the dock’s air lock. “I was thinking the same thing.”

~

Slim gripped a handhold with his rear paws as he unscrewed an access panel.

Jaworsky reached over from where he was tethered, tapped his wrench against the panel. “They teach you how to read in raccoon school?”

The sign read LASERS MAY CAUSE PERMANENT EYE DAMAGE.

“Yeah, yeah. I got your eye damage right here.” Still, Slim paused to set his goggles over his eyes before opening the panel. It was dead, though, the power supply burnt out, so even with some of the cables broken and the optics exposed, there was no danger. “Tharp give you any idea of what we should be looking for?”

“Nope. Just said we might need to be on this wreck a little longer than anticipated, and to make sure she’ll hold up.”

Slim stuck his head into the tangle of cables. “I don’t get it. If we made it home, what’s the big fucking deal? And if we didn’t? We sure as hell don’t have the fuel to get us there. You got a 25 fuse?”

“We made it, but something’s wrong. Fucking Tharp doesn’t trust us peons to keep doing our jobs if he told us.”

“Told us what?”

“Whatever the fucking hell he isn’t telling us. God fucking damn it. ‘Check everything.’ Just the two of us? Captain Vasquez would have given us a priority list.” Jaworsky handed slim a fuse.

Slim accepted it and crawled into the hole until only his tail protruded.

“You hated Vasquez,” he said.

“I hate everyone. But at least she wasn’t perpetually engaging in cranio-autocolonoscopy. She’d have told us to start with the reactor and life support systems.”

In a rustle of fiber optics, Slim twisted around until both his head and his tail protruded from the wall. His lips twisted into a raccoony smirk.

“Don’t even fucking start,” Jaworsky said. “Just hurry up and finish so we can check the reactor.”

“Yeah, okay.” Slim handed the burnt fuse to Jaworsky, set the new one into place. Broken fibers sent bright beams of light cutting across the dim expanse of the hub. Slim tugged the broken fiber cables out and replaced them with fresh cables from his bag.

“You think she made it?” he asked.

Jaworsky frowned. “Sixty-five years, and nobody rescued us. They didn’t have more’n six months of food down on the surface, and no cryo. So what do you think?”

“I want to think they made it,” Slim said, packing his tools. “That’s what I think.”

The workers control the means of production.

Kudzu: Chapter 3

08 Friday Jun 2012

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It’s Friday, so there must be invasive weeds. If you’ve just joined us, you may want to consider starting at Chapter 1.

Kudzu: A Novel

Chapter 3

Earl Jaworsky dropped his towel on the plastic bench and rummaged through his locker.

“There you are,” he said, pulling a rumpled pair of black boxer-briefs from a heap of clothing. The elastic crackled with age. He tugged them on anyway, adjusted his cock–still tender from the catheter–and balls until he was comfortable, snapped the waistband. It sagged a bit. Damn but he’d be glad to be back in civilization.

He stood in front of the full-length mirror. Pulled his shoulders back, expanding his chest. Sucked his gut in.

“Hardly look a day over a hundred twenty,” he grumbled.

He looked up as a portly raccoon shuffled on all fours through the doorway, tail held high.

“‘Bout time you got your lazy ass out of bed,” Jaworsky said.

The raccoon paused only long enough to flash a single extended digit at Jaworsky. He clambered up onto the counter and sat next to the sink. He punched a couple buttons and water flowed into the sink.

“Shower’s in the next room, Slim,” Jaworsky said.

“You ever gonna learn to clean up after you shave?” Slim responded. He rubbed his hands together under the running water, slicked the fur down around his eyes and groomed his whiskers. He lapped at the running water, then dunked his head under the tap.

“Fuck, no,” Jaworsky said. He ran his hands–one flesh and the other shining chrome–over his smooth scalp. “It’s the only thing that keeps me young.” He stepped into his coveralls.

Slim turned the water off and leapt from the counter. He hopped onto the bench next to Jaworsky. Jaworsky was pulling the coveralls up past his hips.

“You stink like a wet–” Jaworsky began.

Slim shook his head, spraying Jaworsky with water.

Jaworsky roared. “Goddamned fucking animal!” He reached for Slim, but only got a handful of his own towel as Slim whipped it at him.

Laughing, Slim ran down the length of the bench to his own locker. “Better than being human,” he chittered. He popped his locker open, sniffed. He reached in and extracted something. It was blue and green and gray, and thoroughly desiccated. He held it up.

“You think this is still good?”

Jaworsky pulled the towel away from his face. “What was it?”

