~Etti V~
~Outside End's Port~
~The Gala Counter~
Someone came strolling in through the coatroom to displace thin sunlight issuing through the shuttered auto entry-door. Seydon paused from listening to Jaxton's background 'static'; Force power was chattering in unceasing tones somewhere in the dark shade at the small of his mind, sensitive to residual ripples playing off Jax's flesh in his effort to keep up against his weight-suit. Deck-plating trembled under his foot-falls and he could smell his exuding sweat with especially acrid detail. Seydon glanced from his data-slate.
The arrival was an overly thin crust of Kajain'sa'Nikto, red-scalped with heavily prominent scalp-ridges planed off by framing horns, bobbing a tremulous throat. He was dressed with spacer-jock breeches and an airy white shirt colourfully rubbed in blue-chalk, yellow sauce drips, and orange plaid stripes that had come off rusty grille-plating. The Nikto scratched at his throat-tubes, leaned forward against the soft obscura-smoke haze. He spotted Seydon, on his lonesome at a washed checkered-alluminum table, with a still full glass lying just out of his seated reach.
He shuttled forward and pushed past Cassidy and Ross at the bar counter, stealing a satellite high-chair to plop down opposite the Dunaan.
"Hmmn?"
"You drinking that?" The Nikto's voice was between bubbly and coarse.
"Planning on something like that."
"I don't got much for cash."
"That's a little sorry," Seydon smiled lightly.
"But I'm parched, you see."
"Yeah."
"And I'm at - "
The Dunaan held up his hand. "Just tell me your scheme, man."
Three flattened data-cred chips slid Seydon's away over the table, clinking off his well-glass. The Nikto grinned.
"Some handsome space-lanes, just off Atchorb. Can lead you right through the Thandon Nebula, untouched. Guarantee. Use 'em all the time~"
Seydon's smile brightened in the grime-shade. "...Do you know Captain Merrill?"
"Know him? Yeah! Any spacer worth their salt knows the Cap'n, man can make junker's dance! ...'Eard he's a Sensitive, though, so not all sure what to make of that."
"Well..." The Dunaan slid the data-creds back over to their owner. "He told me to be on the lookout for a thirsty Nikto offering to pay out your drink with faux space lanes that lead neat little circles round inside the Thandon."
"...Hell," Spat the con. "...But I got a mighty need for a sip. ...You one of them Levantines."
Wolf-eyes peered back with exacting intensity.
"So I hear you lot are always on the lookabout for trouble."
After a note of quiet, the Nikto coughed and rubbed over his neck-holes again, leaning on his thin waist and sharp elbows. "Now, maybe I've heard o'some trouble, between here and the lanes past Kamar."
Seydon's hand was on his well-glass, sliding it over. The Nikto loosed a squawk-note and reached to take hold, though he found the Dunaan's gloved fingers didn't budge. "...Oi."
"So."
"So what? Let me oil my voice and I'll tell you on about it."
"No."
"Oi."
"You won't be any thirstier when you finish divulging a little more."
The Nikto grumbled through his sigh but reneged his hand and leaned back to get his spine a little more comfort against the unyielding chair-back. "Right. Now, I don't have much truck with any fool story about ships and vessels and the like that some lots take to calling 'haunted.' Just ain't no such thing. Not in my experience. ...But there's been something persisting about Authority space for the better part of the last... century I want to say."
"Hmmmn."
"E'ry so often, few ships, flotilla, caravan, fleet exercise, the like, they go out to make a run from this place to that. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? ...Save they make the jump to lightspeed and that's the last you ever heard of 'em. Disappear for weeks straight. ...Then suddenly, comms. on any sympathetic world start picking up ghost-calls issuing out of Hyperspace. Garbled jams with voices too unreal. Patrols go out and... And they find their missing ships. ...Sorta.
"Destroyers tore apart like the Teeth of Horde bit into them. Bulk-freighters and their escorts savaged into oblivion. Just these clouds of vessel debris just idly floating along, bound to get swallowed up in some comet's tail or lost to a star. Nothing salvageable then. Patrols just high-tail the feth out of there to make their reports. It goes a few of those accounts 've been... leaked... to certain journalistic enterprises with eyes for sensational.
"It's standard search and rescue practice to send a few operators in hard-vac suits to go perusing through any vessel debris to seek out anything possibly missed in their sensor combs. Now, no one's rightly seen any of the cam-footage from these excursions. But it's supposedly ghastly stuff. Corridors rimed in hoarfrost and blood, marked out in symbols that move yet don't, shadows taking shape for a brief-sec 'fore you peer round and... nothing. Sometimes they find the dead: cased in torn out vac-suits, expressions all froze in terror. Rumoured they even pick up on echo-casts emitted by local comms: messages of confession, final moments, trying to comprehend what's happening."
"...Hmmmn..."
"Been four centuries of that going around, since the Sickness came and went. Authority's kept it all really hush-hush, but you can't keep a good tale like that from making the rounds. There's talk of a fuzzy pict-capture floating around on local extra-net: colossal warship, all barbed like an urchin, some real ancient make, a hulk. Says that's the Devil's Chariot. The real-unreal predator coming round to have its feast on whatever strays into its sight. Honest-to-feth ghost ship. ...Scariest part?"
Seydon observed the Nikto rub almost too tiredly at his skull-cap. "Last six months, twenty vessel flotilla's from across the CSA have gone missing. Three have turned up: blitzed into pieces only a handful across. The rest, feth knows. ...Maybe summat to do with Druckenwell. All those folk dying at once, that... That can't be any good for much of anything."
Finally, the spacer had his drink. The Nikto snatched up Seydon's well-glass a half-second after relinquishing his grasp, slamming back until the cup nearly chipped on his teeth. Seydon wasn't minding; he was calling up his data-slate.
kypioV1.22.87A
Connecting @: Ashla ([member="Rosa Gunn"])
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K: ...Said you were 'ghost hunting'. Ashla, what do you mean by that?