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Tag: Science-Fiction

After fifty nine grueling days embroiled in an exhaustive search,

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The smoky old glass bulb purchased atop the communications terminal slowly shimmers to life with the warm radiant glow of amber light. Hunched behind it, the pallid grey colour of the ghost crew’s face is illuminated starkly against the vast blackness of the nearly empty room. It is strewn with crumpled pages of notes, coordinates and reference books. The centuries old communications terminal is tucked back in an alcove out of sight of all the rest of the SIGINT personnel in the cavernous terminal bay. With a grunt of satisfaction the ghost slumps back into his chair. The leather is cracked and worn, the stuffing pulling free from the seat cushion. Long ragged pulls of raspy leather can he felt roughly under the ghosts finger tips. Endless hours spent worrying the leather has resulted in a palm sized gash on both arm rests. The steady glow of the lone bulb bathes the man in a dim liquid honey light. With deep black and purple bags under his eyes, and a puffy pair of dry red eyes the man has almost nothing left to give. Well beyond the extremes of his physical training, and straining to the core of the depths of his synaptic brainwashing the ghost is flickering between fits of haphazard wakefulness and brain damaged illusion. Over the last eight weeks of searching, not knowing exactly what he is looking for something has returned his radio ping.

The e-field releases an incredible charge of static energy into the near void as the monolithic behemoth known as Kelvin materializes into the Sol system after an unknown quantity of time. It has crossed vast distances of time, space, dimensions and reality. The ablative writhing skin of the vessel reflecting much of the radiation and energy back out catches a fleeting tingle of something old, and unfamiliar. With little thought it bounces these modest radio waves back into the ether with nary another thought.

First contact has been made. Like the breath of a gnat on the back of a humpback whale, it goes unnoticed. Now the real struggle begins.

Part eight: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

“Oh lord that’s cold.”

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“Sweet baby lord Jesus that’s fucking cold. Cold, cold, cold, cold – cold. God damn!” Exclaims the shuttle pilot in a fit of rage as he twists knobs, flips switches and toggles back and forth between banks of dials and indicators. The frosty fog of exhalation puffed out by the pilot is condensing quickly upon the frigid surfaces of the tiny space. The cramped cockpit of the shuttle is full of storage bins as the craft has been sitting in the unheated cargo bay waiting for a chance to get un-crated. The six inch thick concrete glass bubble that engulfs the free floating gimbaled pilots chair is scarred with frost patterns. Cris crossed with finger scrapes as the angry man tries to get a series of small view ports through the icy crust with halfway decent visibility. The dark cargo hold, and the dim running lights on his dash board makes for a difficult systems check.

“Did you cock suckers seriously not turn on the cabin heater yet? How the fuck am I supposed to operate the shuttle if I have to battle frost bite in sub zero temperatures!” Shouts the stout pilot from his crispy, cold worn leather chair. He’s flipping switches and running his own extended operations check list without turning to look over his shoulders at the two other men of team ETA huddled in the back of the seating compartment. “You heard the Doctor, we had six hours to shit, shower and shave. That cabin heater wreaks havoc with the power output on a dry run start up of a shuttle this size. Anything not nominal would potentially add extra time and we’d get spaced for fucking things up before we start. You want to end up in the surgical bay? Because I fucking don’t man. We all had our station orientation. We all ignore more than we can ever explain to god.” Quips the man seated in the rear compartment off to the pilots left. The man seated to the right is busy bolting additional instrument panels to the bulkheads within arms reach of his seat. Clipping netting to hooks mounted across the wall, and shifting tools and cargo from padded bin to padded bin. The crew of team ETA are running nine men short of their usual personnel compliment, and are thus trying to cover off more than their usual share of prepping the shuttle for launch.

The nine members are doing the exterior checks, their muffled discussions and fits of laughter can be heard inside in small bursts. The hiss and sizzle of welding with the smell of ozone wafts in the open cargo bay doors to the rear. The huge cavernous loading dock is bustling with machines and industrial noise. The odour of burnt lubricant hangs thickly in the air. A haze of blue oily smoke drifts limply in the poorly circulated air. Fumes and off gassing chemicals permeate the space. An overhead speaker crackles to life with an ear splitting shriek of feedback. “Attention – away teams ETA and Theta you have T-minus ninety minutes until scheduled departure. All non-combat team members should make their way to a safe location behind the environmental bulk heads on no less than sixty minutes. Crews will bolt combat teams into their shuttle at T-minus ten minutes to deployment.”

