Lightspeed: Year One

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 CryoPods 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.”

“Then it doesn’t matter, does it? Let me kill him. One last good thing before we die. Then we’ll set the auto- destruct . . . go out in a blaze of glory. Better than starving to death.”

Captain Tyler has no response to that.

The two men stand before the open CryoPod now, looking at Pelops.

“Captain . . . ” Pelops says, “you know as well as I do—”

“Shut up, freak!” Sgt. Harmon’s fist slams into his gut. The air rushes from his lungs, along with the words he failed to utter.

Harmon lifts a service pistol to Pelops’ chin, the barrel digging into his jawbone.

“All of us may have to die,” Harmon tells him, “but you’re going first you cannibal fu—”

Thud.

A flash of silver above his head, a meaty sound, and Harmon goes down. Captain Tyler stands over him with the wrench in his hand. Its round end drips dark blood like syrup, and a clot of hair and skin hangs there.

Tyler drops the wrench and peels the coils of wire away from Pelops’ wrists and ankles.

The captain is silent for awhile as Pelops rubs his limbs to get the circulation flowing again. Tyler stares at his fallen officer, leans against the wall. Tired. Ready to accept his fate.

“You did the right thing doctor,” says Tyler. His sunken eyes turn toward Pelops. They are as black and glittering as the void. “The famine on Dantus could kill tens of thousands. This mission has to succeed.”

Pelops nods. His stomach growls. He is ravenous.

“Can you still make it work?” asks Tyler.

Pelops stares down at the unconscious soldier. Makes a few mental calculations. Rubs his sore temple.

“Yes,” he says. “With your help, the mission will still succeed.”

Tyler helps Pelops carry Harmon into the infirmary.

Pelops carefully rations out pieces of Harmon over the next few weeks. Tyler holds out for sixteen days but eventually joins him for a slight meal. Pelops insists.

“It’s imperative to this mission that you stay alive captain,” he says. “Just a little while longer.”

Tyler won’t go near the infirmary. The blow to Harmon’s head inflicted some kind of brain damage, so he remains comatose as he’s carved to bits day after day. Just as well. No screams to deal with, but still Tyler takes it hard. He sits on the bridge in his chair most days . . . staring at the red star growing ever brighter directly ahead.

Pelops thought the captain would dismantle the bone god . . . but Tyler doesn’t seem to mind it. Or perhaps