by S MacDonald
There was no translucency. The spot-lit hand was real.
As he watched, frozen and electrified, the hand gently faded back and the door returned to normal. As it vanished, there was a sigh. It sounded like a woman, and was unutterably sad – a long, long, mournful sigh of utter weary hopeless despair, trailing into an even more poignant silence.
Tan stayed where he was for a minute, catching his breath. Then, when nothing else happened, he got out of bed, turned up the lights and went to examine the door.
It was, as far as he could tell, a perfectly ordinary folding door. The structure was one of nesting rods in a flexible case. When the door opened the rods slotted into one another and the case shrank down so that the folded thickness was just a couple of centimetres. When opened, the rods extended and the case was stretched to a rigid surface. It was rigid, too, as he confirmed with some tapping. It would need extreme force to put such pressure on this surface so as to dent or distend it. Certainly no human hand could do it.
‘Wow,’ said Tan, and put his own hand where the other had been, feeling nothing there at all, now, not even a hint of a chill. ‘Brilliant!’ said Tan, and went back to bed with a broad grin.
‘Would you do something for me?’ he asked Mako Ireson, the following morning, ‘would you mind arranging an exorcism for my cabin?’
Mako had been asked some pretty bizarre things by passengers, up to and including the insane ‘Can I have a cabin with a window’, but this was a first.
‘An…?’
‘An exorcism,’ Tan confirmed, with cheerful assurance. ‘My cabin,’ he explained, ‘appears to be haunted.’
‘Ah.’ Mako surveyed him carefully, saw the twinkle in his eyes and relaxed. ‘Oh.’ He thought about it some more, and grinned. ‘I’ll get that in hand for you,’ he promised.
The exorcism took place that morning – a couple of crew turned up with some salt and carried out the spacer ritual which was, itself, so ancient that its origins had been forgotten. Standing with some salt on the open palms, they held up their right hands and chanted, ‘Give you peace’ three times while turning around slowly on the spot. Then they scattered the salt into the air, ‘Give you rest.’
As little bots zipped around, cleaning up the salt, the two crewmembers apologised to Tan, who’d joined in with the ritual too and had not needed to be told what to do.
‘Really sorry,’ Ali Jezno was one of the two, giving Tan a look of regret along with some anxiety. ‘We had no idea that we’d given you this panel.’ He indicated the screen which divided the sleeping and day cabins and in which the door was set. ‘I do my best to keep it at the back out of use, but sometimes things get moved around and new riggers don’t always know – you won’t say anything about it, will you, sir?’ He gave Tan a look of earnest appeal. ‘Only, for one, we don’t want to spook the passengers and for two, the skipper won’t have it.’
‘I daresay you know what he’s like about superstitions and hauntings and that,’ said his colleague, a sober Chief Petty Officer – middle aged, responsible, concerned. ‘Fairly rabid about it, he is. He won’t have it that there’s anything of that kind on the Heron, and if anything was to get out about this…’ he too indicated the panel, ‘he’d be down on it like fifty tons of duralloy.’
‘Won’t even let us get rid of the panel,’ Ali confirmed. ‘Says it’s pandering to nonsense and he won’t allow it. So we just…’ he shrugged, with a helpless look.
‘And it is only the second time,’ CPO Wilkes assured him, ‘It’s been in use before and nobody has seen anything.’ He looked at Tan appraisingly. ‘Guess, you know, you have to be open to these things – sensitive, like. But if you could please just…’ he mimed keeping something secret, finger to his lips, ‘keep it to yourself, sir?’
‘Of course,’ said Tan, and zipped his own lips shut with a finger. ‘But,’ he went on straight away, as they looked relieved and thanked him, ‘what’s the story?’
As they looked at one another with evident reluctance, Tan grinned.
‘Come on,’ he insisted.
