The casket opened. "Casket" may not have been technically the right word, but he had felt as if he'd been in this cryo-pod for years. He shouldn't have felt like that, if you felt how much time had passed while you were in cryosleep, then clearly you were not in cryosleep, but the moment he had opened his eyes and sound and light returned to his world he felt like he had been lying down on his back for ages. His whole body was sweating profusely, from head to toe.
A quick rolling around of his tongue inside his mouth, poking at his cheeks, not only revealed just how dry his mouth was but that his cheeks had gone gaunt from starvation. He didn't feel like he was dying or close to starvation, but it was not a pleasant experience to wake up to.
He blinked, crushing or pushing off the ice crystals that had formed in and on the tear-ducts of his eyes. Thanks to the unfortunate mix of the steam and ice rushing to get out of his cryo-pod and the fact he hadn't opened his eyes for an indeterminate amount of time, he couldn't see anything more than silhouettes outside of his tube.
There were three people; two holding what were likely rifles, and another who had taken a step back to get out of the cloud of water vapour and ice pooling out of his casket. He blinked again, a painful process that stretched his dry eyelids, tearing off the ice crystals that had forced them closed earlier. He took his second deep breath, his lungs filling with air.
“Don't try to stand up,” The person without the gun said. “Just take a few deep breaths. Take it easy.”
With oxygen in his lungs and his heart beating again, Joshua Hinds started to try and think. He was still alive and mostly mobile, so this cryosleep couldn't have lasted more than six months. After that, you didn't wake up conscious and needed to be placed in a hospital for the next few moves before everything got back online. He could move his fingers, cracking the layer of ice that had formed on top of him so, clearly, that wasn't necessary.
He also wasn't dead, which meant it was certainly less than a year. But his bladder and stomach felt completely empty, he was caked in ice, and his head was killing him so, clearly, he had been in there for a while.
He was only supposed to be doing a month rotation in cryo while the ship was leaving Sol, then swap with someone else. Joshua had been in cryostasis before, for trips between Earth and Io or Titan, so he knew that he shouldn't be feeling this awful for just a month's nap.
“Where am I?” He asked wearily.
“Just stay put, you've been in there for a while. We just want to make sure you're okay,” The person explained. As his ears adjusted and the air stopped rushing past his head to get out of the tube, he could hear this was the voice of a woman. “What is your name?”
He realised this was a cognitive test- Something that was the standard operating procedure for getting out of cryo, making sure that ice crystals hadn't formed in your brain or the like.
“Dr Joshua Hinds. Aged 27. PHD in Botany with a minor in xenobiology. One of the 15000 crew of the EEV Zheng He. Number 10914,” He replied groggily, his throat scratching from the effort.
He could see the silhouette of the woman hold up her right palm, and the fingers of her hand lit up as they projected a list of names, most of which had been crossed off. With her left, she scrolled down until, presumably, she found him, then pressed it to clear it.
That's interesting. Did they not know who I am?
Joshua didn't have much time to think about the implications because by the time he blinked again, most of the cloud of vapour and ice had cleared, allowing him to see outside his cryo-pod. She was indeed a woman, with shoulder-length auburn hair and blue eyes, with rather pale skin. He could tell they were within a gravity field of some kind since her hair fell down rather than floated like they were inside a swimming pool. So likely they weren't on board the cryo-pod deck of the Zheng He. The two men flanking her were not actually men but were instead drones. Humanoid, with interlocking metal armour and three blue lights that were presumably their eyes in their “head”, but still drones.
Looking around, he could further tell he was not inside the ship. It looked like he was in a mineshaft or something, lit by two LED lamps with numerous support beams holding up a metal roof above. Grains of sand were on the steel flooring below, suggesting that they were somewhere beneath a desert or something.
“What happened?” He asked.
“Steady. We're going to move you now. It's a miracle your pod still had power, but this place isn't equipped with a medical facility,” She explained. One of the drones placed their rifle on a magnetic holster on its back, then started to pull out the various tubes plugged into Joshua's body with speed and precision. Even removing the catheter was both quick and painless. Then it grabbed Joshua's arm with surprising gentleness. It looked into his face, probably trying to ascertain if it had hurt him, then just as gently grabbed his other arm. Then, incredibly carefully, it pulled him out of the pod.
