PROLOGUE

Captain Dale had heard somewhere that pirates on ancient sailing vessels were generally a pretty lazy lot. On ordinary days, when there was no fighting to do, there were always more than enough hands available to perform the rudimentary daily duties of adjusting the sails, repairing broken equipment, or scrubbing the deck. Those sorts of things might account for a mere half-hour of work per day for each individual cutthroat. If they wanted to, they could scale the rigging and eagerly scan the horizon for prey, but there were probably other cutthroats already assigned to that task, so most of the time, they could just laze about. The only reason they had so many extra hands on board were for those rare occasions when they actually engaged in piracy. On these occasions they became an unstoppable swarm of fighters that could easily overwhelm the much smaller crews that manned ships engaged in legitimate enterprise and therefore ran on more economic principles. For pirates, running a tight ship on a regular day meant that the foreman or taskmaster made sure that no one got too lazy, shirking the mere half-hour of work they were required to put in, or merely pretending to work during their half-hour shift and letting others do the heavy lifting.

Modern space-faring pirates were quite a bit different from their ancient predecessors, however. They tended to zip around in fast, tiny craft, crewed by a minimal number of outlaws, maybe five or six, and try to slip in close to a larger vessel, force their way aboard, and demand some sort of ransom. These foolhardy attempts at robbery could usually be warded off by minimalist anti-piracy measures, however, such as a couple of low-yield rockets or other projectiles, easily procured through military surplus stores.

Captain Dale had paused for a moment to peer out through a small porthole at the unusual stellar phenomenon his ship was passing—some sort of gas cloud, he thought, though he did not understand why it appeared to be emitting light. His navigator, Franklyn, would know the technical term for this sort of thing.

Whatever it was, it was beautiful in a terrifying sort of way, ranging from an inky blackness darker than space itself to brilliant reds and auburns. Some people would have called them “autumn” colours, but others would call them ‘angry’ or ‘hellish’. An artist might say that it looked like a frozen snap-shot of Perdition.

Dale had once heard a fire-and-brimstone preacher—in the tradition of the Neuvo Puritan Movement—paint a lurid portrait of hell as an alternate universe filled from one end to the other with nothing but swirling flames—a place where no escape from the conflagration was possible even if one found a ship and fled for a trillion years—a place where the damned would call upon the very burning aethers themselves to hide them from the even more fearsome and piercing Eyes of the Lord. If such a thing were true, it might look something like this. Dale’s eyes traced the swirling gases, following the whorls and eddies. Without too much imagination, ghoulish faces could be found there, conjured up by the mind’s eye. The Neuvo-Puritan Movement had begun on Earth shortly after contact was reestablished with the original Colonies and the religious fervor of those hardy adventurers had been brought back to the homeplanet. It had mostly run its course by this point, but the pictures those energetic preachers had painted with their words would no doubt stick in many people’s brains and keep a lot of them—and many of their descendents—on the pleasant straight-and-narrow path for many generations.

Captain Dale raised a hand to the porthole and rubbed a finger along the glass. It was grimey and damp—or perhaps it was oil. He could not tell. He decided he would have to take another look at the stellar phenomenon later, through a larger and cleaner window in a tidier part of the ship. At the moment, he was down in the ship’s guts. Turning away from the porthole, he picked up his guitar case, which he had set down for a moment, and continued on his way toward one of the steerage rooms meant for odds and ends, which Dale had discovered possessed remarkable acoustic properties. It was very late, but this was too good an opportunity to let pass. The ship's engines were off for a few hours, as the Pater Noster performed a passive ballistic maneuver. Often he played in the galley to amuse the crew, but he wanted to compose something, and the echoey ambiance of a partially empty steerage room often gave the notes he strummed on his guitar that extra spark of magic he needed for inspiration. He had an idea for a comedic-sounding piece with strangely jarring and sudden pauses that would pique the listener’s interest, wondering if (or how) the music would proceed.

