Spacer Tales: The Haunted Hatchway Read online

stretch the definition of “spacer” to include anyone working with starships. Jon Michaels hired spacers to work on the station so Tam had allowed him a membership.

  He had his reservations about that, though. It was possible that Jon Michaels came in so often because he enjoyed the food and liked to pick up on spacer gossip. The more cynical, however, were of the view that he called in so frequently to keep an eye and ear on spacedocks employees. His interruption was loud, and his tone derogatory. “Freaky?” he mocked. “A glitchy door? Spacers! You lot would make a drama out of milk going sour!”

  Many of the other customers glared at the groundhog, but Biz just ignored him.

  “We kept going over it, running tests and trying different things,” he said. “There was no pattern to it, no correlation to wave space contours or anything like that. It had happened three more times before we finally figured it out.”

  If he’d been telling the tale for entertainment, he would have paused at that point, taking a drink of his beer to build the suspense. As it was he went straight on, his manner grim.

  “It was the engineer who found it – Sali Tredwell. She was going through the records from Flancer again and found a file attached to the report from the spacedocks team. It was a service history of the hatchway. We had that already from the spacedocks at Mandram but it turned out they’d left out one important detail.”

  This time he did pause, making sure he had all their attention. Jon Michaels rolled his eyes and a few of the other groundhogs there were grinning, but all the spacers were alert. “According to the spacedocks at Mandram,” Biz told them, “the hatchway came from Fleet Surplus.”

  That did not surprise anyone. The same companies which built warships for the Fleet built freighters for the merchant service. Many of the parts they used were standardized, since the ease of obtaining spare parts was a major selling point. The Fleet had higher standards for tech replacement on their ships, though, so a second hand part from a warship would be perfectly acceptable for use on freighters.

  “It didn’t specify which ship the hatchway had come from, of course,” Biz said. The Fleet was happy to sell non-classified surplus tech and supplies to freighters but reluctant to be too specific about where it had been used. “But the one from Flancer did. Their guys had got hold of the Fleet service record for it somehow and it was right there in the file. And that told us, see… that hatch came from the Valiant.”

  There was a moment of total silence as the spacers stared at him in horror, then an outburst of gasps, curses and a rising hubbub of appalled incredulity.

  “But who on earth would…”

  “Who could be that stupid...?”

  Biz held up a hand with a compelling look, and the exclamations died away.

  “It turns out the Fleet has broken the Valiant up in their yards at Therik, and some idiot at Colestar bought a whole load of parts from it and had them shipped to Mandram.”

  “Why?” Jon Michaels interrupted again as the spacers reacted to that with head shaking, swearing and telling one another how insane that was. “What’s the big deal?” The manager demanded. He often felt that spacers had their own private language, exchanging comments which were incomprehensible to him. He often resented it, too, feeling that they might be talking about him or undermining his authority in some way. One of the reasons he’d started coming to Kluskey’s was, in fact, to learn that private language and feel more in control over his spacer employees. “What’s the Valiant?”

  Every spacer there turned their heads and stared at him, and there was a very telling moment of silence. Even groundhogs might remember having seen stories about the Valiant on intersystem news. For a man who worked in the space industry not to know about it was unforgivable.

  “The Valiant was a Fleet ship.” It was Tam Kluskey who spoke, his manner calm and friendly. Nobody had ever seen Tam anything other than relaxed and friendly, even when shoreleavers got rowdy. Now, the shaggy-haired owner of the hangout drew attention to himself, easing the tension in the atmosphere by his own pleasant manner. “It was a heroic class destroyer. Eight years ago, fourteen people died and fifty two were injured in a flash fire on board. The actual cause of the fire was a laser saw cutting through a hydrogen line. If all Fleet regulations had been followed, however, nobody would have been hurt. Fleet regs are that anyone working in an area where cutting equipment is being used must wear survival suits and surrounding pressure hatches must be closed. The petty officer and two crewmembers doing the work were wearing survival suits and they had closed the hatches. All three of them escaped without serious injury.

