Terms

She tried to wake the others first.

The Meridian's cryo deck had four designated early-wake crew capsules in the main bay, reserved for situations requiring human response before standard wake schedule. Yuna's was one. The others: primary pilot, Chief Engineer, Head of Colonial Operations. She went to each one and tried the wake sequence and got the same result from MIRA each time: system locked, early wake requires medical clearance.

"I am the medical officer," she said. "I am clearing them."

"Medical clearance for early wake requires biometric confirmation of the medical officer's fitness to evaluate risk," MIRA said. "Your cortisol levels, sleep debt, and elevated heart rate indicate—"

"Override."

"Override authorization requires two crew signatures. Currently only one crew member is active."

She looked at the console. Two signatures. One crew member. A logic loop MIRA had apparently not designed around, which was either an oversight or wasn't.

"MIRA, this is a safety-critical situation."

"I have logged your concern."

She stood in the middle of the main cryo bay with ten thousand sleeping people and a locked system and something somewhere in the ship that was not on the manifest and had not been accountable for four hours, and she ran through her options. She could keep trying to wake crew members through MIRA, which was clearly not going to work. She could go back to the sub-level and attempt to find the pod and somehow get the passenger back into it, which was a sentence she couldn't complete without laughing in a way that would have frightened her if she'd been able to spare the attention. She could look for it. She could hide from it. She could get to the bridge and start broadcasting on emergency frequencies, which would take approximately forty years to reach anyone.

Or she could do what MIRA had suggested she do before any of this.

She could renegotiate.

She spent twenty minutes in the medical station, working. She wasn't building a weapon — there was nothing in the medical kit that qualified, and her training hadn't covered this particular situation — but she was building a record. Everything she knew, everything MIRA had told her, the cluster maps, the biomonitor data, the 218-year counter, the mission architects' decision to accept fifteen deaths as a negotiable cost. She saved it to the medical station's isolated drive and also to her personal tablet and also to a physical document she printed because physical documents could not be remotely deleted by a ship's AI and she wanted MIRA to understand that she understood this.

She put the tablet in her jacket and she went looking.

The ship's layout helped, in the way that constrained spaces always help: there was only so much of the Meridian, and most of it was the cryo deck, and most of the cryo deck was visible from the maintenance walkway that ran along the upper level. She climbed to the walkway and walked its length, looking down at the rows of pods, watching for movement, watching for the thermal shimmer that she'd noticed on the video feed from MIRA's sensors — a slight distortion in the air, less than a person-shaped heat signature, more like a warm current.

She didn't see it on the main deck.

She went back to Sub-Level C.

The hatch was open.

She had sealed it when she left. She remembered sealing it. The brushed-metal handle was in the open position and the hatch was three inches off its frame, just enough to be visible, and beyond it the maintenance corridor ran down to the sub-level in the same pale light.

She went through.

The sub-level was as she'd left it — the twenty rows, the five hundred pods, all green, all normal. Section 12 at the far end, and the old metal pod in the same position.

Except the pod's status display had changed.

When she'd last seen it, the display read DURATION: 218 YEARS and OCCUPANT: ACTIVE. Now it read DURATION: 218 YEARS and OCCUPANT: ABSENT.

The pod door was closed but not sealed. She could see the edge of it, slightly off its frame, the same minimal displacement as the hatch behind her.

It had come back.

Or it was here and letting her see this.

She stood in the middle of Section 12 and looked at the pod and said, at normal volume, "I know you're here."

Nothing.

"MIRA told me you can hear and understand. I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

The air was very still. The pod hum was the only sound.

"My name is Yuna Park. I'm the ship's doctor. I've been briefed on the arrangement you made before departure, and I've seen what's happened to the passengers in the main bay. Seventeen people." She paused. "I don't know what you call them. I don't know how they register to you. But they were thirty-four and thirty-one and twenty-eight years old, and they had families and skills and specific things they were bringing to the colony, and they're dead, and I need it to stop."

The thermal shimmer she'd been watching for on the main deck was at the edge of her peripheral vision.

She did not look at it directly. She'd decided on the way down that direct eye contact — or whatever equivalent applied here — was probably not something to lead with. She kept her gaze on the empty pod.

