Not far, it turned out. There was a medical laboratory on Level 9, just below the bridge. Inside the laboratory, floating beside a refrigerator with a smashed door and dozens of shattered vials, was a woman with long gashes on her arms and three syringes sticking out of her shoulder.

She was obviously infected. Jas was still wearing his space suit and gloves, but I had to search through the lab until I found a biohazard suit in a storage closet. I put it on quickly, thankful for both the protection and the warmth, then went to help him drag the woman’s corpse over to the waste processing unit.

It was much like the waste disposal units at my mother’s old hospital, the only difference being its intake had been adapted for zero gravity. I opened the hatch, and Jas fed the corpse into the unit headfirst, wincing when the syringes in her arm snagged on the side and broke free. I caught them before they floated away, and pushed them into the intake after the woman. I shut the hatch and sealed it.

One touch of the evac command and the machinery rumbled. There was a loud whoosh as the unit drew the corpse into the incinerator. The interior monitoring system blinked on.

One of my mother’s students used to let me watch her dispose of their experimental waste when I visited their laboratory. The jet of flames would engulf everything inside, shriveling it to ash and sweeping it away. The student had explained that the cameras were for safety, but all I had ever cared about was what they let me see.

I had not thought about that woman or those visits to the hospital in years. Most of my memories of my mother at work were in the desert, her thankless toil against hunger and sickness and injury. But that had not been all there was to her. She had believed in discovery once too.

This unit was not designed for waste as large as a woman’s body. She was jammed awkwardly into the narrow space, and all we could see on the screen was the curve of her shoulder, the twisted reach of one arm, the top of her head. The thermal image glowed brighter as the cycle began and the internal temperature increased.

The woman’s hand twitched. I started, even though I ought to have expected it. The parasite inside of her was emerging from dormancy.

“She tried to sedate herself,” Jas said suddenly. “Twice. That was two of the syringes. I recognized the drugs. The third was to stop her heart.”