With its arms around his own, Joshua was surprised that he didn't lose more weight. He still didn't know how long he had been in the pod, but even if disconnected from the Zheng He's numerous fusion reactors, each pod had a microreactor meant to last for at least ten years, since pods also served as emergency escape pods for ships. But that wasn't possible since he'd be practically brain-dead if he'd been in cryo for that long.
Joshua stumbled to his feet, even while being carried by the drone. His legs felt both boneless yet strangely heavy. Trying to move them hurt, and he felt like he was cracking something. He feared it might be ice crystals in his bloodstream, which would almost certainly kill him if that was the case, but this wasn't some 20th-century fridge storing some dead animator's head. This was 23rd-century state of the art Cryo technology. And, well, he hadn't died yet. So maybe it was just in his head.
“Help him to the ship,” The woman ordered to the drone carrying him, then she turned on her foot and headed towards a tunnel, the other drone following directly behind her. Before it did anything else, the drone carrying him let go of his right arm and reached into a compartment on its thigh, taking something out and placing it on his head. When his world darkened around him, Joshua realised he had put sunglasses on. Really thick ones, if the light level and weight was any indication. Then, one by one, he took his first steps after waking up. Even aided by the machine, it still took him three minutes just to travel the four metres to the tunnel.
When he reached it, he looked up. It was a metal ramp leading up a few metres to the surface, the sun shining down the ramp. The drone moved its right arm off its own and wrapped it around his waist, ready to help him up the stairs. Looking down, Joshua realised, unsurprisingly, that he was still dressed in the skinsuit meant for Cyrosleep, which did at least cover his feet. Not that he'd call the thin layer of advanced polymers and non-newtonian liquid “a pair of shoes”, but they did protect his feet.
Taking a deep breath, he climbed up the stairs. Or perhaps more accurately, allowed the drone to carry him up them. As he climbed, he was basked in sunlight for what felt like the first time in years. He could feel the lingering ice melting away and shivered in momentary pleasure as his body started to warm up again. He was certainly thankful for the sunglasses and made a point of telling the probably unthinking drone that, since even through the thick dark glass the sun was unbearably bright.
They reached the top of the ramp and stepped out into the wide world. Joshua wasn't sure what he expected. The massive open expanse of desert sands wasn't exactly where he'd thought he would be waking up when he got into the cryo-tube but, clearly, something had happened in the intervening... Amount of time.
They were in the centre of a dig site, with a camp nearby, but there were no signs of life around them, other than the woman who woke him up. She was standing by a vehicle, a large helicopter looking thing with two outstretched wings with fusion vents on the wingtips and a smaller set of vents on the back. It was large, maybe twenty metres long, made of dark metal. It didn't look like it had guns on it, but Joshua didn't recognise it as one of Zheng He's atmospheric shuttles. The woman was stood by an open door by the side, gesturing to him, or maybe the drone, to come over.
The drone carried him over and stepped inside, carefully placing him down on a hospital-style bed inside the craft's hold. It then moved to the rear of the surprisingly spacious interior compartment, standing next to the other drone. Once the woman had stepped into the compartment and the door closed behind her, both drones lowered their heads and powered down. The lights on their heads and across their body turning from a bright blue to a low, pulsating red.
Joshua stretched out on the bed, too weak to sit up, and rolled onto his back, but craned his head to the side to look towards the woman, sitting on a seat facing the craft's rear. The window on the door they had stepped through darkened. He didn't feel the ship taking off and couldn't even hear any noise from outside, but he got the feeling the craft had just lifted off the ground.
“I'm glad to meet you, Dr Joshua Hinds. We're always happy to find another survivor, even after all this time,” The woman gently said as she hunched forward in her seat, a pleasant smile on her pale face. She reached forward to take his thick sunglasses off and place them on the bed before sitting down again. “I'm Dr Amanda Jones, Roboticist and Retrieval expert.”
“Dr Joshua Hinds,” Joshua said, introducing himself, then grimacing as he realised that not only did she just say his name but that he had already kind of introduced himself. “Where are we?”
“Not aboard the Zheng He, which I'm sure you noticed,” She said with a chuckle. She winced, then continued. “No, not aboard the Zheng He. We will be flying for a few hours, but I don't think the hold of a VTOL is the best place to... Acclimatise you to our situation.”
Joshua coughed, his breath still fogging up the air from the chill.
