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Tag: Space Serial

The last thing he could discern from the voice in the darkness was a blood soaked gurgle.

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The single source of overhead illumination he is stood under shows a shimmering wave of tiny undulating dust particles drifting limply through the cone of yellow white light. The room is cool, damp and mournful with the lack of activity. The usual sounds of printers and instrumentation is silent. The ghost follows the ebb and flow of the dust waves as they fall across his vision. Tiny points of sparkling light, each has its fleeting moment where it catches the light just so, enough to twinkle, then vanish amongst the crowd. The ghost too, is silent, transfixed by the dust, and the shouted accusations left hanging in the air. The volume of the shouts so loud his ears are left ringing. The sudden shock of the gun fire over the pa was enough to deafen him momentarily. In a daze he stands there unmoving – unfeeling, unmoored. The inky black shadows of the enormous room shifting and changing shape around him. Many heart beats pound in his chest before a single deeply modulated voice speaks aloud. “Mark – tell me, what message did you send out there? Was it a warning? Did you tell them about the plan?” The voice has an edge to it, a level of panic has set in which the voice modulation can’t quite keep out of the audio feed. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t know what you are looking for. I don’t know anything about the message.” Pleads the ghost quietly but earnestly. “I believe you, my son.” A tinge of regret creeps into the modulation. “Damn.” The voice whispers. The line goes dead once more with a pop and a click, and all of the communications terminal lights spring back to life, the doors open in their entirety, and the signal feeds from all of the dishes and read outs begin to scroll across the screens again. The hum of the lights and the general buzz from the cabling vibrates through the ghosts body.

A soft warm tingle flows down the length of the ghosts left arm spreading from the base of his neck. His face is flushed, and a feeling of euphoria engulfs him. A single tear falls upon his gaunt cheek.

In a moment a blinking message on his wrist will tell him to go to the hazardous materials handling depot, where he will be seen to have walked naked into the decontamination chambers for a shower. As the stringent sanitizer oozes from the curved spigot on the wall a warning siren will go off. The gathered crew in the control room will scramble madly to contain the damage. With frantic screaming and wailing, their fists hammering upon the glass partitions in desperate warning. The ghost will stand motionless under the stream of pink sanitizer, his tears unnoticed in the onslaught of the pink scented fluid, as a clear caustic vapor will creep up through the floor vents. The ghost will collapse in spasms as his body begins to break down. A pool of miasma,gelatinous lipids and bone left dripping upon the bare wet floor. The supervisor on duty will shut all of the view ports between the control room and the showers, but not before the staff witness the violent and all consuming death of the naked man in the shower room. What little there is left will be gathered up, sealed in a plastic sack and crated ceremoniously into a yellow rigid polyethylene barrel and ejected from The Dirty Starling, passing right through the backwash of the engine cones to be incinerated. At the ships next stop, a new ghost will join the ranks of The Dirty Starling’s crew – his name will also be Mark.

Part Thirteen: Ghost of The Dirty Starling.

“Hey! Shush… keep it down…”

