Spacer Tales
The Haunted Hatchway
S J MacDonald
Published by S J MacDonald
Copyright 2011 S J MacDonald
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The Haunted Hatchway
Biz Cooper came into Kluskey’s like a man with a large dog snapping at his heels. Hurrying, anxious, he headed straight for the bar.
Tam Kluskey watched as the spacer put down the kitbag he was carrying and got himself a shot of whisky from the automated dispensers. It had been four years since Biz had been in the bar, but Tam never forgot a customer. The last time he’d seen him, Biz had been celebrating his promotion to leading technician. A big man with orange hair and a booming voice, he’d been standing rounds for the whole bar and hugging strangers by the time he left.
Now, though, he looked ten years older, knocking back the whisky in one gulp and then immediately ordering a beer.
“What’s up, Biz?” Tam went over to him with a concerned look as he saw how pale the spacer was. It was obvious from the logo on the green overalls he was wearing that Biz had just left the container ship Colestar Logistical Solutions 24. The Colestar 24 had come into the Neuwald system four hours before and had just finished port entry procedures. This would have been the earliest that Biz could get off the ship. The kitbag he was carrying made it clear that he did not intend to go back.
“Those morons at Colestar!” Biz told him, “you won’t believe what they’ve done!” He patted the bar with one hand, asking “Can I?”
Tam didn’t hesitate. Biz obviously had a story he was bursting to tell. Even if it was just a gripe about some new policy of Colestar’s, other spacers would want to know about it. Colestar was one of the biggest container shipping companies in the League, and most spacers had either worked for them or knew someone who had.
“Go ahead,” Tam agreed. Biz hopped up to sit on the bar as spacers always did when telling a story, flourishing his beer as he called for people to come over.
“Gather up, folks, and hear this!”
It was not long after the end of a work shift on the Amarynth station and the hangout was busy with workers from the spacedocks and ship services based there, as well as with shoreleavers from the couple of hundred ships currently in port. Around fifty of them came over in answer to Biz’s hail, looking interested, but most just carried on with their own drinks and conversations.
“Listen up!” Biz put his powerful voice to good use and bellowed out over the background of music and voices. “Over here! All of you!”
As Tam turned off the music and put a spotlight on the storyteller, more people came over. It only took a couple of minutes till nearly everyone in the bar was clustered around. There was something about the urgency in Biz’s manner that made it clear this was important.
“All right.” When he was satisfied that he had their attention, Biz began his story. “My name is Biz Cooper and I’ve been senior tech on the Colestar 24 for four years. I’ve served on the Farwater, the Jenny 16 and the Stellar Empress before that. Some of you know me.” He picked out a few faces in the crowd, and there were nods and sounds of confirmation. This was important when a story was being told, establishing the space-cred of the person who was telling it.
“The Colestar 24 had a routine five-year refit done at Mandram, four months ago,” Biz continued. “They upgraded our comms and did some general repairs, nothing out of the ordinary. One of the things they did was to replace three hatchways which failed stress-metals.” He looked around at his audience and saw only a few kids and groundhogs looking puzzled. Starships were tested every five years for structural integrity. The tests looked for any points of weakness in pressure bulkheads and hatchways which might be caused by damage or decay processes like oxidation.
“One of the hatchways they replaced was D4-C, on deck four between quarters and tanks.”
Nearly everyone there would be familiar with the interior of the starbreaker class of container ships. They would be able to visualise the cluster of tiny cabins used by officers and passengers, the mess deck surrounded by bunks for the crew, and the hatchway into the area of high pressure tanks which held air gases and water. The hatchway Biz was referring to was a heavy steel frame and double door, reinforced with duralloy, fitted into a pressure bulkhead within the ship. It would close and seal automatically if there was a blowout or fire, creating an internal airlock which would protect other areas of the ship while allowing people to escape from damaged sections.
“The problems started six days out of Mandram,” Biz told them. “D4-C closed itself in the middle of the night for no obvious reason. The diagnostic showed that it had been triggered by smoke detectors but the smoke detectors hadn’t picked anything up. We just put it down to gremlins and didn’t think anything of it.”
Many of the spacers listening nodded agreement with that. Starship tech could do weird stuff sometimes. Engineers said it was due to tiny fluctuations in the contours of wave space causing multidimensional pulses through the ship’s systems. Most spacers just called it gremlins and didn’t stress about it.
“Three days later,” Biz said, “it happened again. Same thing. The diagnostic said that it had been triggered by an alarm from the smoke detector system, but the smoke detector diagnostics showed they hadn’t sent any such signal. I was asked to look at it and I did a full strip down on all the hatch systems, tested everything every which-way. I couldn’t find a thing wrong with it. The following week, one of the guys was coming through tanks and the damn thing shut right in front of him.
“It happened nine times in the six weeks it took us to run from Mandram to Flancer. We went through everything, checking every system over and over, swapped parts over with other hatches, you name it, we tried it. The only thing we could think was that it was one of the crew winding us up. We had a rookie deckhand aboard, the kind of kid who thinks it’s funny to put fart powder in the coffee. Everyone thought he was messing with the hatch controls, though he swore he wasn’t. He got a lot of ear bashing over it, anyway, and left the ship at Flancer.
“While we were there, the skipper reported the problem to the Colestar offices and they authorised a spacedocks team coming aboard to double check the systems, just in case. They did in-depth tests and confirmed that they couldn’t find anything wrong with them. There is a way to trigger the door closure manually which would read as if it was done by the smoke detectors, of course – you’d just need to plug a hand-comp into the diagnostics port and send a fake smoke-alarm signal. Everyone agreed that that’s what must have happened, and we all thought it was the kid, too. So that was that. We left Flancer seven weeks ago, heading here.”
He looked around and saw that the spacers were anticipating what he was going to say next. It was, after all, obvious that he would not have yelled for them to come and hear this if it had been a bit of gossip about an annoying rookie playing pranks.
“Two days out, it happened again,” he confirmed. “This time, it was at breakfast. The skipper and night-watchkeepers were on the flight deck. Everyone else was on the mess deck, having breakfast. When we heard the hatch close, we all went to see what was going on. I was right there, myself. I was there within two seconds. There is no way that anyone could have tampered with that hatch, no way they could have rigged a timer to send a false signal through the diagnostic port or anything like that.
“That was when we started to get spooked. It was obvious we’d been unfair to the kid, blaming him. There was no technical explanation. All of us were accounted for at the time it happened. It wasn’t just annoying any more, it was starting to get freaky.”
; It was easy to tell the real spacers in the audience, because they were the ones who were looking alarmed. When you hurtled into deep space, you were trusting your life to a tiny, fragile bubble of technology in the most hostile environment known to man. Having an emergency airlock system you couldn’t rely on would be enough in itself to unnerve anyone who really understood the risks they were taking out there.
“Oh come on!” one of the audience protested. He had the short, stocky build of a native Neuwaldian and an authoritative manner. His middle-aged paunch was contained by a silver-grey business suit and his nails were manicured. His name was Jon Michaels and he was a personnel manager for Amarynth Spacedocks.
Like all spacer hangouts, Kluskey’s was a private club, but anyone who worked aboard the station could apply for membership. Tam would generally