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The stories say there is a ship that sails on the furthest edges of space. It's said to have left Earth with the first settlers, those intrepid and brave explorers hoping to build a new home amongst the distant stars.
They say the ship has a crew of just five; old warriors who know their swords from their blasters, and can wield both just as well to protect those lost in the dark.
A ghost ship in every way, they’ve put their souls into it and their very spirits are entwined in the wiring.
If you’ve made a name for yourself off broken backs, if you leave ruined ships floating in space and jettison bodies into the icy black, well, those same stories warn that you should fear crossing their path.
After all, how can you outrun a ghost ship? The answer’s simple: you can’t.
With all the time in the universe, it’ll run you down. There’s no corner, chartered or uncharted, for you to hide in. And if you’re looking to test yourself against them, to trap them, to see what a ghost crew really looks like...here's some advice, don’t.
“This is Captain Bates of The Victoria. Prepare to be boarded.”
The voice that filters through the speakers is arrogant with a casual laziness. It comes from someone known for parading around the edges of charted space pretending to be the biggest fish in the pond. The visual from the video link which arrives a moment later displays a middle-aged grizzled man in a leather backed captain’s chair, well-fed despite being banned from all known spaceports. The ropey scar on his neck would have struck a note of fear in any sane flyer’s heart.
In the captain’s chair, Nile tightens her hands on the rests and exhales slowly, thinks; Louis Marchant 26. Marcia Opeyemi, 34. Roberto Opeyemi, 37. Dipa Kilkenny, 3. Saffa Kilkenny, 6. Matthew Kilkenny, 39. Hamza Osman, 58. Filip Giancola, 18. Eun-Seo Lee, 42. Hao Chen, 31-
Three busts of static filter down her earpiece.
The old tech isn’t needed in a ship that’s fully wired up to her wrist comms but the familiarity of the signal settles Nile. She tips her head and taps her fingers on the armrests.
On the other end of the video link, Captain Bates laughs.
“Don’t drag this out. You're outgunned in that rust bucket. The Andromache? You’ve named yourself after a ghost ship. You don’t want to wind up one.” He snorts loudly and pats his own cheek. “Come on, we’ll leave enough of the bolts behind for you to limp back to Hub Four. On my honour as a Captain.”
Two busts of static buzz in Nile’s ear.
Booker’s shadow on the floor of the bridge shifts and she knows he’s also waiting, counting the seconds down.
All she needs to do is stall for time.
“The scans show you’ve already got cargo,” Nile states flatly. “Life signs are crammed into your hull. Human life signs.”
Bates pulls a disgruntled face. “We’ll make room. And your first gen parts will fetch good prices as collectors’ items. Scorched or not. Tick tock.”
One bust of static.
Nile grits her teeth and nods. “Preparing for boarding.”
Booker already has thumped the bridge doors open when she cuts the video link. With not a moment to spare, Nile is out of the chair and sprinting alongside him to join the rest of the team. Although they had been hunting down The Victoria for a week and a half in deep space, the tables had turned and somehow they were ambushed themselves.
It irks her more than she’d like to admit for being caught on the backfoot but it’s a feeling shared by the rest of them.
When Nile skids to a halt by the docking hatch, she huffs out her irritation. “I can’t believe that asshole called this ship a rust bucket.”
“It kinda is.” Joe shrugs, leaning back against a panel that had rattled itself loose. It pops into place with a loud creak.
It gets an eye roll out of Quỳnh, but she remains all business and taps at her wrist to add it onto the list of things that needed to be fixed, at some point. Then there’s a shuffling of weapons as Nicky unloads his full hands.
The needle on the panel moves slowly to show the stabilising air levels inside the airlock.
“Book, what are we looking at?” asks Quỳnh.
Booker taps at his pad. There’s a round of bleeps across their wrists as he shares the data. “The scans showed fourteen crew. Our future passengers are locked in the cargo bay.”
With her eyes fixed on the twitching needle, Nile repeats the plan they’d decided on when signing up to the job. “A simple extraction. We handle the crew as usual.”
“No sabotage?” asks Joe wistfully.
Nicky’s mouth twitches, betraying an almost-smile.
Rolling out his shoulders, Booker nods along. “Yeah, I’m up for that. I can go and get my laser torch. It’s only in the mess room.”
When Quỳnh bumps her shoulder, Nile gives in. “Maybe a little sabotage.”
The hatch hisses open and Nicky pushes through before anyone from The Victoria can make it onboard. His longsword slices through the air and Joe follows with his own scimitar twisting efficiently in the narrow space.
The rest are on their heels, pushing the other ship’s crew back down the airlock.
Booker wheels back and forth. His nightsticks smack into limbs and cut off any daring breaks. With a nod, Nile raises her staff and aligns herself with Quỳnh to bring up the rear. There's a thwapping noise down the corridor as Quỳnh’s electromagnetic bolts sink into suits. The charge they disperse spreads to fry all electrics, including the wiring inside blasters.
The Victoria's crew drop their smoking, useless weapons cry out in disbelief over the five crewmen.
“Ghost enough for you?” Nicky calls down the corridor and Joe’s laugh echoes off the smooth walls.