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“I can’t hear what’s coming in over the radio.” Fusses the plump man in yellow coveralls. “Jimmy? Jimmy Wu is that you in there? Why is it so dark? What are you talking about?” Whispers the petite woman crouched down at the door beside Jimmy, in a the dark broom closet in an unused portion of the HR office on deck 19 of The Dirty Starling. Jimmy is hunched over his wrist communicator trying to dial in the frequency of his remote audio transmitter. “I told you Janice, I hid my negotiators recorder and broadcaster in the specialist communications bay after that mechanic got cut in half from the containment breach. The place was a mess, and had some seriously weird activity going on. Plus I heard from Jones, the director that they had an actual ghost in their department. I took a nose around but didn’t see one though.” He pouted. “Oh, that’s a shame. I’d have loved to have met one.” She too scrunched up her face in disappointment. Her heavy lids almost closed with the contortion of her lips. “Well, as I was meandering around I deployed my audio unit and have been surreptitiously recording the conversations from inside, over the last few months. It’s getting wild Janice! Bonkers even.” He shuffles from his squat position to instead sit directly on the floor and place his back against the cool wall. Taking the hint that they’ll be there for a while Janice sits down on the opposite wall. Their feet overlap in the middle of the small unused supply closet, littered with brooms and empty musty boxes. Jimmy cranks up the volume so they can both hear it. Janice says “Why don’t you just broadcast the signal to my communicator?” Looking aghast Jimmy says “Don’t be a silly goose – Janice, if I broadcast it there will be an official log of the recording. I’ve got to do this on the down low, otherwise it’ll be re-education for the both of us.” Janice smirks at Jimmy and waves the comment off. They both readjust themselves and wait while the audio begins to build again. At first there is only a smattering of small talk, and some quick bursts of spoken activity. The line eventually goes dead. “Don’t worry about that.” Says Jimmy. “It can be hit or miss. But the reason I called you here was I had an Omega level code orange flagged to my attention regarding a debrief with the ghost. It’s here! Today. Supposed to happen any minute now.” He gesticulates wildly and his ankles knock against Janice’s. “Ouch, watch it Wu!” Janice exclaims.

A kilometer down the hallway, on deck 19 of The Dirty Starling a gaunt and exhausted skeleton of a man in fresh beige coveralls is lumbering towards his debrief in the cavernous communications terminal. The massive doors are closed tightly, there is no one to be seen in the halls within several hundred meters. The lights are a startlingly bright blue white. The cables and pipes that run under the floor grates are the only colorful things in sight. It’s all very drab and serious, and grey. With a loud thunk, and a ratcheting click the doors peel open slowly. With a thud they come to rest about eighteen inches apart. The ghost must squeeze through the large metal teeth that maintain the registration of the doors. It is an awkward and claustrophobic fit. The three foot thick doors are icy cold to the touch. The interior of the room is near black, the only source of illumination are the buttons and dials from the control boards. All over head lights are off. With a loud click one lone spotlight shines down in a white yellow cone on the floor. “Step into the light please Mark.” A bodiless voice commands from the darkness.

Stirring from their sleep Jimmy Wu and his pal Janice sit bolt upright, their hearts are pounding. “Did you hear that? Whose voice is that? I don’t recognize it, do you?” Whispers Janice. “Oh I heard it all right. Now be quiet, this is going to get interesting!” Chuckles Jimmy. Tapping a few buttons on his HR select wrist communicator, he runs some diagnostics on the voice from the audio broadcast. On his blue green LED screen a whirling pattern appears. The machine is searching and the app is thinking.

“I have it on good authority Mark that you were successful in locating my asset. But, you sent a message. What was it?” Growls the heavily modulated voice from the dark. “I’m sorry, sir or Madam. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The quiet response is mumbled. “Of course you know! Tell me, what did you send? Was it a warning, an alert? Answer me before I put you through a recycler!” Shouts the voice in a terse response. “I’m sorry sir, I’m just a generalist, I haven’t spoken to anyone, or sent any messages, covert or otherwise – sir.” The meek voice wavers, whether from fatigue or otherwise is not immediately discernible. “He’s got an Ultima level cognitive block in place – very useful in these covert operations. Give him the key word and his subconscious will spill it’s data core openly. You can cross reference any multitude of points of information. It’s a nifty bit of engineering.” Speaks a second deeper voice. Although given the modulation used it could be anybody on the other end of the line. “I don’t have a key? What key? I was told the ghost would search my coordinates, locate the assets and report back. I said to specifically not send any messages have any type of communications with it. That was of the utmost importance!” Shouts the original, now maniacal voice. “How’d you do it without a key? That’s not possible.” Responds the second lower voice in a breathy tone. “I commandeered his time and sent him the quadrant to look through, same as I would for any duty roster change!” Screams the first speaker. “Wait – you didn’t use encryption or a key word? Oh fuck!” The voice cuts away to a gurgle, there are sounds of gunshots and bones crunching broadcasting over the line.

