The Dark Ship

by Phillip P. Peterson

  “What shall we do?” Joanne whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Jeff said. All he wanted to do was run. But they had to find out what it was. “We’ll go to the turnoff and look around the corner,” he whispered finally.

  Moving at a snail’s pace, they edged their way along the wall toward the intersection, doing everything in their power not to make any noise. Now the ground covering was to their advantage—it did a good job of swallowing the sound of their footsteps.

  It felt like hours were passing. Because of the dark, they could only guess how much further it was. Jeff felt his way along the wall with his outstretched arm. Finally he hit the edge. They had reached the intersection. Where was Joanne? He felt something soft on his right arm. Joanne was right behind him. He could hear her shallow breathing. With pigeon steps he edged his whole body up to the intersection. No more flashes of light. Had whatever produced the light gone? Of was it lurking just around the corner? Was it lying in wait for them? His heart was beating so hard, he imagined the whole ship must be able to hear it. Slowly he moved his head to peek round the corner. But he couldn’t see a thing. If only it wasn’t so pitch black. Or if only he had his infrared glasses. It was no use. He needed light.

  He reached behind him to take the flashlight out of Joanne’s hand. Joanne noticed what he wanted and pressed the small cylinder into his trembling hand. He pointed the flashlight around the corner and laid his thumb on the button. He knew he wouldn’t like what he was about to see. Adrenalin flooded his body—ready to respond to whatever horror awaited him. He took a deep breath. And pressed the button.

  It all happened very fast. He was staring into a demonic grin—right in front of his face. Before he could react, the figure sprang toward him with outstretched arms. The creature screamed, an inhuman roar. Jeff let go of the flashlight, which clattered to the ground. He was blind again. He stumbled backward and yanked Joanne with him. She screamed in surprise. Their legs got tangled and they both fell to the ground. But even as they fell, Jeff pulled his pistol from his holster. He should have done it minutes ago! It might be the mistake that cost them their lives. Frantically, he tugged at his weapon, and released the trigger even as he was pulling it out.

  To his boundless surprise, the roar of the monster turned into a laugh. A human laugh, which he knew only too well. The beast stepped back into the cone of light from the fallen flashlight and Jeff groaned with a mixture of irritation and relief. “Mac, you fucking idiot!”

  Now Shorty stepped into the light and joined in Mac’s raucous laughter. He slapped himself on the thigh.

  Jeff closed his eyes and tried to get rid of the pent-up adrenaline. He took a deep breath, counted to twenty in his head, then exhaled again. He opened his eyes and saw Shorty with his back against the wall, crying with laughter. Mac had fallen to his knees and was clutching his stomach.

  Jeff picked up the flashlight and stood up. Then he turned around and helped Joanne to her feet. She looked him in the eyes and he knew exactly what she wanted to say. He nodded. He couldn’t let them get away with this. “There will be consequences,” he said softly.

  His panic had turned into anger. He was still pumped up with adrenaline. He turned to the still laughing men, pursed his lips, and squared his shoulders.

  “Attention!” he said loudly.

  The men looked up, but didn’t make much of effort to adopt the military position.

  “The next time I say ‘Attention’ and you haven’t taken up position within two seconds, I will make sure that you do not leave your sleeping quarters for the rest of your flight. Is that clear?” Jeff was surprised how icy his voice sounded.

  The men’s laughter petered out. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that they might have overstepped the mark this time.

  “Attention!” Jeff repeated.

  This time the men adopted the correct stance.

  Jeff pulled his pistol from his holster and held it in front of his chest without pointing it in a particular direction. “Did you two idiots even stop to think that you might have been shot?”

  Mac shook his head. “We just discovered that one of the intersections led in exactly your direction. We saw the light of your flashlight and thought we’d play a little joke.”

  “A little joke …” Jeff repeated icily.

  “Yeah, to lighten up the mood around here.”

  To lighten up the mood?

  He was starting to boil with rage. “Since leaving your rooms, you haven’t stopped laughing and making jokes at our expense. As far as I can tell, your mood is light enough as it is.”

  “Yeah, but—” Shorty began.

  “Enough,” Jeff hissed. He put his gun back in his holster. “Next time there will be a price to pay. Is that clear?”

  Shorty nodded, but Mac continued grinning.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Jeff said, pulling Joanne with him into the other corridor. Shorty and Mac walked back in the direction they had come, chuckling, and soon Jeff could no longer see the light of their flashlights.

  “Next time there’ll be a price to pay?” Joanne asked incredulously.

  Jeff lifted a hand. “They were just kidding around.” What should he have done? Sent them back to their quarters and put them under arrest? Given them two weeks’ kitchen duty? That would have been ridiculous. At least he had told them he didn’t condone their tasteless jokes.

  Joanne tightened her lips and shook her head.

  “I’ll report the junction to headquarters,” Jeff said, changing the subject.

  He took his handheld out of his belt pocket. Irons answered the call directly. Jeff reported their position and the direction they were going.

  “Private Short and Private McGuinness are exploring the corridor that ought to lead in your direction. Don’t be alarmed if you bump into them.”

  Joanne groaned.

