Was he dreaming? Around him a shadow moved at great speed, or so he thought, flickering back and forth. He was struck by an inexplicable helplessness. Time passed and eventually the two, crisp lights were extinguished. He returned to his slumber.
Torsten ‘Tor’ Gjerde gagged as the watertight lid of the cryobed suckered open. His body convulsed at the sudden exposure to air, gooseflesh prickled icy skin. He pulled the nose clip from his face and removed his breathing tube. He sat up and allowed his olfactory senses to be overwhelmed by the smell of auto-clean astringent and dry ice. He shivered, disorientated in his neoprene pants, legs dangling from the side of his bed. He rubbed at strangely parallel floaters that throbbed in the back of his eyes, turning from yellow to green.
“Good to see you’re awake, Captain.” A female voice, prim and British, unfamiliar to his groggy memory. The merest hint of something else, foreign and exotic was buried within her accent. She dried him down roughly with a terrycloth towel, then wrapped him in a thermal blanket as he sat as helpless as a babe. He tried to fuss her away, say something, but his utterances came out garbled and slurred.
“Give yourself a little while, in fifteen minutes you’ll be feeling fine.” The female rushed to administer to another waking crewman.
Tor sat and rustled in his thermal coating, dumbfounded. He was in a brightly lit and antiseptic white bay. Around him lay fifteen raised platforms with translucent blue pods atop. Some were closed and occupied, others lay open; their stupefied inhabitant sat glistening and dangly-legged like him.
He was the Master aboard the DSMV Riyadh, memory flooded back as he watched his crewmen gather their bearings. Pods opened at set intervals allowing the ship’s doctor to provide care and comfort. He reached for names to put to pallid faces as the cold leeched from his body. The room would be heated to just above body temperature. Protocol returned to him. He shivered once more.
Determined not to be remembered in his current state, Tor made a furtive attempt to regain his balance, slithering from his platform. The floor was cold and unforgiving, wet feet slipped on the seamless surface. He jammed his hands into the side of the pod, thrusting his thermal blanket apart, naked save for the shorts beneath.
He quickly gathered the foil material around himself again, hands smarting, dignity zero. Tentatively he tested long idle muscles. Like the first strides of a brittle morning run, his calves ached his thighs taut and recalcitrant.
Tor shakily padded around his platform, drawing the ire of the female doctor. “Captain, you really should wait until all your faculties are warmed up before you start walking around.”
Tor stopped and eyed the women suspiciously, she was young, perhaps late twenties, but her stern face and sharp features held an ageless quality. She was not unattractive, but the plain, long, unnaturally straight hair that framed her pinched face gave her a severe appearance. She wasn’t the ships usual doctor. “How long were we out?”
“Eight months, fourteen days,” she replied flatly as she attended to Jan Nilsen. The Chief Engineer looked newly thawed. He stared at Tor with misty eyes and agape mouth.
“Everyone okay?” Tremulous words scratched at his dry throat.
“Everybody is fine, life signs normal.” For the first time since he started speaking to her, she looked up from behind Nilsen and met his eye. “Please, Captain. Sit down.”
“If it’s all the same to you, Doctor…?” Before she could reply a commotion in the bay drew both their attention.
One of the pods had malfunctioned, the cryo fluid had drained, but the pod failed to open. Inside the frantic deckhand beat at the blue Perspex with little more room than a coffin. The Doctor rushed to the bed, releasing the small Filipina. Angela Tala Herrera sprang from her pod, barely any indication she’d spent over eight months suspended in a liquid nitrogen solution – even her Grace Jones fade had retained its rigidity. Throwing her breathing tube and nose clip aside, she punched the pod. “Fucking piece of shit,” then turned and saw her Captain looming over the tableau. Wide eyed she said: “Good morning, Captain,” before doubling over and vomiting brown-green bile over the pristine white floor.
With the Doctor preoccupied, Tor knew a name would not be forthcoming. “Carry on,” he said as she rushed away. “I’m going to the bridge.”
Stiff legged, Tor made the short walk down the arterial corridor, rubbing his eyes in response to the dazzling white light. Long closed, they were slow to react to the imperceptible changes in light intensity. The Medical Bay had been tailored to newly awakened deep spacers in a way the rest of the ship wasn’t. A sudden memory jarred him, the blue lights and shadows, had that just been a dream? He closed his eyes and charted two fading parallel marks that traced a spastic path across his retinas, he’d barely registered them when he woke. Déjà vu, a memory on a memory, he’d probably stared into one of the bay’s strip lights before his sentience had returned.
Tor contemplated the stairs and the burning sensation down the back of his legs. Blood returning to normal temperature cascaded through his musculature, made him think twice. He called the elevator for the two flight journey to the bridge.
Auto lighting illuminated the bridge in a comforting wan glow. To the side, the chartroom was littered with starcharts annoyingly disorganized. Some had fallen on the deck, beside them a set of brass dividers. Tor returned them to the chart table, next to the large faux-leather bound ships log. He squeezed old droplets of water from shoulder length blonde hair. It once flowed down the length of his back, but upon receipt of his first command he’d been ordered to cut it. The company was still not happy with its length.
The hanging light above the chart table – green painted like a billiard hall with ornate brass filigree, hung at an odd angle. Out of place. Tor stared at it for a moment.
Various instrument panels winked, pallid greens and reds. The auto pilot would be engaged for another day, time to allow the crew to adjust to their waking surrounds, assess their position. If for some reason the crew remained dormant fail safes were designed to cut in at that point, a distress would be broadcast and the ship placed into a stationary orbit around the nearest safe object.
Tor pressed the power button on the ships video printer. The grey cathode tube lit up, spooling out green nonsense text as part of its warm up procedure, each bit accompanied by a digital tapping sound. Beside it he let the noisy ribbon printer sit motionless so as to enjoy the comparative quiet of the bridge.
So far everything appeared normal, windscreen shields were down to protect them from micro meteoroid strike. Many early deep spacers had died, completely unaware in their rudimentary cryobeds, after a pea sized piece of space junk or rock pierced their windscreens and pressure bulkheads failed. Later vessels had inbuilt fail safes that would keep the crewman in cryo for as long as it took for assistance to be rendered. In deep space that usually meant freezing to death or hypoxia after the ships cryo fluid ran dry. Tor always considered waking from cryo another death avoided. This had been his seventh time on a sleeping voyage and his second longest.
Tor opened the bridges cooler, predictably empty, a faint smell of old UHT milk, long removed. The coffee table above was poorly stocked, powdered milk and creamer, cheap instant coffee granules. An unwelcome offering for renewed awareness. They should wake the galley a day earlier, he thought, that would be his grand suggestion at the Master’s Conference.