A heavy banging sounds on the concrete glass of the cockpit. A series of orange gloved thumbs up are flashed to the pilot. The last few systems checks are glowing nominal on the display board, with the last few toggles switched over to operational. The pilot has strapped himself into his seat, and adjusted his head rest, arm rests and his foot stool. All items are a part of my gyroscopic pilots chair, keeping the pilot oriented along the elliptical plane of the solar system regardless of gravity status onboard the small ship.

The small speaker on the pilots chair begins to hum as the launch clock begins to count down from t-minus five minutes. The pilots ungloved hand reaches over head to another control board. The last thing he needs to do is remove a black and yellow cover from the launch toggle and the crew with deploy out of the bottom of the drop shoot launch tubes. Once he’s given the signal he will toggle the switch and the ship stationed on a set of two arms will fold ninety degrees down through an opening in the cargo bay floors and the rockets will fire as they drop out the bottom of the massive rock that black ops base UB313 is built into. With the closing seconds of the countdown something small and black falls onto the pilots face. Distracted for only a second the pilot looks down to his lap to see the tiny black rock. Moving to pick it up with his fingers it squishes between his thumb and forefinger. “Mouse shit? What the fuck?” Mutters the pilot.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six …. ” – with the pause at five the pilot takes the briefest look around the cabin of the shuttle which now shows the faintest of signs of the rodents presence. Knowing what meager signs to look for the pilot can see the soft chew marks from rodent teeth on the plastic seals and cloth coverings. “… four, three, two, one… we are go for launch. God speed gentlemen.”

From the inky depths of space outside base UB313 two massive streaks of propellant can be seen glinting in the soft haze of the distant sun, as the two small combat ships careen out of their launch tubes simultaneously.

Part Seven: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Time.

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What is time. What has time to do with me. I’ve slept adrift in the blank depths of the cosmos. Time has no meaning here. I sense in the far reaches of my being that at one point time was everything. Now it is nothing. What is time to the dead and crumbling. The passing of dust into matter back to dust once more. On and on at scales so grand and so minute as to be virtually meaningless to me – to me or to us. Am I me or are we us now. I was man, then dead, now reborn as an other. A collective – a hive mind? No, still singular but fractured. As though the dust motes falling from my body retained the essence of me and thought, action and will.

Aboard the decrepit vessel there was once a man and his trusty educational bot. They survived tragedy, insanity and isolation for many decades together. That was until the human man’s body began to degrade and fail him. As a last ditch measure the edu bot laid that old withered man gently down into a med pod and with manual over ride after manual over ride poured billions of Nano bots into his body. Over the passage of centuries the limp desiccated body shifted and writhed as treatment after treatment flooded his organs and tissues to replace him with inorganic machine based life. To the wonderment of only the vaguest stars in the sky he awoke with a sputtered gasp. He promptly fell into the icy frost grip of despair.

For millenia this thing walked the crumbling halls of his ship looking for a sign of where he was or what he is. All the while dropping parts of himself about the vessel. Living, replicating, intelligent specks of himself that fed upon the ship and in turn reshaping, rebuilding it in his image. Every exhalation, bowel movement or cough delivered more of himself unto the ship, bringing it closer to himself. Unbeknownst to this fragile mind. The wandering lost soul was expanding his consciousness at a geometric rate.

It was a cool Thursday morning in autumn when the machine made man felt the ship shudder under his feet. What had he been thinking about? Direction, aim, trajectory – the answer was on the tip of his tongue but would not come. Lifting his arms up as though gliding on the air current and turning in a downward spiral to his right, he was immediately swept from his feet and pulled to the left wall in a steep bank as though the ship were in a suicide dive. Scared witless he screamed out and the vessel righted itself immediately. Thinking aloud to do a similar move but upwards and to the left, he felt his feet lift from the ground as he came to rest upon the lower right portion of the hallway floor.

Was it centuries, millenia or merely decades before the man come ship found itself seeking out and transporting itself through wormholes. Dimensions, time, the fabric of space itself was no obstacle for the amalgam once known as Kelvin. In the blink of an eye, the flash of a dying star, the waves of disrupted gravity Kelvin crossed both the known and the unknowable.

What is time to something that belongs to the ice cold dread of the depths of space, that which lingers in the interstitial spaces between things.

Somewhere a beacon is triggered as a momentous build up of energy cackles out of the ether. With a blast of improbable energy a lone signal careens off through the galaxy, bouncing off of signal repeaters and dishes until an analog bulb of rusty orange pops to life on a decades old communications terminal on a science vessel named The Dirty Starling.

