[story] affect
author: abon (Dreamwidth)
It was always something or another at the station; when the report of a strange incident in the outer arm came in, the station head merely said, without raising his eyes from a pile of celofax: "The everblue firmament be damned if I'm getting out of this chair."
So it fell upon his second-in-command to investigate the matter, who did his best to appear dignified as he leapt out of his chair, for by the time the report wormed its way to the top of the chain of command, in what appeared to be record time, he, like the entire station, already knew all about what it did not claim in any way, shape, or form: a ghost was on the loose in Sakhalin.
An arm supervisor met him and ushered him into the unit's control room. The junk piece under question had been moved to a smaller, sealed hold so that the rest of the retrieved material could be put through the salvage, he explained. Clare duly noted the supervisor's unimpeachable, if predictable, response to the situtation and then declared that he wanted to see the creature for himself, in person, in fact. The entire room became very quiet; no volunteers came forth to help him put on a contact suit.
Clare inquired as to who had brought the haul in. He suggested brightly that they be made available.
"Caught ourselves a rara avis, haven't we!" he said with admiration as he craned his neck for a better view from the floor. There was no reply from the two navigators, who remained several armlengths behind. Clare adjusted the defogger of his helmet and pulled himself up to the torso with the help of a tether. "What do you think something this heavy was doing, floating hereabouts?" he asked, peering into the core, which had been left open. "We're well inside the old active zones"
"It isn't that old," said the docker called Alejo.
"A hundred years in the past may as well be a thousand, or ten thousand, from where I'm standing," he replied, slapping the armor surface for effect. "Say, I remember seeing something like this on the real. Oya Ai--"
"Asendranath was better," Alejo said. Mou nudged her none too gently. The captain went on as before. "Here's that insignia," he said, and brushed a hand over the bright pinpoints of gold scattered across a diamond plaque. "Always thought he liked hamming it up a bit too much."
Mou jumped in nervously. "That version got more of the details right, though, between the first run and the second run, renaming the Carnivora class Cavalier class."
"Is that so!"
The navigator quieted, unsure whether or not the captain was genuinely interested in what he had to say. He slid down and unhooked himself from the tether and dusted his hands off with satisfaction, undeterred by such a mere thing as silence. The crux of the situation was, really, "How did it come about, the ghost?"
The engine was running bluehot. Superheated gas writhed in salamander coils in the belly of the remote dirigible. Everything was just about ready to go. Mou waited for the signal from his co-navigator that all the scraps they'd retrieved from the void had been secured. It was so routine, and the twitches of his fingers on the controls so disconnected from the rest of him, that Mou's feet found something to do on their own, and started to mimic a boxer's to and fro. As if in response Alejo yawned and shook out her shoulders. A musical chime cascaded throughout the deck. They had stayed incommunicado as the dirigible Skeeter powered its way back to the station. As they took over the pre-programmed controls and reeled the haul in to Digit Three, he heard Alejo say, "Clear," over the intercom.
"Roger."
The mystery piece of scrap had made it through intact. They exchanged discreet finger flicks of triumph once the dirigible was firmly locked in place. It automatically belched forth its cargo and the scraps thudded onto the floor of the hold. They wasted no time switching to the robotic arms arrayed around the hold to help the rest of the sorting crew process the haul.
"Mostly dust," a docker joked over the common channel. From the control room he adjusted a pair of multi-jointed arms via minute twitches of his first and second digits.
"But check this," Mou said, and Alejo let him have the lead, an unheard-of gesture that prompted several speculative comments. The liquid muscles encased in the robotic limbs aligned and realigned, hissing softly. Mou's arms stretched, Alejo's not far behind. They flipped over metal plates and shunted aside a mass of heat-deformed wires. Mou grinned at his co-navigator through the clear partition between their chairs as the first exclamations sounded throughout the common channel.
"Damn. Damn! Gold stars!"
"Straight out of Third Empire," Alejo crowed.
"The devil you say!"
"From early in the Century," Mou said. With a beam he pointed out the forearm grooves to which a ninecat would have been fitted. "Look at the parabola-shaped wave array and the hexagramic figures. That's classic configuration right there," he declared. Had he been born several ages earlier, Mou Hu might have been the type to assemble complicated model planes and spend the rest of his time poring over paperbound schemata of airborne vehicles. "And oh, will you look at this," Mou said with subdued joy, "the chassis is still intact."
Now the exclamations came loud and fast. "This thing is giant!" "But is it worth anything?" "What are the chances!" "You think there's something inside?"
The common channel went quiet. A voice from the control room piped up. "Shouldn't we be starting up quarantine?"
