Lightspeed: Year One
Page 30
The frost coating his skin and flight suit melts into cold water. Droplets fly from his beard and hair, grown to primordial length while he slept. What could have happened?
He stumbles along the corridor beneath the pulsing florescent lamps, follows the plastic maps posted at each intersection, and finally reaches the sealed door of the bridge. A gleaming hand plate accepts his touch. The nerve center of the Goya opens before him, a spacious cockpit of flashing neon display grids and blinking digital interfaces. Above it all, a vista of interstellar wonder, a great oval viewport looking out into the universe. He stares into the bottomless void, captivated by the glimmering of ancient stars. A purple nebula clouds the starfields ahead, and the sheer beauty of the galactic deeps overwhelms his waking senses. Sinking into a vast gulf of infinity. Distant fires grinning and sparkling, the eyes of a demon legion.
You don’t belong here, the stars whisper. This is the Great Emptiness. The stronghold of Death. Soon it will consume you. Utterly.
Pelops tears himself away from the celestial vision and goes to the control panels. He is no pilot, no navigator, but he is a man of science. He has been on ships before. He scans the displays and finds that the ship’s thrusters have gone offline. He switches the relays to instigate backup power.
A lurching and shuddering tells him the ship has resumed its full-speed journey. He falls into the captain’s chair and punches his fingers at the keyboard, requesting a status report. A holographic display emerges, dancing before him like a ghost. It’s the Goya, a gleaming bottle-shaped vessel surrounded by pinpoints of rushing starlight. A scarlet line enters the left side of the display, trailing a cloud of sparks. A comet. It crosses the forward hull of the ship, bathing the vessel in a cloud of scintillating motes.
He reads the print display below the hologram.
Radiation cloud. Unidentified in nature . . .
A short-circuiting of the ship’s power grid, disabling the auto-drive.
Severe turbulence resulting in damage to two CryoPod units.
No shit.
Communications permanently disabled. No messages going out or coming in. Not until the com techs on Dantus install a new stack of relays. Absolute radio silence. The report ends and the curved panels blink silently. Course renewed. Power reserves engaged. Everything nearly back to normal. But now Pelops is awake. And completely alone.
He accesses the logs for time, date, and distance.
Time elapsed since launch: 6 years, 2 months, 3 days, 9 hours, 52 minutes, 39 seconds.
Time remaining to destination: 1 year, 4 months, 2 days, 7 hours, 18 minutes, 3 seconds.
Sixteen months. Alone on this ship.
He considers waking the rest of the crew. Walks back to the pod corridor and almost does exactly that, when it hits him: A terrible, gnawing hunger in his gut. And the realization . . . what is he going to eat? Nobody was supposed to wake until a few hours before touchdown. This ship isn’t equipped for manned flight.
He finds his way through the labyrinth of steel into the airy cargo hold. The massive bulk of the twenty-five UV converter domes loom like black hills beneath plastic tarps. In the far corner he finds what he is looking for. Emergency Supply Kit.
A man-sized chest (like a coffin). Inside, a collection of boxes, tins, and tubes of dry rations. A map on the lid reveals the location of emergency water tanks. He breathes a little easier. There’s enough water in those tanks to keep a man alive for three years. However, he’s not so sure how long the food will last. He’ll worry about that later.
Cracking open a plastic box, he tears through an aluminum pouch and devours the beef jerky inside. Famished and relishing every bit, the salty taste of it on his tongue, the familiar warmth as it fills his belly. In a few seconds the entire package is gone. He curses himself.
He’ll have to ration this out if he’s going to survive. He can’t indulge himself in such feasts. He closes the lid and makes his way along the bay to the water tanks, where he turns a valve and fills a bucket with drinking water. He drinks his fill of the cold liquid.
He surveys and logs the emergency foodstuffs, planning out subsistence portions. Drops his pen and slides to the floor. Someone was supposed to load more emergency supplies than this. Someone did not. There’s barely enough food here to keep him eating at a base survival level for 100 days.
Three months. If he does not wake anyone else.
If he does, that time will be cut in half.
