The Great Galactic Ghoul

by Allen M. Steele

In the late twentieth century, the first unmanned probes were sent to Mars. Most of them failed; of the thirty-nine missions launched by America and Russia between 1960 and 1999, nine exploded during lift-off, seven lost contact with home, seven more either went into useless orbits or missed the planet entirely, and four crashed while attempting to land. No other program had the same failure rate, nor as many mishaps that couldn’t be easily explained.

This led someone at NASA to playfully suggest that a creature lurked between Earth and Mars, a gremlin ready to sabotage or destroy any spacecraft that dared to enter its realm. The Great Galactic Ghoul became a standing joke among engineers and ground controllers, but as the missions continued to fail, the laughter stopped. It soon became considered bad luck to mention the Ghoul. Even if these otherwise rational men didn’t necessarily believe in space monsters, neither were they willing to say anything that might jinx the mission.

Despite the setbacks, Mars was explored and people eventually went there, and not long after that they began to travel farther out into the solar system. By then, they’d learned how to build spacecraft that were reasonably safe and reliable; they had to, because the consequences of catastrophic failure were unthinkably high. There were accidents, of course, and occasionally a life was lost, but those instances were rare; when they occurred, more often than not human error was the primary cause. In any case, investigations would be announced, studies would be conducted, data collected, reports written, findings made public. Changes would then be instituted, and if the process worked the way it was supposed to, that particular accident would never happen again. Or at least not quite the same way.

In time, the Great Galactic Ghoul was forgotten. But he didn’t disappear. He simply went into hiding for a while, waiting for the day to come when he could return from the shadows and wreak havoc upon any vessel he happened to encounter in the darkness between worlds.

Until August 16, 2062, there had never been a deep-space rescue mission. There were countless instances, of course, between Earth and the Moon in which one spacecraft made an emergency rendezvous with another. The distance involved there was less than a quarter of a million miles, though, and since there were over a dozen stations in cislunar space, help was seldom more than a few hours away. Beyond the Moon, the situation was different: spacecraft crews were expected to deal with onboard accidents themselves, without relying on outside assistance. And for good reason: Earth and Mars were separated by an average of forty-nine million miles, and even in the most densely populated zone of the asteroid belt, tens of thousands of miles could lay between one inhabited rock and another.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before spacers realized that they needed to plan for coming to one another’s aid. No one could anticipate every sort of emergency, but there were times when it would have been helpful to know, no matter how bad things might be, that help was on the way. Indeed, one of the first things the Pax Astra did after it was formed in 2049 was to ratify the space rescue clause of the old 1967 U.N. Space Treaty, even though the Pax rejected most of the treaty’s other provisions. As much as the newly independent space colonies wanted to break away from Earth, this part of the treaty, which mandated that all space vessels had to respond to distress signals, was worth keeping.

It’s a good thing that the Pax settled this particular issue, for only six years later the belt colonies broke away to form their own alliance, the Transient Body Shipping Association. Since the TBSA was willing to do business directly with Earth-based companies and governments, economic rivalry with the Pax Astra was assured. So it was just as well that Pax and TBSA ships formally agreed to come to each other’s aid in times of emergency; by 2065, each side would be committing piracy against the other, with worse yet to come.

But hostilities hadn’t yet broken out when the Ritchie Explorer disaster occurred. Considering that the Ritchie was a Pax Astra vessel, perhaps it was only appropriate that the nearest ship to receive its mayday signal was a TBSA freighter.

The TBSA Gold Dust Woman was seven weeks out of Ceres, passing Mars orbit on its way to the Moon, when the signal was received by its Ku-band wireless. Because the ship was no longer in the belt, Captain Henry Zimmerman had relaxed the twenty-four-hour watch mandated by flight regulations. Chief Engineer Quon Ko remembers being in his berth, nursing a squeezebulb of Irish coffee while reading a fantasy potboiler on the data screen, when Zimmerman’s voice came over the intercom, asking him to report to the bridge.

“I didn’t ask what it was about,” Quon says. “I just said okay, be there in a minute, then I climbed out of my bunk, zipped up my jumpsuit and tossed the rest of my drink into the recycler, then headed upstairs.”

Gold Dust Woman was an Ares-class freighter, 272 feet in length and 110 abeam at its outrigger telemetry and reactor booms, the sort of workhorse known by spacers as a “rock hauler” even though it never carried asteroids themselves. It had a nuclear fusion main engine and an open payload bay capable of carrying up to eight cargo containers—on this mission it had six, mainly oxygen, water, copper, and titanium mined from inner-belt asteroids—and it had a crew of three: Captain Zimmerman; Lesley Zimmerman, his first officer, navigator, and wife; and Quon Ko, who doubled as engineering chief and cargomaster. The Zimmermans were the Woman’s permanent crew, while Quon was aboard only until the union rotated him out and gave his job to someone else.