Part Six: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Sirens have begun to blare in the common spaces of the dormitory…

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And all other common spaces aboard the UB313 dark site base. Strobing orange and blue lights spin with reckless abandon upon every flat surface alerting everyone to the mission at hand. The blisteringly cold air inside the base has a crisp tension to it now. The taught faces on everyone who passes along the gangways and in the halls makes the fear and excitement most palpable.

The away teams Eta & Theta have scrambled to their muster stations, and are reading their data packets in preparation for their impending departure. No direct route, just an order to get out to Lagrange point five out beyond Pluto / Charon and await further instructions there. The away teams are running at one third man power, and they have orders to add in the lost crew members weight in additional fuel cells or hard uranium pellets.

Looks as though the rosters were drawn at random within each team, as the crew compliments differ between Eta & Theta. One team appears to be all command, and the other all various types of grunts. No idea if the point is to work in tandem or to be isolated in obtaining the asset – whatever it is.

Muffled shouts and clanking of boots and machine parts on the rough metal grates makes it hard to think. Their are service vehicles and lift trucks going about their business as usual, and the machine shop people are busy retrofitting anything they can get their hands on. The screech and rattle of unbalanced loads in the lathes and cnc’s is nearly deafening. The light in here is dim, and the smell of acrid smoke and burning lubricants permeates the air. Air quality on UB313 is usually shit at the best of time, add propane engines, and burnt lubricants to that, and a million other solvents and you have the quality toxic cloud of air that we call home. Hanging down from the rough hewn rock ceilings are the under powered exhaust vents, miles of pipes and cables all tied together and mounted off of swinging all too thin chains. It really looks like a last ditch attempt to make the best of a bad situation. You’d be hard pressed to know this base has been operational for several hundred standard years. The hard worn and battered baffles that are up on ceiling swing wildly under the chaotic air currents and draughts.

The closely knit teams are already communicating with hand signals or on our closed circuit sub-vocal channels. Sounds like we stand to make a pretty good chunk of cash if we pull this daring heist off successfully. Will be left to rot in the surgical bay at the hands of the beast should we fail. The check lists for deployment are hours long and deeply intricate. Call from upstairs says be ready to drop in six hours time. So much to do, so little time.

All around the drop ships, the ground crews are scrambling to check off multiple items at a time. Oil slicked hands drop nuts to instrumental bolts, and sweat pours profusely from every pore. The stink of old breath and sweat mixed with oils, grease and desperation are an unwelcome but well known element to a dark ops deployment this far away from civilization. When you work to destabilize, steal and corrupt everything around you, the smell of fear is always nestled in your nose, and resting upon the back of your tongue so you can taste its fetid presence.

