Another Tale of Deck 13

Every species across the galaxy has ghost stories, tales told over the holographic campfire as the replicator attempts to toast the equivalent of a marshmallow just right.

The best ships have their fair share of spooky stories too; the Jefferies junction on deck 7 that the midshipman swears is haunted, turbolifts that go nowhere or perhaps even a gremlin that hangs out beneath the battery compartment?

Now is your chance to share a fearful vision told late one night as crewmembers huddle around the flickering lamp and subconsciously shuffle together on their benches for safety, as the cargo bay doors whistle.

Submit a short flash fiction showcasing a scary story your crew share one evening.

Criteria

Submissions should take the form of a maximum 500-word flash fiction entered directly into the competition page. Google Docs will be used to measure the word count.
Submissions don't have to feature your own characters or commands, but should still follow the requirements of member canon.
Stories will be graded in accordance with the Bravo Fleet Fiction Rubric, which marks on the following criteria: Language, Style, & Mechanics; Adherence to Canon; Perspective; Characterization; Originality; Use of the Prompt.

Winners

Submissions

User	Content	Date
Kirok Skyrunner (#2986)	Kirok settled closer to the campfire. The flames danced and crackled in the darkness. His wife, Sophia, snuggled up beside him, her eyes sparkling with excitement as they enjoyed a weekend together. "Tell me a scary story, love," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the wind rustling through the trees. He smiled, taking a deep breath to begin. "It was a night just like this, many years ago," he started, his voice low and mysterious. "I was just a young boy, not much older than ten. My parents took me on a camping trip to the Rocky Mountains." Sophia's eyes widened, leaning closer, her gaze fixed on him. "We camped near a babbling brook. The sound of the water lulled me to sleep. As the night wore on, I was awoken by a strange, unsettling howl. It was a sound I'd never heard before, like the cry of a targ from the depths of the Klingon underworld." Kirok paused, letting the suspense build. Sophia's eyes grew even wider. "The howl grew louder. I felt the ground tremble beneath my feet. I was terrified. My father just sat there calmly. He told me it was the Shadow Stalker, a creature of legend that roamed the mountains, preying on the unwary." Sophia's hand instinctively went to the phaser on her belt, her eyes darting into the darkness beyond the firelight. "We were frozen in fear as the beast emerged from the darkness. Its eyes glowed like embers from the underworld. Its presence seemed to suck the very life out of the air. My father stood tall, his eyes locked on the creature. I could hear my heart pounding in my chest." Kirok took a deep breath, his voice dropping to a whisper. "The creature began to circle us, its eyes fixed on me. I knew we were doomed. However, my father didn't back down. He reached out and placed a hand on my shoulder. I felt a surge of courage flow through me. Together, we stood against the beast. Slowly, it began to back away, its eyes fading into the darkness." Sophia let out a breathless sigh, her eyes still fixed on mine. "Then what happened?" she whispered. Kirok smiled, a mischievous glint in my eye. "Then, my dear wife, the beast vanished into the night, leaving us shaken, but unharmed. My father turned to me and said, 'Kirok, you will become a courageous man, brave and strong. Never forget the lessons of the wild.'" Sophia smiled, her eyes sparkling with amusement. "You're a terrible storyteller, Kirok," she said, laughing. "You always leave out the best part." He chuckled, pulling her close. "Perhaps," Kirok said, "but the story's not over yet. The best part is yet to come. When we're old and gray, sitting around the campfire, we can tell tales of our adventures to our grandchildren." Sophia's smile softened. She leaned in close, her lips brushing against his ear. "I'd like that," she whispered.	2025-10-18 22:30:59
Aloran (#2232)	Meredith Vennock was a doctor and scientist with no stock for superstition. She was a pragmatist, an empiricist. Her latest subject - an amorphous organism recovered from the event horizon of a nebula - had no fixed form, no obvious intelligence. It pulsed faintly under the containment field, its oily surface reflecting the bright lights back on themselves. At first, the creature responded to stimuli with chemical flickers, photonic ripples she charted with fascination. Then came patterns, repetitions that hinted at an imprint of memory. Vennock dismissed the notion. "Chemicals in a random reaction," she told herself. Still, she noted how its responses intensified when she approached, how the sickbay lights dimmed fractionally, as if the ship itself were holding its breath. Days blurred into sleepless study. She increased the tests: radiation exposure, electrical stimulation, controlled dissection. The organism darkened, its responses and rhythms slowing to a heartbeat’s crawl. When she leaned close to record the decline, it shifted - ever so slightly - toward her hand. For a moment she thought she heard something, not a sound but an impression: "why". She froze. Then laughed aloud at her fatigue. “Anthropomorphic nonsense,” she muttered. “Neural