They give chase to round the corridor and find most of the retreating crew had regrouped.
In the thick of the fight, Nile’s staff is ripped from her hands. It goes flying across the small space. Too far for her to retrieve it, she resorts to her fists. Inside her gloves, her knuckles bruise and heal and bruise against The Victoria crew’s robust suits.
It had been her choice to use a staff. They all had brought on board their preferences for a weapon which wouldn't destroy wiring panels and important engineering equipment with an ill-timed shot. In those first days of space flight, Nile had originally chosen a sword. Although Quỳnh was still teaching her how to handle it and she had told her countless times, rather wistfully, that Lykon might have been a better teacher.
Now unarmed and resorting to throwing punches that crack her knuckles, Nile wishes she had hung onto the staff better.
But her opponent keels backwards as a bolt sinks into her suit, and when Nile cranes her neck around, Quỳnh’s gaze is utterly focused even while her smile promises more training hours.
“Here!” yells Booker.
He throws one of his nightsticks to Nicky, who passes it to Joe between spins like a relay. The confined space presses the two of them closer. With both hands full, and Nicky at his back, Joe bursts through a small knot of fighters trying to hold them at bay. It breaks the chokehold on the corridor and The Victoria’s crew hobble backwards, deeper into the ship.
Joe raises his hand, and the nightstick is handed off to Quỳnh. She chucks it over her shoulder without looking, knowing that Nile would be there, ready and waiting to catch it.
Nile does just that, plucking it clean out of the air. And immediately she brings it back to smack her newest opponent in the knee. She follows it up with a quick kick to the chest that has him sprawled on the floor and unable to get back up.
They push forwards and keep up the assault until The Victoria’s crew fall to their army of five. The surrender comes unanimously from the defeated. Booker, Joe, and Quỳnh quickly round up the battered crew and shove them into their own cargo bay.
After retrieving a makeshift timer from The Andromache's airlock, Nicky welds it onto the cargo bay door with little fuss. “Four hours?” he asks.
Leaning against the doorframe, Booker shrugs his shoulders and raises it. “I’d make it eight.”
“Fifteen?” Quỳnh offers sharply as she pushes through two more disarmed crew members through the door.
But Nile considers the small space, and The Andromache’s boosted engines, and evens up the numbers. “Six should do it.”
Bates is the last to be turfed in.
Nile takes great pleasure in pushing him across the threshold of his own cargo bay. A jail cell created to hold others that would lock him in, for a few hours at least. Her grin is sharp with success and matched by her family. “There you go, Captain.”
He spins and hisses back, “That’s my cargo you’re taking!”
“They’re not cargo.” Joe replies bluntly with his hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword. “And you didn’t find The Andromache by accident, Captain. We're here because of you.”
“Heard you’ve been transporting people to the asteroid mines. Figured you could do with a haunting.” Quỳnh says as she slaps the glass panel, and Booker heaves the door shut. The pneumatics hiss and lock into place.
“Don’t worry, we’ll leave you enough juice to limp back to Hub Four.” Nile sets the timer, and it beeps twice before they turn away to finish the mission.
They lead The Andromache’s new passengers on board. It doesn’t take much cajoling once they realise it’s a rescue. Their ship becomes cramped with the sheer number of people around, but they all settle in quickly across the living areas, spreading out as they couldn’t do in the cargo bay. Despite the grumbles and gentle elbowing, it all works out.
While the adults retain a general wariness, the children are quicker to shake off their bad experience and eagerly take up offers to inspect the plants in the greenhouse or to watch old Earth films in the mess hall. They play tag in the longest corridor, bare feet slapping on the floor, socks sliding, and their laughter rings across the ship to sink in between the exposed pipes and wiring.
Their four-day journey back to Hub Four offers them all time to put the bad experience behind them. A shared camaraderie arises from those who escaped a terrible fate of dying underground in the asteroid mines and new plans are made. The young and old, families and lone travellers, come together to discuss their futures. A whisper travels through the huddles and the talk turns to a new colony they could join: Base 344, more commonly known as the Lykon Base. It is well-established, abides by the Peace Accords, and would accept anyone with the desire to settle down.
Passing through to tinker with a half-repaired panel by the airlock, Booker follows the flow of conversations across the newer pidgins and Standard Earth English, and smiles wide.
When the lights flicker off at the start of the first night cycle, the adults slowly head off into corners to getting some sleep. Nile had been clear from the start, they had freedom to roam the ship, so long as they kept out of the private quarters.
But in doing so, it meant they could see the patchwork of repair holding the almost-ancient first gen ship together.
A few of the older ones eye the surroundings with suspicion, the little thrum of adrenaline that had helped to keep them alive up until now. Gut instinct, they whisper back, but even those who remain nervous are cajoled into recognising they should remember to be thankful to have escaped Bates and The Victoria.
Their whispers continue until a few of the rescued adults dip into the engineering kits. They start helping out with the walls and floors, taking direction from Quỳnh and Nicky, to unstick the doors that tended to jam and needed a good thump to keep moving.
A few whispers turn to questions, as curiosity tends to, unable to be bottled within an enclosed space.
