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You can read more original fiction from Emily Chesley in the Meanderings of the Emily Chesley Reading Circle<

The Windigo of Frigheim IX

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The strapping space-engineer second class Benjorn Sigsmund clasped the tatters of his enviro-cloak around him and watched as his five remaining crewmates huddled around the body of their captain, Winston Smythe-Jonson; their hypocritical amen's to his final benediction were torn away in the katabatic winds. Though Benjorn had never liked the man, he was still sad to see Smythe-Jonson succumb to his injuries as did eleven other survivors of the wreck. Like Smythe-Jonson, the Retrograde was a dead shell - what life it could once support in its seething guts was now evacuated. All that was left was the loosely held together filth that somehow lived on.

All except for the lissom Sub-Commander Leila McQuim - Benjorn would never consider her as anything less than immaculate.

The subdued group hurried back into the relative shelter of the ship, each wondering how long it would be until the creature came to claim the body of the captain, just as it had claimed all of the others.

Benjorn tried to put the dreadful hissing noise of the previous nights out of his mind, and contemplated the other surviving members of the crew; the nefarious Fetish twins, the ship's psychodynamicists; Jeremy Tweedle, the ship's xenobotanist; and Bogo Fudgemar, the Mangorian Diplomat, were all hardly the paragons of Imperial rectitude. It was well known, for example, that Jeremy's freakishly long digits had been used to examine much more than the local flora on a regular basis, and he was constantly making indecent suggestions to Leila. Apart from their thick drawls, all Mangorians were known to exhibit an affected enthusiasm for the Emperor and his fancy dress balls; an affectation that Bogo was paying for dearly, as his costume of choice the day of the ISS Retrograde's disaster had been a pixie's frock and wings. His hedonistic Excellency would have looked most ridiculous in the outfit, what, with his long shaggy Mangorian mane and the delicate hams of his race, had the situation be less dire.