Dawn_s

than the others to hear them. "It was . . . pretty bad," she told Aikawa and Ragnhild, and Leo nodded in sober agreement. "I know you guys must've seen plenty of bodies and blood aboard Emerald Dawn, but there was this one stretch of passageway in Anhur. Couldn't have been more than fifteen, twenty meters—twenty-five, max. We counted seventeen dead in that one space. Took one of Commander Orban's forensic sniffer units to do it, too. The . . . parts were so mixed up together, and so . . . chopped up and burned we couldn't even tell for sure which bits went with which, so we DNAed the whole heap of scraps to see how many people were in it. And that was just one stretch, Aikawa. So far, we've confirmed over two hundred dead."
"So?" Aikawa looked at her almost angrily—not so much at her personally, as at the suggestion that anything should make him feel the slightest trace of sympathy for the people who'd done what had happened to Emerald Dawn's crew.
"She and Paulo have a point, Aikawa," Leo said somberly. "I don't know about anyone else, but I'll admit it—I puked my guts up when we finally got into their after impeller rooms. Jesus. If I never see that kind of mess again, it'll be twenty years too soon. And the Skipper did it all with one salvo from our bow chasers. Can you imagine what would have happened with a full broadside?"
"Okay, okay," the smaller midshipman said. "I admit it was pretty horrible. I could tell that much from the visual imagery. But a lot of people who never murdered anyone, or raped anyone, i