Lunar Justice

Disclaimer: the following story is a purely fictional account. Any relationship to any real person living or dead is coincidental. The narrative contains non-consensual torture. It is intended for mature readers who wish to view such material, and for whom it is legal to do so. The author in no way condones or promotes such acts in real life.

Copyright © 2007 by POW. For spam prevention, an animal name has been added to the author’s e-mail address. Remove the animal name to get the actual address: POWauthor zebra at yahoo dot com. This story may be freely copied and distributed so long as it is copied in its entirety, unchanged, including the author credit information and disclaimer. Other POW stories are available at https://powauthor.wordpress.com. The author welcomes feedback.

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Samuel Gerne bounced down the corridor, taking long, easy strides that covered whole meters with each low-gravity step. Even with his bulky suit on and his helmet under his arm, he weighed far less than his muscles had evolved for and he felt like a kangaroo bounding along in slow motion.

Gerne was the security chief for the Lunesco Railgun Construction Station, which was currently two months into its eighteen-month task of building a railgun on the moon. The railgun would be a way of launching material from the lunar surface into orbit. The low gravity of the moon – one-sixth that of Earth – and the lack of atmosphere made it possible to do without expensive chemical rockets when boosting objects up to escape velocity. Instead, the powerful electromagnets in the railgun, once it was finished, would drive payloads through massive accelerations and launch them right out of the gravity well, providing a very cheap way of getting goods into orbit.

Of course, to get the cheap route off the surface, someone first had to shoulder the expense of building the railgun. That was Lunesco’s task. The company was pouring several billion dollars into building a fifty-kilometer long track along the farside equator, starting below the regolith and ending atop the tall wall of a crater.

The work was grueling. The men – “rockhounds”, they called themselves – worked twelve-hour shifts with one day off each week. Their stint at the station would last six months, and there was no possibility of cutting it short – the company had provided them with all the supplies they would need when it had dropped them off and there would be no resupply runs. They were on their own until the six-month tour was over and the transport came to ship them all back to Earth.

The station was not large; it was only designed for temporary use during the construction phase. Once the railgun was operational, a much smaller plant would be required to operate and maintain it. Thus, 420 men found themselves crammed into a space that was none too large and none too luxurious. The deadly lunar environment outside effectively trapped all 420 of them indoors. Privacy was nonexistent; tempers ran short and hot. The only thing that made the conditions tolerable for the rockhounds was the knowledge that they were getting paid about fifteen times what anyone with their skills could make at any Earthside job. These men were the equivalent of the oil derrick roughnecks or the Alaskan crab runners of a century before, working themselves half to death for a brief time in exchange for more money than they could possibly make any other way.

Gerne’s job was not as physically demanding as the rockhounds’, but the constant din and the unavoidable stink of unwashed bodies got to him every once in a while. He occasionally used his position to invent reasons to have to go outside, ostensibly to deal with a potential threat to the station but really to get a few minutes of quiet time when he didn’t have to breathe the recycled exhalations of 419 other men.

That’s what he was doing tonight. It was 2100 hours. Shift change, with its crowds of workers crossing each others’ paths as they went on or off duty, was over, and the station was relatively calm. It had been particularly rough this time – at least a dozen fist fights and a few other assorted disturbances. Gerne figured he deserved a half hour or so of peace on the surface to clear his mind. He stepped around the corner into the lock, started to swing his helmet up toward his head, then stopped.

The scene he saw only lasted for a fraction of a second, but it lingered in his mind long enough for him to clearly pick out the details.

The airlock was not empty; there was a figure inside, suited up but, like Gerne, with his helmet off. He was crouching down by the panel where the controls were, near the outside door facing away from Gerne and looking sly and furtive.

There was an odd noise, a hissing sound. After two months on the station, Gerne was intimately familiar with the routine noises of the machinery that maintained a fragile bubble of Earth-normal environment here on the airless, radiation-drenched surface of the moon. Most of the time he was not consciously aware of the background noise. It was only when an expected sound was absent or an unusual noise appeared that he paid attention to what he heard. Hissing noises in open airlocks were not normal.