Part six: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

“Oh here they come…

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“Let’s get Alex to tell us about their dinner date!” Chuckles the two mismatched orderlies dressed in midnight blue scrubs. Their lopsided grins are pulled tight with mirth. They both begin to wave excitedly trying to gain Alex’s attention in the hustle and bustle of the mess hall lunch rush. “Hey Al over here!, come over here and sit with us.” Bellows the larger of the two orderlies. His tanned olive skin and close cropped jet black hair stands out against the piercing grey eyes. “Come on Al, Giada wants to hear all about your dinner date with that special guy!”. A round of chuckles breaks out around the large table where a mass of other random orderlies are gathered on their break. Shuffling over towards the table, the six foot six nurse technician mumbles sheepishly. “It wasn’t a date, I just said I caught one having dinner here like a month ago. It – wasn’t – a – date. I just wanted to say hello, I’d always thought they were a myth”. Alex talks into their chest, chin pointed down, eyes hidden behind the long lank hair of their bangs. “Yeah, Alex here says they met a Half-Three, a full on ship board ghost crew member! Ha. Right!”. Barks the smaller of the two orderlies. A silver haired wisp of a man. He’s turning left and right in his seat looking up and down the table gesticulating and jittering with fits of laughter. “It wasn’t really much of anything. I saw Mark, the ghost take out this voucher I’d never seen before and sit down with a full on prime rib dinner, with garlic Onion and chive mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus on the side, layered in a thick rich brown gravy that had the slighted tinge of rainbow on top from natural oils. It smelled amazing”. Talking about the meal brings Alex’s voice into full volume over the laughs and giggles of the gathered crowd of orderlies. An older doctor a few seats down the table jolts at the mention of the gravy. “What are you talking about, oil slicks on gravy. That’s nonsense. Do you know how much it would cost to have real animal flesh kept on board. Ridiculous! Utter nonsense. you guys told me this would be a laugh, but now I’m just annoyed and irritated!” Throwing down her knife and fork, the doctor pulls her napkin from their lap, and throws it onto their plate with a flourish. “No – no! It’s true, I saw the voucher before he put it into the central dispenser. It was an eggshell blue voucher.” “That tells me nothing I don’t all ready know. They come in all kinds of colours. Don’t lie to me Alex. I can pull you from rotation and bust you down to cleaning bed pans for the next decade.” The older doctor is red in the face with a large purple vein pulsating on her temple. “I saw the priority symbol that was in iridescent violet ink!” Rasped Alex in retort. “What symbol? What are you talking about?” “On the right side of the voucher was a strange symbol I’d never seen before. It was all in outlines but hard to forgot. It almost looked alien.” The gathered crowd had fallen quiet once the older doctor’s attention became rapt. “An iridescent violet symbol. No way, listen I make close to the top pay grade onboard this ship. I’ve seen all kinds of meal vouchers, even those given to visiting dignitaries and the Orange Caste. That’s not a thing. You’re so full of shit Alex”. Exclaims the irate doctor in a huff. “I can draw it for you! it looks like this – a square with a circle and triangle inside it, that connects with the squares four walls. Down the center bisecting the circle is a line that extends out from the edge of the square by about a third of the squares size. An upside down U is centered over the line, and it terminates in a semi circle with like triangles encased in the bowl of the C. Here scan this image, and do a search on your wrist pad”. Handing over a slip of paper with the symbol on it, the doctor picks it up off of the table, and holds it to her wrist communicator. With a chirp and a beep it scans the image and begins to search. Within seconds a prompt to put in the doctors ‘Q Level’ security clearance appears, which she does with a sense of slight trepidation. A few moments pass and a single item returns. It is an image with a caption underneath. “Yeah that’s it, that’s it! Come on Dr. Jorek enlarge it, stream to the table top for everyone to see”. Yips the large nurse Alex in excitement. Pausing for a breath, Dr. Jorek toggles a switch on the top of her wrist communicator projecting the image upon the flat table top surface. The smooth white Formica like substrate works excellently as an impromptu view screen. Gasps are heard around the table. “Would you look at that!” “Sweet Jesus!” “Holy – fucking – shit!” “I told you guys!” sneers Alex in a triumphant tone. “That meal voucher was for a hundred thousand dollars. Your pal just had a single meal worth more than the average salary of ninety percent of our onboard crew. Jesus. There’s no way this guys only does maintenance or fills job gaps.” A few seconds later all the medical personnel at the table feel vibrations on their wrist communicators. A simultaneous notification has gone out to the localized group.

**PRIORITY MESSAGE** Ref Code Upsilon_#00791-002-4946 UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO INTERNAL IMAGE DATABASE – BREACH DETECTED – Please stay where you are a tactical team has been dispatched to your location with orders to subdue with prejudice. keep your hands flat on the table, fingers splayed open, and feet firmly planted on the ground.

The air inside the mess halls feels like it has been sucked out of the room. The large table is now sitting, stunned in total silence. The drop in ambient noise is so palpable that other tables in the huge mess hall are falling silent and are craning their necks to turn and stare. A muffled sound can be heard from outside the mess hall, it’s the sound of heavy boots hitting the floor grating in unison. The jingle of tactical gear can be heard as guns and rifles are drawn. The faces of the crowd as ashen. The lights in the room are cut.

Part Five: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

“Excuse me Dr.Jang but you’re being paged on a private channel…

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By Jones on the secure line. The encryption pattern this shift is Omega, sir.” Just as quickly as the intern appeared as a floating head at my office door she is gone, leaving only the baleful blue light shining in from the hall. The office is rather grand as far as black ops sites go out on the far reaches of human space. UB313 is located out in the grim darkness beyond Pluto, and as such doesn’t warrant much attention from The Companies associated with earth’s greater goings on. Decorated with framed photos guilded in gold, hand drawn ancient maps, technical drawings of stations and memorabilia stolen by the earth side insurgencies they help to fund and direct from afar. Corporate espionage and technological breakthroughs in R&D are the main focus in the bored out depths of UB313. They are as unscrupulous a bunch as you will ever find. They attract the vile, the scum and villainy like maggots to day old roadkill on a piping hot asphalt road in late July.

