Jonah Ark, ???, ???, ???AD
~
Blearily opening his eyes, the first thing Khoza heard was the hiss of his cryopod depressurising.
Holy shit did we make it?
Pushing against the glassy lid, he opened up to the harsh, clinical, white light of the cryochamber. Taking a deep breath, he spluttered into a coughing fit as his lungs started working again. Sitting up in place, he looked around for his crewmates.
And instantly knew something was very very wrong.
Every other pod was closed and dark, a brown-green biofilm coating the inside of what should have been a sterile, supercooled environment. There was dust on the floor. This is when the panic started to set in.
“No. No, no, no!”
Frantically standing up, he stepped out of what was seeming like the only functional pod in the entire room. Looking around, his worst fears were confirmed.
He rushed over to one of the nearby pods, his steps echoing through the empty room. The diagnostics screen was dark, non-responsive and covered in a layer of dust. Looking into the pod itself, he couldn’t see past the film coating the transparent duroplastic. He wasn’t an idiot though. There was obviously… rotted biological matter in there to produce such an effect.
They’re… they’re all dead.
The room was large, expansive enough to comfortably fit in around eight hundred cryopods. There were more rooms just like this, but people had chosen to take their chillnap near their friends or family.
Everyone Khoza had known before the mission, and everyone he’d grown close to in transit.
Dead.
The Jonah had been the pinnacle of human achievement. Bigger than a Venusian cloud city, those shining jewels dotting the upper layers of the Morning Star. More complex than the Commune, the conglomeration and symbiotic ecosystem of hundreds of space habitats and mining colonies floating in the asteroid belt.
The Jonah was the first colony ship sent out of Sol, and humanity’s first attempt at becoming a multi-system species. Everyone had been so proud of them. Him and the others, handpicked against all odds, had been proud to be a part of it.
Dead.
No. No, it can’t just be me.
It looked like the power had glitched at some point, causing the cryogenic process to fail and prematurely thawing nearly everyone out. But none of the other pods were open.
They woke up. And were trapped. Christ.
He shook his head, dispelling the morbid thoughts. There was nothing he could do about it now. He was one of the first galactic colonists, trained for years to thrive in an alien environment. He would focus on the mission before grieving.
He took a long, sombre look around at the chamber. His last memory of this place had been all his friends joking around and making their final preparations as they stepped into their respective pods. Jake, bragging about how he’d boldly go where no man had gone before and bed an alien, no matter what they looked like. Kang-Dae, writing down his final thoughts and bad poetry in his ever-present journal. Grzegorz, doing pushups of all things. Khoza didn’t even want to check their pods. He wasn’t sure he could handle it.
Still, he had to check on the other chambers. Maybe whatever quirk had spared him had done the same for others. Hopefully.
Let there be at least one other person. Please.
As he ambled forward on shaky legs, a dull ache in his torso as he re-acclimated to having functioning organs, he examined the familiar surroundings.
It was eerie, traversing these silent, brightly lit corridors, with a distinct feeling of lack, like walking through the hallways of an empty school. People had once swarmed all over this ship. When they’d finally accelerated to 30% of light speed and couldn’t see the Sol system through the viewdeck anymore, many had joked that they were the most remote earth lifeforms in history and still couldn’t find some damn peace and quiet.
He tracked a trail of footsteps behind him, disturbing the dust that had been settling for god-knows how long.
I need to find a computer. What year is it?
They’d left Earth in 2260AD, likely before a second Gene War broke out, and had expected to make it to their new system in a hundred and forty years, give or take a few, assuming their calculations were right and nothing perturbed their precise path.
Were they even still in space? Were they orbiting their target? Had they made landfall already? Khoza knew nothing about his situation and it rankled.
What I would give for a datapad right now.
He didn’t have one of the advanced neurobus ports, allowing him to interface directly with the ship, but then again, he wouldn’t have been chosen for this mission if he’d altered himself too much.
One of the few benefits of being a SHiT.
The official term was SHT. Standard Human Template. But when people who deviated from that template—whether by technological or biological augmentation—were so objectively superior to normal people, people who couldn’t afford the fancy mods, that’s what normal became.
Shit.
Reaching the next large chamber, he looked within. At first with hope, then with grim acceptance. It was the same view here. Row after row after row of darkened, dusty pods.
A spasm wracked his chest, bringing him to his knees. He held himself against the metallic wall, taking deep breaths and hacking up a storm each time. His eyes had a strange pressure behind them. He guessed he should be crying, but his tear ducts weren’t working just yet.
Mission. Mission. I should check the other rooms. Focus on the mission.
He didn’t expect to find anyone else at this point. He just needed something to do while he came to terms with how fucked he was.
Khoza, indeed, all those who had decided to go on this cursed expedition were the best of the best of unaugmented humans, picked from every part of Inner Sol to provide the maximum genetic diversity and give their future colony a fighting chance. They’d enhanced themselves the hard way, with exercise, with study, with painstaking incremental progress. They all had something to prove.
