Incursion: The Hospice Ship










The medical frigate drifted through the inky black nothingness between stars. It's hull, bone white, was scarred by impact craters and painted with a crimson cross on both port and starboard surfaces. Dull blue ion efflux tails twisted in it's wake, trailing back light years behind it. Stumbling along at a snails pace, stuck in real space and apparently unable to make light speed, it listed in slow dorsal circles. A faint pulsating light shone through its portholes, the sporadic and infrequent sort of flicker indicative of a failing electrical system. Dozens of pinholes in the its hull bled a constant stream atmosphere into the vacuum.

Unheard, its emergency beacon sang its Siren song and broadcasting continuously, it cried out across the stars for help.

Aboard the vessel, in her halls and corridors, the smell of death prevailed. Devoid of life, lifeless and alone, the medical frigate plies the space lanes. This is a ghost ship, a relic of an era long forgotten and the victim of a war that was never recorded by history. But it has not been alone for long, nor will it be alone for much longer.

These things happen.







“I told you there was something,” remarked the young, pimple faced, radio operator. “Here, close the curtain. I want to turn this up.”

Reginald James was by no means an experienced sensor officer. To discover a here-to-fore unknown signal during his midshipman cruise aboard the Imperial survey vessel, the Expeditious, and especially one of such rarity, was an event that was sure to distinguish him from his peers. Eager and energetic, James was in for life; he planned to become a career Navy man. He knew how these things happened.

At only eighteen years old he had graduated in the top fifteen percent at the Academy and it had been that score alongside his fairly exemplary service in Cadet that had assured him a spot aboard the Expeditious. Unlike others in his class, many of whom had come from rich and noble families, James did not warrant any special attention from higher up. He had only himself to rely on, and only his performance would speak to his character as far as promotion was concerned.

Winning a spot on the Expeditious was, he knew, a formidable thing. A scout frigate, the ship operated on the edge of the Corellian Diktat near Gyndine and served as reconnaissance and patrol vessel for those areas too remote or obscure for a full garrison to take up residence. As a result the Expeditious functioned with considerable autonomy from the Fleet and it was this very circumstance which had, in the past, proven extremely beneficial for up and coming officers. Isolated from the nest, as many of the junior middies tended became too dependent on the centralized authority common to the more populated areas of the Empire, the officers and crew of the Expeditious were known to be something of a cut above and that opportunity to distinguish oneself was exactly what every young officer yearned for.

He turned, youthful brown eyes studying his instrumentation, and twisted a few dials.

“Okay, fine,” remarked his counterpart, another young midshipman making his first tour, while tugging shut the curtain that separated the sensor officers duty station from the rest of the bridge. “Hurry up though. The Chief will be back in a few moments.”

“Whatever,” supplied Reginald James. He toggled the audio open. “I told you.”

A melodic, pulsating tone ushered forth from the booth speakers. It resonated on frequencies so old and out of date that the Empire proper almost never scanned in the same range. Static, indicative of an extremely long range sub-space transmission, crackled in the background. On the display panels mounted around the sensor booth a myriad of information was displayed charting and documenting the discovery.

“Ahem,” the Chief cleared his throat. He had pushed his face through the curtain and was regarding the two junior officers with an expression somewhere between mild aggravation and genteel amusement. “He's back a lot sooner then that,” quipped the Chief. :What are you boys doing?”

At almost fifty years old, the Chief reserved the right to call anyone younger them himself 'boy'. This had occasionally caused problems with the female officers but then it had come to be generally accepted that the Chief did not make gender distinctions. He was a gruff man given to infrequent bouts of camaraderie.

“We were just, um,” began Reginald's partner. “Um, nothing sir.”

Far less impressed by the imposing figure of the Chief and fully inclined to claim the glory for such a discovery, Reginald James spoke right up.

“Sir, I believe I have discovered an unknown signal within a fifty light-year radii from our position,” James spoke even as he was removing himself from his seat and offering it to the Chief. He pulled the transmitters from his ears and passed them to his superior. “I'm unfamiliar with the code, Sir, but I think it's pretty old.”

“You're right,” supplied the Chief, sitting and tucking the nodes into his own ears. “Any guesses?”

Reginald and his partner exchanged glances. “Old Republic?”

“Good guess boys. That's an old colonial Republic signal. What we're hearing now has to be at least a thousand years old if not more.”

How the Chief had identified the signal so quickly was unknown to both middies and neither was inclined to ask. They both assumed, correctly, that having spent so much time on the fringe of civilization and in an area that has been so close to the main routes for so very long he had probably been exposed to similar codes in the past. After all; spaceships went missing all the time.

“We best get the Capitan in on this,” the Chief turned towards Reginald. “You found this?”

Reginald nodded.

“Then I guess it's your honor to tell the Captain. But be quick about it.”

“Aye sir!”

