Snippet #1371008

Ghostship: may refer to a fictional haunted ship, or one found adrift with its entire crew either missing or dead, or one which has been decommissioned but not yet scrapped.

Examples

The Mary Celeste, found in 1872, still sea worthy and under sail in the Atlantic ocean, heading for the strait of Gibraltar . Her cargo was intact, all of the crew’s possessions were accounted for and she still had six month’s worth of food onboard but her crew was no where to be found.

The Carrol A. Deering, found run aground in 1921, abandoned after it was sighted three days earlier with a “milling” crew. The ship’s log, navigation equipment, crew’s belongings and two lifeboats were missing. The galley contained food halfway through preparation for a meal.

The Baychimo, abandoned in an ice field in 1931, she was freed by a storm. Her owners decided not to recover her, believing that she would sink during the rough winter weather. She did not sink however and was reported over the following four decades, with several boardings but unsalvageable each time. She was last seen in 1969. Fate unknown.

The MV Joyita, found adrift but heavily listing in 1955. All twenty-five crew and passengers were missing, along with three liferafts and the lower decks were flooded. The hull was found to be sound and the flooding due to a broken pipe. However she was lined with cork, making her almost unsinkable and making a voluntary abandonment by the crew senseless.



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The Dancer moved as gracefully as her name implied, as she travel through the empty and cold blackness between solar systems. Her white paint and red lettering glowed slightly, in the light of distant stars, as her hull wrapped lovingly around jet-black cargo pods. Running lights flashed down her sides, mingling with the beams of light issuing from her windows and portholes. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

Captain Theo walked lightly on the decking of his cabin, thanks to the gravity plates (which lined most the decks on the Dancer), which pulled with a force one-half that of gravity on the human homeworld of Earth. That was the setting he like, the plates out in the hallways were always set to two-thirds Earth gravity. Of course they had problems, mostly because they were cheap compared with a shipwide magnetic field generators or the like. Thaddus always seemed to be replacing plates here or there, when they burned out or just stopped working.

The digital clock above his bunk read fourteen-ten hundred hours, which meant it was feeding time for the mini-menagerie he kept in his cabin and the one next door, which he had taken over for his cold weather collection. The cabin was filled with hungry chattering and the sounds of small animals eating. He moved around the walls, a large plate of chopped up fruits, veggies and raw meat. At each of the cages, he would drop a morsel in and smile as the creature (or plant) would strike at the food.

There were also several dishes on the floor, each filled for one of the medium sized creatures he let roam around the ship. The largest of theses was an Ezrain Muscle Cat, a six-legged predator which resembles a Bengal cat, only gray in color, strips as well as spots and as big as a good sized dog. Luckily, like all of the creatures onboard, it’s tame enough not to go hunting the crew or any of the other animals.

As the last of the food was placed in the cages and a large, bright red and yellow monitor lizard-like reptile named Rex came through the open hatch, Theo’s personal computer terminal started to chime. It was connected to the ship’s scanners and supposed to alert him whenever the passive, long range sweeps found another ship. He had been aboard a ship taken by pirates before (luckily they just wanted the cargo) and vowed his ship would never be taken by ambush.

Pulling on a light blue tee shirt, which had bold black letters covering the front, declaring that “It’s Better In Low Grav”, the captain of Dancer tapped a key on the terminal and headed for the bridge.