Samaritans

By Jesse James Bond

In the space-faring future of a Humankind without life to live with other than descendants of Earth for their entire history, the loneliest individuals of Humanity will go to the edge of the galaxy to fulfill the dream of knocking on the door of their first intelligent interstellar neighbors, to realize the legend of alien life. First impressions are crucial to building positive relationships, but Humans have never been famous for their understanding of strangers. Good intentions are prone to becoming the foundations of terrible mistakes, a lesson that Humanity may be overdue to relearn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662904318

Book preview

Chapter 1: Stretch

The inside of the ship filled with frigid air, freshly sublimated from solid storage. Slowly, the hissing of the vents became the first sound to echo in the interior in seventy-eight years. As the atmosphere returned, the hull creaked and popped as the pressure of air finally graced the dimpled plating.

Once the standard pressure of eight-tenths that of Earth’s atmosphere was reached, the ship began to warm. The computer ignited electric heaters within the air ducts. Slowly, the inhospitable cold subsided to a withstandable chill, then reached the standard temperature to which the crew was accustomed. There was no scent of burning dust that usually accompanied the reignition of heating appliances, for there had been no Humans about to create any dust for the last seventy-eight years.

A soft light illuminated the cryogenic stasis room, and three wake sequences were initiated. Two rows of six electric coffins and a table were all that decorated the room. The cryogenic chambers were placed beside each other with a single meter separating them, and a two-meter-wide aisle between the two rows. At one end of the aisle was a doorway to the rest of the ship. At the front, the table at which they were all to have their first formal meeting.

Those to be raised first were the elders, the leaders, those who were most used to space travel and the aftereffects of cryogenic stasis. They would take slightly longer to wake, but they would be functioning much sooner than the youths.

There was an Earth woman by the name of Janien Stiller, but referred to only as Commander, as was protocol. Her pedigree was marked by constant exploration. Time and time again, she had turned down positions in higher-ranking vessels in order to volunteer for uncertain expeditions into the frontier. She was an obvious choice to lead the Samaritans. Her only mandate to mission control was the same one she always gave: she must have her right- and left-hand men, Kar and Sclane. The unproblematic acceptance of this requirement brought about one of the two slier tricks of neurological sleight of hand programmed into the cryogenic chambers, the only times the electric mental stimulation technology was used to intentionally erase, rather than preserve.

At the Commander’s side lay the Master Engineer, a grizzled and sandblasted man of Mars, as famous among his crews for his ingenuity and tact under pressure as he was infamous for his brutally honest distaste for people. He was born Karman Holloc, but he never responded to anything but Kar. In many ways, Kar seemed to demand more respect than the Commander herself. Truthfully, he wanted only to be left alone to his work. The Commander had been one of the few to earn his respect, in return for the intense reliance and long-built trust placed on him in all their missions.

In the next coffin over lay a peculiar colonial man from the planet of Demeter, a tiny planet of mountains and metal in the Hades system, and the home of the most curious colonial variations on Earth-based life. Demetrius, as he was called, was one of only two members of the crew from Demeter, and one of the first to have been born on the unprecedented planet. He was the leading mind in the broad study of exoplanets, a shockingly sharp personality devoid of recognizable emotion. It was not that he had none, simply that his upbringing on the isolated planet had rendered him wholly different from most other Humans he encountered—mentally and physically. He stood at just over a meter of skin and bones, but weighed in nearly the same as an Earthly Human, purely on account of the intense gravity of his home planet forcing his muscle and bones to grow in at a density never before seen in a Human. The reliability of Demetrius’s physical form was debated at length, but his skill and reliability in extraordinary conditions were outstanding and guaranteed his placement on the team.

These were the superiors of the Samaritan crew, charged with the accomplishment of the threefold mission statement: keep a watchful eye—on the ship, on each other, and on the fledgling race.

The Commander’s two deputies, Kar’s four underlings, and Demetrius’s three protégés were to remain in stasis for the time being. They were younger, some more than others, and would have a more difficult time adjusting to life again. Something about the bodies of the young snapped back from stasis much faster than the old, making their awakening a miserable ordeal of shock. They would not want to wake alone.

Three coffins in the front of the room began to hum with a different energy—heat, the catalyst that would ignite life in the empty bodies once again. The dry, anaerobic ice fizzled away into nothing, the vapors captured and promptly removed from the environment.

In the space that remained, water and oxygen flowed for the first time in a lifetime. As the tissues of the crew were relinquished from the crystal grip of the ice, the fluids of life returned and resumed their functions as though there had never been a break.

Still, their hearts did not beat, for all respiration was automated by the flow of the now liquid aerobic electrolyte solution. An electric shock many thousands of times more intense than the previous current jolted the flesh of the three bodies, routing its way through the fluids and tissues and, critically, through the poised muscle of the heart. The repeated pulses shot through the cardiovascular nerves and into the related pathways in the brain, forcing the empty neural networks full of energy once again, inciting them to return to their active, living states.

Their hearts beat on their own, for the first time in years, slow, weak, and erratic at first, but with each thump, the bodies seemed to get deeper into their former grooves.