"It's real old," Mou said. "It's got a breach, anyway," a docker added, poking around a small, jagged rip in the torso with surgical precision. "Should be fine."
"Connect your visuals to the screen so we can see, too," came the reply from the control room. A signal to proceed flashed across their screens. The main crew muttered excitedly amongst themselves.
"Century War! Damn."
"Yeah, when I was little I used to nonstop watch those Z. Ssuma reals--"
"Yeah! 'Unbound Hearts', right?"
"Nah, nah, later one, with Asendranadth."
"Open it up, open it up," someone said impatiently. Mou and a docker had attached supple, miniature hooks to the suit's core and were carefully peeling away the cracked armor around the hatch seam. A second pair of workers fiddled with the mechanisms in the back. A loud screech made everyone jump. "See if you can prop it open," said the docker who had just found the hatch motors. Alejo carefully pried apart the hatch and locked her arms against its suddenly closing.
No one spoke at the sight of the perfectly preserved corpse bound to the seat by wide safety restraints. It was slightly tucked in on itself, arms held out stiffly, the hands still encased in the control mitts. Short black hair lay limply across the concave face. Cause of death may as well have been from when the chamber had decompressed, most likely during combat. Coarse brown powder dusted the inside of the chamber.
"Hold, ground crew. We better call someone out here to take a proper look. Meanwhile--"
It drew a sharp breath.
A docker accidentally ripped off one of the limbs of the mech from the scare of his life. The lights dimmed, then flared, then flickered. A trigger-fingered someone hit the alarm and it shrilled loudly, drowning out the yells that flooded the common channel. The high-pitched drone ceased as abruptly as it began. A shaky voice could be heard issuing from the control room.
"Ground crew...."
No one wanted to say it. It took Mou several tries to loosen his mechanical hands from the hatch, and several more seconds to find his voice again. Loosened clumps of the dust drifted down to where the detached limb had fallen. Mou stared at his display.
"Pilot's gone."
"The pilot was gone!"
Mou nodded and Alejo looked all the more baleful at the exclamation, so gleefully uttered. Clare retrieved his copy of the official report from near where the tether had coiled. He looked over it once more. "In any case, it's too bad that the vouchsafe wasn't intact. Else we'd have something to publicise. A Century-era combat unit, indeed!"
Alejo had by now turned very nearly purple. Mou hastily said, "What about the..."
"Do you think the pilot was a single or a double?"
Alejo's shoulders jerked up in a shrug. "Hard to say without vouchsafe data." Mou gave a low wave, as noncommittally as was possible. Clare looked from one to the other. "You two are a regular Rosencrantz and Gildernstern," he remarked thoughtfully. He wasn't particularly interested in returning to his office, and here was an ideal opportunity presenting itself. He invited them to lunch.
"It's koba again."
There were groans. Rho Stacey could be heard complaining.
Seated at a table with the officers the captain had managed to scrounge up, Mou found himself unable to stop babbling about bygone mechs. Keeping her head down, Alejo stabbed at her plate with no apparent intention to consume her portion of reconstituted protein. Mou was using his as a visual aid.
"Used to be that they'd have pilots who tested at a high level do it, but later they tried growing a brain and then dividing it up during some developmental stage, so, you'd have two separate combat units, each the mirror of the other, piloted by a pair of callibrated custom brains that were housed in two extensions that had all the pertinent nerves regrouped and relocated, so then when large-scale--"
Clare listened only perfunctorily, more interested in watching the reactions of the people around him. He was familiar as anyone could be with the story being told; at least, as far as he remembered them being told in reals. In the Hong Kong of his youth, that subtropical island transplanted into the steppe, Century War-themed productions had never been as popular as when he was growing up -- antiheroes with names like Lot Zwitzfolge-Ssuma, pilot of Die Blutgräfin, and Z. Ssuma, his literary reincarnation, merged seamlessly with a succession of legendary players and made up many a childhood pantheon. Worshipped, too, was the girl he could never touch, neither in love nor combat, the next-generation pilot of Gog and Magog, who shot him out of the stratosphere at the close of the period of direct mech-to-mech fighting.
"Doesn't sound so bad, does it?"
"I don't know, would I get twice the pay?"
Most of the people at the table laughed. Mou trailed off in the middle of a explanation about hexagramic arrays. Clare patted him on the back. "Well, you know what happened to Prosper del Prado."
"Those weird old names."
"If I were a girl my parents were going to call me Candyfloss Electra," Clare told Rho Stacey. When his own little girl was about to be born he had felt it, too, slumbering inside his blood, a deep, inexplicable and unabiding compulsion, to bestow upon his offspring a truly one-of-a-kind moniker. Like Tsang Elderyewberry.
