Ghosts

It had been an hour or so since the False Harbor had appeared, then been left behind, but the fog hadn’t let up as it should have. It had followed the Melchizedek, keeping pace with the hulk to the point that the captain didn’t trust in going full speed ahead in such poor visibility. So, he had eased the command to half ahead, then slow ahead, and finally, as the sun set, the radar equipment decided to start glitching. The navigators couldn’t get proper locks on the stars or Moon, so the captain made the executive decision to drop anchor.

The captain thought himself lucky that such a malfunction happened during the night. Most of the crew and passengers were hibernating and thus didn’t think twice about the great battleship making an unexpected, yet not uncommon, nightly stop. Still fresh from the See’s naval academy, he was unperturbed by the incident, having read many a similar account during his studies.

This laxity in his awareness was something that the shape following the Melchizedek had counted on. It had gone silent soon after the battleship had lowered its anchor and had expertly calculated its vector to come to a stop a half a mile from the ship.

Now it too lowered its anchor in addition to a small craft that silently propelled itself toward the sleeping, unsuspecting ship and the people therein.

#

Buddy opened his eyes. Within the dark cabin there was no noise apart from the faint huff and puff of his hibernating companions. There was also a significant lack of vibration, a telltale sign that the great reactors located deep within the ship’s bowels were either off or on minimal output. That, and the motions of the vessel had switched from a steady though light yaw to a gentle roll.

So, the ship had stopped again, thought Buddy.

He sighed, the breath coming out of his armpit vents in a gentle gust. He checked his energy stores and noted that they were full, but his mineral stores were two thirds depleted. Time for a midnight snack, it seemed.

He got up, leaving his poncho, hat, belt and weapon on his bunk, trying as quietly as he could manage to open the door and slip out into the hallway. He’d expected at least one of the occupants sharing his cabin to at least stir, but none did. Not even Hound.

He made his way to the mess through empty corridors, feeling a little giddy as one tends to when being the only one awake. The dim lights were dimmer, and many of the gray candles had gone out. Still, the incense lingered on the deck, forming a milky coating that swirled as its stillness was broken by Buddy’s silent steps. The myriad religious icons and trinkets cast sharp shadows, never letting the bounty hunter forget that this was indeed a See vessel.

The mess was a large chamber with four long tables with rows of stools on each side. By the walls were several slim cabinets with signs denoting which mineral compound or micronutrient each dispensed. Buddy visited most, inserting the dispensed chunks of minerals into his processor, washing it all down with a change of lubricants and amino-slime.

As he leaned on the liquids dispenser, connected to it via hose, he glanced toward the hallway. A man stood there, looking at the bulletin board with its many pinned notices. Buddy felt a jolt course through him, then he grinned.

“You startled me, good sir,” he said.

The man didn’t move. He kept silently staring at the bulletin board as though he was looking through the wall itself. There was something strange about him, though Buddy couldn’t place a finger on what it was.

“Um, you come for a little nighttime refueling too?” he asked.

Now the man turned to him, and Buddy finally realized what was so strange about him. He was wearing a long coat like the boatswain Stick did, but in addition to that, he wore trousers and boots, archaic by the looks of them. What was stranger still was the fact that Buddy couldn’t make out one single replacement. He was bald, his face strong and angular with deep set dark eyes and thick eyebrows and a lipless straight mouth. What made Buddy’s systems shock was the fact that the man didn’t cast a shadow, and that the incense on the deck remained completely undisturbed. Before he could blink, again without a word, the man walked through the wall with the bulletin board.

Buddy didn’t move for a long moment. His mouth hung slightly ajar, eyes glued to the spot where the man had stood, trying as hard as he could to rationalize what he’d just seen. He snapped out of his stupor when the liquids dispenser gave a soft chime, politely asking the user to disconnect.

He tugged the hose out of his socket and ran back to his cabin, making no effort to be silent this time. Hound was the first to snap awake and get up as the bounty hunter clambered over the raised doorframe.

“Get up, all of you!” he hissed in a half whisper.

Jean grumbled something incomprehensible. Jaques was more responsive and sensing the tension right away, his face immediately took on the nervous and glum countenance he so often wore.

“What’s wrong, Buddy?” Hound asked.

“I know yall’re going to think I’m crazy, but I think I saw a God damned ghost!”

At this Jean roused. He sat up and looked at the lanky bounty hunter with an incredulous look. “Mr. Limbo,” he yawned, “in my one hundred and twenty years I’ve never come across a ghost, specter, ghoul or ghast. Things like that don’t exist, trust me. There are Gowers oriented to the spiritual side of humanity who’ve done extensive research on the topic. They’ve still to this day yet to come up with any conclusive findings.”

“Well, mister know-it-all, explain how I saw a man walk through a fucking wall.”

Jean scratched his smooth chin. “You didn’t?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Look, maybe you saw a deckhand going about his business and it was a trick of the light.”

“You know what, keep hibernating, I ain’t arguing with you about this. I know what I saw. Hound, you’re coming with me, I need a second pair of sensors. You’ll be able to tell if that guy was alive or not.”

“Are we stopped?”

“Yeah, lets go,” Buddy said, grabbing his poncho and gun. Before he left he tossed Jaques a small bead. “Keep the line silent unless something happens. If I start hollering, you grab that bag of meat and run up to the bridge, alright?”

Jaques inserted the comms unit into one of his neck sockets, stammering a reply he didn’t have time to finish before the hunter and the hound were out and the door was closed again.