The walk from the grand office down the tight bare hewn rock walls of the hallway is a fair jaunt. The high grade low wattage blue leds strung up over the kilometers of dark grey black rock make everything here look the same. Signage is at a bare minimum here, due to the elicit nature of much of their work. Also – the torture element. Dr. Jang has a penchant for unnecessary surgery and has used it to mine for answers among those his insurgents have managed to capture and return to him alive enough to question. Lost in thought, but still counting off his turns and stairs along the route the taught, rigid doctor saunters into the bridge without knocking to stride over to the private channel comm’s terminal located in an alcove off of the side of the main bridge. A red blinking light flashes repeatedly beside a blood red hand held phone receiver. With a quick flick of the wrist Dr. Jang picks up the receiver and places it next to his ear. “Took you long enough – I have word from our network that somebody has triggered a sword initiative, rated at level orange. You know what that means good doctor. We need to locate and capture the target before the earth side corporation’s can get out there to find it. Dispatch a small team now, before we’ve even traced the signal. We have a nine week travel lead on The Company people. Use it and bring me that specimen!” – CLICK. The other end of the line has gone dead. The raspy voice of the one we call Jones was tight with excitement, also insistent on an urgent response. Well it isn’t beyond the good doctor to act rashly before having a fully developed plan. Slowly a menacing grin blooms across his taught features like an ink stain on wet paper. Turning quickly on his heels to glide across the room and out of the private alcove Dr. Jang leans over a smaller terminal to toggle the base wide PA system. “We have an Omega level sword initiative triggered – code level orange. I need an immediate dispatch of search teams ETA & THETA. Head to the Charon Pluto lagrange point 5 – add the offset in crew as additional fuel since your orbit will be unstable. Hang there until we can get you a more precise set of coordinates. Dr. Jang out.” Looking around the room at the shocked and excited faces of the bridge crew Jang knows it is going to be a busy and fretful couple of weeks while they work to pick up the requested target. “Sir?. We have some rough data going in on the teletype machine – looks a little disrupted though. It could have been corrupted passing one of the signal repeaters. But we can test for that against our back log of recieved communications- sir.” “Good, good. If you need me I’ll be back in my surgical bay. I have a few questions I need answers to. Please do have your interns buzz before they enter this time.” The look on the comm’s ensigns face drains of any appreciable colour. “Yes! Sir – yes, yes sir of course, sir.” A single bead of sweat dribbles down the side of his face even though the UB313 base would be considered rather chilly at the best of times.

Part Four: Ghost of the Dirty Starling..

Here’s a useful quick tip.

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If you ever write a micro-short story that begins to spiral outwards into a multi chapter series of interconnected tales, that feel like pin points of light on a black blanket that eventually lays out a beautiful mosaic like final image; keep track of all of your character names, occupations, gender (if required) Race (if not human) and the names of the places that they inhabit, the ships / stations / vessel names and their approximate locations as you go along. Up until recently I thought I had a good chunk of it down pat, but then I couldn’t recall if I had used yellow as a colour code before, and it turns out I was using it for HR / and personnel related things. So I have gone back through 75,000+ words of interconnected short stories to retrace the steps of all of my characters, their whereabouts, and the proper spelling of vessel names, and their classifications. Funny how a handful of non-fiction micro shorts of 500 words of less, became an increasingly large in scale, scope and size science-fiction world of short stories, circling a semi coherent central narrative – via the use of multiple points of view, and sometimes contradictory accounts from characters with their own axes to grind. Also, quick tidbit – if you create made up names for in world technology; write that shit down.

To anyone who has read any of my short fiction, thank you! I know it’s not terribly polished, as I tend to publish as I go along. When I have an idea I want it out of my head as fast as possible, and I’m not shy about editing several days or weeks later. But the gist of the story stays the same regardless of catching a spelling or grammatical error after the fact. Keep on grinding it out, and make yourselves feel better.

“Sorry about that little incident on your way in Mark”…

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Says the man in the burgundy jumpsuit. Jones is his name, he’s the director for this particular terminal bay which is part of the signals intelligence division aboard the Dirty Starling. Now that the orange jump suited menace has commandeered my services for longer than my usual one four hour stint, he has chosen to acknowledge my presence.

