There wasn't much left of #733. Hardly enough to bury, much less autopsy. Another dead soldier from the multitude of colonization squadrons. I snapped on my rubber gloves, hating this job, and peeled back the body bag flaps.
I never called the soldiers by anything other than their tag number, but this one was so young--no more than twenty. Seeing another half-faced, burned body made me ill. I couldn't help myself, the name Rena just popped into my head. Her one eye, green, stared strangely content past me as I sloshed her remains onto the chrome table. Stale blood scent mixed with germicide. I scanned the reclamation orders on the side of the bag with a light pen: recover one microfeed and one MRC. A memory replacement chip. My hands began to shake.
I shifted Rena 733's body toward the small image capture scanner at the edge of the table. The red light winked on and encircled her head, gathering streams of data from the MRC. The scanner hummed, converting the raw data into an enhanced viewable format. EVF produced a third person video effect of the stored memories. The data could only be converted to EVF once. In a few moments, a summary scan of the chip, only the last 48 hours of this soldier's life, would be played back on the screen above my head. Sometimes, MRCs were damaged by the extraction, so this prescan was a failsafe. The HQ suits had to have their data.
The autopsy room door slid open and medtech student, Deanna Fitzsimmons entered the chamber. Her bobbed blonde hair lay flat against her pale cheeks and thin face. This was Deanna's first week at the station and already, she reminded me a lot of myself back in medical school. It had been more than a year since I last worked with a partner. Deanna's face contorted when she glanced at the body on the table.
"Another one?" She inhaled sharply. "That's the fifteenth casualty since lunch. Don't you get tired of this, Doctor?"
I leaned against the table, studying Deanna's tired blue eyes and the fine lines beginning around her nose and mouth. She wasn't much older than Rena 733. I hated throwing so many cases at her in her first week, but she'd have to get used to dealing with the bodies.
"I don't think I can look at another one today," I said, surprised by the weariness in my voice. I knew Deanna couldn't handle another autopsy like this one today. "Why don't you take log duty this time?"
Deanna smiled, relieved by my suggestion. She turned away from the table and picked up the datapad that hung on the far wall. She scrolled through the chart and her gaze snapped up, looking past Rena 733--even past me. "Ready whenever you are, Dr. Kingston."
"Good," I said. "We'll begin as soon as the data capture is complete."
"When do you match tags with names?"
"I don't. They handle that back on Earth," I answered. And for that, I was thankful.
)