The man in the lock clearly had not heard Gerne’s approach down the hall, but as the security chief entered the airlock, he started and jumped to his feet. Surprise caused his Earth-trained reflexes to kick in, sending him shooting up off the floor to bang his head against the ceiling. The cigarette that he had been holding dropped from his fingers and drifted slowly to the floor, smoke curling lazily upward as it fell.

“Dammit, Kristasson!” Gerne shouted.

---

The accused, Arn Kristasson, sat to one side of the judge’s table in the makeshift courtroom, shackled to the flimsy chair by chains at his wrists and ankles. He was tall and thick, built like a man who would go to Celtic festivals so he could have an excuse to hurl tree trunks around. He wasn’t so much muscular as he was big, to the point that his head almost looked too small for the massive body it sat on. His short, dirty-blond hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. It probably hadn’t – water was too precious a resource on the station to use for cleaning bodies that would only get dirty again. The expression on his face was one of amused contempt, as though to say that he thought the entire proceeding was a farce that he couldn’t be bothered to take seriously.

The “prosecutor” – actually the station’s third-in-command, Len Drachton, whose job description usually consisted of making sure all the reports that were headed back to Earth were in the proper format – was partway through questioning his main witness.

“… so you didn’t actually see him open up a hole in the control panel?”

“No,” Gerne replied. “But it’s pretty obvious what he must have done. Once Kristasson was in custody, I examined the control panel. I found that the screws holding it in place were loose, but I couldn’t tighten them. There was a small rock wedged in between the panel and the wall. Once I dug it out with the blade of the screwdriver, the panel snapped back into place and the hissing noise stopped. Then I could tighten the screws.”

“Why would he have wedged a rock between the wall and the control panel?”

“Objection?” called the opposing counsel, somewhat weakly. He had no more legal experience than anyone else in the room, and had only gotten the job because someone had to do it. Stuck with the task, he gamely tried to do his best. “That’s speculation. Uh, your honor.”

Pete Sparks, the commander of the station and acting judge in the trial, looked down at the “bench” – one of the folding tables from the mess hall – for a long moment. Then he said “Sustained. Please rephrase the question, Mr. Drachton.”

Drachton gathered his thoughts, then said, “How is it possible for a rock to have gotten wedged in that spot?”

“Well, on its own, it can’t. Someone would have had to put it there. See, when the airlock has air in it, loosening the screws on the control panel has no effect because the air pressure inside pushes the panel outward against the vacuum. But if you cycle the lock so there’s vacuum on both sides, then it would be easy to loosen the screws, nudge the panel out of place, wedge a small rock in, then seal the lock and fill it up with air again. Only then air starts getting out through the gap.”

“Don’t we have alarms in place to detect air leaks?”

“We do. The ones in C-2 had been disabled.”

“For what purpose?”

“Objection?” squeaked the defense counsel.

“Overruled,” said Sparks.

“I think Exhibit A answers that question,” said Gerne. He gestured to it – a partially smoked cigarette sealed in a plastic bag, lying on the table.

---

“Mr. Kristasson,” the station commander intoned. “The court will now pronounce sentence.”

“This is a fuck’n joke,” Kristasson muttered.

Commander Sparks heard him, but pretended he hadn’t. “You did an astonishingly stupid thing, Mr. Kristasson. You broke the seal in an airlock, causing a small but nevertheless significant leak of air from the interior. You seem to think it was no big deal, that you had everything under control. I don’t believe you even realize how badly things might have gone wrong. Had Chief Gerne not chanced by and found you, we could have lost a big chunk of our air supply. Even if you didn’t kill us all outright, you could have made us very, very miserable.

“In case you have forgotten, Mr. Kristasson, we are on our own here. There is no resupply ship due for another four months. If we run low on air, there is no way to get any more. We’d be finished, all of us condemned to die slow, agonizing deaths from asphyxiation.”

