When most people die in space, they tend to pick the other option. The permanent, long-term employment kind of option. The repentant labour kind of option. The Navy Bones kind of option.

Two new bodies – drifters, Navy Bones thinks the crew calls them, or perhaps tumblers, fresh/old meat or poor unfortunate souls, Navy Bones has never caught quite the words, only the sentiment – are soon to be offered that choice.

From the bowsprit Captain Navy Bones watches the new faces come in. Each has a matching, round hole in their foreheads. Executed. Dumped. They will probably want revenge, then, and they will have to be assured that isn’t Navy Bones’ business. Wholeheartedly. Most days, at least. Navy Bones is neutral about carnage for the most part: equal opportunity. A go-getter. Bring out your dead! Navy Bones would say, and then go make some dead.

Of course, there is no sound in the vacuum of space. Navy Bones has made a necessary art of incorporating body language, telepathy and a set of fifteen varied eye squints into onboard communication. Navy Bones can speak, but not be spoken to; no one else around for millions of miles of stardust is telepathic. Except for the deep-space kraken, and it has not the left frontal lobe to develop any taste for human languages.

It is never far behind. Its taste is for other things, evidently.

Navy Bones comes off the bowsprit. Gently. It is hard to float around with any intimation of seniority, of commanding spirit. Zero gravity does that to a fellow. There are holes all over the ship – more hole than hull, Navy Bones will often say. All accompanying groans wither off into the soundless grip of space. It wanders onboard quite freely. Navy Bones has created a mannerism, of twitching some cheek muscles up and down, to facsimile chuckling. Concentrating on that, drifting through the halls, shipmates zero-g scurrying underfoot, Navy Bones reaches the creche just as first-mate Missingeye Glassincheek deposits the corpses for induction.

All shipmates must be named. Navy Bones usually picks mode of death or outstanding physical detail. Most often it’s easy to combine the two, because it’s hard to die beautifully in a frozen vacuum. And if something must be remembered for a hundred years, it may as well be obvious.

Navy Bones waves a happy thumbs-up at Glassincheek. She gives him a wilted, space-slow attempt at a salute, then paddles off with her arms. It is much harder, of course, for Navy Bone’s amputee crewmates to get around, but that’s the nature of space. It takes and takes, in an abundance of limbs. Navy Bones has all accoutrements in place, but still … it is enough to wonder, sometimes, whether space should’ve taken everything.

Navy Bones stops wondering because, even in the clean nothing of the galaxy where rot cannot take seed, it’s best to process the bodies as soon as possible. Re-engaging brain activity is achievable; it is not always possible.

The door to the creche is frozen shut, once again, forcing Navy Bones to hammer at its seam until there’s give. They will have to find a sun soon and give it careful orbit; enough to defrost the ship for a while, not enough to burn all its employees to sentient ever-living crisps with seventy-score years left to serve of their contracts.

The orientation vat is open and ready. Not frozen. Given, its freezing point is astoundingly high, but Navy Bones is always prone to a little bit of pessimism, the dutiful knowledge that many small things can go wrong at will, out of spite. Especially with a deadline to meet.

Navy Bones places the two drifters face-down in a tub of cosmic slush, mimes setting a countdown: the wait for brain activity, just the barest hint of it.

It’s a long time coming. Navy Bones takes a nap.

***

Something comes online hours later, stirring the captain. It’s not a heartbeat: that will never happen again, for anything onboard the ship. It’s an awareness, a telepathic brand of Bluetooth unconsciously requesting to pair. Navy Bones jerks up mid-snore, hides it with a cough – without a hand to cough in, for it’s now stuck. One elbow has frozen to the medical desk and Navy Bones, still trying for that dignified first impression most bosses want, pretends it is on purpose. Palm in chin, directing a welcoming thought at the unstirring bodies.

Navy Bones runs through a few different dialects until one seems to stick: Russish, Englanese, Spindi. Old-world English seems to generate a sense of understanding, so Navy Bones rolls along with that, though there’s many more dialects in this personal arsenal to equip. There’s no shortage of spacefaring languages popping up. Navy Bones collects as many as people, though it’s hard talking to a one-way mirror.