Slim tapped the petrified thing against the bench. “Ham sandwich, maybe? With mayo.”

“Yeah, that shit never goes bad. Like them Chinese eggs.” Jaworsky ran his fingers again across his shaved scalp, feeling for anything he might have missed. “So, how’s my hair look?”

Slim tossed the ancient sandwich back into his locker; it landed with a metallic clang. “Like Gustavio fucking Delacourt.”

Jaworsky laughed. “Delacourt’s probably dead by now, flowing golden locks and all.”

“Like I said.”

~

Inside the pod, Ash Hendricksson’s corpse slowly pinked as the system cycled cryo fluids out of his veins and his own blood back in.

Eric Tharp chewed his lip. It was nerve-wracking. He’d almost killed Slim, trying to wake him. Fumble-fingered a number, and then looked away, distracted for a minute. Thank God nobody had seen. He certainly hadn’t told Slim.

It took a good forty minutes to bring the body back to near-life: blood flowing, oxygen circulating, body temperature rising, organs gradually remembering what they were supposed to do. But up to the last step, it was still little more than a corpse.

Hendricksson’s eyelids flickered. His face grimaced, smiled, frowned. His tongue moved in his mouth and his jaw worked. The muscles in his neck tensed and relaxed. The ten-minute exercise cycle still creeped Tharp out, as the pod stimulated every muscle in Hendricksson’s body in a manner designed to minimize actual movement.

It was supposed to prevent atrophy. It reminded Tharp of an old horror vid he’d seen as a kid. He couldn’t even remember the name.

The micro-convulsions rolled down Hendricksson’s body, from head to foot, and then he was still as death again.

When the monitor finally indicated that the body was ready to be functionally normal, Tharp wasted no time. He raised the plexiglass cover and began extracting catheters. The important one was the tube that extended down the throat into the stomach, branching into both lungs. The risk was that the sleeper might bite through the tube when shocked back to life, and then choke to death. The anal and urethral catheters could be left until later, but it seemed cruel to make the patient experience that when he could be spared the discomfort, as Jaworsky had so vividly explained to him.

Tharp punched in the final commands. Inside Hendricksson’s body, Tharp knew, the chest tube was detaching, pumping the remainder of the blood into the body and sealing the aorta shut. There was a fail-safe button, which would auto-revert this step if the heart failed to start, giving the sleeper a few more hours, so that a doctor could intervene.

Not that they had a doctor.

There was an audible thump, and Hendricksson’s body arched. Nothing. Tharp held his breath. Another thump, and the heart started, the double-beat broadcast from the monitor speaker. A second later, Hendricksson gasped and started breathing.

A few minutes later, Hendricksson opened his eyes.

“Fifty years already?” he croaked. “Feels like only yesterday…”

Tharp peeled electrodes off Hendricksson’s body. “Almost sixty-five, actually. Amelia hit some trouble in the asteroid belt.”

“Trouble? And you left it to that… to her? Shit. Why didn’t anyone wake me?”

Tharp’s eyes narrowed. “That what?”

Hendricksson opened his mouth, the shut it. He rubbed his eyes. “Nothing.”

“That’s what I thought. And it wasn’t anything we hadn’t anticipated. We knew we were working on incomplete data, since our resident computer genius got himself locked out of the system. We knew we’d have to make some changes on the fly. We just weren’t as lucky as we might have been, and lost some momentum. Nothing Amelia couldn’t handle.”

Hendricksson flushed. “Now that’s not fair–”

“Nothing about this is fair. Get some clothes on and wake the others. I’ve got to get back to the bridge.”

Tharp set the manual and the recovery charts on the monitor and headed for the door.

“Yeah, sure,” Hendricksson said to Tharp’s back. “Sixty-five years. Fuck. At least we’re saved, right?”

The door slid shut behind Tharp, leaving Hendricksson alone in the chamber. He looked at the rows of empty pods, and then at the three that held bodies. He pressed a hand to one of the plexiglass covers, gazed long at the corpse-pale face within, and then made his way unsteadily to the locker room.

Kudzu, a Novel – Chapter 2

01 Friday Jun 2012

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Welcome to world of Kudzu. If you’re new here, you may want to read Chapter 1 first. You may even want to check out Kudzu: A Prologue in the just-released Sparkito Press anthology, Galactic Creatures, (which seems to be not-out-yet on Amazon, but is also available at the Dark Quest Books website) featuring stories by Rosemary Edghill, C.J. Henderson, and others.

Chapter 2

Sixty-five years.

Gone in the blink of an eye.

