A/N: I have been told that my Captain is girly and that men don't cry but I beg to differ. If any guy was going through everything James has then they would break down to. Besides being a girl I'm not suprised that my male characters may apear a bit feminine.

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"I don't know what to tell you, Captain." Stated the carpenter as he pulled the sheet over the dissected corpse of a dark haired man.

"Can't you tell how he died?" The Captain of the silver sparrow faced away from the white sheets that covered his first mates lifeless body, his forehead pressed up against the dark wood of the small room's walls.

"He died from stress on his heart." The large man, who served as the ships doctor, took off his bloodstained apron and hung it on a peg beside him as he spoke.

"Shouldn't there have been any signs of such a problem? He seemed fine just yesterday; as a matter of fact he's never been better. You know how John is, if he was in any sort of pain he would have said something," The Captain turned about and ran his rough hands through his scruffy brown hair.

"A heart attack would explain why and how he died but that doesn't explain the rest of it."

Captain James T. Morgan looked up with tear-stained eyes, "What do you mean?"

"Take a look at how little a mess the autopsy made. He was drained of every drop of his blood. I have never seen anything like this nor heard of it. Even if he had been hung upside down and all his arteries had been slit there would have been some still in the body. There are no wounds and he's only been dead a few hours, yet all the moisture was sucked out of his body. If this gets out the men will turn to their superstitions for answers and are going to start a riot. They're all scared, they don't know what we're all doing way out here. Hell! I don't even know why we where ordered into the Indian Ocean. The ghost is not so fine a ship, and the war is with the Americas, not the India territories!"

Captain Morgan slowly walked up beside the table and gripped the edge of it till his knuckles where white. He didn't even seem to hear the doctor as he stared blankly at the white sheets over his best friends face.

"Captain?"

"Chasing after a single stolen ship does seem a bit unrealistic when we're at war doesn't it. I was under orders not to tell a soul why we are really after her, why this one ship was so important, but now I have no choice." The Captain took a deep breath before explaining himself. "We are after what is affectively a ghost ship."

"You mean The Ghost"

"Funny that," The captain started with a slightly maddened smile, "The name of the ship is The Ghost, you're right. It's an American vessel, but it's not the ship, it's self we're after."

"There was a rumor on board of some valuable cargo taken by enemies of the crown. Some of the men fancy that we're after pirates."

It was then that Morgan laughed. It was a hallow sound, echoing with despair. "Cargo, that would seem logical wouldn't it. Cargo. No, Neal, we're after people if you can really call them that."

"Then why all the secrecy?"

"The people are dead."

"What?" Neal's head snapped up.

"Dead, Neal, I said dead. They where executed by a firing squad three years ago. You may have even heard of them, Kevin Ashling and his crew.

"So piracy is involved in this, but why are we going after dead men?"

"The Ghost was theirs, they where seen stealing it back seven days after they had been buried, or should I say nights."

"Are you saying the king has sent us half way around the world because a couple of drunk soldiers lost a ship and had to think fast to come up with an excuse?"

"How can you be skeptical when the very proof is lying on this table? The dead are sailing these very seas?" Morgan pushed away from the table's edge and slammed his fist into the nearest wall. "You don't believe me do you?"

"The dead don't come back Morgan, your uncle was mad and your cousin is still buried in England. Tell me what we are really doing out here?"

"Damn, it Neal!" The captain delivered a hard kick to the wall, leaving a long crack in the board. He was digging his nails into the wood so that blood dripped from the skin of his fingertips.

Neal jumped at the sudden noise and watched his captain sink down on to the floorboards, sobbing.

"Don't you think I checked? I looked everywhere for his body, his grave was empty. I swore I would stay far away from my mother and her cracked family. She's dead now, I had thought they where all dead. Then the king himself tells me to go into the old crypts of my family, and to search my Uncle's rickety old house. Do you know why I was forced to look at bloodstained altars and mummified animals? The king wanted to know if my Uncle had succeeded and passed the knowledge down to Kevin before being burnt at the stake. The King wants to know if my dear cousin is still on this earth in one form or another. For three years my father has been rotting in the Tower of London to ensure that I would follow every trail of my twisted family's history."

The two men remained silent for a long time. Finally the quiet began to make Neal's head spin and he had to break the silence. "What are we going to tell the men?"

Captain Morgan's voice was muffled as he spoke, "I don't know. I don't know anything anymore."

Once again a defining silence settled over the room and seemed to be over the ship as a whole. Neal began to feel fear as everything sank in. To him it seemed as though nothing of this entire event was real. He half expected to wake suddenly from this nightmare and find himself listening to John's frenzied fiddle playing on another uneventful morning. Neal looked down at the silently weeping Captain and couldn't think of what to do next.

Many hours passed like this, Neal worrying and Morgan grieving, till the captain regained control of him self and wiped the last few tears from his cheek. He rose using the wall as a brace and looking anywhere but at Neal or the body. After briefly dusting himself he muttered that they would tell the crew that John had died of a heart attack since they too would not believe the truth and he didn't want a panic on his hands.