Freefall Read online

  Elle immediately started feeling down her leg. She sensed there was a gaping hole in her EVO suit somewhere below her knee, but she couldn’t quite reach it with her pack on. She knew she didn’t have time to unbuckle it and take it off. She would die right there on the spot if she didn’t fix that hole.

  They had practiced this drill so many times. This drill they all knew better than any squad song. Hit the panic button to alert the entire squad, take the rebreather in your mouth and suck in a deep breath, then grab the duct tape. The EVO suits were light-years ahead of the old bulky, bubble-headed things the first astronauts who landed on Mars had worn. The improved, lightweight, skin-tight wrappings served the same function, though. Like the old deep-water scuba suits from Earth, these EVO suits were flexible, insulated, and rubbery. They kept the good air and heat inside, and kept the cold air out.

  Elle was tearing and wrapping duct tape as fast as she could manage, but she was in trouble and she knew it.

  Her first breath was gone. She sucked on her rebreather tube and grabbed another breath as full as her lungs could manage, and held it. The rebreather was a time-limited option. It would recycle her exhaled breath up to a point, but not indefinitely. Even at 32 percent, take enough breaths and you eventually ran out of oxygen in the rebreather. The fuel for the oxygenator to create more breathable air was far too precious to waste on a corpse with a ripped suit, or even a stupid potential corpse. If she could seal the rip, the suit would repressurize itself and the oxygenator would kick back into production.

  Elle could see the pressure gauge readout for her suit glowing in the corner of her face shield, and the figure wasn’t moving. There was a hole, a tear, a rip somewhere that she couldn’t quite reach. It had to be someplace on her lower leg but the pack restricted her reach. She was certainly dead unless a teammate arrived to lend a hand.

  “Crikey are you inept, or what?”

  Elle felt a rough hand grab her foot, pull her leg straight out, then slap on a piece of duct tape. Sun glinted off the thin visor over his face, making it impossible to see the features beneath it, but she knew that voice. Micah.

  He had ripped off a long piece of duct tape and started wrapping it very, very snugly just above the jagged line of the rip in her suit. “Fracking hell, you know the routine, Elle. If you can’t find the hole, tape above it.” Micah added another swatch of tape. She felt it wrap around her whole leg just below her knee once, then again two more times. “It’s like a tourniquet: tie off the bleed, whether blood or air, just above the exit point.”

  Micah flattened down the last piece of tape and used both hands to seal it to the EVO suit. Elle could still feel the frigid air against her shin below the tape job, but that didn’t matter to the oxygenator. If it thought the pressure in nine-tenths of the suit would hold, it would repressurize.

  “Okay, now release some of your oxy into the suit. Let’s see if it holds.”

  Elle could hear the hiss of the oxygen in her ears. She looked up at Micah’s visor for confirmation. Micah quickly pulled off his gloves and spread his hands, running them lightly over the seal, checking for leaks.

  He finally looked up and into what would have been Elle’s eyes, if either of them could see past the shaded visors. “I think it’ll hold. No appreciable leaks anywhere.” Micah tore off another long strip of duct tape and pieced together the edges of the tear on the back of Elle’s lower leg. “This should get you back to base, but it’s going to be damn cold before we get there.”

  Elle watched him work for a long moment. “Thanks, Micah.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s what we do. We’re a team.”

  “Yeah, I know. I know all that but still, thank you.”

  Maybe it was the genuineness of her tone, or maybe as a team they didn’t often thank each other for what had been drilled into them. Micah looked up the second time Elle thanked him, and the way the sun shone through his visor revealed that little half-smile that was all Micah, and the dimple that resulted, and Elle felt herself smile in response.

  FIVE

  She had dreamed again.

  Elle opened her eyes and watched Micah’s chest rise and fall, slow and even. The sound of his breathing was so reassuring, when she hadn’t realized she needed assuring at all. The hammock pressed them together, and that was nice and was normal too.

  Micah’s eyes moved beneath his closed eyelids, a stutter-dance of dreaming. A smile played about his lips, fluttering like his eyelids. Elle wondered what vision he was seeing in the dark behind his eyelids. She corrected herself; in your dreams it wasn’t always dark, not unless you wanted it to be. That thought brought Elle up short.

