05/15/2023 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

The last bit of “write this scene later” has been written. The draft’s not actually done, but from here on out it’s more formatting and changing details as I go. I might get it done by the end of the week. Huzzah!

…well, we didn’t do anything horrible to anyone. But all of those pieties about respecting personal information that we quoted to Rubicon, back at the beginning? Of the five entities at that meeting: two were dead, one was in medical cold sleep, one was still recovering from the mental equivalent of a heart attack, and then there was me. If I was the functional one, we were nowhere near out of the woods, yet.

I’m not apologizing. We were right to be concerned about hidden cultists, and roughing up personnel records was a lot better than roughing up the personnel. I just wish — I just wish people had made better decisions, or at least not make poor ones where I had to see them.

One of the things that I did, once I was effectively in charge, was to pull Syah off everything else and have him handle the records searches. I worried that I was playing favorites, but Maki signed off on it right away. So did Nur, ironically. The sooner we cleared everybody, the faster we could go back to work. The quarantine was definitely starting to pinch us.

The problem was? We didn’t clear everybody.