It was dark down here—everything was drab and corroded-looking. As he walked, Dale’s shoes started to stick to the deck plating and made kwawk-kwawk sounds as the soles peeled off the floor. He had walked through a few patches like this already. He stopped, looked at the bottom of his shoe, then moved his foot around experimentally on the floor to see if the stickiness had become pervasive or was restricted to just one spot. It seemed to be everywhere. He had noticed the condition of the floors in this part of the ship before, but it seemed to be getting worse lately.

I should assign everyone to a half-hour of scrubbing the deck around here, Dale thought. Get those lazy bums off their asses. Might bring some of them back to their roots!

He was not really being fair toward them, though. His crew was composed of hard workers, something that became eminently apparent whenever the Pater Noster put in to port, but even when they were between destinations there was much to do—cargo to arrange and sort, manifests to be checked, shipping containers with controlled environments to be maintained, etc. and the crew got everything done in an efficient manner, following the work plans put together by Alberts, the ship’s foreman.

Dale knew little about the backgrounds of most of his crew—except Franklyn, of course. He and his navigator had been at college together on Earth, and somehow Franklyn had trailed along with him ever since then. The rest of the crew were a mixed bag, though. He knew a few of them had criminal records; and he had good reason to suspect that a few of the others had very specific reasons why they had signed on with a long-hauler that rarely put in to port at more civilized areas where records and databases were kept. Some of them would not even disembark when the Pater Noster put in at certain places, presumably to prevent their faces from being scanned and entered into facial recognition software. In spite of this, all of them were hard workers—smart, too. You have to be to work in space.

Dale was pretty sure Franklyn’s assistant navigator, Feorn, was hiding something. The young man was almost as skilled as Franklyn, but somehow did not have his navigator’s licence. It would be very easy for him to get accredited at any of the larger ports they visited. All he would have to do would be to pay a small fee for the exam and administration services, get his biometrics scanned into a database, get his blackbox and guild tattoos, and that would be that—but he never did. The guild tattoos would barely be noticeable alongside the ones that were already decorating his arms, and someone with that much ink probably did not have any religious objections to having a black box implant injected into his neck. His innocent-looking face clashed significantly with the tattoos he bore. Captain Dale had encouraged Feorn to go ahead and get accredited once or twice, as it would help with the ship’s insurance ratings, but the young man had been non-committal in his responses and  eventually Franklyn had strongly intimated that he should probably stop bringing it up. His mind occupied by other things, Dale had not noticed how uncomfortable it made the young man.

Feorn was obviously well-educated, probably from one of the Swedish schools, which normally would have put him on track for a lucrative career as a navigator on a highliner, or a military boat, or even a private yacht. There was a lot of political activism at those schools though, and occasionally a student would get fired up with righteous indignation, abandon his studies, and buy passage into foreign parts hoping to join some noble cause or help the oppressed—only to discover he had been roped into a scam or some illegal enterprise or even into piracy.

Dale did not know exactly what Feorn’s story was, but he suspected it might be something like that. He doubted a lot of Scandinavian kids festooned their arms with human-headed serpents.

Dale’s thoughts were torn back to the deplorable condition of the decking in this part of the ship.  What even is the point of scrubbing the deck on an old-fashioned sailing ship, anyway, he wondered. Did mold grow on it? Barnacles? Did it get caked with salt?

His feet still kwawk-kwawking along the deck, Dale passed the cryo-stasis tubes of the passengers the Pater Noster had been carrying for a few months—a bunch of scientists, or one scientist at least, and his research team. Normally, Dale would have refused to take passengers, but the American university they worked for had paid three times the market price to transport them and their things. Their equipment and supplies were actually in the steerage room to which Dale was headed. Apparently, they had been studying creepy-crawlies on some nameless ice-planet for nearly a year and were headed back to Earth. Dale had nearly pulled out of the deal when he discovered that the scientists were transporting organic samples, but he was reassured when he heard that there had been a human colony on the ice planet for about thirty years, disease-free, and the samples that were being brought onto his ship were relegated to a single small cryo-stasis cooler. The rest of their research was stored digitally. Going by the book, he had made sure all the paperwork and government forms for transporting alien organics were filled out, and ensured that all the appropriate protocols were followed. He did not want to be responsible for transporting some new form of flesh-eating disease back to Earth.