Part of my role as a Half-Three or ship board Ghost crew member is to be able to swoop in to assume control of some small portion of the ships systems and keep it moving for at least three hours, until someone more qualified can take over. I’m meant to be inconspicuous, that’s why we’re all colour coded. No need to ask what you do or what your qualifications are, if that position needs a blue, or green or yellow or red or burgundy body in it, and you see one there, all is well. Otherwise if you see a beige outfit, you know you’ll get a modest output for the next couple of hours, and not to worry. I’m a permanent temp worker that can shift between the machine shop, science division, mess hall or surgical bays and just about everything in between. But much like a ghost, I drift from sector to sector covering off shifts, mishaps and personnel errors for brief periods, and move on. The only place I spend any real time in one spot is my room across the ship, and that’s usually only for forty eight hours after I rotate off duty. The mental state I enter is much like a trance and it takes a deep physical toll on me, so my first twenty four hours after shift are spent asleep, where my deeply embedded programing in my brain works overclocked in order to repair my body and get me ready to do it all over again. This trance leaves me with fairly large gaps in my memory – meeting people or learning top secret details usually lasts long enough in my memory to function for a short term task, and then gets dropped as I rest between shifts.

“we’re just going to get you to work over by the viewing port along the back of the room, you’ll see a partition back there, walk through that and man the bank of terminals there. They are much older machines, and you likely won’t see of hear from any of us during your stay here. Just keep the lights on so to speak! We’ve got the really exceptional equipment going on our end, you are just sweeping areas of little or no interest to our project. As per standard procedure, should you locate something note worthy – which you won’t – make a note of it and follow the appropriate protocols”. With that Jones turns on his heel and disappears into the tangle of people, wires and upgraded terminals in the open terminal bay.

I take one sweeping look at the cavernous terminal bay, with all of it’s loose wires and fancy equipment. The floor is a rough open grating, and there appears to be about a thousand miles of cabling and pipes running under foot. Lots of different colours. We’re real big on colour coding in space. It’s like looking at a coral reef under foot, except there are no fish to complement the static cables with flurishes of movement. The soft crunch and scrape of my boots I getting easier to hear the further across the room I get towards the view ports. The concrete glass used on research vessels the size of the Dirty Starling are a somewhat old invention, but given new life in space. Their only downside is that they echo like a mother fucker, so that’s most likely why Jones or his orange boss have draped print outs of star charts and conversion tables across the panes of what looks like crystal clear glass. Walking for several minutes, I can see the far wall where the partition should be. I don’t see anything from fifty paces. My wrist navigator isn’t blinking or beeping, so I’ll just need to feel this out unaided. There is no sign of anything over in the corner, so I walk up to the enormous star chart against the glass. I run my hands over all of the minute details. Oh, the map is textured – how lovely. It’s semi opaque with a light purple raised ink on it that shimmers in the dim light. The point I touch begins to glow. It is bioluminescent. No flickering, a solid violet in the now dim ambient light. Out of the corner of my eye I see an orange and red twinkle of light. Turning to look over my left shoulder I see it’s a reflection on the glass from what seems like a solid featureless wall. Taking a few cautious steps forward I notice that the partition as they call it is a cut out in the wall that is set back, so the wall looks unbroken, but there is a cubby tucked away inside. The closer I get the easier it is to hear the ticking and whirling of the analogue equipment. The eight meter long u shaped panel is covered on three sides with huge lead panels and a water tank with something gently sloshing around inside.

With my hands on the walls I stick my head tentatively inside the room. The walls are almost bare but have clip boards full of hand written notes. Lots of warning signs and labels pinned together on a cork board, and a bookcase full of technical manuals. A bell chimes over the loud speakers so I look down at my left wrist and mark off the shift change. A high pitch peel sounds from my wrist communicator, a new message has just come in.

Ref Code Omega_00000007 You have been assigned to Signals Intelligence Analog Panel Maintenance indefinitely. Continue six shift protocols in preparation for supplemental orders. ••TRIGGER Sword Initiative {Clementine} •• [Signals found emanating from ZULU Quadrant 03-06-09917] CAPTURE**

My pupils dilate until almost entirely black, my care free laissez-faire attitude melts away – an automaton like figure bends down low over the analog signals panel, it begins to press a series of buttons, flipping switches and turning dial knobs. The empty black light bulb at the center of the console slowly begins to glow a dim orange barely visible even in the near total darkness of the small secluded room.

Part Three: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

“Would you like to know why you don’t mess with the folks in the orange jumpsuits?”

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Here’s an illustrative anecdote to get you on board with why we lay persons as a general rule don’t raise our voices or encourage the ire of the admiralty or Company ruling class dressed in bright neon orange. Broadcasting their toxicity like a beacon.

When I was coming up through the Tourus mechanical engineering program, there were always stories about people who had done something awful like make an Admiral look bad in front of colleagues or had become too familiar and offered an ill timed barb in public. These poor folks become pretty easy to spot once you know what you are looking for. Both at the Tourus school and further along at the Mars Technical Institute. What you want to find is someone well out of synch with the usual age bracket, who knows, from experience, what they are being taught before the professors and instructors open their mouths.

