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Usually, you’d stick around to see if anyone else in your bay was being woken up. Standard operating procedure was for multiple personnel to be woken up at the same time, so that the associated support staff and medical personnel only had to be stood up once. And to go alongside that, it was also standard procedure for personnel exiting cryosleep to check on each other to make sure that nobody choked on the bronchial surfactant that covered the respiratory system. But you decide to make haste for the head for a couple of reasons.
The first of which being that you felt like absolute shit. Waking up from the deep freeze is never a pleasant experience, with the combination of chemicals and unthawed frost binding your skin to the point that if felt as if you were wearing a shirt a couple of sizes too small. And a mild reaction to some sedatives left you feeling groggy. But on top of that, your right side and left forearm were burning up. You’d been wounded in both places during your last ground-side excursion, the former by a near-miss from an energy sword and the latter due to a jackal shield gauntlet overloading. And while both had been treated to the best of the UNSC’s capabilities, the doctors had warned you that the process of thawing out could be painful. Something about rapid changes in internal body temperature agitating the nerve endings. Hell, that was part of the reason why your XO had stayed out of cryo, her wounds had been surprisingly worse than yours.
But more importantly, you knew for a fact that you were the only person being brought out of cryosleep right now. Courtesy of your neural interface module. The cybernetic implant wired directly into your gray matter, allowing for a direct feed of information right into your mind. Right now, the ship’s AI -Diana- was feeding you information as your mind bounced between subjects. It was how you knew that nobody else was waking up with you, even though your head was still spinning and your eyesight was still a bit blurry. It’s how you knew where the head and locker room was even though you’d only seen them once before getting fridged a few months ago.
It’s also how you knew what was being served in the cafeteria a few seconds before your stomach decided to make a sound somewhere between a backfiring engine and a dying whale.
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