Half way through the curtain, one foot on the bridge proper, Reginald stopped in his tracks. The Chief was rising from his chair with a look of alarm plastered across his face, was turning in his chair and grabbing Reginald by the scruff of his uniform and tugging him back. Something had just happened but Reginald, too consumed with his own success, failed to notice it.

And then time seemed to slow. Reginald felt as though he was moving through the mud.

The Chief was hollering, shouting, “Virus! We're being infected!”

But it all seemed too unreal. No one could hack an Imperial codex, at least not without considerable resources. There were only a handful of governments in the galaxy that could field that kind of technology and none had been operating in this area. The idea that someone, or something, so very far away could compromise the computer security of such a frigate seemed laughable. It would take too much, be simply impossible without a massive broadcast array, without a massive series of data bank processors, without, most important, access to Imperial key codes.

It just wasn't possible and so Reginald James decided it was not actually happening.

And then the lights went out.

These things happen.

Reginald tried forced his eyes open.

His eyelids felt like they were made of iron and the effort caused a sharp pain to echo through his head so he stopped, paused for a moment and tried to recall what had happened and why he was in so much pain. Concentration was not forthcoming and, though it hurt less then trying to open his eyes, the task of trying to sort his thoughts seemed insurmountable. Instead he tried to turn inwards to clench off his nerves and make the pain stop. It did not work and the more he tried the more everything hurt.

He decided on a course of action. He inhaled a deep breath, this too caused waves of pain to wash over his body, and forced his eye lids open.

The inky crimson light emanating from the bridge emergency lights flooded his perceptions. He wanted to press his eyes shut in response but fought the urge. An alert klaxon was sounding in the background but his head was swimming thought a torrent and so it sounded as though it were a million miles away. Flashing in time with the angry roar of the klaxon was a brilliant red light that seemed to stare down at Reginald from the ceiling until, with a degree of shock, he realized that it was in fact affixed to the deck plating. This realization forced him to reexamine his perspective.

He was on the bridge, or above it, with the lower half of his body pinned against the bulkhead and hidden behind the upside down curtain that separated him from the sonar booth he had, perhaps only moments earlier, been departing from. Oddly, however; he could not see any other bodies strewn about. Reginald was apparently alone.

Nothing looked damaged. Were it not for the lack of crew and the emergency lighting he would have guessed that nothing was amiss at all. Even the bridge monitors or those that he could observe from his awkward position were all displaying nominal status reports. Even the central monitor displayed only the slowly moving starscape. But none of that made any sense. Reginald knew full well that a gravity failure was indicative of a much larger problem, a problem of such scale that at least some of the monitors visible from his position should be displaying anomalous information and that more importantly as the emergency lighting and alarms were active, that corresponding information of some sort should have showed up on those screens. It didn’t make any sense.

Slowly Reginald began to realize that the longer he kept his eyes open and focused his thoughts on the matter at hand the pain began to abate or, at least, become less tangible and that was good because it meant that he could eventually extricate himself from his unfortunate predicament and explore the problem more thoroughly. It was satisfying to know that his training back at the academy had forged in him a basic military instinct strong enough to overcome. He remembered his instructors berating him and breaking him down and how he hated them for it but understood now what it had all been about; that the Empire did not need men it could not break down and rebuild, stronger, better and in its own glorious image. And he was thankful for it.

First things first, he reminded himself; test your equipment before battle.

Reginald attempted to lift his head and found that a great weight was pulling him down but not so heavy that he could not fight against it and though this caused new, inundating waves of pain to wrack his body he forced himself through it with the knowledge that if it did not kill him it would only make his job that much easier. His brothers in arms could be hurt, trapped or in danger and need his help. It simply would not do to lay around waiting to be rescued… that was for civilians and Coalitionists, not the glorious warriors of the Empire.

His head lifted from the steel and he looked down at the rest of his body which did not appear to be pinned down despite the considerable weight he could feel pressing on his lower body, however; as he remained unable to see through the thick cloth draped over his legs he could not be certain that he was not pinned by some obstruction still blocked from view. That too would have to wait, he reminded himself.

Utilize what you have before you come to depend on what you do not, his instructors had preached.

Flexing his left bicep and tugging at the shoulder he struggled to heft his arm from its position against the ceiling and in so doing realized that his upper body was not pinned or held in place by any visible obstruction because gravity remained invisible. He found some humor in that and in that humor, found strength. As he moved his limb further from the steel it had been pressed against he noticed that the resistance became noticeably lower and that, at full extension, he could move his wrist and fingers around as normal. It was a simple matter then to lift his other arm and, doing a sit up, bend his body at the waist and free himself from the bonds of paranormal gravity all together.

He had never been so proud of himself and thought; it’s the small things in life that matter the most.

Able to move about with much less infringement on his physical body, Reginald took a moment to do a more in depth examination of his surroundings. Nothing he saw encouraged him save for the fact that there still did not appear to be any tangible damage done to the structure of the ship. The lifts were closed and sealed by blast doors as was part of the procedure but this also prevented him from seeing through the tubes to the chambers off of the bridge. Contented that there was little else for him to do before dealing with his legs, Reginald moved to pull back the curtain that separated the lower half of his body from the bottom.

