Spacer Tales: The Space Monster of Sector 17 Read online



  Spacer Tales

  The Space Monster of Sector 17

  S J MacDonald

  Published by S J MacDonald

  Copyright 2011 S J MacDonald

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Penelope Rees for editing.

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  The Space Monster of Sector 17

  ‘I’m telling you, it’s real!’ Pell was getting annoyed now, as the cadets were clearly not taking him seriously. ‘There’s something out there in Sector 17. It’s very big and very real!’ As the cadets looked unconvinced, Pell turned to the owner of the bar and appealed to him for support. ‘Right, Tam?’

  Tam Kluskey smiled. Tall and shaggy haired, he ran the most popular spacer hangout in the Neuwald system by providing great food and a friendly atmosphere. Kluskey’s was one of the few places Fleet cadets were allowed to come to wearing uniform. Today, five teenage cadets had called in for Kluskey burgers and to chat with the spacers. Pell Argood’s conversation about the space monster of Sector 17 had however only made them giggle. Four of them at least. One of them was standing at the back looking thoughtful; a girl with the bird-boned physique of someone from a low gravity world.

  ‘Something, for sure.’ Tam agreed, and smiled at the cadets. ‘Nobody knows what, but there’s definitely something out there.’

  The cadets looked at him uncertainly. All of them knew his reputation and his standing in the spacer community. Cadets usually called him sir until invited to call him Tam and it was high status amongst the cadets if he knew them by name.

  ‘Seriously?’ Cadet Officer Velda Milat queried with a challenging lift of her chin. Velda was seventeen with bright green eyes, fluffy hair and a stubborn chin. She was top of her year at the academy and tended to be the spokesperson for any group she was with.

  ‘Seriously.’ Tam confirmed and nodded to Pell, a thin man with a scrawny moustache and a nervous manner. ‘Tell them about it properly, Pell.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Pell hitched himself up onto the bar but perched on the edge in a way that made it clear that he was not intending to stay for long, accepting the glass of cornbeer Tam handed him. ‘So, okay,’ he told the cadets, his manner that of a man getting an obligation over and done with as quickly as possible, ‘I was a tech on the Bluebell, right? That’s a sixty eight engine container ship. This is nine years back. We were on the Novamas to Rebekael run – tech from Novamas to Rebekael, food nutrients from Rebekael to Novamas, totally routine. Of course, we knew the stories about Sector 17. Spacers have been telling stories about things being seen out that way since ships first started going there and there are any numbers of sightings. Generally what people see is a flicker right on the edge of their scopes, something way too big to be any kind of ship we know, and just incredibly fast. Most of them are dismissed as scanner glitches or hoaxes, of course. Me, I never really believed in it. Not really. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have been out there.’

  He took a drink of his beer like a man who felt the need to steady his nerves a little.

  ‘Anyway, we’re twenty three days out, right? Perfectly ordinary day. I’m doing perfectly ordinary maintenance on air filters and suddenly there’s yelling blue murder up on the flight deck. So of course we go running, all of us, and there’s our watchkeeper cowering on the deck screaming, ‘It’s coming! It’s coming!’ He was in such a state we had to sedate him. All we could get out of him was that he’d seen something enormous. The skipper was there by then, obviously, and once we’d got him calmed down, she pulled up the log.

  ‘We all saw it, then. It was on our long range scanners for 2.8 seconds, clear as you like. There was no fuzziness, nothing that could have been signal echo or scanner glitch. It was crystal sharp, as real and solid as you are. Only it was…’ He gestured helplessly. ‘Unbelievable. Nearly two kilometres long, with thirty two tentacles trailing another four klicks or so behind. There were no engine hotspots, no sign of hull structures or any tech. It looked like a huge jellyfish, the tentacles kind of pulsing behind it.

  ‘Hundreds of ships have seen it. I knew that, and still, somehow, I didn’t really believe it till I saw it with my own eyes. It was just the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life. A hundred times the size of our ship. And a hundred times as fast, too. Thousands of times faster, maybe. I dunno. When we saw it, it was just kind of floating there in space. But 2.8 seconds after it appeared on our scopes, it saw us.’

  He paused, and looked intently at the cadets. ‘You understand that?’ He said. ‘It saw us. Whatever it was, it saw us or sensed us somehow, and it reacted instantly. It just kind of spun around and vanished. It was so fast that even frame-by-frame playback only showed it as a blur. It was off the scale of even the fastest superlight velocities. We couldn’t even work out how fast it was going. And when it was off our scopes, you know, we didn’t know where it was then, or whether it might come back.

  ‘None of us got much sleep the rest of that trip. We buddied up with a couple of other ships for the return trip, running in convoy. Me, I left the ship as soon as we got back to Novamas and you won’t catch me on any ship going through Sector 17 again. Whatever it is out there, I say we should leave it alone.’

  ‘And what did the authorities say?’ Velda was not going to be impressed, even by this eyewitness account. ‘I mean, presumably you reported it?’

  ‘Reported it?’ Pell echoed. ‘I should say we reported it! At Rebekael and Novamas. There wasn’t much point at Rebekael, of course. It’s a second stage colony world, hardly out of the homesteading stage, and the port admiral is a retired Lieutenant who fills in paperwork for the Admiralty.

  ‘Back at Novamas, though, we put in reports to the Port Admiralty office there. We’d all made statements for the log swearing that none of us had put the image on the scopes for a joke or anything like that and the skipper filed a report on it as soon as we hit port. She called the news channels too, offering them the original footage as proof of what we’d seen. But the Fleet had got there first.

  ‘It turned out that there’s a blanket ban in place restricting broadcast of any and all footage of any ‘unexplained phenomena’ in Sector 17 unless the media has permission from the Fleet, and they wouldn’t give that in the case of our footage. First they said it was ‘under official investigation’, which they managed to drag on for three years and when they eventually issued their findings they said that it ‘related to classified military matters’ and the footage couldn’t be released into the public domain.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it did.’ One of the other cadets, an owlish boy called Pob, spoke thoughtfully. ‘The Fleet does have research stations in remote areas and it’s possible that what you saw was a classified experiment.’

  Pell looked at him.

  ‘That was no kind of human technology’ he said, definitely. ‘It’s either a ship more alien than anything we’ve ever seen or some kind of life form, living in deep space.’

  That sparked an immediate reaction from the spacers gathered around, with many people giving their opinions on that issue to anyone willing to listen. From the hubbub, it seemed that opinion was about evenly divided on that one, with the ‘ship or monster’ debate clearly a perennial amongst spacers.

  ‘You really believe t
hat?’ Velda was still sceptical. ‘You don’t think it could have been, oh, I don’t know, some kind of camouflage signal from a classified ship, designed to mess with your scanners?’

  ‘That’s what the Fleet would like us to believe’ said Pell, amidst a general clamour of ridicule. ‘But that’s just stupid. For one, the usual idea of camouflage is stealth, to be invisible, not to make yourself a hundred times bigger and easier to see than you really are. For two, if it is supposed to be Fleet tech in development, they have apparently been working on it for hundreds of years without ever deploying any of that kind of tech for real, so what would be the point? And yes, yes, for three,’ he added, as several other spacers were pressing the point, ‘the Fleet exists to protect ships, not to scare them off a route vital to one of our own colonies. So no, we are not buying that it is the Fleet testing false image technology. We don’t believe that the Fleet has an alien ship they’re testing out there, either. We do know where the experimental research stations are and there’s nothing out that way. No, it’s either an alien ship or a deep space life form. And either is entirely possible, you know.’

  Velda looked