‘Oh… well… absolutely strictly between ourselves, sir…?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Well then…’ a low, confidential tone, and Ali leaned forward a little as if afraid that someone might overhear. ‘Thing is, this here panel is an old one, see, came over from the old Excelsior and was on the ship before we took it over. The Excelsior, that was a destroyer – a jinxed ship. It was laid up for a year and a day with the airlocks open to try to shift the jinx but it was no good, they couldn’t get any skipper willing to command it, and if they had, they’d never have got a crew. So they broke it up, see, and by rights, it should all have been destroyed, but some wally decided that some of the parts could be used and they were sent off to other ships. And this panel…’ he glanced a little nervously at the screen, ‘ended up on the Heron.’
‘We didn’t know,’ CPO Wilkes assured him. ‘Till the trouble last year. We had a passenger came on comms screaming that there was something trying to get into her cabin – ‘Get me out, get me out!’ There was nothin’ there that we could see, but Mr Burroughs, he thought to look up the usage record for the parts in the cabin, and that’s when we found it – this panel, the ID chip in it shows that it was used on the old Excelsior, part of a bunkroom.’
‘And the thing is…’ Ali dropped his voice another tone, ‘the jinx, the thing that did for the Excelsior, it was a suicide. It was doing a tour of duty as a troop carrier, see, taking a Peace Corps unit out to Sixships. And one of them, a woman, killed herself – we dunno why, the inquest just says ‘while of unsound mind’. But given what kind of hell they were going into, not hard to see that she just couldn’t face it. But that’s the thing, see, sir, this here panel; it was used in a bunkroom. So we reckon… well, we reckon it’s her - trying to get back together with her unit, maybe.’
‘We’d swap this panel out for you,’ CPO Wilkes observed, giving him a worried look. ‘But questions would get asked, like, and we don’t want this getting to the skipper.’
‘He’s a good bloke, the skipper, none better,’ Ali said. ‘But he’s got a right bee up his… in his hat about anything like this…’ He gestured again at the screen. ‘So…’ he gave Tan an imploring look. ‘Stumm, sir? You shouldn’t be troubled any more.’
‘No, I’m sure I won’t be,’ Tan smiled. ‘And thank you, gentlemen, I very much appreciate all your efforts. Just one thing…’ he looked at them with benign curiosity. ‘How did you do that thing with the hand?’ he asked, and laughed when they looked bewildered and slightly hurt. ‘They did me a haunted shower once on the Eagle,’ he commented, ‘and that was pretty good – a hollow dripping sound, a misted mirror and a face looking over my shoulder. That one, they said, was the victim of a terrible accident, drowned in the shower. Full marks, it was great. But that hand, still can’t figure out how you did that, it was brilliant. And please, let’s not…’ he looked at them kindly, ‘The Excelsior,’ he observed, ‘was laid up and taken apart because it was obsolete, not because of any jinx. The jinxed-ship stories began after the dismantling was halted due to budget cuts and the ship was left in parking orbit for several years in a distressing state of half stripped ruin. I’ve heard them all, believe me – the suicide, the murder, the skeleton found in the hull, the screaming mirror. And if every ship which claimed to have a part from the Excelsior in their inventory actually had¸ the Excelsior would have had to be the size of three carriers. As for that…’ he grinned at the panel, ‘all the fittings used on the interdeck are new – I know, the Diplomatic Corps helped pay for them. But all in all, excellent, really impressive, and I’m busting to know how you did that thing with the hand. It wasn’t a hologram, was it?’
The two men looked at one another and were chuckling, then, as they looked back at him.
‘Sorry,’ said Ali, and touched a finger to his nose. ‘Trade secret. But…’ he held out his hand and Tan shook hands with both of them in
turn, a gesture appreciative on both sides.
It was Buzz who told him later how the stunt had been worked, with a micro-gravity plate slipped into the fabric of the door, itself thin and flexible and very high powered.
‘It’s actually lab-tech,’ he explained. ‘And can generate up to five hundred gees of positive or negative gravity. That’s what they used, programmed for thousands of tiny points to force out the door with repulsive gravity and pull in around the shape with equal and opposite force. They took it right to the edge, too, of what’s possible before the door fabric would be damaged.’
They were talking in the wardroom, having an informal lunch there – the few other officers at the table were either talking amongst themselves or reading while they ate, lunch being a casual meal in all Fleet wardrooms. Nobody was listening to them, or at least, not obviously.