“Well, are we back on Earth?” He asked. It was the most probable explanation. They were clearly on a terrestrial planet with an earth-like atmosphere and gravity, that much he could work out already. The Zheng He was designed to scout out new worlds and settle them with the best humanity had to offer, but that wouldn't explain how he was no longer on the Zheng He. If the ship had, say, exploded, then there'd probably be no one to rescue him. He sort of recognised Amanda, not personally, but vaguely. Perhaps from one of the many, many, many tests the government had them perform before sending them on this expedition or something, which meant he couldn't have spent too long in the pod. The Zheng He was the first human-crewed FTL vessel ever made, but its speed was still only 10 times the speed of light, so even getting to the nearest stay would take nearly half a year, and Bernard's Star didn't have any terrestrial planets.
Amanda ran a hand through her auburn hair, clearly chewing on something.
“Not... Exactly. Well, no time like the present, I suppose. What's the last thing you remember aboard the Zheng He?” Amanda asked.
“Getting into the cryo-pod and going to sleep,” Joshua replied.
Amanda chuckled and smacked her head, the answer obvious.
“Sorry. You must've been the first rotation for that. If I remember correctly, you guys got in... When we were moving between Mars and Jupiter?” She asked.
Joshua nodded. They had left the Zheng He's drydock in Earth Orbit on the 14th of June, 2232. They weren't to activate the Alcubierre drive until they got past Neptune which, even with Reactionless drives and Anti-Proton drives, still took months. To save on resources like air and food, a subsection of the crew had been placed in cryosleep, which was completely normal.
“Well, I'll fill you in on the rest. We got to the Oort cloud no problem, Captain Bell deciding not to risk going to FTL too close to Sol. Once she activated the drive and got to FTL speeds, that's when things went wrong,” Amanda explained.
Joshua tensed up, painfully pushing himself to sit up straight, silently, weakly but still firmly asking her to continue.
“The moment the negative mass drives kicked in, they... Exploded, for lack of a better term. We're still not 100% on what happened. I... I think I banged my head in the crash, I don't personally remember the specifics. But the Zheng He's warp bubble collapsed almost as soon as it was created. Thankfully, by some miracle, we had arrived in orbit of an earth-like world. Rather annoyingly, on a collision course with its surface. Most of the ship's systems were knocked out. There was a massive hull breach across multiple decks, the centrifugal midsection was just torn off completely and fell to the surface. Not all of us were even aboard the ship,” Amanda explained. “I think I was, but some had just... Appeared on the surface of this planet. Anyway, we made a crash landing at the foothills of some mountains.”
“How many died?” Joshua asked.
“That's... Hard to say. Confirmed dead, found the bodies, only about three hundred people. But there are still nearly two thousand people missing and unaccounted for. Well, one less now,” Amanda said with a smile, nodding at him. “The alcubierre drive was beyond repair, we the Zheng He wasn't made for getting back out of the atmosphere, half of it was burning, and everyone was still in shock. But we survived. We built a little colony for ourselves, made new ships, new drones.
She pointed to the two powered down drones that had helped him.
“New everything. Slowly, but surely, we are rebuilding. Getting the Zheng He back online,” She explained excitedly.
“So, I guess this isn't a death world at least,” Joshua asked.
Amanda chuckled at some private joke.
“Not at all. But, well, we'll explain that to you when we're back at the Enclave.”
“Enclave?” Joshua asked.
Amanda waved her hand.
“Our name for our... Colony,” She explained. “I can see the expression on your face. The name will make sense later.”
Joshua blinked and shrugged.
“Sorry. So, how long have I been asleep?” Joshua asked.
Amanda smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile or a kind smile. It didn't reach her eyes, but worryingly showed an uncomfortable number of teeth. It was strained, like whenever Joshua tried to explain his job to his parents.
“It's been... Quite some time,” Amanda said carefully.
Joshua tilted his head.
“Can't be that long. You're still in your... Twenties?” Joshua asked.
Amanda laughed.
“You charmer, you. Well, yeah, I was twenty-nine when we set off,” Amanda explained. Joshua certainly didn't consider himself a charmer, his record with women wasn't exactly stellar. Rather than linger on that though and risk embarrassment, he decided to charge on ahead.
“So it can't be more than a few years. Certainly not more than ten,” Joshua stated far too certainly.
Amanda blinked.