Kristasson rolled his eyes. Pete Sparks continued undeterred.

“Asphyxiation is a very unpleasant way to go, Mr. Kristasson. Imagine it: a station with four hundred and twenty men aboard it, and not enough air to go around. What would happen next would depend on how much air had leaked out. As it happened, the loss was minimal. But suppose the loss had been larger?”

“The CO₂ scrubbers could have kept up with the load, I suppose. But the air pressure would have dropped. We keep it at sea level, 1000 or so millibars. Your stupidity might have dropped us to 900, 800, maybe 700. It would have been like rising in altitude back on Earth. Imagine trying to keep up the pace of our work at the elevation of Denver, or the Himalayas.”

He left the bench and began to pace back and forth across the room.

“We would be gasping with every breath, sucking hard to get enough oxygen to our starving muscles. All day, all night. We wouldn’t be able to sleep soundly; our bodies would constantly wake us up with their demand for more oxygen. Four hundred and twenty men, already crowded and cranky and now sleepless and air-starved, too. Day in, day out, always needing more and never being able to get it. For four more months. How long do you think we would last before the riots broke out? How long would it take for the killing to start once the rockhounds realized that every man dead meant more air for the survivors?”

Sparks stopped pacing directly in front of Kristasson and brought his face in close.

“Do you have any idea how agonizing it is to be so desperate for air that you’d do anything to get it, yet no matter what you do you can’t quite get enough?”

Kristasson just stared back into Sparks’ eyes, the smirk that had been on his face since the beginning of the proceedings still visible at the corners of his mouth.

“No,” Sparks said, backing away. “No, I don’t believe you do. And yet that is what you would have inflicted on every man here. And for what reason? So you could smoke a cigarette.”

Kristasson finally spoke. “OK, OK, I get it. Ain’t gonna smoke no more, swear I ain’t. Lesson learned, boss. ‘Sides, you took my cigs anyway. Can’t smoke even ‘f I wanted to.”

Sparks slammed his hand on the table. “Kristasson, you don’t get it. You knew when you signed up for this job that there would be no smoking on the station. Yet this is the third time you’ve been caught lighting up. The first time you got a stern lecture and we confiscated your cigarettes. Or so we thought. Obviously we missed some because we caught you a second time, slapped you with a hefty fine and took the smokes again. Now here we are a third time, only this time you thought you could get away with cracking a hole in the wall and blowing the smoke outside!”

Sparks began to pace again.

“Kristasson, either you are too stupid to walk and breathe at the same time, or you were trying to get caught. I don’t know which it is, but it really doesn’t matter. You have shown no remorse for your actions, which leads me to believe that the moment you get another chance to light up, you’ll take it. Despite the fact that it could endanger every single one of the lives that I’m responsible for.”

“So what, then?” Kristasson asked. “I tol’ you you got all my smokes. It don’t matter.”

“I don’t believe you, Kristasson. Why should this third time be any different from the first two? No, this time I’m afraid we have to find a more permanent solution.”

“What, you gonna ship me back groundside?”

“Much as I’d like to, that’s not possible for another four months. Neither is it possible for me to lock you up for the rest of your stay here. We just don’t have the luxury of providing food, air, and water for a drone who does no work. Mr. Kristasson, you have put me in a very difficult position. I’ve thought long and hard about what to do with you, and finally took my inspiration from the American Old West.

“They had the same problems there, you know – small towns of law-abiding folk who were preyed on by bandits, criminals who were too dangerous to be allowed to run loose once they were caught. A small town didn’t have the resources to feed and care for them in a jail. Neither could they be shipped off elsewhere, because of the community’s isolation. Much like the situation we find ourselves in here. So I decided to adopt the solution they used.”

Sparks lifted his head and stood erect behind the folding table that served as his bench. When he spoke, his voice was formal and filled the room. “Arn Kristasson, you have been found guilty of endangering this station and the lives of everyone on it. You knowingly and willingly circumvented the station’s safety systems, threatening everyone on board with death by slow asphyxiation.