Three months of food. Sixteen months until reaching Dantus.
Nothing else here.
Nothing to eat.
After three months he will begin to starve.
Pelops carries Tanaka’s rigid body into the airlock, says a quick prayer, and ejects her into space. He should be grateful. One less mouth to feed.
He races back to the two open CryoPods and tries to get them operational. Spends hours working on them, up to his elbows in grease and cryonic residue. But it doesn’t matter. They’re both totally out of commission, their transparent lids shattered. And even if they weren’t, the pods cannot be put back into service once they’ve been opened. The only way to do that would be to introduce more cryogen . . . which can only be done by CryoPod contractors.
No way to re-freeze himself. No way to avoid the twelve weeks of bare subsistence and the slow, lingering starvation that will surely follow. He envies Tanaka her quick death.
He lies on the floor of the pod corridor, weeping, remembering his look into the void. The whispering stars and their message of doom. And he knows it’s true. This is the realm of Death and he has entered it willingly.
He wails and gnashes his teeth and smashes the floor with his fists. Eventually he falls asleep and enjoys the mercy of a warm oblivion.
Pelops wakes sometime later, trembling on the cold metal floor. He gets up and returns to the bridge. His stomach growls, but he denies it. He sits in the captain’s chair and stares out at the numberless stars.
With Tanaka dead, he is the only one capable of getting the UV converters up and running on Dantus. And the future of the colony depends on those machines. Wolf 359 is a red dwarf star, and not enough crops grow in its infrared glow. The colony’s population has grown too fast for its agricultural systems to handle. Setting up the converter domes and transforming the star’s radiation to ultraviolet light is the only way to boost food production and end the famine. The only way to feed thousands of brave families who settled there. Eleven thousand men, women, and children already, with an exponentially expanding birth rate. They’re all depending on Dr. Andrew Pelops.
I have to survive, he thinks. All those lives depend on it. This mission has to succeed. Everything else is secondary.
Think about those people. Those children. Think about those hungry mouths, so many more than yours.
The mission must succeed.
For the first three months Pelops eats frugally and his body grows lean. The flight suit hangs loose on his frame. He cuts his beard and hair with a pair of infirmary scissors, but they always grow back into a hermit’s nest of tangles. The boredom is deadly. He spends most of his waking hours on the bridge, staring into the glittering void. He charts constellations . . . Scorpius, Serpens, Hydra. He sails through a gulf of myth and darkness. At times he fears the demon-eyes of the stars, and at other times he laughs at them. He carves images of ancient monsters into the deck floor with a screwdriver. He sleeps.
Sometimes he talks to the sleeping crew, sharing his knowledge of photonic chemistry, tales of his failed marriage, and his dreams for the future. They lie cold and still inside their coffins and listen to his every word. They are the perfect listeners.
Sometimes he imagines they reply to him.
Whispering like the distant stars.
Pelops eats the last bit of the dried jerky from the emergency chest. There is nothing else inside. Only the empty carcasses of plastic and tin where the faintest scent of edible things lingers. For days afterward he endures the grinding of his stoma
ch, drinks himself to bloating at the water tanks, endures the hunger pangs that stab in his guts.
He babbles to the sleeping crew, telling them tales of hunger strikes.
“You see the body persists on glucose energy for the first three days of starvation,” he says, walking between the rows of frosty faces. “At that point the liver starts feeding on body fat as ketosis begins. Thanks to the natural reserves of the human body, you don’t really begin to starve until after three weeks. Now the body extracts nutrients and substance from the muscles and organs. Bone marrow too. Here’s where the real danger begins . . . ”
He imagines himself gnawing the meat off a large bone, slavering like a hound.
“Most hunger strikers die after fifty days . . . but are incapacitated long before that. We can’t allow that to happen. The mission is all that matters. It must succeed . . . at all cost.”
He hopes they understand.
After ten solid days of starving, he dreams of his father. The stars are bright and blinking above the Colorado mountains. He’s twelve years old, and his father has killed a deer. Pelops helps skin and prepare the carcass. They roast the venison over an open flame and enjoy its wild, savory flavor. His father’s eyes glisten like the stars as he smiles through a frosty beard:
You know what you have to do, son.