mimicry at best.” The next morning the containment field failed. Security logs would later show no tampering, no power surge. Yet the specimen was gone. In its place, a spreading stain of black residue, like soot, that no solvent could remove. Within a day, it began appearing elsewhere. On her gloves, her reflection in the viewport, her dreams. A soft, wet whisper echoed behind her whenever she entered the lab. Her instruments would flicker to life, displaying neural waveforms identical to those of sentient species. And always, at the centre of the readout, a single repeating pulse: her own brain pattern, mirrored perfectly. She tried to report the incident, but every record she composed corrupted into static. Crew members began avoiding her. Her husband, James Kincaid, mentioned that the air around her felt "thick, like grief." Another swore he saw something move in her shadow. Vennock worked alone then, desperate to isolate the anomaly. She traced it to the ship’s biofiltration system. When she opened the maintenance hatch, darkness poured out. Not an absence of light, but something present and formless. Her own face flickered within it, distorted, lips mouthing a question she could not bear to hear again. She staggered back. The blackness followed, spreading across the deck, pulsing with the rhythm of her heart. Responding to the alert as fast as possible, Kincaid and the security team entered the ruined sickbay and found no trace of Vennock. Only a glossy smear upon the walls, vaguely shaped like a woman reaching toward the stars.	2025-10-18 18:14:14
Ludvig Traven (#3114)	Ensign's Log. Every ship has its ghost stories. Throughout history, in every culture, explorers have become the most superstitious of people. Ours started last night.... It was third watch, power was cycling in Cargo Bay two, the lights were dimmed apart from a single portable lamp flickering like an ancient camp fire. Someone brought with them replicated cocoa. It kept reheating itself in the flask and smelt faintly of coolant. It was the perfect conditions for fear. There were four of us in there, Crewman Beck, Rixx, Ens Liora and myself. Beck started it, as usual. “you've all heard about deck 7,” he said. “About Jefferies 7-B?" None of us had, or at least we pretended we hadn't. According to Beck, during the refit, an engineer named Ensign Veyra got assigned there alone. It was routine diagnostics, nothing unusual at all. While there, she heard a whisper over the comm, it was someone saying her name. She put it down to interference until it whispered again, right beside her ear. Rixx joked that maybe Lt Brunak had fallen asleep in the conduits somewhere, but no one laughed. Beck carried on, the hatch had sealed behind her but the system indicated it was open. She turned and saw.... something in the conduit. Not humanoid, or machine. Just a shimmer in the darkness. It had two pale lights where eyes should have been, blinking in time with the pulse of the warp core. Liora leaned into the group so far that she almost singed her uniform on the lamp. Beck said that but the time a recovery team had found Veyra, she was alive but completely coated in frost with her tricorder still running. It had recorded an audio spike. He picked up his PADD from beside him and tapped a button, beginning the playback. It was mainly static but with a slow rhythm, like breathing through metal. Then a voice, distorted but there said “still here.” The flask, still warming its contents, hissed as he said it and spat out a half melted marshmallow. We all jumped a mile. I told them it was a [rank file, maybe a feedback loop of some kind. Rixx agreed with me.... loudly. As he did the ships intercom chimed, “Power fluctuations detected on Deck Seven, Jefferies tube 7-B.” We all froze. The lamp flickered slightly, dimmed and the went out. In the darkness surrounding us we heard the same static hiss. From a speaker embedded in the wall came a voice, “still here.” The lamp came back to life, but it had moved. It was on a different crate, perfectly centered. Like someone had placed it there intentionally. We filed a maintenance report, but found nothing. Apparently, tonight, during Gamma shift, the environmental sensors on Deck 7 registered a localised temperature drop, right beside 7-B. When the ship is quiet enough, you can almost hear the pulse of the warp core through there, like breathing through metal. End Log	2025-10-18 15:03:04
Jaya Thorne (#2970)	The floor of Tanna and T’Luni’s quarters was littered with empty candy wrappers, soda cans, and chip bags. The two roommates sat in a circle on the floor, with Ezra, Pym and a few other ensigns. In the middle of the circle, a holographic fire cast long shadows along the floor and up the walls. Tanna leaned back against the couch. “Alright, T’Luni. You’ve been quiet all night, it’s time for you to tell a ghost story.” “Vulcans do not believe in ghosts,” she replied. “Oh, come on,” Ezra said, nudging her gently with his shoulder. “Neither do I, but I still came up with one.” “Fine,” T’Luni said, straightening up. “But if you desire to be unsettled, please do not interrupt.” “It happened when I was a cadet, on my first cruise. Our ship passed through a photonic inversion field. The hull plating glowed for hours afterwards. The engineers said it was nothing, but they were wrong.” “The next morning, people started to notice their