Despite the Corporations’ best efforts, the Galactic Court had failed to find me guilty of any of the horrific crimes that would warrant a death sentence and my presence was so politically sensitive they didn’t dare lock me away. Instead, they decided to freeze me and leave me as an interesting ethical dilemma for future generations.
In deference to my age and frailty, my request to walk to the cryo facility where I would be serving my sentence had been granted. In deference to the fact the Galatic Court weren’t bloody idiots and my many unlikely escapes were now legend, a whole company of masked Court guards followed me as I walked very slowly to my destination.
They weren’t the only ones. A stony-faced observer from the Corporations watched my slow progress. The slight waxy sheen of his skin showed him to be a veteran of multiple rejuvenations, making him both older, and richer than everyone here put together. He wanted me dead and I doubted he or the Corporations he represented would be bothered by interesting ethical dilemmas if the opportunity to kill me presented itself.
He sneered as I lowered myself into the pod. I gave him a smile and a wave as the silent technicians connected me up. Then they stood back and the lid of the pod closed over me. Despite it being called cold storage I felt warm and the drugs they’d given me had dulled all but the worst of the pain. I smiled and closed my eyes…
***
I came awake to pain so intense it was as if every nerve ending was on fire. Pain that wouldn’t let up. Pain so overwhelming that I was unable to comprehend anything else. For what felt like forever the agony continued. Then after what felt like an eternity, the pain started to recede. I gasped for air, coughed up what felt like half my lungs and, for a while, the pain that had been distributed throughout my body centred on my chest.
After the latest spasm receded I realised I was lying on an uncomfortably hard, cold surface and risked opening my eyes. I found I was lying naked, alone, in a pool of viscous liquid in a dimly lit, long, tall, narrow chamber lined with rows of dark, vertically stacked, coffin-like boxes, three rows high. A few of them stood open and empty. The rest of them were firmly closed.
I raised myself on shaking arms and looked around. There should have been someone here, either to gloat or commiserate with my situation, maybe with some sort of machine to give me painkillers. Or, at the very least, to stop me from getting up and wandering off.
I got up and inspected the featureless box next to my former prison. It was covered in a thin layer of dust. I ran my hand over the surface and felt the power flowing through the box but couldn’t see any obvious defrost button. I shivered. It wasn’t all that warm in here, so I staggered to the double doors at one end of the chamber wondering what sort of reception a naked old man would get.
The doors slid open smoothly as I approached, a few lights flickered on to reveal a room full of industrial-looking medical equipment and uncomfortable-looking trolleys, their restraining straps dangling untidily. I guessed this was the room I should have been defrosted in. It was as deserted as the chamber I’d just left.
In one corner was a glass-walled shower big enough to wheel one of the trollies into. As I was still sticky with whatever had kept me alive in the pod I decided a quick cleanse was just what I needed. I entered and pressed the full cycle button. There was an ominous rumble and the button flashed orange. Just as I was about to give up waiting, there was a ‘dong’, the light went green and I was assaulted by blasts of icy cold water coming from every direction, seemingly intent on deep cleaning every orifice. The water cut out and searing hot air blasted across my skin for a few agonising seconds. Then there was a friendly ‘ding’ and the shower door opened. I staggered out and leant gasping against a trolley feeling violated but cleaner than I’d ever been in my life.
Now I was clean I decided whatever was going on I was going to meet my fate with some degree of dignity, so, with that in mind I ignored the double doors that were the obvious exit and instead went over to a single door marked ‘Staff Only’. As I’d hoped, it was a locker room, and, even better, some of the lockers had been left open. I went over to investigate the contents and caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror.
I stopped and stared. A hairless, slim, middle-aged man stared back at me. It was me, but me fifty years ago if I’d been fitter and healthier with a penchant for depilation. It was as if all those decades of living on increasingly dilapidated spacecraft had never taken their toll.
Before I’d been frozen I’d had arthritis so bad I could barely open a door and a heart condition that threatened to make a mockery of any punishment the Court handed down. Of course the Courts would never have granted someone like me access to rejuvenation, even if I’d had access to that sort of money. But… somehow rejuv had happened which meant I still had friends… Somewhere.
I turned away from the mirror to investigate the contents of the lockers and in short order, I’d found clothes to fit my shiny new body. Comfortable, if unstylish medical scrubs and some surprisingly substantial boots. I also found an identity badge dated thirty years after I’d been frozen. Considering my crimes I was going to chalk that up as an early release.