  “A young Sub on his first tour of duty, however, overrode the hatch controls. His name was Anden Jeraldsen. He was notoriously full of himself, convinced that he was God’s gift to the Fleet and impatient with more senior officers nit-picking about proper procedures. He was supervising a party of crew bringing supplies up from the hold and didn’t want them slowed down by having to go through the small airlock, so he put in his authorisation to open both hatches.

  “Seconds after he did that, an explosion and flash fire ripped through the ship. Anden Jeraldsen and the supplies party were killed instantly, as were seven others caught in the blast. The report found Anden Jeraldsen responsible for their deaths. The skipper lost his command and the entire ship’s company was disbanded. The next skipper, however, resigned his command the following year, and the one appointed after that didn’t even stick it out for a month. It had a reputation for being jinxed, you see.”

  “Oh, come on!” Jon Michaels marvelled, “A jinxed ship? Are you people for real?”

  “Please, let’s respect everyone’s right to their own opinion.” Tam quietened the spacers who were getting angry by then and starting to tell the personnel manager what to do with himself. Then he spoke to Jon Michaels, his manner quiet but somehow holding everyone’s attention. “Most spacers do believe in supernatural phenomena because most spacers have personal experience of the strange and unexplained. It goes with the territory out there, and by that, I don’t just mean that space is dangerous.

  “We still don’t fully understand the nature of wave space. Superlight fuel is in itself one of the weirdest things in the known universe. It generates a bubble of twenty four dimensional energy around a ship which is in constant flux with the space-time continuum. Even the people who make that fuel don’t understand everything about the way it works. We know even less about the nature of consciousness and life energy. It is entire possible, scientifically speaking, that when someone dies aboard a superlight starship their life energy does not fade out the way it does normally, but may remain in some form we do not yet understand.

  “Whether you believe in such things or not, though, the Fleet took this seriously, and for very good reason. Once a ship has a reputation for being jinxed, it can very easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. High calibre crew who have other choices will turn down offers of placements there and there’ll be high crew turnover, neither of which is good for the operational standards of a ship. Any little thing that may go wrong will be attributed to the jinx, too, and that unsettles people and is bad for morale. You can’t just tell people not to be stupid in that situation. That does no good at all, just makes people feel that their concerns are being dismissed.

  “The Fleet did everything they could. They even sent in one of their best, high flying skippers to try and turn things around. That was Skipper Tennet – you may have heard of her. She’s known as “Terrible Tennet” in the Fleet.” That raised a few grins amongst the spacers, as disturbed as they were by the news of what the Fleet and Colestar had done.

  “She doesn’t stand for any nonsense,” Tam assured the personnel manager, “and you could not find anyone less inclined to superstition or hysteria. She has a reputation for seeing even the toughest assignments through, too, thriving on the challenge. She was only on the Valiant for three weeks before she resigne
d the command. Whether you believe the rumour that she saw the ghost of Anden Jeraldsen or not, it’s a fact that it was on her recommendation that the Fleet disbanded the crew for a second time and took the ship out of service.

  “They had it laid up in orbit for more than a year, completely powered down and with the airlocks open. Spacers believe that leaving a ship powered down and open to space for a year and a day will let the jinx go out of it, see. They left it a few extra months to be sure, then gave it a new skipper and crew.”

  “Yes, and four months later they took it out of service again, this time for good.” Biz had let Tam explain that far, but jumped in then and picked up the thread of it himself. “Regardless of what you may think, whether you call it group hallucination or whatever, people saw and heard things on that ship that scared the hell out of them. In the end, the Fleet recognised that it was never going to be viable as a warship so they laid it into the reserve.

  “You may not know,” he added, with a little note of scorn in his own voice for the groundsider’s ignorance, “that when a Fleet ship is taken out of service it’s laid into the reserve until such time as another ship is built to replace it and given the same name. The