Cease and Deceased

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It wasn’t the most beautiful starship ever conceived, not with a budget of only half a billion dollars. It was mostly just an open framework atop an Orion class fusion rocket, but the Spook had one big advantage over anything else that had ever been built for interstellar travel: it could carry passengers.

Of course they had to be dead first, but that was no problem for Tilbey and me. We had plenty of experience at it by the time the ship was ready to fly. Liam, on the other hand, still hadn’t made the transition, and it was coming right down to the wire.

“So when are you going to snuff it?” Tilbey asked him one afternoon while we were working on the magnetic trap that would hold us in place while the ship was under thrust.

All three of us were outside, hovering around the payload section and getting in each other’s way while we replaced a blown coil in the magnetic restraint system. Liam was all thumbs in his pressure suit, but Tilbey and I were little better. We didn’t need suits anymore since we didn’t need air, but in our incorporeal state we still had a hard time holding onto anything. And when we slipped through normal matter, the magnetic fields that made up our “bodies” played hell with electrical circuits.

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