“We'll go over this once we land. But all you need to know is that most of the people who set off on the voyage are still alive. Your friends will probably want to see you, once you've had a real check-up and been debriefed,” Amanda explained.
Joshua certainly didn't like the way she didn't answer his implied question, but he wasn't confident enough to go right ahead and ask. The subject of friends seemed like a nice one for him to turn to instead.
“My friends are still alive? That's good. You said that some 2000 people are missing, anyone important?” He asked.
“A few of the Myrmidons either left the Enclave or are still missing, the XO died in the crash, and we haven't got as many theoretical physicists as we'd like or need. But the Captain's still alive, as is Gen... Officer Kant. Most of the department heads are alive and working. We could've come out of the crash a lot worse,” Amanda explained.
“Good to hear. Suppose I should be glad I woke up now; most of the hard work has already been done,” Joshua said jokingly.
“Hmm. I suppose a botanist won't be much help on rebuilding the alcubierre drive,” Amanda said, unable to hide her disappointment out of her voice.
Joshua winced but forced a smile regardless.
“Well, this is an alien world; I'm sure there are lots of exotic, unknown plants still to discover?” He half asked/half reminded her. Amanda didn't say anything.
“I know you've been asleep for quite some time, but get some rest. We'll be at the Enclave soon enough, and they'll need you wide awake for the medical tests,” she said before standing up and heading towards the empty cockpit. Of course, the craft could fly itself. She just wanted to eject from the conversation. Joshua would be lying if he said that was the first time this had happened.
He lay back down on his back, looking up at the ceiling of the hold. He certainly didn't need to sleep, not after however long it had been. Presumably years, which was terrifying and didn't make much sense. But he was still a sort of tired, something deep in his muscles and bones that had yet to truly wake up and shake off the ice. He looked up, counting the seems in the welding as the craft sped on and on.
He hadn't been allowed to look out of the craft and had landed in an interior hanger. When he looked up after he landed, it looked like a perfectly normal sky, blue with soft white clouds. Occasionally it shimmered with some strange light, but that might just have been his eyes adjusting to being able to be seen again.
The hanger had been mostly cleared of people, with everyone keep a respectable distance from him. That made a certain kind of sense; who knows what kind of new planetary diseases they had developed an immunity to that might kill him.
The place was all steel and titanium, well kept and just like a military installation back home. It reminded him a lot of the training grounds he and likely everyone else here had gone to train for the expedition. Now, it was their home. On his right and left, he was flanked by two soldiers, human ones this time wearing non-newtonian liquid armour with polymer hardpoints. Light, but strong. They carried what looked like some kind of electromagnetic rifle, perhaps a coil or railgun, but he didn't much about guns. They had fitted him with a small exoskeleton to allow him to walk off the craft.
He and his escorts moved out of the hanger and out into clean metal corridors. They were signs that the place had been evacuated in a hurry, with a still steaming thermos of some hot drink sitting on a trolley next to a toolkit and an open access panel on the ground. Once again, probably limiting his exposure to new people.
They entered a medical examination room filled with advanced medical equipment, like an auto-surgeon and sterilisation field generator. The guards stood by the door, smiling at him. Even these soldiers were happy to see him. Perhaps it was nice to see another survivor, or maybe they were just polite.
Joshua walked over to the bed and sat on it, looking around nervously at the medical equipment. He wasn't much of a fan of hospitals, the gauntlet of medical tests he had to partake in to get a place in the expedition was not an experience Joshua soon wanted to repeat, but he swallowed his nerves.
The door opened, and three people stepped through. Two of them he recognised immediately. One was Captain Bell, the woman of the entire Zheng He operation, and the Captain of the ship. And the other was Officer Kants, the head of security and all the military forces of the expedition. The Captain was a middle-aged woman with dark skin, maybe fifty or so. She had fierce blue eyes, a strong jaw and a small metal dot on her temple that was likely some kind of cybernetic implant. She stood at 6ft 4, forcing Joshua to look up.
Kants was an older man, maybe sixty or so, with a full shock of grey hair and a trim beard. He wore a military uniform, dark blue with white trimmings. He had a lot more cybernetic implants than the Captain, though they were still relatively subtle compared to some of the metalheads Joshua had seen in the Asteroid belt. He was just as tall as the Captain, a bit more muscly, and his expression was a lot colder.
