Fatal Boarding by E. R. Mason

damned thing has cleared. We've got some kind of
noise getting in the system somewhere. I've seen it before, but
never this bad. I sure hope its not bleeding in from the engine
sensors. I sure don't want to go crawling around way back in the
damn tail tunnels. They woke me up around 01:00. I'm gonna give up
and try to get some sleep. If it's still going on when I wake up,
I'll just have to start all over again."
    "Better you than me, Pell. I've had my share
of adventure."
    "Yeah, so I heard. Hey, take a look at this
music. It's really something." Pell peeled off the light weight
optics he was straining to see me through, and handed them over. It
was not my thing, but you must remain on good terms with Pell. I
looked them over and carefully put them on. The music instantly cut
in slightly too loud, giving me a tingling sensation behind the
ears where the transducers touch skin. It was an ancient-styled
blues band. An unshaven man with bifocal-style glasses was bending
strings on an old-fashioned electric guitar that had a cord and
tuning keys. He wore baggy-looking brown work pants, and big,
brown, heavy work shoes. He kept lifting his left foot slightly off
the floor as he wrapped himself around his instrument. His voice
was raspy and pitch-perfect. I could see Pell nodding
enthusiastically at me through the image.
    "It's Clapton, can you believe it?"
    I took off the optics and handed them back.
"Sorry, never heard of him, Pell."
    "Clapton, ...you know. He brought the blues
into the twenty-first century. Studied under the best blues players
in the world. They're taking all these old videos and converting
them to surround-sight. You get to see the real masters as though
they're right in front of you. It's incredible. It just kills
me."
    "Well, if you keep speeding down the hall
wearing those things, it just might."
    "Yeah, sorry about that. I'm half asleep.
Well, I'd better get where I'm going. See you later." He hooked the
optics frames back over his ears and headed off, clanking along the
grated section of corridor floor that led to his stateroom. I
smiled to myself, shook my head and headed for the mess hall.
    The Commissary is one of those cartoon-like
places that are designed in fine detail by architectural engineers
who were born to care about cost and efficiency and nothing else.
They lie in bed at night entertaining fantasies about ground
breaking designs in food dispensation. They design plastic rooms,
with no detail, and no sharp edges as though the room was intended
to prevent five-year olds from harming themselves. They generally
top it off with a picture of a boat on the wall to show the depth
of their symbolism, which it does.
    Unbeknownst to them, as soon as the mess
hall is activated, it is completely taken over by a strange group
of space bound eccentrics who use it for a dozen different things
for which it was never intended. They are the people who become
walking outhouses on Halloween, Santas at Christmas, gigantic
bunnies on Easter, off-key karaoke singers and flat comedians
backed by too frequent, synthetic rim-shots during thinly-populated
talent nights.
    Understandably, Halloween is the favorite.
On that particular evening, if you come to the mess hall, you are
likely to be served brain salad by someone dressed in a big black
helmet with the sound of heavy breathing.
    There are no seasons in deep space, but
there are seasons in the mess hall. It snows there in winter,
flowers bloom in the spring lasting through the summer, and pines
needles and corn stalks are gathered in the fall. R.J. does not
really need to slay his invisible windmills in the cause of
preserving humanity. The atypical people, who stalk designated
human prey relentlessly, dragging their captured victims to the
galley under false pretense only to bellow choruses of happy
birthday to them while forcing them to blow out tiny, flaming
sticks stuck into oversized pastries bearing their names, will do
that for him.
    Feeling lazy, I took an