Rho regarded the statement with skepticism. He couldn't help it; the captain was an experienced and competent officer who should have inspired a great deal of confidence in his people, and yet there was something excessively light-hearted about the man that made most people wary, and the station head, livid. Rho poked at his meal and absentmindedly scratched his arm. "The ghost would seem less ghostly if we could put a name to it," he remarked.
Mou began to lament the loss of the vouchsafe module. Clare shrugged, twirling his fork above his plate of spaghetti. "Even without a name it was a person once."
"It's just a ghost."
Alejo finally had had enough. "A corpse is a corpse, but a ghost walking around the station is something more. We ought to be treating it with respect."
"I agree that treating the dead as completely dead is inhumane, but treating them the same as the living is rather foolish," Clare said.
"I don't believe you believe in ghosts, sir," she countered.
At this, Clare set his coffee down and looked blankly past Rho's shoulder. "Oh," he said mildly. "it's rather that I find that I must. Particularly when one is staring at me."
Chairs bounced across the floor as every single person at their table, and some at several nearby tables, got to their feet. Breaking the heavy silence, Rho turned back to the captain with an aggrieved look. "That was unkind, sir."
Still in the middle of violently suppressing a laugh, Clare said, "We should be all right, as long as it's not a vengeful ghost. Why in heavens do you keep scratching your arm like that? You'll be plebotomizing yourself at that rate."
Rho frowned and rubbed his left forearm. He unbuttoned and rolled up the cuff and grew slightly pale.
"It's a pimple," Alejo said. Rho grew a shade paler. "It's a mosquito bite," he said shakily.
A mosquito! Instantly a crowd appeared around him, surging like waves, cresting with questions. "Now, now," Clare said, perturbed, "you all know there can be nothing bigger on this station than common mites--"
"That's not true," Rho squeaked out, looking as if he were about to faint, "a few years back there was this station that had a rat living on board."
The effect was the same as if he had, in all seriousness, said he'd seen an elephant crawl out of a soup bowl.
"Rho Stacey, you're full of shit."
"Try bathing!"
"I've been summonsed," said Clare with regret as alternate theories, accusations and counteraccusations started to fly in earnest. He glanced at his pager and sighed. No one paid the captain any mind as he made his excuses; Rho battled his way through jeers in a cold sweat. Clare gave him a helping hand, even a few words of advice. But to the station head he simply had this to say: "Everyone's spooked." A transparent joke that might have gotten laughs under usual circumstances had elicited nothing more than a couple of strained smiles and expressions that, directed at any lesser officer, would have been cause to fear an imminent mutiny. Clare handed the station head a report that said the same thing using more elaborate terminology and stood at ease. Sakhalin ignored the celofax viewer and turned to him with a frosty glare.
"Already I'm hearing rumors that you're selling ghost-repellent to the officers and personnel. That true?"
Clare was taken aback. "Hardly. Just regular old-fashioned barter, nothing out of the ordinary. And besides someone else has already got the crew cornered."
Sakhalin lifted a disdainful brow.
"Cllarrissa Allan over in Processing Two is hucking handmade charms, claiming her great-great-something was a Daoist master," Clare explained. It really was such an excellent angle; it irked him that he hadn't thought of it first.
"Do you really believe in this nonsense?"
"At this very moment there's someone walking around convinced that he's been bitten by a mosquito. Can you imagine! I certainly can't begrudge the existence of any less fantastic thing."
Sakhalin snorted and scanned the report and tossed it to one end of his desk. "Yet you can't bring yourself to mention the obvious."
"But as I see it, sir -- if keeping up discipline and morale becomes a serious problem, my mother once let it slip that my great-aunt's cousin's son-in-law is friends with an exellent exorcist." he said. It occured to Tsang Claremont Yew-lan, not for the first time, that the station head was quite lucky to have a second officer as well-connected as he. "I could make some calls and see if she's available for a remote consultation. Shouldn't be too difficult to arrange."
The station head very carefully folded his hands on a sheaf of celofax. "Mr. Tsang."
"Sir."
"Get out of my office."
Gathering up his personal effects, Clare went away suffused with the feeling one only gets from having completed a good day's work.
The workday was not going nearly as well for Rho Stacey. His arm itched and his entire life seemed to be unraveling. It was as a child, growing up in one of the posh microdomes on the steppes, that he had slowly suffered the realization that a million things and more were alive just outside the metal and plastic. Even though he had always been at the top of every class, he had been deemed unfit for any kind of planetside duties. He was normally about as happy as could be inside the filtered, purified atmosphere of the station.
But now a mosquito -- the evidence of its existing was festering on his very person -- this was a thousand times worse than a ghost. He stumbled along a quiet stretch of the walkway that led to the infirmary. He shivered. That the mosquito might be swimming through the same air as he was breathing at that moment was a thought so much more hideous than anything he could conjure up about the ghost.
