The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

partition of the lid was right up against her face and her arms with all her weight behind it. She wasn’t on her side; the Sleeper was.
    Amber could feel the fear leap into her, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even open her eyes. The computer kept stubbornly monitoring and testing, untroubled by the smoke it gently breathed in at her along with the oxygen and the screams she could hear behind the walls. It didn’t sound like a couple panicking colonists getting cold feet on their new planet. There were so many people screaming that they had formed a single, endless, ululating voice. That didn’t take just a lot of people. That took hundreds. Maybe thousands. Maybe…all of them.
    Amber tried again to break the paralytic hold of the Sleeper on her body, but the only result of all her invisible efforts was a mild musical tone before the pl easant voice interrupted itself to say, “Heart-rate elevated. Please remain calm. Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…three minutes eleven seconds. You are not paralyzed. Your movements will be restored when the umbilicus is withdrawn. Please remain calm.”
    Three minutes? Something was burning. People were screaming. How much worse could this get in three whole minutes?
    Again, she fought to take back possession of her body, but focusing all the willpower in the world couldn’t even open her eyes.
    “Please remain calm,” said the voice after another censuring chime in her ear. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute fifty-seven seconds. You are in no physical danger. If a medico must be dispatched to attend you, you will be liable for the cost of any restraining measures. Please remain calm.”
    The fact that she could smell the smoke at all—and now feel it itching at her nose and throat—meant that the fire was somewhere in the ventilating system. Or, even worse, that the Sleeper wasn’t airtight the way it was supposed to be, and if it wasn’t, what else wasn’t working right? Where were they? Dear God, was the ship burning in space? No, no surely not. The false gravity the ship used during flight pulled everything straight toward the floors, no matter how the ship itself was tipped. She was on her side, so there had to be real gravity, meaning that they’d landed.
    Only she was on her side. So they hadn’t landed. They’d crashed.
    “A medico has been notified of your distress,” the voice informed her. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute eleven seconds.” A short pause and that musical tone again. “The umbilicus is about to be withdrawn. You may feel some discomfort.”
    She didn’t or perhaps simply couldn’t notice against the prospect of the ship burning all around her, but she could hear the whispering sound as the cable slithered out of her clothes and back into its port.
    “The umbilicus has been successfully withdrawn,” the computer said. “You will sho rtly begin to recover mobility—”
    Amber’s hands twitched. Then her lips, although she couldn’t manage to shape the word she wanted, which was just as well since it was nothing but a swear and no one was there to hear it anyway.
    “—will not open immediately. Please remain calm. Your Sleeper is in perfect working order and will unlock as soon as its final maintenance scan has been completed.”
    Amber’s eyes opened at last, but showed her only the glass plate against her face, fogged over by her own breath. She saw no smoke, except the thin ribbons sneaking in through the vent. She was able to see only by the light of the monitoring bar as it finished its sweep down by her feet; the overhead lights had not come on the way the seminar had said they would. Her room remained perfectly black.
    She rolled over, her numb arms falling limply across her stomach, slow to respond after being crushed up between her and the Sleeper’s wall. The computer was still talking,