“For your crime, I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, sentence to be carried out at 1800 hours today.”

Arn tried to surge out of his seat, but was hampered by the chains and the guards behind him on either side. “WHAT?!? Are you fuck’n KIDD’N ME?!? You can’t do that!”

“Mr. Kristasson,” said Sparks, “I not only can, I have to. Any lesser punishment just gives you the opportunity to try again. We can’t send you away, we can’t let you walk free, and we can’t spare the resources to keep you alive. Therefore, you have to die. Take him away.”

Kristasson continued to protest while the guards set him loose from the chair and bundled him out of the room. Commander Sparks sat down behind the bench and put his head in his hands. Finally the room was empty except for the station commander and his chief of security.

“Sam, this is just a bad deal all around,” he said.

“You did what you had to do, boss,” Gerne replied. “That guy was trouble from the day he got here.”

“I know, I know. It’s the only thing we can do. But the whole situation still sucks.”

Gerne stayed silent.

“You’re sure you don’t mind taking care of the arrangements? I’d do it myself if I had to, you know. I would never order anyone else to do it, but, you did offer, and …”

Gerne interrupted “It’s OK, boss. I’ll take care of things.”

“Thanks, Sam. I appreciate that.”

---

Commander Sparks decided that it would be best if the execution were conducted in private, unlike the public spectacles of the Old West. Kristasson had so far been the only smoker caught in the act, so a public display of punishment was not necessary for its deterrent value. And while there was no way to keep the event and manner of Kristasson’s death a secret, there was also no reason to dramatize it and leave the visual memory of a dangling corpse in the men’s minds.

The vehicle bay was therefore the best place for the hanging. The selection of locations was limited because there were very few rooms on the station that had ceilings high enough to suspend a man from, and most of them were inappropriate for the job for morale reasons. The mess hall, for instance, was out, and likewise the two rec rooms. The vehicle bay, on the other hand, was a public space, but it was seldom used and the next planned surface excursion was two days away.

Gerne had run into one small hitch: there was no rope anywhere on the station. There was, however, plenty of cable, so he decided to use that instead. In the hours before 1800, he figured out a way to fashion a noose at the end and tested it out using a cluster of oxygen tanks strapped together. After a few test drops, he had everything set the way he wanted it to be.

At 1750, Kristasson was brought into the room, kicking and struggling. “You fuck’n assholes! Lemme go! I ain’ goin’ in there! Aw, shit, NO!”

When he saw the cable dangling from the ceiling with the noose at its end, his shouts and struggles grew even more intense, and it took all three guards to manhandle him over to the execution site.

His hands were locked behind his back with two pairs of heavy-duty handcuffs, but those were the only restraints he wore. His massive torso was clothed in a thin sleeveless cotton shirt, and he wore plain trousers and work boots on his legs. His eyes were wild as he fought to escape. Despite his resistance, the guards lifted his struggling body up onto the hood of one of the lunar excursion rovers, directly beneath the dangling cable.

Gerne, waiting atop the vehicle’s hood, slipped the noose over Kristasson’s thrashing head. He slid the noose closed until it lay snug against the condemned man’s neck. Only then did the three guards release their grip on him and climb down off the rover. They backed away to stand by the door, clearly tense and anxious about what was coming.

“Thanks, boys,” said Gerne, climbing down from the hood himself. “I’ll take it from here. You can stay or go, whatever you like.”

The three guards shifted uncomfortably, all of them clearly wanting to leave but no one willing to make the first move. After long, uncomfortable seconds, one of them made a tentative gesture that another interpreted as a move toward the door, and then the dam broke and all three were heading out, leaving victim and executioner alone in the bay.

Kristasson continued to struggle, but his movements were hampered now by the fact that he couldn’t bend his body without feeling the pull of the noose on his neck. Gerne ignored him. Eventually, Kristasson settled down a bit, but invective continued to spurt out of his mouth periodically.