reflections in the windows were behaving – oddly. They seemed to be delayed, first by just a fraction of a second. You’d raise your hand, and your reflection would follow. We just assumed it was a quirk of the inversion field… until the reflections started smiling when we didn’t.” “Then, one crewmember – Lieutenant Jurok– walked past a mirror and saw his reflection stop. It just stood there, watching him. He laughed it off as a trick of the light, but we swore we saw it stay there, standing in the glass… even after he walked away.” She paused and took a long drink from her can of soda. “Over the next few days,” she continued, “People began to report hearing whispers, which seemed to be coming from the reflections. They turned up everywhere – monitors, panels, even the warp core containment field. We tried covering the mirrors, but that only made the whispers worse. The voices sounded like our own, but reversed.” “Eventually we scanned one of the reflections, and we found out the inversion field had actually duplicated our visual patterns. The ship had created mirror echoes of the whole crew, trapped in the reflective services.” “Wait,” Pym said, “You’re telling me they were sentient reflections?” “I am telling you,” T’Luni continued, “That one night, Jurok’s reflection actually tried to reach out. The glass rippled like water, and when it stilled, it was gone.” A chorus of gasps escaped the group. T’Luni shrugged dismissively, then continued. “Eventually, we sealed off that section of the ship. We left the field, and the reflections returned to normal.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “But when we checked the logs, there was an extra biosign. It flickered, then disappeared.” Ezra let out a low whistle. “Okay, that was spooky.” “I told you,” T’Luni said, smirking ever so slightly, “Vulcans do not believe in ghosts.” Tanna caught her reflection on the screen of the TV, and for a split second, she swore she saw it wink at her.	2025-10-14 15:24:50
Thomas Hunter (#3094)	The USS Mosse had only been out of spacedock for thirteen days, when it found itself under attack from an unknown enemy. Heavily damaged, the Captain orders the ship to drop an emergency distress buoy and limps towards a nearby nebula, where it eventually loses power. Casualties are sent to sick bay and there are fourteen fatalities, who the CMO has stored in the ship’s morgue, while engineers are rushing to try and fix the ship, which has several systems down and hull breaches across several decks.The computer’s voice changes and warps, shifting through different iterations and pitches and tones, then blends them all together in a terrifying warble, “hElp mE” - Ensign Falcone taps on his helm console, but gets no response, as his screen goes black, followed by a flicker of red pixels, that eventually form a face that begins to scream “HEALP MAYYE” The captain steps up from his chair and attempts to talk to whatever this creature could be, but is met with some kind of electrical feedback, as each of the consoles explodes in that way they always seem to do, as a massive charge of electrical energy discharges from the main screen and is funnelled into the captain, killing them instantly. The first officer orders non-essential personnel to the shuttles and escape pods, despite the nebula, but as they begin to launch, they are hit by the same energy and destroyed. The remaining crew are sent to common areas like cargo bays and holodecks, while engineers and computer operations officers get to work on looking for a solution. Time Passes Engineering is a mess, highlighted by emergency lighting and the odd carefully placed lantern or the torchlight given by another crewmember. Ensign Annie Ghrymme, somehow still in tidy uniform and well-kept hair and make-up, is working hard, opening up panels and rewiring panels, in order to bring something back online. Suddenly, a spark, then a console comes to life - isolated from the rest of the system - but still connected to it, through bypasses and workarounds. Ghrymme hooks up a PADD to the console and begins writing and re-writing code, somehow managing to purge the console of whatever virus, or creature, or being had taken over the ship. Excited, Annie tries to communicate with the bridge, but finds no reply - the first officer, no reply - she speaks with her team and the chief engineer, who tells her to grab a phaser and a security team, as he opens the door using the manual release. The door opens, but something looks off - the corridor layout is wrong and there’s a deteriorated body on the floor, which looks eerily familiar to the chief, as he checks down the corridor, only to find signs which tell them they are on the wrong deck, on the other side of the ship. The chief walks out, followed by security, but as Annie starts to leave, everyone begins to glitch out, with Annie looking on in horror as she sees the sign 'Holodeck 3'	2025-10-13 22:16:17
James C. MacLeod (#653)	Private Submission	2025-10-13 00:57:59

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New Frontiers: Act 3 Story Updates

Task Force 86 Report #1

Another Tale of Deck 13

Criteria

Winners

1st Place

2nd Place

3rd Place

Submissions

Managed By the

New Frontiers: Act 3 Story Updates

Task Force 86 Report #1

Another Tale of Deck 13

Description

Criteria

Winners

1st Place

2nd Place

3rd Place

Submissions

Managed By the