Intrepid

Emergency

Time, for all intents and purposes, only existed on the other side of the glass.

This period of stasis had been the strangest he'd ever experienced - if for no reason other than his awareness of it at all. But reasons were ample.

An unending miasma of preternatural screams and distant, vague weapons fire had flooded his senses in ebbs and tides, echoing the discord they had been privy to for the Admiral's brief but frightened announcement and perching upon him, refusing to dissipate. Plasma, burning flesh, the acrid stench of sizzling metal raked at his nose, stung his eyes as gunfire roared on, the sea of agonised howls continuing ceaselessly throughout. Those noises, those smells, tenuous and shapeless, were a mere backdrop to the tightening of his throat, the pounding in his veins - panic, he knew panic when he felt it, heightened by the fact that he could not move an inch.

This wasn't his first rodeo; he knew how stasis was supposed to be. In truth it was far closer to sedation than sleep, time flashing by in an imperceptible, dreamless instant until the reanimation sequence was inevitably fired - by machine or by hand, it made no difference to the mundane, routine procedure. And yet here he was, so minimally conscious that it wouldn't have registered more than a peep on the monitors, but conscious nonetheless, and able to, apparently, dream .

Dream, perhaps, was the wrong word for the endless, looping, eternal phantasm his nearly-but-not-quite unconscious mind had been subjected to.

Limbless, perpetually dazed, his mind was unable to quantify exactly what the apparitions swirling about in terrifying shrieks were; the juxtaposition of their forms, oscillating between huge and black and sharp, and soft and translucent and small, made little sense.

Sense was a process of minds far more awake than his. Rather, the cognitive dissonance simply lingered, unabated, in consciousness' absence, swirling about his being relentlessly, eternally, until, until ...

There had never been a time where the reanimation sequence beginning had come with such a profound sense of relief .

That sequence, he knew, took little time at all; but when subjected to it, as time itself seeped through the glass and regained meaning, as frayed ends in the infinite, looping thrum of unconscious thought finally tore free, those scant moments between arousal from near-death and one's boots touching the deck outside felt like forever.

Perhaps, he reasoned - as much as he could, in his present state - those thoughts had been looping in those moments alone, and supposedly thrashing about in a dream-state for the duration of his time in stasis was a figment of his imagination, spurred on by the circumstances by which he had arrived here in the first place.

A familiar cold rush erupted along the length of his spine, akin to liquid nitrogen, from the pit of his stomach to his extremities, wrenching his dazed mind from the deep and flooding it in its icy grasp. There was never a time it had been an enjoyable sensation, lingering somewhere between plunging into a bitterly cold lake and the sort of searing panic that ripped the breath from one's lungs. Such was the function of adrenaline, he knew. It was a necessary - no, critical - part of the procedure, but it didn't mean he had to like the way it awakened the mind and body alike with instantaneous, brutal effectiveness, flooding the mind with the clarity required to fly into whatever situation had presented itself on the Bridge as the jitters from the rush gradually faded.

Yes, this period in stasis had been strange, indeed.

There was nothing clear about his current mental state at all. As the reanimation sequence completed, the unit's piping breaking away from his suit and releasing the godforsaken mask over his nose and mouth, there were only two things filling his dazed mind; one was the relentless, dull pounding of a cracker of a headache. The last time he'd experienced one quite like this, he had been sunburnt and dehydrated beyond belief; as far as he knew, the stasis unit was supposed to prevent exactly this. Why did he feel so fucking dry ?