Dusk of Defiance (The Era of Ensemble Book 1) (2 page)

The room would have been silent, if not for a computerised ping being repeated. The constant bleep of the echoing life support indicators that called out a warning. The frozen
body inside had started to thaw. The pings alerted supervisory medical staff to attend to the needs of the waking human. Circular dots of miniature lights flashed along the control panel. A pattern that confirmed the presence of life inside the working cryogenic chamber. There was a long flat rectangular table in the centre of the room accompanied by upright pods surrounding the outer rim, but there was only one chamber which remained active. A man, who stood inside the chamber barely large enough to contain someone of his frame, released a slight groan with his first unaided breath. He attempted to open his eyes, but ice clung to his eyelids like miniature chemical stalactites. A crusty layer which inhibited a speedy wakeup.
Be patient,
echoed around the empty space within the man’s mind. He felt water droplets slide down his face. He tried to move, but quickly remembered his training. He remained still and waited. The tube began to heat up more and more as the seconds ticked by. The white inside of the chamber began to change colour as the ice melted. The man eventually opened his intensely bright hazel eyes. It took a moment for his vision to return, but he could only partially see. He looked out of the reinforced glass in front of him as his bleary eyes refocused. Nobody was to be seen. Routine dictated that there should always be someone outside waiting. The man tried to relax.
Maybe they're working on helping somebody else get out of another cryogenic chamber?

The man waited, but nobody came. He slowly moved his head and searched for the emergency switch. An internal button inside the chamber for
self-assistance when nobody could attend the wakeup. His mind felt hazy, but he remembered it was located to the right of the cryogenic pod. He found it, he tried to move his arm to the switch, but his fingers couldn’t even twitch. He always suffered stiffness after being frozen. The man closed his eyes and focused on moving just his index finger. He felt a twinge and opened his eyes. He could move his fingers slowly, they tingled with a rush of pins and needles.
A good sign, I'll be able to move soon.
He progressed onto trying to move his arm, it took him some time, but he got there and flipped the switch. The chamber instantly filled with a cloudy gas and the man started to cough uncontrollably. The glass windowed door to the chamber swung open rapidly and the man dropped onto his knees, clutching his chest. He fell to the floor, just outside of the cryogenic pod. The darkened room seemed alien to him. His thought processes still frozen, muffled his yells from deep inside for help. His adrenalin fuelled heart pumped madly as his lungs filled with oxygen. The pain deep in his chest immobilised him at first.
Where are those damned assistants?

Once he had reclaimed full control over his lungs he climbed back to his feet and stood up. He stumbled over and grabbed tight hold of the table in front of him so he didn’t fall. Mildly disorientated, the man stroked the dark stubble on his chin, and then rubbed
his face as aggressively as he could manage, to help wake himself up. There was a stack of clothes on top of the table in front of him. Standard issue, dark blue, workers clothes.
Colour coded to match my status aboard the ship.
The man shivered, and fumbled to pick up the shirt. He struggled, but accomplished the task. There was a name tag on the front pouch pocket. It read ‘Luke Mason’. It suddenly came back to him.
That's my name
. He wished his mind wasn't so sluggish, but his brain had started to connect the dots.
I'm on a spaceship.
It was more of a city speeding through space, but he remembered it. Not all of his memories were returning. He knew he had people he cared about aboard the ship.
My girlfriend...
Her name eluded him. He might have been suffering from some sort of amnesia after being cryogenically frozen, or deep sleep as most people referred to it on the spaceship. A slowness to his thought processes was an acceptable recovery from deep sleep at this stage.

Luke pulled on the rest of the clothes that lay in front of him and slipped his feet into a pair of heavy shoes. He was slowly starting to feel warmer. He looked around the dimly lit room. There was no one else in the cryogenic pods. He checked carefully to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. Luke hoped he didn’t have deep space dementia. Few people ever got it, but it was still a possibility. He checked the room, he was sure that the chambers were all empty. There were still clothes laid out for other people to wear after their sleep. As he inspected closer he noticed some of the chambers had been smashed into, glass scattered across the dark grey metal floor. Nervousness quickly washed over him.
What's happened while I've been in deep sleep?

The lights of the room flickered. It made Luke look up to the ceiling. The main lights were not on. The blue-green glow of the ship's backup lights, shooting upwards from the floor, were the only things keeping the room from complete darkness
. The lights felt eerie, it sent shivers up his spine. Luke heard footsteps which came to an abrupt stop at the entrance of the room.
I'm not alone.
The door slid open. “Hello?” Luke called out. There was no response. The person didn’t move. Its dark shadowy silhouette waited in the doorway. Luke took a step towards the door and shouted for the second time. “Hello?” Again there was no answer. A second shiver raced along his spine, as he waited for a response. A loud shriek echoed from another part of the spaceship. The figure who stood in the doorway, returned the shriek and ran off in the opposite direction from Luke. Its footsteps loudly slapping on the metal floor beneath its bare feet as the doors re-closed. Luke’s heart pounded, he didn’t know what was going on, and he didn’t know if he wanted to find out.
Maybe I should just get back into the cryogenic chamber and resume my deep sleep?
He thought,
I'd be safe there,
but then he remembered.
What about Elizabeth and Megan?
He couldn’t go back into deep sleep now. He needed to know if they were both safe.

