by E. R. Mason
Chapter 9
There are cunning little tricks experienced captains sometimes play on their crews. With help from the rumor mill they will, on occasion, allow trite problems to be exaggerated into monumental ones. A simple pressure leak in a plasma conduit, for example, can easily grow into impending doom. Throughout the escalating ordeal, the captain will make himself appear only casually concerned, even indifferent, to the ongoing crisis. And when all around him have reached a point they are teetering on the brink of hysteria, he will coolly instruct a mechanic to go to the proper junction point and tighten the loose coupling, thus miraculously implementing a solution to the near disaster. In this way, a ship's crew can come to believe that no matter how bad it gets, if the captain is cool, things probably are not all that bad.
I had just seen our Captain not so cool. It set off little alarms in my head. The Adrian Tarn rule number four of self-preservation had come streaming out of the mental ticker tape machine: 'When conditions conducive to mortal danger first become apparent, do not wait to see if they will go away'. It was time to string the tin cans around base camp and listen for anything that might set them clanging. And, it was time to learn everything there was to know about the enemy. Most of my evening was spent going over everything we had and reviewing which SWAT members were best suited for this particular unknown. By morning, I had a good idea of the type of EVA that would need to be set up.
I squeezed the communications button on my watch and spoke into it. "Tarn to R.J. Smith.”
The tiny screen read, ‘please wait.’ There was an unusually long delay. Finally, a very scraggly image of R.J. came into view. He needed a shave. His hair was sticking up in a cowlick that reminded me of ‘Our Gang’. His eyes were rebelling against the command to open. I could tell he had gotten up and was sitting at his computer terminal, leaning too close to the monitor.
"God, R.J., you look bad even on a little screen!"
"No, no, don't give it a second thought, Adrian. It's perfectly okay. I had to get up anyway."
"I didn’t see you at the jump we didn't make."
"I was going to ask you not to remind me of that. What time is it?"
"It's 07:00. Meet me in the mess. I'll fix you a coffee, and tell you more things you don't want to hear."
"Okay, give me thirty. But I'll bet my news is worse than yours."
"I don't see how."
"I'll meet you in the mess."
"I'll try for a window seat."
"Keep your humor while you can, Mr. Tarn."
The lack of patrons in the Mess hall left an ominous air about the place. Earlier in the day when the place should have been deserted, it'd been packed. Now, at this time of day when the first shift people should have been celebrating their normal time off, there were only a few groups scattered around the hall. The mood had changed. Instead of the casual cheeriness so apparent this morning, the tone of the conversations was subdued. There were a few casual glances my way as I took a table by the observation windows. No jovial greetings accompanied them. I placed the coffee server by R.J.'s seat and sipped the ice water I'd made for myself.
R.J. came striding in a few minutes later, his prided flower-child mug swinging along in his left hand. His off-duty wear consisted of an aging gray sweatshirt with the collars and sleeves cut off, washed out jeans, and dirty, high top athletic shoes. He sat down across from me and reached for the coffee. His usually flippant stare was missing. He looked tired and unamused.
"Ah, the coffee. I'm not sure I will care for the awareness it will bring."
"R.J., what is with you? I've never seen you like this."
"You first, my unorthodox friend. I will keep score to see which of us has the more chilling horror story. Why have we not left this godforsaken place? Has Ms. Maureen Brandon so corrupted the Navigation computer network that we may be stranded here, forever?"
"It's not the nav facility this time. That is apparently working just fine. First, they couldn't get a good initiation test on the AmpLights, then the maneuvering thrusters would not accept new commands. A massive effort is underway, as we speak. Two tiger teams, one on the main engine clusters, another on the thruster control systems."
"Well, I find that all very depressing indeed. But you will lose our little contest on points if that's the best you can do."
"Okay, you want points? The rest is just between you and I. Contingency plan number one is to fabricate bumper fixtures and attach them to two of the scout vehicles to push us out of here if all else fails. How'm I doing now?"
"Your point total has jumped considerably. Is there more?"
"Contingency plan number two. Equip an assault team and go back on board that ship out there to see if we can secure it."
"And who would lead such an EVA?"
"Can't you guess? I'll give you a hint. As far as I can tell, only you and I have heard about this."
"Adrian, that is disgusting."
"But is it disgusting enough to win?"
R.J. wiped one hand down his face and looked around as though he'd forgotten where he was. He took a drink of coffee and shook his head. "My story is so invincible, I hereby declare you the sole judge of our contest. Your decision will be final. Do I sound overconfident?"