“Is this a ghost ship? It has the same name as one I was told stories about when I was kid.” A middle-aged woman in a patched jumpsuit tentatively asks Quỳnh between welding new panels together.
It makes Quỳnh laugh loudly and ask back, “Do we look like ghosts?”
“No…” The woman remains unconvinced as she runs a finger over the old logos pressed into the discarded panels.
Another conversation crops up on the third night during the second dinner shift. A father with two kids, one snoozing against his chest and the other clambering over his back, takes the free seat beside Joe. He accepts his bowl of soup and stares at Joe’s sketchpad, with its real paper, and the real pencil in his hand.
Only after he finishes his soup does he starts talking, the warmth of the meal and the soft hubbub in the room restoring his confidence. “Excuse me, but I’ve heard stories of The Andromache on Hub Two. That it’s a first gen ship still sailing out in the black...nearly a century and a half after they stopped rolling them off the manufacturing hoops.”
Resting his pencil on the table, Joe shares a smile with Quỳnh as she elbows him. “Yeah, we’ve heard those stories too.”
The passenger looks between them, trying to figure out the impossible puzzle. “And there were mentions of its crew too.”
Leaning over, Nile pushes the last two dessert rations towards the man and winks his daughter who had come to sit down at the table so that she could look at Joe's sketches. The girl pulls one of the silver packets close. When she opens it to see chocolate, she turns her wide eyes up at her father and lets out a giggle of delight.
The man swallows uneasily. “Yeah, a crew of five.”
With her chores done, Nicky on the bridge, and the dinner shift complete, Nile’s curiosity gets the better of her. She takes a seat on the floor between Joe and Quỳnh, and leans into the hand squeezing her shoulder.
“Like what?” asks Nile.
The man brushes his snoozing child's back, still hesitating.
Then, as a quietness falls over the room, the way it always does for gossip or for truth, he coughs awkwardly. “Well, Captain Nile... we’ve been talking, and most of us have heard something. In bars or in the Hub Two port-”
“My old welding crew loved a spook story!” A young woman piped up from the back of the room and gets hushed quiet by those sitting around her.
“The Andromache and its crew of five. But there’s nothing that sticks. They’re only stories. Any encounters are wiped from official logs and visual scans are corrupted. It’s only the eyewitness accounts that remain. And everyone knows that if you can spin a good tale, you’ll get a drink and a meal.”
When Nile looks up at Quỳnh and Joe with a silent question in her eyes, they glance around the room and find there’s no fear.
Quỳnh breaks the silence. “What have you heard?”
The questions come thick and fast; Were you really there at the Battle of Sirius B? Did you break the stalemate at the Ocean of Tranquillity? How did you join the crew - is it always five, or has there been more? I remember stories about the Bronze Sailor when I was a little girl, are they true? I heard of the Rig Riots, you really held the picket line, stopped the Corp from claiming those rigs back?
Joe laughs and picks up his pencil, resumes his sketching. He shows the little girl his progress when she leans over her father’s legs, leaving Quỳnh to smile demurely.
“I guess all good ghost stories have some mystery to them.” Nile nods before taking her leave and returns to the bridge.
When The Andromache lands back at Hub Four and its contingent of passengers disembark to start their new lives, they take a few more stories with them. They’re added to those that already circulate across the air vents and are carried across to the docks and rigs where other ships perch before setting out into the deep black.
They have kind faces, old eyes.
Equally gentle and fierce. They fought for us. They didn’t know us, but they saved us.
What did you expect? In ancient times they hung their myths and legends on the night sky. It’s all one and the same, except now we’ve seen them with our own eyes, we've flown with them between the stars.
They work on their ship with great care. It flies because they will it to, piecing it back with their hands. Healing it.
The Earth flowers in their greenhouse bloom in colours we’ve not seen since we left Hub One. The stew we ate on the second night, I never thought I would taste something so much like home.
We asked them our questions, and yeah, they didn’t give answers, but you just know. It’s them. They’re the same ones who left Earth. They must remember it all.
On the first night back in deep space where the stars are so far flung out it’s pitch dark, the five of them sit together on the floor in the bridge. Quỳnh passes around the bottle of old vodka, while Joe and Booker fiddle with an old record player and vinyls that the printer spat out.
Soon enough, a jaunty tune spills over the circle.
It’s a quiet celebration for their completed mission and they try to commit to memory the sound of the childrens’ bright peals of laughter, of the love and humanity they saw amongst their fellow travellers.
As they drink, Nile’s eyes glance over at the empty captain’s chair. She can easily picture Andromache the Scythian sitting there, though the woman had never made the journey out to the stars. From the ripple of movement around their circle, Nile knows she’s not the only one to feel the warmth of Andy’s smile or the whisper of her voice across the lightyears they’ve travelled.
“We did good, Andy.” Nicky quietly says, raising his glass.
It’s echoed back; “We did.”
Over three hundred years later, stories still float around space ports and mining hubs and say: The Andromache is still flying. Its crew listen to the stars and song of humanity reaching out to touch them. Remember if you find yourself in trouble, call honestly, call for aid, and help will come.