‘Ah,’ Tan smiled, curiosity satisfied. ‘Clever!’
‘You really don’t mind?’ Buzz looked at him closely. ‘I can have a quiet word with them, you know, we don’t need to make it official.’
‘No, no, please don’t.’ Tan said quickly. ‘I thought it was brilliant, very well done – and flattering, too.’ He smiled at Buzz’s alert look. ‘I’ve spent quite a lot of time with the Fleet,’ he observed. ‘And I know that this is just the kind of prank that gets played on new officers. It isn’t something that you do to passengers, is it?’
‘No, absolutely not – passengers are strictly off limits for pranking,’ Buzz confirmed. ‘We’re even quite cautious about how we joke with civilians, these days, since even the most ludicrous jokes seem to have a habit of turning up in the media as if they were true. And you’re right, of course, it does mean that they consider you to be one of our own – which is fine if you really don’t mind.’
‘Not in the least, I do consider it to be a compliment,’ Tan assured him again, and Buzz smiled.
‘Just needed to be sure,’ he explained. ‘The Fourth has such a very vibrant culture that we do tend to sweep all before us, and we do tend to assume, too, that people want to be considered one of us. It’s meant to be welcoming, but I’m mindful of the fact that some people might find it overly familiar, impertinent, even.’
Tan chortled. He knew that Buzz had good reason for his anxiety over this. None of the authorities back at Chartsey would be impressed by reports that members of the Fourth had pranked the Ambassador with a faked-up haunting. It was impertinent, no two ways about it, and questions would be asked about the misuse of resources, what this evident lack of respect implied for His Excellency’s standing in the mission and what effect it might have had on him, too, at the very least of it disturbing his sleep and distracting him from his work. Such questions, of course, would only be asked by those who had either an axe to grind against the Fourth or zero sense of humour, but there were a good many such people at high level in all organisations. Buzz, no doubt, had in mind the outraged kerfuffle Third Lord Cerdan Jennar would kick up over it, and there were equivalent internal politics and killjoys in the Diplomatic Corps, too.
‘Don’t worry,’ Tan said. ‘I’ll make sure it is known in the right places that it was a harmless entertainment laid on because of my interest in the supernatural, and one which I very much enjoyed. And I did, too.’
‘Thank you,’ Buzz said, knowing that such a word from Tan would count for immeasurably more than any statement from the Fourth themselves that it had been a friendly joke and no offence intended or caused. ‘Actually, I do have to say that it is very good to see Ali Jezno having some fun – he’s going through a tough time of it just now and it’s good for him to have a bit of a laugh.’
Tan nodded. The fact that he didn’t ask questions was not lack of curiosity, or even sensitivity to Ali’s privacy, but because he already knew that Ali Jezno, who the media continually referred to as a zombie, was being sued by his own mother.
‘Glad if I can be of any support,’ he said.
There wasn’t much more than passing hilarity around the ship at the Ghost of Cabin Fifteen. It wasn’t, after all, as if anyone on the ship had much time to snigger over it. Now that the issue of their legal identity as humans had been resolved, the mission was driving ahead again. The news had been broken to the Carrearranians that morning that their world was not clean of the plague, as they had always believed. It had taken a great deal of effort and explanation and Alex had actually had to put his hand on his heart and swear to them that the viruses had been on their world all the time and neither the Fourth nor the Solarans had brought them. They were still, understandably, rather unnerved by the discovery and the general mood around the planet was restless, questioning and uneasy. Diplomatic effort was, therefore, going on at full pitch, every team talking with their liaison group, answering their questions as fully as could be and reassuring them that they were fine, had always been fine and would continue to be fine, the viruses no threat to them at all.
