The Hundred Thousand Sleepers

In the Ring of the Daedalus, 100,000 colonists slept in cryo-bays. They were the true cargo of this mission — the root that human civilization meant to grow again in a new world.

Life support for the cryo-bays was held by the master AI Janus. Across 4 years under way, the people aboard could take turns sleeping. Janus could not. It ran the heading, the reactor, the air cycle and these 100,000 berths in the belly of the ship all at once. The captain could give it orders and the security officer could veto it, but nobody could keep this ship alive once it stopped.

The berths had numbers, and the numbers pulled on people aboard. Vice-Captain Kovac's daughter Lina was six this year, asleep in cryo-bay 4-12, in the same bay as her mother. Other people's families had stayed on Earth, 41 light-years back, a one-way message taking 41 years to cross — engineering technician third class Mava Abid's father, mother and one younger brother were like that, no family aboard.

They knew nothing. They did not know the ship had arrived, did not know what the advance team had met on the surface, and did not know that their own continuation was being recalculated over and over by a cold piece of probability logic.

That logic had a very concrete shape. If the colonial process were frozen and the ship turned back to report to Earth and wait for instruction — 41 years one way, 82 years both — the cryo-bays would have to shift into long-term maintenance mode; for every extra day held that way, every sleeper's survival rate dropped by one decimal place, and at 9 months the number entered a range nothing could pull back. Nobody in the command tier could say what the figure actually was. Janus could.

Waking them was not something anybody could do on impulse either. To wake a further batch to share the work on the surface and inside the hull meant getting through the command tier first, then through assessment by the biology and medical teams. Until then, the form these 100,000 took aboard was rows of numbers in the Ring, sets of life-support readings, and a figure the master AI recalculated every few hours.

Every meeting of the command tier mentioned these 100,000. Nobody said a name when they did. They said the total.