One mind latches on to the English. It’s almost audible, the thinking: is hell a tub of green liquid? Perhaps in some cases. Navy Bones imitates chuckling, having never found out.

Why hello there, Navy Bones think-greets. There’s a pulse of questioning from inside the tub. The other in there, the red-haired corpse, is neither thinking nor receiving. Oh well. One should do well enough. But the woken one is focussing, thinking hard at some words to make them travel.

No, I’m afraid tha’ won’t work. I’ve yet to meet another telepath, in this line of work. I imagine yer thinkin’ it gets lonely: weeell. What can I say.

Navy Bones reminisces for a moment. Then, rotating one arm in a move close to dislocation, frees the trapped elbow. Unnoticed!

Now, I have an option for yeh. Navy Bones tries a mind-smile. There’s never been concrete proof that expressions travel well over telepathic links, but always Navy Bones tries. Yeh may be noticing yer dead. Tha’ is perfectly normal. Unlike the normal earth-dead folk, yeh have tahh choices. Yeh can remain completely dead. Tha’s fine – I won’t hold yeh back should yeh seek another vocation.

Navy Bones always likes to pause here. They’re curious, they’re consumed. Wanting to know brings them closer to really wanting it.

This corpse, however, just seems impatient.

Okay. Yeh seem like yeh might be amenable to somethin’ else. Yer second option is thus: I have a spot on my crew. Fixed-term. There are some benefits. Oh, how long? Tha’s mostly the benefit, y’see. For one hundred years of service aboard my vessel, yeh’ll not be dead. Mostly. We push back tha’ unfortunate due-date a wee while longer. What kinda service? Weeell, there’s some variety. Some chances ta move up, get ahead: leadership roles come about erry twenty years or so. Job description … best I can say, Ferryman. Rower. Sailor. Occasional line cook.

Navy Bones lets that percolate. Sometimes it takes a sales spiel; sometimes the grateful dead jump at the chance to postpone the inevitable for a while longer.

After a moment of tangible deliberation, Navy Bones feels acceptance.

Wonderfully fantastic! Navy Bones mind-cries. The corpse is signing the contract before he even realises his hands can move again. The deep dead slumber of his companion doesn’t seem to disturb him, but it’s like that for the crewmates; emotions are a shallow wellspring now. Not much use for them in space, particularly when you are dead.

The corpse sits up and looks around; mostly at Navy Bones. At the odd, misplaced limb that grows, floats, and shrinks back again. At the pressure-popped eyes peeking, at intervals, through frostbitten skin. Navy Bones is yet to find an agreeable mirror in this plane of existence, but thinks there’s little cause for fuss.

Weeell, I’m Navy Bones. There’s no need ta stare, young man.

He continues to stare as he’s helped out of the tub. Navy Bones almost gives him a pointed name about looking too hard, but benignly decides not to. It may be too hard to remember.

The man becomes Mr. Third Eye instead.

Glassincheek has returned outside the creche door – Navy Bones, in infinite wisdom, left it propped open this time – and has a crewmate uniform tucked under her arm. Just one: she must have known, she’s an old hand. 

She greets the newcomer with a handshake, firm as a lack of gravity will allow.

The two introduce themselves as best as hand gestures will allow. Navy Bones retrieves the second body from the orientation vat and ushers it along with a firm hand on one ankle.

Time fer a tour, Navy Bones mind-says; living (in a manner of speaking) for the occasion of tours.

Navy Bones is immensely proud of the ship, timeworn though it is. Deadnaught class, almost twice the size of the deep-space kraken that trails it hopefully like a dog for scraps. Navy Bones has a notion that, whatever a dog is, it must have a frightful eternal hunger. Krakens seem to. Navy Bones always thinks of the kraken before a tour. It’s metal, the ship, all crunchy – but it’s what’s inside that counts. The hallways have faded scorch-marks upon murky graphite floors, and pretty, iridescent oil drops float overhead, occasionally coming by in twisting larger patches that must be limbo’d under. Dead people come and go. Before long, Mr. Third Eye forgets to stare. 

