Log 91: Slap Fight
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.
“Hmmm,” he buzzed.
