Her XO shrugged. Stephen was a big man, and his default expression was doleful, so he tended to resemble a depressed mountain. “She’s frozen. We’ll see what happens when we thaw her out.” He activated something on the panel, and they both stood back as the cryopod rumbled, the lid sliding down and icy vapor pouring out in a condensing plume of fog.

“The system should be warming her up now.” Stephen seldom sounded excited, and he was hardly vibrating with enthusiasm now, but he did sound interested: for him, that was the equivalent of jumping up and down with glee. “These cryogenic procedures are barbaric – they’re on par with bloodletting and trepanation, medically speaking – but from what I’ve read, after she’s returned to a reasonable temperature, her heart will be jumpstarted with electricity or adrenaline or both. Apparently the initial reaction can be quite dramatic–”

The sleeper screamed and jolted upright, clouds of vapor eddying around her. Some collection of straps and restraints around her waist and legs kept her from floating up out of the pod, but her upper body was free. She stared around, eyes wide, then reached out, grasping Callie’s gloved hands in her bare ones, and pulled the captain close.

“First contact!” she shouted, loud enough to make Callie turn her head away. “We made first contact! I had to come back, to tell everyone, to warn you, humanity is not alone–” She stopped talking, her mouth snapping shut, and then her eyes rolled up and her body sagged.

Callie squeezed the woman’s unresponsive hands. “Is she dead?”

Stephen floated closer, removed his gloves, and touched the woman’s throat. “No, there’s a pulse. The jolt that started her heart shocked her into consciousness, but it wasn’t enough to keep her awake. There are a lot of drugs in her system. Some were keeping her healthy while she was in hibernation, and some are trying to bring her metabolism and other systems back up to baseline. She’s going to be sluggish for a while. I’ll examine her more thoroughly back on the White Raven, but I don’t see any immediate cause for concern.” He paused. “For someone born in the twenty-second century, she’s doing quite well.”

Callie let go of the woman’s hands and pushed herself away from the pod to float near the center of the room, considering.

“So.” Stephen peeled back the sleeper’s lids and shone a light into her eyes. “After she wakes up, do you want to tell her we’ve known about the aliens for three hundred years, and her first contact bombshell is old news?”

Chapter Two

Callie sighed. “You think she’s stable enough to move to the Raven?”