Properly attired I walked out of the medical room, down a wide, deserted, corridor with many doors off it, lit only by emergency lights, through an unfriendly grey reception area and out through the unlocked front doors.
No one tried to stop me, no alarms went off, in fact, it was the most undramatic jailbreak I’d ever made.
It was then I realised that I was on a Corporate space station. One of the millions of almost identical, efficient, soulless little oases dotted throughout the galaxy. They were all so similar that I was able to instantly pinpoint my former prison as being located at the top level one end of the main central atrium. I looked down the centre lightwell to check for any sign of life. Nothing moved in the twilight of the emergency lighting, not even a maintenance bot. Even the skeletal remains of the long dead trees on the bottom level were still. It was a depressing sight, not helped by the stale dead smell of the air, and I suspected the life support had either malfunctioned or been turned off. It looked like the station had been abandoned for quite some time too.
That’s not to say the place wasn’t monitored. This was a prison after all and I had a nasty feeling I had a very limited window to get myself off the station before some trigger-happy death squad arrived to investigate.
Unwilling to trust the elevators, I found the stairs and descended down several floors of administrative and accommodation levels to the retail level, enjoying how my body coped with the exercise.Once on the retail level I Ignored the eateries and shops and hurried to the viewing lounge at the end, hoping against hope I was somewhere relatively civilised… but not too civilised.
The station had been abandoned in a hurry, the shops were still stocked and even the eateries still had drinks and food on the shelves although some of the cartons and containers had dissolved, their contents oozing over the various counters. I wondered how long it took for food packaging to lose structural cohesion. How long had I been frozen? My stomach rumbled as it informed me it was way past dinner time. I chose to ignore it.
The pair of double airlock doors to the viewing lounge was wide open, another sign of either hasty abandonment or pure incompetence. The viewing lounge was half set to dining tables with the other half arranged as an amphitheatre around the seamless curved window with a small stage in front of the window. Any performance held on the stage would have to have been absolutely fucking jaw-dropping to draw anyone’s attention away from the stunning view.
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The vastness of a planet revolved below me, the white of a snow-covered landscape visible between gaps in the whirling clouds and suddenly I knew where I was. Jeckon, one of the few habitable planets in the galaxy that had never been terraformed.
That's not to say it was comfortable. The atmosphere was breathable but the ambient temperature ranged from mildly chilly on the equator to painfully fucking cold at the poles. For reasons that must have made sense at the time of colonisation, the planet’s main and pretty much only city, the appropriately named Kacke, had been built uncomfortably close to the South Pole.
Of course, if I wanted to visit Kacke I had to get off this space station first and with that in mind I made my way to the viewing lounge escape pods. Not only were these the most easily accessible, but they were also the largest, the most controllable, and the most valuable as they were the ones tasked with taking the station’s senior management to safety.
They were also conspicuous by their absence. If the blinking red light on the airlocks wasn’t confirmation enough, the little viewing windows showing nothing but empty space confirmed the pods were gone. I cursed, the next closest escape pods would be back on the upper accommodation level, so I headed back through the retail level, this time going through the clothing district. As I’d hoped there was a high-end outlet selling survival and cold weather gear to senior members of management who’d had the misfortune to be assigned to visit the planet.
I changed into stylish high-end clothes that didn’t seem to have suffered from their long sojourn on the shop shelves, helped myself to an expensive looking, chunky wrist-com that still worked, then filled a backpack with more clothes, an emergency cold weather survival pack, a useful-looking multi-tool and a high-end first aid kit. Then, given that I was bloody starving, I tucked into some MREs that were supposed to last forever.
They certainly tasted like longevity had been more of a priority than edibility and after my third pack I suddenly had to pay a lengthy visit to the staff toilet.
Afterwards, feeling far more human, I made my way back up the stairs to find the corridors littered with abandoned personal belongings and every escape pod gone. Now I was starting to get a bit worried. I was stuck on a space station that had been hastily abandoned, albeit some time ago, and it was looking increasingly likely there wasn’t going to be an easy way off.
There was only one more place there might be a pod. The engineering section, all the way down in the bowels of the station and if there were no pods left, at least there I could get creative. The climb down took me as long as I feared and by the time I entered the dimly lit, cavern-like engineering section at the base of the station even my shiny new body was demanding a break.