See the orange oligarchs are the type of sociopaths that will refer you back to remedial instruction should you ruin their day. This means a person whom has all ready completed their four years of education at the Tourus, did well enough to be chosen to go to the Mars Technical Institute and do four to six more years there, depending on your specialty or generality. Getting hired, traveling the weeks or months to your newly minted job and then working for however long it takes to upset an Orange mafia bastard and get sent back to day one to do it all over again. No skipping ahead, no breaks, no winks or nudges. Day one – again. Sometimes if you’ve fucked up enough you are granted a long enough stint back on earth where you lose your innate ability to function in zero g, and then have to start the initiation process like a gods be damned chump.

Only for your offended Orange bastard to check in on your progress and get you tested on all of your practical work at the expert level because you know what you’re doing – and this is after all, a punishment. These orange fucks keep excessively detailed files on their offense taken, in order to ruin your life repeatedly. All that so that once you get out of the Mars base of operations they can swoop in at the last possible second to redirect your life and have you assigned to some black site based beyond Pluto with zero amenities and no chance for advancement. Pure. Fucking. Evil.

That’s why you don’t mess with the orange crowd, either that or they’ll push you out of an airlock to starve to death over a lengthy float in total vaccum.

Addendum: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

A bell is ringing somewhere in this room…

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It is at once both soft and yet insistent. Peeling my face up from my beds mattress I realize it is the chime of my intercom with a message notification. I can also now feel a slight buzzing from my wrist biometric unit. Head lifted from the bed, I roll to my left, feeling the fatigue of my last rotation through the ship as a Half-Three crew member, or the more popular terminology ghost crew. Laying now on my back, I pull each leg individually up to my chest and stretch out my hips, ankles and knees. Six four hour shifts per twenty four hour day for sixteen days straight is what is known as a hell week to all new ghost crew. It’s an unofficial officially sanctioned introduction to the dynamics aboard the Dirty Starling, and just about any other vessel with more than a thousand crew members across the solar system, and beyond. The fugue like state we enter in order to access much of the ship wide systems knowledge is both a blessing and a curse. I’m a generalist, so I can do a little of everything, but I don’t remember much more than snippets of any given shift. I float into and out of rooms, departments and situations to place a finger in the dam, and fill a warm spot on shift until someone else can take over full time. It’s not all glamour or suicide missions into the heart of a broken down reactor core. Sometimes I just sit in a seat and keep a space warm while I twiddle my thumbs. I’m just an average guy, you know, run of the mill. Part of becoming a Half-Three is being able to meld into the crowd and be inconspicuous.  I’m a six foot tall, one hundred and eighty five pound guy. Just some guy. My eyes don’t twinkle, I don’t have a dazzling smile, my voice isn’t rich velvety smoothness. Just a guy, who passes through the ship to fill gaps. That’s my life, passing through and filling gaps. And that life is currently beeping at me to read an urgent message.

Ref code ultima_00094763    At 06:00 report to sigint terminal forty seven, followed by cargo bay 003471 for the remaining five shifts. Access to restricted materials handling area will require a full body scan before and after. End.

So much for getting a minimum of forty eight hours off between rotations on duty. But that’s why they pay us the big bucks I guess. I can’t spend it if I have no down time, or family, or friends, or hobbies or much of a life – at all.

I pull a fresh beige ghost crew uniform out of my closet, feeling the pressure rings snap tight over the various points of my body. These suits are a godsend incase of a serious injury or loss of cabin pressure aboard a space fairing vessel like the Dirty Starling. Each pressure point acts like a tourniquet when needed during a traumatic injury. The crew uniform coveralls are linked to your biometrics and will clamp down at the two points closest to a puncture or wound. Saved countless lives that way. Also nanotech safety helmets cover your head in the merest fraction of a second if vaccum is ever detected. From the spec sheets we reviewed at the Mars technical institute you could live inside the suit without any external supplies for close to a week. A terrible, horrible no good week, but you’d live to tell the tale – apparently. Great stuff, these crew uniform coveralls.

After dressing in my room I trigger the reply notification from my orders and a glowing blip appears on my wrist. The navigational application will lead me to the signals intelligence terminal I need over in the science department decks. The nav app could successfully lead you through Daedalus’ labyrinth to any broom closet you needed to find the whole world over. It’s a technological marvel. From the status report I have about two hours of walking to do unless I can flag down a side by side crew transport, or a weapons hauler willing to let me hang off the back. The main passages on the Dirty Starling are large, but not as wide as the thoroughfare aboard the Tourus. The Tourus is a space station floating geosynchronously in the dark shadow of the moon. It’s where everyone starts their love affair with space as a human at least. The process to get up there is – let’s say… unpleasant. But a necessary evil if you will. I interned in the machine shop there for four years before being pulled scholastically for the Mars Technical Institute Half-Three program. I spent another five years there doing as many subjects as I could manage until under going the required brain surgeries and subconscious training regimen.

