Miguel Galluzzi turned, hearing more of the maniacal laughter. Freelander seemed to be compressing the air, making it hard for him to breathe. He stared frantically up and down the poorly lit hallway, past Astrogation Control. Thought he saw a thin woman staring at him from the shadows. But for the long black hair, she might have been Tyne. Or, locked in the AC, had she let her hair grow?
“Captain?” Shig asked.
Galluzzi’s heart began to pound, a foul taste on his tongue. A panic like he’d never known sent a tickle through his guts. Thoughts went dead in his head. He couldn’t stand it. Had to get away. Miguel turned, ran, frantic to get away from that awful door, that eerie and haunted hallway.
Mindless, he pounded down the corridor. Powered by terror. A cry strangled in his throat.
“Captain? Miguel! Stop!” Shig’s voice barely penetrated the heterodyne of fear.
Crazed, thoughtless, Galluzzi’s feet hammered the deck. At the companionway, he instinctively turned: an animal in desperate flight, seeking only to hide.
Taking the stairs two at a time, he rounded the landing, charged out onto the Crew Deck, and fled pell-mell down the flickering corridor. Winded, he staggered to a stop, peering fearfully up and down the dimly lit passage. Nothing. Eerily empty, as if robbed of space itself. The effect was as if part of the very air, sialon, and light were missing. The reality he saw had the curious property of being incomplete.
Well, but for the endless lines of overwritten script.
Galluzzi tried to catch his breath, wheezed. His heart fought desperately to beat its way through his ribs.
Exhausted, Galluzzi slumped against the wall, felt his trembling legs give way. He slid down the smooth surface to curl into a ball. Across from him, barely legible in the looping script, he could scry out the words: With each breath inhale the essence of the dead.
Tears began to well, silvering his vision. Was that what he was doing? Inhaling the dead?
Tyne Sakihara, beautiful Tyne, with her soft dark eyes, petite nose, and charming smile. Dead. Up there. A moldering skeleton?
He’d loved her with a full and uninhibited passion. Figured that ultimately, after they’d exhausted their careers, in the end they’d be together. Married. The two of them had fit together that well. Soulmates. Of course they’d taken different berths, separated for the time being. That was mandatory. Part of the sacrifice officers made in Corporate spacing.
I saw her. He ground his teeth in grief and despair. He was as sure of that as he was of gravity.
Galluzzi scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms. Tried to press the image of Tyne’s face from his memory.
Her voice sounded so clear she might have been standing over him: “I saw the first of the bones, you know.”
Galluzzi winced, tried to tuck himself into a smaller ball, to collapse his body until he could squeeze himself completely out of the universe.
Unbidden, the image formed in his mind: a jumbled pile of macerated human bones made a meter-tall mound on the floor. They had been dumped in a confused heap in the middle of the Crew’s Mess, cleared as it was of tables and chairs. A brown-haired woman wearing a shift knelt in the center of the room. She held a string to the floor. A second woman, holding the other end of the string taut, walked in a slow arc. With a scribe she marked out a perfect circle.
“We were no longer in command,” Tyne’s voice explained. “The decision had been made that death and life were one. That only through death could life survive. Wherever Freelander had gone was eternal. Tried reversing the symmetry. Didn’t work.”
She paused, then added, “Jem and I made the decision to euthanize the transportees. It was our last act of kindness. No one could explain why, but we were infertile. The women didn’t conceive. Couldn’t make Freelander a generation ship. So it was just us. Living off the dead.”
Galluzzi clamped his eyes tight, pressed harder with his palms, but try as he might, he couldn’t stop the vision. If anything, it clarified as if he were there in the Crew’s Mess.
One of the women began using a vibrasaw to cut a shallow trench in the mess floor, following the scribed circle. The other began wiring the femora together, carefully choosing each for the proper length.
“Jem and I didn’t want to end like that,” Tyne told him. “It was crazy. The Chief Engineer used a cutting torch on the ship’s AI. So we locked ourselves in the AC. Stayed there until it was clear that Freelander was lost. That we were going to be in that room forever.”
“How could you?”
In his mind, Tyne smiled at him. Love, like he remembered so clearly, shone in her eyes. “In the end there is no right, no wrong. We are nothing more than chemical composites of carbon-based molecules that are directed by chemo-electrical impulses designed to allow the highest probability of replicating those same chemical composites. Billions and billions of us. Anything else, like ethics, morality, notions of deity, ultimate good or evil, are nothing more than abstractions. We need those delusions to mask the reality of what life is. They provide us with a sense of purpose.”
The Crew’s Mess was filling with people now. Crew in uniforms showing various states of repair. He watched as they began lifting the wired-together femora, raising them like a wall and fitting them into the trench excavated into the floor.
They’re building that creep-freaked dome of bones!
“Do you know that I still love you?” he asked.
“Cling to whatever you have, Miguel. In the end, it’s the only thing that makes existence worth enduring.”
In the Crew’s Mess, the Freelander crew were separating all of the arm bones from the jumbled pile.