“Sir – we have at least two more listeners on the line.” Says a soft but firm voice over the audio broadcast. “Uh. Find them and eliminate them please. Are we on Vox? For fuck’s sake turn that shit of…..” The line goes dead a second time that day in the HR broom closet on deck 19. Janice and Jimmy are frozen in place. “They don’t mean us do they?” Asks Janice. “They couldn’t possibly. I used a remote audio broadcaster. They’re a dime a dozen onboard this ship. It’s not registered to me specifically, just our department.” Shrugs Jimmy. “Maybe they could trace the outgoing signal of the broadcast unit, not that they know it’s us?” A heartbeat later a quiet peep chimes in from Jimmy’s wrist communicator. The voice diagnostics are complete, and a red flashing flag is present on Jimmy’s LED screen. Before he can cancel it, a matching beacon pops up on Janice’s wrist communicator too. Sitting so close together for so long the HR consultants private chat app has linked them together. In the green blue glow of their wrist communicators the two share an ashen grimace.

In the bright yellow halls of the HR department on deck 19, loud boots and the metallic clink of assault rifles can be heard.

Part Twelve: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Sprinkled across her field of view

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Is a smattering of dim flecks of light. Distant stars, far further than her own native sun. The Mangelo has been coasting for some time now, aiming for Pluto’s Lagrange point 5. But with only the slimmest quantity of fuel left in the sabotaged external tanks Racquelle is fighting for her life. Desperately trying to locate team ETA and their small search and rescue vessel Lil Boat Peep. After discovering the treachery onboard The Mangelo three days prior, the tainted rations & water cistern, Racquelle has been trying to devise a plan to not only keep the ship on course, work through the damaged cockpit, but also solve the water and food supply issue. She hasn’t slept more than a few hours over the last three days, and dehydration is making her life hell. Her ability to perform manual labour is limited in scope, and painful to endure. Her last move was to cut back the output of the heater and hope that there was enough moisture in the air to condense on the walls and panels so that she could collect it with some rubber sheeting she’d hung before collapsing into the captain’s chair, and passing out from exhaustion.

A brilliantly dazzling explosion of light burns through the eyelids of the sleeping Racquelle. Her hair is damp, and her seat is a puddle of cool water. With a flinch she slides off of the chair to bury her rough cracked lips into the cushion to unceremoniously slurp up the puddle of water. It dribbles over her chin and collects at the neck ring of her space suit. She holds the mouthful of water in her cheeks and tries to slowly swallow only a small portion at a time. Trying desperately not to vomit up the precious water. Her wrist communicator is flashing amber alerting her to her near fatal state of dehydration. The notification for hunger is still in the late stages of green, almost to yellow. She could last another twenty one days without food if she absolutely had to. Taking a deep breath, her chest heaving, the urge to vomit subsiding Racquelle can see nothing but grey and alabaster shapes outside the view port of the cockpit. Struggling to stand up, her legs shaky, she crawls back up into her chair, and moves the control panels to face her. The radar screen is showing a city sized green amorphous blob just outside The Mangelo . But no sign of the rescue tug Lil Boat Peep. The communications panel has a lone flashing blue notification. Something has been calling her in her sleep.

Racquelle toggles a switch on her armrest to display the notification on the swing armed screen above her head. It has no video, just an audio file of a strange metallic machine screaming tone. Like a tin can through a grinder. Pulling up a few diagnostics of the signal she can tell that the message originated from the direction of earth and not from the behemoth parked outside her window. Reaching up Racquelle pushes the screen out of her field of view. Slowing getting to her feet she steps over the jury rigged cabling and exposed wires littering the floor of the cockpit. She stands by the front view port and stares at the writhing grey off white mass before her. The vessel is so large it covers one hundred and eighty degrees of her vision out the window. Up and down, and side to side. Nothing but a shuddering, wriggling and writhing metallic surface.

