'But that's neither here nor there. Or anywhere, now. That world
is gone, and will never return.' He sighed bitterly.
'Back on the ship, Christian lost her mind when she saw the
devastation, and knew that her husband and son were dead, like all the
others. She couldn't live without them, and so she killed herself.
That left only Stenmark and Doc McIntyre to try and decide our fate.
The best they could do, under the circumstances, was to re-rig the
entire ship---computer, cryogenics, life-support, everything---for a
vastly different purpose than what they'd been designed for. Their
new function was, simply, to hold us all in suspension, retain the high
orbit, and wake us all when, hopefully, it was safe to return to the
surface.
'It's no coincidence that you, Sylviana, and William---you
haven't met him yet---came out of suspension at approximately the
same time we did. A German scientist named Krause had been advocating a
common de-suspension date, in the event such a travesty ever occurred.
He was considered a black pessimist at the time, and partly insane. But
your father, and Sten, and possibly others, took his advice, and set the
‘wake up call' for exactly ten thousand years from the first day
of Armageddon, hoping that would give the planet enough time to heal
itself, and support recognizable life-forms once more.
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