I’ve been retired for almost eight years now. Eight whole years… my, my how the time does fly.

​

I have to say, I’ve got mixed feelings about retirement. On one hand I appreciate having more time to spend with my wife and our grandkids. I’ve spent most of my life saving up a nice little nest egg and now I can finally enjoy it. My wife and I have been taking some of those vacations we always talked about taking, I’ve had a chance to see more of the world and enjoy my life on my own terms.

​

On the other hand, I find that I get bored quite easily. I’ve always had a mind for puzzles. I liked the challenge of them. Back when I was working as a fisherman, they kept me occupied while I was out at sea. Then when I got too old to be at sea, I thought I might as well put my brain to some use and started working for the government, inspecting ships to make sure they were up to snuff and eventually investigating marine accidents.

​

Macabre as it may sound, I enjoyed dealing with the marine accidents the most. I just found them so interesting. If a boat didn’t dock correctly or if it ran aground, I was the man they called in. My job was to determine exactly what happened, why it happened and what could have been done to prevent it. Then of course we’d write up our report. Granted, the full process was far more complicated than that. I could spend hours and hours going into the details, but I’ll stop myself there lest I get too far off topic.

​

Most of the accidents I investigated were fairly open and shut. Human or mechanical error was generally the cause. Sometimes, I’d come across an accident where loss of life had occurred, or where a ship had gone down but those generally weren’t that difficult to figure out either. People are stupid and the sooner one accepts that, the sooner one will make peace with the world around them.

​

In each case, I’d do my investigation, report my findings and leave it to the proper authorities to handle the rest. It was an interesting career and I enjoyed it immensely. I spent about fifteen years investigating these accidents and as fascinating as many of them were, none of them have stuck with me quite like the last one I ever worked on. The only one we never actually solved.

​

See, with every other accident I’ve investigated there was always a clear cut explanation. Someone made a mistake. Someone was being an idiot. A piece of machinery was not properly maintained. There was always a cause that could be determined. But the sinking of the Walter was different. I’ve gone through the details over and over again in my mind and I’ve yet to find an explanation to any of it that I consider satisfactory. For eight years now, it’s vexed me.

​

My wife has told me time and time again to let it go but… well, that’s far easier said than done. She doesn’t know what I know. I’ve never shared the details with her. Technically, I should not be sharing the details now… but a few glasses of whisky on this nostalgic night have loosened my lips a little. Yes, yes, I know the saying. Loose lips sink ships, but the ship has already sunk hasn’t it? What harm is there in putting it out there, all these years later? Maybe someone else will see something I’ve missed. Maybe the obvious answer has been staring me in the face this whole time.

​

Maybe…

​

The Walter was a Reefer ship sailing in from South Africa. For those who don’t know what a Reefer ship is, it’s more or less just a refrigerated cargo ship (Reefer being shorthand for refrigerated you goddamn hippies). They use them to transport perishables that require a temperature controlled enviroment. Fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy and the like.

​

On Febuary 7th, 2015 The Walter was scheduled to make port in Montreal, only it never actually arrived.

​

There’d been some concern already since the last communication from the ship had come roughly three days before. But the Walter was also known to be a fairly old ship. They’d had technical issues in the past and on top of that, the entire area had been ravaged by a fairly nasty snowstorm that day. The ships that did come in, came in with layers of ice crusted onto their hulls. While the Walters delay was concerning, it was still considered likely that the boat had simply been delayed by the storm and that their radio silence was on account of some kind of technical issue. However when the Walter still hadn’t arrived by Febuary 8th, people started getting worried.

​

A team had been dispatched to look for the ship, moving down St. Lawrence River for either a sign that the ship was en route or that it was in trouble. They found nothing. No sign of the Walter. No sign of an accident. Nothing at all. In fact, as far as the team could tell the Walter hadn’t even made it to the St. Lawrence seaway.

​

So the search was expanded. They started searching the Gulf of St. Lawrence and there, at last, they found it. Or, I suppose it might be more accurate to say what was left of it.

​

I can still clearly recall the photos that were sent to me of the wreckage. I remember staring at them, trying to figure out just what exactly it was I was looking at. The pictures showed something that somewhat resembled a large iceberg. It wasn’t until I looked closer that I even saw the ship. Only part of the bow and the upper deck were exposed. The rest was almost completely buried in the ice. In all my years, I’d never once seen anything like it.