And nearly threw up at discovering, uncovering even, the fates of the rest of the bridge crew. The sight was almost indescribable.

The twelve men and women who comprised the rest of that shifts duty roster was crammed, broken, smashed, squeezed, shoved into the sensor booth. Limbs had been snapped and twisted around corkscrewed torsos and separated necks forming a roughly cube-shaped jumble of humanity all crunched up and stuffed in the small room without any accord for the natural state of a human body. Extremely distorted faces stared up at him from the deadly orgy of flesh and bone, their now-inhuman visages gazed up at him and he knew, seeing the pain on their faces, that their deaths had been gradual and unforgiving.

Reginald James turned his head and vomited. It fell to the floor.

His legs were stuck in that mess, trapped or mired in the hodgepodge below the knees. The pain he felt in his legs was severe but not such that he believed his legs had been broken or rendered inoperative. That mess, he reminded himself, had previously been the men and women that he had come to know during his brief time aboard the Expeditious. Grappling with his own growing sense of hysteria and the moral complications of his situation, he began kicking… frantically.

Moments later, and though he was not sure how he had done it so lost in that moment of revulsion, he was free and for but a moment, suspended in open air by nothing but the ships internal gravity. Then, he fell.

Scrambling through the pain, the hysterics and his own vomit, Reginald struggled to his feet and ran, stumbled and tripped across the bridge in a vein attempt to get away from the thing stuffed in the sensor booth. Tears had begun to stream down his face and a cold sweat was causing him to tremble with such severity that he was unable to steady himself. He had to get away from it.

Reginald threw himself at the lift doors and pounded them with his fists until his knuckles were raw. Minuets lapsed and passed during that moment of frantic desperation until the young officer had exhausted himself. Dismayed and beaten he slumped against the blast doors and hid his face in his palms.

The resolution that he had felt earlier had left him in a rush, leaving him broken and weeping on the deck plates. Gurgling phlegm he spat his anxiety at the wall and tried to calm his breathing. This was doing him no good and, though his fellows on the bridge had met with certain death, there could be others like him trapped throughout the ship and he was doing them a disservice by sitting there in his own self pity like a child. Reginald James was a commissioned officer in the Imperial Navy, damn it all, and he would suck it up and do what was expected of him whatever it meant.

Emergency lock down could be over ridden which meant that he could potentially free himself from the bridge and explore the rest of the vessel but, before embarking on any half cocked quests he knew that he could use the ships internal systems, those that were still functional, to his advantage. So, finding the courage to face his fears, Reginald stood up and made his way over to the helm. He slipped into the chair and examined the instrumentation.

The Expeditious appeared to be directionally functional; all indicators reading green for active but the controls were not responsive. He tried tapping in a few commands only to receive the all too frustrating error noise with each stroke. The helm would be of little use but at least he knew that, should it come down to it, he might be able to get the ship on course. He slipped over to the navigational array and studied the readings and though he was not a navigator by training, his officer training meant that he had at least the basic skills to operate and understand a navigational computer. It was, unfortunately, returning inconclusive results that were too complex for his basic knowledge to decipher. He was fairly certain that the ship was somewhere around a hundred thousand light years out of position which implied that, somehow, the ship had leapt into hyperspace during the catastrophe.

Reginald sighed. All of this was good but it did not take him much closer to discovering the condition of the rest of the ship and he knew, all too well, that if he had access to the ships sensors he could answer a great many questions with relative ease but… he was not prepared to face the corpses in the corner just yet so, instead, he hopped over to the captains chair and called up the mini-plot interface. Even with the captain dead he felt bad for sitting in the mans chair.

Oddly, and much to his surprise, a damage summary was already displayed on the small screen alongside a situation report that appeared to have been compiled by the computer only moments earlier according to the time stamp. Reginald was puzzled but he was no fool for he would not look this gift horse in the mouth.

The ship had received illegal packet information from an unknown source and, seconds later, succumbed to a system wide virus hack which had likely been transmitted along the same signal that Reginald had discovered. Following the cascade systems failure a new protocol was enacted throughout the ship. The computers, tricked in to believing that the ships hull had been breached, went into immediate lock down and sealed off all sections off the vessel behind thick bulkhead blockades. And then inexplicably the hyperdrives had ramped up and leapt the ship into hyperspace. A plethora of bizarre gravimetric readings followed a notation that internal gravity had experienced an “unknown modification in operational parameters” which, Reginald surmised, was responsible for his bizarre position upon waking and the gruesome deaths of the rest of the bridge crew.

A trained officer, Reginald knew that he had to transmit a situation update to the Fleet as soon as possible so, changing chairs again, he propped himself in front of the Communications Stack and tried to activate the emergency channels. All to no avail and as the response returned by the computer made little sense to Reginald, he decided that he would have to activate the beacons manually. Curious, however; he did not fully understand what the computer meant when it returned his query with, “unknown spatial anomaly – external sensors and communications offline”.