“Hungry”. The message appears like frosted smoke across her view port. “Yeah – sure.” She says aloud. “I could eat.” She dead pans to herself, assuming that she is hallucinating rather vividly due to stress. “I hunger.” With a soft chuckle Racquelle retorts. “No, no, no – dickhead. I’m the one that’s hungry.” Staring slackly at the glass the message fades as though it were never there leaving no trace. “Yah! That’s what I thought.” She gives her head a shake. Droplets of water splash onto her control console, dripping down her neck from her hair.

The alabaster skin of Kelvin wriggles itself into four meter thick tendrils and reaches out hungrily to absorb the tiny black and orange morsel into itself. Kelvin has needs for raw materials and ejectable propellant mass. In the span of a few moments, or were they days, a week or instantaneously, The Mangelo and it’s occupants are consumed entirely.

As the off white tendrils leech over the ships hull Racquelle shrieks in horror. The silence that follows is deafening.

Part Eleven: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

How attached to your written characters are you?

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As far as I am concerned 99% of my characters are expendable, in as brutal or mundane a fashion as possible. I like to build something up only to fizzle in an unexpected manner, or for the pay off for the characters actions to be as empty as they tend to be in real life. We know the feeling. Same some bridezilla’s get after a year or two of planning a wedding, or a kid building up Christmas morning, only for it to come as this fleeting whisper of what you’d built up in your head, and then it’s done, and you are right back where you were, only now, your every waking moment isn’t spent pouring over details of this supposed magical day, and you feel a little empty or lost without the goal you’ve focused on so hard.

Then there are the 1% of characters who practically write themselves. They lead the story into unexpected territory, and can really turn one of my surface level short stories into something more compelling and create interesting problems to solve.

For those select few of you whom have read a couple of my interconnected shorts will know I don’t write my characters very deeply, they talk and do stuff, but their appearance is left fairly unremarked upon unless I feel there is a trait that sets them apart that will come up, or makes a point in the story. I’m not a “she breasted boobily” down the stairs kind of a writer, if that makes sense. Sure some characters have intercourse, but that’s not the point. Many are straight, lesbian, gay or androgynous or other, and I want them to be people, not their personal orientation.

To me they are just “folks”, they live, breathe, eat, defecate and work. They get irritated by one another and get snarky or playful as they see fit. If someone is going to affect a lisp or mumble it’ll be because they have a broken jaw, or were punched in the face. Not that I don’t operate with cliches or generalities, these are micro shorts so I need an explanatory short hand to fill in the blanks.

But, yeah… I like to kill them off. Or at least render their best laid plans moot wherever possible. I think that’s funny. Even my best laid plans fall apart at the hands of some one elses illogical choices, feelings and actions, so why wouldn’t that fate befall my characters too. These aren’t military disciplined combat troops, most are working class trades people silo’d into their own small social circles, or are corporate stooges looking to increase their bank accounts or prestige levels with little regard for those around them. Why would they do anything more than surface level planning for the pawns in their own games. Exit strategy? Not likely. Poisoned drink, or a bullet in the chest more like it.

Are you lot precious with your characters? Do you put them through hell or do you hold back on some? Are they fit for the meat grinder, or a mild annoyance?

“Hey Marko! What the fuck bud, you too good to answer your pages now?”