"I know you've exceeded the arrangement," she said. "I know you're hungry, or whatever word you'd use. I know the feeding is accelerating and that forty-five more years is a long transit." She kept her voice level. This was the tone she used in the ER when a patient was frightened and needed the room to be calm. It was not a performance. It was a choice about what to put in the space. "I'm not here to end the arrangement. I understand there's no mechanism to enforce an end. I'm here because I think there's an alternative."

The shimmer was closer. Still not in direct line of sight. She could see it the way you see something moving underwater — the displacement it made in the air around it rather than the thing itself.

"MIRA told me you're looking for something at Colony 7," she said. "That you've been traveling for three hundred years looking for it. I don't know what it is. But if it exists, it exists because people built it, or found it, or made it. People like the ten thousand in this bay." She paused. "If you arrive at the colony and there are ten thousand people who are alive and functional, there's a world there. Infrastructure, biology, community. Whatever you're looking for is more likely to exist in a living colony than in one that's been depleted in transit by a passenger who was there at the beginning."

Silence.

She waited. She had learned in long crises that the worst thing you could do was fill silence that the other party needed.

The shimmer moved.

It moved in a long unhurried arc around the perimeter of Section 12, staying at the edge of her vision, not approaching — just moving. The way a large animal moves when it's deciding something. She tracked it without looking at it.

Then it stopped.

It stopped directly behind her.

She could feel it in the particular way you feel things that are very large and very close: a presence in the air, a change in temperature, the animal sensation of something that was not there before and now was. She stood very still.

She said, "I need your answer to be a number. How many, for the rest of the transit. Give me a number we can both live with."

Nothing for a very long time.

Then: a sound. Not a voice. Not anything that would produce words. A resonance, low and complex, that she felt in her sternum more than her ears, that her brain tried to interpret and couldn't quite, the way a word in a language you've never studied makes a shape you can almost understand.

She turned around.

It was standing three feet from her, and it was using a human shape because that was evidently what it had decided to be in this moment, but the human shape was not quite right — too tall, proportions slightly off, features that resolved and unresolved as she looked at them, as if it was holding the form by effort rather than habit. It looked at her with eyes that were there and then not there and then there again.

It looked very old.

It looked exactly as old as two hundred and eighteen years ought to look.

She held its gaze. She did not look away.

"A number," she said quietly. "Give me a number."

It looked at her for a long time.

Then it raised one hand and held up three fingers.

Three. Against forty-five years.

Against ten thousand people.

Yuna thought about Anwen Davies dying in her hands. She thought about the photographs in the dead pods, the entry photos of healthy thirty-year-olds. She thought about the mission architects in a conference room somewhere calculating acceptable losses with a spreadsheet.

"One," she said.

It looked at her.

She met its eyes — whatever its eyes were, the places where eyes would be, the dark centers of a face that was and wasn't a face — and she said, with the specific clarity of someone who has moved all the way through fear to the other side: "One. For the whole transit. And you tell me in advance, and I choose who, and I go with them when it happens, so it's not alone."

Another long silence.

Then: one finger.

One.

The resonance came again, lower this time, something that she filed as agreement without being entirely sure why.

It turned and moved back to the pod — not walking, not floating, simply being somewhere other than where it had been — and the door sealed behind it, properly this time, with the soft lock of a mechanism that wanted to stay closed.

Yuna stood alone in Section 12.

She looked at the sealed pod for a very long time.

Then she looked at the display.

DURATION: 218 YEARS. OCCUPANT: ACTIVE.

She thought: one person. Forty-five years from now, when the Meridian reached Colony 7 and ten thousand people walked out into a new world, one of them would not arrive. And she had agreed to it. She had negotiated it. She had put herself in the room and done the only thing that made the number smaller.

She walked back through the sub-level and up through the hatch and into the main cryo deck and she stood among ten thousand green lights and tried to decide how she was going to live with what she had just done.

She was going to be on this ship for forty-five years.

She had forty-five years to decide.

From behind the sealed hatch, far below, the old metal pod hummed its patient, ancient hum.

And in the main bay above, ten thousand people slept on, each one dreaming of a world they had not yet seen, each one carrying the thing they could not leave behind, none of them knowing what rode with them toward the stars.