THE TITAN EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER 32 - The Journey has Begun

With Nova changed into a gravity jumpsuit—a specially designed suit created to wear inside the fuselage of a spaceship—Sarah acted quickly. In the back room of the lab, she hurried Nova over to a cryogenic hibernation chamber. The lieutenant commander became disturbed when she saw the unconscious occupants of the other chambers, but Sarah didn't give her time to think. She coaxed Nova into lying on her back and reassured her she would understand everything soon. With Nova partially confused and still weak from the reanimation process, getting her into proper position was simple enough.

After securing a strap over Nova's legs and another across her chest, Sarah tapped a selection on her eBoard tablet and the glass lid—actually polycarbonate—closed on the sleep chamber.

"What are you doing?" Nova said. "Why are you putting me back inside one of these things?"

"This is different," Sarah replied. "I don't have time to explain. Trust me, I'm a doctor."

Nova wrinkled her brow and offered a slight grimace, accepting Sarah's reassurance.

After what Sarah learned from the process with Wolf, she had already made the proper alterations to the refrigeration units in each chamber. Now, she could manually lower the temperatures inside the units to twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit by adjusting the controls on her tablet. She activated the coolant and watched as cold air rushed into the encasement, producing a crystallized fog on the glass. It turned out it didn't matter which came first, the frigid air or the serum. All that mattered was that she introduced them together, consecutively.

Nova shivered. "That's co-cold."

Sarah smiled, tensing with a slight jitteriness at her extremities as she released the serum in gas form.

Nova coughed and pressed her hands to the glass lid. "What is this? What are you doing to me?"

"Just breathe. That's all you have to do."

Seconds later, Sarah followed the serum with the anesthesia, it in gas form too. Prior to Nova's reanimation, she had treated the other members of the astronaut crew somewhat differently. The gas issuing from the vents in the ceiling rendered them unconscious. Several of Admiral Jax's military police changed the crew's clothes into the specially designed gravity jumpsuits, then lifted them with care, setting them into their respective cryo units, securing them with straps over their legs and chests. Since they needed to be awake for the serum to be administered appropriately, Sarah allowed the anesthesia to wear off... almost. With groggy eyes opening inside the sleep chambers, she released the serum gas, lowered the temperature to an arctic chill, and then knocked them out again.

It had been a challenge to get to this point, but Sarah had accomplished the unthinkable with the serum. As far as it concerned her, the assembly of the crew was another step along the way.

The readouts on her eBoard tablet showed the vital signs of each crew member: Phoenix Drake, Nova Kailani, Callisto Tenzing, Ariel Fairhaven, and Luna Skye. Sarah stabilized each subject at the project's recommended levels, and then she monitored everyone for signs of unusual side effects. Everything progressed according to plan. As a last measure, she administered the correct combination of drugs to the unconscious crew of the Titan X spacecraft, giving them what they needed to regulate their bodies during extended sleep. A robotic injection arm inserted a needle into the neck of each crew member and delivered the proper dosage of the drugs. No one wanted to use the bathroom on themselves in the opening days of space travel, and then wake up years later with dried urine or excrement stuck to their undergarments.

Each cryogenic hibernation chamber extended out into the open space of the room. Sarah observed their sleeping bodies, navy blue jumpsuits with long sleeves, hands resting on their stomachs. Their hearts beat at barely detectable rates, their breathing so light, it was imperceptible to the human eye to see the rise and fall of their chests. Body temperatures hovered at eighty-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit. That was the newest turn of events. The latest in hibernation technology didn't require freezing someone in stasis. Although extreme cold activated the serum and triggered the anti-aging properties, it turned out their bodies didn't have to remain in subfreezing temperatures for the duration of hibernation. Keeping their body temps ten degrees below the normal ninety-eight point six was sufficient.