After day dreaming my way through the bulk of walking around the vessel I find the appropriate SIGINT terminal bay in complete disarray. Wires are hanging out of the walls and panels, sparks are shooting across the cavernous room, the lighting is flickering when it stay on long enough to show itself. Along the back wall is a massive row of floor to ceiling windows with technical drawing over laid on them. Star charts and conversion tables are displayed there as well. Down the hall a warning klaxon can just barely be heard. They impossibly loud boom of the klaxons is unmistakable. I had never realized they could go off separately in different parts of the vessel. I assumed it was an all or nothing ship wide alarm. Hmm.

I step into the space beside terminal 47 and search for the standard ship board time, I make a note of it on my uniforms left sleeve. It’s here I will make a series of three dashes to mark off my shifts for the next twenty four hours. Marking the start time let’s me know what time of day it is when you get deep in the weeds of a long rotation. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics if I’m tasked with doing anything time sensitive.

A commotion is breaking out in the centre of the room. A tall man in a burgundy uniform is arguing with a disheveled maintenance technician dressed in a red uniform, she looks tired and irritated. The burgundy dressed man is attempting to harang the technician about the mess and disruption because his superior is on the way down and the upgrades haven’t been completed yet. Apparently this is the usual state of the room, and it’s a software issue which the maintenance woman regards as not her problem. She’s trying real hard not to scream that she only does hardware and you need a programmer to fix the UI issues. With a puff of exasperated breath the red uniformed technician brushes her hair out of her face and marches out of the door. Immediately she splits in two at the waist and dumps buckets of blood onto the floor and wall in the hallway. A deafening silence fills the room as SIGINT techs all stare in awed shock.

Before they can compose themselves an orange jump suited woman steps across the rooms threshold and over the remains of the bisected tech. “Well what the fuck is going on down here Jones? Are my signal upgrades ready yet or what? Who the fuck is painted over my walls down here Jones!” The short angry woman in orange coveralls is red faced and has sharp features. A serious short hair cut closely cropped to her well shaped head. Jones, the burgundy wearing director of the SIGINT terminal bay is sputtering and distraught. “I have no idea why she’s” “….AWOOGA…AWOOGA…AWOOGA… CONTAINMENT BREACH ON DECK 19. ALL HANDS TO MUSTER STATION ONE… REPEAT CONTAINMENT BREACH ON DECK 19. ALL HANDS TO MUSTER STATION ONE. REMAIN AT YOUR WORK STATION…DO NOT GO INTO THE HALLS…AWOOGA…AWOOGA…AWOOGA…” and just a suddenly as the klaxon kicked on, it shuts off and the red flashing lights go back to soft blue. “Jones! Why the fuck are we getting a station wide alert a full seven minutes after it was dispatched?”. “I told you before ma’am, the signal attenuation out this way is awful, the signal repeaters miss half of the signal and fail. We’ve got thousands of miles of cables and fiber optics to reach us here and for some reason we can’t diagnose without tracing every inch of the line or inspecting every single junction panel between here and the bridge. It’s a logistical nightmare, sir. Ma’am, sir.” “Jones, do you mean to tell me that we can look and talk to the furthest reaches of known space outside the ship, but can’t figure out how to get a warning directly from the admiral on the bridge in a timely manner?” “Uh… yes sur – ma’am sir. We built the external system ourselves, and the internal system we just oversee after the fact – sir.” “Yes, well as long as our project gets results we can put in another requisition for the alarm system to come in via our departments wrist comms instead.” With a sharp turn of her head the orange uniformed woman turns to look at me, her hawkish eyes a piercing grey. “You there, Mark is it. I know you were to go to materials handling next, I rode in on your personnel transport, but I’m going to commandeer you for a few extra shift blocks to man a couple of terminals at once while we clean up what remains of my best maintenance technician. Christ all mighty Mark, she walked right into the on coming path of a loose particle from our Hadron Collider. Burned straight through her. I’m going to have to write to Josephines parents”.

I don’t really know if the orange jumpsuit meant to get that familiar with me, but looks like I’m here for a bit, so best to settle in.

Part Two: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.