#script; void (null)

     I raised my hands to shield my face from my assailant, and in the process I hit myself in the beak with the ore detector, which I promptly let go of and sent hurtling into space. My eyes watered, and tears unfettered by gravity pooled in them and blinded me. Whatever had slapped me approached again, but through the wobbling dome of tears all I could see was that it was red and about the size of a melon.

     I tried to bat it away, but my hands went through it. Suddenly the thing turned blue and flailed its little arms at my head, landing a volley of (surprisingly powerful) blows and knocking away the bubble of tears. For a brief moment I saw its face before my eyes teared up again and a sound like a whipcrack in my eep’s field rendered me deaf. The slapping stopped. I rubbed my eyes and looked around for the captain.

     When I had cleared my vision, the chameleon ghost was gone. A wisp of luminous pink smoke was all that remained in its place. Staring at it gave me a cold, uneasy feeling in my blood, the same way staring at the moon ghost had.

     I caught a glimpse of a slimy, silvery-pink whip in the captain’s hand just before he vanished it with the matter manipulator. Then he summoned a few empty glass jars, which he placed at his feet. With a flick of his wrist, he set the matter manipulator spinning in front of him like a floating gyroscope and began unscrewing the jar lids one by one.

     “What are those for?” I asked. My voice sounded muffled, but the deafness was subsiding.      Without looking up, the Glitch gestured to the pink smoke. “This junk these ghost things drop. S’good for stim packs. Patching yourself up if you leak.”      “Oh. That’s … useful.”

     He snatched the manipulator from where it was spinning and pointed its arc at the wisps of smoke, jar in hand. The smoke’s opacity pulsed slowly, as if it was phasing in and out of existence. Indeed, it seemed to resist being directed into the jar by the matter manipulator, behaving more like taffy than smoke. The captain seemed patient with this. He said, “Gonna use it to make ghost dogs, though. Folks’ll pay a lot for ‘em. Novelty.”      “We’re traversing an asteroid belt for novelty ghost pets?”      “And gold,” he added quickly, and I wondered where the ore detector had hurtled off to. He gestured impatiently with the hand holding the jar. “Can you, uh, move over? Hard to grab this stuff without getting gross on you.”

     I kicked off the asteroid so that I bounced backward, pulling the grappling gun’s cord taut and ensuring the ghostly smoke was no longer within my EPP’s atmospheric field. The captain took his time, carefully aiming the manipulator arc. I looked around for any more surprise visitors and massaged the space between my eyes. I could feel a scratch on my beak where I’d hit it with the ore detector.      “Hate this stuff,” the captain said with an exasperated rattling sound. “Even harder to suck up than brains.”

     “Water pressure works far better than suction,” I said absently, thinking back to my days in the Institute’s preservation lab. “You could also just scrape them out through the foramina, assuming there’s a skull. Unless you’re trying to keep a wet specimen of the brain itself, in which case an extraction machine is your best bet.” As I rubbed the last of the tears out of my eyes, I looked down and found the captain was staring at me intently. We locked eyes for a long and unsettling moment.

     I’d thought the moon was bad, but today has given me a new standard by which to measure fear and emasculation.

     The good news was that the captain assured me that we were done collecting fuel (and therefore visiting moons) for several thousand light years. The bad news was that our next goal was to mine for ductile metals, and it would be my job to operate the detector.

    Working the detector wasn’t what worried me. What worried me was the captain’s plan to mine an asteroid field.

    Though my EPP had a heating unit installed, I was advised to dress warmly, especially with regards to my feet, as they would be the points most likely to leach heat from the eep’s field. I wasn’t really able to find any shoes that fit, but I did find a few other items of clothing that I was able to repurpose. Thankfully, nobody would be around to critique my fashion sense. As I stepped onto the plastic sheeting of the ship’s makeshift teleporter platform, I asked the captain how long he thought the trip would take.

    “The usual,” he said.

    Okay. I took a deep breath and reassured myself that this would be a routine spacewalk. I already had one spacewalk under my belt from our horrible trip to the moon, so “routine spacewalk” was a phrase I now felt qualified to use. Gripping the ore detector in both hands, I braced myself for the blackout, the familiar weightless feeling of teleportation, and then for the abrupt return of gravity.

    Except that gravity didn’t return on time. The rest of my senses seemed to be intact, but my sense of direction was wrong. I could feel something against my feet, but the asteroid beneath me didn’t register as “down.” When I opened my eyes, it was immediately apparent why: the thing was tiny. I’d used restrooms that were larger.

    The asteroid and I were very nearly free-floating through a field of debris. To my right, the blue gas giant was casting planetshine upon the asteroid field and its rings, but most of the local light came from a red flare lodged in the side of a nearby asteroid. The Horsebutt nebula was all around us, but was most visible as the dark veil which loomed up from beneath the asteroid belt, backlit by a faint pinkish glow and surrounded by fire-red stars. It actually did look a bit like a horse’s tail raised to shoo away a cloud of red flies. From the safety of a ship, the view would have been breathtaking, but with nothing to separate me from the void of space but the atmospheric encabulation field of my EPP, it was terrifying. I dug my toenails into the asteroid, clutched the ore detector to my chest, and took a shaky breath of the recycled air.

    “You coming?” echoed a voice through my EPP’s speaker.

