Jim's eyes fluttered open. His mind still half asleep all his senses were competing for his attention. There was the sound, piercing, insistent and for the life of him he had no idea what it was, he just knew he wanted it to stop. Lights flashed in front of his eyes, red. They were almost pretty, memories of tearing into wrapping paper danced across his mind for a moment as he watched his breath like a puff of white smoke. There was a terrible taste in his mouth and his tongue clung to his palette, toothbrush, he desperately wanted a toothbrush. He felt cold but was unable to even shiver, something was restraining him. The smell, most visceral of senses brought his mind into sharp focus, the sharp metallic smell of stasis gas. His mind snapped into full awareness. He was not restrained, he was frozen well past the sensation of cold. The siren was a warning. Something was going terribly wrong.
It took about a minute before the capsule finished it's reanimation cycle, commonly referred to among the crew as the "thaw", and opened. Jim tried to run to his station but as he stepped out of the stasis capsule his foot didn't touch the ground. No gravity. He truly hoped this was the only issue, as mission commander, it was his duty to ensure the voyage to Gaia went smoothly for his crew, the 1,500 passengers all in deep stasis, as well as the cargo which included, the passengers' belongings, building materials, seed, and even livestock, also in deep stasis. Seven years from Earth, 56 years from their final destination, if he couldn't fix what was wrong, there was certainly no help coming any time soon. He swallowed hard as he tried to adjust to the lack of gravity. He was alive and there was breathable atmosphere, this was a good start. Once his initial inertia moved him close to a wall he pushed off towards the seat at the engineering station. The Aurora had certainly stopped spinning he knew that without needing to look at the computer interface. Once he strapped himself into the seat and shut off the siren and warning lights he began to scan through a very long list of systems that could be malfunctioning.
A mile long cylinder barreling through the blackness of interstellar space at seven tenths the speed of light, the Aurora was a marvel. The computer systems were online. Computers ran the day to day tasks and every 6 months the crew would be revived from stasis to run diagnostics on every system or, as now, to deal with issues the computers could not. The Kessler Drive was online. It had not been used since the Aurora had attained her maximum speed and it would not be used again until a few years before their arrival at Gaia in order to slow the ship down without the inertia turning everyone on board into a thin paste crushed into the wall. Stasis allowed the human body to resist higher levels of G Force, but only so much. If the drive were to fail, there would be no way to stop the ship other than to hit something with enough mass and that wouldn't be pretty. Of course there were plenty of other things out there to hit. Space was not entirely a void, it was sparsely populated with the detritus of creation. The sensors were online. Early detection and course correction was an absolute necessity. Thrusters were online as well. Of course there were particles out there too small for the sensors to detect in time to move around and Newton's second law was quite firm on what happened when even very small masses were accelerated to very high speed or hit at high speed. At their current cruising speed of just over 210,000 kilometers per second, even a pea sized fragment could destroy the ship. The deflector array was online as were the reactors running it. Without their protection the Aurora's speed would be severely limited. In fact, the only thing keeping the Aurora from reaching higher speeds was the limitations of the deflectors, not the drive which theoretically had only one upper limit, Einstein. He found the issue.
The rotational thrusters had fired. The ship spun for two reasons, the first was to maintain gravity, which made the lives of the crew easier during their waking hours. The second was to generate power. When they arrived at Gaia the rotation would need to be halted to dock with the space elevator to offload passengers and cargo and because weightlessness made moving said cargo off and on the ship a lot easier. The bad news was that without the additional power created by the rotation a lot of the ship's systems would cease to function. The good news was he couldn't do it alone and meant he would need to thaw Sarah. At least she would be awoken from stasis without the lights and screaming alarms. But before he did, he took the time to brush his teeth.
She never wore her coveralls according to company regulations, not that he would ever dream of writing her up for it. Unzipped to the waist she tied the arms around her waist wearing nothing above that but a sports bra. It made Jim's heart race every time he saw her. Groggily she stepped out of the capsule and though she could hear someone saying something she couldn't quite make it out. As she floated across the deck Jim's words started to register.
"Tried to warn you, Sarah, the thrusters malfunctioned, we have no gravity."
She got herself more or less under control and tried moving to her station. Her coordination was still a little off from the thaw and she ended up bumping into the back of Jim's head, breasts first. Which would not have been so terribly awkward had the surprise not made him turn his head around so that he ended up face first in her breasts. And had that not been bad enough, in the struggle to get her back on track his hand ended up firmly on both her breast and her ass. A few awkward apologies and a great deal of blushing later, she had gotten herself strapped to the seat at her station and checked over the systems chewing a stick of gum to take that awful taste out of her mouth. Jim had been right to wake her, this was going to require one person at a terminal and one person outside and neither Craig nor Darren, the other members of the crew, had the training required. There had been more than just a misfire, there had also been a jam in the actuator when the computer tried to override the thruster controls, she would need to get out there and deal with it herself. She unbuckled herself and pushed off towards the EVA suits.
"I guess it's time to stretch my legs."
Jim unbuckled and pushed himself after her to give her a hand. He miscalculated his push and ended up bumping into her. She latched onto him as they drifted from their goal and ricocheted gently off another wall. As they bounced, their arms clinging to each other, their eyes met. The mutual attraction had been there since day one and now it reignited and burned hot and bright. Neither had succumbed to it as it could easily cost them their contracts and they had only ever been awake in the company of Craig and Darren. But nonetheless their eyes softened as they managed to extricate themselves from each other and got to the suits.
Many people felt intense vertigo during an EVA, the immensity of it all could be very daunting. This far from the sun, the light of the Universe was all around her. Though the sun was still the brightest of the trillions upon trillions of bright pin points around her. The beauty of it made her heart race, almost as much as it had five minutes earlier when she had been in Jim's arms for that fleeting moment. She turned on the lights on her suit and turned towards her task. The jam wasn't that bad, really. A few minutes work and it was fixed.
"I think I got it, give it a whirl, Jim."