As it turned out, Henry and Lesley weren’t on the bridge either when the signal was received. Captain Zimmerman was in the observation blister, using the optical telescope to make a manual navigational fix as required by regulations, while Lesley was napping in their cabin. So the transmission was first heard by the ship’s AI, which in turn alerted the captain. It took Henry Zimmerman less than a minute to ride his chair down from the blister to the bridge, and only a minute after that to confirm that the signal was an emergency transmission sent by another spacecraft. A stickler for following TBSA regs to the letter, the captain immediately summoned the other senior officers to the bridge; as it so happened, his wife and Ko were also the only other two people aboard.

By the time Lesley and Ko left the living quarters in the ship’s carousel and climbed up the access shaft to the bridge, Henry had learned other pertinent facts. The signal was coming from the PASS Ritchie Explorer, a mobile mining rig registered to the Pax Astra. The Explorer was presently anchored to Eros, an S-type asteroid whose annual period presently put it just within Mars orbit. According to the TBSA database, it had a crew of six.

Beyond that, little else was known. The signal, apparently sent by an automatic transponder, consisted of a brief print message that repeated again and again:

MESS. 1397 1503 GMT 8/16/62 CODE A1/0679

TRANSMISSION FROM PASS RITCHIE EXPLORER/433 EROS TO ALL SPACECRAFT PRIORITY REPEATER

MESSAGE BEGINS

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY

PASS RITCHIE EXPLORER EXPERIENCING LIFE-THREATENING EMERGENCY BREAK EXPLOSION OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN BREAK POSSIBLE CASUALTIES AND/OR FATALITIES BREAK REQUEST URGENT ASSISTANCE FROM NEAREST AVAILABLE VESSEL BREAK LOCATION ASTEROID 433 EROS CRATER HIMEROS 070S 2800W BREAK PLEASE RESPOND ASAP

MESSAGE ENDS

TRANSMISSION REPEATS

1504 GMT 8/16/62 CODE A1/0679

“As soon as I saw this,” Lesley Zimmerman says, “I knew we were going in. There’s a lot of ships between Earth and Mars, but chances were that we’d be the nearest one.” A quick check of the chart board confirmed this; although there were two other spacecraft presently operating within that sector, Gold Dust Woman was the closest ship to Eros.

There was never any question of whether the Woman would undertake the rescue effort. Regardless of the fact that the Woman was a TBSA freighter and the Explorer was a Pax Astra mining rig, it had always been understood among spacers that one ship always came to the assistance of another in times of emergency; international space law only codified what was already a long-standing practice that had been carried over from Earth’s maritime traditions. A few years earlier, officials from the Pax and TBSA had met to discuss forming a dedicated search and rescue team that would be on permanent standby for just such emergencies, yet both sides soon realized that the inherent difficulties were too much to overcome. Even in the inner system, the distances are just too vast for a SAR ship to be able to respond to a mayday in time for it to do any good. That, and the expense of maintaining crews and vessels which would do nothing but wait for emergencies meant that the proposal was impractical. Ultimately, both sides agreed to simply continue what they’d been doing before: overlook their rivalry in crisis situations, and come to each other’s aid no matter what.

So while Lesley began plotting a trajectory that would take the Woman to 433 Eros, Henry and Ko began prepping the ship for a course-correction burn. Once the captain was sure that his crew wasn’t having any problems of their own, he got on the radio and attempted to make contact with the Ritchie Explorer. His sense of foreboding grew when he received no response to either voice or text messages.

“That was when I knew that things were really bad,” Captain Zimmerman later told the TBSA board of inquiry. “According to the registry, there were six people aboard. When none of them can apparently make it to the wireless, you know there’s serious trouble. And when their comp does nothing more than repeat the same preset message over and over again, then it’s clear that they’re in deep.”

There was one piece of luck: Eros was only about one and a quarter million miles from the Woman’s present position. Once Henry and Ko worked out the logistics, they estimated that if they used most of the fuel reserves and ran the engine at maximum capacity, the Woman should be able to reach the asteroid in a little more than four days. This might seem like a long time, but by interplanetary standards it was a quick jaunt. The other two ships in the vicinity—the TBSA Martian Pride, another freighter, and the PASS Ulysses, an exploration ship outbound for the Jovian system—were seven and nine days away respectively, and although the Pride’s captain offered to assist the Woman, the other freighter was nearly out of range. Henry thanked the Pride, but told its captain that he and his crew could handle the problem themselves.

“I was wrong,” Henry would say later. “The situation was beyond us. I just didn’t know it then.”