  “Huh.” Elle rearranged herself to give herself room to think, instead of just feeling Micah pressing into her.

  The crew of the Vera Rubin had completed nearly three cycles of hibernation, or 270 days of HCH sleep. And now that she actually thought about it, Elle couldn’t remember anyone mentioning a single dream. That’s weird, isn’t it? The scientist in her thought it was kind of odd. She instantly wondered if she was an anomaly. Is everyone else dreaming and thinking nothing of it? Could any one of the 150 humans on board the Vera Rubin remember a single dream they’ve had over the past nine months?

  Elle’s recollection was that it was an accepted scientific fact that human beings needed dreaming to maintain a strong sense of mental well-being. Elle couldn’t remember the details. She was a botanist by trade, so the psychology stuff was tenuous. She couldn’t exactly remember the drawbacks of reduced REM sleep, but she did recall they weren’t good. Elle suddenly felt a very strong urge to answer this question. It was like an itch at the back of her mind now. She wouldn’t sleep again until she’d at least begun her research. She needed to get to the lab.

  As she started to disentangle herself from Micah, of course he woke up. The man who could sleep through a bomb blast suddenly was hypersensitive to her every movement. “Going somewhere?” Micah reached out and pulled Elle back into his arms, rolling her over to lie on top of his chest. Elle opened her mouth to reply, and Micah drew her to him and kissed her. It was a long kiss.

  Elle tried to resist the very compelling urge to let go of her scientific questions until the next obvious opportunity to disengage. Maybe tomorrow. She sat up, casually straddling Micah’s hips in order to crawl over him. “I need to get to the lab. I’ve got some really critical questions about sleep cycles and REM deprivation.”

  Grinning, Micah moved his hips beneath her. Elle very pointedly felt the stirrings of Micah between her legs. “Oh.”

  Now grinning wickedly, Micah replied, “Oh, indeed. We may have some very critical questions of our own to answer right here.”

  Elle looked at him with woeful exasperation. Her reticence seemed to embolden Micah. His grin was huge now as he placed his hands on her hips, holding her in place. “Nice, hey?”

  Elle shook her head slowly and met Micah’s gaze. “It is, Micah.” She let herself relax onto him. “It is very, very nice.”

  “Much better than research.”

  Elle groaned softly, panting her reply. “Maybe.”

  SIX

  Elle floated through the Skein fully awake and searching the sleeping faces arrayed before her. She grabbed a Skein filament and travelled hand-over-hand from one sleeper to the next, looking for Rapid Eye Movement. For six weeks she had been researching REM sleep and then documenting what she found amongst the hibernating colonists. The more she learned, the more she feared for the mission.

  The sleepers were tethered to the Skein because for the bulk of their hibernation cycle they were weightless to avoid issues like bedsores and circulatory problems. Hibernation allowed them to sleep without their body consuming their own muscle tissue, which was a huge issue in extended space travel before the synthesis of HCH. With HCH, muscles didn’t atrophy, the body didn’t need as much oxygen as it slept, and body temperature could drop significantly without harmful affects. In theory, HCH was a miracle discovery. Elle was more and more convinced that the miracle part of HCH might mostly be theory.

  At the top of the Skein Elle stopped and stared into the face of Vihaan, who so often kept her laughing when he was awake. Beneath his closed eyelids his eyes rolled overtly back and forth, up and down, but then suddenly stopped. Elle continued to watch for several minutes, but Vihaan didn’t repeat the REM movements. She tapped a notation on her data pad to check on him again, and then hesitantly reached over and smoothed a frown off his forehead. “Sweet dreams, Vihaan.” She moved farther down the Skein.

  Elle stopped briefly at Achebe, smiling fondly at the woman curled in the fetal position. Achebe with the laughing eyes and always still face was the dearest of her new family. Achebe of the dancing fingers that could weave string, copper wire, hair, or seaweed strands into the most marvelous designs. A gift from her grandmother, Achebe would say; a gift from her culture, she would add; and sometimes a gift from her to Elle.

