To Sleep, Perchance To Scream: Cold Eternity, by S.A. Barnes

Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This author has carved out a specific, rather exotic niche for herself: sci-fi horror, and not of the supernatural type, either. This story owes a lot to the movie Alien, and also to the urban myth of ancient aliens that landed on our planet in millennia past and helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, or something (which is totally insulting to the Egyptians, insinuating that brown people couldn't have constructed those marvels all by their lonesome). This version of "ancient aliens" is far more terrifying.

Halley Zwick, our narrator, is a former high-class political operative, who saw something she shouldn't and is now on the run. Down to her last credits, she takes an under-the-table job working as a caretaker for the frozen people on board the Elysium Fields. More than a century ago, this ship launched carrying cryogenicaly preserved people, the dying and/or the powerful, gathered together under the aegis of the long-dead tech billionaire Zale Winfeld. Winfeld was a cult leader of sorts, promising immortality and a future cure for fatal diseases. But the reawakening process has never worked, and the ship is circling the solar system on an endless loop, carrying its forever-limbo ghost passengers.

However, working there is just the place for Halley to hide, to escape the scrutiny and pursuit of both her family and the politicians she ran from, with her insider knowledge of election tampering. No matter that the Elysian Fields is full of shadows and strange noises, and Halley is getting more sleep-deprived and stretched thin by the day (since she has to make rounds every three hours, and press a button on the bridge that confirms to the ship's governing board that its passengers are being watched and protected). The person who hired her, Karl, is doing maintenance and remodeling on the ship's lower levels, but that doesn't explain the strange skittering noises Halley hears at night, or the things she sees on the ship's cameras....things Karl insists aren't actually there.

Of course, they are, but the full horror of what is happening on the Elysian Fields takes its time being revealed, and is set up by the author beautifully. Suffice to say that we have alien parasites, a dead-alive tech trillionaire, and the trillionaire's three children who were supposed to be dead decades ago, but who have been uploaded into the ship's AI as a hellish artificial existence. This all comes together in a horrifying, gory, zombified stew in the book's explosive and action-packed final quarter.

Halley's voice very much carries the story. This book shares some similarities with Alien, none more so in the fact that Halley is a young, unassuming, everyday sort of character thrown into terrible circumstances who manages to step up and carry the day. Like Ripley, she does not think she has the strength or the smarts to cope with what is happening, but in this baptism of fire, she finds that she does. She is helped in her struggle by Aleyk, one of Zale Winfeld's uploaded children. There is even a romance of sorts between Halley and Aleyk, even though both know nothing can come of it. But Halley succeeds in freeing Aleyk, destroying the Elysian Fields and giving him the peace of true death.

The author has improved with every book, and in this one, the characterizations and the wonderfully creepy atmosphere of the story is her best yet.

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