Chapter 8: Post-Stasis Awakening
The cold floor was a shock against their feverish skin. For a long moment, there was only the sound of ragged breathing and the soft, hydraulic sigh of the stasis tubes retracting into the ceiling.
“Fuck,” Rae gasped, the word punching out of her. She pushed herself up on trembling arms, her blue eyes wide and unfocused. “What the hell was in those tubes?”
Willow rolled onto her side, a shaky laugh escaping her. “I don’t know, but I’m not sure I ever need to come again. I think my soul left for a minute.” Her fingers, as if moving of their own accord, trailed through the slickness between her thighs. She looked at the moisture, then at Carol. “Best idea you ever had, Cap. Walking right in. Genius.”
Carol ignored her, sitting up and running a hand through her tangled black hair. Her green eyes were sharp, scanning the smooth, glowing chamber. The pulsating control panel across the room seemed to beat in time with her own slowing heart. “Everyone intact? Mentally, I mean. As intact as we ever were.”
June was already standing, her curly hair a dark halo. She walked, legs slightly unsteady, to the wall, pressing her palms against its featureless surface. “Biometric feedback loops. The gel was clearly neuro-conductive. It read our physiological states and… amplified them. Induced peak arousal and then satiation. A pacification protocol, or perhaps a reward system.” Her voice was clinical, but a faint flush remained on her cheeks.
Sky stretched, her perfect body arching like a cat’s. A radiant, blissed-out smile was plastered on her face. “Reward. Definitely a reward. I feel… amazing. Like every nerve ending got a massage.” Her hand drifted to her own throat, fingers pressing lightly, experimentally, a dark flicker in her eyes before she dropped it.
Her hand drifted to her own throat, fingers pressing lightly, experimentally, a dark flicker in her eyes before she dropped it. “Seriously, though. Where are our clothes?”
“Who needs them?” Willow said, winking as she got to her feet. She spun in a little circle, her red hair flying. “Feel that air? It’s perfect. No bugs, no sunburn. It’s like… a nude paradise.”
“A naked mystery box,” Rae corrected, gruffly. She was already at the room’s only apparent exit, a seamless archway. “With really good plumbing. Let’s move before it decides we need another… cycle.” A touch of pink tinged her ears.
Carol stood, shaking out her limbs, feeling the lingering, liquid looseness in her muscles. “Alright, crew. Let’s head back to camp, regroup, and figure out what this place is. Maybe the tubes downloaded an owner’s manual into our brains.” She led the way toward the arch, which irised open silently at their approach. “Everyone remember the way?”
The corridor beyond was more of the same seamless, softly glowing material. It curved gently, following the ship’s hull. Large, transparent sections offered views outside.
Sky drifted to one, peering out. “Wow. Night came fast. The stars are incredible out here. I’ve never seen them so clear.” She pressed her palms and forehead against the cool surface. “No light pollution at all. It’s… wow.”
June moved beside her, looking out. She was silent for a long beat. “That’s not right,” she said, her voice low.
“What’s not right?” Carol asked, joining them. She followed June’s gaze.
The view was not of a sky, but of an unbroken, inky blackness, dense and absolute. The stars weren’t twinkling points. They were hard, brilliant pinpricks, impossibly numerous and steady. And there was no moon. No familiar constellations.
“There’s no horizon,” June whispered.
“What do you mean?” Sky asked, her smile fading.
“The trees, the hills… the ground,” June said, pointing. “It’s not there. There’s only black. And those.” She gestured at the field of stars. “We’re not looking up at a night sky. We’re looking out.”
Willow pushed between them, her playful energy gone. “Out where?” She stared, her face illuminated by the stark, alien starlight. “Oh.”
The realization moved through them like a cold current. They weren’t in a structure on Earth. The “windows” were viewports. The curved corridor was a hull. The complete, gravity-defying silence took on a new, terrifying quality.
“Keep walking,” Carol said, her voice tight. She started moving again, faster now. “Look for a larger port. A different angle.”
They hurried down the gently curving passage, their bare feet making soft slaps on the floor. Each viewing panel showed the same vista: endless, star-studded void.
Then Rae stopped at a wider, floor-to-ceiling observation blister. “Oh, shit.”
They crowded behind her. The view was dominated not by stars, but by a vast, swirling tapestry of ochre, cream, and red. A colossal storm, large enough to swallow Earth whole, churned in silent, hypnotic majesty. Banded clouds streaked across its face in parallel lines of impossible beauty and scale. To its side, hanging like a marble, was a familiar, cratered sphere.