  Jeff sighed. “We just met them at our position.” Should he inform on them? He didn’t see the point. “They went back the other way and are continuing their recon.”

  Joanne groaned again.

  “Understood,” Irons said and signed off.

  Jeff handed the flashlight back to Joanne and continued down the corridor. About forty feet ahead of them was another intersection. They continued in silence until they reached it. Jeff stopped in front of the turning and leaned his head forward to look round the corner. “Oh,” he said. “A dead end.” The corridor ended in a wall several feet away.

  “Not quite. There’s a door. Let’s see what’s behind it,” Joanne said, moving closer. Jeff hurried after her.

  “Shall I open it?” Joanne asked, pointing at the silver square on the wall.

  Jeff nodded and the heavy steel door hissed open.

  Together they stepped over the threshold.

  “Pretty big,” Joanne remarked, playing the light of her flashlight across the walls.

  Jeff nodded. The room was about the size of a small football stadium. The ceiling was far above them. In fact, he guessed where it was more than he could actually see it. The walls were lined with shelves.

  “Maybe a storage room,” Joanne said. Together they walked toward the opposite wall.

  Jeff stopped in the middle of the room and looked around. Following a sudden impulse, he clapped his hands. Again, there was no echo. He sighed. “It’s possible, I guess.”

  “Well there’s nothing being stored here now, that’s for sure,” Joanne said dryly.

  Jeff reached the wall of shelves opposite the entrance. He climbed a ladder that was leaning against the shelves until he had a good view of the room and the upper shelves. Yup—all empty. “Maybe it used to be a storeroom, when the ship had a crew. And they emptied it when they left the ship.”

  “If it weren’t for that computer, you’d think we were on a ghost ship,” Joanne said. She stood at the bottom of the ladder and looked up at Jeff.

  Carefully he made his way back down, rung by rung. There was nothing of real interest in here. “As f
ar as I’m concerned it is a ghost ship.” When he reached the bottom, he fumbled for his handheld. “I’ll report back to base. Let’s go back outside.”

  Joanne followed him into the corridor where Jeff activated his handheld. Irons replied immediately.

  “We reached a dead end. There’s a big room at the end, but it’s completely empty. We’re not going to get any further in this area.”

  “Join Private Short’s squad immediately. The two men have found something.”

  Jeff was all ears. It would be the first time since the beginning of the reconnaissance mission that they had found anything.

  “What?” Jeff asked. He could hardly keep the excitement out of his voice. Joanne moved up closer to him.

  “A gate,” Irons said.

  “A gate?” Jeff asked.

  “Or a bulkhead. Go and see for yourselves. I’ll give you the coordinates.”

  Irons described the way from the point where Jeff and Joanne had met Mac and Shorty. Jeff signed off and they headed back the way they had come.

  “What kind of gate do you think it is?” Joanne asked. Her voice was tense.

  “No idea. Maybe the men just found a door and are exaggerating again.”

  “If it’s a gate, what’s behind it?”

  Jeff shrugged. Until they got there, all they could do was speculate.

  A few minutes later they reached the junction where they’d been ambushed by Mac and Shorty. Jeff glanced down at his handheld, but he remembered that on the way here, they had come straight. So now they had to turn left if they wanted to follow Mac and Shorty’s route.

  After about half a mile they reached another intersection. A corridor led to the right. That must be the way back to their quarters. Another corridor went off to the left and in the beam of Joanne’s flashlight, they could see another junction about eighty feet further on. Jeff glanced down at his handheld to double check, then turned into the corridor. Joanne followed him.

  After the first junction, another one appeared after about six hundred feet. Beyond it, the corridor started to go down at an angle of approximately twenty degrees.

  Silently, they followed it further down into the depths of the ship. Without the handheld, they would have lost their way completely. It would have been impossible to sketch this three-dimensional labyrinth with a pen and paper.

  A short while later, when they reached the next junction, they were in for a surprise. At first, Jeff thought they had stepped into a room, but it was a corridor, much wider than the ones they were used to. In fact it was so wide, they could have fit the Charon inside it. There was one corridor branching off to the right, and two more branching off to the left, each of them as wide as the one they had just come out of. Jeff looked up at the ceiling, which was arched like the nave of a cathedral. Then he spotted Mac and Shorty. The two mechanics were standing about six hundred feet away in front of a dark gray wall. The beam from their flashlight flickered in different directions. As Jeff and Joanne approached them, Jeff realized that what he had thought was the back wall of this hangar-sized corridor was in fact a gate.

  The gate!

  It bulged a little in middle, and to its left and right were shimmering silver rails, or runners, along which the gigantic gate could presumably slide up and disappear into the ceiling. Huge white and yellow characters were painted in the middle of the door. In front of it, on the ground, there were more strange white and yellow markings. A blue area directly at the foot of the metal gate probably indicated the danger zone.

  When they reached Mac and Shorty, the two of them were sounding out the walls. Jeff guessed they were looking for some kind of operating system with which to open the gate, but there was nothing there. Like everything else on this ship, the gate was presumably controlled by the computer, too.

