Quoted By:
>COMMIT
>15,18,19
You spend the rest of the cycle retrieving your dead crew. All seven of them are locked within synchronization cradles now, their skin still ice-cold to your touch. Articulated probes click softly, using bursts of magnetic resonance to peer inside vitrified flesh. They are accompanied by hair-thin autosamplers that blur with reciprocating motion, collecting deep tissue for genetic sequencing.
You collapse. Your uncoordinated muscles burn from overexertion. It would have been far more sensible to commandeer a cargo drone for a task like this.
But something had stopped you from doing that. You remembered how your crew had treated their dead in the few instances they could be recovered. Always borne aloft by their clade-siblings. Always lifted to their cradles by hand, their sightless eyes shuttered by the gentlest of fingers. You did not understand the significance of this ritual, but you had still tried your best to emulate it.
Once your breathing stabilizes, you enter one of the spare cradles. Adrenaline spikes as the headpiece obscures your eyesight and dampens your hearing. False colors swim around the margins of your visual field.
You take a shivery breath. The synchronization protocol activates.
