Hiro reached in and grabbed Paul by the wrist and pulled him and his fluid cage free.
“Okay, only five of us were out,” Maria said, floating down. “That cuts the synth-amneo down by around four hundred gallons. Not a huge improvement. There’s still a lot of crap flying around. You’re not likely to get evidence from anything except the bodies themselves.” She held the knife out to Wolfgang, gripping the edge of the handle with her thumb and forefinger. “And possibly the murder weapon.”
He looked around, and Maria realized he was searching for something with which to take the knife. “I’ve already contaminated it with my hands, Wolfgang. It’s been floating among blood and dead bodies. The only thing we’ll get out of it is that it probably killed us all.”
“We need to get IAN back online,” Katrina said. “Get the grav drive back on. Find the other two bodies. Check on the cargo. Then we will fully know our situation.”
Hiro whacked Paul smartly on the back, and the man doubled over and retched, sobbing. Wolfgang watched with disdain as Paul bounced off the wall with no obvious awareness of his surroundings.
“Once we get IAN back online, we’ll have him secure a channel to Earth,” Katrina said.
“My speech functions are inaccessible,” the computer repeated. The captain gritted her teeth.
“That’s going to be tough, Captain,” Joanna said. “These bodies show considerable age, indicating we’ve been in space for much longer than our mindmaps are telling us.”
Katrina rubbed her forehead, closing her eyes. She was silent, then opened her eyes and began typing things into the terminal. “Get Paul moving, we need him.”
Hiro stared helplessly as Paul continued to sob, curled into a little drifting ball, still trying to hide his privates.
A ball of vomit—not the synth-amneo expelled from the bodies, but actual stomach contents—floated toward the air intake vent and was sucked into the filter. Maria knew that after they took care of all of the captain’s priorities, she would still be stuck with the job of changing the air filters, and probably crawling through the ship’s vents to clean all of the bodily fluids out before they started to become a biohazard. Suddenly a maintenance-slash-junior-engineer position on an important starship didn’t seem so glamorous.
“I think Paul will feel better with some clothes,” Joanna said, looking at him with pity.
“Yeah, clothes sound good,” Hiro said. They were all naked, their skin rising in goose bumps. “Possibly a shower while we’re at it.”
“I will need my crutches or a chair,” Joanna said. “Unless we want to keep the grav drive off.”
“Stop it,” Katrina said. “The murderer could still be on the ship and you’re talking about clothes and showers?”
Wolfgang waved a hand to dismiss her concern. “No, clearly the murderer died in the fight. We are the only six aboard the ship.”
“You can’t know that,” de la Cruz said. “What’s happened in the past several decades? We need to be cautious. No one goes anywhere alone. Everyone in twos. Maria, you and Hiro get the doctor’s crutches from the medbay. She’ll want them when the grav drive gets turned back on.”
“I can just take the prosthetics off that body,” Joanna said, pointing upward. “It won’t need them anymore.”
“That’s evidence,” Wolfgang said, steadying his own floating corpse to study the stab wounds. He fixated on the bubbles of gore still attached to his chest. “Captain?”
“Fine, get jumpsuits, get the doctor a chair or something, and check on the grav drive,” Katrina said. “The rest of us will work. Wolfgang, you and I will get the bodies tethered together. We don’t want them to sustain more damage when the grav drive comes back online.”
On the way out, Maria paused to check on her own body, which she hadn’t really examined before. It seemed too gruesome to look into your own dead face. The body was strapped to a seat at one of the terminals, drifting gently against the tether. A large bubble of blood drifted from the back of her neck, where she had clearly been stabbed. Her lips were white and her skin was a sickly shade of green. She now knew where the floating vomit had come from.
“It looks like I was the one who hit the resurrection switch,” she said to Hiro, pointing to her body.
“Good thing too,” Hiro said. He looked at the captain, conversing closely with Wolfgang. “I wouldn’t expect a medal anytime soon, though. She’s not looking like she’s in the mood.”
The resurrection switch was a fail-safe button. If all of the clones on the ship died at once, a statistical improbability, then the AI should have been able to wake up the next clones. If the ship failed to do so, an even higher statistical improbability, then a physical switch in the cloning bay could carry out the job, provided there was someone alive enough to push it.
Like the others, Maria’s body showed age. Her middle had softened and her hands floating above the terminal were thin and spotted. She had been the physical age of thirty-nine when they had boarded.
“I gave you an order,” Katrina said. “And Dr. Glass, it looks like talking our engineer down will fall to you. Do it quickly, or else he’s going to need another new body when I’m through with him.”
Hiro and Maria got moving before the captain could detail what she was going to do to them. Although, Maria reflected, it would be hard to top what they had just apparently been through.
Maria remembered the ship as shinier and brighter: metallic and smooth, with handholds along the wall for low-gravity situations and thin metal grates making up the floor, revealing a subfloor of storage compartments and vents. Now it was duller, another indication that decades of spaceflight had changed the ship as it had changed the crew. It was darker, a few lights missing, illuminated by the yellow lights of an alert. Someone—probably the captain—had commanded an alert.
Some of the previous times, Maria had died in a controlled environment. She had been in bed after illness, age, or, once, injury. The helpful techs had created a final mindmap of her brain, and she had been euthanized after signing a form permitting it. A doctor had approved it, the body was disposed of neatly, and she had woken up young, pain-free, with all her memories of all her lives thus far.
Some other times hadn’t been as gentle, but still were a better experience than this.
Having her body still hanging around, blood and vomit everywhere, offended her on a level she hadn’t thought possible. Once you were gone, the body meant nothing, had no sentimental value. The future body was all that mattered. The past shouldn’t be there, staring you in the face with dead eyes. She shuddered.
“When the engines get running again, it’ll warm up,” Hiro said helpfully, mistaking the reason for her shiver.
They reached a junction, and she led the way left. “Decades, Hiro. We’ve been out here for decades. What happened to our mindmaps?”