Spacer Tales: The Haunted Hatchway Read online

new Valiant was launched a couple of years back and is a fine ship, no problems there. Once that was launched, the old Valiant could be fully decommissioned and sent for scrap. Everyone thought that the Fleet had sold the metals off to be recycled for groundside industry, but it turns out they had this deal with Colestar to buy a load of the tech. And we, as we discovered, were given one of the Valiant’s hatchways.

  “You can think what you like, mister, but we had to live out there on that ship with a hatch that keeps closing because of a fire no other systems can detect. If you think that’s nothing, that it wouldn’t bother you, then fine, you go and sign up on the Colestar 24. You’ll just have to hope that if there is a real fire, that hatch will actually close and not stand open the way it did on the Valiant.

  “Me, I’m out of there, and I’m not alone in that. There were twenty eight crew on the Valiant when we came into port. By now,” he glanced at the time, “there’ll only be ten of them left. And they’re only staying, including the skipper, on condition that Colestar replaces that hatch with a brand new one before they’ll launch the ship again. The rest of us have quit on principle. Colestar should never have done that to us, giving us gear from a jinxed ship just to squeeze a few bucks. We agreed amongst ourselves to head out and cover all the spacer hangouts, to tell you the score before Colestar starts advertising for crew. You have the right to know what you’re getting into if you go aboard that ship.”

  Jon Michaels looked around, seeming more bewildered now than scornful.

  “I can see why you’d want action taken on it if a fire door isn’t safe or reliable,” he admitted, “but I just don’t see why any intelligent, reasonable person would give up or refuse a good, well paid job because they believe a piece of technology is haunted. You people are just nuts!”

  There was some muttering and more than one suggestion that Mr Michaels might like to take his opinions elsewhere or shove them up any convenient orifice, but Tam Kluskey defused the situation again, with a chuckle.

  “All spacers are nuts,” he agreed, to Jon Michaels’ surprise, and then explained, “You’d have to be nuts, really, to make a living working on starships. And until you’ve done that, Jon, until you’ve lived out there for months at a time in a claustrophobic can with people you can’t get away from, until you’ve lived in an environment where your survival is dependent on keeping thousands of bits of technology working perfectly all of the time, you can not possibly understand what spacers are. You can come in here every day and listen to our stories and gossip – fine, we don’t mind that.” There were some dissenting voices, but Tam pretended not to hear them. “We appreciate that you work with spacers every day and you want to understand us better,” he went on with a smile, “but if you really do want to understand, Jon, you will have to step out of working in an office and actually go out there yourself. Work a trip or two as a deckhand and then see how you feel, okay?”

  To his own amazement, Jon Michaels found himself grinning back. He felt that he ought to be angry, justifying his right to sane opinion and doing his best to point out to the spacers how irrational their beliefs were. There was just something in the way that Tam spoke to him, though, using his name, talking to him as a friend, that took away the need to be defensive.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I think space makes you crazy.”

  The way that Tam laughed at that made many of the others laugh too. Some of the younger ones pulled mad faces at the personnel manager and that made him chuckle as well. Even Biz Cooper was relaxing now.

  “Maybe it does,” he replied, “but we’re not crazy enough to go into space on a haunted ship.”

  “Some hauntings are fine,” one of the older spacers observed mildly. “I’ve been on a ship with a friendly presence – you could feel it sometimes on the nightwatch, just companionable, and nobody minded that. I’ve heard plenty of stories of spirits protecting crew, too, warning of problems and things like that.”

  There was immediate agreement in the audience and several such stories were mentioned.

  “I suppose it would be all right if it’s the spirit of someone from the Valiant trying to keep you safe,” said a skinny young man, hopefully. His name was Jem. He’d dropped out of Fleet Academy after only a few weeks and was desperate to get offworld, applying for every berth going. He looked like he was trying to convince himself that the Colestar 24 would be fine.

  “It didn’t feel like that,” said Biz, positively, and told the youth, “After we found out the hatch was from the Valiant we decided to keep it closed. It’s inconvenient coming and going through the airlock but we all felt it would be worth it. So it was closed and locked. Two nights later, it opened itself. According to the diagnostics, it was still shut.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in.

  “We got magnagrip clamps and physically sealed both hatches. That meant we had to go up or down a deck to get around it but we all felt we’d sleep better that way. Even then, the readout kept changing on whether it was open or closed. As we came into port, once we’d powered down our engines, we physically disconnected everything to do with that hatch from the ship’s systems. It’s totally unpowered, understand? And physically clamped shut with a force that ten airtrucks couldn’t pull apart. Twenty minutes before I left the ship, the reading on the flight deck changed from “D4-C disconnected” to “D4-C rebooting” and then “D4-C open”.”

  As the audience went quiet again, considering that, Biz continued, “One of our crew reckons he saw something, too. Just a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, before we knew it was from the Valiant. He thought he saw someone in Fleet officer’s rig standing by the hatch, as if they were working the controls. Which means, we reckon, that the chances are we’ve got the spirit of Sub-Lt Anden Jeraldsen aboard our ship. And you have to ask yourself this question – given what we all know about the guy and what a cackhead he was – dead or alive, would you really want to serve on a ship with him?”

  Jem swallowed, and gave a brief, involuntary shake of his head. Behind him, the wall-sized infoscreen that dominated the bar was already flashing up new items, berths available aboard the Colestar Logistical Solutions 24. Wanted: Engineer, Engineer’s Mate, Watchkeepers (2), Leading Technicians (3)…

  It would be some time, Tam felt, before the Colestar 24 would leave port again.

  ______________________

  Skipper Alex von Strada and his corvette Minnow are sent on a makework mission after a disastrous PR mess up. Inspector Mako Ireson goes with them, still trying to work out which is the front end of the ship as they hurtle into deep space. The last thing anybody wants is for them to get caught up in a real mission. A lighthearted space adventure by the author of Spacer Tales.