​

According to the report I got, a rescue team had been called in although honestly, I don’t think they were expecting to actually find anyone still alive on board. Even from the air, it was clear that the ship was devoid of life. They found a few bodies on the top deck, although they’d been picked at by the birds to the point that it wasn’t immediately clear as to what had killed them. The cargo hold looked to have been severely damaged by some kind of explosion and most if not all of the cargo had been completely incinerated although exactly what had been used to incinerate the cargo was unclear. Our best guess was thermite or white phospherous, but even that didn’t exactly match the profile. There was no residue left behind, none we could identify at least.

​

Going below deck, the rescue team found more bodies. These ones were more intact and a couple of them were even armed. The team theorized that there had been some sort of skirmish and that the crew had been trying to defend themselves from something, although exactly who they’d been trying to defend themselves from was unclear. Whoever the attackers had been, they didn’t seem to have suffered any casualties and every body on that ship would later be positively ID’d as a member of the crew. The bodies had all suffered severe burns which were later determined to have been the most likely cause of death, although just what kind of weapon could have killed them was never identified.

​

Simply put, the ship was a goddamn graveyard and almost nobody knew why.

​

Almost nobody.

​

There had been one survivor. A man by the name of Nathan Cameron.

​

They’d found Cameron in the ships galley of all places. The door had been closed and locked, and a fairly thick sheet of ice had grown over it. From what I heard, the ice was thick enough that the rescue team might not have even bothered trying to get through it if they hadn’t heard movement behind it, and wondered if somebody might somehow still be alive back there. They’d spent almost an hour chipping away at the ice before they finally got that door open and the poor bastard who had opened the door was rewarded with a knife through his shoulder.

Cameron had come out wide eyed, hysterical, and fighting like a cornered animal. It’d taken three men just to restrain him before he finally seemed to realize that this was a rescue team. After that, he’d just gone completely limp, not necessarily calming down but not fighting anymore.

​

They’d taken him off the boat and back to shore, let him sleep in a real bed and waited to see what he’d say when he started talking. Only Cameron didn’t talk. Not at first, anyway.

​

I was brought in to speak to Nathan Cameron around early March of 2015. It was roughly a couple of weeks after they’d discovered the wreckage of the Walter and managed to haul it to the nearest port to examine it.

​

Due to the state that Cameron was in, my team and I had opted to investigate the ship itself first which was no easy task. The ice proved to be the biggest obstacle in our way. It wasn’t just outside of the ship. Several of the lower levels were completely blocked off by it too. Given the volume of ice we were dealing with, we figured that sometime before the freezing had occurred, there’d been a breach in the hull. The levels we couldn’t access had probably been completely flooded before the freeze.

​

There was too much of it to chip away and the weather was too cold for it to melt, so we needed to get creative. We had to bring in bring in a whole other team to use some sort of ground penetrating sonar to figure out where the breach might be and from there they needed to use mining equipment to break away chunks of ice so we could get a good look at the damage to the hull. The process itself took over a week and I can’t say that what we found helped clear anything up.

​

Our initial theory was that the breach might have been caused by a collision with an iceberg or some rocks. But what we found in the hull of that ship wasn’t consistent with that kind of damage. As far as we could tell, something had melted clean through the hull of the Walter, and whatever had done it had left a hole big enough for a grown man to stand upright in although just what could have done that, was beyond any of us. Our leading theory was that whatever had been used to burn the cargo had also been used to burn through the hull although that still didn’t leave us with a lot of answers.

​

Nobody on our team knew what the hell could have possibly done this, nevermind who or why. So with no answers to be found on the Walter, we turned to Cameron next.

​

When I was flown in to our office in Gatineau, Quebec to speak with Cameron about what exactly happened to the Walter, he still hadn’t officially said anything on the record. I was told that he’d started speaking again though, which was considered to be a good sign.

​

The man I met in our office bore little resemblance to the wild eyed, feral thing the rescue team had recovered from the ship. The Cameron that I met was a man in his late forties to early fifties. He was bald and had a stern face with narrow eyes. He had a tattoo of an anchor on one arm and a nautical star on his wrist. I imagine he had other tattoos elsewhere although I never saw those. He carried himself with a certain tension, like a rubber band ready to snap. When I first entered the conference room to speak with him, he watched me intensely as if he were waiting for me to make a move that he didn’t like. I must admit, the way he watched me made me a little bit uncomfortable, but I couldn’t really blame him for his demeanor. After what he’d been through, I’d probably be tense too.

