The starship rocketed across the blackness, looking not unlike an enormous rainbow trout. Deep within its mechanical workings, a small, seemingly unimportant circuit suddenly shorted out. This started a small fire. Unfortunately, the systems on board the ship that were there to detect fire, all ran through the circuit that had just fried itself. The ship carried on regardless. So did the fire. In fact, the fire and the ship continued to ignore each other until a service repair robot happened to notice some smoke in the cabin and decided that it might be a good idea, if its supervisor would let it, to wake up the captain. Humans were always better at dealing with situations like this, he thought, and the captain was quite intelligent for a human.

Its supervisor was unsure. It had never been on this class of starship before, and through an oversight of programming, did not know if smoke floating serenely through the cabin was normal or not. It decided, after much deliberation, that it ought to wake the captain after all, just to make sure.

The captain was a well built man, who was in his late 30's before he went into suspended animation for this voyage. His dark brown hair, thinning slightly at the back now, was pushed rakishly back from his eyes. A deep scar cut down his left cheek, a souvenir from his military service. This mission, originally, had been a scouting and science mission. He was to land, set up camp and begin exploration and experimentation on the fourth planet from the star Omicron Zeta 4. The rest of his crew consisted of 5 science personnel, a plethora of service robots, and his assistant Michaela.

Michaela was a bit of a mystery to him. She was transferred on board just before the launch, with instructions to be his assistant and he was told not to ask any questions. She was tall, with long dark hair, and a penchant for wearing greasy overalls wherever she went. He had no idea what her body looked like or even, for that matter, whether she actually HAD a body. They had gone into suspended animation almost as soon as the course had been set, and didn't expect to see each other for the duration of the ship's five year journey.

When the service robot supervisor revived him from Sus-An, he blinked a few times, and immediately smelled the smoke. This worried him. Fires on board starships were not uncommon, but usually the emergency systems would kick in and fix it. It appeared that there had been a malfunction. He quizzed the robot.

"Well sir, there doesn't appear to be a fire - at least the ships systems haven't detected one. In fact, i didn't even notice the smoke, it was one of my subordinate units. I can have the unit reprimanded if you wish, sir!" replied the Supervisor unit, with a little too much enthusiasum.

"That won't be necessary. Have you performed a full sweep of the ship?" the captain asked.

"Not yet sir, my fellow Supervisor units and I felt that it was wiser to revive you first."

"I see. Well you and your 'fellows' can go and perform a sweep, if you would be so kind." the captain tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but he had been asleep for the best part of five years, and he was feeling a bit cranky.

The robot wheeled off, with an indignant beep. The captain sighed. Ever since they had made these new advances in artificial intelligence, and the invention of new suspended animation technology, space travel had got really boring.

The smoke was getting thicker now, and had started to smell of burnt circuits. The supervisor robot was nowhere to be seen. The captain tried hailing it on the ship wide radio net but got no response. He supposed it was sulking. The mark III models had a bad habit of doing that, he remembered.

Suddenly, alarms blared through the ship. He looked at the console in front of him. 'Ah,' he thought, in an offhand manner, 'the fire burned through the guidance circuits as well. Ho hum, it appears we are about to crash into an unknown planet. How typically original.'

If a camera man was to be present in the vacuum of space, he, or she for that matter, would have seen a spectacular sight, shortly before the explosive decompression got them. They would have seen this: a vast fireball, shedding smaller burning debris, plumetting towards the surprisingly verdent landscape of the planet below. Surprising because the normal way that these things happened, at least in most science fiction disaster films, is that the ship crashes loudly and messily into the surface of some barren rock of a planet, covered with flesh eating insects or brain sucking aliens. It just goes to show that you can't get creative story editors anymore.

To Be Continued... (when I think of something)

By Jon Tuttle

If you have any scribblings or short stories of a similar weird nature and would like to see them published here, please e-mail submissions@knightfallproductions.co.uk.