  Elle cherished the straw doll Achebe had given her. It still occupied a niche in her pack, wherever they were sent. Achebe had been twelve, already a seasoned team member, and Elle was nine the first day they met at Moonbase Command. Their barracks was perched on the lip of Plinius Crater in the southwestern quadrant of the Moon. Elle was new as grass, scared as a rabbit, lonely as Grand Central Station on a late Sunday night in deep winter.

  Elle didn’t remember much of her Earth childhood before meeting Achebe on the Moon. She remembered waiting rooms, and doctors and nurses, and endless myriad and seemingly mindless tests. Elle couldn’t remember what they were testing her for or why. She did remember Achebe’s smile the first time they met at Moonbase as clear as a bell—but sadly all Elle’s memories before that pivotal event were vague.

  Elle would learn th
at Achebe was as frugal with smiles as she was generous with gifts. Most of Achebe’s smiles never left her eyes. If you could spark an outright laugh from Achebe, well, you knew you had accomplished something very special that day.

  Elle reached out and gently touched the woman’s shoulder before moving on. She had requested Angie send her data on the length of time each sleeper had been under in this session of HCH sleep. In theory, REM sleep should be in the neighborhood of 35 percent of their normal sleeping pattern.

  Elle passed Bingwen and, noting his furrowed brow, stopped to stare into his face. Bingwen’s eyes were motionless. The trouble is, Elle mused, HCH doesn’t seem to induce a normal sleeping pattern in humans. It gives them the appearance of sleep. The more she studied HCH hibernation, the clearer it became to Elle that it could not be equated to actual sleep.

  She stopped again, this time in front of Carla and Jack. They had taken to fastening themselves to the same Skein node while in hibernation. She often found them curled around each other in sleep. They claimed it made their sleep more peaceful somehow. Elle scrutinized their faces. They certainly look peaceful. Yet neither of them exhibited REM sleep.

  As far as Elle could tell from her research, studies showed that bears in their natural hibernating state didn’t exhibit REM sleep either. What no one seemed to know, or care to ask during any of the Earth studies, was whether bears ever displayed REM sleep patterns at all. Elle fastened her tether to an empty portion of the Skein and stopped to enter data into her recorder. To Elle, it seemed that Control hadn’t factored into the equation the results of three years of HCH-induced sleep with no REM sleep to balance it. Elle was certain this was the crux of the issue on board the Vera Rubin. She still needed more data to convince the others that maybe Control hadn’t thought this through completely before launch.

  Elle unclipped her tether and went hand-over-hand farther down the line. Control had done studies, both short-term and long-term studies. The trouble was that colonists left the study labs and always went back home to real REM sleep eventually. They also always went back to their squads and social connections. A new concern arose from the research Elle had been doing. Bears were incredibly solitary creatures. They only lived socially when they were young and being nurtured by their mother. Not so with humans. Humans were the antithesis to bears, incredibly social by nature for all of their lives. If a bear woke up cranky after hibernation he or she could stay that way for a month or a lifetime, and who would notice?

  What to do with her misgivings was becoming a problem to Elle. They now had less than a year and a half of space travel left. They were due to arrive at the Einstein-Rosen Space Fold sometime in the next few cycles, and Elle felt the crew deserved to be made aware of her research before making the commitment to the slide into the wormhole.

  Elle had found that as she spent more time out of HCH sleep, it was easier and easier to rediscover REM sleep. She intentionally spent more time out of HCH than was scheduled for her. She noticed that with REM added to her cycle, she awoke from HCH sleep less groggy and in better spirits. What she hadn’t documented, but had also noticed, was a corresponding spike in her creativity. She had always been a doodler and the pristine white walls of the ship seemed to beg to be covered in color. Elle spent much of her free time searching for places where the walls lacked nanotech and so would preserve her drawings.

  What scared Elle, though, was the growing documentation from her surveys with various colonists regarding HCH withdrawal. Some colonists seemed to experience strong to very strong negative results upon awakening from HCH sleep. In some cases the debilitation appeared to grow worse as they moved through cycle after cycle of HCH sleep. Micah was the example she had observed the most closely. Now that she had begun asking questions of her teammates, other names were being relayed to her as well.