This continued until 1757, when Gerne said “Listen up, Kristasson. We’re going to do this right.” He extracted a slip of paper from his pocket and began to read in a stilted, formal voice.

“Arn Kristasson, you have been convicted of deliberately endangering this station and threatening everyone on it with death by slow asphyxiation. Having no other alternative, Commander Sparks and the station’s judicial authority have sentenced you to death in a manner appropriate for your crime. If you have any last words, you may speak them now.” Gerne let the paper fall to the floor and added “Not that it’ll matter a gnat’s fart in a hurricane.”

“Yeah, fuck you too, you mother-fuck’n fucker!” Kristasson shouted. The stream of profanity continued, but Gerne paid no attention, looking up instead at the the old-style military-issue analog clock on the wall. The second hand swung inexorably around, reaching the zenith at 1759. As it did, Gerne climbed into the driver’s seat of the rover. The second hand continued its journey around the clock face.

When it passed the horizontal on its way up to the top again, Gerne switched on the rover’s engine and revved it a few times. Kristasson squirmed in panic now that the inevitable moment had finally arrived. His feet danced on the hood and his hands clutched at the empty air behind him. “You fuck’n asshole,” he shouted, “you can’t fuck’n do this! Don’t you dare move that fuck’n truck, Gerne! Get me down!”

His tirade continued as the second hand swept past the vertical again. As it did, Gerne revved the engine again and slowly moved the rover backward. Kristasson was forced to inch forward as the rover moved back, stepping closer to the edge. It only took a few seconds before he ran out of room. The rover continued steadily backward as Kristasson’s booted feet reached the end and had nowhere else to go. The condemned man’s body arched at a steeper and steeper angle until at last he could stand no longer. His body plunged forward and he fell.

“Fell,” though, is not the most accurate word, for this was not at all like a hanging on Earth would have been. The word “fell” conjures up an image of speed, of a mass accelerating downward at one standard gravity, 9.8 meters per second squared. But this was not Earth. This was the moon, where the gravity is only one-sixth of the mother world’s. In that low gravity Kristasson’s body seemed to float gently downward, lazily eating up the short distance until the cable pulled taut and stopped its downward motion.

Gerne backed the rover far beyond the reach of Kristasson’s kicking legs, then climbed out to inspect the result. Just as he had planned, the cable now held Kristasson suspended by his neck with his feet about half a meter above the metal floor. Kristasson’s hundred-and-twenty kilograms – 260-some pounds by the old reckoning – were now all dangling from his thick bull neck. But the pull on his neck was not the full 120 kg. The low gravity made it seem like he only massed 20 kg, far from enough to break his neck and not even enough to strangle him completely.

But it was enough to make him uncomfortable. Gerne watched while Kristasson tried to come to grips with his situation. His hands were useless. The heavy shackles – two pairs of them – were unbreakable, even for a man of his size and strength. They severely limited the range of his arms’ movement; he could lift them up and backward a bit, twist them around a bit, or tug them to one side or the other. But he could not bring his hands into any position where they could reach the cable around his neck.

His legs were free to kick, and kick they did. It was surely obvious to him that reaching any kind of support with his feet was impossible, and yet his helpless body continued to try. His spasmodic kicking caused his body to swing back and forth like a pendulum, oscillating around in low-gravity slow motion.

“You fucker!” he gargled through his partially-closed throat. “You mother-fuck’n bastard!” Gerne saw that the implications of this method of execution had penetrated into Kristasson’s brain. There would be no quick and easy death for him. No quick, clean snap of the neck and then oblivion. Not even a five- or ten-minute ordeal with a completely closed throat, waiting while his body ran through its oxygen reserves.

No, this hanging would last a long, long time. Kristasson’s lunar weight was enough to ensure that he was uncomfortable and stressed as he swung, but it was not enough to kill him. Eventually it would, but that moment would come a long time in the future. Until then, every breath would be an agony. His head would throb and swell with trapped blood, further constricting his airway. For all of the long hours to come, Kristasson would be able to get just the wrong amount of air – too little for comfort, but not little enough to kill. Exactly as Commander Sparks had decreed, though Gerne had a hunch that the commander had no idea how long the torture was likely to last.