Craniums drained of the cryogenic lattices of ice and fluid that had preserved the precarious structures of their brain tissues, and like prisoners unshackled, brains got right back into their old ways. The flow of sedatives into the stasis chambers ceased, and the bodies slowly relearned their metabolisms, using the breakdown and excretion of all cryogenic material as practice.

Before the three had time to wake, the chambers were finally purged of all cryogenic material. The fluid, the crystal that had enveloped their bodies for the last seventy-eight years, was now suddenly gone. Unconscious but breathing bodies lay moments before awakening in dark, empty metal pods.

Then, the top halves of the three chambers split off with a crack and a hiss, pulled and tucked away out of sight in the walls behind the pods. For a moment, the preserved bodies lay motionless, unstaring at the ceiling above them.

Commander Stiller was the first to wake.

After her many years spent journeying across space, her body was especially attuned to this experience. The first thing she knew was that Kar would be waking soon after her.

At first, she could not feel anything. She knew the dull pain and sickness would be coming soon. Her eyes opened, but she did not dare move—she knew moving too quickly only made the pain worse. She stared through the ceiling as she checked her body over in her mind.

Blood: flowing, burning hot. Head: still attached, still intact. Arms and legs: drenched in a cold sweat, smothered in a feeling of atrophy. Chest and stomach: writhing and tumbling in wretched sickness.

Kar woke with a start, as always. He jumped up and tumbled out of his coffin, squirming and groaning in pain as his mind strained to fit back into his old and battered body. He struggled to climb to his feet but was stopped at his knees by an overwhelming urge to vomit. He did not, but did stay fixed in place for a while, mouth agape, drooling.

Slowly, with great care, the Commander emerged from her long repose, steadying her queasy self as she lifted herself up. She sat on the edge, dangling her feet over until they lightly touched the ground. The ground was cold metal, smooth under her bare feet. The feeling made her recoil. She would try standing later.

Demetrius had awoken, only turned over in his chamber and tucked his arm under his face for support. He almost looked comfortable. Seeing this made the Commander slightly jealous as she held back a retch, as if she had anything in her stomach.

Kar made a lot of noise as he scrambled to his feet, found his legs were still weak, and fell to the ground multiple times. The Commander slid slowly off the edge of her chamber and landed on the ground, taking a long moment just to remember how to stand up straight. She lifted her arms high above her head and stretched her back and arms, then took another minute to stretch her other muscles.

She wobbled over to her struggling comrade, making sure not to trip over her own feet in the three-meter trek. Kar had momentarily given up and lay on his back, arms and legs splayed out. The Commander looked down into the eyes of her sullen subordinate with an expectant look and reached out her hand.

Kar held it in his eyes for a second, then carefully moved his arm to grasp it. He got to his knees and balanced himself before rising to his feet, finally staying there.

The Commander broke the long silence in a voice hushed by decades of ice. Good morning.

Kar took a deep breath before speaking, replying only with a gruff, Good morning.

They took small, careful steps to the circular table at the back of the room and sank into the chairs around it. The Commander pressed a button on the side of the table, and a large projector hidden in the center activated, displaying only a simple prompt line to take control of the ship system from the automated navigation.

Before she began, she called to the Research Leader, Demetrius! Join the debrief.

Promptly, the small skeletal figure emerged from his coffin with a singularly swift motion, walking with all the smooth confidence of a hovering specter over to the table and taking a seat across from them.

Kar looked on in envy. When Demetrius took his seat, Kar had to ask, How is that shit so easy for you?

Demetrius replied in a trained but shrill voice, I am used to the cold.

The Commander allowed the banter only for a moment, then officially began the crewed portion of the mission by answering the prompt and usurping the computer as commander and controller of the vessel. She spoke a debriefing command to give the readout of the information gathered by the ship’s automated scan compiled with all the known data from preliminary missions. Also displayed was the diagnostic report of each mechanized component of the mission: the satellites, telescopes, all the rovers and drones and cargo within the ship, and the Hector itself.

The three of them stared into the illuminated center of the table, breaking the long period of disuse in their brains by filtering and interpreting the mass of data between them.

Demetrius was the first to speak, his voice eager to return after decades of inactivity. It seems the Third Planet is notably more hostile than anticipated—the atmosphere is thinner and less useful than the distant readings suggested, and the surface appears to be composed almost entirely of solid mineral formations disinclined to produce significant regolith, and only sand when it does. However, the electromagnetic field about the planet seems to be significantly stronger than we were worried it might be—more than enough strength, combined with its density, to hold a livable atmosphere after intensive recomposition. Demetrius reopened his mouth only slightly to continue speaking in a manner meant only for himself to hear, Curious, how such a strong electromagnetic field occurs around a planet that rotates only once every seven months. There must be a hidden rotation of the core in great resistance to the static mantle…

Kar mostly ignored him, but the Commander had been listening intently, unfazed by the complicating news, already turning over the options in her head. After a few seconds, she inquired, And the Second Planet? What are the conditions like there? How complex is the life?