In the years since the human race had taken to space, an almost uncountable number of new flesh-eating diseases had appeared, picked up by colonists on some new world or another. They varied in potency and lethality, but more than one had resulted in multi-planetary pandemics. Some of the earliest colonies were believed to have been completely wiped out by new and novel forms of flesh eating disease. Centuries after some of those first Colonists had ventured out into space, new explorers from Earth had attempted to find them and found nothing but ruins and cryptic messages.

All of these new forms of flesh eating disease were caused by previously unencountered alien microfauna and microflora, or other microscopic or near-microscopic critters that defied categorization. It was as if on every other new world, some tiny form of life was just waiting to dive into the human body, defy the body’s best efforts to defend itself, and simply start consuming. There were forms of flesh-eating disease that ate the eyes, the brain, the skin, the bones, the muscles, the endocrine system, the digestive tract, and a handful that were undiscriminating in their appetites. As a result, the human race had learned protocols to survive when some new threat of this sort appeared. Government interventions had not helped at all, of course. It was ordinary people who had developed the intuitions and protocols that were now almost universally recognized, even among those who remained planet-bound on Earth.

Hearing something, Dale looked down a cross-corridor and caught sight of Onobwe hastily concealing something behind an access panel. Onobwe was one of Albert’s sub-foremen and also piloted the landing vehicle. With a jerk, the man turned to stare at him and froze, his eyes wide in startlement. Dale did not care about whatever Onobwe was hiding. The crew sometimes hid liquor and other “contraband” down here in rarely-frequented places. They might be hard workers, but many of them were not above snatching anything tempting that was left in easily-accessible places. It was probably a bottle of vodka. Dale found Onobwe’s startlement somewhat endearing.

He called out, “You know, Alberts says he lost a bottle of Jack down here years ago. Fell down into the wall somewhere. It’s yours if you can find it.”

Onobwe’s eyes darted back and forth, between the Captain and whatever he was hiding. He almost looked like he was afraid whatever it was would jump out at him.

Dale did an exaggerated slow walk through the remainder of the intersection, mocking Onobwe’s awkwardness. Quickly forgetting about what he had just seen, and leaving the other man to his own business, Dale continued on his way toward the steerage room. Passing by another small port-hole, his face was momentarily bathed in the red light of the stellar phenomenon they were passing. The light streamed into the corridor like a beam, bouncing off moisture and particulates in the air. Turning back to look at it, Dale almost convinced himself it could be light from a fire or a sunset.

Some people were superstitious about unusual stellar phenomena of this sort. Vague and incomplete reports had come to Earth from the earliest Colonies, warning about demons and inhuman creatures that appeared near stellar anomalies, looking for prey to devour. Of course, when later colonists had set out from Earth centuries later, they found nothing of the sort—no demons, no monsters, no eldritch gods with gaping maws and glowing eyes. Many Earth-people believed that the early Colonists had sent these fantastical stories back to Earth in an attempt to terrify those left behind and discourage further expeditions, allowing the first Colonists to gobble up the resources on all the best new worlds without competition. Later colonists had found plenty of creepy-crawlies and alien beasties (and many new forms of flesh eating disease), but nothing even remotely like what the earlier Colonists had warned about. Some claimed that this was because the earlier Colonists had ‘cleared the way’, but most Earth-people scoffed at this idea.

Coming to the steerage room’s hatch, Captain Dale pulled his security card out of his shirt and flashed it in front of the lock. The hatch slid open for him and the auto-lighting in the steerage room flickered on. A bunch of the lights were broken, so most of the room was left in darkness. There was a work-light hanging from the ceiling above an aluminum table and chair. This was Dale’s destination. He entered, closed the hatch behind him, and went over to the worklight to switch it on. It buzzed and a warm circle of light appeared on the floor and table.