Eros is somewhat unusual. Not part of the main belt, its highly elliptical orbit brings it as close as .15 AU to Earth during its 1.76-year solar period; during this time, it crosses the orbit of Mars twice, therefore occasionally making it both a near-Earth and a near-Mars asteroid. In 1999, the NASA probe NEAR Shoemaker orbited the rock several times, sending back the first close-up photos of a major asteroid, before crash-landing on its surface. Because of this, more was known about 433 Eros than any other transient body until the beginning of asteroid mining operations.

Despite its proximity to both Earth and Mars, though, it wasn’t until fairly recently that anyone claimed a stake on Eros. And for good reason: since type-S stony asteroids are chiefly comprised of rock, they’re considered less valuable than either type-C carbonaceous chondrites or type-M metallics, which offer resources of volatiles and precious metals. Eros may have been easier to reach, but it didn’t seem to offer enough to attract the attention of a profit-minded mining consortium.

This changed once the more valuable main-belt asteroids were gradually claimed by one TBSA consortium or another, thereby locking out competitors from the Pax Astra. When that happened, Pax prospectors began shifting through old astrogeological data, seeing if perhaps there may be anything that had been overlooked… and that was when it was found that NEAR Shoemaker had detected large surface deposits of olivine and pyroxene, along with the possible presence of iron sulfide and iron-nickel. Eros wasn’t a bonanza, but neither was it worthless; the fact that it was close to Earth made a stake by Pax consortium a feasibly profitable venture, if they were willing to invest in a mining rig and crew.

Four days after the Gold Dust Woman received the mayday from the Ritchie Explorer, the freighter came within visual range of the asteroid. Thirteen miles long and eight miles wide, Eros looks vaguely like an Idaho potato from which someone has taken a bite; at its midsection is a deep, scalloped depression, less like a crater than a gorge, from when it had apparently broken away from a larger asteroid countless years ago. Called Himeros, this was where the Explorer had anchored itself.

Asteroid mining rigs such as the Ritchie Explorer are called ships only because they have engines that enable them to move from one place to another. Other than that, they’re more like spacefaring versions of the offshore oil platforms that used to line the coasts of Earth’s oceans. About 70,000 tons in dry Earth-weight, the Explorer was an ugly, dust-covered hulk half-hidden by conduits, pipes, storage tanks, antennas, and cranes, with three fusion engines at one end and a hemispherical command module at its midsection. Eros was in its winter season, with the asteroid’s slow, end-over-end tumble on its spin axis causing Him-eros to face away from the Sun, so the rig could only be seen by its red and green formation lights.

As the Gold Dust Woman approached Eros, Henry Zimmerman repeated his radio calls, continually hailing the Explorer while Lesley fired maneuvering thrusters to bring the freighter alongside the asteroid and match spins with it. As before, there was no response… and when the Woman finally achieved a parallel position about 2,000 feet above Himeros, its crew saw why.

“It looked like a bomb had gone off down there,” Henry says. “The command module dome was almost completely blown away. It was like…” He pauses, thinking of a way to describe it. “If you made a bowl out of aluminum foil, turned it upside-down, then lit a firecracker underneath it… that’s what you’d get.”

“The moment I saw that,” Ko says, “I knew this wasn’t a rescue mission anymore. We were just going in there to find the bodies. There was no way anyone could have lived through whatever happened down there.”

Nevertheless, Captain Zimmerman proceeded as if lives were at stake and the clock was ticking. According to the database, the rig’s six-person crew was an extended family, three married couples who’d joined together to form a clan under a common surname. This practice is not unusual aboard Pax deep-space vessels; quite often, the clans are also the consortiums that own and operate their ships. In this instance, the Owlsley clan was listed as being the owner-operators of the Ritchie Explorer: David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley, the captain and first mate respectively; Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley, the chief engineer and operations manager; and Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley, both surface-operations technicians. According to their profiles, all were experienced spacers; it was possible that a few might have survived in some airtight compartment out of reach from the long-range com.

Because the Woman’s reactor boom jutted out at right-angles from the rest of the ship, there was no way the freighter could hard-dock with the rig. To make matters more difficult, the Explorer’s primary docking hatch was occupied by its skiff, thereby preventing the Woman from sending over her own skiff; compounding the mystery was the fact that the Explorer’s two three-person lifeboats were still in their berths as well. So reaching the rig wouldn’t be simple.

After a brief discussion, Henry Zimmerman consented to let Quon Ko make an untethered spacewalk over to the rig. It was a dangerous task; Ko would be using an EVA maneuvering pack, and the slightest misfire of its control thrusters could mean that he’d mismatch his spin relative to those of both the Woman and the Explorer and either tumble away into space or, worse, smash headlong into Eros at hundreds of feet per second. Ko had logged hundreds of hours in spacewalks, though, and had practiced this particular ship-to-ship jump before.