Spatial anomalies were common enough, but the Expeditious’ operation area put the ship well outside of the danger posed by any known or documented event horizons. More over every major obstacle to Imperial Sovereignty, natural or not, had been overcome by the Empires technological might and the Expeditious was among those vessels specially outfitted to negate the impact of such a thing.

Reginald shook his head and moved over to the science station located just to the left of the lifts and began accessing the systems that would enable him to unlock the ship. He keyed the command.

The computer had been acting strange, doubtless a result of the viral infection, but all the same Reginald was entirely stumped by the question that appeared on his screen. He quirked a brow.

“What does that mean?” He asked aloud.

The words “Fatal Error In Judgment To Follow. Are You Certain You Wish To Let The Animals Out Of Their Cage?” kept flashing on the screen but he saw no option to key in a yes or a no reply.

On a whim, he said “Yes I want out.”

And the doors whooshed open throughout the ship. As he was seated so near the doors, and having confirmed positive pressure on the other side, Reginald felt a rush of cold, stale air come blowing up from the lower decks. It sent shivers down his spine and caused his skin to tense up. Even the hairs on neck were standing on end.

Shaking the feeling from his bones Reginald reached under the panel and retrieved the Emergency Rescue Pack from its cubby and strapped the affair to his back. After all, he had people to save…

The hallway, the corridor leading away from the bridge, loomed before Reginald James. A tunnel of flickering darkness and roiling smoke looked back at him. He checked his lantern and tried shining the beam into the darkness before him. The emergency lighting had failed and the primaries were oscillating badly. In the intermittent flashes luminescence he observed nothing, simply a desolate junction slowly filling with smoke. Reginald inhaled the grey smog and tasted copper. Something was dreadfully wrong.

Standing there, paralyzed with indecision, Reginald considered going back to the bridge, considered jumping into one of the escape-pods and blasting himself out into the perpetual black. Weighty responsibility pushed him forward for he knew, deep within his belly, that he could not abandon his crewmates to an unknown and likely bleak demise. His feet felt like stones and realized that this was not due to the sense of dread dwelling in his guts but because the gravity plating had somehow redoubled its output. Each step more agonizing then the last, the young man felt himself succumbing to fatigue and knew he could not go much further. Furthermore, he was beginning to fell unsteady, woozy on his feet. He decided that it was probably the smoke and that he needed to get out of the halls.

Fortunately astronomic’s was just ahead though the blast doors were sealed shut.

Reginald stepped awkwardly into a computer alcove while the world spun around him bleeding the colors out of the terminal screen and smearing them across the bulkhead doors. He decided that the smoke was probably having a narcotic effect on his brain and reminded himself that, even though the colors and lights were rather awe inspiring, his first and most important course of action should be to get clear of the haze.

Staring at his finger, unable to make his hands hover in the ‘home-key’ position over the keyboard, Reginald stuck his forefinger out and began prodding the thing. His keystrokes were neither precise nor swift and the computer seemed to recognize this. Nearing the end of his own tolerance, Reginald was about to give up and find a blow-torch or explosive of some sort when the screen, seemingly of its own accord asked him, in big, red, block letters, “Are You Okay?”

Reginald shook his head and said to himself, aloud, “No, I’m really not okay.”

He forced his hands over the keyboard and tried to type in a response, but before he was able the screen shifted. In the same blocky text it queried, “Would You Like A Hand?”

Finding this humorous, Reginald began clapping. He was not entirely certain what, exactly, was funny about the situation.

“I Would Like A Hand,” stated the terminal inspiring Reginald to clap louder and faster. He was smiling but knew not why.

“Put Your Hand In Me,” declared the computer. It changed display resolution and provided Reginald with a map. The map seemed to indicate that he should crawl under the terminal and stick his hand into the bowels of its workings. This, he knew, was a very bad idea. High currents passed through the rear of the terminal and Reginald certainly wasn’t qualified to go mucking about in the guts of a terminal.

“That’s not a good idea,” countered Reginald aloud. “I might get hurt.”

“No,” replied the terminal. “I Will Let You Inside. You need To Reach Inside Me. I’m Inside. I Need Help!”

Now this, Reginald decided, made sense. Someone was obviously trapped inside of Astronomics and, for whatever reason, could only communicate with him through the terminal. If the person in question was also experiencing the effects of the intoxicating smoke then it made sense that he or she might refer to himself or herself as the terminal. This made sense, he reminded himself, and that nagging sensation that he might be wrong, for whatever reason, he ignored.

Reginald crawled under the terminal and, much to his surprise, found the access door already open and unhinged from the inside. Curious, but not enough to give him pause, he reached up inside the machine and began feeling around blind. He chuckled and commented that he must be pretty messed up to do something this stupid.

