Marie caught her breath, leaning against the chief's desk. She was coming down from her maddened arousal, the fog clearing from her mind, and her thoughts were beginning to move. She'd learned a lot, maybe more than she had wanted, but there was no clear overall picture to the information. But as an engineer, she was used to solving puzzles, and she began to think over the events she had witnessed methodically, categorizing the knowledge and analyzing it.
Jane's presence on the tapes was the largest surprise - and perhaps the most important piece. It was clear that her sister had been in close communication with Lemar before the woman went off the deep end. It wasn't obvious what they were working on - another mystery Jane could help clear up.
As for Lemar herself, the woman's quick descent from professional to monster harlot was a frightening and intimidating thing. Fooling around with a subordinate is one thing, but turning her office into a sexual free-for-all? Rutting with the infected? Clearly, the chief and her officers had been affected by whatever had taken the rest of the crew, but their descent seemed different. Did her promiscuity predate her infection and did it lead to it? Was uncontrollable lust an early sign of exposure? Thinking back on her own response to the videos, Marie pushed that thought away. She had no answers to any of these questions, but something about the timeline of what she had witnessed tugged at her mind.
The signal! Marie's eyes widened in realization. The day of the distress signal went out, Lemar was in no shape to send it, or to initiate a ship-wide lockdown - and yet her credentials were used. The image of Jane's hand snatching something from Lemar's desk swam through Marie's mind.
Marie briefly considered the meeting between Safin, the captain, and Chief Lemar - but beyond her instinctive distrust of the man, she had no useful information to go on, and she filed it away for later consideration.
She was just about to leave the office, thinking that she had lingered there overlong as it was, when one last detail from the recordings floated up in her memory. Lemar, naked from the waist down, reaching for something - in the drawer of her desk.
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