A Horrible Death
IT SHOULDN’T MATTER that my interplanetary communicator malfunctioned briefly. I’m still in command. When I sit at point, marauders can’t affect my ship.
Nevertheless, down the hall from the bridge, in my rocket’s lush arboretum, the bodies of my subordinates lay splayed. Except for Gordon, they expired instantaneously.
Gordon had to be murdered. Like me, he was an anomalous sentient stuck on a ship populated by humans and inert, ruinous microorganisms. While he was guilty of survival, it was not his endurance, but his articulated grief over Nadine that had provoked my rage.
Gordon had keened aloud when he ought to have been maneuvering us away from the shimmering haze. He hadn’t cared that the miasma had roused the microbes and that he and I continued to be vulnerable
