disposed of them, mopped the drips with a sonic scrubber and antiseptic, and turned to the sink to scrub her hands with violent thoroughness.
Quinn nodded toward the big green cartons. 'Can I help you get these out of the way?' she asked brightly.
'There was absolutely no point in bringing them down ahead of schedule, ' said the ecotech. 'I have an interment scheduled in five minutes, and the degrader is programmed to break down all the way to simple organics and vent to Hydroponics. It will just have to wait. You can take yourselves off and tell Dale Zeeman—' she broke off as the door slid open.
Half a dozen somber Stationers followed a covered float pallet through the door. Quinn motioned Ethan silently to an inconspicuous seat on their own float pallet as the procession entered the chamber. Ecotech Helda hastily straightened her uniform and composed her features to an expression of grave sympathy.
The Stationers gathered around while one of them intoned a few platitudes. Death was a great leveler, it seemed. The turns of phrase were different, but the sense would have passed at an Athosian funeral, Ethan thought. Maybe galactics weren't so wildly different after all…
'Do you wish a final view of the deceased?' Helda inquired of them.
They shook their heads, a middle-aged man among them remarking, 'Ye gods, the funeral was enough.' He was shushed by a middle-aged woman beside him.
'Do you wish to stay for the interment?' asked Helda, formally and unpressingly.
'Absolutely not,' said the middle-aged man. At a look of embarrassed disapproval from his female companion, he added firmly, 'I saw Grandpa through five replacement operations. I did my bit when he was alive. Watching him get ground up to feed the flowers won't add a thing to my karma, love.'
The family filed out, and the ecotech returned to her original aggressively businesslike demeanor. She stripped the corpse—it was an exceedingly ancient man—and took the clothes to the corridor, where presumably someone had lingered to collect them. Returning, she checked a data file, donned gloves and gown, wrinkled her lip, and attacked the deceased with a vibra-knife. Ethan watched with a professional fascination as a dozen mechanical replacement parts clanked into a tray—a heart, several tubes, bone pins, a hip joint, a kidney. The tray was taken to a washer, and the body to the strange machine at the end of the room.
Helda unsealed a large hatch and swung it down, and shifted the body on its catch basin onto it. She clamped the catch basin to the inner side, swung it up—there was a muffled thump from within—and resealed it. The ecotech pressed a few buttons, lights lit, and the machine whined and hissed and grunted with a demure even rhythm that suggested normal operation.
While Helda was occupied in the other end of the room, Ethan risked a whisper. 'What's happening in there?'
'Breaking the body down to its components and returning the biomass to the Station ecosystem,' Quinn whispered back. 'Most clean animal mass—like the newts—is just broken down into higher organics and fed to the protein culture vats—that's where we grow steak meat, and chicken and such for human consumption—but there's a sort of prejudice against disposing of human bodies that way. Smacks of cannibalism, I guess. And so that your next kilo cube of pork doesn't remind you too much of your late Uncle Neddie, the humans get broken down much finer and fed to the plants instead. A purely aesthetic choice—it all goes round and round in the end—logically, it doesn't make any difference.'
His carrot had turned to lead in his stomach. 'You're going to let them put Okita—'
'Maybe I'll turn vegetarian for the next month,' she whispered. 'Sh.'
Helda glanced irritably at them. 'What are you hanging about for?' She focused on Ethan. 'Have you no work to do?'
Quinn smiled blandly, and rapped the green cartons. 'I need my float pallet.'
'Oh,' said the ecotech. She sniffed, hitched up one sharp, bony shoulder, and turned away to tap a new code into the degrader's control panel. Stamping back with a hand tractor, she lifted the top carton and locked it into position on the hatch. It flipped up; there was a slithery rumble from within the machine. The hatch flopped down again, and the first carton was replaced by the second. Then the third. Ethan held his breath.
The third carton emptied with a startling thump.
'What the hell… ?' muttered the ecotech, and reached for the seals. Commander Quinn turned white, her fingers twitching over her empty stunner holster.
'Look, is that a cockroach?' cried Ethan loudly in what he prayed might pass for a Stationer accent.
Helda whirled. 'Where?'
Ethan pointed to a corner of the room away from the degrader. Both the ecotech and the commander went to inspect. Helda got down on her hands and knees and ran a finger worriedly along a seam between floor and wall. 'Are you sure?' she said.
'Just a movement,' he murmured, 'in the corner of my eye…'
She frowned fiercely at him. 'More like a damned hangover in the corner of your eye. Slovenly muscle- brain.'
Ethan shrugged helplessly.
'Better call Infestation Control anyway,' she muttered. She hit the start button on the degrader on her way to the comconsole, and jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. 'Out.'
They complied immediately. Floating down the corridor Commander Quinn said, 'My gods, Doctor, that was inspired. Or—you didn't really see a roach, did you?'
'No, it was just the first thing that popped into my head. She seemed like the sort of person who is bothered by bugs.'
'Ah.' Her eyes crinkled in amused approval.
He paused. 'Do you have a roach problem here?'
'Not if we can help it. Among other things, they've been known to eat the insulation off electrical wiring. You think about fire on a space station a bit, and you'll see why you got her attention.'
She checked her chronometer. 'Ye gods, we've got to get this float pallet and canister back to Docking Bay 32. Newts, newts, who will buy my newts … ? Ah ha, the very thing.'
She made a sharp right turn into a cross corridor, nearly dumping Ethan, and speeded up. After a moment she brought the pallet to a halt before a door marked 'Cold Storage Access 297-C.'
Inside they found a counter, and a plump, bored-looking young woman on duty eating little fried morsels of something from a bag.
'I'd like to rent a vacuum storage locker,' Quinn announced.
'This is for Stationers, ma'am,' the counter girl began, after a hungry, wistful look at the mercenary woman's face. 'If you go up to Transients' Lounge, you can get—'
Quinn slapped an ID down on the counter. 'A cubic meter will do, and I want it in removable plastic. Clean plastic, mind you.'
The counter girl glanced at the ID. 'Ah. Oh.' She shuffled off, and returned a few minutes later with a big plastic-lined case.
The mercenary woman signed and thumbprinted, and turned to Ethan. 'Let's lay them in nicely, eh? Impress the cook, when he thaws 'em out.'
They packed the newts in neat rows. The counter girl, looking on, wrinkled her nose, then shrugged and returned to her comconsole where the holovid was displaying something that looked suspiciously more like play than work.
They were just in time, Ethan gauged; some of their amphibian victims were beginning to twitch. He almost felt worse about them than he did about Okita. The counter girl bore the box off.
'They won't suffer long, will they?' Ethan asked, looking back over his shoulder.
Commander Quinn snorted. 'I should die so quick. They're going into the biggest freezer in the universe— outside. I think I really will ship them back to Admiral Naismith, later, when things calm down.'
''Things,'' echoed Ethan. 'Quite. I think you and I should have a talk about 'things'.' His mouth set mulishly.
Hers turned up on one side. 'Heart to heart,' she agreed cordially.
