There was a crew, once. I found this ship in a New Berlin dockyard, convinced a girl to let me aboard. My feet were bleeding, bloody, from walking miles across icy streets. Her name was Amelia, and I've kept her. The rest of her spacing family I did not keep. There were thirty seven, and I stalked the halls, slowly. The first few, I got to while they were all sleeping, and they were quite the most fun. I think the screams woke the others. There was a gunfight. I synthesized a pike, and gave them a little show of how well the Rheinland Military trains its recruits.
The crash couch is new, a magneticaly repulsed floating one, and the room is simply drenched in blood. Everything but the couch, covered in a dark sheen that has dried and cracked, separating into big geometric plates like the dry earth of a savanna...In the back, along the bulkhead, I affixed their heads, replacing their eyes with rubies. They're preserved by a synthesine polymer.
The frost is tinted pink, and cleavers are mounted near the door. Hooks hang from the ceiling, in neat rows. Twelve by twelve the rows hang, and from them dangle bodies. Corpses dangle, swing and starve. Sausageges hang along the walls, and the skin tanned to leather in the back. Their ribs are splayed, their chest cavities emptied, chopped and ground and shoved into intestine sausage. Sausage hangs around the walls. And along every hook, a dangling corpse, headless, skinless, naked and bare. Men and women, children, hanging in the meatlocker, prepared like pigs or cows.
