Waking From Stasis Teaser

Primordial — teaser for the Next Episode

INTERSTELLAR SPACE… 2 NOVEMBER 2121… 05:39 SHIP-TIME…

The thermal pads thawing Joe Mercer out triggered a childhood memory of the cramped Displaced Persons camp after The Cascade, and being pressed too long against the searing metal of the ancient radiator - hot enough to blister skin - as the sergeant crushed little seven-year-old Joe against it, demanding he confess to a petty crime. It was among many scenes his waking mind usually suppressed. And in the acute mental confusion that accompanied emergence from hypersleep, Joe thought he was back there. A stasis pod is a tight, confined space. When he tried in his delirium to move, something tugged on his skin, something that hung from a vein, and perhaps it was this that snapped his attention to the present. Made him peer out through the tiny fogged up pod window into the sterile room beyond, and the shield-door marked with a wing above a sea of stars. Emblem of the Space Service, or ‘Double-S’. This was all inside of six seconds of disorientation before Joe remembered where he was—in the stasis chamber on board Starchaser.