Starrise_at_Corrivale

He glanced over at Enda. She was still, looking at the body, and her face was more completely "shut down" than he could ever remember having seen it, even when she would fall asleep in the pilot chair. Gabriel glanced back at the body, forcing himself to it. The face was sunken, shrunken, the eyes fallen in, the bones of the skull all too clearly visible under the pallid, green-streaked flesh, as if this body had not been moving and shooting at them just half a day before. It looked rather as if it had been lying in some dry place for a long time, dessicating in the darkness. Though wet, the flesh still looked leathery, papery, too thin to stay on the bones. The expression was anguished, almost a rictus of paimn … and also rage? Gabriel thought, for he had seen men's faces locked that way after dying on the battlefield. The skull was corded with something like tendons that ran down the back and sides of the skull, down the neck to the chest, from the chest over to the shoulders and arms. The tendons looked like cords of greenish-white material, striated the long way like bundles of twisted fibers. The corpse's muscles were wasted almost to nothing, to cords and strings themselves. The middle of the body was sunken in as if its owner had been long starved. In one spot, Gabriel half thought he could see the contours of the spinal bones showing through the sagging papery skin of the abdomen.

"Age of subject indeterminate because of extreme fragility and denatured status of tissue," Delde Sola was saying calmly, but her eyes were dark with something that was beginning to look like anger. "No adipocere, massive tissue wasting in all extremities, atypical cordlike growth or bioengineered network, apparently sourced in the dural layer of the spine and the dura mater, radiating to all extremities and

bone/muscle insertions. Exterior appearance suggests all major organs have experienced pathological wasting." She lifted her knife again. "Paused," she said and looked over at Gabriel. "Observation: some entities find this portion of the examination disturbing."

Enda got up and went hurriedly away. "I will listen-" she said as she went out the cargo bay door and shut it behind her.