The ghost.
At that moment his entire body seized up; he was petrified. But his arm stubbornly continued to itch. His face ran hot and cold and his fingers tingled. The ghost made no move. The arm itched relentlessly. Rho didn't dare break eye contact. The ghost did not move. Rho couldn't bear it. Slowly his left hand crept up, and up. It inched its way up past the gold insignia on his uniform toward the swelling. The ghost didn't move. The left hand scratched furtively and futilely at the layers of cloth, compounding the dreadful writhing the itch. Still the ghost did not move. The scratching grew louder, and effective. Awash in false bliss, Rho relaxed his stance. Still the ghost did nothing but look at him with a lost expression. The worst momentarily appeased, Rho went flush with embarrassment. The hand abruptly dropped back to his side.
The ghost's mouth moved. There was hardly any sound. Rho chewed his tongue and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Soon the arm was starting to itch again, even worse than before. There skin was a radius of twisting and burning, emanating from an epicenter of hurt. An uncharitable feeling welled up in his gut. A ghost. A mosquito. What was the ghost of a long-dead mech pilot doing on a salvage station, anyway. "Headed home," the ghost repeated.
The statement of purpose was so quiet that Rho again doubted he had actually heard anything. He was frightened. But then the ghost said nothing more, only looked more sad. He felt bad again. As though he were being a jerk, the same as his crewmates back at the mess. He awkwardly shifted his weight. To say nothing of the itch possessing his arm, Rho Stacey was, in fact, supremely discomfitted. "Where's that?" he asked, for lack of anything else to say.
"Wuhan," the ghost replied.
"Wuhan?" Rho asked. The arm jerked. Earth! He thought he saw the ghost nod. Astonishment rose over Rho Stacey in a wave, aggravating the itch to terrible heights. The scratching resumed. "That's on Earth," he said. The ghost's expression grew even more downcast.
"Which isn't all that far," Rho added awkwardly. To give his hands something to do other than destroying epidermal nerves, Rho started to sketch wavy-curly physics in the air. Calculations galloped from his fingertips to his brain and back. His arm was on fire. His very nose was beginning to smolder. He was getting light-headed. Rho suddenly felt, without the shadow of a doubt, extrememly silly. He coughed and shuffled from foot to foot and gestured and pointed.
"Only some thirty clicks away."
The ghost nodded a little. Its smile was concave. Rho fell down in a dead faint.
So it was always some emergency or another at the salvage station. This time the report came in the person of a officer of the Watch. Clare paused in reviewing Rho Stacey's medical evaluation and looked up, his face completely impassive as the station head received the unfortunate messenger.
"It's disappeared, sir. It's gone. There's nothing in the hold."
Clare immediately honed in, with the greatest of detached, professional interest, on the small vein that popped up on a corner of the station head's forehead.
Into the everblack beyond the station there sounded no scream, no cry, no yell. There most certainly was no hastily muffled laugh.
- - - - - - - - -
The office seen through the open door was empty, save for man whose face would have been much improved with a decent growth of beard, and on whose bony knees rested a broken celofax viewer, recently forcefully bent into a curious quadrangle.
Though many years and hereditary versions lay behind him Sakhalin had never concerned himself with vanished landscapes of the mind; of late, the absolutely infuriating mindsets of his subordinates occupied him more than was seemly. There was no one on the station like him, now more than ever. His station was in chaos. Sakhalin roared, he fumed, he sat in a darkened office in a self-imposed sulk, but the lights had dimmed with the passing of day. There was no erudite babbling to keep him from dozing off in his chair. Sahkalin's eyelids fluttered and drooped like malformed wings.
An unfamiliar sound reached his ears. A threadbare note, low one moment and high the next, and then low again. Sahkalin increased his efforts at keeping his eyes open. A delicate angular thing bound on an erratic course floated toward him. It set down on his wrist and glided over the knob of bone.
The mosquito was larger than he would have expected. It seemed to him dusted in black and light grey, rather than striped, supported by illuminated filaments that bent into arcs under the weight of what seemed, to him, so inconsequentially small. But this was the creature that might have felled a giant -- suddenly he did not know. It broke the skin. Fury rose up in him; he decided to strike. But the breach did not quite hurt -- a curious sensation. Sahkalin watched it draw. It only lingered for the lenght of a breath then took to the air again. A feeling that he could not immediately name misted before his eyes and dried itself up, for lack of reciprocity. The mosquito settled again to feed, and loneliness too, on the heels of that evanescent feeling, evaporated.
