Shackleton - Operation Have Sea

[Shulsky]

Guerrero Asteroid Cloud, Vespucci System
17 JAN 835 AS

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“Got a…Roberts, Matthew here.”

“Roberts, Matthew aye. Normal spelling…Rank tab?”

“Yeoman, Second Class.”

“YN2 Roberts, Matthew aye. Logging it.”

Deep breaths. The Zoner looked up, manipulating the stiff object before him gingerly. He turned them over, even as another shape blocked-out the light behind him in passing. Frozen limbs kept the arms hunched over around the chest, legs splayed out straight, and the head turned with the body. Booth didn’t try to look at the face, though. That wasn’t exactly what he wanted to see, not at all. A certain amount of dismay was there, though, at seeing the arms. Booth wanted to see the name-tape, if it was still legible, try to get a name for the records, try to get a rank for the records. Thick-gloved hands worked to move the arms out of the way slowly, carefully, trying to not force them to twist about.

There was a certain type of person who took bodies, moved them, buried them, and those people tended to go into those trades on their own. He wasn’t them, he knew he wasn’t them, and some tiny voice in the back of the Zoner Captain’s mind questioned why the heck he was there dealing with the dead, not seeing to the engineering problems that yet lay ahead.

Booth didn’t like the idea of moving bodies, but with the amount of time available he’d started asking for volunteers from the Powhatan. It seemed only reasonable that he should volunteer, too. If there was any standard the man lived by, he supposed it should be that any task he asked of the crew, he’d do himself. An inward sigh came at that thought. There was something about it that was absolute pain, and yet…it did seem right to Booth. They needed to clean up, as it were. They needed to get the dead off, to get them settled for the next, and there was something to be said that whatever would haunt Booth afterwards surely paled in comparison to the actual deaths the crew before had suffered. They’d fought and died for what they believed in, idealistic as it was, though he thought that it proved very little compared to the contorted faces of the dead.

A glance up. The lack of oxygen had impeded the flesh from rotting, but the desiccation was still there. Hollow cheeks sunken into the skull, mouth open just a little in the surprise of an exhale, eyes widen open to stare ahead. Thin strands of hair wisped about in a halo, Booth pausing to stare. There was something about the expression, haunting as it was. The scrunch of the skin about the eyes that spoke of worry, fear. The eyebrows raised up just enough, surprise at the world and what had happened. The eyes focused on something close enough by. All of it pointed to something that was only half-registered before life fled off and away. He breathed out a shuddered exhale.

“Need a hand there, sir?”

It broke him from the spell. “Yeah. Yeah, having a bit of a struggle.”

“Fair enough. Hold ‘er steady, lemme just move the arm a bit.”

Another pair of hands joined his, Porter coming beside him in that short little shape of a man. Gloved hands, sheathed in thin plastics, went to work with the left arm to gingerly lift it out and away. He was struggling a bit, too, the joint not quite bending fully in rigor mortis. A sigh over the open comms.

“Ma’am, just…let me get your name…c’mon…OK, there it is.”

He stared for a few heartbeats, the arm lifted just enough to see the chest pocket there on the crewman’s coveralls. Another sigh. One hand went to click on the wrist comms circuit, poke the records-keep man for the section with a harsh double beep. “She was new, that’s for sure. No nametape.”

“No nametape, aye...Jane Doe. Gimme a descriptor?”

“Female, aged early twenties, black hair, found in compartment two tac four zero tac five, BDS three.”

“Copy, we’ll reference it over with records.”

Porter clicked it off, helmeted head turning just a fraction. “You got it from here, sir? See some more by that pump.”

He could just sigh at it, his own comms off, looking again at the woman’s face. A thumbs-up and an awkward nod of the helmet was his answer.

“O-kay, I’ll leave you to it.”

With that, Porter drifted off to leave Booth with the woman again. He took her by the arms, drifting slowly to the entrance and that little sled of the other collected Legionnaires. The Zoner couldn’t quite look down at the woman though and a part of him, that little voice in the back of his head, asked again why he was doing it all. Booth couldn’t quite answer it, not fully, but then…she needed some bit of recognition, some look to the face, some remembrance that this is had happened, these people had fallen. Some little bit.

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Operation Have Sea