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Starchaser
Date: 10/18/2014, Categories: Fantasy & Sci-Fi, Author: spectreofhell, Rating: 0, Source: LushStories
It was a going away party. There were words to be said, things to be done. Some things to be undone, if possible. The next day, they would be gone, and only God, if He existed, knew when, or even if, they would ever return. Captain Marco Kensington woke slowly. Very slowly. The computer monitoring his vitals was careful. Precise amounts of stimulants were being fed into him at calculated intervals. He rose from the nothingness of suspended animation into a fog of barely conceivable reality. They had warned him about the sensation of dislocation. He had experienced it before in the trials, but those had been days, sometimes weeks in the state they called hypersleep. This time, eleven years would have passed. If nothing had gone wrong. If the hull had not been breached, if radiation had not damaged the computer despite the thick shielding, if no one at the ESA had goofed the math and put them off target. Marco would wake, he would rise from his chilly coffin, he would exercise and eat and be tested by the computer to make sure he retained cognitive function, and then he would go to the command module. He would open the shutters. He would gaze out upon a new world and a new sun. Maybe. He wasn't confident anymore. They said he would not dream, but memories tugged at him. Events that could not have happened. Which was real? Making love to his best friend's wife on the eve of departure or the fantasy that he was an astronaut, the commander of the first ever interstellar mission? ...