And now Khoza had to survive with exactly none of their collective expertise.
Staggering through another doorway, another cryochamber revealed itself to him. He hadn’t expected to see anything different, but the sight was disheartening nonetheless. Dark, sealed pods.
Despite himself, he still had hope. It was stupid, but there was one more chamber left to check, and he could feel himself getting more anxious as he approached it. His mind refused to completely accept being alone on a colony ship, light-years away from his home system. It was the kind of isolation a human mind couldn’t even really comprehend.
Which reminded him, he had to find some sort of interface so he could see where he was, when he was, and what his options were.
But first…
He mentally braced himself, stopping just outside the archway leading into the last chamber. He took a few breaths, said a prayer under his breath and stumbled in.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
And broke out into a grin so wide it hurt his face.
Some of the pods were open!
The vast majority were dark, but a few scattered pods, about twelve of them, had their lids open wide, with the lights still on within. He searched the ground, looking for footprints in the dust.
He didn’t see any.
What does this mean? They’re clearly not in here. They hovered out? Or the dust settled after they left. Which could mean a door open to the outside!
Another spasm wracked his chest, contorting him with the pain, leaving him panting on the floor. His smile earlier had cracked his dry lips, and after a brutal coughing fit, he wiped at his mouth with the sleeve of his grey sleepsuit, seeing that his blood was thick and discoloured, the usually red liquid having a dark tint, with both clear patches and black spots in the vaguely red smear.
He broke out into another coughing fit and felt an acute, piercing pain deep in his abdomen as he realised this wasn’t the way most people recovered from cryosleep.
Something else was very very wrong.
When it rains, it pours.
He considered going to the medbay, but feeling his growing weakness, he didn’t know if he would make it to the other end of the ship and judging by the total silence he’d been in so far, it seemed the ship’s mind, Dag, was no longer functioning. He’d be on his own trying to diagnose whatever was wrong and using medication that was likely decades expired.
No, he was closer to the hangar. To the bay doors. To the outside and hopefully, salvation.
Nodding slightly to himself, he stood up using the wall as a support, and made his faltering way down the white hallways.
He passed a few terminals, but they remained dark as he approached and he couldn’t exactly ask Dag to turn them on. Still, he called out, just in case.
“Dag? You online? Anyone?”
Nothing.
Nothing, except his laboured breaths and dragging feet echoing down the empty halls.
Dammit. The power must be on its last dregs if only the lights are working.
A bout of nausea twisted his stomach, spurring him to clutch at it and groan in pain.
This is not how I imagined this would go when I entered the pod.
Making his way painfully towards the doors to the outside, every ounce of effort had to be put into simply keeping one foot in front of the other. He had some suspicions about what was wrong with him but he wasn’t a doctor, merely trained in basic first aid.
What he was, was a chronicler. His role was meant to be advisory on the new colony, helping the administration get things running smoothly, maybe write a dusty history book that future generations would fall asleep to. Everyone aboard had multiple skill sets, just due to constraints on the space available, but that also meant that more valuable skills (for a new colony) were overrepresented. Engineers, doctors, geologists, agronomists, meteorologists, all sorts of people with hard scientific knowledge. People like Khoza, with advanced degrees in history, economics and political science were only lightly scattered on the Jonah. In fact, he suspected he’d only made it onto the ship because of his mostly-forgotten bachelor’s degree in physics.
It was a dark irony. The scientists and survival experts had all died while the bureaucrat was the last remaining crew member. Jake would have laughed himself to a heart attack.
All my knowledge is useless unless I find people. Can’t find people unless I survive whatever this is.
Not wanting to die useless was a pretty shaky motivation, but he needed any excuse to not just give up right there. He knew there was every chance the few crewmates who’d also made it out of their pods had died as well.
He pressed on.
Stumbling into the wide-open space of the hangar, Khoza’s hopes were further buoyed. A few of the land and air vehicles they’d brought were missing. The massive bay doors were shut, but there was a smaller, human-sized door near it that worked mechanically, not electronically.
The expansive viewing ports to the outside were disappointing, as they only showed darkness. Still, it was generic black, not the speckled darkness of space. It seemed like they’d landed successfully.
Okay, good sign. With how low the power is, our ship atmosphere would have failed were we still in orbit. Still…
Khoza was uneasy. Not just physically. Something had gone catastrophically wrong for him to be in this situation, and he had no idea what to expect outside. He didn’t even know if he could breathe out there. Spectrographic analysis from Sol had revealed high enough levels of oxygen and nitrogen for human respiration, but they couldn’t get a comprehensive read on the atmospheric composition at the planet’s surface and didn’t know for sure if it was safe. For all they knew, the atmosphere was two percent nerve gas.
In this situation, however, that meagre bit of knowledge would have to be enough.
Lurching his way past the dust-covered autos, swaying with every step, he grit his teeth, grabbing onto the hope that rescue was outside with all his will. Help was outside.
