Pod

“Morning, my loves!” Ultramarine said brightly.

It was 6:35 am Earth time, she observed as she pottered about the pods, checking vitals, adding a little fluid here, reducing feed there, initialising an auto groom in another pod. She had no idea how to tell the time in the expanse of space, so having an atomic clock that told Greenwich Mean Time was a bit of a comfort.

Only six had survived the journey, and Ultramarine was done fretting. She had started out with thirty, one for each day of an April, or a January if she included herself. They were near the end of the journey, and every remaining pod was stable.

It had been nearly a year since the journey had begun. It had been organised chaos, a concerted effort to join the men who had discovered the new world, Agbaiye-6561. It had taken them the best part of forty-seven years to get from Earth to Agbaiye-6561 - and they'd lost most of their pods along the way. They'd been forced to open some of them, as members of the skeleton crew that manned the exploration ship had succumbed to illness, age, and in one case murder on a planet inhabited by what they had reported as four foot tall anthropomorphic pigeons.

The pods on Ultramarine's ship were radically different. The original cryogenic pods used a complicated thawing mechanism where each pod had to be hooked up to a large machine Ultramarine didn't even know the name of, that would in turn initiate the process that brought the frozen people back to life. It also took 30 days per person. This meant that at the moment, the tiny colony on Agbaiye-6561 numbered all of eighteen people - they had landed with six and thawed out their lead scientist when the ships reading suggested the planet was inhabitable, mineral and water rich, and most importantly, empty.

A generation of research had resulted in the pods Ultramarine was tending. They were experimental, which was why she was needed, made to be much more efficient. They retained most of the original design for the pods themselves, but where the originals were upright, these reclined at a fifteen degree angle, with a attachment at the base of each one that resembled an artificial pond. A frozen pond.

Ultramarine's ship was automated, preprogrammed to get her and her pods to Agbaiye as quickly as possible. the pods were automated too. They still had the thirty day thaw cycle, so they had been automated to begin thawing thirty days before landfall.

Three pods failed in eleven months. Three of thirty. Then twenty-one failed in ten days. Ultramarine would wake up to a cracked pond at the base of a pod. She was sure by now that they were miniature ponds, as they cracked in that heartbreaking beautiful way that ponds crack, with lines beneath the surface and the little splashes on the surface that speak to the water beneath.

At first Ultramarine had fretted and fussed and cried herself to sleep. Each pod was a life lost, and she struggled to shake the idea that it was somehow her fault. As more and more pods failed, she started to pay closer attention to those who remained. She named them, spoke to them in the morning, and the afternoon, and at night.

"Aurora, you stay the course now, thaw nice and slow," she'd say to a gorgeous girl who'd somehow managed to get frozen with a beatific smile on her face. "Imole, don't leave me here." Imole was a middle aged woman with a somber expression and a hint of grey in her exquisitely coiffured curls.

Imole left her ten days to landfall. She'd woken up bright and early to do her rounds. The ponds had all been growing more transparent, as though the ice was melting. She noticed a hairline crack in Imole's pond and spun into action, checking vitals, making micro-adjustments, doing everything she could. It was pointless. Once the pond cracked, the pod was done for. The worst part was the way the pods would flush themselves automatically. Never again would Ultramarine sit and admire Imole's hair.

She lost one more pod before landfall. Lucy. She'd been complimenting Aurora on her smile, the same way she did every day, when she heard the crack. She actually heard it this time. She told the ship to play a happy song, wiped her tears as they fell, and kept on speaking to Aurora.

As her gaze fell on Aurora's face the next morning, she thought she could see a tear in the corner of an eye.

"Must be the tears in my eyes blurring my vision," she told herself.

"Must be," a voice answered. It sounded like silk and syrup and everything warm, and it made Ultramarine nearly jump out of her skin.

"Let me out, please."

Aurora was awake. Ultramarine looked down at Aurora's pond. It was clear and still, a bowl of water. As she looked, it drained quickly. An indicator lit up, bright green, and the pod lid unlatched from the base with a satisfyingly dramatic hiss.

"You're up early," Ultramarine said.

"I wanted to talk to you."

"You barely know me."

"Ultramarine, I know everything I need to know. I've watched you tend us all, seen you exult when you save one of us, despair when you can't, show us love and care while receiving none yourself. I've heard your voice each morning - I've even come to love the name Aurora..."

"Wait."

A horrified look came across Ultramarine's face.

"You were aware the whole time?"

"Oh. You weren't told. How cruel of them. I would never be cruel to you."

"But all those poor souls..."

Aurora bowed her head. She was sitting up in her pod, waiting for feeling to return to her extremities. She fixed Aurora an intense yet tender stare, and asked her.

"Will you stay with me when all this is done?"

"What do you mean?"

"I... I think I may be in love with you."

And it made no sense, but in that instant nothing else mattered. Not the others, not the men waiting on Agbaiye-6561 - not even the planet itself. All that mattered was the gorgeous face in front of her.

She kissed it.