“No, just some minor cognitive impairments.” Doctor Oh was watchful and serious, and seemed very self-contained. Callie felt that sparkle again, a throb in her solar plexus, a tightness in her chest, the desire to say oh oh oh. She resolved to ignore the attraction. They’d been cooped up on the Raven too long, doing speed-runs to the Jovian Imperative and back, and Elena was the first person other than her crew and Europan dock workers she’d seen in weeks. What she felt was just the lust of deprivation. And perhaps a touch of space madness.

Stephen peered into Doctor Oh’s face. “What sort of impairments?”

“Loss of continuity of memory, mainly. It’s a known side-effect of the emergence from cryosleep.”

Stephen grunted. “Your mind can’t be too badly scrambled if you remember that much. Your pod was damaged, drawing insufficient power, so it didn’t complete the wake-up procedure properly. Our chemical printers are synthesizing the recovery drugs you’ll need. When you’re ready, we’ll go to the medical suite and administer them. That should help any sense of fragmentation.”

“Would you like to wait until you’ve recovered more to talk about… everything… Doctor Oh?” Callie said. Curiosity was burning a hole through her like a welding torch through a bulkhead, but Callie could be patient when she bothered to try.

“Call me Elena,” the sleeper said. “No, I… It’s good to hear human voices. It’s been a long time.”

“Well, excuse me,” the computer said, in a mock-miffed tone.

Elena, Elena, Elena, Callie thought. Oh, Oh, Oh. “Elena, then. I’m Callie. I assume the computer filled you in on the situation? We can answer any questions you have – or try to, anyway. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“Mmm… I haven’t had a cup of coffee in five hundred years.” A fleeting look of bleakness crossed Elena’s face. “Do people still drink coffee? It hasn’t gone extinct, or anything?”

“It did, briefly, a few hundred years ago. There was a blight. But we’ve gotten pretty good at bringing extinct things back.” That was mostly thanks to Liar technology, but Callie wasn’t ready to broach that topic yet. “We’ve got some brewed now, actually. Do you take it black?”

“That would be wonderful.” Elena slipped into one of the chairs, a modular seat attached to the floor that could lock in place or fold down out of the way, as needed.

Callie liked Elena’s voice. Her accent was unlike any Callie had heard before –and she’d spoken to people from Earth, the Jovian Imperative, the valleys of Mars, and dozens of stations and colony worlds in this solar system and beyond the twenty-nine bridges. There was an odd formality to Elena’s tone, too, but that could all be explained by the linguistic drift of centuries. Callie found it charming, and was annoyed with herself for being charmed.