The third person Joshua didn't recognise. He was a shorter man, much shorter than Kants or Bell, with thinning black hair and green eyes. He had full rosy cheeks, not quite fat, but not as lean and taut as the other two. He wore a rather fancy silk suit, almost garish looking with its deep greens and blues.
“Dr Joshua Hinds. You likely remember me, but I am Captain Bell. This is General Kants, head of the Enclave armed forces, and this,” The Captain spoke firmly, pointing to the shorter man. “Is Governor Chin, the elected leader of the Enclave.”
Joshua nodded his head, afraid of being too personal. He touched his solar plexus.
“Dr Joshua Hinds. Botanist,” He replied. Kants seemed to fix him with a withering look as he just repeated what the Captain had repeated, but she and Chin laughed.
“You seem to be in excellent condition. We've had a few stragglers come in half-mad, close to death. A few days of bed rest and some exercise, and you'll be right as rain!” The man named Chin said excitedly. “In all my years as leader, I've only had the chance to welcome new people four times.”
All my years?
Kants glared at Joshua, not quite angrily but certainly firmly.
“I'm afraid we have little need of your services, Dr Joshua. Most of the planet's biosphere has been well categorised, and others have had a fifty-year headstart on you, so...”
Some part of Hinds knew not to interrupt Officer Kants, but that bombshell demanded clarification.
“Sorry, did you say fifty years?!” Joshua exclaimed.
Bell and Chin shot the General a withering look, but he just stared at Chin in return.
“This one isn't a drooling madman; he can deal with that information. Let's not waste both of our time on pretending otherwise,” He stated at the governor.
“B... but...” Joshua mumbled.
Captain Bell sighed, then walked forward and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Yes. I'm sorry Josh, but you've been in cryosleep for nearly fifty years,” She explained.
That didn't make sense. So much of that made zero sense. Fifty years inside a Cryo-pod should've left him a mummified corpse at the very least. And he knew these people; remembered Bell's and Kants' faces. They didn't look much more than a year older than when they had set off from Earth. Ageing had been slowed down a little by medical technology in the last three hundred years, but certainly not to the point that it had just outright stopped.
“Wah? What?”
He couldn't think of much more to say than that.
“Dr Jones messaged us that she had filled you in on the events of the crash. But yes. Fifty years ago, the Zheng He exploded in orbit of this planet and crashlanded. We've been building a colony here ever since, hoping to rebuild the Zheng He, get it into orbit, and get back home,” Captain Bell explained.
Governor Chin stepped forward.
“While Captain Bell is the commanding officer of the Zheng He, she clearly cannot be eternal dictator of us all, so in our last election, I was humbly chosen to serve as our leader and beacon, policymaker and diplomat of our fair Enclave,” Chin said proudly, his right hand placed above his heart.
Joshua ignored him and placed a hand against his forehead, his temples and brow throbbing. Fifty years. He had been gone for fifty years. His parents were almost certainly dead. His brothers and sisters likely were too. He had given his cat to a neighbour to keep, but she was also definitely dead.
“I..” Joshua cried.
Bell patted his shoulder again.
“Take a deep breath. It'll be okay,” She said calmingly.
Kants stepped to his right and coughed to draw Joshua's attention.
“As you heard the governor just say, there's more to this than merely crashing on an unknown planet. We have got a lot to catch you up on. But not only is there life on this planet, but sapient life as well. So, you're in for a joint biology and politics crash course, Doctor,” The General explained. He held up his left hand and clenched his fist.
Joshua felt a vibration in his left hand. For half a second, he was afraid he had just had a heart attack. He quickly realised that it was just his implants telling him he had just been messaged. Shakingly, the botanist held up his left hand, turned it so that his palm was facing up, and spread out his fingers. A holographic display appeared, projecting by tiny implants in his fingers and thumb.
He was afraid that some monster out of a sci-fi movie might appear, or that it'd be some eldritch horror that even looking at it might drive him mad.
Looking at what appeared in his hand, and quickly reading the text around it, maybe it had.
Because he was pretty sure he was looking at a pony. A pony with an larger head, with some weird fur colour, and which the text said was the most politically dominant sapient species on the planet, but nonetheless a Pony.
“Welcome to Equestria, Dr Hind.”
Author's Note
As always with me, I'm sure this first chapter will leave you with quite a number of questions. They will hopefully be fascinating to answer. More soon, with any hope. Cya soon.
