Roman and his colleagues unzipped the LES and stripped the corpse. The fabric was fire-retardant, too tough to cut through.
They had to peel it off. They worked efficiently, their comments matter-of-fact and without even a hint of emotion. When they had removed her clothing, she looked like a broken doll. Both her hands were deformed by fractures, reduced to masses of crushed bone. Her legs, too, were broken and akilter, the shins bent at impossible angles. The tips of two broken ribs penetrated her wall, and black bruises marked the strap lines of her seat restraint.
Jack felt his breaths coming too fast, and he had to quell his rising horror. He had witnessed many autopsies, on bodies in much worse shape.
He had seen aviators burned into little more than charred twigs, skulls exploded from the pressure of cooking brains.
He had seen a corpse whose face had been sliced off from walking into a chopper's tail rotor. He had seen a Navy pilot's spine in half and folded backward from ejecting through a closed canopy.
This was far, far worse because he knew the deceased. He remembered her as a living, breathing woman. His horror was mingled with rage, because these three men viewed Jill's exposed body with such cold dispassion. She was a slab of meat on the table, nothing more. They ignored her injuries, her grotesquely positioned limbs. The cause of death was only of secondary concern to them.
They were more interested in the microbiological hitchhiker harbored within her corpse.
Roman began his Y incision. In one hand he gripped a scalpel, the other hand was safely encased in a steel-mesh glove. One slash ran from the right shoulder, diagonally through the breast, to the xiphoid process. Another diagonal slash ran from the left shoulder and met the first slash at the xiphoid. The incision continued straight down the abdomen, with a small jag around the umbilicus, ending near the pubic bone. He cut through the ribs, freeing the sternum. The bony shield was lifted to reveal the chest cavity.
The cause of death was immediately apparent.
When a plane crashes, or an automobile slams into a wall, or a despondent lover makes a suicide leap from a ten-story building, the same forces of deceleration apply. A human body traveling at great speed is abruptly brought to a halt. The impact itself can shatter and send missiles of bone shards into vital organs. It can vertebrae, rupture spinal cords, crush skulls against dashboards instrument panels. But even when pilots are fully strapped in and helmeted, even when no part of their body makes contact with the aircraft, the force of deceleration alone can be fatal, because although the torso may be restrained, the internal organs are not.
The heart and lungs and great vessels are suspended inside the by only tissue attachments. When the torso comes to an abrupt halt, the heart continues to swing forward like a pendulum, moving with such force it shears tissues and rips open the aorta. Blood into the mediastinum and pleural cavity.
Jill Hewitt's chest was a lake of blood.
Roman suctioned it out, then frowned at the heart and lungs. 'I can't see where she bled out,' he said.
'Why don't we remove the entire block?' said his assistant.
'We'd have better visibility.'
'The tear is most likely in the ascending aorta,' said Jack. 'Sixty-five percent of the time, it's located just above the valve.'
Roman glanced at him in annoyance. Up till then, he'd managed to ignore Jack, now he resented this intrusive comment. Without a word, he positioned his scalpel to sever the great vessels.
'I advise examining the heart in situ first,' said Jack. 'Before you cut.'
'How and where she bled out is not my primary concern,' Roman retorted.
They don't really care what killed her, thought Jack. All they want to know is what organism might be growing, multiplying, inside her.
Roman sliced through the trachea, esophagus, and great vessels, then removed the heart and lungs in one block. The lungs were covered with hemorrhages. Traumatic or infectious? Jack didn't know. Next Roman examined the abdominal organs. The small bowel, like the lungs, was splotchy with mucosal hemorrhages. He removed it and set the glistening coils of intestines in bowl. He resected the stomach, pancreas, and liver. All would sectioned and examined microscopically. All tissue would be cultured for bacteria and viruses.
The body was now missing almost all its internal organs. Jill Hewitt, Navy pilot, triathlete, lover of J&B scotch and high-stakes poker and Jim Carrey movies, was now nothing but a hollow shell.
Roman straightened, looking vaguely relieved. So far, the autopsy had revealed nothing unexpected. If there was gross evidence of Marburg virus, Jack did not see it.
Roman circled behind the corpse, to the head.
This was the part Jack dreaded. He had to force himself to watch as Roman sliced the scalp, his incision running across the top of the crown, from ear to ear. He peeled the scalp forward folded the flap over the face, a fringe of chestnut hair flopping down over her chin. With a rongeur, they cracked the skull. No saws, no flying bone dust, could be allowed in a Level 4 autopsy. They pried off the cap of bone.
A fist-sized mass of clotted blood plopped out, splattering the stainless steel table.
'Big subdural hematoma,' said one of Roman's associates.
'From the trauma?'
'I don't think so,' said Roman. 'You saw the aorta -- death would have been nearly instantaneous on impact. I'm not sure her heart was pumping long enough to produce this much intracranial bleeding.' Gently he slid his gloved fingers into the cranial cavity, probing the surface of gray matter. A gelatinous mass slithered out and splashed onto the table.
Roman jerked back, startled.
'What the hell is that?' his assistant said.
Roman didn't answer. He just stared at the clump of tissue. It was covered with a blue-green membrane. Through the glistening veil, the mass appeared irregular, a knot of formless flesh. He was about to slit the membrane open, then he stopped himself and shot a glance toward Jack.
'It's a tumor of some kind,' he said. 'Or cyst. That would explain the headache she reported.'
'No it wouldn't,' Jack spoke up. 'Her headache came on suddenly -- within hours. A tumor takes months to grow.'
'How do you know she hasn't been hiding her symptoms these past months?' countered Roman. 'Keeping it a secret so she wouldn't get scrubbed from the launch?'
Jack had to concede that was a possibility. Astronauts were so eager for flight assignments they might well conceal any symptoms that would pull them from a mission.
Roman looked at his associate standing across the table from him. The other man nodded, slid the mass into a specimen container, and carried it out of the room.
'Aren't you going to section it?' said Jack.
'It needs to be fixed and stained first. If I start slicing now, could deform the cellular architecture.'
'You don't know if it is a tumor.'
'What else would it be?' Jack had no answer. He had never seen anything like it.
Roman continued his examination of Jill Hewitt's cranial cavity.
Clearly the mass, whatever it was, had increased pressure on her brain, deforming its structures. How long had it been there? Months, years? How was it possible that Jill had been able to function normally, much less pilot a complicated vehicle like the shuttle? All this raced through Jack's head as he watched Roman remove the brain and slide it into a steel basin.
'She was close to herniating through the tentorium,' said Roman.
No wonder Jill had gone blind. No wonder she hadn't lowered the landing gear. She had already been unconscious, her brain about to be squeezed like toothpaste out the base of her skull.
Jill's corpse -- what remained of it -- was sealed into a new body bag and wheeled out of the room, along with the biohazard containers holding her organs.
A second body was brought in. It was Andy Mercer.
With fresh gloves pulled over his space suit gloves, and a clean scalpel, Roman set to work on the Y incision. He was moving more quickly, as though Jill had just been the warm-up and he was only now hitting his stride.
Mercer had complained of abdominal pain and vomiting, Jack remembered as he watched Roman's scalpel
