CHAPTER 14Again Stacey looked at the hell found in the Lewanna. He was not bothered by the blood smeared over the bulkheads and the floors—red paint would have made a similar pattern. But the huddled masses were something else, and he felt the old sickness as he studied the pulped tissue, the bone, the ravaged organs.
He sipped, feeling the stinging warmth of the brandy running down his throat. Man’s oldest anaesthetic and still one of the most efficient, the alcohol dulled, made tragedy seem like comedy, a crisis a slight and ephemeral affair. And if it could not cure, at least it made dying easy. He sipped again and studied what he saw.
The holograms had been taken by an expert and left nothing to the imagination. The crawling thing was obviously trying to use legs that were no longer