“That’s…” Sky’s voice was a thin thread.
“Jupiter,” June finished, all the air leaving her lungs in a single, stunned exhale. “And that’s Io. One of its moons.” She took a step back, bumping into Willow. “We’re in orbit. We’re not on Earth. We haven’t been for… I don’t know how long.”
The five of them stood frozen, a tableau of naked shock silhouetted against the gas giant’s endless, roaring face. The camp they’d left behind, the forest, the world—it was all gone, reduced to a memory beneath an impossible sky.
Carol finally spoke, the words brittle in the vast, silent understanding. “We’re not going back to camp.”
“We’re not going back to camp.”
The silence that followed was thick, choked with the immensity of what hung in the viewport behind them. Jupiter’s storm eye seemed to stare right into their huddle of naked, vulnerable flesh.
Then the panic didn’t explode; it shattered, flying off in five different, absurd directions.
“Oh my god,” Rae blurted, her hands clenching in her choppy black hair. “The fucking Jeep. I put a two-thousand-dollar deposit on that Wrangler. It’s sitting in the parking lot at the trailhead. My credit’s gonna be destroyed.”
She paced away from the viewport, then back, her bare feet slapping the floor with frantic energy. “The rental agreement said unauthorized off-roading voids the insurance. Is a forest service road unauthorized? Shit. It definitely is.”
Sky’s radiant smile had vanished, replaced by a look of dawning, pragmatic horror. “Monday,” she whispered, then louder. “Monday! I’ve got the Sunrise Vinyasa Flow at the community center. Sixty people signed up. They prepaid. Mrs. Haversham brings her ancient Tibetan singing bowl every time.” She grabbed June’s arm, her nails digging in. “Who’s gonna lead the centering meditation? They’ll all want refunds.”
June shook her off, her warm brown eyes wide behind imaginary glasses she kept touching. “My laptop. It’s in the tent. All my data on the Kuiper Belt object trajectories, the unpublished paper, the grants… It’s on the hard drive. The battery will be dead.” She looked at Carol, her voice trembling with academic despair. “The backup is in my apartment. My cat-sitter can’t access the encrypted drive. It’s all gone.”
Willow let out a sharp, barking laugh that held no humor. “You guys. A client. A real one, with a gallery and a budget. Wednesday. We were finalizing the mural for the new boutique hotel lobby.” She sank to the floor, drawing her knees up. “I ghosted a five-figure commission. He’ll think I’m dead. Or flaky. Flaky is worse. My professional reputation is cratered from another fucking galaxy.”
Carol stood amidst them, their leader, watching her crew come undone not over death or oxygen, but over deposits and schedules. It was so profoundly, devastatingly human it almost broke her. “Everyone, shut up,” she said, but her voice lacked its usual command.
“Shut up?” Rae wheeled on her. “My insurance is tied to my registration, Carol. That’s my livelihood! How do I fix a spaceship? I can’t even call Triple-A!”
“My mat class expects a vibe,” Sky moaned, sitting down hard next to Willow. “I cultivated that vibe for two years. Now I’m just the flaky instructor who vanished before sun salutations.”
June was muttering to herself, fingers twitching as if typing. “Corrections… peer review… all the citations…”
The enormity of space, of time, of their utter displacement, was too vast. Their minds, reeling, latched onto the last anchors they had: a jeep, a time slot, a file, a meeting. These tiny, Earth-bound obligations were the only things that made sense.
Carol closed her eyes, trying to find her own petty anchor. Wonder Woman wouldn’t fret about a Jeep deposit. Wonder Woman would assess the threat, secure the perimeter, find the source. She opened her eyes. “The… object,” she said, the word cutting through the litany of earthly woes.
They all looked at her, their faces blotchy with distressed confusion.
“The shiny thing in the grass, before the tubes took us,” Carol pressed, forcing steel into her voice. “It wasn’t Earth grass. It was here. In this… place. It’s the only thing we’ve seen that isn’t a wall or a viewport.” She turned from the terrifying majesty of Jupiter and pointed down the empty, curving corridor. “We find that. We find out what it is. Before we worry about yoga refunds.”
The logic, however thin, worked. It was a task. Rae scowled, rubbing her forehead. “Fine. But if we get home and there’s a repossession notice on my door, I’m blaming you.”
They moved again, a silent, naked procession past the terrifying windows. The corridor eventually ended in another irising doorway. It opened not into another sterile hall, but into a vast, green space. The air changed, smelling of damp soil and growing things. Artificial sunlight streamed from a high, curved ceiling.