Gerne knew.

“Now you know, too,” he breathed at the hanged man, too low for the words to be heard.

Kristasson’s head had flushed a deep red as the blood backed up in his veins. Over the next five minutes, it steadily darkened to purple. During that time he continued to bite out occasional obscenities, but most of his attention was focused on trying to find some kind of relief from the discomfort he was in. There was none. His useless, wild, uncoordinated struggles convulsed his body as if he were lost in the throes of an epileptic seizure.

When it became clear that everything was working as planned and that nothing much was going to change, Gerne called, “Hey, Kristasson, I’m not gonna stick around to watch the rest of the show, but don’t you worry – to make sure nothing goes wrong, I’ve got a pair of cameras trained on you so I can keep an eye on you from my office. You just take all the time you need.”

“Fuck you! Fuck, fuck, FUCK you!” Kristasson tried to shout, but the cable choked his voice down to a rasping bark.

Gerne turned away and walked to the door, locking it behind him. Not that he expected any of Kristasson’s buddies to try to stage a rescue, but a little caution was never a bad idea.

---

The door closed. Kristasson could not believe how much hurt he was in. His neck was thoroughly chafed from the tight cable around it. His head felt swollen to twice its normal size from all the blood jammed inside. Every breath seared – the air had to squeeze past his tightened throat going in and going out, and it felt like sandpaper as it went.

It didn’t help that his legs kept kicking with a life of their own. Every time they lashed out, he gave himself a painful tug on the cable, but he couldn’t seem to force them to stay still. The moment his attention wandered elsewhere, his legs started up again, trying over and over again to reach the solid ground that they would never feel again.

If he could only get his hands up, he thought, he could try to lift himself up and maybe get enough slack to slip out of the noose. But the locks on his wrists were impossible to break, though he strained and tried. Cuffed as they were, his hands were trapped uselessly behind him. He couldn’t use them for anything except pawing the air.

Some fifteen minutes into his ordeal, a thought came to him. He tried to use the low lunar gravity to his advantage. He tensed his muscles, then gave an abrupt jerk with his neck and shoulders. It worked – briefly. His body rose up into the air and for a moment he felt the tension at his neck fade away. Freed from the constriction, the blood began to drain out of his head and the swelling lessened. He seized the chance to gulp a deep breath of air.

But then came the inevitable. His body reached the top of its rise and began to descend. With the slowness of all objects in lunar free-fall, he sank back downward until he reached the limit of the cable and was jerked to an abrupt halt. Fresh burns scorched his neck as the cable slid along his skin and retightened itself. His legs began to pinwheel again and the familiar pool of trapped blood quickly re-formed in his head.

He tried it again three more times, each time hoping to gain enough altitude to wriggle free of the trap, but he never even came close. After three tries he gave up; the pain of hitting bottom again was too big a price to pay for each fleeting moment of freedom. Besides, he was being monitored, anyway. Even if he managed to get out, where would he go? He couldn’t leave the station. They would just find him and hook him back up again. Unless he could find a way to kill himself more quickly before they got to him.

He prepared himself for another launch upward, but just couldn’t bring himself to do it, knowing the pain it would cause him when he inevitably failed to slip free. He resolved to just suck it up and take it like a man.

His resolve lasted thirty seconds, and then he was bucking and grunting again, suffering in unending agony beyond anything he had ever imagined.

---

Gerne entered his office and closed the door behind him. The latch had barely clicked before Gerne had his fly fumbled open and his thick cock out in his hand. Seconds later, he shuddered and gasped as load after load of thick white cream sprayed onto the desk and floor. Weak in the knees, he sagged down until he was kneeling on the floor while the aftershocks of his orgasm pulsed through his body.

