It wasn’t he precisely, but the expressions on the women’s faces as he moved through the museum and pointed to the different displays. His enthusiasm for history was contagious. She trailed after him and watched him play the enthralled tourist while she enjoyed the spectacle. The meteor strike was particularly interesting. The vid records were blurred, but the energy discharge in the oceans, the mountains and the plains was obvious. Power had broken, and if it was a large-enough chunk to leave ten-kilometre-wide craters, it might have been a piece of a broken sentient world or even a star. To her surprise, the outbreak of coma patients then began on Nurmegar. They had a record of the outbreak and a note on the memorial that the patients aged to death and their physical forms passed on. She stared at the records, and a sick horror ran through her as she realised that twenty thousand local lives had been given to this strange power and no one had done anything.