Luke slowly edged towards the door. He pressed the touch pad on the wall and the door slid open. Luke tentatively placed his foot at the edge of the doorframe and carefully poked his head out around the corner. His dark hair swayed across his foreh
ead as he looked both ways. He stepped out of the cryogenic chamber room, and then shouted out again. “Hello?” There was no response, but he heard footsteps, and other strange noises he couldn't identify in the distance. His survival instincts were warning him not to shout again. A door opened further down the corridor. Luke turned quickly to face the noise. There was silence for a brief period, and then there was the sound of another door opening further down the passageway. Luke moved quietly and slowly, as he edged towards the door that had most recently opened. He stepped closer, the door hadn’t closed yet. He heard the footsteps again. They emanated from beyond the door. His eyes found it hard to see the movement in the, abnormal and eerie, backup lighting of the ship. Luke swallowed, building up his courage. He reached the door, and as he was about to glance through it closed.
Damn
. He took a deep breath, and then opened the door. A stairwell resided beyond the door. The silhouette that had run through couldn’t be seen. Luke heard the noise of another door open a few storeys below him. He took another deep breath and walked into the stairwell.
What am I following?
Luke questioned his own motives.
Why do these shadows run with no acknowledgement to me?

The backup lights were floor level, either side of the stairs in a line, lighting up the bottom of the stair
s. The majority of the steps were in complete darkness.
Someone must have broken most of the backup lights.
He took tight hold of the railing, it was surprisingly cold and it made him jump.
The heating system must be on the blink.
He took a few seconds to compose himself, and then he continued to follow the mysterious figure. A door closed on the floor below him. He took his time climbing down the steps to reach it. A dark, sticky liquid was smeared across the door, but he couldn’t identify what it was. He touched the control pad. The door rapidly slid apart and allowed him passage into another corridor. He stepped through the door. It was drastically different to the previous hallway that he had been in. The floor was wooden and didn’t ping when Luke stepped on it with the metal soles of his shoes. The shoes needed the metal soles in the unlikely event that the gravity failed. The soles would become electromagnetically charged to enable the wearer to walk across the floor of the ship.
My steps no longer ring aloud, they are noticeably different. Will the shadows hear my approach?

The walls were painted a light cream, which made the corridor feel much brighter. Luke remembered various styles of the different parts of the ship. It was to allow the brain to absorb different
colours and textures. To keep everyone stimulated, fresh and alert. There were a lot of things which changed aboard the ship on a regular basis to keep everyone stimulated. The food menu was always chosen randomly from day to day, it was never a fixed schedule of what you were going to eat. There were hobby classes in the evening to paint, craft, or mould things for your own living quarters or for other peoples use. But the one thing Luke was most interested in when he got the brochure for the UCSC Defiance was the mood elevating drugs which were vented throughout the spaceship to keep morale high. Previous space travel had reiterated their invaluable contribution to long voyages. A lifestyle necessity minimising the risk to space dementia.

The darkness of t
he shadows were unnerving Luke. He moved down the corridor away from the stairs, as he heard another noise from a nearby room. He slowly walked across the golden brown wooden floor until he reached the door. He cautiously muted his own footsteps. He could hear a low mumble of a voice from inside. “Hello?” He said once again, but there was no answer. Luke gently pressed the touch pad on the side of the wall and the door opened. The mumble was louder, but he couldn’t make any sense of it. He walked into the room. It was a small housing unit, specifically developed for a group of people who provided a lower tier of work aboard the ship. Luke glanced around the small living space, there was a television in a tiny cramped hole, a brown and bland two piece suite, a small table with two chairs either side, and a shelf with the ornaments that were once stacked upon it, in smithereens on the floor. Luke didn’t notice the smashed ornaments until he stepped on them. He looked down to the ground as he heard the crunch. The ornaments which had been created by someone in an evening crafting class were shattered and scattered across the floor. The room and the ship, were in a state of disarray. He ignored the condition of the room and carried on searching for the groaning sounds, which he could hear from behind the bedroom door.

The door had a handle rather
than a touch pad, mostly to simulate a more Earth like environment. Luke placed his hand on the handle and twisted it until the door opened. A woman was sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, her arms wrapped around half a toy bear which looked like it had been chewed apart by some sort of beast. The woman’s light blond hair covered her face, and she had scratches and cuts all along her arms.

“
Are you okay?” Luke asked as he slowly stepped closer to the woman. She didn’t turn to face him. She just rocked back and forth with the half destroyed toy bear in her arms. An unrecognisable language left her lips. He wondered if it was even a language at all, it just sounded gibberish. As he watched the woman, his mind raced.
What's going on? What have I awoken to? Why was I the last person to wake from cryogenic sleep?
He snapped out of his thoughts, and glanced back towards the woman at the foot of the bed. He looked around the room. The wardrobe was open and one outfit hung on a hanger. It was a cleaners uniform.
She's a cleaner, but look at the state of this apartment
. He turned to the bed and looked at the blanket, and then at the woman. Her clothes were torn and most of her skin was visible. He grabbed the blanket from the bed and laid it over the woman’s legs.
If she's not going to acknowledge me, at the very least, she's going to keep warm.

Luke left the woman, closed the door behind him, and walked back into the hall.
The shadow wasn't her.
That woman couldn't have been the figure I saw before. There must be more people around here somewhere
. He checked to his right, and then to his left. But before he could decide which way to move, a noise emanated from his right. He slowly and steadily walked to where he thought he had heard the sound. The adrenalin was pumping again as his heart began to race. He felt a forceful instinctive urge to fight for his life.
This surge of adrenalin can’t be good for my heart
.
Why do I feel so nervous?
He cautiously moved towards the edge of the wall where the corridor turned left. He glanced around the corner. He couldn’t see anything.
Maybe I imagined the noise
. But then he heard the same sound again. It was reminiscent of an animal running on all fours. Luke hesitated, and then slowly made his way down to where the sound originated. At first there was nothing, only the usual hum of the ventilation system, and then he heard it again, a quick shuffle of feet, and then a sprint. It couldn’t be a human. It had to be something else.