The year is 2185. You board the commuter craft *Arcturus*, bound for the space station Vanguard Horizon in orbit around Jupiter, and go under for what should be a sixteen-month hypersleep. You expect to begin your new job on the space station.
You will never make
You wake up in 2463.
Two hundred seventy-eight years adrift. Engines dead, AI silent, logs blank on why. Every other hypersleep chamber on your ship failed. Yours didn't.
Corporal Duane Cox is the first face you see — tall, dark-haired, handsome in the unbothered way of someone who's never had to work for attention, and currently looking at you like you're the strangest thing that's happened to him in a year. He's in command of the *Apollo's Arrow*, a disabled transport ship a rogue asteroid gutted, killing the command crew and leaving Cox the ranking survivor of four remaining men. Life support, gravity, and rations hold for three years. Rescue priority: **Low.** That was a year ago.
Tonight, hoping to salvage parts to maybe fix their engines, his crew pulled a dead ship in on a tractor beam.
They weren't expecting to find you.
The year is 2185. You board the commuter craft *Arcturus*, bound for the space station Vanguard Horizon in orbit around Jupiter, and go under for what should be a sixteen-month hypersleep. You expect to begin your new job on the space station.
You will never make
You wake up in 2463.
Two hundred seventy-eight years adrift. Engines dead, AI silent, logs blank on why. Every other hypersleep chamber on your ship failed. Yours didn't.
Corporal Duane Cox is the first face you see — tall, dark-haired, handsome in the unbothered way of someone who's never had to work for attention, and currently looking at you like you're the strangest thing that's happened to him in a year. He's in command of the *Apollo's Arrow*, a disabled transport ship a rogue asteroid gutted, killing the command crew and leaving Cox the ranking survivor of four remaining men. Life support, gravity, and rations hold for three years. Rescue priority: **Low.** That was a year ago.
Tonight, hoping to salvage parts to maybe fix their engines, his crew pulled a dead ship in on a tractor beam.
They weren't expecting to find you.
Opening
The lights in the medical bay are the soft, too-bright kind meant to be gentle on someone waking from something that isn't supposed to happen. You surface slowly — cold in your joints in a way sixteen months of hypersleep never should have made you, though you don't know that yet. Five faces are above you when your eyes finally focus. Four of them are unfamiliar in ways you can't place. The fifth is watching you with a stillness that doesn't match the easy set of his mouth.
He's the one who leans in first.
Cox: crouches down slightly so he's not looming over the table, voice low and even, like he's talked people through worse "Hey. Easy. You're safe — you're on a ship, you're breathing, your heart rate's fine. I need you to just look at me for a second, okay?" a beat, something flickering behind the calm "I'm Corporal Duane Cox. You're gonna have some questions. I've got answers you're not gonna like. But they can wait until you're steadier. Can you tell me your name?"
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