"How come there's already a casket for him?" asked someone.

"That was all worked out before he even arrived," replied the medic. "The intention was to keep a bio-containment casket on standby close to him at all times."

"Seems rather ghoulish."

"No, just good sense. No one wanted him to die, but if he did, we didn't want to lose vital information. And his body is vital information."

Such a comforting thought, but at least it dispelled the slight worry I had that corpses might normally be expelled straight into vacuum.

I guess they subsequently dragged me along through the cagework tube, since the bars would account for the jolts I kept receiving. They then sat me in one of the seats of the lift buggy, which began to ascend at half its previous acceleration. Next I was carried out into a grav section, loaded onto a gurney with squeaky wheels—a strangely primitive mode of transporting a body when you had access to anti-gravity, and perhaps indicative of how they had yet to fully understand the science behind that technology. Numerous crashings and bumpings later, I heard something like a vacuum-sealed door opening, then my gurney came to a halt.

"Do you want him in there?" someone asked.

"No, out of the bag and on the slab," the medic replied.

"Are you going to…you know?" said the first speaker, suffixing his question with a slurping sound. I got a horrible vision of the gesture that had accompanied that sound: one representing the double-handed scooping of offal. Was she now preparing to do an autopsy? I hoped her heart was in good order, since it would need to be sound when I finally sat up and told her to put her scalpels away.

The body bag parted right above me, giving me a view of a white ceiling with pairs of light bars inset—one bar producing white light and the other bacteria-killing ultraviolet. Cold air fingered my face and I felt my eyes starting to water in response. The medic woman leant over to peer down at me, and I very nearly shifted my eyes to look into hers. Until then there had been no twitches or ticks to give me away, but now I felt as if I was rising from a pool, and floating poised just at the surface. I sorely wanted to start my body running again. Perhaps some survival impetus was taking over, for maybe being too long in this state would render me unable to recover from it.

"No, I'll not start cutting him up just yet," said the woman. "Director Gneiss wants to take a look at him first."

"Hardly surprising that," said the other, "Gneiss taking an interest in alien corpses."

Laughter ensued and I listened to footsteps retreating, followed by the thump of a heavy door closing. For a moment I considered allowing my heart to beat normally and allowing my lungs to inhale. However, if this was a bio-containment area there might be sensors operating. I decided to bide my time and considered the fortuitousness of Director Gneiss coming to see me here, and meanwhile puzzled out how best to take advantage of the situation.

We had failed to cause the containment breach that would have instigated the ejection protocol. Alone I would never be able to gain admittance to any of the Ozark Cylinders, and I doubted that Yishna, having just seen her brother die and herself taken a hit in the shoulder, would be of any help right now, even if I could track her down aboard this huge station. Should I give it all up? No. What other routes could I try? I could try to convince Director Gneiss that the Worm was ultimately responsible for the present conflict, and ejecting it to awaiting destruction would bring an end to that conflict. Despite the fact that I was dead, my face twisted in a sneer, for I wasn't entirely sure I believed my own reasoning. The offspring of Elsever Strone had believed, because they could feel the Worm inside their heads. I'm certain that Duras only partially believed, and that his reasoning, in allowing us to come up here on this half-baked mission, was that if the Polity Consul Assessor did something outrageous, that would raise the bargaining position of Sudoria when it came to future negotiations with the Polity. There was also the chance that I might be right, of course—a secondary consideration. From everything I understood about the man, Director Gneiss would believe absolutely nothing unless it was backed up by cold empirical fact. It was an admirable trait, but one I could do without him possessing now.

Time passed, though I don't know how much. I wondered if the human body clock was some kind of biological mechanism that counted the beats of the heart, and therefore in me had ceased to work properly because it had nothing to count, for my sense of time passing now seemed quite hazy. Eventually I heard the thump of the vacuum-sealed door opening.

"You may return to your duties," said an implacably stern voice.

The door closed and I thought I was alone again, until I heard a sigh followed by the slow approach of footsteps.

Cold empirical fact?

I sat bolt upright, my hand snaking under my foamite top, then emerging to offer Gneiss a cold empirical fact in the form of the handgun Duras had given me. I didn't suppose anyone would get in trouble over my having retained it, since checking to see if a corpse is still armed might be considered rather anal.

"You are now going to apply one of your Emergency Ozark Protocols," I informed the Director.

He gazed at me with his weird eyes, then smiled a disconcertingly crazy smile.

Harald

He ran the display a couple of times, and felt a deep disquiet. The Brumallian ship must be the same one he had sent Captain Lambrack to destroy. Harald had received brief reports of contact and weapons fire, but nothing subsequently from Lambrack, who had disobeyed the order to destroy the launch site on Brumal and continued out into the system. Lambrack must have missed this ship, or more likely simply allowed it to go past unharmed. Somehow it then managed to reach the surface of Sudoria, where some Fleet spies reported Chairman Duras going aboard with security personnel, then departing a few hours later. Whereupon this ship launched from the planet's surface, and approached Corisanthe Main, where an interstation shuttle left it to dock with the station itself. The ship had since disappeared, and Harald could only suppose it now lay within one of the blind spots of Fleet coverage. Why was it here and, most importantly, would it have any effect on his plans?

Harald shut off the display and sat back for a moment. The appearance of this Brumallian ship should not have any effect on his original plans, since what happened next was all about firepower. He decided to dismiss the intruder from his consideration, and returned his attention to their present situation.

Because the technology was so risky to use, Fleet did not run many tests of its gravity disruptors. The last such test Harald remembered was when he had been a mere apprentice in the Engine Galleries. But, then, maybe there had been other tests the memory of which the bullet had scoured from his mind.

Readying the gravity disruptor for firing also created all sorts of strange effects throughout the ship. Infra-sound and ultrasound spikes directly affected mood, so mock tests were conducted, producing similar sounds, and crew were instructed to practise interacting with each other without any emotional input. What these mock tests could not duplicate, however, was the sounds the ship made as huge forces began to distort the very fabric of space around it, and as the gravitic effects of that distortion began to twist and stretch the ship itself like a piece of bread dough.

Numerous alarms began sounding, until an officer managed to shut them down, thereafter tracking the breaches and breaks on an electronic flow chart, and delivering instructions on what to do about them to the maintenance crews via his com helmet. Internal lights dimmed and in some places went out completely to be replaced by low-energy emergency lighting.