Navy Bones brings the entourage across the bridge and into the control deck. It’s a useless room.

There are so many buttons and levers, switches and screens, on the control deck that Navy Bones has long since forgotten what, if anything, they did. It is no matter. It is dead; the ship is all dead. It makes for a handy space-dead beacon, but does little aside from that. It slides through light-years easy as you please, blinking from system to system with only a corpse for an engine. It is utterly devoted to its purpose, even in the afterlife. Navy Bones admires its resolve from time to time.

Mr. Third Eye goes to the central tableau. Probably looking for a send help! button.

Oh no, Navy Bones boom-thinks. No lights are on, but everyone’s home! Ship’s dead, friend.

He looks a bit guilty. Glassincheek is giving him a hard look, oozing enough derision to make up for the missing option of a verbal takedown.

And, Navy Bones adds, forget about hailing yer last ride. This ain’t no revenge ship, kid. It’s the bloody Draugr.

There’s no blood in him left for blushing, or going pale in shock, but the effects can be superimposed in imagination. Most all know the name Draugr. So Navy Bones expects. There’s really no way to confirm it.

Aye, the death ferry, Navy Bones mind-says after considerable pause. Mr. Third Eye nods and pretends to get it. 

He doesn’t, though, he won’t, in the way all can’t before they reach the final stop on Navy Bones’ dead-ship trawl. Even Navy Bones, the first, hadn’t really got it; swimming through all that darkness newly woken, blind and bumping. 

There is an eldritch blossoming and Navy Bones feels the change. Out come the snaking aether tongues, too big for a captain-sized body, right-sized for the threat of a titanic one. Navy Bones is freakish for a moment, hulking, cursed. Then gushes the mild lick of embarrassment – not meaning to come across as a scary boss, frighten the new guy off, when Navy Bones really likes a friendly work culture – and it all tamps down again.

It happens like a reflex. Thinking about purpose. 

Navy Bones smiles open a mouth slightly too-full of slime. 

Next port of call! Navy Bones mind-says. 

Glassincheek leads them down through a hole punched centre-stage in the command room. It is elevator-sized and fantastically long, and they pull themselves down with handfuls of copper wire and ropes of useless technical intestines. 

A small window in the chute peeks out into the cafeteria, dark but for trails of cosmic fungus limning the edges of the long room. It pulsates in a green sort of way. There are few people in the cafeteria, pinning down in hopeful manners the food attempting to float away from floating plates, or wrangle from floating buffet bowls their unnecessary rations of deep-space spaghetti. 

Yeh don’t need ta eat, Navy Bones mind-explains, but yer welcome tah try.

All the new ones do, and it’s fine, until they run out of room with no bodily functions available to process the backlog. They become all lumpy with the extra mass, like sacks of generously packed potatoes, until they figure out a way to expel it. Even in zero-gravity they seem a bit less buoyant, orbit-bound to themselves.

Mr. Third Eye watches a crewmate chase a string of pasta across the room with their lips. Perhaps this one won’t be hung-up like the rest of them, eating long-past(a) the point of death. Even Missingeye had her phase. 

Weell, says Navy Bones, having few hang-ups but the need to fill the gaps in conversations, which could only ever be held one-way, Tuesdays are pizza night. There’s freeze-dried pepperoni, only a few hundred years past the best-by printed on the packaging slips. Mr. Third Eye affects disinterest. Perhaps it’s only the body being lugged along ankle-wise by Navy Bones, killing once again his newly dead appetite. 

They resume the tour, trending down like some vaguely metaphorical descent into hell. Navy Bones thinks all ideals of hell are too earth-bound, dirt-and-dark heavy. There’s that narrow-minded obsession with brimstone to contend with. But space is a graveyard full of dead things. Perhaps hell is real, and is a spaceship. Navy Bones is not to know. 

Next come the sleeping quarters; a wide rectangular room, little wall cubbies in a towering locus of metal, neat and orderly with cold pull-out slabs for beds. 