Lesley would later confess to biting her nails to the quick, but Ko made the jump without incident. “The trick is, you don’t look where you’re going,” he says. “If you did, you’d get dizzy and screw up. So you keep your eye on the heads-up the whole time and just do it.”

He came down near a small service airlock located on the Explorer’s starboard side, just above one of the four massive anchor pods on the rig’s underside that held the rig to the asteroid. Not far away was the hollow shaft of the primary drill; within the dim illumination of the formation lights, Ko could see that the drum-like shaft was sunk within the asteroid, a certain indication that the chemical laser bore had been deployed.

Ko found the airlock hatch, and it was then, within the halogen beams of his helmet lamps, that he noticed a safety line tethered to a rung next to the hatch. The slender rope lay limp from the hatch, falling down the adjacent ladder until it reached the ground, where it trailed away into the darkness. Ko used a flashlight from his belt to give the safety line a quick glance; there was nothing at the end of the line except another tether hook, but he also noted footprints scattered along the dark gray regolith beneath it. Little more than two dozen impressions, they went away from the rig and didn’t come back. There appeared to be more than one set of footprints, but it was hard to tell for sure whether more than one person was responsible for them.

“I had a hunch all this was significant,” Ko would later tell the board of inquiry, “so before I went in through the airlock, I took plenty of pictures. Particularly of the footprints, before they got messed up by anyone else.”

To avoid disturbing what might be a major clue, Quon Ko clung to the ladder as much as possible while he opened the airlock, setting his own feet on the ground only once. That was made possible by Eros’s very slight surface gravity. At less than .002-g, one would have to remain still for a long time in order to stand erect; even a dropped object took a minute or more to slowly drift to a rest.

Once he entered the airlock, the first thing Ko did was to check the interior pressure gauge. He was startled to find nothing but hard vacuum on the other side. It appeared that the Explorer had suffered a catastrophic blowout that had voided even the lower decks. “Automatic pressure doors should’ve come down,” he says, “unless the explosion was such that the comps were instantly knocked offline. In that case…” He stops, shakes his head. “When something like that happens, there’s no hope. You’re dead before you even hear the alarms.”

There seemed to be emergency power, though, so with Henry’s permission, Ko disengaged the airlock fail-safes, then pried open the inside hatch. An emergency ceiling lamp had been lit in the adjacent ready-room, and beneath its amber glow Ko found another clue. Two skinsuits were missing from the lockers; the other four were still in place, and when Ko checked their name patches, he saw that they belonged to David and Kathryn Dolan-Owlsley and Sean and Clay Connor-Owlsley. Which meant it was Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley who’d left through the airlock and not come back.

“When Ko found this,” Lesley says, “I figured, ‘Okay, that’s it. We’re going to find everyone else’s bodies somewhere in the rig.’ In fact, I started bracing myself for just that… even grabbing the med kit so that I’d have a sedative patch handy.”

For Ko, the situation was different. Professional spacers speak of moments of surrealism that sometimes occur during stressful EVAs; they become hyperconscious of the fact that they’re seeing the world through a helmet faceplate, and it suddenly seems as if they’ve become living cameras. “Distancing” is the expression most often used; you’re there, but it’s as if you’re not quite there.

This is what happened to Quon Ko as he made his way through the Ritchie Explorer. Climbing up the ladder from the airlock, he found the passageway that led him to the crew quarters. As he’d suspected, the emergency pressure doors hadn’t dropped; one by one, he entered compartments completely absent of atmospheric pressure. In the sanguine red tint of the ceiling lamps, he saw the damage caused by the blowout: food cans torn from galley shelves and strewn across the deck, clothes ripped from closet hangers, shredded paper thrown everywhere like confetti… and across it all, a thin layer of frost, where water vapor had instantly frozen out and become a patina of ice.

One small detail he’d come to remember: On the floor of one of the staterooms lay a paperback book, its cover torn and frosted-over but its title still readable—Basics of Rock Climbing. Perhaps because the book was so out of place, it stuck in his mind.

Yet there were no bodies. Like Lesley, Ko expected to find corpses. Even if two of the missing crewmen had been on EVA when the disaster occurred, it still meant that the remaining four should have been inside the rig; the lifeboats were in place, as was the skiff, so it was clear that no one had abandoned ship. Yet just as it was apparent that the rig had lost internal pressure before the emergency hatches could be sealed, so it also became obvious that no one would be found belowdecks.

Leaving the crew quarters, Ko crossed the short passageway that took him into the rig’s industrial section. When he came to the place where the ladder to the command module should have been located, though, he found himself at the edge of a gaping hole. A blast crater yawned in the center of the rig: nearly a dozen feet in diameter, it was practically bottomless, or at least as far he could tell from the beams of his helmet lamps. This was the site of the onboard explosion, the effects of which the Woman’s crew had seen from above. Judging from the way the torn metal edges of the crater were bent upwards, it appeared that the blast had happened somewhere below.