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Sneers the greasy looking mechanic in rumpled red coveralls. He’s used an over ride key card on the crew quarters door. The grey green lump of human that is currently out cold on the raised bed doesn’t stir, at all. In fact the body is so still it doesn’t even appear to be breathing, let alone functional enough to answer a page and report in for his duty rotation. Stepping across the threshold of the most spacious single occupancy room the mechanic has ever seen. Large though it may be, since it is kept sparse and unadorned it comes across as positively massive. Standing in the center of the room, the bisected doors begin to close. The change in cabin pressure from the hall and the closing door wafts the rancid smell of rotten meat, body odor and foul breath right to the mechanics nostrils. It clings to the soft palette and inside of the nose like an oily scented film. The greasy lank haired mechanic gags on the stench. Looking closely at the ghost on the bed he can see clumps of dead skin gathered in ragged lumps on the man’s pale dirty feet. He looks like he hasn’t bathed in months. He smells like he’s been sleeping in his own filth and waste for a year straight. With a ear splitting peel the greasy mechanics wrist rings again to remind him he has to get the ghost named Mark, up and ready for his next rotation in the next few hours. He flicks off the notification on his wrist communicator and finds the lighting panel for the room. With hesitation he begins to poke around getting the bathing unit ready for the nearly dead ghost. Walking around the side of the raised bed he leans against the lower desk, and pulls out a couple of drawers to stand on, as no step stool can be seen inside the room. As his line of sight comes parallel to the comatose man, he can see that he appears to have been unceremoniously deposited onto the bed with little thought given to comfort or his own safety. Limbs akimbo, neck turned harshly to his left, looking in towards the padded wall and away from the door. If his wrist biometrics unit wasn’t flashing green, you’d easily assume he was dead. The beige uniform is strained, torn and falling apart at the seams. “Dude, what the fuck were you up to? You smell like shit buddy boy. If you’re here with me at all, I’m just gonna pull you down from your bed and strip you down to your skivvies. God I hope you guys wear skivvies. Then I’m going to run you through two or three wash cycles to clean you up. I have an Omega level code orange on you my man. If it were up to me I’d leave you in the sick bay, or a med pod for the next month, but those orange fucks don’t play that way, you get me? Huh? Shit… I’d swear you were dead… umph! Jesus, heavy too.” With a lot of writhing, wriggling and unflattering pulls using leverage the mechanic drops the ghost named Mark to the hard metal floor. He turns the puddle of man and clothes about looking for a safety pull cord that should be poking out from under a stitched patch. Locating it to the rear behind Mark’s left armpit, he rips off the patch to expose the yellow triangular handle. Grabbing it firmly he pulls the twelve feet of molecular fiber cord out of the uniform coveralls and it falls apart along the seam lines. The smell that erupts out of the split clothing is horrendous. The body is covered with pustules, open pressure sores and deep tissue rashes. His skin dyed black with rot from faeces build up that the suit was unable to filter or remove via catheter. “They’ve done a real number on you bud. Come on, this might sting a little, sorry to drag you around your room like this.” Pulling the dead weight of the unconscious man from a pile of his tangle of limbs to orient him for bathing in the shower cubicle. “If you’re alive in there, listen, I’m going to key in an antiseptic scrub, wash and rinse cycle as well, for after the wash. It’s gonna hurt like a Son of a bitch, but you look as though you need it. The orange mafia don’t care to smell anything less than perfumed roses when you have a debrief. You can thank me later. Maybe a shot of adrenaline when the cycles are complete will help you out eh? Why not. It’s on the house uh! Company money, well spent I’d say.” Clicking away on the control board outside the showers the mechanic types in the resource codes he was given, triple checking against his wrist communicator to be sure. He presses the initiate button and walks out of the room.

A opaque cream coloured bag expands out of a hole in the wall, the naked man is enveloped within it soundlessly. A viscous pink gel floods the bag from multiple directions. A soft glop and slurp can be heard, muffled by the membrane. The sticky goo oozes over the man pulling sixty days worth of dead skin, waste and dirt along with it, to be filtered and pushed back through again. Cleaning every surface as it goes. As the gooey mass get sucked from the ghosts nasal cavity he gulps in a deep and startled breath. He twitches and shakes as he comes to. With the pinch of a syringe to the base of his neck his eyes pop open as adrenaline floods his veins. He pushes backwards frantically as though trying to hide inside the wall. His heels crack the tile lining the floor, his finger nails push off his cuticle with the strain of his panic. He can not remember why he is so afraid, it’s like a blood memory buried deep within his bones. “I’ve seen a god, and it was not benevolent.” He whispers weakly from cracked lips into the empty room, a small trickle of blood from his ruined fingers dribbles down the drain in the center of the wash cubicle.