​

“Nathan, it’s nice to finally meet you,” I said to him as I sat down. He didn’t respond to me at first. He just fixed me in an intense stare, still sizing me up.

“My name is Thomas. How are you feeling today?”

“I’m fine,” he said quietly. It was a simple statement, but it was at least a statement. A sign that he was willing to talk.

​

“I’m glad to hear that. You settling in alright? Have you had a chance to talk to your family?”

“They’re in town,” he replied. “My wife is waiting for me back at the hotel.”

“Good, good. After what you’ve been through, it’s important to have a support network. I’m glad we got her out here for you.”

​

No response that time. Cameron just kept staring at me.

“So, Nathan. Let’s talk about what happened on the Walter,” I said. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

​

More silence, only now he wasn’t looking at me. His breathing had changed a little bit, growing heavier and more labored. He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. I gave him a few moments to compose himself.

“Nathan, if you don’t want to talk about this today then I can come back later when you’re ready.” I said, “I just want to understand what happened out there.”

“You saw the ship, didn’t you?” He finally asked, “That didn’t tell you enough?”

“It told us a lot, yes,” I said. “But we still have a lot of unanswered questions. I was hoping that you could fill in those gaps for us.”

​

Another pause. Nathan was back to looking at me now, although, after a few moments, his expression softened a little.

“Where do you want to start?” He asked.

“Let’s start with what you remember. Walk me through the series of events as you recall them.”

​

Cameron gave a slow nod and fell silent again, choosing his words carefully before he spoke.

“I suppose I’d best start with what we saw in the Atlantic, then…” he said. “It was about eight days after we’d left Durban or, I guess you could say we first noticed it eight days after we left Durban. I didn’t see it at first, but I heard some of the others talking about it. Seeing something out on the water at night.”

“Seeing something?” I asked.

“Lights in the sky. Not stars. Something else. We thought it was just some planes flying past at first but the more we saw them, the more we started to think there was something else going on. Like I said, I didn’t see them at first. I just heard others talking about them.”

“But you did see them, right?” I asked. Cameron nodded.

​

“Just once. I’d been out for a late night smoke when I saw them off the port side. At a glance it just sort of looked like a plane although it was flying a little too low and moving a little too fast. I’d watched it for a while before it disappeared behind some clouds. To be honest, I hadn’t thought that much of it at the time. I’d found it a little odd, sure. But I figured that it had to have just been a plane.”

​

“You just said it couldn’t have been a plane,” I said.

“I said it was flying too fast and too low. It was odd. But I didn’t think there were a lot of other things it could have been. You see something flying in the sky, your immediate thought is that it’s a plane, right? Yeah, this one was weird, but I didn’t think there was anything else it realistically could have been.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest you were contradicting yourself,” I said. “Please, let’s continue.”

​

Cameron leaned back in his chair a little.

“Right…” he said, “Like I said I didn’t think too much of it. But I knew some of the other guys on board found the whole thing creepy. They thought we were being followed and were trying to figure out who it was. There was even a rumor going around that we had some unusual cargo on board and that someone was sending some sort of spy plane to keep an eye on us. Personally, I found that whole idea to be kind of stupid.”

​

“So what did you think was happening?” I asked.

“Overactive imaginations,” Cameron replied. “People saw some weird planes and immediately made up some stories to try and explain it. Then they noticed some weird boxes in the cargo hold and started looking for connections.”

​

“Weird boxes in the cargo hold?” I asked.

“Yeah, Samples from some sort of lab, I think. I was there when we loaded them on. We were told to handle them very carefully. I don’t know what was in them, but I assume the Captain did. Either way, we kept them separate from the food we were carrying to prevent any sort of cross contamination. We get things like that all the time. Specialty items.”

“Right,” I said before moving on, “So these concerns among the crew, you personally didn’t put a lot of stock in them, correct?”

​

“Not until I had a reason to,” Cameron replied. “Up until around… February 5th, I think… we were on schedule. Everything was going the way it was supposed to.”

He paused, going quiet for a moment.

​

“Can you tell me about what happened on February 5th?” I asked.

