McCandless' voice came back crisp and clear almost instantly. "You are, ma'am," he said formally, "now, please, disengage your pod from the relay so I can get a tractor on you and get you back to our ship."<br/><br/>Sam could do little more than wait. He'd long perfected the art of waiting the minutes or hours between action when in the Navy. It gave him more than enough time to get out of his skinsuit and stand the ship down from general quarters as the other shuttles checked in with reports of no survivors. But someone managed to recover both the ship's black box and its flight recorder and had already brought them aboard into the smaller of the ship's two pressurized cargo bays, both converted missile magazines for tubes that no longer existed. He'd protested at first, until he saw what one of his old friends had done to the GMS<i>Fearless</i>'s tubes: convert them to first-class staterooms and charge top-dollar for passage. Dirtsiders, it seems, would pay through the nose to travel aboard an authentic warship. Not that the milk run to Conrad was one favored by passengers; the fact a chunk of the ship's company was taking two week's leave on Grissom more than made up for it.<br/><br/>Sam listened to the radio chatter on a headset while helping the understaffed knuckle-draggers pull the flight recorder out of a piece of debris with plasma cutters.