With all this going on, along with a secondary wave of sample collection, analysis and reporting, on top of the normal operations of the ship, they had the civilian observation team out and about asking questions. This was a normal part of the cycle – the four new observers had completed their orientation and guided access and had now been cut loose to go wherever they liked and ask any questions they wanted. Few of the questions were any surprise, they were the kind of things lots of civilians asked and the Fourth accepted that it was something they had to expect, an inevitable part of having civilian observers on board. Even so, their first day at liberty could be disruptive, as they would interrupt people even in the midst of technical work to ask what they were doing or talk to them about something else entirely.
The Fourth coped with that by finding it amusing, quietly keeping score of what they called FADs – Frequently Asked Daftness. The winner, as usual, was ‘Is that dangerous?’ scoring an impressive fifty seven hits by the time the tally closed. Much this, admittedly, was down to one observer who seemed to be stuck on the one question most of the time. Since the only truthful answer to that question on a starship was ‘yes’, because everything on a starship was potentially dangerous, he was not a happy bunny by the end of the day and complained to Mako, indeed, that the crew had been winding him up, trying to scare him.
In amongst all this, more mail arrived. Alex had given permission, now, for shuttles to ply between the Heron and the Minnow. He wasn’t allowing couriers to come out – they were already at the upper limit of what their crews were expected to endure without a break, making the run from Telathor via Oreol, out to Border Station and back. Adding even just a few more hours to that would mean that they’d have to break that journey for a twenty five hour rest, or swap out crews, seriously disrupting the schedule. It wasn’t as if they could make the trip any faster than a shuttle could, anyway, since the pace was dictated by the nature of the space. In oceanic terms, the space between Border Station and Carrearranis itself was choppy, short cross-waves in energetic tumult, so there was no rushing through it no matter how fast your craft was or how good a pilot you were.
As the scheduled shuttle service got started, the incoming shuttle turned up with the mail just after lunchtime. There was quite a stack of mail for Tan, following a couple of days behind him as the couriers raced him here.
A significant chunk of that mail concerned a matter which took Tan to see Alex, that evening, asking for a private meeting with him at his convenience. Alex was hosting a dinner on the interdeck, a weekly courtesy to the civilian observers. It was only a small affair – Alex himself and a handful of officers, using the dining room which was mostly known as Egghead Central, the ship’s academic hangout. Even so, the Fourth went to some effort, dressing the dining room in style and having a steward to serve. Alex and the other Fourth’s guests wore dress uniform though not full honours and the passengers displayed whatever formal wear they had brought with them for these occasions.
Tan had dinner in the wardroom, Buzz assuring him that he did not need to attend th
e interdeck event which was invariably a dreadful bore.
It was certainly that, though Alex did work conscientiously through his training in hospitality, making appropriate small talk and being attentive to the comfort of his guests. There was no denying, though, he did it very badly. It was all too obvious that he was working through a mental checklist and his cordial manner was as artificial as the elaborate courtesy of a well-trained Maitr d’. Passengers who had seen him at his most relaxed, munching rolls and cookies on the command deck, were daunted by this chilly, aloof man in the grand and slightly intimidating black uniform. Even people who were used to attending high level formal events found it hard going, while those who’d never been to anything more formal than a workplace dinner-dance were quite at a loss. Alex had to excuse himself a couple of times, too, stepping aside from the table to take priority calls, adding to the subtle but pervading sense that he had far better things to do with his time than this and was only going through it because he had to. There was a feeling of relief all round when the ordeal came to an end at 2100. By 2105, Alex was in his quarters, changed out of the loathed dress rig and offering Tan a coffee.
‘No – honestly, I’m fine, thanks,’ Tan assured him, and since time was pressing for them both, got straight to the point. ‘I’m sorry Alex, but I have a situation…’ he gave the captain a look of sincere apology. ‘The last thing you need to be dealing with, really. But there is, I’m afraid, a situation back home – on Chartsey. Efforts are being made, I have to tell you, to have you relieved of your command.’ He saw no shock on Alex’s face, just interest, clearly waiting for Tan to be more forthcoming. ‘I have, I very much regret to say,’ Tan said, ‘been ordered to report on…’
He broke off as Alex held up a hand.
‘Sorry to stop you,’ the skipper said pleasantly, ‘but would you mind if we continue this discussion on the command deck, Tan?’