"Just a bit."
"After Ms. Maureen botched the nav systems, the work on the alien gibberish sort of ground down a bit. Eventually they got copies of the most recent charts we made and loaded them into the analytical group's own isolated computer system where they could play to their heart's content and not hurt anything. That, of course, is what should have been done in the first place. So they get set up and download the segment of alien memory into their system, and guess what? The same thing happens. Their computers crash hard and won't come back up. They've been working on them ever since.”
“So then, all the attention turns to the films and the scans of the mysterious goop you found on the lower level. Well, of course Life Sciences scanned that ship a dozen times looking for life signs and found nothing, so they declared it unoccupied. When we came back with all that neuro-radiation though, suddenly Life Sciences was begging to get back in the game. Frank Parker was the propulsion expert on the EVA. Nothing on the drive systems was brought back, so nothing there for his people to look at. Pete Langly was the power systems expert, nothing on that, either. So, the research suddenly became a tug of war between the two groups who were interested in the crazy putty. Nira represented the chemical group. They felt the data was entirely their domain since life sciences had declared the ship void of life. But Nira is still in sickbay, despite her tendency to roam. Erin, however, was the rep for life sciences and she was on hand to add pull to her group's request for the data. So, in the end, a little sharing was done, but the main brunt of the research focused on life sciences, the people who'd said there was no life on board."
"R.J., this is ugly beyond fairness, you're starting to make me nervous."
"I'd like to put your mind at ease, my friend, but you haven't heard anything yet. Do you know what 'shock tremors' are?"
"It sounds like something I might not want to."
"It is, believe me. We knew that the goop was emanating intense levels of beta and mu and other stuff like that, but it was gibberish, saturated levels on all the scopes and pen graphs. Then one of the technicians inadvertently mixed this saturated signal with an alignment carrier wave built into one of the scopes and found something new. He had accidentally divided the garble into two separate new garbles. So they mixed the two new garbles with the same wave and got four completely unique waveforms. Then somebody got the brilliant idea of trying the mix with different EKG carriers and that's when things started to get really scary."
"R.J., I've got a B.S. in electronics but you're losing me."
"Okay, okay; it's like this. You put one person in a room alone and have him talk continuously and you've got a nice clean, single sound source, right? So then you
bring another person in and have him talk continuously and you've got an annoying, unintelligible confusion, right? Okay now you bring one hundred people into the room, then a thousand, and suddenly you've got a saturated level of unintelligible noise that sounds like one signal, right?"
"You’re saying the brain waves we picked up were from dozens of independent sources?"
"Hundreds, but that's not all. Once they finally were able to break through the distortion and isolate a single source, they found even more unexplainable crap. Shock tremors. If you've ever seen someone in a bad accident, someone in severe shock, they get a case of the tremors real bad. They shake so violently it's like they're sitting in a vibrating chair or something. Well, every one of the thought patterns they've been able to isolate contain the same kind of shock tremors, the mental equivalent of them anyway."
"Holy crap!”
"Oh yeah? Well here's the piece de resistance. Life Sciences was able to remove the shock tremor signatures and analyze the individual thought patterns of a dozen of the sources. The translations were all the same: alarm, pain, agony, distress, pleas for help."
I sat back with a look of revulsion. I waited for a further explanation, but R.J. did not seem to have one prepared. "What the hell does it mean? Is there or is there not something alive over there?"
"No, Adrian. You mean are they, or are they not, alive over there."
"My God!"
"You slow the data way, way down and it sounds like a horde of a million honey bees. The whole thing gave me the creeps so bad I had to go to sickbay to get something to help me sleep. Of course you understand none of this is to be released?"
"Of course."
“I'm supposed to report back to Life Sciences as soon as I've finished resting. Inspection is spread pretty thin with everything that's going on. Adrian, please, let's get out of this place right away. Let's extend the oars and paddle like hell. Let's get out and push, if necessary."
"I believe that is part of the plan."
R.J. topped his mug off with coffee, pushed his chair back and stood. He turned to leave, but stopped and looked back at me with a worried stare. "That wasn't it, by the way."
"What wasn't what?"
"Commanders. It didn't fit with four down. I still think its prostitutes, but that doesn't fit either. Givers of pain and pleasure. You got any other ideas?"
"How about 'ghostships'?"
"That's two words, my friend, but it sure as hell fits."