It’s just one of those things, Jim Kirk had quietly said. Regrettable, yet unforeseeable and therefore unavoidable, Spock had calmly said. Damned stupid waste! he had said, more than once and neither quietly or calmly. He was so upset he didn’t even notice his captain’s hand tightly gripping his shoulder, or even more surprising, Spock’s hand on his arm.

Thank God he didn’t have any reason to hold back his tears. These people were his direct subordinates—many of them long-standing shipboard associates, some of them personal friends. He had hand-picked the landing party for a quick shuttle trip down to a medical conference on Pacifica. Who could’ve known that an undetected microscopic rupture in a plasma manifold would have caused explosive decompression in the shuttlecraft?

And the sight—my God the sight! All of them shriveled mummies, blood vessels exploded, eyes widely staring in a horror of disbelief, flesh literally freeze dried by the frigid vacuum they experienced during the sudden decompression of the shuttlecraft.

The captain had become concerned when communication was lost as the shuttle approached, but that sometimes happened due to interference with a starship’s warp chamber’s coil emissions. But when the shuttle door remained tightly closed upon full pressurization of the bay, Scotty had called Sickbay ASAP. The hiss of rapidly incoming air when the door was pried open confirmed both his tricorder readings and his worst fears. Only God in His wisdom knew why the shuttlecraft hadn’t imploded when the shuttlebay was repressurized.

Maybe there was something to be learned here—something positive to be salvaged out of this sad sorry mess. Seven lives! Seven lives snuffed out in the span of a few seconds—seven empty spaces forever in their families’ and shipmates’ hearts—seven autopsies he would permit no one but himself to perform as a last pathetic gesture of love and respect—seven canisters to be gently cast adrift upon the infinite netting of space, never to be seen again by those who knew and loved them—seven subspace letters Jim Kirk would agonize over.

I’m ordering you off duty for seventy-two hours Bones. I want you to get some rest...and some perspective, Kirk had told him. Not a request, an order mind you! Oh well, maybe the captain was right. His friend well knew the emotional toll this horrible accident had taken on the entire crew in general, the science and medical sections in particular, and his CMO personally. He just couldn’t shake the image of the shuttle’s gruesome passengers out of his mind—couldn’t shake the numbness of such a senseless loss, couldn’t shake the brutal rending truth of the captain’s words at the memorial: "We lost them so close to home!"

This Day in History:

1 February 2003 Old Earth calendar. Columbia’s Final Flight. Today the world mourns the loss of the seven astronauts aboard NASA’s space shuttle Columbia who died when their vehicle disintegrated and burned up in the atmosphere sixteen minutes shy of landing at Cape Canaveral.

This stunning loss comes only four days after the observance of the 17^th anniversary of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, in which seven astronauts also perished, and five days after the 36^th anniversary of the fiery Apollo tragedy in which three astronauts died.

My God, he thought. What a litany of loss! These dear souls from so long ago—no less precious than those just recently lost—had no doubt left gaping holes in the fabric of their friends and family. Kirk’s forcible speech of a few years past came unbidden to his mind. God! He could still feel his face burning with shame at Jim’s words. He had asked one question: Why!? "Risk!" Jim had said. "Risk is our business! That’s what this starship is all about! That’s why we’re aboard her!" He couldn’t deny that. He knew that as sure as the stars burned hot in the galaxy. He lived it every day! But it did nothing to lessen the pain of this loss.

He rolled the names off his tongue silently as he read them—Chaffee, Grissom, White, Scobee, Jarvis, McAuliffe, McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Smith, Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon. He realized how much he and all who preceded him owed to these pioneers and others like them. They didn’t give up. They didn’t quit in the face of heartbreaking tragedy. They cried, they grieved, they mourned, they carried on. He knew that he, too, needed to cry, grieve, mourn, (yes even rant!) and finally carry on. They would’ve wanted it this way. He wearily massaged his temples, then changed the comm mode to "do not disturb".