Pelops wakes remembering the taste of greasy venison.
He staggers to the infirmary and finds a laser scalpel. In the cargo bay tool cabinet, a trio of gas-powered welding torches. He picks one up and presses the switch. A blue flame emerges, dancing before his eyes like a beacon of hope.
The flame is hot and perfect.
I have no other choice.
He punches the release lever on Thompson’s pod. A hiss of escaping vapor, a white fog rushing about his feet. He lifts the lid and looks at the man’s sleeping face, blue-white with a mask of rapidly melting frost. As the eyes begin to flutter against their icy hoods, Pelops raises the hypodermic needle. He’s found a powerful sedative in the infirmary cabinet. He injects the drug into Thompson’s jugular and pulls him from the pod, slinging him over his shoulder.
I could use the scalpel on myself, he thinks. Cut my own throat . . . quick and painless.
Is it wrong to kill a few people to save thousands?
He already knows the answer. It sits in his chest like an iron weight, far heavier than a single human body.
On the infirmary operating table he lays Thompson out, strips him of flight suit and undergarments. Bathes his body with fresh water from the tanks. Removes most of the body hair with scissors and razor.
He has never killed a man before. His nerves are electric. His hands tremble, and he begins babbling again. He knows the unconscious Thompson can’t hear him. He could wake him up and have a real conversation first . . . but that would only make it harder.
“During World War II this type of thing was fairly common,” he says. “Take the Siege of Leningrad. Eight hundred and seventy two days. The survivors trapped inside the city ate all the pets, birds, and rats before they were forced to . . . So it’s not as if this sort of thing is completely without precedent. The mission must succeed, Thompson. At any cost.”
I’m so sorry.
He switches on the laser scalpel and draws the blade of light across Thompson’s soft throat. A fountain of red flows across the table and drips onto the floor, where Pelops has spread a tarp and bucket to catch it.
He dons a surgeon’s mask to avoid the smell and proceeds to butcher the carcass. First he separates the limbs from the torso, then the head. The heat of the laser provides partial cauterization, but not enough to keep blood from leaking through tiny holes like puncture wounds in the raw, pink muscle tissue. A wave of nausea and weakness claims him, so he leaves the segmented body for later and takes Thompson’s lower leg into the cargo bay. With the scissors he lacerates and peels the skin from the hock of meat. Then he arranges the calf and foot on a metal spit, propped between two crates above the three activated welding torches. The blue-white flames cook the flesh nicely . . . the smell of it roasting both titillates and nauseates him. He wretches, but has nothing inside him to throw up.
It’s only venison, he tells himself.
After a few minutes he turns the spit, browning the other side.
He catches himself drooling and wipes his lips.
He cannot bear to wait for it to fully cook, so he settles for medium rare.
Picks it up like a massive chicken leg and takes his first bite, sinking teeth deep into the tender flesh. Tearing a mouthful from the bone. He chews, remembering that trip with his father . . . sitting around the camp fire. Eating what he’d killed.
Veal.
The exact consistency of fresh and tender veal.
He takes another bite. Expects to wretch it all up, but doesn’t. He swallows the second bite, and a third. A great contentment settles over him. For the first time in six years his belly is full. He falls asleep on the cargo bay floor, the hock of gnawed meat lying on his chest.
He dreams of brown gravy and hot, steaming biscuits.
Less than a week.
Less than a week, and the meat has all gone bad. Energized and renewed by a succession of hunger-free days, Pelops realizes his mistake. Once the pods are open they won’t freeze again. There is no freezer on the ship—it was never meant to sustain awake beings for more than a few hours at a time. He has no way to keep the meat from spoiling.
The next few days he makes himself sick by eating the rotten flesh. Half of his kill has been ruined. He smashes a naked shinbone against the wall in frustration.
He checks the time log on the bridge again. Just over eleven months to go. Eleven functioning CryoPods. Eleven bodies to sustain him. But only if he does things differently.
It all depends on me, he reminds himself. Eleven thousand men, women, and children.
