Carson blinked and stumbled out of the cryo pod, waiting for his vision to unblur so he could check the readout. Normally, he'd just get to sleep all the way through the journey back to earth, but this trip was going to be anything but normal. They'd been on the usual sort of survey mission, taking soil and air samples from some distant planet that might be close enough to livable that some miserable group of settlers could try and start up a colony in a few hundred years, when Davis stumbled onto it.
Nobody was really sure what "it" was exactly, but it definitely wasn't a rock. Carson would love to have said they'd tried every test they had to identify what it was, but frankly nobody'd wanted to risk damaging it to try and scrape a piece of it off. They'd just carefully loaded it into a padded crate in the cargo bay, set the ship's computer to monitor what conditions it could, and wake everyone if any of the readings had any sort of sudden spike.
The problem was, there was a sudden spike damn near every day. Sometimes it would vibrate, sometimes it would glow, once it even started making an odd low humming sound, that had given everyone a good scare. This far out though, they couldn't afford to spend the whole trip out of cryo, so they'd been turning down the paranoia of their monitoring system step by step. Right now, it took a much bigger spike, and would only wake one person at a time, in round robin fashion. First Davis, then Rogers, Carson, Kim, Schultz, and O'Neil before looping back around. It wasn't too bad a system, Carson hadn't been woken up for a good 14 months before this.
Checking the readings as he did a few stretches, he saw that this time it was a huge temperature spike. Not enough to worry about damage to the ship, at least not yet, but enough for him to grab an extinguisher just in case. Not bothering to properly suit up, he headed down the hall, unlocked the door, and gritted his teeth.