#infernoxstart

Though she sits on her bed, Lo has not actually been able to sleep since it happened. She is running on fumes. The creature is still loose, but they have more information. It seems impervious to most things: It caught fire, but was not killed. It spat out bullets. Tranquilizers had no effect. It grows rapidly. She is borderline talking to herself, just low murmurs, when she notices someone come in. “We’ve got one soldier in medical who looks like she stayed too long on the grill,” Lo grumbles, and then her tone drops lower, “and a casualty.” She repeats this in disbelief. She repeats this to process it. 

She runs a hand roughly across her face, letting herself hide behind it a moment. The stress of space is sinking in. Someone has died because of her decision — her research. It was her order. Incubate the specimen. Her heart feels like it has stalled in her chest. She’s trying to be better about breathing, but it’s hard, and so she stops to take a few deep ones. In and out. In and out. Then she turns to the person beside her. “How are you holding up?”

Renzo furiously scrubbed his hands beneath the running water. While his skin never made any actual contact with the dead body, nor the eggs that sprouted from its decapitated head, he couldn’t get the sensation of what they felt like out of his head. It was a nervous habit, if anything. 

“This isn’t the way that we need to be researching this area!” He muttered to himself, mostly, but at the presence of someone else joining him in the small quarters, his voice became louder. “If anyone had bothered to listen to me, we wouldn’t have an alien carcass on board with us. Killing an innocent creature isn’t okay!”

Where: The ship’s galley/mess hall

Open to all

Four years, fourteen hundred days, and over thirty three thousand hours. Back on Earth to ensure her fitness for expedition she'd gone through small periods of time under cryosleep with her functions, especially her heart, closely monitored after stimulus. Those trial runs had done little to prepare her from the reality of this. The restive edge of her muscles coming out from hibernation, her nerves sparking at random intervals as they remembered their purpose. She'd felt sick for the first twelve hours, then ravenous, and finally seemed to settle down her digestive tract. She'd read up on all the proper journals about the side effects of prolonged cryosleep but there was nothing logical or scientific about getting reacquainted with your body.

She didn't sleep the first night. She actually spent most of it in her laboratory checking in on the long term experiments that had been running while she was asleep. The ships telescopes had been scanning passing star systems throughout the journey checking for habitable planets and moons and collecting data that she could sort and relay back to the company. Her own speciality on nanorobotic technology had been left to gestate over these years. She'd been trying to create targeted drug systems that would recognize and attack cancer the moment it developed. There was also, of course, the backlog of data coming in for Gaia. Increasingly more intricate analysis of it's atmosphere, density, and circumference. Her next two weeks would be anything but restful.

Eventually she'd found tired her body out but not her mind. She'd come to the galley, still unprepared to fall asleep and set on a pot of coffee. She was just taking her first sips when one of the other crew members stepped in. Apparently she wasn't the only insomniac on board. "You know for all the billions of dollars this ship cost, you'd think they'd have thought to get us better coffee."

Sitting with their legs crossed on the couch, drinking an apple juicebox, Blue pondered about the first exploration team to leave the ship. Things hadn’t gone exactly well for them but some positives had to be taken into consideration: no one had gotten killed or seriously injured and research was ready to begin. It wasn’t much but it was something, it was the beginning of the mission they had been sent to do, a glimmer of hope for humanity or something. 

Still, it bothers them. Having to stay behind and hearing how things went keeps them thinking of the things they could’ve done if they had been there. Like preventing an animal from getting. Humans? Blue wouldn’t have minded much but the poor alien had done nothing wrong. It deserved to live. Next time, however, they would go and they would make sure to show the team how to deal with animals without using deadly force. 

But that was the future, they’d have time to think about that later. There would be other missions, other times to shine. They took another sip of their juice, finally coming back to the present, looking at the person that had just walked in. 

“Any news on what the next step is?”

There had been a training manual tucked along with the  excessively long legal documents that required his signature. A manual about cryosleep and aftereffects that he’d neglected to read. The basics of it, he’d assumed was that it was a bitch. He hadn’t been wrong. The pretty doctor on board had checked him out thoroughly, but when he’d been deemed fit he didn’t follow her directions. Fluids, rest, bland diet. Screw that he was collecting the cigarettes he’d stashed. 

They weren’t exactly something he’d gotten permission to bring aboard but the company didn’t expect him to be spending any of the next eight years actually awake and in need of them. He pulled them from his stash, took a seat in the common area, dangled them from his fingers, and got up to speed.  “maldito infierno”