It left a trace of powder on his palm; in the air, motes and rust.
the end
It was always something or another at the station; when the report of a strange incident in the outer arm came in, the station head merely said, without raising his eyes from a pile of celofax: "The everblue firmament be damned if I'm getting out of this chair."
So it fell upon his second-in-command to investigate the matter, who did his best to appear dignified as he leapt out of his chair, for by the time the report wormed its way to the top of the chain of command, in what appeared to be record time, he, like the entire station, already knew all about what it did not claim in any way, shape, or form: a ghost was on the loose in Sakhalin.
An arm supervisor met him and ushered him into the unit's control room. The junk piece under question had been moved to a smaller, sealed hold so that the rest of the retrieved material could be put through the salvage, he explained. Clare duly noted the supervisor's unimpeachable, if predictable, response to the situtation and then declared that he wanted to see the creature for himself, in person, in fact. The entire room became very quiet; no volunteers came forth to help him put on a contact suit.
Clare inquired as to who had brought the haul in. He suggested brightly that they be made available.
"Caught ourselves a rara avis, haven't we!" he said with admiration as he craned his neck for a better view from the floor. There was no reply from the two navigators, who remained several armlengths behind. Clare adjusted the defogger of his helmet and pulled himself up to the torso with the help of a tether. "What do you think something this heavy was doing, floating hereabouts?" he asked, peering into the core, which had been left open. "We're well inside the old active zones"
"It isn't that old," said the docker called Alejo.
"A hundred years in the past may as well be a thousand, or ten thousand, from where I'm standing," he replied, slapping the armor surface for effect. "Say, I remember seeing something like this on the real. Oya Ai--"
"Asendranath was better," Alejo said. Mou nudged her none too gently. The captain went on as before. "Here's that insignia," he said, and brushed a hand over the bright pinpoints of gold scattered across a diamond plaque. "Always thought he liked hamming it up a bit too much."
Mou jumped in nervously. "That version got more of the details right, though, between the first run and the second run, renaming the Carnivora class Cavalier class."
"Is that so!"
The navigator quieted, unsure whether or not the captain was genuinely interested in what he had to say. He slid down and unhooked himself from the tether and dusted his hands off with satisfaction, undeterred by such a mere thing as silence. The crux of the situation was, really, "How did it come about, the ghost?"
The engine was running bluehot. Superheated gas writhed in salamander coils in the belly of the remote dirigible. Everything was just about ready to go. Mou waited for the signal from his co-navigator that all the scraps they'd retrieved from the void had been secured. It was so routine, and the twitches of his fingers on the controls so disconnected from the rest of him, that Mou's feet found something to do on their own, and started to mimic a boxer's to and fro. As if in response Alejo yawned and shook out her shoulders. A musical chime cascaded throughout the deck. They had stayed incommunicado as the dirigible Skeeter powered its way back to the station. As they took over the pre-programmed controls and reeled the haul in to Digit Three, he heard Alejo say, "Clear," over the intercom.
"Roger."
The mystery piece of scrap had made it through intact. They exchanged discreet finger flicks of triumph once the dirigible was firmly locked in place. It automatically belched forth its cargo and the scraps thudded onto the floor of the hold. They wasted no time switching to the robotic arms arrayed around the hold to help the rest of the sorting crew process the haul.
"Mostly dust," a docker joked over the common channel. From the control room he adjusted a pair of multi-jointed arms via minute twitches of his first and second digits.
"But check this," Mou said, and Alejo let him have the lead, an unheard-of gesture that prompted several speculative comments. The liquid muscles encased in the robotic limbs aligned and realigned, hissing softly. Mou's arms stretched, Alejo's not far behind. They flipped over metal plates and shunted aside a mass of heat-deformed wires. Mou grinned at his co-navigator through the clear partition between their chairs as the first exclamations sounded throughout the common channel.
"Damn. Damn! Gold stars!"
"Straight out of Third Empire," Alejo crowed.
"The devil you say!"
"From early in the Century," Mou said. With a beam he pointed out the forearm grooves to which a ninecat would have been fitted. "Look at the parabola-shaped wave array and the hexagramic figures. That's classic configuration right there," he declared. Had he been born several ages earlier, Mou Hu might have been the type to assemble complicated model planes and spend the rest of his time poring over paperbound schemata of airborne vehicles. "And oh, will you look at this," Mou said with subdued joy, "the chassis is still intact."
Now the exclamations came loud and fast. "This thing is giant!" "But is it worth anything?" "What are the chances!" "You think there's something inside?"
The common channel went quiet. A voice from the control room piped up. "Shouldn't we be starting up quarantine?"
"It's real old," Mou said. "It's got a breach, anyway," a docker added, poking around a small, jagged rip in the torso with surgical precision. "Should be fine."