  There were documented problems of colonists not being able to fall asleep on their own during non-HCH sleep, restlessness, irritability, and in some cases inexplicable rages. This was in addition to the other more widespread but generally mild instances of nausea or lack of appetite, and nonexistent libido. Elle agreed with Control that many of these milder symptoms could disappear, given time out of HCH sleep. She was no longer certain that the more extreme cases could afford to wait until they reached Herschel Station.

  Elle reached a midpoint in the Skein and floated down towards a sleeping crewmate. Even with his back to her, Elle recognized Micah’s broad shoulders and square build. She floated closer and peered into his face. Micah in HCH sleep never seems comfortable or happy. She reached over and touched his cheek with her fingers, tracing where his dimple would be if he were smiling. She examined his face carefully for signs of REM. She had never witnessed Micah in REM.

  Elle revised that thought. She had seen Micah in REM sleep once—the time they fell asleep together in her hammock. She reached out and clipped her lanyard to the ring that held Micah in place on the Skein, then turned so that she faced Micah and looked again into his face before closing her eyes. She matched the rhythm of her breathing to his. Jack and Carla might be onto something, tethering themselves together. Elle was determined to find out, but she was asleep before she could finish the thought.

  Seconds later, Micah opened one eye and simply stared at Elle for a long, silent moment, then reached out and slowly pulled her closer before he fell asleep again.

  SEVEN

  Elle pounded her water glass on the tabletop in front of her, trying vainly to restore order. The tiny cafeteria that usually only held seven to ten crew was filled to the gunnels with Elle’s own Alpha Company. The Alpha crew was augmented by a small number of colonists from Bravo and Charlotte Companies. They had been awakened from HCH early to act as representatives at the meeting for their own crewmates. This was the compromise that Micah and Elle had agreed upon.

  Elle surveyed the chaos. She had wanted all 150 colonists awake and present. And now she could barely control the sixty-plus people crammed into the dining hall. Micah shot her an “I told you so” look. Elle subtly showed him a middle finger.

  “C’mon, you guys. Settle down,” Elle shouted, and banged her glass on the table again. Finally the hall began to quiet. “All right, thank you. Now as many of you know, I’ve been conducting a study of the side effects of HCH. How many of you have experienced nausea when waking from hibernation?”

  A few hands rose here and there in the crowd. Elle frowned. “Really. Five people? That’s not what I’ve been hearing in my post-HCH interviews.” Elle looked at her notes on her data pad again. “How many have experienced dry eyes?” She raised her own hand on this one, which seemed to encourage the group a bit. She scanned the crowd and counted ten hands. “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Any problems with urination after you wake up?” A few more hands slowly rose. Elle scowled and looked at her interview notes again.

  Micah cut into the discussion. “C’mon Elle, get to the point. Where are you going with this?”

  Rattled, Elle floundered a moment before blurting, “Well, I think—no. I’m certain that there are side effects to prolonged HCH usage that Control hadn’t tested for adequately. Or simply didn’t report to us prior to launch.”

  The gathering erupted into a chorus of questions, demands for proof, and angry denials. Elle tried banging on the table again and again, but no one would listen. Finally Micah interceded. He picked the nearest table up by one corner and flipped it over, smashing it to the floor. The resounding crash brought every conversation in the room to a halt. Everyone in the room was now focused on Micah and Elle.

  “Listen up, you assholes,” Micah bellowed to the shocked gathering.

  Elle was as astounded as everyone else and she reached for Micah’s arm as if to restrain him from further action. “Um, thank you, Micah.” Elle searched the crowd for Achebe and found her standing next to her friend Ashok. They both wore expressions of concern on their attentive faces. Achebe nodded in support, motioning for Elle to continue.

  “So, as I was saying. In my interviews with various colonists after they awaken from an HCH cycle, I’ve recorded fifty to sixty cases of dry eyes and dry mouth. Many, many people are experiencing mild nausea, and some have extreme nausea. As well, various colonists report a definite lag time in starting regular urination, no matter how much water they drink.”