The Captains of Dangerous Toys and The White Lady were taking a well-deserved break in the Micro-Orbital. “So tell me your story. How the hell did you get out of it? I’ve been to too many funerals to expect a freight-ship like yours to survive the Intec Pirates.” There was a pause in the conversation. The Captain of The White Lady slowly responded, “This doesn’t go beyond us, right?”

Both Captains were from the Central Worlds, the vast amalgam that made up the space-faring galaxy. They shared many of the same hopes, desires, and problems. Whenever they could they teamed up to swap notes. The Captain of the Dangerous Toys used a scent as his name and preferred to go by his ships name whenever necessary. The Captain of the White Lady was simply known as ‘Lady’, more out of habit than any other reason. Dangerous Toys nodded his crest, “As usual.”

Lady took a deep breath and began. “I bought my ship from Humans and I got it cheap. No-one ever gave me a reason why the price was so low and the research I found was nonsense. You know what they’re like so I just took the deal. I hired a human Engineer because, well you know why. He told me I was brave to carry that name into space and when I asked him why he just laughed.”

She took a deep drink and stared into her memories. “It started as you would expect, except the human had hung strange icons around his quarters. I had to make him stop when he hung the decomposed corpse of one of his people over the door. I lost three men to the medbay before he explained it was simply a print, a tradition among his people. He then poisoned the food producers with something called ‘Pumpkin spice’. Honestly, I thought the creature had lost his mind.”

She took another drink. “Then the Intec arrived and I tried to run. The human was convinced that he could get us the speed and on a normal day he would have been right.” She looked darkly at Dangerous Toys and continued, “Now that they know we carry humans they only travel in pairs. They were waiting for us to run.” she smiled briefly, “ The first ship accidentally ran into an asteroid. Funny how often that happens around the humans, but the second one blew our engines before we knew it was there.”

Dangerous Toys nodded, “I’ve heard that tends to happen. But what happened next?”

Lady shrugged, “I don’t know exactly. The Engineer told me that we would be fine if I just let him work. He said he didn’t need weapons, just control of the ship systems. I gave him free rein and pulled the crew back into the lifeboats. I was ready to launch them the moment the Intec took the bridge. They never made it that far.” She reached into her sleeve and produced a data spike. “Let me show you what the surveillance caught.”

The video was less than perfect and something was interfering with the frame rate and the sound. Her Engineer was killing all the lights in the ship and instead, he was replacing them with an organic light source he called ‘candles’. Shadows flickered around the ship. He hi-jacked comms to play some dark human tune that filled the ship.

“I suspect he programmed it to create an echo of every sound made in the ship. I can’t prove it because the records are clean. Apparently, nothing happened according to the ship’s memory.”

A flash of white appeared briefly in the shadows, a humanoid shape that lingered for only a moment. Then the Intec began boarding and it disappeared. Throughout the video, only the flickering of candles and the human music filled the record until the screaming began. Again some flashes of a human shape, possibly something transparent and female were briefly visible but nothing more and never around long enough to be sure.

The lady finished her drink and ordered another. “I tried to analyse it of course but I found nothing. Some temperature shifts, some temporal disturbance but no cause, only effect. Every Intec pirate was found frozen with fear and very dead. Even the crew on their own ship had been hunted down but not a single physical injury. Still dead though.”

Dangerous Toys laughed, “Well that was at least a decent joke. I didn’t know you could kill the Intec with candles! Your Engineer has a sense of humour at least.”

Lady shook her crests, both major and minor. “My engineer demanded that we cut loose the Intec ship and leave it in space. He threw the bodies of the dead pirates into their hold and we fled the system. Now he won’t sleep with the lights off. I have just passed him into the care of the human authorities. They won’t tell me anything except that he will be looked after properly. His last words to me were worried, he said, “She likes you. Don’t ever change the name of this ship. Some days the barrier between the living and the dead is thin. What happened to the Intec will happen to you.”

She finished her drink and ordered another. “ I have read their stories. What if the humans didn’t come to space on their own? What if we fly with their dead behind them and ready to kill?”