Not far beyond is the edge of the ship and its rows of cannons. Here is the smell of old war, still hazy on the not-air. Navy Bones treasures it, perhaps the only smell to be had in this vacuum they call home. The cannons are not mechanical and have never lived, so had not died when the ship did. They can still fire death, if it is not to be delivered by hand. To wreck a ship in space is a beautiful thing, a silent vivisection in fire and metal. It is a visual death, as scraps spiral far into nowhere like so many drops of blood. It is a successful team-building exercise. Navy Bones likes to host them when morale feels a little low, and then they all go gallivanting into the wreckage, little heat-seeking missiles glomming onto the last of the living and the freshly dead. They like presenting their finds to Navy Bones like shy toddlers, going bashful when they get their praise. A hundred years is a long and thin time to go without base recognition. Navy Bones is happy to give it to them. 

It takes a long time to travel the length of the ship, past cannon here, past cannon there, before they turn inwards. It’s probably overkill, but Navy Bones likes to be defensible. There are worse things in space than people, and certainly worse than krakens. Worse than Navy Bones, though? Well. There is no scale. 

Draugr’s bowels are a cold place, colder still than the open surface-points where the space creeps in. There’s no frost down here; even that can’t survive. It wasn’t made for the living or the life-adjacent. This is where Navy Bones thinks the hell of it really comes in. 

The three swim through a wide black channel, river in the dark. The wall has curved and gone away from them – parabolic with revulsion, a phobia of the unlike.

The ship is but an oyster, meaningless as a shell; within is the pearl. Here it does not shine. There is the totality of nothing to reflect. Navy Bones often visualises it – cracking the shell apart until its hinges snap and bleed, reaching in to pluck the pearl, which is a dead man’s eye, white and still blinking. Navy Bones has never seen oyster nor pearl. 

The Locker waits perfectly still in the closed-lipped emptiness. It never moves an inch. The ship gravitates to this; it is an orbit, the room with its own crushing weight and weightlessness. 

Everything cleaves to the Locker, eventually.

Navy Bones tugs the body along, firmer now. Resistance is residual and catching. This close to the Locker, Navy Bones’ fingers warp and shine: a little closer to the truth. From moment to moment they are fingers, they are claws. There is a Milky Way sheen from wrist to hairline; a fracture in the dark, within becoming without. 

Mr. Third Eye’s face is coated in anticipation, uncertainty. Death is never enough to quell the surprise of what comes after. Glassincheek’s face is a study in misery, ninety-one years of it. Each trip seems to eat her away a little more. Her contract is close to expiry and she knows, eventually, she must come here and stay here. Even Navy Bones can’t get her a stay of execution. 

The Locker’s door is plainly unbefitting to hold what it holds, but all parts of the dead ship are only refitted images from the ship that came before: the one with lights, sound, and a voluble electronic pulse. The door is a small rectangle and Navy Bones sometimes struggles to fit through. Unlike most everything aboard it is unmarked. Scarless. The nature of this door is wholly un-kin to the nature of everything inside. 

Navy Bones presses open the door, palm to the rigor mortis pinch of cold metal. Un-light washes out, over them, darker still than before. Navy Bones ushers them all in before anything can get out. 

The Locker has rules of its own – serpentine, Navy Bones has never pinned them down – and the whisper-shut sound of the door echoes out, rolling as waves through the vast pitch interior. Navy Bones has them all form a ring, hand-to-hand so no one gets lost. Hand-to-foot, for one of them, but there’s no sense in making that the complaint. Here Navy Bones’ hands are deviating further and further from the traditional form. It’s the Locker, after all. 

Come, mind-whispers Navy Bones. The captain is always afraid to think louder, to disturb the silent crystalline dark. They all kick off; a leg or two short of synchronisation. Glassincheek’s fingers go clammy with the want, with the broken habit, of sweat. 

Navy Bones feels a peaking of awareness, knows nothing in the Locker is capable of so strong a feeling. 

Anymore. 