After a quick breather I checked the escape pod and wasn’t too surprised to find it missing, but everything else needed to keep what was effectively a small city in space running was laid out before me. If I couldn’t make some kind of spacecraft, or weaponise something and steal whatever craft the death squad had, I had really lost my touch.
The maintenance airlock was my first point of call, or rather, the space suits around it. They were the standard dirty orange general-purpose maintenance suits, the sort you see every EVA worker in the galaxy wearing. There is great debate about which brands are best but, in truth, they’re all pretty much the same and the best strategy is to find one that hasn’t been inhabited by an incontinent sub-clone with bad personal hygiene.
I made a quick inspection of the suits before glimpsing something half hidden in a corner that was much more my style and hurriedly moved the piles of stuff that had built up over the years, not quite believing my eyes. How an FYT suit had found its way onto a civilian space station I could only guess, although if I had been searching for one of these, Jeckon and its environs would have been my first stop.
I got close enough to caress the dull grey surface of the suit which looked genuine. It had been a very long time since I’d used one of these but you never forget the slightly rough texture of the outer skin that changed colour to my touch.
The suits had been manufactured by some long-forgotten war-focused corporation during the last tech revolution in a bid to make infantry viable again and were vulnerable to a short list of weaponry usually only used in full blown space combat. Whole new battlefield strategies had been hastily invented to neutralise them, and, when those had been deemed to be too collaterally expensive, treaties had been signed banning them from being used on habitable planets and space stations.
And yet, here was a genuine FYT suit looming over me and I wasn’t about to turn this piece of good fortune down just because some cabal of over-rejuved corporation power brokers had signed a treaty. I tripped the suit’s hidden manual override switch and with a hiss of air, the front of the suit swung open. Inside it was immaculate. Mind you, with something worth this much, I wouldn’t have expected it to be left in the same state as your average station maintenance suit.
I got up into the suit, sliding my arms into the arm holes, and, hoping against hope it hadn’t been booby-trapped, then I turned it on. The helmet lowered down onto my head and the familiar head-up display beamed into my head. The good news was that the suit failed to kill or entrap me and the display was the original clear, easy-to-understand interface which hadn’t been ‘improved’. It even looked like it had the latest updates.
“Thank you for choosing the Imperial Arms FYT suit. Properly maintained this suit will give you years of faithful service. Please take time to fill out your warranty to give you an extra… Time frame exceeded by… two hundred and fifteen years… Warranty is now void… To go through the training simulator…”
“Skip training,” I told the suit’s pleasant-sounding, accented female voice.
“Please take a moment to set up your user preferences,”
“Suit, skip setup,” I said.
“Setup skipped. Standard settings loaded. This suit is currency running on emergency power as the fusion generator has been disabled for transportation. Please attach to a power source of 1.21 gigawatts or greater,” the suit told me and an armoured power connector sprung out from the suit’s groin.
I smiled. I’d forgotten the power cable had been stored there. I jumped out, unfurled the charging cable from its storage space, wandered over to the nearest suit charge port and plugged it in. The station emergency lights visibly dimmed as the suit started to drain the station's power reserves. As the suit charged it started to whine as the fusion generator powered up.
While waiting I checked the fluids. Unsurprisingly, all were empty. The water was easy to top up, but the other stuff took a bit of searching for. By the time I’d found everything, the station lights were flickering, the industrial charge port was melting and there was a strong smell of burning plastic. I ducked behind a piece of machinery as the whine of the suit increased. Then my ears popped as the station lights flickered and went out.
For a few painfully long heartbeats there was darkness, then there were several loud clunks. Then all the lights in engineering came on, not just the emergency ones, as did everything else including several flashing red lights and the fire alarm. A breeze stirred the air. I came out from behind the machinery to find the charge port burning merrily. I grabbed a convenient extinguisher and sprayed it over the charge port encasing it in foam. There was a ping as the suit's undamaged charging cable detached and retracted into the suit, the smoke dissipated and the alarms stopped. Then, one by one, the main lights went out leaving only the emergency lighting.
I checked the suit. Despite the suit generating enough power to power up the entire space station, it was cool to the touch. I filled up the fluids and refilled the water container, checked the suit a couple more times before I realised I was just putting off the inevitable. I put my backpack in the suit’s external storage, took a deep breath and got in.
This time the suit moulded itself around me. I forced myself to go through the power-up checklist, and then, as all readings were showing normal… Well, normal for an FYT suit, I squeezed into an airlock and ejected myself into space.