Part Ten: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

“You dirty, dirty bastard. What have you done!”

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Bellows the navigator aboard team Theta’s modest search and rescue vessel The Mangelo. She is furiously toggling switches and flipping frantically through a cluttered control board of dials and buttons. An ear splitting siren is screaming over the ships pa system. The pilot, now missing, went to the restroom and just vanished off of the ship. But not before dumping the ships fuel, and tainting all of the rations. The oil canister he must have secreted aboard the ship is lying overturned next to the now ocher coloured water cistern. It’s green label is well worn, and partially fading. It sits stark against the rust brown floor grates in the cargo compartments yellow overhead light. “Richard’s! Did you have any part in this – you slick silver fox fuck. You greasy – gods be damned bell end!” Roars the navigator as she continues to arrest the vessels endless supply of alarm bells and warning klaxons. Constantly shifting between control boards, the captains chair terminal and the read outs situated at her own post. As far as she can tell they are still on course, the trajectory she plotted out is perfect, though now with the loss of fuel and the weight of the propellant missing it could turn too steep an insertion to Lagrange point 5 out beyond Pluto and Charon’s gravitational pull. That’s an awfully dark and remote place to float with no fuel and tainted, spoiled rations. The course called for several corrections over the coming weeks as they waited for further instructions and a final destination. Unforgiving is an understatement, untenable an apt description- suicide more like it. “That thick fuck. What was he thinking?” She has begun to mutter vehement curses under her breath as she works expertly to stave off the flow of fuel pellets and propellant leaking out of the containment tanks on the exterior of The Mangelo.

Rustling in the rear of the cargo bay brings the navigator, Racquelle to a standstill. The clear ring of aluminium piping falling onto the metal floor grates is unmistakable. Followed by the sounds of heavy food bins tumbling and the muffled shout of someone swearing magnificently. More bangs, pings and thumps can be heard in the now cluttered cockpit. Racquelle had to pull a bunch of the main bus wiring out of the panels in order to reroute power and environmental functions around the alarms triggered by faulty equipment. Seems Theta’s flight commander had a nefarious plot to hatch as he had taken it upon himself to cut cables and conduit in a seemingly random fashion.

Racquelle couldn’t make head nor tails of what he’d cut or why. There wasn’t much about what he was planning that made any sense at all. We all knew what failing Dr. Jang would do for us, we’d end up spending the rest of our miserable lives kept prisoner in the doctor’s grotesque surgical bay, being eviscerated via needless surgery and bouts of straight up torture. The man’s eyes gleamed as he poured over the mangled lumps of his favourite specimens, still somehow alive, as he gave his orientation speeches to the newly initiated at UB313.

The sound of somebody clumsy waddling through the central gangway of The Mangelo, clumping along like a cunting great Clydesdale with lead weights for shoes brings Racquelle up short as she catches her breath while staring out the cockpits view port. Standing slouched over her NAV terminal is a man in black shiny coveralls. His face is burgundy and his grin is lopsided. Breathing heavily he mumbles and his face goes slack. He topples over the radar – Lidar view finder lands face first upon the ground. A two inch pipe poking out of the back of his head. The fracture surrounding the wound leaking brain matter and copious amounts of blood mingled with wiry grey hair. His name tag reads Richards. He was the medic and second in command aboard The Mangelo.

“What the fuck is going on here!” Racquelle leans her head against the view port, feeling the icy chill of the concrete glass cool her forehead. The empty black void outside hides a great deal. Many people in better situations than this have succumbed to the siren song of betrayal and intrigue.

Part nine : Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

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.