The light felt real on their skin, warm and solid, a stark contrast to the sterile glow of the ship’s corridors. It fell on broad, terraced planters overflowing with green—vines, leafy vegetables, unfamiliar herbs with violet leaves.
“Okay, an alien garden,” Willow said, reaching out to touch a waxy leaf. “That’s new. Still no pants tree, though.”
The grass beneath their feet was soft and cool, a real, living carpet. The sheer normalcy of it was more disorienting than the void outside. They stood in a cluster, five naked women in a jungle under a fake sky, all of them tensed for whatever impossible thing came next.
Rae’s eyes were scanning, mechanic-sharp. “There,” she said, her voice dropping. She pointed across the grassy expanse.
Half-buried near the base of a large, fruiting tree was the object. It was the size of a small car, angular and sheathed in a dull, gunmetal gray. One edge was torn open, revealing a darker interior, like a twisted mouth.
It was undeniably not part of the garden. It was a wound in the pastoral scene. They moved toward it as one, drawn by its brutal, out-of-place reality.
Up close, the damage was clear. The metal was scorched and buckled, as if it had been ripped from something larger. The exposed interior was a nest of shattered crystalline components and severed, fibrous cables that oozed a clear, viscous fluid.
“A crash,” June whispered, kneeling at the edge. She didn’t touch it. “This is a piece of something. A shuttle, maybe. It came from outside.” She looked up, her face pale. “It breached the station’s environment. Recently.”
Sky hovered behind her, hugging herself. “So we’re not alone here? Something else… arrived?” Her gaze darted to the shadowy spaces between the planters.
“Or someone,” Willow added, her usual levity gone.
They all stared at the wreckage, the earlier panic over mundane Earthly concerns now replaced by a cold, quiet dread. This was proof. They weren’t just lost passengers in a strange ship. They were potentially not the only visitors.
Carol crouched beside June, peering into the torn hull. Her mind, usually so good at plans and checklists, spun uselessly. She saw the intricate, shattered technology. She smelled the acrid scent of burned circuits and something coppery, like blood.
“This is bad,” Rae stated flatly. “This is incredibly, monumentally bad. We’re naked, we’re lost, and now there’s wreckage from a fight we didn’t see.” She turned on Carol, her blue eyes blazing. “How are you not screaming? How are you just… looking at it?”
Willow nodded, her arms wrapped around her torso. “Yeah, Cap. A little freaking out would be appropriate. A lot of freaking out. I’m currently at a nine out of ten on the internal freak-out meter.”
June stood up, brushing nonexistent dirt from her knees, a nervous habit. “Statistically, our situation has crossed several catastrophic thresholds. Panic is a rational response.”
Even Sky just looked at her, silent, her model-perfect face etched with a fear no yoga breath could fix. They were all waiting. For her to break. For the leader to finally admit that this was not a hiking trip gone sideways.
Carol felt the weight of their stares. She swallowed, her mouth dry. The image of Wonder Woman felt silly now, a child’s costume. But the core of it—the stand-up-and-fight part—that wasn’t a costume.
“Of course I’m freaking out,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. She stood up, turning her back on the wreckage to face them. “My mind is doing backflips. I’m thinking about my mom, my job, whether I left the stove on. I’m thinking about dying in a place no one will ever find.”
She took a breath, looking at each of them. “But we’ve been in tight spots before. That flash flood on the Bright Angel Trail. The bear in the Smokies. This is just…” she gestured vaguely at the artificial sky, the impossible garden, “…a weirder trail. With worse views.”
A strained, almost hysterical laugh escaped Willow. “Worse views? Carol, Jupiter is in the window.”
“I know,” Carol said, a real smile touching her lips. “So the stakes are higher. The adventure is bigger.” She took a step forward. “We can’t fix where we are. We can’t wish the tubes undone. The only thing we can do is the next thing. And right now, the next thing is to move. To find out what this place is, and who, if anyone, is here with us.”
She held out her hand, not sure who would take it. “We move forward. Because sitting here waiting for the next scary thing to find us is how you actually die.”
Rae stared at her hand, then at her face. She shook her head, but a grudging respect softened her scowl. “You’re insane. And you’re right.” She didn’t take the hand, but she moved past Carol, deeper into the garden. “So let’s move. But if we meet a space bear, you’re talking to it.”
The tension broke, not into ease, but into a shared, determined exhale. One by one, they followed Rae, stepping away from the silent, metallic wreck. They moved between the planters, toward a far archway leading out of the greenhouse, their bare feet silent on the path.
It was Sky who heard it first. She froze, head cocked. “Do you hear that?”