Stasis shock is a bitch, there’s no getting around it. I gasped as the cold hit me, smashing through my sluggish faculties with unrelenting force. Darkness enveloped me and my muscles screamed when I attempted to move them. It wasn’t from overuse or fatigue, but because they were frigid and stiff, unused to movement after so long.

  I raised my hands to my face. Thankfully, muscle atrophy was not as big of a concern as you'd think. We'd come up with some ways around that, electrical stimulation, certain drugs and some other neat tricks to stimulate the body and minimise muscle atrophy. That was a very good thing in my opinion. If I'd had to drag myself out of stasis with sticks for arms I'd probably have cried.

  I still had all my fingers and as the rest of me warmed up I did a quick check of all my other parts, wiggling my toes and testing each of my muscle groups in turn.

  I looked down and my heart swelled with relief. "Thank god." I breathed.

  My dick was cold, but not frostbitten, blue or falling off. I wiggled the fingers on my gun hand and couldn't resist cracking a smile with my half-numb facial muscles. Everything seemed intact, especially the most important bits. Nothing was frostbitten as far as I could tell. I pressed my palm to the transparent door of the stasis pod and pushed. Relief flooded me when I realised there were no alarms and there was still breathable air onboard. I’d half-expected some kind of emergency alarm.

  Going from being almost entirely still and frozen for an extended period of time to very much alive and thawing is not a pleasant experience even with all our precautions and tech miracles. I hadn't realised right away, but it wasn't that my stasis pod door was black or opaque, the whole room was dark. The lights were off.

  I was still foggy upstairs, I could feel it. If I’d been sharper it probably would’ve crossed my mind already. It would be a while before I had all my faculties again.

  We termed the ordeal ‘stasis shock’ because coming out of stasis was invariably an unpleasant shock at the best of times. It took time to readjust to things when you woke up and the trace amounts of the drugs left in your system took a while to clear out. Everyone kept hoping for better stasis tech with lessened side effects, but the fact we’d developed it at all was a minor miracle in my opinion.

  I pushed and the door of my stasis pod swung up and open. I couldn’t see a damned thing but I took a step outside anyway. My left foot caught on the lower lip of the pod as I moved and I was sent sprawling to the deck of our escape pod. I went down in a tangle of limbs. The cold competed with fresh waves of pain to see who could cause me more grief.

  The realisation that the lights should be on hit me like a ton of bricks. Why weren’t the lights on already?

  "Ow! Stupid fucking computer.” I muttered. “Turn the damn lights on!" I hissed as sharp pain continued to lance through my foot.

  Managing to stand and regain some of my dignity, I squinted hard as the lights snapped on. The harsh white light blinded me for a few moments as my eyes adjusted. When they did I was pleasantly surprised to see things looked the same as I'd left them.

  “Everyone alright?” I asked, breath fogging into the still cold air of the escape pod. With audible effort, I managed to stagger across the metal deck plates to an empty seat. My bare feet stung as they pressed against the cold floor and I dropped myself into a collection of padded seats mounted on the walls.

  I watched the rest of my team shake themselves from their slumber. I’d never experienced stasis sleep before, as I’d told Carver, but I’d read a few manuals on it out of sheer boredom in the time after our escape from the ship.

  A cocktail of drugs, bio-engineering miracles and probably black magic allowed us to wake up unharmed, with no lasting side effects on the body, at least as far as we knew. We’d feel like shit, we wouldn’t end up looking like the human equivalent of a thawed tomato. I considered that a worthy trade.

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  Sometimes, if you were born unlucky, your body would reject the stasis drugs. Unfortunately, that meant entering a stasis pod would kill you. It tended to cut about twenty percent of applicants to the space-going services, unfortunately.

  Before I could stroll further down memory lane , I saw Chen step out of his pod, looking annoyingly awake and alert. How he’d managed that I didn’t know; the rest of us seemed like sluggish zombies by comparison.

  Goosebumps covered everyone’s skin, but the large muscular Korean seemed less affected than the rest of the team. I figured it might be something to do with his sheer body mass. He was stronger and bigger than I was by a noticeable margin, he had to be to operate and carry various heavy weapons and equipment.

  A yawn from him threatened to be contagious. “Morning Edward, sleep well?”

  “Yeah, slept in a bit.” I chuckled.

  “So, we’re alive.” Chen said, rather redundantly.

  “You sound surprised.” I grinned, feeling my face alternate between feeling numb and cold.

  “Well, it wasn’t the likely outcome, you have to admit that.”

  “True.” I conceded. “The computer woke us up for some reason. I haven’t checked it yet though. I figure since there are no alarms we can all take our time and warm up a bit first.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Chen moved stiffly to stand next to me. “I don’t know about you, but I’d appreciate a heated seat or hot soup right about now.” He took a seat to my right, wincing.

  I could only agree with that, nodding. “You alright?”

  “My ass is sore.” Chen chuckled, casting his eyes around the room.

  “Mine too, hell my everything is sore.”

  I looked up at the ceiling, more out of habit than anything else. “Proc, raise temperature to twenty-five Celsius.”

  “Raising temperature to twenty-five degrees Celsius.” A soft female voice said in monotone, digital tones.

  The processor's voice was very clearly artificial, but I was glad for that. I was equally glad that the processor or ‘proc’ for short, on the escape pods didn’t try to mimic a human voice. There was always that uncanny valley effect that creeped me out to no end.

  Chen made an approving sound, looking himself over. “Nothing seems to be broken, so in a minute when things stop hurting, I’m going to go find some clothes.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t given much thought to my nakedness yet.

  Chen disappeared through a doorway as I sat there willing myself to return to a state that didn’t resemble a half-thawed snowman. I flexed the muscles closer to my extremities. willing blood to flow through my veins and distribute heat throughout my body.

  “Why the hell didn’t it warm the pod up before it woke us up? Stupid machine.” I exhaled sharply, the cold still biting into my flesh.

  I looked over as Larsen made her way across the room on unsteady feet to sit next to me and I nodded in greeting as I got up.

  “I’m going to see what we have to eat besides MRE’s.” I told her before I disappeared through the same hatch Chen had taken.

  “Leaving already? Was it something I said?” She asked as I walked off. I could only laugh, my throat protesting and remind me it was sore and cold.

  The next room over was quite a bit larger than the little stasis room and it acted as the main hub for the inhabitants of an escape pod, complete with a central table, large screen display and storage cupboards. There was even a small galley. I looked around and found a now fully-clothed Chen already digging around inside a cupboard. Watching Chen’s ass as he rummaged around for food wasn’t terribly entertaining, so I moved on rather quickly.

  Almost immediately I noticed something that caught my attention. I moved to the corner of the large room to get a closer look at the object of my interest.

  A stage one fabrication unit sat snugly in the corner, darkened and deactivated. Comprised of three different stages, each stage meant an increase in size and capability, but they all functioned the same, using a combination of 3D printing, nanotech and artificial intelligence to build damn near anything.

  To me, the thing looked like a bit like an oven. The unit took up about three square metres of space, a good quarter of the room we were in. The side facing me was made of thick tinted glass which obscured the mechanisms within slightly. I stepped closer, squinting through the material. I could just make out six spindles of steel and a variety of clear polymer tubes. They were arrayed in a ring above a flat slab of gray material.

  I turned as I heard heavy footsteps beside me.

  “Chicken soup, or peppered steak?” Chen held up two large sachets in each of his hands, the brown shade of an MRE was unmistakable to me.

  I didn’t even have to consider his question and I reached for the peppered steak.