HALLMAN: Starship Plangite

As a child, still living on Earth, Jonathan Fargates was told by his mother the story of a ghost ship drifting through space. After passing through an undetected shield raised by an advanced alien civilization, as he remembered the story, the bodies of all its tripulation were vaporized, leaving no survivors. All of the subsequent attempts to retrive the spaceship, his mother told him, have failed with catastrophic results. None of the ships sent to retrieve came back, leading to the belief that the ship somehow still carried the consciousnesses of the members of its tripulation, and they attacked and destroyed anyone and everyone who went to their rescue. That ultimately led to the prohibition by the Conglomerate for any ship to enter the sector where the ship could be found.

The ship's name had almost been completely wiped from captain Fargates's memory, only resurfacing while he was passing through the supposedly banned sector---whose ban he knew fully well wasn't present anywhere on the Conglomerate's records---and stumbled upon a ship of a decomissioned class which happened to be the same of the ship from his mother's story. He attempted to contact the ship and, to his surprise, he received an answer.

"This is captain Fargates of the spaceship SS Fortuna", he said, "identify yourself".

The image that came on screen was very unclear, almost completely obscured by static. Captain Fargates could barely identify the figure of an old man so thin he thought for a split second he had seen a skull rather than a living human being. The man wore a captain's uniform, there wasn't a single hair on his head, his deep eye sockets made him look like he was over a hundred years old. He seemed much too old and frail to be a ship's captain. He began to speak in a surprisingly young, deep voice.

"This is captain Stuart of the SS Plangite".

I've recently finished watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I might have still been watching it when I wrote this, or I may have done so soon after I've finished, I can't quite remember. I wrote this short fake excerpt as quickly as I could and as soon as it came to me. I think it might work well if I wrote this concept as a novella.

You may notice the change in author name from River to R. K. Hallman. Same author, slightly different pen name. In future covers, I plan on swithcing between the two names depending on which one I feel suits better the cover.