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Archie Phoenix

"The Haunting on Deck 10"

One by one, Archie returned his larger engineering tools to their box. All the water that had spilled onto Deck 10 was drained, the wall panels were bolted over the circuitry which had shorted out when contacted by the flood, and power was restored to the local coupling. A check of the crew logs revealed that this section of circuitry had been under routine repairs when the crewmen were ordered to sweep the decks for any equipment that could have been responsible for the strange dreams. The repair crew, in their haste, did not close the exposed circuits nor restore the wall panels. It was the kind of mistake crewmen were liable to make, and the flooding caused by the water conduit puncture turned this mistake into deckwide power fluctuations. All was well now, though. Thanks to Archie, the equipment on Deck 10 was once again stable and the deck once again dry.

 

Now, to the brig.

 

The ‘dream crisis’ had given Archie a few hours’ respite from his Aether debriefing/interrogation/inquisition. Now that things were settled down, he would have to answer for his unwitting creation of the Samantha-Kent construct. With a sigh, he closed his tool box, picked it up, and began his trek through the mazelike industrial corridors back to the turbolift.

 

Halfway through corridor S8, he stopped. At first, he wasn’t entirely sure why he stopped. Aside from his reluctance to go to the brig -- a reluctance which was by no means overwhelming -- he could think of no good reason to stop in the middle of corridor S8 on Deck 10. He looked over his shoulder, back the way he had come. Had he forgotten something while repairing the fried circuitry? No, he was sure he hadn’t, and he was sure that this possibility hadn’t stopped him. He shrugged and continued walking; it mustn’t have been that important.

 

“… aaaar … chiiieeeee ….”

 

This time, Archie knew exactly why he stopped. He’d just heard a voice behind him. A female voice. He whirled around and saw, predictably, nothing in the corridor formerly behind him. The voice had been distant and hollow, as if the corridors were cavernous and the voice had echoed throughout them. Yet it had somehow seemed so near. The voice seemed familiar, though his mind found it hard to pinpoint. The image of a featureless cube with a ring inside kept forming in his mind.

 

“ heeheehee “

 

Archie backed up slowly, glancing around corridor S8. He’d heard stories in the Academy, stories that had circulated among the aspiring engineers, stories of sections of ships being haunted by the spirits of crew that had perished on board, usually in … messy fashion. They were always the most isolated and stifling sections of the ships -- industrial corridors, maintenance tubes, weapon bays -- areas where the spirits would not be regularly disturbed. On the rare occasion that they were disturbed, however … watch out.

 

Archie turned and hastened toward the turbolift. The lights seemed to dim a bit with every step he took; the uncomfortable sense that someone was nearby grew. His intimate knowledge of the industrial corridors, which he had studied thoroughly his first few months on Arcadia, seemed to be waning. At a few intersections, he was uncertain which way to take, but every time his alarm that he had gotten lost peaked, he found a familiar corridor.

 

Eventually, he found his way back to the turbolift. The feeling of dread vanished immediately when he stepped aboard the summoned and quite appropriately named lift. As the lift sped its occupant back to engineering, Archie looked back at his flight from the industrial section and wondered why he’d felt so fearful. While the voice he’d heard was strange -- and intriguing -- it now seemed hardly a cause for the panic that he’d experienced. His reaction seemed even silly now, so when a small but prominent part of his brain urged him not to mention the whole incident to anyone, he was too eager to comply.

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