Tonight was the 2nd Annual GSV Remarkable Zero-G Dance, where we turn off the gravity generators in the gym and hold a dance for the entire crew.  Last year’s dance was particularly entertaining, as the lack of gravity made the skirts on all of the female crew who wore dresses that night float upwards aimlessly, especially when the D.J. played the Phillatian Flip!  Totally awesome!  Unfortunately, thanks to Dr. Rena’s imposed dress code provision on this year’s dance flyers, everybody showed up wearing pant-suits or regulation uniforms. 

Things only got worse from there, as when Chief Beauregard and INFO sealed the gym and turned off its gravity generators, they accidentally switched off the room’s life support systems as well.  We all woke up floating about in the dark about 5 or 30 space minutes later (I don’t recall how long it was, exactly), after INFO managed to turn the oxygen vents back on in the gym, and the dance finally started.  Cdr. Powell volunteered to be D.J. this year, and he was really excited about it beforehand.  But by the space gods, that man has the worst taste in music!  I’m pretty sure he popped in his own demo tape a half-dozen times during the night as well.  It was like listening to a Vendrexxi hive queen give birth to a litter of angry cats! 

Pickings were slim amongst the handful of pant-suited female crew who attended (next year, I’m making attendance mandatory), but I finally managed to corner Lt. Quimbly over by the punch bowl to ask her to dance.  She refused, so I had to make it an order.  But before I could show off my crisp weightless dance moves, Mr. Jayda, who was dancing with Ensign Adams next to us (no doubt Adams was doing this out of some kind of unsexualized sibling-like pity gesture), got space sick.  Most of Jayda’s vomit got all over Adams, but some of it floated into me as well and … well, it was zero-g, so it basically got everywhere.  But the thing is, Antillean vomit gives of a noxious gas as well, so most of us in the area started choking and gasping for air until we finally passed out. 

By the time we regained consciousness (again), gravity in the gym had been restored, and the dance had been over for the better part of a space hour.  I found Lt. Quimbly doubled over the D.J. booth, still unconscious.  But like a true gentleman, I wouldn’t think of taking advantage of her in that comatose state.  So I left her there and went back to my quarters, called a few old ex-girlfriends, and drank until I blacked out. 

All in all, an okay dance.  Not great, but still a little bit better than last year’s, at least.  

Last Tuesday, we held a funeral service for the late Corporal Mallory from the Space Marines detachment.  It was a solemn, dignified service in the missile loading bay, that is until it was discovered that Cpl. Mallory had been cheating on his girlfriend, Ensign May, with Nurse Vega.  That certainly livened things up a bit!  But once the two of them were separated and the overturned space casket was placed back on the loading stand, we managed to conclude the funeral service with grace and solemn dignity, and fired the missile-coffin out into the infinite reaches of space.

But then – get this – two days later, Powell comes to me and says that he’s found out from Cpl. Mallory’s personnel file, that he’s an orthodox Lollardian, and according the Lollard faith he must be buried in the place where he was born, in this case the colony of New Belfast.  After a terse meeting with the ship’s HR Department, I’ve come to the conclusion that, in order to avoid a formal inquiry, the Remarkable must turn around and start searching for the missile-coffin we fired off containing the mortal emains of Cpl. Mallory. 

So it’s been five days searching and nothing so far.  Given the unknowable physics of the vacuum of open space, the missile-coffin could literally be anywhere by now.  I’m starting to wonder whether we could just ‘find’ the late Cpl. Mallory in the meat locker … in a space casket that’s been welded shut.  I mean, that’s plausible, right?  

It seems that we’ve got ourselves a little mystery here onboard the Remarkable, and at the worst possible time too. Cdr. Powell discovered a severed human hand sitting in a pool of blood outside the ship’s galley this morning, and all this while the Kreesian diplomatic delegation is on board! Dr. Rena wanted to run some stupid genome tests on the blood pool to find out whose blood it was, but I had ordered it all mopped up before the diplomats saw it. Besides, I told her, we don’t need to go through all that scientific mumbo-jumbo to identify the former owner of that button-pushing appendage. We’ll just do a roll-call of the entire crew, and find out who’s missing (or who reports for roll-call missing a hand), and bingo! Unfortunately, following the roll-call, all of my crew is present and accounted for, and every one of them still has all the limbs that they had since the previous roll-call. It’s quite a mystery!

Now, Dr. Rena has a new theory – she says that according to their profile, the Kreesians are experts in the science of cloning, and they’re known to be devoted meat-eaters. She theorizes that the Kreesian diplomats cloned a member of the crew, and either devoured the clone, or else they ate the crew member and set the clone loose to report for roll-call. She suggests I bring the question up with the Kreesians tonight at the formal state dinner I’ve invited them to. It’s probably going to be an awkward night, especially during the fruit salad course.