A thin layer of dust covered everything. Tharp rubbed his fingers together, feeling the fine silt in the grooves and whorls of his fingerprints. His footsteps echoed eerily through the empty corridor. Motion sensors flicked LEDs on as he walked, extinguished them in his wake.

He used to love the corridors; he’d jog the circumference of all six rings every day, glorying in the burn in his legs and the view through the porthole windows, showing the ship stretched out and beyond that, the stars, and infinity. Now the tangled wreckage was just a reminder of everything they had lost.

Each ring rotated around the ship’s hub, mounted on four spokes. Two of the spokes housed elevators; the other two were filled with wires and tubes and God knew what else. It wasn’t his job to know, but then, it wasn’t his job to be responsible for the lives of seven other people. He was supposed to be responsible for the research. For the ice and mineral analysis.

The cryonics chambers were on the opposite side of the ring from the bridge, counter-balancing bulges in the forward ring. The fastest way there was straight through–elevator from the bridge to the hub, a quick hop across the hub, and then the opposite elevator down to cryonics.

Tharp hesitated at the elevator door. He hated the elevator, the stomach-twist as gravity increased and then went away. He hated the sickening always-falling feeling of weightlessness, the loss of control. He hated the hub, which reminded him of nothing so much as some sort of cybernetic intestinal tract.

Tharp hurried down the corridor, almost jogging the half-mile to the other side. He kept his eyes on the floor, and didn’t look out the windows.

He hated the windows. And the corridor. He hated the whole ship, which had failed him so thoroughly, so catastrophically. And he hated the cryonics chamber, which had stolen so many years of his life.

It was an awful lot of hate for an inanimate object, for a damned spaceship, when all evidence showed that he was going to be stuck on it for a lot longer than he had hoped. Sometimes he envied Amelia. As the pilot, she constantly had a myriad of little tasks to occupy her time. She never had to think about the big picture, about the enormity of it all. And really, the raccoons were lucky that way, almost childlike in their thought processes.

She made a good pilot, though. Probably better than a human would have done, for her ability to focus in on the task at hand without being distracted by deeper thought. Especially any of the humans who’d survived the accident. Amelia was the only reason they’d even made it this far.

Tharp took a deep breath, and pressed his hand to the sensor.

The door slid open for him.

Row after row of pods, enough for a hundred people. Empty, all but six of them. The remaining crew clustered together in front of him: three men, two women. One raccoon.

There was no question as to who to revive first. The ship was broken, and as dislikeable as he was, Earl Jaworsky was the only person left alive who knew how to fix any of it.

The mobile control panel was stupidly complex. Tharp wheeled it over to one of the pods. Inside, Earl Jaworsky’s massive, tattooed body lay motionless, still as death. Wires ended in pads stuck to his thick-furred chest, his neck, and balding head. Tubes ran through his nose and mouth, his urethra and anus. Another tube–and this was the one that made Tharp’s knees go weak, even more than the urethral catheter–ran from the pod’s machinery directly into Jaworsky’s chest: the heart bypass tube that ran clear, cold cryo fluids through Jaworsky’s body.

Tharp cursed under his breath. It was tricky and complicated bringing someone back from the dead–or the near-dead, at least–best left to the automated systems. Each person was unique, and the cryo process was tailored to each body; reversing it was strongly tied to what had been done to start. Even the neural link to Jaworsky’s prosthetic hand needed to be taken into account, presumably, if he expected to be able to use it. With half the computer systems destroyed and most of the rest locked down until the ship’s command staff–all of whom were dead–could enter the access codes, they could only keep the data for one person to be auto-revived. That honor was reserved for Amelia, who needed to be woken every few years to pilot the ship. Everyone else had to trust that whoever tried to bring them back didn’t mistype any of the data on the faded printouts.

Now, with the ship still mostly inoperable and Earth-space mysteriously empty, they needed to get as much as possible working again, as fast as possible. And since Hendricksson’s hackery still hadn’t managed to break the codes in the sixty-five years they had been running, they needed to start bypassing the primary computer systems entirely. And for that, Tharp needed Jaworsky.

Astounding that the most valuable people on the ship right now were a raccoon and a glorified janitor.

Tharp studied the control panel, trying to remember what the procedure was to bring someone safely out of deep sleep.

He uncoiled the thick universal cable and plugged into the port on the side of the pod–the only port it would fit in, so that, at least, was right. His fingers hovered over some of the buttons, ready to enter the initializing sequences. He hesitated. Was it the right sequence?

“Godammit,” he said, stepping back from the machine.

There was a manual in the recovery lounge. He settled in to read.

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June 2012
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