He remained silent, closing his eyes again to compose himself. I let him take his time.

“We got hit by the storm,” he said. “We knew it was coming. We just didn’t realize it was going to hit us that hard. I remember that while we were preparing, we saw the lights in the sky again. Only this time they were off in the distance. Nowhere near us. A few of the guys were still worried about them, but the rest of us just wanted to batten down the hatches and get below deck before the storm hit.”

​

Another pause. Cameron seemed lost in his own memories.

“My team had finished our portion of the work, so we’d gone down to the mess hall for dinner. I never saw what happened topside. One minute, we were sitting in the mess, shooting the shit and the next the boat just shook. Felt kinda like something had just hit us. Well, naturally we wanted to see what was going on. We heard over the PA that there’d been some kind of breach on the lower level. My team was sent down to help out down there. We barely even made it out of the mess hall when the engine died. The whole ship just lurched. I almost fell flat on my face.”

​

“I don’t suppose you’d know what caused the engine failure, do you?” I asked. Cameron just shook his head.

“Sorry. Don’t know anything about the breach either, other than there was one. Whatever hit us must’ve put one hell of a hole in our ship though. The flooding was pretty bad by the time we made it down there. We were pulling men out and trying to seal off the flooded levels when the freeze hit us.”

​

“The freeze?” I asked. Cameron gave a single nod.

“I don’t know how else to describe it. One minute, the water was flooding in. The next, it was ice. It just… it came almost out of nowhere. Christ… some of the guys who were in the flooded hallways were knee deep in the water when it just froze around them. They started fighting to get out. A couple of them did. The rest were stuck. Zack, the Officer in charge at the time sent me to go and get some more help. He sent someone else up to the bridge to radio in for help but before either of us made it topside again, that’s when everything went to hell.”

​

“What happened next?” I asked.

“Honestly? I don’t know,” Cameron replied. “We heard the guy on the PA saying that we were being boarded, but the power went out before he could say much else. At first we figured it was just something to do with the storm, or the damage. But as we headed up to the top deck, we started hearing sounds. People screaming. Something that sounded sorta like gunfire. Then there was this smell…” Cameron trailed off before sighing. He rubbed his face, slowly shaking his head.

​

“God… I don’t know how to describe it…” he murmured, “Burning, I guess.”

“Your crewmates?” I asked quietly. Cameron nodded.

“Yeah…” he said, “Yeah, I think so…”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“The guy I was with got brave. Wanted to see what was going on firsthand. But by the time we smelled the burning, I already knew that going up there was suicide. I tried to warn him, but he didn’t listen. He made a choice to go up there. I made a choice not to. Instead, I went to the galley, grabbed the sharpest knife I could find, and closed the door. I figured that in a best case scenario, they wouldn’t find me and I could keep away from them. And in a worst case scenario, maybe I could at least take one of them with me.”

​

I sat still, hanging on to Cameron’s every word. His voice trembled a little as he spoke and he still had a faraway look in his eyes, recounting every detail as if he were reliving it all again.

“After a while, the ship went quiet. The air around me was freezing. Colder than it had ever been. I could hear movement on the deck above me, but I didn’t hear any more fighting. Then I started hearing footsteps coming down the hall outside. I could hear them opening doors. Looking for survivors, I think. They must’ve found some. I heard screams. Something that sounded a lot like gunshots although… well, I’m not exactly an expert on guns, but it didn’t sound like any gun I’d ever heard. It made this sort of crackling, sizzling sound, and after it was fired that burning smell just got stronger…”

​

Another pause. I could see him recalling the smell he’d described.

“Finally they came to my door. I thought about trying to keep it closed, but I was afraid they could shoot me through the door. So I hid. The door opened. I held my knife in a white knuckled grip and I saw a figure coming in. It was too dark to make him out clearly at first, but what was immediately clear to me was that the guy who’d just walked in wasn’t very tall. About five feet, give or take. He seemed to be wearing some kind of environment suit. The helmet was reflective. I could see my own face in it, but I don’t think that whoever had come in saw me. Not at first, anyway. They were holding some kind of gun in their hand. Don’t ask me about the design of it,

​

I never got a good look at it… honestly, the thing I remember the most is hearing the sound of my blood rushing through my skull. The figure in the room was about to look over at me, and that’s when I lunged. I grabbed him by the arm that was holding the gun and pulled him toward me. I heard the gun go off. It made the same sizzling noise I’d heard earlier and I could feel this heat on my left side. But I never saw any sort of muzzle flash. There were some dishtowels on the counter beside me that caught fire and they were just about the only light through which I could see what I was doing. The guy I had was struggling pretty hard. He wasn’t strong, but he was fighting. So I took the knife and I stabbed him in his chest.