If he keeps eating spoiled meat, he’ll die. So he shoves the rest of Thompson into the airlock and ejects it into space.
What a waste. Just like Tanaka.
He waits as long as he can for the hunger to catch up with him again. Stares at the cold stars beyond the bridge viewport. Gazing into an emptiness that mirrors the void in his belly. He abstains as long as he can possibly stand it . . . nine days this time.
He harvests the next pod.
Staggs, E. Male. Big, guy, good physique.
Pelops thaws him out, sedates him, and straps him to the operating table. He can’t kill this one like he did Thompson. He has to keep the meat fresh.
He dry heaves into a plastic waste bin . . . there is nothing inside him to throw up.
Think of Dantus. All those people . . . all those hungry people.
Wiping his wet eyes, he starts with the left leg, severing it at the knee.
Like last time, he roasts it and relieves his initial hunger. This time his guilt and nausea are drowned beneath a torrent of sheer gratitude. The meat (venison!) is savory, red and juicy on his tongue. His teeth tear through it with gusto. This man was an athlete . . . lots of tender muscle. Protein . . . nutrients . . . flavor.
Thompson was veal. Staggs is prime beef.
He waits as long as he can between each meal. Finally settles on eating once every 48 hours. In this way, he calculates his meat will last until Dantus. Eleven months. Sure, he’ll suffer from lack of carbohydrates and vitamin . . . . but men have survived on all-meat diets for longer than that and been just fine. After this ordeal, after the converters are installed on the colony farms, there will be vegetables and fruits aplenty. A bounty to replace what he has lost. And the crew of the Goya will be remembered as heroes.
He pumps Staggs full of fresh sedative on a daily basis. The man remains oblivious as his legs and arms disappear, replaced by careful tourniquets that prevent him from bleeding to death. Pelops cleans him, looks after his bodily functions, makes sure he stays alive. Preserves as much of the man’s dignity as he can.
Later, when only the head and torso are le
ft, Pelops has to be more careful. Tricky to harvest a torso without killing the subject. He starts with a crude appendectomy. Next, he removes the liver. Then the spleen and stomach. Eventually, when Staggs is truly dead, he cracks open the chest cavity and removes the fist-sized heart.
Filet mignon, he tells himself. That’s all it is.
He cooks the heart a special way, cutting it open to butterfly the meat.
Eats it sitting before the viewport, gazing into the abyss of blinking stars.
It is the finest piece of meat he’s ever tasted. The heart, he decides, must be the choicest morsel in the human body. The prime muscle. The lights of the console blink across his face as his molars grind the meat and it slips down his gullet into his grateful stomach.
Staggs’ brain, sliced in two, provides a double meal.
Tastes like stringy roast chicken.
Gray matter. White meat.
Pelops harvests the next pod in the same way, but runs out of sedative after ten days. First Officer Bernard Hoffman wakes up on the table, restrained and entirely legless. His panicked screams draw Pelops into the infirmary.
“Shhhhhh . . . ” Pelops comforts him. Gives him cool water to drink. “Take it easy, Hoffman.”
“What . . . what’s happening?” asks the terrified man, his brown eyes pleading.
“Shhhh . . . it’s all right. It’s just a bad dream. The mission is going to be a success. We’re only ten months from Dantus. Go back to sleep.”
Hoffman writhes against his restraints, tearing at the leather straps. The stumps of his legs begin to bleed. “What the fuck are you talking about? You look . . . look . . . where are my legs? What happened to my legs?” More screaming. He’s only just noticed his missing appendages.
Pelops breaks down. He apologizes and explains everything. Tells Hoffman about the comet, about the radiation, about the pods, the lack of food, how he must ensure the mission’s success. Reminds him of the thousands of people depending on his UV converters.
But Hoffman doesn’t get any of it. He just screams.
Screams and screams until he makes himself hoarse.
Pelops begs him to stop, but the screams go on and on. He knocks Hoffman unconscious. But the man only wakes up screaming again. Pelops stuffs a rag in his mouth and leaves him on the table. In a few days, he won’t have the strength to make any more noise.