"Connect your visuals to the screen so we can see, too," came the reply from the control room. A signal to proceed flashed across their screens. The main crew muttered excitedly amongst themselves.
"Century War! Damn."
"Yeah, when I was little I used to nonstop watch those Z. Ssuma reals--"
"Yeah! 'Unbound Hearts', right?"
"Nah, nah, later one, with Asendranadth."
"Open it up, open it up," someone said impatiently. Mou and a docker had attached supple, miniature hooks to the suit's core and were carefully peeling away the cracked armor around the hatch seam. A second pair of workers fiddled with the mechanisms in the back. A loud screech made everyone jump. "See if you can prop it open," said the docker who had just found the hatch motors. Alejo carefully pried apart the hatch and locked her arms against its suddenly closing.
No one spoke at the sight of the perfectly preserved corpse bound to the seat by wide safety restraints. It was slightly tucked in on itself, arms held out stiffly, the hands still encased in the control mitts. Short black hair lay limply across the concave face. Cause of death may as well have been from when the chamber had decompressed, most likely during combat. Coarse brown powder dusted the inside of the chamber.
"Hold, ground crew. We better call someone out here to take a proper look. Meanwhile--"
It drew a sharp breath.
A docker accidentally ripped off one of the limbs of the mech from the scare of his life. The lights dimmed, then flared, then flickered. A trigger-fingered someone hit the alarm and it shrilled loudly, drowning out the yells that flooded the common channel. The high-pitched drone ceased as abruptly as it began. A shaky voice could be heard issuing from the control room.
"Ground crew...."
No one wanted to say it. It took Mou several tries to loosen his mechanical hands from the hatch, and several more seconds to find his voice again. Loosened clumps of the dust drifted down to where the detached limb had fallen. Mou stared at his display.
"Pilot's gone."
"The pilot was gone!"
Mou nodded and Alejo looked all the more baleful at the exclamation, so gleefully uttered. Clare retrieved his copy of the official report from near where the tether had coiled. He looked over it once more. "In any case, it's too bad that the vouchsafe wasn't intact. Else we'd have something to publicise. A Century-era combat unit, indeed!"
Alejo had by now turned very nearly purple. Mou hastily said, "What about the..."
"Do you think the pilot was a single or a double?"
Alejo's shoulders jerked up in a shrug. "Hard to say without vouchsafe data." Mou gave a low wave, as noncommittally as was possible. Clare looked from one to the other. "You two are a regular Rosencrantz and Gildernstern," he remarked thoughtfully. He wasn't particularly interested in returning to his office, and here was an ideal opportunity presenting itself. He invited them to lunch.
"It's koba again."
There were groans. Rho Stacey could be heard complaining.
Seated at a table with the officers the captain had managed to scrounge up, Mou found himself unable to stop babbling about bygone mechs. Keeping her head down, Alejo stabbed at her plate with no apparent intention to consume her portion of reconstituted protein. Mou was using his as a visual aid.
"Used to be that they'd have pilots who tested at a high level do it, but later they tried growing a brain and then dividing it up during some developmental stage, so, you'd have two separate combat units, each the mirror of the other, piloted by a pair of callibrated custom brains that were housed in two extensions that had all the pertinent nerves regrouped and relocated, so then when large-scale--"
Clare listened only perfunctorily, more interested in watching the reactions of the people around him. He was familiar as anyone could be with the story being told; at least, as far as he remembered them being told in reals. In the Hong Kong of his youth, that subtropical island transplanted into the steppe, Century War-themed productions had never been as popular as when he was growing up -- antiheroes with names like Lot Zwitzfolge-Ssuma, pilot of Die Blutgräfin, and Z. Ssuma, his literary reincarnation, merged seamlessly with a succession of legendary players and made up many a childhood pantheon. Worshipped, too, was the girl he could never touch, neither in love nor combat, the next-generation pilot of Gog and Magog, who shot him out of the stratosphere at the close of the period of direct mech-to-mech fighting.
"Doesn't sound so bad, does it?"
"I don't know, would I get twice the pay?"
Most of the people at the table laughed. Mou trailed off in the middle of a explanation about hexagramic arrays. Clare patted him on the back. "Well, you know what happened to Prosper del Prado."
"Those weird old names."
"If I were a girl my parents were going to call me Candyfloss Electra," Clare told Rho Stacey. When his own little girl was about to be born he had felt it, too, slumbering inside his blood, a deep, inexplicable and unabiding compulsion, to bestow upon his offspring a truly one-of-a-kind moniker. Like Tsang Elderyewberry.