Around the Cthullu-tongues, Navy Bones manages a sigh, a here-we-go, it’s-happening-again sort of sigh. 

Light opens above Navy Bones; from a star-specked giant eye, one with a planetary-level intelligence in all its dark spaces (which is to say sizeable, but a few watts short of providing its own illumination). Wide, but not bright. In places it is mostly empty. The big eye blinks and the small party is cast in its glow; the first-mate, rigidly still despite the formlessness of space, undrifting, even; Mr. Third Eye, thrown into the deep end right on his first day; Navy Bones and the body in-hand, one very dead and the other newly so. 

The eye is soft and liquid; it is so hungry. 

The kraken has always been the kind of pet that knows when the fridge door is opened.

However – a mercy for everything that might be considered a snack aboard – the beast remains a small eon away. It’s projection only, just a thought. 

The kraken is able to cast its mind across vast distances; because, Navy Bones supposes, there is not much to throw. Were someone to swim up right now and poke that peeping-tom eye, it would not water or flinch, because it is little more than reflected light. It only wishes to be real. Here is feast, it is buffet, but it is a lockbox treat. Navy Bones is the cruel key-keeper, but the more the captain safe-guards, the harder the kraken begins to beg. Some days it is very hard to overlook, though Navy Bones hardly thinks a kraken ever starved to death for lack of a few dead people bodies. Whatever did ye eat before people turned up in space, Navy Bones often scolds, and the beastie returns sad images of space-rocks and chunks of cold, bitter dead stars. 

Navy Bones relinquishes the dead body to the deep, peeling away tendrils and flagellum from the ankle-bone. They all – recruit, first-mate, kraken, captain – watch it recede on dark tide. The eye-glow lifts; the spotlight goes deep into the Locker, and all of Navy Bones’ charges light up, small dead people-moons in frozen phases of waxing and waning. Whole, slivered, partial, crescent. Some are a tangle of arms, a rat-king of various un-decomposing limbs. Some float gently, fetal, for the Locker is just a womb of the other kind. The reverse. 

A large mass has begun to form, far-down, a ball the size of a small planet. The long-dead, perhaps tired of floating, maybe sick of being alone. Navy Bones keeps a careful eye on its growth, but it doesn’t seem harmful, so far. The captain suspects that spot – the very centre of the mass – is where the Locker once formed, sprung up from. Where Navy Bones woke after death. The kraken gets particularly hungry, sighting that big dead lump. 

Navy Bones imagines there’s a plug in the centre (sink-kind, tub-kind, thin-layer-keeping-it-all-in-kind) and one day, for a reason yet to be known, Navy Bones will thresh a way through that ball and lift the plug free. When the ferry reaches port, when it docks, when it is finally known where. The people will drain like a pernicious clump of hair, like soap-scum scuds. Navy Bones imagines it because it means rest. It will mean that forever has its end. 

The kraken doesn’t know this is Navy Bones’ endgame. It would be put-out, sweetly devastated. Navy Bones can only entertain it with the notion of perhaps, and leave out scraps every so often so it doesn’t really starve. 

Navy Bones looks up at it, fondly. They are of a feather. 

The kraken coos. It is drawing closer. Tempting as it would be, to be consumed – Navy Bones considers it often – Navy Bones withdraws, gives the order for top speed, fast as a dead thing like the ship can go. They pass back through its guts and useless organs without a word, thought or otherwise. The first-mate has a handkerchief ready for Navy Bones, once the Locker’s grip fades and all the tongues and teeth do, too. 

Navy Bones wants to tell their new recruit: tha’s the worst of it. It’s really not. Thirty-six thousand, five hundred and twenty-five days pack a fair dose of punches. 

Instead, just sops off all the slime and leaves some of it spinning through the zero-g.

Instead, what’s next. Forever holds so many more days than one hundred years.

Mr. Third Eye will need his training. Glassincheek will need a week of recovery. 

Captain Navy Bones will go to the bowsprit – watching for the next, there is always more – and keep a weather eye on the horizon. For as long as it takes: that’s the promise, that’s the sentence, and Navy Bones serves.