It took a few minutes for him to recover. When he did, he set to work mopping up the mess, then settled himself at his desk. His info screen showed two windows, each set to the view from one of the cameras in the vehicle bay. The resolution was not the best, but the lighting was good – he had seen to that – and the suffering of the hanging man came through with crystal clarity. He reached for his softened penis and began to idly rub it while he watched.

It’s a wonder that I was able to make it back to the office in time, he thought. It would not have been fun explaining the stain on the front of my pants.

He flicked his eyes between the two views of Kristasson’s agony, imagining what the man must be feeling now, the burn on his neck, the rasp of air through his half-strangled throat, the overwhelming yet perpetually unsatisfiable urge to swallow… He zoomed one of the cameras in on the noose for a moment, getting a close-up of where the small loop at the end met the vertical length. It was hard to tell with the screen resolution and Kristasson’s constant jerky motion, but it looked like his little device was working properly.

It was tiny, barely visible – a small clamp, strategically positioned on the cable to prevent the loop from slipping past. Without it, the noose would have tightened inexorably, even with the low lunar gravity, eventually closing Kristasson’s throat completely and bringing his suffering to an end. A premature end, in Gerne’s view. With the clamp in place, however, the noose was prevented from tightening past a certain carefully-measured point, and Kristasson would be able to hang from it for hours, perhaps even days…

The image on the screen flickered as Kristasson’s body lurched again, so he zoomed the camera’s view back out. He watched Kristasson try to wriggle his way out of the noose by hurling his body upward, and saw how it only resulted in more pain. Each descent brought an involuntary grunt out from the constricted throat. The sight and sound stirred Gerne’s cock to new life, and before long he had shot a second load, this time catching the result in a tissue.

On the screen, the slow dance of death went on. Gerne’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two windows, riveted by the view.

---

It felt like hours later, but Kristasson had no idea how long his suffering had actually lasted so far. All he knew was that he wanted it to end, one way or another, because he could not take one more minute of the torture. Try as he might, though, there was no way he could make it stop. He had tried everything he could think of to either escape the noose or hasten his death, but nothing he did had any effect. He could not slip free of the cable, but neither could he cause it to tighten any further and grant him release. He tried over and over to hurl his body downward to strangle himself faster, but nothing changed. Blessed oblivion remained out of his reach. At last he gave up in despair, realizing that he was utterly powerless to affect what was happening to him. All he could do was endure.

Kristasson forced his restless legs to hang still once more, but they started kicking again almost as soon as he had stopped them. He could barely see now – his eyes had swollen almost completely shut and he was pretty sure some blood had leaked into them, because what little he could see was all tinged with red. His mouth was dry and chalky, his throat was in absolute torment, and his tongue felt so thick in his mouth that it forced its way out between his teeth. Every breath hurt like hell. He had tried a number of times to just stop breathing, but that was beyond him, too. His body kept betraying him, overriding his will and sucking at the air, desperately clinging to life even though his mind knew that every additional minute of existence was just another minute of suffering.

He could not believe how badly he hurt. Pain like this was simply unimaginable to him before he had experienced it, but now that he was in the middle of it, he found he could barely remember a time when he was not in indescribable agony. It felt like his entire life had been spent hanging by the neck at the end of a cable in a dusty vehicle bay a quarter of a million miles from home.

He felt his legs kicking and again forced them to stop. Damn Gerne for doing this to him. In fact, damn Gerne for catching him in the first place. C-2 should have been the perfect place to sneak a smoke – Menderling had practically said as much, and he should know. Menderling worked in Gerne’s division, for Chrissake, and had access to the records of airlock usage and shit like that. He said it was the least-opened lock on the ship, almost never used even at shift change, the perfect place to get a little private time to jerk off or take a sniff of something to ease the tension. Or sneak a smoke, Kristasson had figured, if it weren’t for the air-leak alarms, but then he had overheard Brennon bragging about how to disable those.