As Ko peered into the abyss, Henry and Lesley hastily pulled up the Explorer’s schematics from the Woman’s database. It was then that they discovered that the rig’s primary drill was positioned directly below the command module. It looked as if the drill had hit something deep underground that had caused the explosion, the force of which had blown straight upward into the rig itself.

There was nowhere else to search for survivors except the bridge. Rather than spend time searching for another ladder, Ko took the most direct approach: firing his EVA backpack, he carefully used its jets to glide up the crater to the top deck. “I could’ve left the rig entirely,” Ko says. “The ceiling was almost totally gone. When I got up there, I saw almost nothing but stars above me.”

The compartment was a wreck, only a handful of lights glimmering on the sole control panel that remained operational. Indeed, the final report issued by the Pax review board would conclude that it was only by a miracle that the Ritchie Explorer had been able to transmit the mayday received by the Gold Dust Woman; with most of the comps instantly knocked off-line by the explosion, only the emergency transmitter, which was located elsewhere on the platform and powered by its own battery, was left intact.

Still, nothing prepared Quon Ko for what he found. When the ovals cast by his helmet lamp found a black stikshoe wedged beneath the base of an upended chair, his first thought was that it was empty. But then he moved a little closer, and saw that the shoe was crusted with red ice. A foot, roughly severed just above the ankle, was caught within the shoe.

This was the only human remnant found aboard the Ritchie Explorer.

Captain Zimmerman immediately sent word to Ceres Station, which in turn sent urgent requests to the Martian Pride and the Ulysses that they come to the Gold Dust Woman’s assistance. By then, both vessels were nearly two weeks away from Eros, time enough for news of the disaster to reach Earth.

Journalists often say that the public pays little attention to what goes on in space until something goes wrong, and this is true more often than not. When space exploration became less about discovery and more about commerce, the only people on Earth who continued to closely watch what was happening out there were investors, lien holders, and insurance companies, along with the handful of amateur enthusiasts who still cared about such things. This tends to change, though, whenever something unusual occurs… and in space, an unusual occurrence is almost always something that takes its toll in lives.

So Quon Ko hadn’t even returned to the Woman before the first reports of what he’d found aboard the Explorer appeared in the news media back on Earth. Within twenty-four hours, about half of the world’s inhabitants, along with nearly 100 percent of the lunar and Martian colonists, were aware of the mysterious loss of six lives aboard an asteroid mining rig. To be sure, most of those same four and a half billion people would forget all about the Explorer and its crew within ten days, for nothing is as fickle as the attention of the media mass-mind. But for the moment, the Ritchie Explorer was the top-of-the-hour lead story.

It wasn’t just that six people had been killed. It was also that those six people were missing, with nothing more than a severed foot to show for them. Among the countless experts, real and self-proclaimed, who took turns espousing opinions both educated and ignorant, the more well-informed pointed out that, even if most of the crew had been blown out into space by the explosion—the cause of which was, itself, a major mystery—then Eros’s gravity would assert its pull upon their corpses, and the bodies would therefore eventually be found and recovered. And they were right: over the course of the next few weeks, searchers from the Pride and the Ulysses located the torn and frozen bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys, each floating in space not far from Eros. However, the disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley remained both unsolved and unexplained.

Then there was the explosion itself. What caused it, and why hadn’t the crew been able to prevent it? This took much longer to figure out; in fact, it wasn’t until a year later, when the Pax Astra dispatched an investigative team to Eros, that a cause was definitely determined. Even then, it was something that surprised even accredited experts: the Explorer’s laser drill had apparently hit a methane pocket deep within Eros. Such gas pockets are sometimes found within type-C asteroids, but are practically unknown among type-S rocks. Indeed, most media commentators had already ruled this out as a possibility. But the findings of the Pax investigation were conclusive: the explosion had occurred the instant Explorer’s laser pierced the rock surrounding the pocket and ignited the volatile gas, and the resultant blast had gone straight up the mine shaft to devastate the rig above.

These things took a while to discover, though, and in the meantime, the imps of the net came out to play. People of our time take pride in their sophistication, but that doesn’t mean that the superstitions of the past have vanished. Thus it wasn’t long before someone mentioned the Great Galactic Ghoul.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the Ghoul would be remembered. Nothing lives quite as long as a myth, particularly when it takes the form of a ghost story to be told around the flames of a virtual campfire. And the Great Galactic Ghoul was no mere legend; he had a long history behind him, one that could be accessed with only a few keystrokes. The fact that the Ghoul had originally been a joke was forgotten. Like the Loch Ness Monster, foo fighters, or Big Foot, he gradually took on a life of his own.