Demetrius spun his eyes around in his sockets, internalizing all the data before relating it. He spoke in an even higher-pitched voice. Not much like Earth at all, actually—especially with that tidally locked atmosphere, but teeming with complex, multi-organed life forms. The atmosphere has some oxygen, but there is far more fluorine gas than we ever thought life could tolerate. I think it is likely that the organisms are respirating with fluorine rather than oxygen. How this affects them, I can’t yet say too much—but images from the reconnaissance orbiter indicate a dominant foliage color of orange, and a dominance of organisms living and traveling in massive formations, like a single flock of birdlike creatures that covers a whole one percent of the planet’s surface.

As Demetrius trailed off into wavering mumbling, his expressionless face became increasingly stunned with the detached glee of a lucky schizoid scientist on the verge of becoming legend.

The Commander’s countenance briefly reflected a moment of disbelief, but she trusted Demetrius to do what he did best—discover and report. She would leave him to it.

Kar did not hear any of what Demetrius said, gravely focused on the ship diagnostic.

Kar? the Commander asked.

"We’re intact, for the moment. Hector’s computer is reading failures in a fifth of its transistors. Life support is fully functional, enough residual antimatter for another…eighty cycles of full power use, but broken shit reported all over the ship. We need to fix all of that before we can deploy any drone cubes to build habitats. It will take weeks."

The Commander considered the news. And the orbiters?

SPO barely functional. TPO at half transistor volume. Still has a working sensor, fortunately.

The Commander took a deep breath and smiled at the waiting cryogenic chambers around the room. Then we should waste no more time. Let’s wake up some help!

Demetrius hopped out of his seat and began walking briskly to the door. I shall leave the introductions up to you, he said over his shoulder.

Kar did not take lightly to the dereliction of duty. Where the hell are you going, Demi? The pet name was thrown with the full intent to belittle, and in truth, it did irritate the petite man. You’re not gonna pin all the babysitting on us!

Demetrius turned his wispy body around at the doorway and said simply, It is not me they will want to see, and was the first to exit into the rest of the ship.

Kar looked back at his Commander for permission to pursue his equal but was instead disarmed by a look. She responded before Kar could complain, He’s right.

Kar frowned but accepted the fact as it was: the sight of Demetrius’s inhumanly thin frame and ghostly blue skin would be a nightmarish vision to the unprepared. The freshly thawed minds of the newly reborn were nothing but unprepared.

The Commander’s announcement had already initiated the wake sequences for the next group: those who were not so fresh as kids, but not nearly so solid in mind as their superiors. They would be affected by the reality of cryostasis but would soon be able to return to a close approximation of their former selves. There were the Commander’s two deputies, Sclane Harlow and Etith Titheren. The Commander leaned back in her seat and let her back arch over the edge of the back of the chair. The coffins around her hissing, her eyes turned up to the soft glow of the ceiling; her thoughts retraced what memories remained of past lives spent in and out of trouble with her crewmates.

Sclane, next in command by seniority, was an Earth man who had been under the Commander’s wing for all his years. He was a close student of her tactics, as well as a constant critic. The Commander appreciated his thoughtful resistance more than anything else, as it never hurt to keep one’s self in check. Sclane was a man of protocol, and the Commander knew he would probably have to learn to bend his own rules in order to survive this far out into deep space, but she was sure of his ability to adapt. She had seen him overcome unique challenges alongside her many times before.

Over many missions, the Commander had come to rely on Sclane’s realistic judgment as much as she relied on Kar. Other subordinates felt that Sclane was prone to overanalyzing—especially when he came down to their sectors just to grill them on the shortcomings he perceived in their work—but the Commander believed that people misunderstood the purpose of her second-in-command. Sclane acted as a bridge between the Commander and the aspects of her ship and crew that were more difficult to manage alone, like the depths of the engineering core. He was not liable for maintaining the same face as the Commander herself, for she would eventually be the one at risk of any mutiny. This gave Sclane a necessary but harsh impunity among the crew.

Etith was a young woman discovered by the Commander while she was operating out of the Alpha Centauri colony world, Centaur-B, and had been hired onto the Commander’s ship as a bottom-level technician. Despite her unknown origins, Etith had soon proven herself as an indispensable and trustworthy individual. When the mission was raided by pirates and her section leader was killed in a blast along with two-thirds of the Engineers in the weapons sector, Etith rallied the survivors to repair the damage and restart the cannons with unprecedented knowledge and fortitude in the shrapnel- and fire-filled conditions, all before the Commander had time to divert any personnel. Kar refused to work with weapons out of principle but was soon acutely aware of Etith’s technical abilities and strongly advised the Commander to keep the rookie around—a rare occurrence. Further earning his gruff respect, Etith ardently resisted every promotion she ever earned.

The Commander never dared to pry at the cagey woman, but secretly believed Etith was a defector from a crime syndicate. In many of her logs, the Commander recalled the feeling of total disarmament under Etith’s intense gaze: She looked me in the eyes, and I felt more terrified than when I stared into a black hole.

Rising at the same time were the four Engineers, all handpicked for efficacy. Three of which were chosen by the particular preference of the indefatigable Kar. He did not stretch his back, but hunched over the edge of the table, resting his boxy chin on his scarred knuckles as he