Funeral Foul-Up

SPACE DATE 2236.059

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?