We All Fall Down

...Ashes To Ashes...

Stuart Flane, Captain of the starship Mercury, and lately the butt-end of innumerable jokes doing the rounds at Space Fleet H.Q., is called upon once more - kicking and screaming - to investigate all manner of preternatural fuckery.

How would Flane's skeptical superiors react to his next report - and above all, how would he word it? The word "carefully" always came to mind. Sooner or later, he worried, someone was going to turn up demanding answers - and it wasn't too long before someone did.

Commodore Link, a heavy-handed disciplinarian, makes it his business to get to the bottom of Flane's alleged fraud, and his investigation progressively turns the starship Captain's life into a bit of a miserable hell. Then, as if by coincidence, the Mercury is redirected to a nearby industrial colony to investigate disturbances at what - much to Flane's acute embarrassment, turns out to be one of the most haunted hotels in the outblack.