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from somewhere… it’s hard to tell, when you don’t seem to have a
body… ) You can see that by her culpable inattention to duty, and
inexcusably laggard performance of her Captain’s last command to Engage Drive,
Lieutenant Kirrah Roehl is personally responsible for the loss of her ship with
all hands.
    Audio, we’ve only got audio,
where’s the damned video feed?
    So, what was it got them, then?
(asked a different, more kindly voice, not unlike her Aunt Risa’s)
    …objection, immaterial! They’re all
dead! Next witness! ( Geez, that first voice was familiar too… and where was
the damned video! Ahh, there we are…
    Pictures: slowmo, so painfully
slow. The kinder voice again: Look, Kirrah, there’s the rip actually opening in
the floor of the bridge, see: you really can see the planet between your
knees. No, there’s no time to see the other crew, these memories are limited to
where you happened to be looking at the time. But there, and there; see the
bright red flecks in the air, just part of the general debris sucking out the
massive rent in the hull; a stylus, spinning lazily end over end; pieces of
cabling; dust, tsk tsk, who would have thought there was so much dust ; a
food wrapper someone lost a month ago; yes dear, that is someone’s hand and
part of their forearm, not Doris’s, judging by its light color; another stylus;
a whole intact First Aid kit (we won’t be needing that here, now will we?); a
wristcomp, trailing something red and stringy; two empty caffi bulbs;
unidentified bits of optronics, so bright and glittery; along with all the air,
all the sweet, people-smelling, lunch-aroma-lingering, warm, homey air - look,
you can see crystals forming already as it hits hard vacuum, so cold; and one
last bit of flotsam cast into the unending dark, that’s you, my dear…
    Me? what?
    More? You want more? I suppose
there’s no harm in that, we’ve got the time. It’s a joke, dear… a little humor.
Ok, let's run the next memory, there’s about a second and a half missing, you
did hit your head rather hard on the coaming as you went out. That’s all right,
don’t feel badly… ahh, here we are…
    Pictures: slowmo again, and an
intense itch on her forehead; blackness swimming out of a dark red haze, a
blackness with stars in it… space: raw, naked space, 11,000 kilometers give or
take, over the polar ice cap of her beautiful new planet... the feeling of
tears with that thought, but no actual tears, nothing seems to be there,
no body. Swinging slowly, left to right, the ship comes into view. Not the
ship, surely, the ship was …smoother, yes, definitely smoother than that jumble
of metal and, and … things . Oh God, and there’s the drive collar, what’s
left of it, around the bow, and there’s the port gravitics array, where’s the
starboard one… guhhh! There is no starboard side, just a massive
rent, hullmetal peeled back like a food wrapper, you can see right into the Rec
room, heeheehee the wreck room, the … Turn it off! Please TURN IT OFF!
There are… things, floating in the ripped-open Rec room, things that
brought me my last lunch, things that I played Chess with last offshift,
that I…
    I know, dear, this is hard. Just a
few seconds more…
    …objection! (that male voice
again!) The Accused is the cause of all of this, for every single person on
that ship! Let her watch it all!
    That is acceptable. Kirrah, dear,
just a few seconds more, we must do this, please, I’ll be right beside you…
    Pictures: so slow, more like
freezeframe, one terrible image after another: the slowly spreading debris
field; then a sudden, impossibly intense flare of light, its source behind her;
every bit of debris flaring a saturated, painfully brilliant solid white,
razor-sharp against the utter blackness; a voice, faint and familiar,
whispering in savage triumph: “ Got the sonnofabitch!”   …Sammy? Was that you?
    Where…
    Fading now, the images shrinking,
no, her field of view shrinking,