It has to be.
Another sharp pain bloomed in his gut, this time sawing away at his intestines rather than stabbing them. It took everything he had not to fall to his knees and curl up into a ball.
Not like this. I’m not dying like this.
Staggering forward, propelled purely by tenacity, he finally, blessedly, reached the door. He leaned against it heavily, panting and covered in sweat.
“Okay, we’re at the door. Please, please, if there’s someone or something out there, let them have morphine. Heroin, even, I’m not picky right now.”
Done with his little prayer, he heaved himself off the door, turning to face it and gripping the recessed opening wheel. With a deep breath, he turned it.
The mechanisms within the wall groaned and squealed, but in fits and starts, the door slowly slid open.
Revealing… bare rock.
You’re fucking kidding me.
A few feet in front of the doorway, a sheer rock face spread out in all directions except down, where a gentle slope curved away out of sight.
Khoza chuckled. A spasm convulsed his chest.
He laughed harder. Nausea rushed through him and he leaned forward, puking up blood. Not just blood, his dark red vomit was speckled with chunks of white.
I’m puking up bits of my organs now. It has to be radiation damage. But how?
They’d been thoroughly schooled on the signs of radiation poisoning, but they’d assumed it was a problem for transit only. The ship had been adequately shielded as far as they knew, and from his advanced symptoms, it felt like he’d been dunked directly into reactor water.
You know what? Fuck it. I tried.
He let himself topple.
Khoza fell forward, hitting the ground hard, hearing more than feeling his collarbone crack. Rolling down the slope, his body bruising and bones fracturing underneath the sleepsuit, he was already regretting letting himself fall.
Okay, this isn’t as instant as I’d have liked.
He couldn’t even have a moment of dignity in death?
Coming to a painful stop, Khoza lay facedown in the dirt, recovering as best he could for a dying man. Still, his ever-increasing weakness pointed towards only one resolution.
All he could do was wait.
…
…..
Despite waiting in depressed, acceptant silence, all the aches and pains persisted. There was no sweet release. He was still alive.
This is ridiculous.
Mustering his meagre strength to turn his head, he made a discovery.
A skeleton! No, a few skeletons!
He was so surprised, he ever so slowly pulled himself up to a seated position to get a better look.
There was some sort of… baton or short staff trapped in the rock wall like the proverbial sword in the stone, giving off a soft red light, and the skeletons were all reaching towards it.
These are human bones. Are these my former crewmates? Did this thing kill them?
His curiosity burned, but looking at his circumstances, he would not live long enough to solve the mysteries surrounding the fate of the Jonah.
Well… I could solve one at least.
Resolutely, he started moving towards the glowing baton, alternately crawling and dragging himself as spasms shot through his spine, his legs, his chest, all over his body. Still, he pushed on.
At least he’d go out on his own terms.
Getting closer and closer, the baton bathed him in its oddly beautiful crimson light. Now, he could see intricate tracery up and down its shaft, like circuits formed of quicksilver. It didn’t look like any tech he’d seen before.
Is this… alien?
Back in Sol, in the entire history of people scouring the stars, the only “aliens” they’d found were single-celled simple organisms. Turned out life was common enough, it was complexity that was vanishingly rare. But no bacteria had made whatever this was.
Khoza also idly noted that it didn’t seem to be doing to him whatever it had done to the skeletons that he’d now managed to crawl past. He was zero for two on suicide attempts and now felt mildly embarrassed.
Might as well touch it. There’s a non-zero chance I become King of all England.
He chuckled to himself, regretting it immediately as he felt his organs complain.
Truly having nothing to lose, Khoza pulled himself right up to the cavern wall, leaning against it panting. Grunting with the effort, he lifted his arm off the ground and grabbed the end poking out of the wall.
Instantly, the light flared, becoming blinding. Khoza tried to recoil, but his hand was stuck fast.
A stabbing pain in his palm. Something burrowing up his arm.
Bad idea bad idea bad ide-
Then, a single moment of excruciating agony, his head caught in an industrial press, before a blissful release.
Text scrolled across his eyes as the colonist fell into unconsciousness.
Host detected.
Warning: Time limit exceeded, autodefence disabled.
Warning: No companion Lorica within range. Initiating Beacon Protocol.
Warning: No response from Beacon Protocol.
Warning: Requirements met. Worst Case Scenario protocols unlocked.
Initiating Cerberus Protocol.
Warning: Power level insufficient.
Initiating Armageddon Protocol.
Warning: Power level insufficient.
Initiating Messiah Protocol.
Scanning…
True Human non-variant host detected.
Assimilation possible.
Assimilating…
Assimilation failed.
Troubleshooting…
Warning: Catastrophic genetic damage in host.
Solution: Full rewrite.
Assimilating…
Assimilation failed.
Warning: Power level insufficient.
Troubleshooting…
Solution: Failure override, searching for suitable power source…