Another space story, seriously condensed from a longer version...
Palmer killed the captain, knocked out gravity, fried the radio, and nearly blew the drive core before we stopped him.The crew wanted him dead, but I insisted on a trial. Procedure is procedure.
It didn't take long, though. Guilty of murder and mutiny.
Minor problem: the lawbooks were seriously out of date.
Punishment was still death by drop-hanging.
"Can we yank on his legs to choke him?" asked Victor.
"Nope," I said. "No weights. Free drop."
Palmer laughed at us. "String me up and leave me there for a day," he said. "That's the law."
So we did.
Outside.
In the original version, the crew left the mutineer strung up inside the ship, hands tied behind his back. They tortured him for the three weeks it took to get to a base, tossing darts at him and cutting off fingers and putting bugs in his ears to eat out his eardrums and cause painful infections, burns, and so on.
At base, the ship was supposed to regain gravity, but the crew insisted that they leave him in zero-G to suffer more.