Sterling Crow, the Nettimes star commentator, was the first to mention the Ghoul. That was appropriate; Crow was not only knowledgeable enough to be aware of the Ghoul, but also gullible enough to indict him as a possible culprit. Since most of Crow’s viewers watched his show only for its unintentional humor, the majority of them didn’t take him seriously… but The Morning Crow boasted a daily audience of sixty million, so even the minority who accepted Crow’s ravings at face value was a significant figure.

Shortly afterwards, The Public Inquisitor ran a story claiming that a senior Pax Astra official, who’d insisted upon anonymity, had told the site that “a mysterious alien entity” was responsible for the Explorer disaster, and that Pax investigators believed this entity to be the Great Galactic Ghoul. The Inquisitor went on to say that the Ghoul had been blamed for spacecraft disappearances as long as a hundred years ago, and both American and Russian officials of the last century had covered up the creature’s existence. Again, while most people didn’t take the Inquisitor seriously, quite a few did, and so its story helped push the Great Galactic Ghoul further into the public consciousness.

Seeing what was coming out of the rumor mill, the Pax hastily released reports of what the Gold Dust Woman, the Martian Pride, and the Ulysses had found thus far. By then, however, theories about what had really happened to the Ritchie Explorer had already appeared in the news media. There hadn’t been a mine shaft explosion; instead, the blast had been the result of an energy beam fired by another spacecraft, one doubtless of extraterrestrial origin. The six missing crew members weren’t dead, but had been abducted instead; even after four of them were eventually found, the fact that two were still unaccounted for only helped to fuel this particular hearsay. The Ghoul had been gone for a long time, yes, but only because he’d been asleep on Eros; the Ritchie Explorer had disturbed him, and so he’d reacted by wiping out those who’d trespassed on his domain.

All this might have been harmless were it not for the fact that the scare may have contributed to the outbreak of the System War. Royalists within the Pax—notably Lucius Robeson, who’d later become Queen Macedonia’s Chief of Naval Intelligence once the New Ark Party was overthrown and the Pax became a constitutional monarchy—were quick to claim that the Explorer disaster wasn’t an accident at all, but rather an act of war by the TBSA. The TBSA hotly denied this, of course, and Robeson had nothing to back up his allegations. Nevertheless, insurance premiums on ships traveling between Earth and Mars soared to an all-time high, and some vessels began to add weapons their captains thought they’d never need. It wasn’t just the idea that ships might be attacking one another, though. There was also the prospect—however remote or absurd it might seem—that there really was a Great Galactic Ghoul lurking out there. So when actual hostilities broke out between the Pax and the TBSA a few years later, vessels on both sides were already armed with ship-to-ship missiles.

In the midst of all the hysteria and saber- rattling, the investigation quietly continued, even if it had reached something of an impasse. By then, the bodies of the Dolan-Owlsleys and the Connor-Owlsleys had been recovered, and it was clear that they’d died when an explosion had ripped through the command center and hurled them into space. And although no one was yet certain what caused that explosion, it strongly appeared that the rig’s laser drill had ignited some volatile gas deep within the asteroid. So the only questions that remained unanswered were why no one in the command center had acted to prevent the accident in the first place, and also the whereabouts of other two crewmen.

Unfortunately, the ships that had responded to the mayday—the Gold Dust Woman, the Martian Pride, and the Ulysses—had to leave before the matter was resolved. All had missions that needed to be completed, and their original destinations were getting farther away with every passing day. So the bodies of the four dead crewmen were loaded aboard the Woman, the only one of the three vessels that was headed for Earth, and the recovery teams sealed the rig as best as they could. And then the TBSA and Pax ships made their departures from Eros.

Yet one person would eventually return to solve the mystery.

“I never believed in the Great Galactic Ghoul,” Quon Ko says. “Maybe it was fun for people to think some invisible space monster was responsible, but I couldn’t accept that. I have to work out there, y’know. There had to be another explanation.”

Over the next six months, while the Gold Dust Woman made the long trip home, its chief engineer continued to study the problem, putting together everything he and the others had learned while trying to supply the missing pieces. He studied the photos he’d shot, read the Explorer’s logbooks, pored over schematics of the rig. Nothing new came to him, but Ko admits that it became something of an obsession and Captain Zimmerman eventually noticed that it was distracting him from his duties.

“Ko and I had a talk,” Henry says, “and I suggested that something might shake loose if he put it aside for awhile. It was sort of a roundabout way of telling him to get back to work, but he seemed to take my advice, because Lesley and I finally stopped hearing his theories over the dinner table… which, I gotta tell you, was a relief.”

