Allen Steele - The Great Galactic Ghoul

The compartment was a wreck, only a handful of lights glimmering on the sole control panel that remained operational. Indeed, the final report issued by the Pax review board would conclude that it was only by a miracle that the Ritchie Explorer had been able to transmit the mayday received by the Gold Dust Woman ; with most of the comps instantly knocked off-line by the explosion, only the emergency transmitter, which was located elsewhere on the platform and powered by its own battery, was left intact.

Still, nothing prepared Quon Ko for what he found. When the ovals cast by his helmet lamp found a black stikshoe wedged beneath the base of an upended chair, his first thought was that it was empty. But then he moved a little closer, and saw that the shoe was crusted with red ice. A foot, roughly severed just above the ankle, was caught within the shoe.

This was the only human remnant found aboard the Ritchie Explorer .

Captain Zimmerman immediately sent word to Ceres Station, which in turn sent urgent requests to the Martian Pride and the Ulysses that they come to the Gold Dust Woman ’s assistance. By then, both vessels were nearly two weeks away from Eros, time enough for news of the disaster to reach Earth.

Journalists often say that the public pays little attention to what goes on in space until something goes wrong, and this is true more often than not. When space exploration became less about discovery and more about commerce, the only people on Earth who continued to closely watch what was happening out there were investors, lien holders, and insurance companies, along with the handful of amateur enthusiasts who still cared about such things. This tends to change, though, whenever something unusual occurs… and in space, an unusual occurrence is almost always something that takes its toll in lives.

So Quon Ko hadn’t even returned to the Woman before the first reports of what he’d found aboard the Explorer appeared in the news media back on Earth. Within twenty-four hours, about half of the world’s inhabitants, along with nearly 100 percent of the lunar and Martian colonists, were aware of the mysterious loss of six lives aboard an asteroid mining rig. To be sure, most of those same four and a half billion people would forget all about the Explorer and its crew within ten days, for nothing is as fickle as the attention of the media mass-mind. But for the moment, the Ritchie Explorer was the top-of-the-hour lead story.

It wasn’t just that six people had been killed. It was also that those six people were missing, with nothing more than a severed foot to show for them. Among the countless experts, real and self-proclaimed, who took turns espousing opinions both educated and ignorant, the more well-informed pointed out that, even if most of the crew had been blown out into space by the explosion—the cause of which was, itself, a major mystery—then Eros’s gravity would assert its pull upon their corpses, and the bodies would therefore eventually be found and recovered. And they were right: over the course of the next few weeks, searchers from the Pride and the Ulysses located the torn and frozen bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys, each floating in space not far from Eros. However, the disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley remained both unsolved and unexplained.

Then there was the explosion itself. What caused it, and why hadn’t the crew been able to prevent it? This took much longer to figure out; in fact, it wasn’t until a year later, when the Pax Astra dispatched an investigative team to Eros, that a cause was definitely determined. Even then, it was something that surprised even accredited experts: the Explorer ’s laser drill had apparently hit a methane pocket deep within Eros. Such gas pockets are sometimes found within type-C asteroids, but are practically unknown among type-S rocks. Indeed, most media commentators had already ruled this out as a possibility. But the findings of the Pax investigation were conclusive: the explosion had occurred the instant Explorer ’s laser pierced the rock surrounding the pocket and ignited the volatile gas, and the resultant blast had gone straight up the mine shaft to devastate the rig above.

These things took a while to discover, though, and in the meantime, the imps of the net came out to play. People of our time take pride in their sophistication, but that doesn’t mean that the superstitions of the past have vanished. Thus it wasn’t long before someone mentioned the Great Galactic Ghoul.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the Ghoul would be remembered. Nothing lives quite as long as a myth, particularly when it takes the form of a ghost story to be told around the flames of a virtual campfire. And the Great Galactic Ghoul was no mere legend; he had a long history behind him, one that could be accessed with only a few keystrokes. The fact that the Ghoul had originally been a joke was forgotten. Like the Loch Ness Monster, foo fighters, or Big Foot, he gradually took on a life of his own.

Sterling Crow, the Nettimes star commentator, was the first to mention the Ghoul. That was appropriate; Crow was not only knowledgeable enough to be aware of the Ghoul, but also gullible enough to indict him as a possible culprit. Since most of Crow’s viewers watched his show only for its unintentional humor, the majority of them didn’t take him seriously… but The Morning Crow boasted a daily audience of sixty million, so even the minority who accepted Crow’s ravings at face value was a significant figure.

Shortly afterwards, The Public Inquisitor ran a story claiming that a senior Pax Astra official, who’d insisted upon anonymity, had told the site that “a mysterious alien entity” was responsible for the Explorer disaster, and that Pax investigators believed this entity to be the Great Galactic Ghoul. The Inquisitor went on to say that the Ghoul had been blamed for spacecraft disappearances as long as a hundred years ago, and both American and Russian officials of the last century had covered up the creature’s existence. Again, while most people didn’t take the Inquisitor seriously, quite a few did, and so its story helped push the Great Galactic Ghoul further into the public consciousness.

Seeing what was coming out of the rumor mill, the Pax hastily released reports of what the Gold Dust Woman , the Martian Pride , and the Ulysses had found thus far. By then, however, theories about what had really happened to the Ritchie Explorer had already appeared in the news media. There hadn’t been a mine shaft explosion; instead, the blast had been the result of an energy beam fired by another spacecraft, one doubtless of extraterrestrial origin. The six missing crew members weren’t dead, but had been abducted instead; even after four of them were eventually found, the fact that two were still unaccounted for only helped to fuel this particular hearsay. The Ghoul had been gone for a long time, yes, but only because he’d been asleep on Eros; the Ritchie Explorer had disturbed him, and so he’d reacted by wiping out those who’d trespassed on his domain.

All this might have been harmless were it not for the fact that the scare may have contributed to the outbreak of the System War. Royalists within the Pax—notably Lucius Robeson, who’d later become Queen Macedonia’s Chief of Naval Intelligence once the New Ark Party was overthrown and the Pax became a constitutional monarchy—were quick to claim that the Explorer disaster wasn’t an accident at all, but rather an act of war by the TBSA. The TBSA hotly denied this, of course, and Robeson had nothing to back up his allegations. Nevertheless, insurance premiums on ships traveling between Earth and Mars soared to an all-time high, and some vessels began to add weapons their captains thought they’d never need. It wasn’t just the idea that ships might be attacking one another, though. There was also the prospect—however remote or absurd it might seem—that there really was a Great Galactic Ghoul lurking out there. So when actual hostilities broke out between the Pax and the TBSA a few years later, vessels on both sides were already armed with ship-to-ship missiles.