He was still chuckling when a sharp pain passed through his wrist. His laughter and general sense of amused detachment vanished with considerable abruptness when, upon pulling his arm from within the terminal, found that he was short one hand. It had, in fact, been cleanly severed at the wrist and was now spouting his life blood like an upturned fountain. Reginald screamed and panicked. Quickly on his feet, running despite the enhanced gravity, he threw himself at the closed bulkhead doors to astronmics. With his good hand he pounded on the doors until it too was bloody. He knew he would not be able to remain conscious for long; too great was his blood loss.

Nearing the end, fearing his own demise was within sight, Reginald leant his body against the doors and screamed. This a scream of desperation, a shout of outrage. He felt helpless and then, shockingly, he felt weightless. A soft exhalation of gas rippled behind him and the doors to astronomics slid open letting Reginald fall, unconscious, into the zero-gravity of astronomics.

In a dream state, half dead, half alive, he dreamed of ghosts who came to mend his hand, who sewed up his wound and fixed him with bacta. Disembodied hands reached for him, grabbing hungrily at his body while the faces of his brothers and sisters in arms floated above him. The cursed him while mending his injury and he slept the sleep of the damned.

Inky blackness suffused the starship. The stars blank, it drifted through an abyss of nothingness. Nothing seemed to exist here, not even the energy patterns, micro-wave, radio-wave and otherwise, that were so often associated with the depths of space. Whereever it had stumbled and in to what, the Expeditious was a ghost-ship doomed.

Dark.

Reginald James awoke for the second time since his nightmare, manifested in the real world and only escaped in slumber, had begun.

His head was swimming in an ocean of blackness. He felt weightless and free and for a moment, just a fleeting second, he thought that maybe it was all over, maybe he was safe. The Empire had saved him, they had picked up the emergency signal and come to the rescue. That was what had happened, he knew it.

Soon a doctor would come and give him an injection. Outside his eyes the world would resolve itself and he would find himself staring up at the sterile, pale walls of a medical bay. This far out, with this many young officers on their midshipman cruise, the Empire, the Regent or Simon Kaine or someone in authority, would dispatch a fleet of Imp Stars to come, rescue the boys and uncover the cause of their consternation.

He would wake up and the doctor would explain about his hand and how he would be getting a new, synthetic replacement. It would hurt and be a shock, being dismembered, but soon he would forget all about his loss and, this would be the best part, he would still be able to continue with his Imperial Service. His career was not over. And then a Commander would come, maybe his own commander from back home, and then he would be debriefed. All smiles and concern for his tribulations, the Brass would read his report and then send him home for a while, to recover. Before he would know it though he would be back aboard a starship, back on a bridge and doing his job.

But this was not reality.

Reality is too real, too grim and gruesome to be ignored. Try as he might…

Reginald forced his eyes open. Nothingness looked back at him and for a moment he feared he might be blind. But then, on the periphery of his vision, colors began to resolve and he knew where he was and what was wrong.

He was in astronomics and the gravity was out. The dome that protected the occupants from the vacuum of space was transparent, granting those operating within the area an unparalleled view of natural, local space. But something else was terribly wrong. There were no stars looking down upon him. Only the inky blackness of the void stared back at him and it saw into his soul.

He was still weak, still woozy. Reginald struggled to recall what had happened and immediately wished he hadn’t.

His hand!

Reginald pulled his arm up, through the empty nothing, and held it before his face.

Below him, perhaps a dozen feet, the screens were still active and swirling with colors. The ambient light they provided was the only illumination he could perceive, and it was in these weak, shifting hues of purples and reds that he saw the stump that was his wrist. His hand, severed at the wrist, was missing. Perplexed not by the lack of his limb, as he clearly recalled the event now, he puzzled over the tourniquet and bandages that had been affixed over the stump. He did not recall doing that and if it had not been him… then that implied that he was not…

… alone.

“Awake?” A voice, disembodied in the blackness, asked. “Hurts?”

Reginald tried to spin, to rotate and get a look around him. In zero gravity, without anything within reach to grasp, Reginald was unable to reposition himself. He wished, in that moment, that he had paid more attention in 0-G Orientation.

“Who-who are you?” He asked.

“Alive,” the voice wheezed, it groaned. It did not sound human. “Dying. You… need… go.”

Reginald reckond he could hear the sounds of someone vomiting followed by the wet slurping sounds of suction applied to the same. “I can’t move. Where are you?”

“Virus,” replied the voice. It was choking now, forcing words between heaving seizures. “Infected… the Ghost. You… survive. Tell them. I… can’t help…”

Reginald was struggling now. Kicking his legs and pumping his arms in an effort to find something, anything to kick off of, or grab on to. “I can help you. I can…”

His fingers landed on something. He felt a cold steel cylinder with a glass tip.

His lantern!

