So it was that the Service had its roots in the history of what the mutants of Old Earth called The Old Ones, the original race of man as represented by those few who managed to escape Earth before The Destruction. When a sailing ship of the New Earth Navy lost a man while at sea, his body was consigned to the deep with due ceremony. Traveling in the broad cavity of space was, in many ways, similar to sailing wide seas. In each instance distance was a factor, and time was required to conquer that distance. When a man died far from land on one of the old sailing ships, he was sewn into a hank of sail and given to the sea. There the materials contained in his body were returned to the earth through decay. In deep space a ship was far from home. Aboard a relatively small vessel, such as the Erin Kenner, no method had been provided for storing a dead body. Even on larger ships keeping a body aboard would have beenentirely too destructive of crew morale. Better to consign the dead to the sea, to the sea of space.
However, there was a difference between dumping a man's body into the water where it would be consumed by sea creatures who would benefit from it and pushing a body through an air lock to float in the darkness of space. There the cold and the vacuum would preserve the body forever.
Although the cosmos could have accepted the fleshy remains of all mankind without becoming noticeably littered, it had become the custom, early on, to give the dead a gentle thrust toward the nearest sun. Perhaps the idea of one's remains floating weightlessly through eternity in the loneliness of the big black had contributed to the adoption of the custom.
Perhaps it was just a reflection of the accepted way of disposing of the dead through cremation. Or, perhaps there was a smidgen of comfort for the survivors in knowing that their comrade would not be cold forever.
Angela Bardeen Webster, forty-five years old, not yet halfway through her allotted lifespan, was consigned to space in a Service bodybag. The Erin Kenner was driving on flux toward the sun that reflected off the ice of the second planet of the system. Joshua Webster, in E.V.A. gear, stood in the lock beside his wife's body as the air was evacuated and the outer lock opened to the void. He knelt beside the bundle and put his gloved hand on it. He said a prayer with much hesitation, for he was not ordinarily a praying man. He took the bodybag in his arms. He leaned against his safety line and, after a long pause, pushed the bodybag away. The speed at which both the ship and the body were moving was not apparent. The body tumbled, moving slowly away from the ship, and, at the same time, continued along the vector imparted by the Erin Rentier's motion. Weeks later, a tiny mote in the glare of solar fires, it would be consumed, its components returned to the cosmos.
Josh watched the tumbling bundle until it was lost in the distance. He felt the clang of metal on metal as the outer hatch closed, heard air roar into the lock. Sheba and Kirsty Girard were in the service corridor waiting for him. Sheba helped him get out of his suit, took his hand, kissed him on the cheek. He pushed her gently away.
"Lieutenant Girard."
"Aye, sir."
"Take us back to DF-2."
The crew had taken to calling the ice planet Deep Freeze and that name had been applied to the entire system. Thus the second planet from the sun was Deep Freeze II, DF-2.
"Sir?"
"I think I spoke quite clearly," Josh said.
"Aye, sir," Kirsty said.
The navigator hurried ahead of them. Josh and Sheba walked more slowly, arriving on the control bridge in time to feel the slide of a blink as Kirsty moved ship. DF-2 gleamed whitely on the viewers. Kirsty had blinked the ship directly into the orbit she had last occupied. Directly below them lay the two Webster ships.
"We're going to get them," Josh said to Sheba. "We're going to take our family home."
At the controls, Kirsty looked startled. She licked her lips nervously.
"Are you sure that's the right thing to do, Josh?" Sheba asked.
"It's what I'm going to do," he said. "That bastard down there has taken enough from me." He thumbed on the ship's communicator. "This is the captain speaking," he said. "As you know an act of aggression has been committed against this ship. We do not intend to accept this outrage without retaliation. The installation that directed the attack which resulted in the death of one of this ship's crew had been destroyed. Soon we will be returning to the out-galaxy blink route where we can make contact with headquarters to ask for a complete alien contact team. In the meantime we have a duty to perform. Down there on that planet lie the bodies of four of our people. As you may have heard, they are all my relatives. That is not the prime consideration. The important thing is that we have always given our dead a proper burial and that's what I intend to do with those down there on the surface."
Kirsty looked at Sheba and raised her eyebrows in surprise.
"Because of the condition of the bodies, recovery will be a delicate operation," Josh continued. "It cannot be accomplished by remote."
"Whooo," Kirsty whispered.
"I will lead the landing party," Josh said. "I'll need three volunteers."
"Pat Barkley, Captain," a voice said immediately. "I'll go."
In quick succession the rest of the crew repeated Pat's offer.
"Thank you," Josh said. "I'm going to designate Pat Barkley as my second on the surface. Pat, I'll leave it to you to pick the other two men."
When Josh turned off the communicator, Kirsty cleared her throat.
"Yes, Lieutenant Girard?" Josh asked.
"May I speak frankly, sir?"
"If you'll make it fast."
"If you land, you'll be breaking so many service regulations that it will take an hour of computer time just to list them," Kirsty said.
"But there is one regulation, Lieutenant, that supercedes all of the others," Josh said. "In space the captain's best judgment is the final criterion."
"Yes, sir," Kirsty said.
"You'll be senior aboard ship while I'm E.V.A.," Josh said. "I want Weapons on the alert. I want you to be ready to blast anything that moves, and if there's any real problem down there you are hereby ordered to use maximum force, if necessary, to insure the safety of this ship and her crew."
"Aye, sir," Kirsty said. She swallowed with difficulty, for her throat closed up as she absorbed the meaning of the captain's order. Maximum force, aboard an X&A ship, meant use of the galaxy's most terrible weapon, the planet buster.
The landing party was away within minutes. Kirsty felt the reaction of the Erin Kenner to the separation of the ship's launch. She adjusted a viewer and had the little vessel on screen as it fell away toward the gleaming surface.
"You're against this, aren't you?" Sheba asked.
"Very much so," Kirsty said. "Has your brother always been impulsive?"
"Anything but," Sheba said.
"Kirsty," Josh's voice said from the communicator, "we're at fifty thousand feet. We'll be landing in about ten minutes. All systems on the alert?"
"We're ready, Captain," Erin said.
"Good. Standby."
"Standing by," Kirsty said.
The ship was in a stationary orbit directly over the landing site. DF-2's thin, clear atmosphere made for excellent visibility of the surface.
Together Kirsty and Sheba watched the launch settle down toward the ice.
Kirsty was finding it difficult to believe that an X&A captain was disobeying, along with others, the two prime commandments regarding exploration and alien contact. Not only was the captain landing on a planet that had not been declared safe by the science division of the service, he had, in effect, declared war on an alien intelligence without so much as having sent available data back to headquarters.
She was thinking that she was setting herself up for a reprimand at best and a court martial at worst when she ordered the preparation of a standard permanent blink beacon. When the beacon was ready she activated its memory banks and, in one huge, electronic gulp, copied the entire contents of the Erin Kenner's computer into them.