Rho regarded the statement with skepticism. He couldn't help it; the captain was an experienced and competent officer who should have inspired a great deal of confidence in his people, and yet there was something excessively light-hearted about the man that made most people wary, and the station head, livid. Rho poked at his meal and absentmindedly scratched his arm. "The ghost would seem less ghostly if we could put a name to it," he remarked.
Mou began to lament the loss of the vouchsafe module. Clare shrugged, twirling his fork above his plate of spaghetti. "Even without a name it was a person once."
"It's just a ghost."
Alejo finally had had enough. "A corpse is a corpse, but a ghost walking around the station is something more. We ought to be treating it with respect."
"I agree that treating the dead as completely dead is inhumane, but treating them the same as the living is rather foolish," Clare said.
"I don't believe you believe in ghosts, sir," she countered.
At this, Clare set his coffee down and looked blankly past Rho's shoulder. "Oh," he said mildly. "it's rather that I find that I must. Particularly when one is staring at me."
Chairs bounced across the floor as every single person at their table, and some at several nearby tables, got to their feet. Breaking the heavy silence, Rho turned back to the captain with an aggrieved look. "That was unkind, sir."
Still in the middle of violently suppressing a laugh, Clare said, "We should be all right, as long as it's not a vengeful ghost. Why in heavens do you keep scratching your arm like that? You'll be plebotomizing yourself at that rate."
Rho frowned and rubbed his left forearm. He unbuttoned and rolled up the cuff and grew slightly pale.
"It's a pimple," Alejo said. Rho grew a shade paler. "It's a mosquito bite," he said shakily.
A mosquito! Instantly a crowd appeared around him, surging like waves, cresting with questions. "Now, now," Clare said, perturbed, "you all know there can be nothing bigger on this station than common mites--"
"That's not true," Rho squeaked out, looking as if he were about to faint, "a few years back there was this station that had a rat living on board."
The effect was the same as if he had, in all seriousness, said he'd seen an elephant crawl out of a soup bowl.
"Rho Stacey, you're full of shit."
"Try bathing!"
"I've been summonsed," said Clare with regret as alternate theories, accusations and counteraccusations started to fly in earnest. He glanced at his pager and sighed. No one paid the captain any mind as he made his excuses; Rho battled his way through jeers in a cold sweat. Clare gave him a helping hand, even a few words of advice. But to the station head he simply had this to say: "Everyone's spooked." A transparent joke that might have gotten laughs under usual circumstances had elicited nothing more than a couple of strained smiles and expressions that, directed at any lesser officer, would have been cause to fear an imminent mutiny. Clare handed the station head a report that said the same thing using more elaborate terminology and stood at ease. Sakhalin ignored the celofax viewer and turned to him with a frosty glare.
"Already I'm hearing rumors that you're selling ghost-repellent to the officers and personnel. That true?"
Clare was taken aback. "Hardly. Just regular old-fashioned barter, nothing out of the ordinary. And besides someone else has already got the crew cornered."
Sakhalin lifted a disdainful brow.
"Cllarrissa Allan over in Processing Two is hucking handmade charms, claiming her great-great-something was a Daoist master," Clare explained. It really was such an excellent angle; it irked him that he hadn't thought of it first.
"Do you really believe in this nonsense?"
"At this very moment there's someone walking around convinced that he's been bitten by a mosquito. Can you imagine! I certainly can't begrudge the existence of any less fantastic thing."
Sakhalin snorted and scanned the report and tossed it to one end of his desk. "Yet you can't bring yourself to mention the obvious."
"But as I see it, sir -- if keeping up discipline and morale becomes a serious problem, my mother once let it slip that my great-aunt's cousin's son-in-law is friends with an exellent exorcist." he said. It occured to Tsang Claremont Yew-lan, not for the first time, that the station head was quite lucky to have a second officer as well-connected as he. "I could make some calls and see if she's available for a remote consultation. Shouldn't be too difficult to arrange."
The station head very carefully folded his hands on a sheaf of celofax. "Mr. Tsang."
"Sir."
"Get out of my office."
Gathering up his personal effects, Clare went away suffused with the feeling one only gets from having completed a good day's work.
The workday was not going nearly as well for Rho Stacey. His arm itched and his entire life seemed to be unraveling. It was as a child, growing up in one of the posh microdomes on the steppes, that he had slowly suffered the realization that a million things and more were alive just outside the metal and plastic. Even though he had always been at the top of every class, he had been deemed unfit for any kind of planetside duties. He was normally about as happy as could be inside the filtered, purified atmosphere of the station.
But now a mosquito -- the evidence of its existing was festering on his very person -- this was a thousand times worse than a ghost. He stumbled along a quiet stretch of the walkway that led to the infirmary. He shivered. That the mosquito might be swimming through the same air as he was breathing at that moment was a thought so much more hideous than anything he could conjure up about the ghost.