    I looked “up” and saw the captain’s orange optics faintly peering over the edge of a larger and rather distant asteroid. I was too afraid to even shake my head, lest it somehow throw me off balance and send me hurtling into space. Recognizing my cowardice, the Glitch said, “Hang on. Be right there.”

    The sudden impact of a grappling hook a few feet away startled me and I stumbled backwards. Of course I, unable to even fall properly, just floated helplessly away as the captain reeled himself in on the grappling hook. I didn’t get very far. In fact, I just sort of ended up colliding with another asteroid from behind. I clung to it for dear life until the captain appeared over the tiny horizon.

    “The gravity is really weak out here,” I said.

    He rolled his oculars and sighed, “It’s weak everywhere. Here,” he handed me the business end of the grappling hook and pulled another off of his belt.

    “I don’t know how to use it.” He shook his head and kneeled down beside me. Then he looped the cord around my waist, fashioned it into a harness, and holstered the gun-end back into his belt.

    I spent the rest of the trip tethered to him like a panicky balloon. Technically I was still operating the ore detector, but I felt embarrassingly useless. He was clearly very experienced at navigating a dense asteroid field using only a grappling hook and didn’t really need my help. After an hour or so of floating after him, I began to feel a little bored.

    Not that the view wasn’t still awe-inspiring. It’s just that there was really not very much to do other than look at the view and, occasionally, the ore detector. I let my mind wander a little bit. In retrospect, it’s sort of dangerous to do this in space. The captain was knee-deep in asteroid rock and I was trying to come up with a new way to prepare my last can of beans when I thought I heard something behind me.

    Which was ridiculous, I knew. Not only could there not have been anything behind me, but even if there had been, there would be no way for me to have heard it make a noise through the vacuum of space. Unless it had been inside my EPP’s field, which was equally ridiculous.

    Still, I turned my head to look.

Hahahaha, your timing is amazing. Would normally be all over that.You know these things?

Hohoh man. You ever think back to your greenhorn days, when you were schlubbing around without so much as a lantern on a stick?This happened back then.

Beamed down to your average “alien” planet. Think that’s kind of a stupid classification, personally. Aren’t most planets alien?Anyway, started digging. Used the typical rookie techniques. Was a time when you could dig out the back hole of whatever cavern you were in for light.Got below the planet’s upper crust and found, well, a bunch of meat and bones where clay should’ve been.Pretty unusual. Most planets have those kinds of things right on top. Bunch of stuff dies around tarpits or from something crashing into the surface often enough, you get bones. Meat, well, don’t normally see that kind of thing anywhere, excepting a cloning tube malfunction or extraterrestrial infestation. Hemogoblins’n’stuff.Got kind of sweaty and gross (and cool) down there, but it was too dark to assess what to do next.So, did the logical thing. Dug out the back of the cavern. Tried to light things up a bit.D’you know what was back there?

So uh.

    The thing emerged from the cave wall itself and floated above us like a malevolent, airborne buoy. It was translucent, with a wormlike body, spidery limbs, and a face like a sphincter. It glistened faintly in the light of the glowing water. Despite the EPP, the air around me turned cold and tasted of ozone. It was as if someone was slowly draining the blood out of my body and replacing it with carbonated ice water. My lungs felt as depleted and shriveled as refrigerated balloons.

    As a biologist I am usually well-armored against magical thinking. Had I heard about this secondhand, I might have tried to explain away such sensations as a pheromone or infrasound-induced state of shock. But having been there, I can tell you with absolute certainty that this thing was definitely an evil fucking ghost.     And my peculiar companion could not seem to care less about it. I skittered backward to the opposite wall of the cavern, but he just stood there and stared. It is also worth mentioning that he was standing mere inches away from lava, and was casually on fire.

    “Aw, they’re not so bad,” said the Glitch, and waved at the thing. As luck would have it, the ghost ignored him completely and floated above his head, reaching out its spindly hands in my direction. My back was literally against the wall. There was no way out.

    Then I remembered I had a gun.

    I yanked the gun out of its makeshift holster on my belt loop and aimed it at the ghost, which remained unimpressed. I’d never fired a gun before, but in that moment I was certain I could. This one felt natural in my hands. I pulled the trigger.

    A dog appeared.

    I fired the gun again. Beams of light cut through the ghost and became more dogs. The dogs fell from where they materialized midair and hit the cave floor running.

    “Where the hell did those come from?!” I screamed.     “Dog room,” shrugged the captain.

    Their barking was barely audible from within the EPP’s field. That’s probably because the moon’s exosphere was incredibly thin, and as such, the dogs did not last very long. They began to panic and bolted in every direction, stumbling and frothing at the mouth.

    For some reason, this intrigued the ghost. It turned its attention away from me and floated here and there after the dogs as though it couldn’t decide which one to grab first. I couldn’t in good conscience fire the gun again, which meant we likely only had a few more seconds before the ghost was no longer distracted.

    “So that’s where that went,” the captain said blithely as he eyed the gun in my shaking hands. He summoned a pistol with the matter manipulator and offered it to me, saying, “Here, trade you.” I complied, if only because I wanted nothing more to do with the dog gun. The captain magicked it out of my hands with the manipulator.

    “Well. Guess that freed up some space in the dog room for sand,” he said. He siphoned up the tunnel blockage as he ascended the stairs, adding, “Do dogs like sand?”