Ghost Story

OK. I'm not completely sure exactly how we ended up here, but if I've learned anything in my years as a Champion, it's that you have to adapt to the situations you find yourself in. Deal with one thing at a time, until you've fixed whatever needs to be fixed. Well, Chiana -- our Chiana -- seems to have done a fine job of fixing the first thing. And if she'd gotten herself into a bit of difficulty, well, it was nothing she couldn't handle.

Which led us to the second thing... I'm actually really proud of the spell my analog came up with to cure Chiana's -- this universe's Chiana's -- blindness.

So, overall, I'm feeling pretty good about things. We've only been here a few minutes and we've already done some serious good! D'Argo seems disinclined to shoot us, and I'm sure we'll get this confusion over our Chi straightened out... So everything's cool, right?

Yeah. Remind me to stop thinking things like that...

I start seeing them moments after we enter the maintence bay. Horrible, demented, ghostly figures in old-style Starfleet uniforms, mainly red ones. Dozens of them, screaming all around us. A tasteless joke about dead redshirts floats through my head, but the thought makes me feel slightly ill, because there's nothing funny about this at all.

"They must have come through with us," my twin mutters, clearly seeing them as well.

"Frell!" shouts Crichton from where he's just come in with Aeryn and our own Chiana. Hmm, clearly he sees them, too. OK, now, I'm not an expert in ghosts, but I do remember a few things... Ghosts generally tend to be visible only to members of their own species, and these ghosts are human... Sure enough, the non-humans present all appear to be completely oblivious.

But, oh, wait, here comes the exception...

Stark runs in, shouting frantically. He's speaking Banik, of course, or whatever his native language is, and without microbes or a translator spell, we don't have much hope of understanding him. But I'm not surprised by the one word I do recognize: zy-limbron. "Not-alive." Or, in other words, "ghost." (And, man, do I deserve trivia points for knowing that one!)

Stark tears off his mask, bathing the entire room in golden mystical light. And, under its influence, it seems that now the others can also see what he sees, what we see... Several of them scream. The ghosts scream. Aeryn lets off a pulse-blast that, of course, hits nothing. Or at least, nothing corporeal.

"Calm down!" I shout. "Everybody, please, calm down! They're just ghosts." Boy, does that sound lame. "Just ghosts?" That's supposed to reassure people?

It seems to work on Stark, though. He replaces his mask, takes a deep breath, and says something that, needless to say, I still don't understand. He sounds a little agitated, but at least he's not screaming any more.

"Yes," replies Crichton shakily (in English, of course). "We saw 'em. Hoo, boy, did we see 'em!"

There follows several minutes of everybody talking at once in five different alien tongues, culminating in a long, excited speech from Stark.

I turn to Crichton. "What did he say?"

1. "Uh, he said he knows how to get rid of 'em..."

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