​

He didn’t scream. He was just… silent. He was still fighting and trying to get away from me and I was trying to keep a hold on him. I ended up ripping the knife out of him and he tried to make a run for it. He almost slipped away from me, but I grabbed him, dragged him back in. His head slammed against the counter and his helmet broke open. That was when he turned to look at me and that was when I saw his face…”

​

“What did he look like?” I asked quietly.

“Like something out of a goddamn sci fi movie.” Cameron replied, “He had these eyes. Big black and shiny… and that was just about all he had. Not much of a nose, a small mouth. The eyes took up most of his face and there was just… no expression in them. Nothing I could recognize, at least. He stared at me and I didn’t know what he could’ve been thinking. If there were any thoughts behind those eyes, they were all alien to me… I could hear others just outside the door, probably coming to investigate the noise. I ripped the knife out of the creature again and drove it into one of those empty black eyes. Its struggles stopped, save for a few twitches.”

​

“You killed him?” I asked.

“It,” Cameron said, “Not him… and yeah, I killed it. I honestly wasn’t even sure if it could die. The gun fell out of its hand and I grabbed it off the floor. Around the same time I did, I saw these two other figures in the hall wearing the same type of environment suit. I saw one of them raise their gun at me, so I took the gun that I had, pulled the trigger and I just started shooting.

​

Just like before, it didn’t really seem to fire anything. There was no recoil, it didn’t feel like anything came out of it. There was just this heat…” he paused, struggling to think of a way to describe it. “You ever been on one of those theme park rides with the pyrotechnics? You know how you can feel the heat from them on your face? It was just like that. Just heat, nothing else. It must’ve done something though. The figure who’d been raising their gun at me, they started to burn. So did the figure beside them.

​

They tried to get back, but I just kept shooting at them. I could… I could smell them cooking in that hazard suit of theirs. They didn’t put up much of a fight after that. They just sorta collapsed. I could hear even more coming to investigate and for a moment, I thought about taking the gun and trying to use it against them, you know?”

​

“Did you?” I asked.

Cameron uttered a quiet, empty laugh.

“Figured I’d just get myself killed all the sooner if I tried,” he admitted. “I mean, whoever they were, they probably had a way to counter their own weapons, right? Even if they didn’t, all they needed to do was point and shoot. So no. I didn’t go all Rambo on them. I closed the door again and waited to see if they’d come for me a second time.”

​

“Did they?”

“No. But I heard them outside. Probably trying to figure out just what to do to me. I just sorta held my ground. I put out the fire that had started earlier and I waited. The whole time I was waiting for them to come in and kill me. I could hear their footsteps out there. I figured they must’ve been doing something, but nothing ever happened. They didn’t make a move and neither did I.”

​

“So this standoff?” I asked, “How did it end?”

“They left,” he replied plainly. “After about… I don’t know, fifteen, twenty minutes something else made the ship rock. Some sort of explosion, I think. I was sure the entire damn ship was going down this time, but it didn’t and my friends outside didn’t seem too worried about it. After a few moments, I heard their footsteps getting further away and then, nothing at all. I went to the door to see if I could hear anything, but there was nothing out there. They weren’t even gone twenty minutes when the body of the dead one started to burn.”

​

“Burn?” I asked.

“Yeah. The suit just started smoking and I could see the body sort of burning inside. The whole thing kinda freaked me out, so I used the side door to make my way into the mess hall and get away from it. The body burned for about another twenty minutes or so before the fire died down. Around the same time, the gun started doing the same thing. It got so hot that I had to drop it and sorta just burned itself away.”

​

“Why?” I asked.

“Hell if I know,” Cameron said. “Some sort of protective measure, maybe? Whoever it was, didn’t want their tech falling into the wrong hands? Maybe the guys outside had hoped that the fire would kill me. Who knows. Either way, when I went to check on the body later, there wasn’t much left. Just this scorch mark where it had been. Same for the gun.”

​

“So there was nothing left behind then?” I asked.