Yet Ko only stopped discussing the Ritchie Explorer with the Zimmermans; he didn’t stop thinking about it. And the more he worked at the problem, the more he came to suspect that the two unsolved mysteries—the apparent negligence of the bridge crew, and the disappearance of Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley—were somehow linked. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the two surface-operations technicians were both on EVA when the blast occurred. Not only that, but Pax regulations mandated that anyone working outside a spacecraft—even in the low-gravity environment of an asteroid—should use a safety line. So why was only one line tethered to the outside hatch?

Yet Ko didn’t come up with answers to any of these questions until after the Gold Dust Woman came home. And even then, it was only by accident.

Three days after the freighter parked at the L2 port on the lunar farside, Quon Ko was strolling through Descartes City’s crater floor arboretum when he happened to glance at a bulletin board next to a snack bar. His gaze passed over the various items tacked on the board; along with political ads and notices of lost pets, there were also posters for various clubs and social groups… and suddenly, Ko found himself looking again at one in particular, featuring a picture of a skinsuited figure hanging precariously by his hands from the edge of a lunar cliff, with only a thin nylon rope between him and death.

The poster was for the Descartes City Mountaineering Club, and offered instruction in both tethered and free climbing… and that was when Ko remembered something he’d seen when he was making his way through the Explorer’s crew quarters. A book on the floor, titled Basics of Rock Climbing.

“Just like that, I had the answer.” Ko snaps his fingers. “I knew why Keith and Jane were out on the surface while an emergency was going on, and why there was only one tether and not two.”

Quon Ko immediately pulled out his phone and scanned the number on the poster. A few seconds later, he was speaking with Jody Suarez, the club president. After Ko explained who he was and why he was calling, Suarez agreed to check the club’s membership records. Although he reported a few minutes later that the Wetherill-Owlsleys were not on its rolls, that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t climbers. Port Armstrong and Tycho City had their own mountain-climbing clubs, as did Arsia Station on Mars, and even then it was possible that the missing couple hadn’t belonged to any of those societies.

“I asked him if he’d ever heard of anyone free-climbing on asteroids,” Ko says, “and for a second or two I didn’t hear anything. And then he came back and told me that, yeah, he’d heard about this sort of thing, and it was possible that this might have been what they were doing.”

Free-climbing—the art of rock climbing without safety gear—has been practiced on Earth for over a hundred years, but only lately has it made its way to the Moon and Mars, where ropes and tethers are mandated for anyone not on planetary surfaces or spacewalking with EVA maneuvering packs. In recent years, a new sport had been devised by enthusiasts: asteroid free-climbing, where one went EVA without lines or tethers, relying only on their hands, feet, and the asteroid’s minimal gravity to keep them from floating away.

“Both of the Wetherill-Owlsleys were surface techs,” Ko says, “which meant that they had plenty of opportunity to take up free-climbing. So that made me wonder. Maybe one of them had left the rig to go climbing and somehow got into trouble. That might have forced the other to go to the rescue, but in order to do so, he or she might have had to detach themselves from their own line.”

Even though he’s describing how he successfully deduced the solution of the mystery, there’s no smile on his face, but rather a wary skepticism that persists to this day. “If that were true,” Ko continues, “then maybe the rest of the crew was in the command center, watching the whole thing and not paying any attention to what the drill was doing. So when the laser hit the gas pocket, they’d already lost any chance they might have had to save themselves.”

His theory made sense to the Pax board of inquiry when they summoned him to testify. The TBSA had agreed to let Ko continue to cooperate with the investigation, which is what he wanted to do more than anything else. So when the Pax Astra dispatched a military vessel, the PASS Archangel Gideon, to Eros to finish the official investigation, Quon Ko went along as a consultant. Although this forfeited any chance of landing another chief engineer job for the next eighteen months, Ko was willing to return to the Ritchie Explorer.

“I wanted to find out what happened out there, once and for all,” he says. “I felt like I owed it to everyone who’d died that day.”

Another person participating in the Pax investigation was Lauren Moore, an astrophysicist from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Moore had spent months studying old NASA data about Eros, and she had discovered an interesting anomaly that had been overlooked until then. When she described it to Ko while en route to Eros, he responded with his own conjecture, and the two of them realized that it might provide an explanation for Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley’s disappearance, however far-fetched it might seem. But they didn’t reveal their theory to anyone else; they wouldn’t be able to test it until they reached Eros and went out on the surface for themselves, and they didn’t want to appear foolish if they turned out to be wrong.

Almost five months later, the Gideon rendezvoused with Eros and its lander was sent down to the Ritchie Explorer. Shortly after it docked with the crippled rig, Ko and Lauren put on hardsuits and, along with Gideon’s chief petty officer, Elijah Koons, ventured out on the surface, using the same airlock through which Ko had entered the first time he’d been there. The handful of footprints Ko had spotted were still there, undisturbed in the year that had passed since the Gold Dust Woman had responded to the automated distress signal, and so was the safety line, which the trio followed across Himeros’ basin.

