Spacer Tales The Haunted Hatchway S J MacDonald Published by S J MacDonald Smashwords Edition Copyright 2011 S J MacDonald Smashwords Edition, License Notes Thank you for downloading this free estory. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support. ____________________ The Haunted Hatchway Biz Cooper came into Kluskey’s like a man with a large dog snapping at his heels. Hurrying, anxious, he headed straight for the bar. Tam Kluskey watched as the spacer put down the kitbag he was carrying and got himself a shot of whisky from the automated dispensers. It had been four years since Biz had been in the bar, but Tam never forgot a customer. The last time he’d seen him, Biz had been celebrating his promotion to leading technician. A big man with orange hair and a booming voice, he’d been standing rounds for the whole bar and hugging strangers by the time he left. Now, though, he looked ten years older, knocking back the whisky in one gulp and then immediately ordering a beer. “What’s up, Biz?” Tam went over to him with a concerned look as he saw how pale the spacer was. It was obvious from the logo on the green overalls he was wearing that Biz had just left the container ship Colestar Logistical Solutions 24. The Colestar 24 had come into the Neuwald system four hours before and had just finished port entry procedures. This would have been the earliest that Biz could get off the ship. The kitbag he was carrying made it clear that he did not intend to go back. “Those morons at Colestar!” Biz told him, “you won’t believe what they’ve done!” He patted the bar with one hand, asking “Can I?” Tam didn’t hesitate. Biz obviously had a story he was bursting to tell. Even if it was just a gripe about some new policy of Colestar’s, other spacers would want to know about it. Colestar was one of the biggest container shipping companies in the League, and most spacers had either worked for them or knew someone who had. “Go ahead,” Tam agreed. Biz hopped up to sit on the bar as spacers always did when telling a story, flourishing his beer as he called for people to come over. “Gather up, folks, and hear this!” It was not long after the end of a work shift on the Amarynth station and the hangout was busy with workers from the spacedocks and ship services based there, as well as with shoreleavers from the couple of hundred ships currently in port. Around fifty of them came over in answer to Biz’s hail, looking interested, but most just carried on with their own drinks and conversations. “Listen up!” Biz put his powerful voice to good use and bellowed out over the background of music and voices. “Over here! All of you!” As Tam turned off the music and put a spotlight on the storyteller, more people came over. It only took a couple of minutes till nearly everyone in the bar was clustered around. There was something about the urgency in Biz’s manner that made it clear this was important. “All right.” When he was satisfied that he had their attention, Biz began his story. “My name is Biz Cooper and I’ve been senior tech on the Colestar 24 for four years. I’ve served on the Farwater, the Jenny 16 and the Stellar Empress before that. Some of you know me.” He picked out a few faces in the crowd, and there were nods and sounds of confirmation. This was important when a story was being told, establishing the space-cred of the person who was telling it. “The Colestar 24 had a routine five-year refit done at Mandram, four months ago,” Biz continued. “They upgraded our comms and did some general repairs, nothing out of the ordinary. One of the things they did was to replace three hatchways which failed stress-metals.” He looked around at his audience and saw only a few kids and groundhogs looking puzzled. Starships were tested every five years for structural integrity. The tests looked for any points of weakness in pressure bulkheads and hatchways which might be caused by damage or decay processes like oxidation. “One of the hatchways they replaced was D4-C, on deck four between quarters and tanks.” Nearly everyone there would be familiar with the interior of the starbreaker class of container ships. They would be able to visualise the cluster of tiny cabins used by officers and passengers, the mess deck surrounded by bunks for the crew, and the hatchway into the area of high pressure tanks which held air gases and water. The hatchway Biz was referring to was a heavy steel frame and double door, reinforced with duralloy, fitted into a pressure bulkhead within the ship. It would close and seal automatically if there was a blowout or fire, creating an internal airlock which would protect other areas of the ship while allowing people to escape from damaged sections. “The problems started six days out of Mandram,” Biz told them. “D4-C closed itself in the middle of the night for no obvious reason. The diagnostic showed that it had been triggered by smoke detectors but the smoke detectors hadn’t picked anything up. We just put it down to gremlins and didn’t think anything of it.” Many of the spacers listening nodded agreement with that. Starship tech could do weird stuff sometimes. Engineers said it was due to tiny fluctuations in the contours of wave space causing multidimensional pulses through the ship’s systems. Most spacers just called it gremlins and didn’t stress about it. “Three days later,” Biz said, “it happened again. Same thing. The diagnostic said that it had been triggered by an alarm from the smoke detector system, but the smoke detector diagnostics showed they hadn’t sent any such signal. I was asked to look at it and I did a full strip down on all the hatch systems, tested everything every which-way. I couldn’t find a thing wrong with it. The following week, one of the guys was coming through tanks and the damn thing shut right in front of him. “It happened nine times in the six weeks it took us to run from Mandram to Flancer. We went through everything, checking every system over and over, swapped parts over with other hatches, you name it, we tried it. The only thing we could think was that it was one of the crew winding us up. We had a rookie deckhand aboard, the kind of kid who thinks it’s funny to put fart powder in the coffee. Everyone thought he was messing with the hatch controls, though he swore he wasn’t. He got a lot of ear bashing over it, anyway, and left the ship at Flancer. “While we were there, the skipper reported the problem to the Colestar offices and they authorised a spacedocks team coming aboard to double check the systems, just in case. They did in-depth tests and confirmed that they couldn’t find anything wrong with them. There is a way to trigger the door closure manually which would read as if it was done by the smoke detectors, of course – you’d just need to plug a hand-comp into the diagnostics port and send a fake smoke-alarm signal. Everyone agreed that that’s what must have happened, and we all thought it was the kid, too. So that was that. We left Flancer seven weeks ago, heading here.” He looked around and saw that the spacers were anticipating what he was going to say next. It was, after all, obvious that he would not have yelled for them to come and hear this if it had been a bit of gossip about an annoying rookie playing pranks. “Two days out, it happened again,” he confirmed. “This time, it was at breakfast. The skipper and night-watchkeepers were on the flight deck. Everyone else was on the mess deck, having breakfast. When we heard the hatch close, we all went to see what was going on. I was right there, myself. I was there within two seconds. There is no way that anyone could have tampered with that hatch, no way they could have rigged a timer to send a false signal through the diagnostic port or anything like that. “That was when we started to get spooked. It was obvious we’d been unfair to the kid, blaming him. There was no technical explanation. All of us were accounted for at the time it happened. It wasn’t just annoying any more, it was starting to get freaky.” It was easy to tell the real spacers in the audience, because they were the ones who were looking alarmed. When you hurtled into deep space, you were trusting your life to a tiny, fragile bubble of technology in the most hostile environment known to man. Having an emergency airlock system you couldn’t rely on would be enough in itself to unnerve anyone who really understood the risks they were taking out there. “Oh come on!” one of the audience protested. He had the short, stocky build of a native Neuwaldian and an authoritative manner. His middle-aged paunch was contained by a silver-grey business suit and his nails were manicured. His name was Jon Michaels and he was a personnel manager for Amarynth Spacedocks. Like all spacer hangouts, Kluskey’s was a private club, but anyone who worked aboard the station could apply for membership. Tam would generally 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 resigned 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 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. Available at Smashwords