Hound sneezed the moment they stepped into the swirling incense. “Dreadful stuff this is,” he said.

“Watch it, you know how these thumpers like their trinkets and smoke. Don’t want to get in no trouble with some blockheaded wrench-hand that was dropped one too many times,” Buddy said.

They made their way back to the bulletin board and once there, Buddy explained in detail what he’d seen while Hound sniffed about the area with his chromed snout. At times he licked the wall, smacked his lips, then after an extensive scan he finally shook his head.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Buddy. The most recent scent here is yours.”

“Well, duh, I don’t believe ghosts tend to leave scents.”

Hound looked worriedly at the bounty hunter for a long moment, then asked, “Buddy, are you well?”

Buddy pinched the bridge of his nose, then worked his jaw. It kept getting stiff. “Look, Hound, I’m as well as a man my age can be. And since you’ve known me, have you once seen me act insane?”

“A couple of times, yes,” Hound answered.

“Don’t be smart with me.”

“I’m being honest. Your dream, then the Chronologist. Also, you keep anthropomorphizing your gun.”

“Hold on now, all of them have a rational explanation, just like this ghost incident must have. The dream, I grant, is kinda weird, but the Chronologist was real, Jaques met her too, and my gun’s a Neptune, so mostly likely it’s at least semi-sentient. And… are you listening?”

Hound’s neon eyes were locked on something at the end of the corridor. His cloudy silicone ears were flat against his head, and his whole body was rigid. His tails slowly lowered to hang straight between his hind legs, and the line of fur along his spine was standing on edge as though he’d been electrocuted.

Buddy followed Hounds gaze and saw three men phase through the weathertight door leading to the deck. They were dressed different, but all of them shared in that archaic aesthetic that he’d seen on the first one. As they passed through the metal their outlines fizzed with an ephemeral glow, denoting their spectral nature.

In such a moment one should expect a grown man and a grown dog to act in a more orderly manner, but as is often the case when a human’s frail constitution comes across something that is not rationally explainable, one tends to act irrationally. Even though Buddy had often partaken in watching fictive vid-chronicles from the pre-cataclysm age, some with encounters very similar to the one in which he was in now, his preparation for such an unlikely scenario was lackluster.

Ancient instincts kicked in when the two witnessed the sight, and a heartbeat later, both were sprinting in the opposite direction as fast as cybernetically possible.

The three specters didn’t give chase. Instead, they spread out, commanded by an unknown intelligence, each searching for something in different parts of the ship. Outside, magnetically moored to the hull of the Melchizedek, the small craft hid in the darkness, a small light flickering on its deck. Its far larger mother hung back in the veil of fog, waiting.

#

In the five minute period following Buddy’s and Hound’s flight from the ghosts, three things happened. First, the rest of the swarm of specters around the ship that had gone unseen by the hunter, spread out into all the vital areas of the ship. Engine rooms, data centers, cooms room, even the bridge, where a lone watchman stood at the ready for everything but what hovered through the deck. Second, more than one person aboard woke to a strange sensations of being watched, only to see softly glowing outlines of a men looming over them. Screaming ensued. Third was the blaring general alarm, which the horrified watchman was in mind to trigger even though he was staring down something that shouldn’t be, that roused every soul.

#

By the time Buddy and Hound made it to the bridge, the captain, a handful of soldiers, and the boatswain had risen and rushed up as well. The watchman cowered beneath a table, and the lone phantom that had caused the man’s distress stood silently before the conning, looking out the windows into the darkness that lit up once the captain gingerly flicked on the deck lights and turned off the alarm.

The See soldiery had their guns trained on the placid ghost, Buddy’s was as well, and he recognized him to be the same bald man he’d seen while in the mess. The entire bridge stood still, waiting for something to happen.

The captain, a squat man with overly large shoulders compared to his near neckless body spoke first, never taking his red-lensed replacement eyes off the sight. “Who’re you, and what’re you doing on my ship?”

The man’s outlines flickered as he slowly turned to regard the speaker. “So, you are the captain of this vessel?” he said in a monotone voice.

“I am. Now answer my question before I tell my men to open fire.”

“Don’t think that’s a good idea, skipper, this guy can walk through walls,” Buddy interjected.

“I detect no heartbeat, nor any traces of life in this man,” Hound chimed in.

“They are correct,” the man said, “your weaponry would only damage your instruments. There is nothing here to fire at.”

“That’s good and all,” Stick snapped, “but ye’ve yet to answer the captains damned question. Who’re you and what’s your business.”

The man turned to regard the flat faced boatswain, sparing a quick glance at Buddy’s gun. “I represent the Optima. My business is the assessment of your vessel, which has been completed, and the commandeering of some of your live assets.”

“Excuse me?” the captain growled, “explain what you mean by, live assets.”

The man’s image flickered. “Was I unclear? I am here to commandeer people, good captain. I require thirty lives. I will have them within the next forty eight hours. If you do not comply, we will use force.” As the man finished speaking, for emphasis, a loud typhon blared a warning out in the darkness.

“You are outgunned,” he continued, “any resistance will be met with appropriate reprisal. You have forty eight hours.”

In a blink, he was gone, and so too were all the rest of the ghosts that had boarded the Melchizedek. The flickering light on the small craft outside had gone out. It detached and returned to its mother, leaving the people within the Melchizedek dazed, confused, horrified and bewildered.

 

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