Dale scowled at the light, concerned that the buzz it emitted would be too distracting, but he realized after a moment that it was not that bad. He took out his guitar and repositioned the chair so that it was right underneath the work light. He tuned the instrument, then realized he did not have a foot-rest. He considered using his guitar case, but then noticed a busted tool-box next to the wall of the steerage room that looked like it would do nicely. On his way over to it, his foot struck a particularly sticky patch on the floor. Simultaneously, something wet dripped onto his face.

Dale grunted then exclaimed, “What the blazes is this!?”

With a particularly loud kwawk, Dale peeled his shoe off the ground and looked upward, trying to get some clue as to what had dripped onto his face. It was too dark to see anything between the structural beams and pipes above him, however.

Taking a step back, Dale looked back and forth between the sticky patch on the floor and the darkness above, trying to decide if this was something that had to be dealt with immediately. Leaking fluids on a spacecraft could mean trouble. He wiped the liquid off his face and gave it a sniff, but he could not identify it. After a moment, he decided it could wait. He would send someone down here later to check it out—probably Constantini, the ship’s technician.

After retrieving the busted toolbox, Dale finally took a seat and began to strum a few cords. He forgot all about sticky floors, shady crewmembers, gas-clouds, creepy-crawlies, eldritch gods,  scientists, and everything else he had to worry about as ship’s captain, and began to compose. The piece began to take shape. It was jaunty, with a strange darkness underlying it—almost as if it reflected the lives of deep space long haulers—a life where it was important to keep up a cheerful attitude in the face of the terrifying emptiness that surrounded you most of the time; a life where death could leap upon you without a moment’s notice. Centuries of development in space-travelling technology had never altered the reality that when nothing but a thin wall of metal separated you from the deathly vacuum of space, the smallest of errors could lead to instantaneous death.

After a while, some movement caught  Captain Dale’s eye and he looked up to see someone passing by through the large window in the hatch to the steerage room. Whoever it was, he was wearing a pressure suit for some reason—very odd for the interior of the ship. He was walking funny too, sort-of robotically, only taking a few inches with each step. Perhaps whoever it was was dragging or pushing something.

The fellow in the pressure suit stopped and turned toward him, perhaps attracted by the light above Dale’s head. Through the glass of the man’s helmet, Dale saw that it was Constantini. He felt some curiosity to find out what the technician was doing, but suppressed it and gave the man a brief wave. Constantini kept his own schedule and always had numerous personal projects on the go, very few of which he described in very great detail in his work reports; but he had always kept the ship running smoothly.

Dale could not see the man’s facial expression very well through the glass of his helmet, but Constantini raised his arm and waved back. It was a strange wave, though, vaguely puppet-like in manner, his wrist bending like a snake. The movement reminded Dale of something, but he could not place it at first. Then he realized it resembled the movement he had once seen of a man wearing a power-suit, where his natural body motions were supplemented by pneumatic jacks.

Constantini turned away and resumed his unusual gait, disappearing from the window.

Dale shrugged and went back to his music. A few minutes later, the data pad in his pocket  chirped a notification at him. Constantini had used his security card to open an airlock—nothing unusual. Dale had turned off low-priority notifications, but someone opening an airlock was significant enough to come through anyway.

Captain Dale tried a few variations and transitions with his new piece, and started to feel like it was headed in a good direction. He was disturbed a few times by faint sounds he presumed to be rats scuttling around the dark corners of the room. One of the crates in this room had a power cable running from it to a power hook-up in the centre of the room. This crate, a cryo-stasis cooler, contained the frozen samples which the passengers were transporting from the ice planet. The thing was made of metal and ceramics. No rats were getting in there.

In the back of his mind, Dale decided it might be a good idea to have the ship fumigated and possibly irradiated some time soon, depending on local prices at the next port and whatever profits he had managed to accumulate.

He was also disturbed once or twice by a strange sound coming from the vents, which he had been hearing a lot recently. It was a sort of strange warbling cackle, almost witch-like, which he was pretty sure was being caused by a squeaky hinge somewhere in the air distribution system. He had to laugh whenever he heard it, because sometimes it really did sound like a cackling witch or a gibbering goblin. Everyone had been complaining about it, but so far tracking down the squeaky hinge had proven impossible. Sound carried very well on the Pater Noster. It was something of a design flaw.

