Third Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics watched the readouts on the cargo hold carefully. The accident that had killed his commander had been hushed up to protect the guilty soldiers, but no repeat would occur on his watch. He even did the work of an enlisted man now, none of the officers trusting any of the lower ranked, lesser skilled soldiers. His attitude, and the attitudes of the other officers in the organization, forced the new commander over logistics to reassign most of his enlisted staff planetside and bring officers up and assign them back on the ships.
Third Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics didn’t care. No one was going to die on his watch.
Especially not with the Lord Admiral looking over his shoulder. The commander wandered around a bit with the alien Ambassador, explaining things to him in the Ambassador’s tongue. Third Lieutenant simply focused on his duties and ignored them. It’s what the Lord Admiral would have wanted anyway.
The knot at the base of his neck unraveled a little when the Lord Admiral and the alien left.
“Thirdy. You speak English?” Second Under Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics whispered.
Third Lieutenant shook his head.
“I do. A little.” Second Under Lieutenant had been one of the officers cycled up from the planet. His shift overlapped with the Third Lieutenant’s and they often ate meals together. The man left his post and stood over Third Lieutenant’s shoulder as if they were conferring at the Third Lieutenant’s console. He whispered so no one else could hear.
“The Lord Admiral told the alien that the radioactive cloud caused by their atomic weapons would reach his homeland in six to eight months. He expected it to devastate the continent.”
“That’s what they get for using atomic weapons. Idiots.”
“But we were pulling all the drones in from treating the cloud. It was massive. It took over a thousand drones and vast quantities of chemical precipitant, but we cleaned the cloud up. There’s no more significant radiation left in the planet’s atmosphere.”
“Are you sure?” The Third Lieutenant looked up at his companion’s face. He wanted to gauge the expression in the man’s eyes.
“I was a shift commander. I saw all the reports. The job was finished. It was going to take another few weeks to decontaminate drones and repurpose them for new duties, but we were done. The land that had been radiated will be useless for millennia, but the rest of the world is safe. That’s the exact opposite of what the Lord Admiral told the alien Ambassador.”
“How well do you speak English?”
The two men stared at each other, both realizing they may have become privy to information they shouldn’t have.
“Apparently not good enough,” the Second Under Lieutenant replied.
“Correct. You did not hear what you think you heard.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. I apologize. I need to study English better.”
Third Lieutenant nodded.
“And I think you and I need some alcohol,” the Second Under Lieutenant added.
“Maybe,” the Third Lieutenant replied.
The two never shared a drink together again, never even shared meals together again and rarely spoke to each other. And they never told anyone else what the Second Under Lieutenant Grenadier Over Logistics thought he overheard.
Back on Fourth Transport, Stanley shared a relaxed meal with First Doctor Medical Corps. The briefing by the Lord Admiral as they wandered around First Command had exhausted Stanley, and although he respected the Lord Admiral, it felt better to eat with a friend, an ally.
“Are things really as bad on your planet as I hear?” the First Doctor asked.
“I don’t know,” Stanley replied. “Probably worse. A radioactive cloud is sweeping the planet, contaminating everything and everyone in its path. Clouds of dust cover most of the face of the planet, turning summer into winter for the northern hemisphere and causing crops everywhere to fail.” Stanley shook his head in disgust. “And all the people down there can do is keep killing. They fight over land. They fight over food. They even fight over women. It’s absurd. And your people can’t do anything. Every time they try to help, my people attack them.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. The Lord Admiral seems optimistic, but I think even he’s beginning to recognize the hopelessness of the situation. A famous Earth psychiatrist once said that our civilization hangs by a thread, meaning that without order and structure, my people don’t know how to remain civilized. I only wish I knew how to help them.”
“I wish I knew how to help you, my friend.” The First Doctor put his hand on Stanley’s arm, the one that hadn’t been shot. “I can do one thing for you, though. I can show you how a cold sleep bed works. We ran out of time during your last visit.” The doctor winked conspiratorially. “You can even try it out, if you would like.”
Stanley’s pulse quickened.
“Is it safe?”
“I spent two and a half years in one on the way here. It’s not without risk, but a short sleep is very safe.”
After finishing their meal, they left the galley and headed for the first pod, the one closest to the doctor’s examination room. Stanley marveled at the size, three hundred and sixty beds strategically stacked four high, in three long rows extending over two hundred feet in a gentle arc. The aisles between each stack were three feet wide, just enough room for a bed to slide out.
The First Doctor demonstrated.
“It’s easiest to get in and out of the one on the bottom. Sometimes people fall out of the top ones if they don’t wait for help.”
“It’s so cramped. How does everyone get out at once?”