  “Interesting.” At that moment, Jeff couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “You could say,” Mac responded. His jovial mood seemed to have died away in face of this colossal gate, beside which the two men looked like dwarves.

  “Looks to me like the door to an airlock,” Shorty said. The mechanic punched the metal with his fist. “The way it bulges out, I’d say it’s at least fifteen inches thick. You’d need an atomic bomb to get that open.”

  “No controls?” Joanne asked.

  “We didn’t find anything. We’ve searched the whole corridor,” Mac said.

  “And the little room, too,” Shorty added.

  “What little room?” Joanne asked.

  Only now did Jeff notice the door in the wall of the corridor, about forty feet away from the gate. It was open. Next to it was a square window through which he could look inside.

  “It’s only about thirty by thirty feet. And completely empty, like everywhere on this ship,” Shorty said.

  “How the hell are we supposed to open this thing?” Mac was clearly frustrated.

  Jeff wondered if they should even try. Who could say what was behind it? Suddenly, a wave of fear washed over him again. As if something utterly evil was just waiting to be let out behind that gate.

  “We can’t,” Shorty replied. “There are no controls—again.”

  “I’d love to know what’s behind there,” Joanne said. “Maybe Irons was right, and the interior of the ship is divided into lots of individual areas. Probably a new area starts behind that gate.”

  “I reckon the corridor on the other side is just as wide. Could be a kind of highway to the center of the ship,” Mac mused. “Maybe it used to be a transport route. It’s sure wide enough.”

  “We could ask the ship’s computer to open it for us,” Joanne suggested.

  Before we do anything, we should speak to Irons,” Jeff said. “He has to decide our next move.”

  “And what do we do now?” Joanne asked.

  “We’ll do another thorough search of the area around the gate, to be absolutely sure we didn’t miss something. And I’m going to take a few pictures of the gate and the funny letters on it for the major.”

  “And then?” Mac asked.

  “Then we’ll go back.”

  10.

  “There were no controls?” Irons asked. “No knobs, switches, or anything else?” His spoon lay untouched next to his plate of stew.

  “No,” Jeff shook his head. They had spent an hour searching before heading back to their quarters in the early afternoon.

  “The gate is probably controlled by the computer,” Joanne said. “We could ask it to open it for us.”

  Irons nodded. “Let’s hear what it has to say.”

  “Maybe we should just stay away from it,” Green said. It was the first time he had joined them to eat since being knocked out by the flu, or whatever it was. The engineer was still pale. His eyes were bloodshot and, like Irons, he hadn’t touched anything on his plate.

  “Why?” Castle asked derisively. “Are you scared there might be a monster on the other side?”

  Green turned very slowly to look at his shipmate. Like Mac and Shorty, Green and Castle were buddies. “I’m not afraid of anything,” he answered evenly.

  “Knock it off!” Irons said. “We’ll ask the computer to open the gate the next time it contacts us.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been a while, actually. Then we’ll decide what to do. Until then, we’ll check out the two remaining unexplored corridors.”

  “I think I heard that my presence was required,” the emotionless voice of the computer suddenly echoed through the room. Jeff wondered how long it had been listening in on their conversation.

  “Yes,” Irons replied. “Thank you for contacting us. Everything OK with you and the ship?”

  “Thank you, yes. Some irregularities with one of the power plants, but repairs are already in progress. You will be pleased to hear that the capacitors are charging for the next hyperjump. This will take place in two days.”

  “Great. Thanks again,” Irons said. “I have a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “On a … er …
walk around the ship, we came across a big gate. It’s about a mile from our quarters in a big corridor. It’s locked.”

  There was no answer. Irons looked over at Jeff with raised eyebrows.

  “What’s behind it? Can it be opened?” Irons asked.

  “The gate leads to another sector of the ship,” the computer answered promptly. Apparently it needed explicit questions in order to reply. “The gate cannot be opened because the sector behind it is no longer under my control due to a defect that occurred a long time ago.”

  “Oh.”

  Jeff bit his lip. True, the computer had confirmed Irons’ assumption that the ship was divided into different areas. But Jeff hadn’t expected to hear that there were areas which weren’t under the computer’s control. If that were the case, then they would only be able to explore the corridors on this side of the gate. Maybe they would come across another gate leading to another sector, which was still accessible.

  “So you’re saying that you can’t open the gate,” Irons continued.

  “Your assumption is correct.”

  “Are there any manual devices for opening the gate?”

  “No.”

  “So how could the crew open the gate in an emergency?”

  “By asking me to open it.”

  “I see, but you’re not always available,” Irons said. He could barely suppress the sarcasm in his voice.

  “It has not always been that way,” the computer replied, almost crossly. “With the passing of time, the number of failed systems has increased, and this has affected my own capacities.”

  Irons raised his hand. “All right. I didn’t mean it as a criticism.”

  “Now I need to get back to dealing with other tasks. I will contact you when we have made the next hyperjump.” The familiar crackling indicated that the computer had switched off without waiting for an answer.

  “What now?” Castle asked.

  Irons turned to look at the weapons specialist. His forehead was deeply furrowed and he appeared to look straight through Castle.