Despite the coalition of 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. That left them with the dilemma of what to do with me. My mere presence during the trial had been considered so politically volatile they hadn’t been able to lock me away, mainly because no prison would take me. There was also the consideration that what little time I had left to me would, no doubt, be spent in hospital.
Instead, in a decision that had the Corporate lawyers objecting so strenuously they could probably be heard on the other side of the Galaxy, the Court decided to freeze me and leave me as an interesting ethical dilemma for future generations.
In deference to my age, my request to walk from my secure private room in the hospital to the Cryo room where I would be frozen, had been granted. In deference to the fact the Galactic Court weren’t bloody idiots, my many unlikely past escapes from justice now being something of a legend, a whole company of masked Court guards surrounded me as I walked painfully and slowly to my destination. I took my time, enjoying the warm South African afternoon, reflecting that it was the first time in my life I’d ever felt the Earth’s sun on my skin. It would, no doubt, be the last too.
In the Cryo room, a stony-faced observer from the Corporations impatiently watched my slow progress, the slight waxy sheen of his skin showing him to be a veteran of multiple rejuvenations, making him both older, and richer than everyone in the room put together. 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 awkwardly stripped off then lowered myself into the pod. I gave him a cheery smile and waved as the silent technicians connected me up. Then they stood back and the lid of the pod closed over me. Despite the fact I was technically being frozen, I felt warm and the drugs they’d given me had dulled all but the worst of the pain. I smiled as I closed my eyes. I was probably going to die and the experience was going to be a rather more pleasant experience than the last time. I let myself drift off, at one with the universe...
***
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 myself 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. 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. There should have been a machine to help with my defrosting. At the very least, there should have been something to stop me from getting up and wandering off.
I got up and inspected the featureless pod next to my former prison. I ran my hand over the surface covered in a thin layer of dust and felt the power flowing through the box but no obvious defrost button made itself known. I shivered and staggered to the double doors at one end of the chamber in search of clothes or people, preferably in that order, all the while wondering what sort of reception a naked, old man would get.
The doors slid open smoothly as I approached, and a few emergency lights flickered on revealing 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 trolleys into. As I was still sticky with whatever goo had kept me alive in the pod I decided a quick cleanse was just what I needed. I 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.
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. 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 slim, hairless, brown-skinned man of around thirty years old stared back at me. It was me, but me sixty years ago… if I’d been fitter, healthier and had a penchant for depilation. It was as if all those decades of living on increasingly dilapidated spacecraft had never taken their toll. My body was no longer one sudden shock away from making a mockery of any punishment the Court handed down. I had been Rejuvenated.
How this could have happened was a mystery to me. The Galactic Court would never have granted someone like me access to rejuvenation, even if I’d had access to the sort of money only the most powerful leaders of the Corporations had access to. But the evidence was staring straight back at me. Somehow rejuv had happened. At present, though, I had more pressing issues. 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 comfortable 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, again, 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 hundreds of thousands 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 light well 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 several floors of administrative and accommodation levels, down 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.
It looked like 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 I’d been frozen way past dinner time. I chose to ignore it for now.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The pair of double airlock doors to the viewing lounge was wide open, another sign of either hasty abandonment or total incompetence. The viewing lounge was half a dining area with the other half arranged as an amphitheatre around a seamless curved window with a small stage in front of the vast 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.
The vastness of a planet revolved below me, the white of a snow-covered landscape visible between gaps in the whirling clouds. Suddenly I knew where I was. I was looking down on Jeckon, one of the few habitable planets in human-controlled space that had never been terraformed.
That's not to say it was comfortable. The atmosphere was breathable and the gravity was almost Terran standard, 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.
If, however, I had been asked where I would have liked to be defrosted, Jeckon would have been top of my list. The government barely existed, the Corporations left it alone as the population was small and lawless, and, of course, there were an uncountable number of abandoned spaceships littering the surface. Spaceships an enterprising soul with a bit of technical knowledge could acquire.
Of course, if I wanted to visit the bright light of Kacke I had to get off this space station first. 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 weren’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 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 are supposed to last forever. They certainly tasted like longevity had been more of a priority than edibility and after my third pack I 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 where 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. 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 weaponize something and steal whatever craft the death squad had, I’d 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 mutant 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. I hurriedly moved 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. They 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 the suits 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… 215 years… The 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 as 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 fusion generator powered up, the suit charge port started to whine, then smoke.
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 in the air. I ducked behind a piece of machinery as the suit started humming. 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. 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 to see by.
I checked the suit. Despite generating enough power to power the entire space station, it was cool to the touch. I filled up the fluids and refilled the water container, checking 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 showed normal… Well, normal for an FYT suit, I squeezed into an airlock and ejected myself into space.