“They don’t. We stagger them. A computer program cycles through each, optimizing how many people to wake up at once. But even that was more than we could handle when we arrived at your planet. We could only wake up twenty or so out of each pod at a time.”
“Why?”
“After a long sleep, the body craves real sleep. Often, cold sleepers sleep another twenty hours, a full day, after their awakening. Then they are very hungry.”
The doctor looked up words on his tablet and asked Stanley for clarifications as they spoke, but Stanley understood his new friend well. They were both scientists, and Stanley bonded with the man like he had never before with anyone else. He was conversing with a true equal.
Stanley inspected the bed, noting the various openings and sensors, wanting to understand everything about them. The two talked for another hour, the doctor explaining, with the help of his tablet, how the blue fluid the Est called ‘metoapp’ placed a body into a state of suspended animation and kept skin and muscle from atrophying.
“It’s discovery is a miracle. Even when the AIs learned to jump, interstellar travel would not have been possible without metoapp. No one would want to live on a ship for the years it would take to travel between stars.” The doctor traced his hand along the edge of the bed. “Do you want to try it?”
Stanley did. Like a terrified teenager standing in front of a roller coaster, he knew he wanted to try it, but felt a primal, childish fear nonetheless.
And like a teenager, he allowed himself to be goaded by his peer.
“It’s safe. I promise.”
Stanley giggled a little.
“Okay. What do I have to do?”
“First, get naked.”
“You’re my doctor,” Stanley said. He undressed while the doctor prepped the bed.
“Now, climb in, close your eyes and your mouth. You’ll be asleep before the metoapp covers your face.”
“What if I’m claustrophobic?”
“Are you?”
“No,” Stanley replied, looking at the tiny space the bed would slide into. “You can’t be claustrophobic and be an astronaut. But what if someone was?”
“The bed stays open until
you’re asleep, and you can’t wake up while it’s closed. We have been using these beds for almost a hundred years. They’re quite safe.”
“Okay,” Stanley said, feeling naked and exposed lying in the bed while the First Doctor watched the readings on the panels. The blue fluid felt warm and comforting as it filled up around Stanley’s body. He laughed a little.
“Are you alright?” the doctor asked.
“I’m crazy,” Stanley replied.
“It’s a good experience. You’ll understand it better having been through it.”
“I feel like I’m being hypnotized. I’m so tired.”
“Allow it to overcome you. It will anyway, but fighting it can give you a headache.”
“Okay,” Stanley replied. “Will I dream?”
“You won’t remember them,” the doctor answered. He reached his hand out and Stanley took it. The doctor squeezed. “Sleep well.” He smiled at Stanley.
“Good night,” Stanley said sillily and remembered nothing else.
The First Doctor Medical Corps pulled out the sleep conditioners, two electrode-like extensions that attached to a traveler’s temples. The Hrwang had used them on the trip to this planet to learn, or to reinforce the learning, of the languages the aliens spoke. First Doctor had been conditioned in English during the two and a half year journey.
The conditioning could be used to teach other things. Sometimes, criminals on Hrwang were put into cold sleep and conditioned to change their behavior. The program met with mixed success and had been cancelled due to morality issues. But the technique was still used on the worst criminals, as experimentation. Although illegal, the First Doctor was aware of the research and its implications.
The aliens had invented techniques that, although they were wildly different than sleep conditioning, achieved similar results. They had a strange name for the results of their techniques. The name produced a humorous mental image in the First Doctor’s mind, but he also saw the utility of how they named the procedure and why it made sense. The aliens called it ‘brainwashing’.
The First Doctor attached the conditioners to the alien’s temples and pressed the buttons that closed the bed.
He returned to his office and sent a message consisting of two pings.
1804 observed the Hrwang officer putting an individual, possibly an alien, into cold sleep. It watched the man place a device on the individual’s head and it decided it would determine what the device did and why the individual received it, and why the individual was going into cold sleep in the first place. There was much 1804 wanted to learn and this seemed like a good place to start.
Communications officers on the various ships of the Fleet of the People noted that someone on Fourth Transport broadcast two pings. The message meant nothing to them, there was nothing to decode, and most assumed it was a prearranged signal for a commander somewhere.
Which it was.
When the message was reported to the Lord Admiral, he acknowledged that officer who delivered the report, then dismissed him and sat at his tiny desk in his tiny office. He yearned for the huge office he had created in the library at Hearst Castle, and he yearned to visit the place where he considered creating his second palace. A world needed two palaces to be governed by one man, and he would have two, on opposite sides of the planet from each other.
The one on the opposite side of the world from Hearst, Neuschwanstein, looked even more impressive than Hearst.
The Lord Admiral smiled. He was one step closer to his goal.
The two ping message from the First Doctor had been prearranged and meant something very simple.
“It’s done.”
80