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 moved 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 muscles 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 using 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 I 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 dark, 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 it ‘stasis shock’ because coming out of stasis was invariably an unpleasant shock at the best of times. It took some time to readjust to things when you woke up and the trace amounts of the drugs left in your system took a while to disappear. 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.

The door of my stasis pod swung up and open. It was dark, nearly pitch black 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 onto the hard deck in front off me. A tangle of limbs and alternating spots of numb cold and aching pain, the realisation that the light should be on hit me like a ton of bricks.

"Ow! Stupid fucking computer. Turn the damn lights on!" I hissed as pain lanced through my foot.

Managing to stand and regain some of my dignity, I squinted hard as the lights flashed on abruptly. 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 Spear, but before our artificial sleep. A cocktail of drugs, bio-engineering miracles and probably black magic allowed us to wake up normal, with no lasting side effects on the body, as far as we knew. It didn’t mean we wouldn’t feel like shit, but it did mean we wouldn’t end up looking like the human equivalent of a thawed tomato.

Sometimes, if you were unlucky, your body would reject the stasis drugs, making it all but impossible for you to ever undergo the process properly without being rendered extremely ill. The drugs still worked, but your body went nuts. Fortunately, a quick injection during basic training was enough to determine if you would reject the required drugs or not. The allergic reaction if you did reject them was nasty, but it was better than the alternative. Civilian freighters sometimes had to deal with that coin toss since the drugs were expensive, but most bigger companies and first-rate militaries weren’t inclined to lose a skilled asset to something as mundane and avoidable as a fatal stasis allergy, so they usually shelled out the cash.

I remember asking one of my Drill Instructors how often the stasis pods failed to revive someone properly, just after my training platoon had been lectured on their function and use. The Drill Instructor just smiled at me when I asked him that question. I drew my own conclusions from there. Suffice it to say, I was very happy no one was suffering a medical emergency and that a mild headache and freezing our asses off were the worst of our woes.

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Before I could stroll further down memory lane, I saw Chen stumble out of the 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 Chen seemed less affected than the rest of my team. I figured it might be something to do with his sheer body mass. He was stronger and bigger than the rest of us by a noticeable margin.

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

“We are.” I grinned, feeling my face alternate between feeling numb and cold. “The computer woke us up. I haven’t checked it yet, I figure we can all warm up a bit first before we see why we’re awake.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’d appreciate a heated seat or hot soup right about that.” 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. “Nothing seems to be broken though, so in a minute when things stop aching, I’m going to go find some clothes.”

I chuckled. “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 flat digital tones.

The processor's voice was very clearly artificial, but I was glad for that. Realistic simulations of human voices unnerved the hell out of me. I was just 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. I found that strange given that we had good enough tech to produce flawless voices that sounded human. We just didn't. I assumed the reason was political or financial, or maybe there wasn't much of a market for it.

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 body again and distribute heat around my body.

“Why the hell didn’t it warm the pod up before it woke us up? Stupid machine.” I exhaled sharply.

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

“Stay here. 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. I looked around and found a now-clothed Chen already digging around in a cupboard built into the wall. 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 right now, but it was supposed to assist in repairs in case they were needed, or in extreme cases in setting up shelter if we landed on an inhabited world. A stage one unit was for emergency use and was above the size of two or three fridges put together. A stage two unit was intended for general use on a larger scale and so was more like the size of a small car. A stage three unit was usually employed on battleships, battlecruisers or as part of colony efforts on new worlds. Stage three units were the most capable, but also the largest, physically speaking.

The earliest models had been the size of apartment blocks. Refining them had resulted in every stage becoming more compact, but it was still four or five times the size of a stage two unit. Just one of the stage three units was too big to fit in our pod. Each stage was an increase in size and capability, but they all functioned more or less the same way using a combination of 3D printing, nanotech and A.I. designers. Our particular fabricator wasn’t likely to be inadequate for whatever we dreamed up, thankfully. To me it looked like a bit like an oven, only instead of racks inside and a door it had a platform inside for fabrications to rest on.

The unit took up about three square metres of space, a good quarter of the room we were in. The side facing me was transparent, thick tinted glass obscuring the mechanisms within slightly. I stepped closer, squinting through the material. I could just make out six spindles of steel and a variety of polymer tubes arrayed in a ring above a flat slab of inoffensive grey. I knew that slab had some anti-adhesive properties, or at least I assumed it did. I wasn’t an expert in fabrication technology by any means but I knew it had its roots in old 3D printers and those relics certainly had anti-adhesive build platforms.

I looked up above the fabricator and noticed a small slanted chute between it and the ceiling, large block letters denoting it as the input chute. I quickly found a similar chute jutting out from the bottom of the fabricator, with similar words to advertise the output. I turned as I heard heavy footsteps beside me.

“Chicken soup, or peppered steak?” Chen held up two large sachets in his hands, the brown shade of an MRE was as nostalgic as it was unmistakable to me. Both were fair options and neither was one of the varieties that would leave you wishing for mountains of toilet paper. I expected we would all leave those until last.

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