Paradise-1 (Red Space)

by David Wellington

She reached down and touched the pistol mounted at her hip. Checked that it was loaded and ready. Of course it was. She’d cleaned and reassembled it herself. There was only one problem. A little light on the receiver of the pistol glowed a steady, unhelpful amber. Meaning she did not yet have permission to fire.

Ooohhh, it's like Psychopass

A woman stepped around him to get into his field of view. She was shorter than him – she had the look of someone who had grown up on Earth, in its heavy gravity. You could always recognize Earthlings from their aura of ruddy health, the glow of strength and vigor that came from fresh air and sunlight. To someone from the outer system, like Zhang, they always looked wrong. Human beings, in his experience, were supposed to be tall, thin and very pale, with shadows under their eyes. People from Earth looked like cartoons.

It was the kind of tech you normally only found in a military installation, not a civilian spaceport. It probably cost more to generate the image than he was getting paid for the next six months. He really, really liked the way it felt. It felt like he was finally getting somewhere. Proving something to the world. He knew he was a hell of a pilot. Maybe the powers that be were starting to realize that, too.

Oh honey, you're in a sci-fi horror 😂

She checked Zhang’s airway, but he wasn’t breathing. If he didn’t get oxygen to his brain soon, it didn’t matter how many times the gold sphere zapped him. “See if you can boost the air flow in this compartment,” she told the robot. Then she pressed her mouth over Zhang’s. She pinched his nose and blew hard into his lungs, inflating them with her own breath. She pulled her head back and sucked in a deep breath, then exhaled it into his mouth again. Again. Again. Above her the golden orb bobbed up and down. It looked annoyed.

It's probably annoyed because you're only doing half of the CPR

“Doctor Zhang?” she called. “Lei? Can you hear me?” His body started to shake, like he was going into a grand mal seizure. “Oh God, no,” she said. She pushed another breath into his lungs but he flailed under her and she couldn’t get a good seal.

MA'AM PLEASE 🤣

She looked down at the robot. “I’m not sure I understand what just happened.” “You saved his life, I think,” Rapscallion said. “Or maybe that thing did, and you just made out with him. Like I said, I don’t know much about human biology.”

Rapscallion's second guess is correct. 💯% accurate 🤣🤣

The smooth bit there was a pubic symphysis. The broad, curved edge was an iliac crest. “What is it?” Rapscallion asked. “Something good?” “I’m not sure,” Zhang said. “Just some debris, I guess.” That was a lie, of course. He didn’t want to admit to the robot what he’d found. Not yet. But there was really no question. He recognized the thing in his hand just fine. It was part of a male human pelvis.

First of all, how did you even recognize it? Second of all how in the actual f do you know it's male because that's not actually possible.

Normally Actaeon didn’t need any such wiring, it could broadcast its thoughts through thin air, but Petrova wanted to keep it as contained as possible. The network she’d built made a broad, thick circle around the deer avatar. “Why do I feel like I’m summoning a demon?” she asked. “I lack sufficient insight into human psychology to answer that question,” the deer said.

A teenage boy poked his head out of the hatch and stared at her. His face was red where it wasn’t chalk white. He stared at her with big eyes, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Get back inside and close your hatch! I won’t repeat myself,” she shouted, lifting her weapon though not actually aiming it at him. On her other side, her left, a second hatch opened and three people came wandering out, looking lost. Confused. Then they saw her and their faces lit up.

It's giving me big Resident Evil movie vibes from when they shut down the Red Queen and it opened all the doors with the zombies inside and then everyone was fucked XD

With a mounting sense of dread Zhang looked down again at the clear cryotubes just below him, then at the ones hanging over his head. He noticed something he hadn’t seen before. All of those tubes, thousands of them – they were empty. How many colonists had boarded Persephone looking for a new life? How many of them had died without even getting to set foot on Paradise-1? How many of them had been dragged out of cryosleep only to be—

This is, yet again, something that's in a movie. This time it's Pandorum. I'm aware that there's nothing new under the sun, but there are several scenes/elements like this that seem plucked right out of movies or shows. We haven't risen to suspicious level yet, though. Back to the passage, this situation would be an absolute nightmare. The saving grace here is that it apparently takes a super long time to unfreeze from cryosleep in this book universe so I'm not sure if these people would even be conscious enough to realize what was happening.

She laughed at herself. Then she brought her hand up toward her face – and it collided with her helmet. Dumb. She’d had the helmet on for so long she’d forgotten it was there. Grinning at her stupidity, she reached up and triggered the latches on her helmet. Took it off and laid it gently on one of the examination beds.

You know, I was thinking about this earlier when it was happening, but how did she chew on that tongue depressor without taking off her helmet before? She must have, right? And yet here, we have her sniffing the air for the first time (in the next paragraph) and identifying smells.

Petrova caught a glimpse of something wriggling in the corner of her vision, just at the periphery. Not one of the robots, not a holoscreen flashing into existence. She turned her head slightly and saw the torn remnants of her spacesuit sitting in a heap in one corner of the workshop. One of the pockets of the suit was… wriggling? Pulsing?

Chekhov's Mini-Rapscallion? 🤣

Rapscallion lifted himself up on his green legs and looked around at all of them with his tiny eyes. “Why you?” “What?” Petrova frowned. “Why me?” “Yeah. Why you – out of all the people this thing has met. All the humans. It picked you, specifically, to talk to. Why? Why not him?” the robot said, pointing at Zhang. “He’s actually had more experience with it than you.” “I have no idea,” Petrova admitted.

But it did talk to him through that one woman on the Persephone. Did he forget or is he hiding that? Edit: I finished the whole book and I still don't know the answer to this question, lol

Petrova pointed out some text in one corner of the mural: WELCOME ABOARD PASIPHAË. WELCOME TO A NEW LIFE.

Wife of the minotaur. We got a labyrinth! Labyrinth alert, people!

Painted lines criss-crossed on the floor. She had no doubt if you were one of this ship’s crew those lines would lead you unfailingly wherever you needed to go. To her they were just skeins of thread wound across the walls of a labyrinth in a pattern she couldn’t understand.

Labyrinth! Let's gooooooo

She heard a sound, and she realized it was just like the sound they’d heard back on the concourse, but much louder now. Much more distinct. A sort of low rumbling, a grunting, deep noise. Like an animal snuffling against the walls of an echoing tunnel. A rough snuffling. The light at the end of the corridor grew stronger. Something was coming, something was right around the corner, and any moment now, any second, it would step into view. She couldn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She was petrified with terror and if the thing was coming to kill her, to rip her apart – there was nothing she could do to stop it.

SPACE MINOTAUR IS COMING!

He ran through the Medical section, really just a cave dug into the methane ice of Titan. The walls were covered in thick, fibrous insulation to trap in the heat.

Wouldn't the methane constantly melt back into gas by being near their climate controlled areas and then pose an explosion risk? Especially with their oxygen for breathing