Blood Impulse

Part 42.1 - THE AUTOPSY

Meloira Sector, Battleship Singularity

The ship's morgue was an unfortunate necessity.

It could never be anything other than that.

It was a drab room. The length of the longest wall was lined with cold storage tubes layered together in a honeycomb pattern. Each tube was large enough for one corpse. Before decomposition could set in, they were laid upon metal trays and slid into the tubes. The cold preserved them as they were, whether that was for investigation or to be prepared for formal burial.

Civilian ships were never designed with such facilities, but military ships required them. Even without the instance of a proper war, military ships saw a fair amount of danger. They were destined to lose crew, even if it was only through police or exploratory work. The Singularity had never been an exception to that. In the last month alone, due in large part to the nuke that had hit the ship in the Kalahari Sector, the Singularity had lost thirty-two crew members. In such cases, the recovered bodies had to be stored somewhere.

The ship's morgue served that morbid purpose, concealing the dead from the eyes of the living, and the deplorable nature of that function showed in all aspects of the room. The lights were more hesitant to turn on, and the air tasted staler than elsewhere on the ship. The room had an inescapable chemical funk, and Admiral Gives had never been certain if that came from the disinfectant sprayed on the storage trays or if it was some strange preservative in the tubes' preservation system. It wasn't the sewer-stench of organic decomposition, but it stifled the air nonetheless.

Walking along the long wall of storage tubes, the Admiral located the active one and undid the latch. All the other tubes were empty. The dead from the nuke had been turned over during the ship's last resupply. He wanted to believe those corpses would be returned to their families or given proper burial, but he doubted Reeter had been so kind. More likely, they had been tossed in the incinerator aboard Base Oceana.

Pulling the storage tube's door open, a small cloud of freezing fog escaped into the air, neither worsening nor alleviating the scent of the room, only adding a physical chill. With his gloved hand, the Admiral reached in, took hold of the storage tray and yanked it back. It slid out along the rails it was mounted on, stopping when the track ran out and the corpse was presented in its entirety.

The Indigo Agent's body had been stripped of his clothes and covered in a white sheet. The clothes had been taken elsewhere for examination and afterward, if their material was deemed fit, would be recycled.

Presented like that, the figure beneath that white sheet could have been anyone. The Admiral tried not to recall just how many bodies he'd seen stored like this – how many he'd come to observe in this very room. They blended together at times. Once the sheet covered them, they looked much the same, but there always exceptions. Brent had been one of them.

Admiral Gives remembered every detail of that corpse. He'd demanded to see it, ordered the sheet to be removed, and spent over an hour memorizing every aspect of Brent's mortal wounds. A crushed and leaking skull, the contents gelatinizing upon the cold storage tray. The purple and green bruising of the abrasions on his neck. Admiral Gives had burned those sights into his memory to convince himself that Brent was well and truly dead.

And he had been.

At least, the Admiral had thought so, but the day's events had called that into question, for there was no doubt in the Admiral's mind who had possessed his body on the bridge. Every bit of that presence, down to his sickening laugh, had been Brent. There was no question of that, only the question of how that was possible.

The ghost had tried to tell him, even warned him that Brent was still here. He had brushed it off, assumed she spoke of trauma. Stars, he felt like an idiot now. He should have listened more closely, paid more attention. The ghost had never recovered from Brent. Her inability to forget what he'd done to her would have made that difficult, but there was more to it than that. He could see that now.