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+--- Thread: Tall Tales, Ghost Stories and Legends from the Sirius Sector (/showthread.php?tid=37186)
Tall Tales, Ghost Stories and Legends from the Sirius Sector - Talbott - 03-25-2010
Tale: The Wreck of the Yellow Rose
Teller: George Tex Austin, GMG Paramilitary
Now I know ya'll GMG vets have got some pretty hairy tales regarding apparitions and somesuch inside the Crow, but respectfully that ain't nuthin' compared to what I've got to tell. Ya'll have heard of the Texas Incident? Biggest dang disaster in the history of Sirius, I'd say. Buncha egghead Ageira types were holed up on some top-secret station on the outskirts of the system, fiddlin' about with things not intended to be fiddled with. Long story short, they blew themselves up. Smashed half the system in the process, created a giant radioactive nebula and spawned a black hole as the cherry on top. Every ship that wasn't in the shadow of a planet or behind milspec anti-rad hardware got hard-boiled. Total wipeout on most of 'em, with fried systems and fried crew.
Now this accountin' is about my grandpappy, Dale Austin, and the things he done and saw during the cleanup. Ol' Dale was a young man at the time of the incident, and he was workin' as a deckhand on a Heavy Lifter that musta been a lucky ship, because through some act of providence they were inside the shadow of Planet Houston when the Dallas went up. His captain musta had junker blood in him, because when that old space-dog realized that they were one of the only working ships in a system full of derelicts, he made straight for the ship's copy of the salvage laws and disappeared into his cabin for the next few hours, presumably to celebrate.
Ol' Dale had a busy time of it for the next few weeks. That old lifter and its salvage-happy captain was running all over the Texas system, tying on to wrecks and hauling them into Houston orbit. But eventually the easy salvage ran out. They had to start goin' closer and closer to the nebula, which by now was cordoned off an' forbidden by the navy. They started running dark like some sort of smuggler, dodging navy patrols and eventually plunging into the edges of the nebula itself. And that was where they picked up the distress signal of the bulk carrier Yellow Rose.
It was a weak signal, scrambled by the nebula and attenuated by distance, but as the lifter homed in on it the message became clear. It was in a semi-archaic morse code, being tapped out by hand on a shortwave frequency. The crew found the ship's old, dusty lookup book and managed to decipher a message that went something like this.
"All officers including captain dead,
lying in chartroom and on the bridge, probably whole crew dead..."
This repeated a few times, until the last transmission of the Yellow Rose was logged, garbled by static.
"...I die."
The Rose was one of them old style deep-spacers built way back in the early days of the Republic, a real trooper of a ship. Back then there weren't no lanes yet and shields were too expensive, 'sides it wasn't like there were any pirates that could afford that sorta hardware anyhow. So the Rose was built like other ships of the time, with a thick hull and oversized engines to speed her across the distance from gate to planet. Apparently she was bound for Rhineland at the time, and full of bulky mining machinery and hull panels and such. Such a bounty of goods was too much for the captain to trust to some two-bit salvage clerk, and he took a crew aboard the Yellow Rose to inventory the cargo and loot whatever of the crew's effects were worth anything.
The captain's party kept in good contact with the lifter for twenty minutes before their signal cut off mid transmission. They had been making their way to the bridge of the ship, picking their way through dead crew that showed signs of heavy bruising, like they'd been bounced around like toys. And then they found the bridge, where the ship's final survivor had bled out over the backup shortwave radio set.
Suddenly all that came over the lifter's radio was screaming and a repetitive wet thudding sound, like meat being hit by a tenderizing hammer. The stunned crew left aboard the lifter could see the carnage on the bridge of the Yellow Rose as the deck plates switched their gravitic field on and off at rates and forces no man could endure. And then something happened to the Yellow Rose.
Every radiological detector on the lifter lit off like a caterwaul from hell. Somehow the Yellow Rose had cold-started her fusion reactors in record time, ignoring every safety rule on the book. When my grandpappy saw those reading spike, he knew he had barely any time to save the ship. He hit the emergency release for the cable he'd hooked up to the Yellow Rose and rammed the lifter's throttles to the stops, praying he'd get clear of the fusion explosion that was coming hard on his heels.
It ain't too hard to escape an explosion in space. There's no shockwave like in a terrestrial explosion, so all you've got to worry about is the plasma cloud, heat and hard rads. Well, that pig of a lifter didn't make it out of the plasma cloud. It got buffeted to hell and back, left it drifting in space with two working engines left. And then the thing came.
Now my grandpappy was never too clear on the specific of the thing, but he described it as a perfectly round orb with a burning red optic, like some sorta cursed space eyeball. It had come, impossibly, from the Yellow Rose, its burnished hull still glowing cherry red from the heat of the fusion explosion even in the frigid space of the nebula. It was movin' itself around the lifter using some sort of tractor beam, and it circled three times before it spied one of the still-flickering engine pods.
And then that tractor beam made itself like a cutting torch, and the thing cut the dorsal engine out of the lifter with impossible precision before grafting it to itself. And then, as my grandpappy swore to his dying day, it lit off that beat-up engine pod and sailed straight into the heart of the nebula, never to be seen again.
There have been a few sightings over the years of an impossible, cobbled-together scrap craft sailing through the dark matter nebulae of the Texas system, mostly by junkers and rogue who travel that area. It's made the stories easy to dismiss, that's for certain. Most folks who know about the story of the Yellow Rose figure it was moving some experimental robot-type thing to the Ageira labs. Sounds like mad science, but then again they did blow up half the system so I wouldn't put it past them.