Every culture has its own term for the infinite darkness out between the stars.
The Big Empty. The Widow-maker. The Endless.
Space isn't all dark, of course, and it isn't all empty. There are stars boiling with furious light, comets streaking their way through long orbits around their suns, planets spinning lazy ellipses with their own followers of moons and ice.
The Vast. The Big Null. The Ship-Eater.
There are the defiant lights of the people of the Cluster, too: stations with their docking beacons and every window shining; the Gates flashing a blaze of color every time a ship jumps through; ships of every shape and size, from shuttle to titans, plying their busy way between the stars.
But space is big, and the lights are small, even the incandescent furnaces of the stars.
In between them is the dark.
And the dark, as any child can tell you, is where the ghosts live.
The Cold Hereafter. The Infinite Sea.The Forever Night.
There are a lot of ghosts in the dark between the stars.
Some pilots say they hear them, half-asleep in the pod, in the blink between here and there of the jumpgate. Voices. Whose voices, well, that's a different question. The dead. The damned. The unborn.
Some engineers say they can hear them in the hum of the engine and the whine of the capacitor: the ghost of the ship, the spirit of the steel around them. Singing. No, I don't know the tune.
There are stories of ships that have particular ghosts: a rifter that always set its own autopilot to the homeworld of the previous captain, who'd died on board but not in pod; a myrmidon with a guardian spirit that appeared as a woman made of flame to lead crew trapped by an explosion safely through corridors choked with smoke.
Some less harmless, like the freighter whose crew, stranded in slow orbit by engine failure, drew lots to see who would survive on the limited life support and the flesh of their colleagues, and which, repainted, renamed and relaunched, was halfway through its next voyage when the ship's cook woke from a strange dream to find herself preparing a fricassee of the first mate.
Ships that cry and ships that bleed, ships that send their crew mad and ships that set course for the sun of their own accord and will not answer to the helm. There are stories about all of those, told in the crew bars along the dockside, late in the evening.
Spend a few weeks on a ship, any ship, and its easy to see where the stories come from. Dopplered static on the comms, signals caught and echoed and distorted by any one of a thousand kinds of interference, voices from the past, half-heard, a quarter-understood. Ships found drifting, empty, ownerless: sometimes with a gaping rent in the hull to show what happened; sometimes with the escape pods missing and all the signs of an orderly evacuation; sometimes with the crew still at their posts, white and stiff and rimed with frost.
Sometimes, most unnerving, ships in perfect working order, with no sign of any emergency - a pot set on a cold stove, spoon still propped across it, as if the cook had stepped away from a moment and would be right back; a coffee cup on the captain's desk and just one bed in the crew quarters unmade. Coming across one of those ships gives the disturbing feeling that the crew have simply, and only seconds ago, vanished.
Or that they're still there, unseen, unheard. Waiting.
Ghosts.
Signals skipping across the interface, ending up in places they were never meant to go. Drifting hulls. Ships slipping on and off the registry lists, undocking here and sliding out into the dark to disappear until the crew disembarks there off a different ship with a different name. The Bright Spark; the Sapphire Star; the Magpie.
Ghosts.
Every faction and corporation has its ships that can run silent and lie hidden off the grid, for all intents and purposes just another piece of space-junk until the systems fire up and the guns go live. Not every war is declared.
The Kogaru Io; the Felton May; the Toshkaiska.
Ghost ships fighting ghost wars.
The official response to any question is laughter. Ghosts? You know how superstitious spacers can be! No, we certainly don't employ any 'ghosts'. There's no such thing!
Everyone knows there's no such thing as ghosts.
Except out in the Void, the Vast, the Deep Beyond, at the back of the Big Empty, wrapped up in the Endless, and the mercy of the Infinite Sea.
There's no such thing as ghosts, except where the ghosts live.
In the dark behind the stars.
The Big Empty. The Widow-maker. The Endless.
Space isn't all dark, of course, and it isn't all empty. There are stars boiling with furious light, comets streaking their way through long orbits around their suns, planets spinning lazy ellipses with their own followers of moons and ice.
The Vast. The Big Null. The Ship-Eater.
There are the defiant lights of the people of the Cluster, too: stations with their docking beacons and every window shining; the Gates flashing a blaze of color every time a ship jumps through; ships of every shape and size, from shuttle to titans, plying their busy way between the stars.
But space is big, and the lights are small, even the incandescent furnaces of the stars.
In between them is the dark.
And the dark, as any child can tell you, is where the ghosts live.
The Cold Hereafter. The Infinite Sea.The Forever Night.
There are a lot of ghosts in the dark between the stars.
Some pilots say they hear them, half-asleep in the pod, in the blink between here and there of the jumpgate. Voices. Whose voices, well, that's a different question. The dead. The damned. The unborn.
Some engineers say they can hear them in the hum of the engine and the whine of the capacitor: the ghost of the ship, the spirit of the steel around them. Singing. No, I don't know the tune.
There are stories of ships that have particular ghosts: a rifter that always set its own autopilot to the homeworld of the previous captain, who'd died on board but not in pod; a myrmidon with a guardian spirit that appeared as a woman made of flame to lead crew trapped by an explosion safely through corridors choked with smoke.
Some less harmless, like the freighter whose crew, stranded in slow orbit by engine failure, drew lots to see who would survive on the limited life support and the flesh of their colleagues, and which, repainted, renamed and relaunched, was halfway through its next voyage when the ship's cook woke from a strange dream to find herself preparing a fricassee of the first mate.
Ships that cry and ships that bleed, ships that send their crew mad and ships that set course for the sun of their own accord and will not answer to the helm. There are stories about all of those, told in the crew bars along the dockside, late in the evening.
Spend a few weeks on a ship, any ship, and its easy to see where the stories come from. Dopplered static on the comms, signals caught and echoed and distorted by any one of a thousand kinds of interference, voices from the past, half-heard, a quarter-understood. Ships found drifting, empty, ownerless: sometimes with a gaping rent in the hull to show what happened; sometimes with the escape pods missing and all the signs of an orderly evacuation; sometimes with the crew still at their posts, white and stiff and rimed with frost.
Sometimes, most unnerving, ships in perfect working order, with no sign of any emergency - a pot set on a cold stove, spoon still propped across it, as if the cook had stepped away from a moment and would be right back; a coffee cup on the captain's desk and just one bed in the crew quarters unmade. Coming across one of those ships gives the disturbing feeling that the crew have simply, and only seconds ago, vanished.
Or that they're still there, unseen, unheard. Waiting.
Ghosts.
Signals skipping across the interface, ending up in places they were never meant to go. Drifting hulls. Ships slipping on and off the registry lists, undocking here and sliding out into the dark to disappear until the crew disembarks there off a different ship with a different name. The Bright Spark; the Sapphire Star; the Magpie.
Ghosts.
Every faction and corporation has its ships that can run silent and lie hidden off the grid, for all intents and purposes just another piece of space-junk until the systems fire up and the guns go live. Not every war is declared.
The Kogaru Io; the Felton May; the Toshkaiska.
Ghost ships fighting ghost wars.
The official response to any question is laughter. Ghosts? You know how superstitious spacers can be! No, we certainly don't employ any 'ghosts'. There's no such thing!
Everyone knows there's no such thing as ghosts.
Except out in the Void, the Vast, the Deep Beyond, at the back of the Big Empty, wrapped up in the Endless, and the mercy of the Infinite Sea.
There's no such thing as ghosts, except where the ghosts live.
In the dark behind the stars.
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