Excerpt from The Lilean Chronicles - Redemption

Hi all.  Here's an excerpt from my book The Lilean Chronicles - Redemption.  It's the first in a series of science fiction/space fantasy novels.  First comes the blurb and the excerpt follows.

Book blurb - 

Two ancient prophecies, both foretelling the extinction of a race. Two sides racing to their appointment with destiny. A terrible tide of evil laying waste to their world. So much rage, fear and a baby crying.  A single baby prophesied to save Lilea and many other worlds from extinction by the Transmortal Army. One single man who will bring an end to the evil that almost wiped them out and in doing so, save many worlds from their darkness. Vincent worries for his sanity as he suffers the nightmares and hears the voices in the dreams. As he battles with the nightmares and the source of the voices in the dreams is revealed, he begins to discover his destiny and finds that there are other forces at work against him.

Many worlds away Farra discovers her part in his great task. Can she survive the terrors that lurk in the tunnels and can she unmask the mysterious killer? The ancient spirit people take them on a journey through space and time as they both race from world to world to meet their date with destiny and fulfil the prophecy.

Excerpt from chapter 7

The last document Byron had found was an Inter Galactic Law Enforcement Memo concerning the Cryo Stasis Facility and Vincent’s escape. The Cryo Stasis Confinement Facility had been based on an uninhabited moon of the Steran System. This location had been chosen due to its lack of inhabited planets in the system itself. The Steran System has 2 suns and so the facility used solar energy as its power source. A system of back up generators was put in place which was continuously topped up itself by solar energy, so that when the moon entered its regular three yearly eclipses, the system didn’t grind to a halt and unfreeze all the inmates. Every six months a team was sent to check and test the whole system and it was during one such visit that a rookie technician had made a fatal
mistake and caused a small explosion which had burned out the main back up system generators. Unfortunately for them, the technical team’s only pilot was badly burned in the explosion and was unable to fly them out of the facility in order to obtain spare
parts from the storage facility on Steran 7’s second moon. One of the facility’s own pilots was brought in as an emergency but he was unaccustomed to the controls on the technical team’s ship and crashed it on take off, killing himself. Another of the facility’s
employees was brought in to make the journey in one of the facility’s own ships, which took off for the adjacent moon without trouble. During the three day round trip, the Steran System’s primary sun gave off a gigantic solar flare that caused permanent and irreparable damage to the facility’s solar energy cells, which stopped operating. Due to there being no back up system working at the time, a meltdown occurred.

The occupants of the facility were kept in underground bunkers, layered in 17 underground levels, each level holding 20,000 inmates in coffin sized cells. The cryo system worked from the deepest level up, so that in effect the cells at the lower levels got
frozen first and the higher levels last. The whole system had to work harder to pump to the higher levels, than it did to the lower levels. When the system failed, it was the higher levels that thawed out first. As inmates began to regain consciousness and break out of their cryo cells, the facility staff became overwhelmed and unable to contain thousands of rapidly awakening murderers, violent psychotics and other assorted dangerous prisoners. The effects of Cryo Stasis take a while to wear off and for the first few hours after thawing, most prisoners are very disorientated. This gave the facility staff a valuable window of opportunity in which to escape in their last remaining ship before their prisoners gained their senses and became dangerous. As they made their way to the hangar to abandon the facility and the moon, they found an escaping prisoner already boarding the craft and preparing to take off. They failed to get to the craft before the prisoner escaped and were stranded on the facility. In the ensuing riot, all the facility staff were murdered by the awakened inmates.

Once control had been restored by an emergency team one month later, it was discovered that the Cryo Stasis procedure was not as safe had it had been thought to be. Many of the inmates were found dead in their cryo cells and forensic analysis showed they had died during the cryo freezing procedure and had effectively been executed by freezing to death. Security film footage of the riot showed the escaping prisoner who was easily identified by the prisoner ID number printed across the back of his overalls. The identification was confirmed later by digital comparison of the video film footage and the prisoner’s intake ID photograph. It was Vincent Richard Domenico. He became a wanted man across the whole galaxy and gained himself the legendary status of being the only man to escape the Cryo Stasis Facility.