[ WP ] Sailors have always been a superstitious bunch . In the long stretches of darkness and isolation between stars superstitions still run high . So let 's hear a ghost story from deep space .

`` Aye noobies get over ere'' bellowed a crewman named ol' beer belly. 
 
 `` It's an old Astronaut tradition to sit'round the heater and tell tales, been doin it since the first ships left for Mars I reckon.'' 
 
 The young new crewmen of the FTS Indomitable Spirit set down on a few couches and chairs that had been set up around the heater, it's projection of orange flames danced on the walls. 
 
 Ol' Beer Belly was a rough short of man who thought of himself more like a pirate from the days of sail than a modern astronaut. Most people figure that's why he'd been snuffed for command for 15 years. 
 
 `` They say that before the days of FTL that people would travel between the stars in primitive ships with great chambers full of stasis pods. The whole crew and all the passengers would go to sleep and the ship would pilot itself. That's how the first interstellar colonies were settled, eye a one way trip by the time you got there everyone ya knew back home would be long dead. Well at least a few of the ships went missing, flew off course never to be seen again, or so we thought. 
 
 One night after second shift had taken watch, I got a call from the captain talking me to form a boarding party, we had found a derelict ship. I grabbed the best men I could find and had them suit up. There were no docks on the old ship so we had to space walk over. When we opened the door stale cold air exited. We went first to the bridge, empty and powerless. One of the engineers spent a few hours roughing batteries into the ships systems. As soon as they were on line warnings and lights were flashing, it took us a while to figure out how but we sur them off. We figured out that the ship had an error in it's navigation system and had been adrift for 200 years, it flew proper for 100 years before that and was only 3 years from it's destination. 
 
 What we saw next though haunts me to this day. We walked to the stasis room and opened the door, when we did a corpse no more than a month dead fell at our feet. He had glass all in em, Luke he had busted through his stasis chamber but then could n't make it through the door. Everyone else though was curled up at the bottom of their chambers. All of the glass tubes had scratch marks on the inside, some were bloodied. From what we reckon about a month prior to our arrival the power finally gave out. In it's death thralls it woke up the crew but failed to open there pods. Cause of death was ruled by our medic to be hypothermia. Apparently it still supplied air to them until they all froze to death in their pods. I can still see them there and I ca n't help but think if we'd only been a little sooner we could have saved them. 
 
 Now the most disturbing thing was n't what we found in the stasis room, it's what we did n't. The caption was no where to be found. Not in the room or his pod or the bridge. We did n't find him until we finished our sweep. Between the stasis room and the computer room we found him. With a board from the navigation computer in his hands. He was just a skeleton and a uniform with his rank obviously on his shoulder. He had woken up gone mad and doomed the entire crew to a terrible fate. Judging by the knife next to him and the cut marks on his radius, ulna, and wrist bones be had killed himslef. 
 
 Maybe he had been awake by himself to long. Some old astronauts say that to long in space can drive a man mad, make him kill, they call it space sickness.'' 
 
 He leaned back in his chair took a deep breath and said `` I been in the fleet for 20 years I wonder how much longer I'll last'' 
 
 The noobies all let out an awkward laugh and then hurried back to their quarters.