And then something bumped into him, something wet and warm. It sent him spiraling through the bleak nothingness until he collided with a wall. Quickly, with his good hand, he gripped the wall while pressing the lantern to his chest with the stump that was once his hand. Slowly, he lowered himself down to the floor and assumed a more-or-less neutral position.

Across the room he heard a shuffling, snuffling noise that seemed to be approaching him along the floor. “Is-is that you?”

He asked aloud and threw on his lantern, casting it’s brilliant white beam towards the source of the sound and what he saw changed his perception of reality forever.

When he was a boy Reginald enjoyed horror productions. Holo-Dramas of the most bizarre and gruesome sort were his joy and he had watched them all. Nightdream on Alm St, Jazon, Tuesday the 12th and so on. He’d seen them all but the ones that he loved the most, the ones he remembered to this very day, were the Zombie movies. He loved to watch the dead rise from their graves and feed on the living. It amused him as a boy, scared his sisters and terrorized his mother. He loved it.

And what he saw, crawling across the floor impossibly in the zero-gravity, took him back to those days. All of a sudden, in a flash, Reginald James was no longer a young Imperial Officer, but a twelve year old boy. A warmth flushed his pants.

Torn, broken and rearranged, was the body of what, presumably, had once been a female deck officer. He knew this only because of her uniform which, though matted in blood and gore, still retained enough of its shape that he could tell. Her head was split at the jaw, looking as though it had been cleaved by a sword or axe. Ribs protruded from her flesh at places impossible and the inner-workings of her body had, somehow, become the outer-workings.

She came closer vomiting blood and leaving a slimy trail behind her. The laws of physics had left her, for she moved as though she were not hampered by the lack of gravity while Reginald, trying to flee, felt as if his feet were mired in mud. He scrambled and struggled, fought for purchase. Flee, his mind told him, run from this thing and don’t stop running until you can not run any farther!

And then she was upon him, hands and fingers grabbing. Teeth pierced his flesh sending waves of pain rushing along his shin. Electric sensations fired along his nerves, reaching his brain. The adrenaline pumped furiously.

Reginald James found himself bludgeoning the thing with his lantern, found himself aiming for its head (he could not bring himself to call it “her”) and battering it with all the strength he had within him.

It recoiled, fell limp and slid away from him into the black and, Reginald, having found a door, bolted.

These things happen.

Legs pumping and blood like battery acid flowing through his veins, Reginald James ran for all he was worth through the bending, twisting maze of corridors, junctions and hallways with which the Expeditious was rife. Lights zipped past him, he wheeled and spun without direction. Only the adrenaline burning in his chest kept him aloft and moving for he was no longer thinking but simply reacting based on the instinctive need to flee. Heedless of his missing appendage he stumbled and fell when attempting to balance himself with a palm beset by digits no longer present and then the pain would ripple through his body like a tsunami and regardless of his self induced chemically enhanced state, his vision would go black at the edges.

The lifts, too slow in their arrival and too confined for his state of being, were not an option and given the limited deck space of the tall ship he would quickly exhaust his options for places to hide. Without thought for his bandages he stopped to rend at a quarter-panel and reveal the access tube behind it. Like most capital-scale starships the Expeditious had numerous man-sized tubes that connected one area to the next. A man could squeeze himself through these narrow arteries on his belly and the only necessity for such contrivances existed within the need to mix aesthetic with function to which end certain vital components had to be hidden behind walls and tucked in narrow spaces.

Reginald barely noticed when, clawing as we was at the panel, the first of his fingernails splintered and broke leaving a bloodied trail as his continued ministrations similarly damaged his remaining fingers. With a heave and grunt he managed to dislodge the plate of polymer. Normally a special tool was required to accomplish the task but so great was his need to escape that Reginald would sacrifice any amount of himself in order to preserve his own life.

The panel fell to the floor with a weighty impact which sent up a furious noise that thundered across the deck plating and caused a series of echoes to repeat in the dim, lonely darkness that abounded around him. For a moment he froze. Casting sidelong glances in either direction lest his commotion should arouse someone, or something to his location, he waited a pensive moment. His delay was not long lived and with a powerful thrust he forced himself, head first into the first of a series of winding tunnels that circumnavigated the ship.

The depths tore at him, physically and emotionally. These junctions were not designed for speedy travel nor were they designed with an eye towards mobility but rather these junctions, though connected, existed only to allow the ships crew to avail themselves access to vital areas of the ship from the man halls which they adjoined. His clothes caught and tore on the jagged angles that protruded at intermittent intervals exposing his raw flesh to the abrasions of unfriendly componentry. Missing a hand as he was Reginald was further hampered in his ability to pull himself along and so resorted to shoving harder with his legs which had the affect of skinning his knees to near the bone. His progress was slow, bloody and, painful.

Somewhere in his tribulations Reginald began to regain his senses. Eventually, aware of his condition and cognizant of the fact that he was unsure of his location in the bowels of the Expeditious, he came to a stop at a more open area that allowed him to almost stand. He chose to slump.

