First officer Aspri gripped the contoured arms of his acceleration couch as the pilot juggled the thrusters. A tricky docking. The enemy battleship was corkscrewing about its line of momentum like a single-winged butterfly. Aspri watched with morbid fascination as the two differently coloured wire-frame traces whirled towards each other on the pilot's console. A single miscalculated thrust might join the two traces and the huge icon would crumple the small one.
Aspri felt the loud metal-on-metal screech tingle his spine through the couch's padding. Contact. He tensed, waiting for the rush of air that would mean they had been ruptured. Taught muscles unknotted when he heard the clang of the magnetic grapples.
Whuff! A probe was fired through the foot of the grapple.
Captain Parim frowned at his first officer from the tiny screen inside Aspri 's helmet "Derelict?"
"Yes captain. No movement. Several heat sources but none intense enough to be crew members."
"I don't like it. Where did they go?"
"Perhaps they were never here."
"Their evasive manoeuvres were too complex to program." The lined face on the tiny screen was thoughtful for several seconds. "Proceed, ... with caution."
An umbilical snaked out from the small shuttle clinging like a barnacle to the battleship. The boarding party cut through the enemy hull and entered the well lit interior, weapons drawn.
A dark red globule floated past Aspri.
"What was that?" snapped Parim.
Aspri reached up to trap the bubble, but stopped short. There was a body floating above his head. One of his boarding party began to vomit inside his helmet.
"I think it's blood captain. One of the heat sources is a body. Shot through the mouth, by the look of it."
In a well practiced routine, the boarding party, minus one, cautiously leapfrogged their way through the remaining compartments to the flight deck. They encountered fifteen more recently deceased crew.
"Speculations, number one?"
"Looks like a suicide pact Captain. They're all shot through the head, some by their own hand, including the captain. Probably brainwashed into preferring death to capture.
"How long?" asked Parim, as he paced the small distance between the door and the bench.
"A month maybe?" A young woman in a white lab coat sat hunched over the bench peering into an electronic eyepiece.
"What are the chances of a breakthrough cure?"
The young woman looked up sharply and eyed Parim with a mixture of pity and loathing. "You have to be joking. If we had unlimited funds and a couple of years to spare, we might just make a start."
Parim looked shattered.
"No doubt about it," she spat, "military madness still kills more people than all other causes, combined."
The anger that flared in Parim burnt out just as quickly. His decision to bring the bodies back for burial had seemed quite rational at the time. Enemy or not, they were human beings and should be treated with respect.
The bastards had counted on it.