The ghost.
At that moment his entire body seized up; he was petrified. But his arm stubbornly continued to itch. His face ran hot and cold and his fingers tingled. The ghost made no move. The arm itched relentlessly. Rho didn't dare break eye contact. The ghost did not move. Rho couldn't bear it. Slowly his left hand crept up, and up. It inched its way up past the gold insignia on his uniform toward the swelling. The ghost didn't move. The left hand scratched furtively and futilely at the layers of cloth, compounding the dreadful writhing the itch. Still the ghost did not move. The scratching grew louder, and effective. Awash in false bliss, Rho relaxed his stance. Still the ghost did nothing but look at him with a lost expression. The worst momentarily appeased, Rho went flush with embarrassment. The hand abruptly dropped back to his side.
The ghost's mouth moved. There was hardly any sound. Rho chewed his tongue and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Soon the arm was starting to itch again, even worse than before. There skin was a radius of twisting and burning, emanating from an epicenter of hurt. An uncharitable feeling welled up in his gut. A ghost. A mosquito. What was the ghost of a long-dead mech pilot doing on a salvage station, anyway. "Headed home," the ghost repeated.
The statement of purpose was so quiet that Rho again doubted he had actually heard anything. He was frightened. But then the ghost said nothing more, only looked more sad. He felt bad again. As though he were being a jerk, the same as his crewmates back at the mess. He awkwardly shifted his weight. To say nothing of the itch possessing his arm, Rho Stacey was, in fact, supremely discomfitted. "Where's that?" he asked, for lack of anything else to say.
"Wuhan," the ghost replied.
"Wuhan?" Rho asked. The arm jerked. Earth! He thought he saw the ghost nod. Astonishment rose over Rho Stacey in a wave, aggravating the itch to terrible heights. The scratching resumed. "That's on Earth," he said. The ghost's expression grew even more downcast.
"Which isn't all that far," Rho added awkwardly. To give his hands something to do other than destroying epidermal nerves, Rho started to sketch wavy-curly physics in the air. Calculations galloped from his fingertips to his brain and back. His arm was on fire. His very nose was beginning to smolder. He was getting light-headed. Rho suddenly felt, without the shadow of a doubt, extrememly silly. He coughed and shuffled from foot to foot and gestured and pointed.
"Only some thirty clicks away."
The ghost nodded a little. Its smile was concave. Rho fell down in a dead faint.
So it was always some emergency or another at the salvage station. This time the report came in the person of a officer of the Watch. Clare paused in reviewing Rho Stacey's medical evaluation and looked up, his face completely impassive as the station head received the unfortunate messenger.
"It's disappeared, sir. It's gone. There's nothing in the hold."
Clare immediately honed in, with the greatest of detached, professional interest, on the small vein that popped up on a corner of the station head's forehead.
Into the everblack beyond the station there sounded no scream, no cry, no yell. There most certainly was no hastily muffled laugh.
- - - - - - - - -
The office seen through the open door was empty, save for man whose face would have been much improved with a decent growth of beard, and on whose bony knees rested a broken celofax viewer, recently forcefully bent into a curious quadrangle.
Though many years and hereditary versions lay behind him Sakhalin had never concerned himself with vanished landscapes of the mind; of late, the absolutely infuriating mindsets of his subordinates occupied him more than was seemly. There was no one on the station like him, now more than ever. His station was in chaos. Sakhalin roared, he fumed, he sat in a darkened office in a self-imposed sulk, but the lights had dimmed with the passing of day. There was no erudite babbling to keep him from dozing off in his chair. Sahkalin's eyelids fluttered and drooped like malformed wings.
An unfamiliar sound reached his ears. A threadbare note, low one moment and high the next, and then low again. Sahkalin increased his efforts at keeping his eyes open. A delicate angular thing bound on an erratic course floated toward him. It set down on his wrist and glided over the knob of bone.
The mosquito was larger than he would have expected. It seemed to him dusted in black and light grey, rather than striped, supported by illuminated filaments that bent into arcs under the weight of what seemed, to him, so inconsequentially small. But this was the creature that might have felled a giant -- suddenly he did not know. It broke the skin. Fury rose up in him; he decided to strike. But the breach did not quite hurt -- a curious sensation. Sahkalin watched it draw. It only lingered for the lenght of a breath then took to the air again. A feeling that he could not immediately name misted before his eyes and dried itself up, for lack of reciprocity. The mosquito settled again to feed, and loneliness too, on the heels of that evanescent feeling, evaporated.
It left a trace of powder on his palm; in the air, motes and rust.
the end