The pain began to seep through his adrenaline induced haze. Reginald James screamed aloud but none could hear his cries of tormented desperation, he screamed until his throat was raw and the last of his strength was threatening to escape him. He fell quiet only because he had not the energy left to roar on but the pain remained and he wished for the blissful release of unconsciousness.

“You’ve got a concussion,” spoke a voice. It seemed to emanate from nothing, or perhaps was just the echo of someone speaking far in the distance down one of the same tunnels in which he was now trapped. “If you go to sleep you will die.”

He knew this to be the truth; his senses were swimming in a sea of murky depths that threatened to swallow him up always and forever. It occurred to him that death would be a release from the hell around him and allowed his eyes to drift shut. Damn the voices, he thought, and damn the torpedoes too. Everyone around him was dead… or worse and he saw no hope of salvation. Without a map he may never escape the ships immense innards while without medical attention he would surely die also.

Hopeless, he resolved to let himself die but the voice seemed aware of his decision and spoke again.

“Consider this, Reginald James; if what you see is real and everything you thought was impossible is happening around you, what guarantee is there that you will be any less tormented in death?”

“How can you be sure that death is not much, much worse?”

Hearing those words was like being thrown into a bath of icy cold water. Reginald opened his eyes and, much to his surprise, saw himself reflected in the back-panel of a fuse box. The steel was polished to a high sheen and he could clearly see his own visage reflected back at him. Somewhere, on the far side of this wall, was a source of light too bright to have been coming from the tunnels and the glow had cast him in his own light.

The man looking back at him seemed almost a stranger. He was bedraggled, bruised and contused with smatterings of blood, sweat and grime cemented into every crack and crevice. Dried blood had formed a mat in his hair, evidence that in his flight he had collided with something and this was likely the source of his concussed state.

He lifted his good hand to his face and wiped away some of the slag but it was a futile effort.

“Some mess you’ve made,” he said to himself.

“It’s all your own mess,” countered his reflection, much to his surprise.

By now Reginald had accepted the fact that impossible things were happening all around him and to that end he was a little less surprised when they did, but still enough that his heart began pumping and he pressed himself against the wall.

“What?” He asked.

“You’ve made this mess all by yourself. Think about it. Why are you still alive?”

“Shut up,” he snarled and wiped his hand across the polished steel. His hand smeared a path of grime across it obscuring his reflection. “I’m going to live.”

For the next half hour, or so Reginald estimated, he struggled to make his way towards the source of light having to backtrack, quite literally, on multiple occasions. Eventually, however; he succeeded and found himself looking out on the engineering deck from a ventilation duct high above the floor.

He realized then that he had not been in hell because when he looked out of his tunnel onto the gas-filled, and heat baked decks that this, truly was hell. Whatever had happened to the ship had so utterly changed the ships engines that Reginald feared he had stepped out of his own reality and into the past, into a ghost story from his childhood; the ghost ship.

Although he had never seen such before, he knew the large bulbous contraptions that dominated the immense, cavern like expanse were coal burning boiler-tanks. Having never seen a coal furnace, having never glimpsed cylinder driven, internal-combustion engines before, he found himself quite at a loss to explain his familiarity with the scene. And then, in a flash, it hit him.

When he was a child his father had told him a story. They were camping and he was but a young boy when someone suggested that, given the late hour and the dying fire, they gather and tell their scariest ghost stories. None of them had affected the boy, young Reginald, until his father’s tale. He recalled a story told to him by his own father who in turn had been told the story by his father and so on. The story told the tale of a young ships mate on an ancient steel-bellied ship of war, a young man who went mad over the loss of his love, back home while he was away. So total was his abandon that the young man murdered many of the crew before stealing away to the ships engines and shoveling a furnace to over full and then clamping tight the release. The resulting explosion blew a hole in the side of the ship and from there… all hands lost.

The realization made his blood cold.

“What is going on?” He asked of no one in particular.

Getting down from his high position was not easy and, for a good portion of it, he fell. He did not land gracefully, rolling his ankle so severely that he feared having broken it. For a moment he lay there, gripping his new injury in his remaining hand and staring at the ceiling. It occurred to him that there should not have been rafters and walk-ways looming so high above him they vanished into the darkness. It occurred to him that the entire engineering deck of the Expeditious could fit in the expansive breadth three or four times over.

Reginald rolled to his side and, propping himself on his good foot, stood up. He immediately wished he had not.

Somehow he had not noticed before, but from here, looking along the length of row upon row of coal furnace, he could see the bodies of men and women shoveling black rocks into the burning fires. He found himself in a dream like state, lost in a nightmare where, if he looked hard enough, the shapes resolved themselves into fine detail and he knew what had become of the rest of the crew. They were lost forever shoveling black rocks that looked like little planets into the flames before them. The ghastly description of their appearance made his stomach twist but he had not the strength nor substance to vomit. Skin became indistinguishable from bone which in turn was wrapped in the tatters of the Imperial uniform.