His data pad chirped at him again, and with a sigh Captain Dale picked it up to see what it was about. It was a video call from Alberts in the CIC, or Command Information Centre. Alberts must have forced the call through to him despite his notifications being turned off. Dale accepted the video request. “What is it, Alberts?”

The foreman responded in his soft drawl, “Hey, Captain. Uuuh…” Alberts dragged out the uuuh so long that Dale almost began to get irritated. “Constantini is extravehicular, and he’s not responding to any of our attempts to contact him.”

“Does he look like he’s in trouble?” Dale asked.

“Uh, no sir, but he appears to be doing something funky with the chemical fuel tanks. From the way he’s moving, I think he might be… inebriated.”

“You’re telling me he’s drunk?”

Alberts made an unsure motion with his head. “Well, I don’t know, sir. All I can tell you is what it looks like… and it looks like he’s drunk.”

“He went for a drunken space-walk?”

Alberts shrugged. “Like I said, that’s what it looks like.”

“What do you mean he looks drunk,” Dale demanded. “He’s in zero-g. It’s not like he’d be stumbling over his own feet. I can’t even imagine what that would look like.”

Alberts waffled. “Well, he’s, like, making overly deliberate motions with his arms.” Alberts tried to imitate the motion, without much success. He was sprawled on a chair in front of his workstation in the CIC, from which he often directed his work crews. From his workstation he could access many cameras located all over the exterior of the Pater Noster and its masts. One of these cameras was locked on Constantini, far to the aft, next to the ship’s chemical fuel tanks. Alberts leaned in toward the small, square black-and-white image on his workstation that showed the man. Superimposed on top of the image were the biometric readings being transmitted by Constantini’s pressure suit.

“He might be fine, Captain,” Alberts continued. “It’s just kinda weird. Suit says he’s OK—O², CO², nitrogen. He’s not hypoxic. I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t  have bothered you.”

Dale stood up, put his data pad down on the table, and started to put his guitar away. “No, it’s all right, Alberts. I’ll come check it out. Dale out.”

After snapping the guitar case closed, Dale squirrelled away his data pad, switched off the work light, then began moving toward the hatch.

Hearing a sound behind him, Dale turned and caught a brief glimpse of something enormous and inhuman hurling itself in his direction. He had no time to react. There was nothing he could do. There was a wet crunch as a boney spike pierced him through the chest. He would have screamed if he could, but the only sound he could make was a sort-of cough. He would have fallen, but the spike held him up, at least at first. The next moment a screaming mass of tentacles and writhing flesh followed after the spike and engulfed him. Then together Dale and the thing fell to the ground. He felt the thing tear right into his body, right into his mind. The thing howled piercingly.

Starting from his arms, his skin began to fly off his body in pieces and strips. Dale’s body shuddered for a few moments, then lay still. The thing continued to burrow its way into him for a little bit, then it stopped, extricated itself, and half-crawled, half-slithered away into the darkness.

The flesh of Captain Dale’s body began to heave and boil, twisting into tortuous shapes with wriggling veins and writhing connective fibers. Bulbous shapes erupted out of the arms and legs. There were cracks and wet squishing sounds as the body changed. For a moment, it was completely unrecognizable as the remains of a human being, but then the process seemed to reverse itself.

Slowly the red, writhing mass pulled itself back into the shape of a man. Legs, arms, and head appeared, coated in smooth human skin. The clothes were mostly still intact, and clung wetly to the body.

When it had fully returned to human shape, it lay still again for a few moments, then its ribcage expanded as it took an enormous, wet-sounding breath. Suddenly it stood, but not like a man. The feet, which had erupted out of the shoes, seemed to stick to the floor somehow and the body rose like a board, or perhaps like a marionette—a marionette with Captain Dale’s face. His beard and hair were even the same, or nearly so—he was slick and dripping all over with red and clear liquids. This thing that looked like Captain Dale stood with a crooked posture, hips and shoulders contrapposto, with the arms held at weird angles. It turned toward the hatch. The head twitched a few times to the left, then it began to shamble toward the exit.