“Just the marks on the floor,” he said. “After that, I waited a few hours before trying to get out of the mess hall, but the door wouldn’t budge. Neither would the door to the galley. The rescue team told me they were both frozen shut. I’m not sure if that was an accident, or somebodys way of keeping me from causing any more trouble. Either way, I guess I’m lucky I got stuck in the galley. The food there kept me alive for the next few days. The power never came back on, but they had some perishables I could eat.”

“I see,” I said quietly. “When the rescue team found you, you attacked one of them with a knife, is that correct?” I asked.

​

“I thought that those things had come back for me,” he said. “I panicked. Soon as I realized what I’d done… I…” he trailed off, “I was in that room for three days. Freezing my ass off, trying to stay alive, waiting to die… I wasn’t exactly myself when they found me.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything. It’s just, I have to say your retelling of things sounds a little…”

​

Cameron’s expression darkened.

“You don’t believe me?” He asked.

“I do believe you,” I said. “But like you said, when we recovered you, you weren’t exactly in your right mind. I’m just suggesting that there may be some details you’re misremembering… the figures you saw. The way you described them, they didn’t sound human.”

​

“They weren’t human,” Cameron said before leaning in closer to me. “You’ve seen the boat, haven’t you?” He asked, “Do you know anything that could have possibly done that? I saw the bodies on my way out… burned so bad their own mothers couldn’t recognize them. I saw what those guns of theirs could do. If you go down into the galley, you’ll find the scorch marks on the floor. Go on. Look. You can tell me I’m crazy if you want to, but I know what I saw. Whatever came for us that day, it wasn’t human.”

​

There was an intensity in his eyes that I must admit, did unnerve me a little. These were the eyes of a man who truly believed what he’d seen and I knew that there wasn’t a single doubt in his mind about it.

​

In the days following my interview with Nathan Cameron, I returned to the Walter for a follow up investigation. I focused primarily on the galley and the mess hall, where Cameron had been confined. Sure enough, I found the scorch marks he’d told me I’d find there and I asked the lab to examine them, hoping that maybe they’d give us some clue about what exactly it was that someone had been so eager to burn away. Part of me had hoped that maybe they’d be the missing piece to all this. Hell, maybe they were. But if the lab ever found anything, neither me nor my team ever heard about it.

​

Not even a week after my interview, our team was pulled off the investigation. According to our bosses, it was being handed over to some other department although they never specified who exactly it was being handed over to. The whole thing was fairly hush hush. We were made to sign NDAs and told that if the subject of the Walter ever came up, we were to simply say that the ship had capsized.

​

That was it.

​

No less than a year after the ordeal with the Walter, I retired. Partially because I was old and I’d damn well earned it and partially as a way to get the Walter out of my head.

​

It didn’t work. I’ve spent the past eight years lying awake at night, going over the evidence in my head. I’ve replayed my interview with Nathan Cameron over and over again in my head so many times that I’m quite sure I’ve written down every word exactly as it was said. I’ve tried to piece this thing together in a way that makes sense, but nothing quite fits.

​

The closest thing I’ve got to an answer is that this was some sort of espionage thing. I think it explains why the cargo was burned and why the investigation was taken off our hands. But that answer doesn’t quite fit. I can’t think of a weapon on earth with the ability to burn a hole through the hull of a ship like that, nor can I think of any possible way that someone could have so perfectly frozen the water around the ship. The weapons that were used to burn the cargo and slaughter the crew don’t match the profile of any weapon I’ve ever heard of and in eight years of research, I’ve yet to find any type of weapon that could do something similar. There is nothing on earth that could do the kind of damage we saw done on the Walter.

​

Which leads me to the thing that haunts me the most.

​

The way that Cameron described the figure he’d encountered, the one he’d stabbed to death. He was convinced that it wasn’t human and the way he described it, I’m not so sure that he was wrong. Maybe I’m going crazy in my old age, but if there’s nothing on earth that could have carried out that attack on the Walter… then maybe whatever attacked that ship didn’t come from earth. Maybe I’m just going crazy in my old age. Maybe I’m grasping at straws here. Maybe I’m misremembering something. But it’s the only conclusion I’ve reached that explains everything. And if it’s true, what happens if they come back?

​

Maybe I’m just crazy.

​

God, I hope I’m just crazy.