Reginald slunk to his knees.

“What have you done?”

“I’ve stolen them, Reginald.”

A man unlike any man alive, appeared before him. Words failed him but, faced with the grim truth, Reginald James knew himself to be looking upon the face of the devil himself.

“I have stolen them forever, Reginald and only you can set them free. I have a furnace free for you, Reginald. And a shovel with your name upon it…”

Accepting the truth to be impossible, Reginald knew what he had to do…

Aboard the Cargo-Hauler; Camel Back.

“What was that?!”

Captain Tout, an impish Sullustan man, stepped onto the bridge of his cargo-hauler Camel Back, clad only in his bed robe and undergarments. He had been fast asleep in his bunk when he had been shaken awake with the deck literally rocking beneath him. Whatever had happened, he knew, had come with such swiftness that Veesa had obviously not had time to wake him.

Veesa, his partner in life and trade, was clutching the yokes and struggling to regain control of the vessel while the stars spun wildly around the canopy. Her stubby grey fingers fought deftly with the ships controls as Tout struggled into the copilots chair and strapped himself in.

He toggled the ships internal communications, “All stations report in!”

“Engineering is fine,” called the Chadra-Fan responsible for the ships engines.

“I’m fine,” repeated the ships Doctor, a medical droid in bad need of a memory wipe.

Having accounted for his four-person crew, Tout turned to Veesa who had managed to regain control of the vessel.

“What was that?” He repeated himself. “Did we hit something?”

She shook her head. Her chin flaps were practically vibrating she was so nervous. “Something hit us. I picked up an explosion close by and then boom, we’re being flipped around. It was really close.”

Tout turned his attention to the ships sensors. “There’s debris everywhere. Must have been a large ship… I’m not picking up anything big enough for rescue… or salvage.”

Veesa clicked her tongue sharply at his tone. “People just died.”

“This close to the border,” quipped Tout. “They were probably imperial.”

Few cargo traders dared operate between the heavily contested borders shared by the empires of the Taj and, as things had been developing, Grand Marshall. Tout and his crew were an exception and they made a career out of plying their trade in the most dangerous sectors of the known Galaxy. They had survived through wit and guile alone.

“We’d better high tail it out of here,” advised the cautious Veesa. “I don’t want to be around when they come looking.”

“Anzat isn’t far from here.” Tout manipulated the navigational computer. “We can probably find somewhere to lay low in system…”

*

Elsewhere, in a darkened room...

In the darkness sat three figures.

Between them was a small, rustic wooden table beset by a trio of chairs of which each occupied one. A lantern, of the oil burning variety, sat squalid and squat between them but its dome shaped top cut the light dramatically. Above the chest their faces vanished into shadow.

One spoke. He said, “Well done, gentlemen.”

His chest was covered in a drab olive tone tunic draped in a red sash. The outlines of rank insignia seemed visible in the opaque zone between light and dark. When he spoke his voice came out soft, subdued and determined. He sounded like a man of resolve, grim resolve. “Phase one is complete?”

“Indeed,” spoke another. “You saw the documents.”

The second speaker was considerably more nondescript then the first. A simple leather jerkin was all that distinguished him from the rest. His voice was bland monotone. “The weapon worked spectacularly.”

“But not perfectly,” added the first voice. “The explosion was not part of the plan. They were supposed to find the ship, and everyone dead aboard it.”

“Criticize not,” snapped the last.

The third speaker was decidedly more disturbing then the others present. It spoke with a voice neither male nor female but with a clear indication of deviousness. If a serpent could speak with the voice of a human, or something like it, then it would have sounded much like this. Unlike the others present it was almost totally sheathed in darkness and that area of its chest that was cast in the pallor of the lantern seemed draped in heavy, thick fabric.

“Not everyone died,” the third voice commanded the attention of the others. “There was a survivor but the Sea of Voices connected us, he and I. I watched through his eyes.”

“In him the Sea of Voices spoke strong and loud. He created a metaphor for his nightmare, to explain the things he was seeing.”

They all paused, as if waiting for it to go on and it did. “The weapon is focus and projection. The Sea of Voices killed everyone save young master James. Instead it drove him to madness and forced him to destroy himself and the vessel. What do we learn?”

Again they waited.

“The weapon is sentient. The Sea of Voices speaks through our ancestors and our victims. Amplify it, focus it outwards and we give it reign to act according to its own desires. Those who do not die with the soup cooked in their skulls become the pawns of the Sea of Voices. As at home with any but the Chosen People, it induces madness and death.”

It was the first man who spoke next.

“The weapon will still work?”

“Oh, it will work,” assured the middle voice, initially the second speaker. “It will work better then in our best hopes.”

“Good. Your people will go ahead with the amplification satellites according to schedule and mine will be prepared for the day. The thing which has defined us as a people will become the weapon which frees us of domination. Today I know it, that our world will soon be free.”






The End?