Forty-eight hours later. Slice. Tourniquet. It’s no longer a person, despite all the writhing and moaning and muffled screams. It’s only meat.
Forty-eight hours after that. Slice. Tourniquet. They’re usually too weak to scream much more after this.
Some are lucky enough to sleep through the whole process from this point on.
Three more crew members and thirteen weeks later. Only two months away from Dantus.
His next meal is the last female. But this fact barely registers; Pelops no longer sees them as women or men.
They’re only meat.
All of us…charting the course of history…only meat.
Yet this one is something special. When he slices into her abdomen he finds her secret. The command board would have grounded her had they known. Or maybe she didn’t know. Two months along before Cryo, he estimates. Her eyes are glazed by the time he discovers the prize inside her. Strapped, gagged, limbless, and unblinking, she stares at the antiseptic ceiling as he vivisects her. And there it is…
A tiny thing…only 18 centimeters. Barely recognizable as human. More like something amphibian…a vestige of our marine origins.
Miniscule arms more like fins, or flippers. The stubs of barely formed legs. Round head no larger than an orange.
So we begin…the seed from which all of us grow.
Expanding and developing meat on a rack of expanding and hardening bone.
He carries it to the bridge, shows it to the stars. He imagines the universe itself as one big womb…an inescapable uterus containing planets, stars, and galaxies.
In the end, it’s little more than a snack.
Sweet, a bit crunchy. A fresh flavor.
Bit of a fishy aftertaste.
Its mother lasts another eight days.
In these months he’s decided to put all those bones to good use. At first he carves them into tiny figurines: goblins, serpents, scorpions, or wholly new creatures birthed in his imagination. Then he decides on a project. A sculpture. He drags all the bones and skulls onto the bridge and works nonstop in the pale starlight, baring his creative spirit to the naked universe.
Directly ahead, a red star shines. Wolf 359. His destination, the color of spilled blood gleaming brightly in a mantle of eternal night.
A new god observes and blesses the success of the mission. Its lofty head is a ring of ten bleached skulls gazing in every direction. Its body is a tangled conglomeration of leg bones, arm bones, and rib cages. It wears a necklace of finger and toe bones. With screws and caulk and ductile adhesive he has brought it to life.
He sits before it in the captain’s chair, discussing with it the secrets of the universe, watching the void outside and the red star that is their final destination.
His creation tells him things, terrible things that he has long suspected, now confirmed in the glaring honesty of cold starlight. He eats his meals before it, calling upon it to bless the meat.
He tears into his latest chop, red and quivering.
Fresh and raw, that is the only way to eat meat.
His new god approves.
With two months to go and two CroPods left, Pelops gets careless.
The man inside (Harmon, Sgt. G.) revives while he’s being tied, his frosty eyelids flickering open. Some fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in and he knocks Pelops from the opened pod, spilling out on top of him.
“Wha…” he stammers. “Whaaaaa…”
Pelops tries to club him on the head with a wrench but Sgt. Harmon is already too fast. He rolls away and pulls his hands free of the wire. He kicks Pelops in the side of the head. Stars swim crazily in Pelops’ eyes.
Pelops regains his senses to find Harmon holding him against the wall, pressing the tip of a screwdriver against his neck. The sergeant is still cold and reeks of cryonic fluid. He breathes hotly in Pelops’ face, the crystals on his beard beginning to melt.
“Who are you?” he asks. “And what the hell are you doing?”
He shoves the screwdriver painfully into Pelops’ skin, drawing a trickle of blood.
“I’m Dr. Pelops,” he says. “I had to…awaken you prematurely.”
Harmon looks around the corridor. Sees the empty pods. All but one now missing its inhabitant.
“Where are they?” His teeth are gritted as his black eyes bore into Pelops’. “Tell me!”
“Dead…” Pelops admits. “There was a comet, or a meteor…some kind of radiation cloud…took out the auto-drive and the pods. I was lucky.”
Harmon blinks, thinking. Considering. He knows I’m not telling him everything. His eyes fall upon the last functioning CryoPod.
“Why didn’t you wake Captain Tyler?”
“I…I was going to,” says Pelops.
Harmon grabs Pelops’ throat in an iron grip. “Then why tie me up? Huh?”
Pelops says nothing. Gasps for air.
“You look like hell,” says Harmon, examining him. Hair and beard a matted rat’s nest. Face sunken, skin sallow. Nails long as claws.
Can he smell the dead on my breath?
“How long?” asks Harmon. Rams his knee into Pelops’ groin. Pelops falls to the cold floor. Harmon bends and holds the screwdriver’s tip to his eye. “How long?” he shouts.
“F-f-fourteen months!” cries Pelops.
Shock spills across Harmon’s shaggy face. “Fourteen…” He looks again at the empty rows of CryoPods, stares down the corridor in either direction. Sniffs the air like a suspicious hound. “Fourteen months…how did you survive?”
Pelops clutches his throbbing groin and says nothing.
Harmon kicks him in the stomach.
“How? Tell me! Say it!”
Pelops tells him. Doesn’t look at his face. Hears him start to wretch.
“All that matters is the success of this mission…” Pelops growls. “And I’m the only one who can get those converters up and running.”
Harmon is strangely quiet.
“We’ve got two more months,” says Pelops.
Harmon’s boot comes down hard on his face.
Darkness.
“He’s a sick fuck!”
Pelops regains consciousness, wrapped in a web of pain. No, it’s the copper wire. He’s propped upright inside one of the defunct pods. In the corridor Harmon stands arguing with another man. The inhabitant of the last pod, the ship’s captain (Tyler, Capt. H.). A sinking feeling as he realizes that Harmon has revived Tyler far too early. He tries to move his arms and legs, but he’s securely bound. He listens to their conversation, watching them in the corner of his eye.
“I know how you feel, soldier,” says Captain Tyler, still wiping frost from his flight suit, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “But Pelops is the only one who knows how to set up those UV converter domes and get them operational. We can’t just execute him.”
“Execute? Who said anything about an execution? You don’t execute a mad dog, captain. You put it down. And that’s what we have here. He fuckin’ ate them! Didn’t you hear me?”
“I heard you, son.” A weary sigh.
“Come on,” says Harmon. “Let me show you the nice little present he built for us on the bridge. Once you see that I’m sure you’ll agree to shoving him out the airlock at the least.”
The sound of their boots tramping down the corridor.
Pelops waits.
Prays.
Mutters poems to his bone god.
Eventually the voices return, growing in volume, punctuated by the sounds of boots on metal.
“…even if we do this, we’re still going to starve. There’s no food left on board and we can’t enter Cryo again. This is the end of the line for us.”