The discarded rope came to an end a hundred yards from the hatch. The footprints continued from there; they were sporadic, an average of six feet apart from one another, and although they were plainly visible now that Himeros was facing the Sun, they would have been easy to miss a year earlier, when that side of Eros had been in the middle of its long night. As both Ko and Lauren anticipated, the footprints led in to the direction of Himeros’s western wall, a little more than a mile away.

Quon, Dr. Moore, and Chief Petty Officer Koons carried extra loops of safety line, which they attached to each other as they made their way across the basin. It soon became clear that there were two sets of footprints, one set less distinct and on a slightly different track, as if one person had run after the other. The trails led to the bottom of the wall, where they suddenly came to a halt at the edge of an oval-shaped area where the regolith appeared to have been recently disturbed (“It looked like where kids had been horsing around in a sandbox,” Lauren would say later). There were a few handprints on the steep wall above the area of disturbance, but the searchers didn’t notice them until later; it was what they saw at the base of the wall that grabbed their attention.

“Sticking up from the ground was a boot,” Ko says. “It was upside-down, and we could see it from the bottom of its sole all the way down to its ankle. It looked like someone had thrown it there, until we got closer and saw another boot beside it, this one buried a bit more deeply. And then we saw that there were legs attached to them.”

This was the surface anomaly that Lauren Moore had learned about from studying old NASA data. As Eros slowly tumbled end-over-end, landslides frequently occurred within its larger craters and depressions. Over time, these landslides would create sand traps that appeared at first glance to be solid ground, but instead were little more than deep pits filled with powdery gray regolith.

“They’re like quicksand, only dry,” Lauren says. “Fall into one of them, and unless you’re attached to a safety line, you’re in a lot of trouble.” A grim smile. “Which is exactly what happened here.”

The legs belonged to Jane Wetherill-Owlsley. She lay upside-down above her husband Keith, who was buried more deeply than she was. Her right hand was grasped within his left hand, and their helmets were less than three feet apart from each other, but they were stuck fast, like two insects caught within dusty gray amber. Their suit batteries were dead and the oxygen supplies were depleted; both of them had suffocated, neither of them able to extricate themselves from the death trap into which they’d fallen.

Now it all came together. Keith Wetherill-Owlsley had unwisely decided to go free-climbing while a drilling operation was in progress. Perhaps he was bored with the monotony of his work; it may have even been possible that no one on the rig, other than his wife, knew what he was doing. Whatever the reason, he’d attempted to make an ascent of Himeros’s western wall, only to lose his grip and slide downhill to the crater floor… where, unknown to him, the sand pit lay waiting.

Hearing his call for help, Jane Wetherill-Owlsley had rushed to rescue her husband. Apparently she’d been on EVA at the same time, probably working on the rig while her husband was goofing off. Since the western wall was beyond reach of her safety rope, she’d released the tether. This decision ultimately doomed both of them, because when she tried to pull her husband out of the pit, there was nothing to prevent him from pulling her in as well, and once both of them were trapped in the pit, they couldn’t get out by themselves.

The crisis hadn’t gone unnoticed in the command center. The rest of the crew had dropped what they were doing to see what was going on. Perhaps they were on the verge of suiting up and going to the rescue. In any case, this was the third and final mistake the crew made, because while all this was taking place, no one was paying attention to the drill. Any warning that they might have had that the laser was about to hit a gas pocket came too late, and the explosion probably killed everyone in the rig almost instantly. The two surviving crew members only lived a little while longer; their suits’ air supplies finally ran out though, and they died together, only a few feet from safety.

Everything could have been avoided. No one had to die that day. But six people lost their lives because stupid things were done in a place where stupidity isn’t easily forgiven.

Quon Ko was one of the co-authors of the final report that revealed the circumstances of the disaster. He continued to serve as a TBSA spacecraft engineer for four more years before taking early retirement. Since then, he has made something of living from the Ritchie Explorer disaster—he has written articles, delivered lectures, and even worked as a consultant on a vid about the tragedy.

To this day, he’s surprised to hear how many people continue to believe that the disaster was the work of a mythical creature. What’s far more incredible, he points out, is the realization that the Explorer’s crew committed three separate errors that, on their own, might have been trivial, but when combined killed everyone on the rig. Nonetheless, some people feel it necessary to believe that an invisible space monster was responsible. He suspects that, for those people, a supernatural cause for the disaster is preferable to one that anyone could commit.

“We spend a lot of time worrying about stuff like the Great Galactic Ghoul,” he says, “but the thing we really should be afraid of is what we do to ourselves. Space monsters don’t exist, really. But careless mistakes will kill you just as quickly.”

Content

The Great Galactic Ghoul
by Allen M. Steele