It was so fuckin’ unfair. There had been no danger at all, just one tiny crack in the wall. Hardly any air had leaked out, and he would have covered it up as soon as he had finished that cigarette. One lousy cigarette. Where had he even gotten it? he wondered now. They had taken his whole stash after the second time, even the emergency three he had stored in the hollow support rod holding up his bunk. Oh, that’s right, he had won five of them from Thien in a poker game. Shit, Thien didn’t even smoke, what was he doing with cigarettes anyway?

Another violent coughing fit seized him, coughs that were choked off by the unending pressure on his neck. His throat was so irritated now that his body kept trying to cough, trying to dislodge the invader that was causing it such distress. Except that the problem wasn’t inside his neck, it was outside, and no amount of coughing was ever going to fix it, though that knowledge didn’t stop his body from trying, over and over again.

There went his legs again.

Please, let me die, he thought, for the thousandth time.

---

At 0100, Gerne finally, reluctantly, locked up his office, stumbled back to his room, and sank into his bunk, completely spent. He had shot four loads in the seven hours since he had strung Kristasson up – nothing to write home about if he were eighteen again, but not too shabby for a forty-two-year-old man.

He had spent all the time he could get away with watching Kristasson’s struggles, glued to every motion the struggling man made and never tiring of the show. Now, though, he had to get some sleep if he was going to be any use in the morning. There was still his day job to do, after all. Besides, both video streams were being recorded, so he’d be able to review what had happened during the night as much as he wanted tomorrow. Over and over and over…

He figured the odds of Kristasson still clinging to life in morning were about fifty-fifty. The guy’s neck was tough, sure, but the way he kept kicking around was taking its toll. Even though the cable couldn’t get any tighter than it already was, something would eventually give. Kristasson’s brain cells had to be dying off by the thousands every minute, and his muscles would be growing exhausted from the constant effort of forcing air through the constricted passageway of his throat. At some point, brain or body would fail, the flow of air would cease, and Kristasson would be nothing more than a dangling hunk of meat.

Lying in his bunk, Gerne felt faint stirrings in his shriveled cock at the thought. Could number five be possible yet tonight?

Perhaps not – he was pretty tired. It had been hard work arranging the circumstances that led to tonight’s execution. Playing both sides of a game was a tricky proposition, after all, and made even harder by the fact that he couldn’t trust any of his intermediaries with his secret. He had to be seen as acting in his role as security chief at all times, never revealing a single clue to his darker purposes.

It had been no easy task to provide Kristasson with his cigarettes while ostensibly preventing him from having them. Likewise to ensure that he learned when C-2 was likely to be deserted and how to disable its air-leak alarms without anyone seeing Gerne’s hand at work. Manipulating Sparks into choosing the appropriate sentence had been fairly simple in comparison.

Patience was the key. Never make a move in haste. Two months was not so long to wait to bring a plan to fruition; in fact, it was downright speedy. The trap he had laid was complicated, built of many small parts that each had to remain unnoticed. Trying to rush its progress would only have increased the risk of something going wrong. There were so many variables, in fact, that he really was fortunate that events had come together as perfectly as they had. Any number of unknown factors might have intervened to alter the outcome. That was why a prudent planner made backup plans, and backups for the backups.

Now, on the cusp of sleep, Gerne wondered whether he should continue with plans B and C. B involved one of the youngest men on board, a cute nineteen-year-old Asian who would provide hours and hours of entertainment as his life slowly slipped away. C was a beautifully muscled, heavily tattooed Latino, perhaps the toughest of the three to manipulate due to his unpredictable temperament. Tempting as it was to picture either of them delivered to him for punishment, the risk might just be too great. One execution was an unfortunate tragedy; two was a pattern. Three, well, three might be enough to send Gerne to the noose himself, a thought that had its allure, to be sure, but one which he was not quite willing to commit himself to yet.

Sleep was overpowering him now; number five would definitely have to wait until morning. He smiled as he drifted off, seeing in his mind’s eye the image of Kristasson still hanging by his thick bull neck in the vehicle bay, choking and gasping, face black with blood, eyes swollen shut, endlessly kicking and spinning in futile struggle as the interminable remaining minutes of his life slowly, glacially, ticked away.