You ever had a piece of alien technology that may, or may not, be compatible with your biology start mucking around with your molecules? No, well lah-di-dah, aren't you lucky? Round these parts, we have a name for that, Tuesday. Or as Jenel prefers to call it, after a bit of a grumble “you bloody well did it again didn’t you?”

She never really had much patience for my nonsense, probably because it usually became her problem in short order.

In case you were curious what the aforementioned scenario feels like, you know that feeling when your foot falls asleep? Yeah, nothing like that, but it does give your limbs the same goofy noodle feeling. Sensation wise it’s like licking a live battery, from a solar-powered starship, (yes they exist. Hippies happen everywhere, and while their travel routes are limited by solar range there are a lot of them, They normally find some planet out in the arse end of nowhere and start up some kind of communes, where they raise animals they’ll never eat, practice yoga, and go around making lots more little hippies. They pay a fortune for their Quinoa, too.) As I was saying, it’s like you somehow licked that battery with your whole body.

It only gets worse for you when you start passing through something too, it’s like your molecules know they aren’t supposed to be there and try to rectify the situation as fast as possible, and with great prejudice. So next thing I knew, there I was getting spat out at the far side of the door and into the ship hard enough to be glad there were no walls in range. Death by Wylie Coyote’ing into a wall was definitely not on my to-do list. (RIP Eileen, death by cartoon physics, now there’s an obituary worth reading, I could get a goofy holler, or a Wilhelm scream written on my headstone.)

I got to my feet, and as I moved the lights throughout the disused bays flickered to life ahead of me, or at least a line of them did. The rest of the deck stayed dark. “Yeah, that’s not creepy at all” I muttered, as I did the one thing umpteen gazillion horror vids had told me never to do. I started to follow the trail, keeping a weather eye on the dark bits, of course. Which proved despite my actions there was still a hint of a brain in there somewhere, not much of one like. But it has to be better than none.

Usually by now I’d be pondering some music, but in cases where there are potentially things that could kill you, traps included, it was generally considered a good idea to leave your hearing apparatus unoccupied. Could save you from being eaten. Because, contrary to popular belief, there are creatures that can survive the void. They aren’t the kind of things you wanna meet, mind you, but they are there.

Typically, they result in discrete little messages to the proper authorities, who then lose them in case some genius takes it into their heads to go on a rescue mission, which would often go missing itself, and you get the idea. Basically, if it’s living out here, odds are very good that it will make its purpose in life to ensure that you aren’t. Don’t get near it. Don’t poke it with a stick to see what it does. (Because what it does is maul people who poke it with sticks.) Do not attempt to talk to it, in case it notices you’re there. You don’t want things like that noticing you. This is one of the ten golden rules of space-faring. We’ll get to the rest as time goes on, I’m sure. After all I break the damn things on a regular basis, and no before you ask, no that is not what happened to most of my organic bits, alright. (Only my left hand, but let’s not talk about that, alright?)

“What the hell are you doing?” Jenel whined in my headset. “Even a turkey is sometimes smart enough not to follow bait, get the hell outta there.”

“Umm, I hate to agree with Jenel and all, but I’ve seen enough of those movies of yours to say this is a really bad idea.”

“Nara, honey, when in the entire time we’ve been travelling together have I ever given you the impression that I was doing the smart thing? If I did it now, odds are you or Jenel would die of shock. Now hush, if there’s something down here I’d prefer to hear it before it tries to eat my face, alright?” That seemed to work, as my headset went silent, that or signal had dropped again. They never were the most reliable pieces of kit we had on inventory. We would have upgraded years ago, but, yeah, you know.

I kept following the light the whole time, not in the least reassured when some of the light fixtures flickered from lack of maintenance, especially not on a junction. “OK already, I take the hint, this place is creepy, like Elvira’s male fans level creepy, now can we please just get all the lights?” Apparently the answer to that was a definite no, as the dark corridors remained dark. So either all the other bulbs, but these had blown. (I don’t believe in coincidences that big, but of the options, that had to be my favourite.) Or something out there with access to the ship, and intelligence enough to lay a trail and test the lights had been gradually swapping out the light strips along this trail, in order to act as bait, (I really didn’t like this possibility, but given my luck, it did seem the most likely reason. Which showed how pessimistic I was, and why I was still alive, pessimism and not dying horribly go together great.)

With options like those, who needed enemies? I carefully reached down to my tool belt, and pulled out my Splatter. (Once over people had used other weapons in space, until they figured out that when you’re floating through space in a tin can with one way shields you do not wanna be holding anything that goes bang, zap, whoomph, or scworch. The last one’s burning plasma, by the way, plasma weapons were by and large the only things shorter lived than their users. Which given an operational lifespan of less than a year really is saying something.)

Then it was time, the trail led to a little cabin, nothing remarkable, just a plain old room. With one minor difference, that was about to become major. The sound of a building charge, I tried to get the hell outta there, then ZAP, everything went dark.