Homebound Sector, Haven System, Flagship Olympia
Lieutenant Montgomery Gaffigan was incredibly bored. The Olympia’s Marines refused to lend him any reading material, so he had no means of entertaining himself. The walls of the Olympia’s brig were so clean, Monty was willing to lay a small wager that he was the first to spend the night there. What an honor, he mused miserably. The confining cell was an excruciating white that seemed purposeful, intended to drive prisoners mad with boredom.
By no means was this Gaffigan’s first time in a brig. He, like most of the crew, had spent a few nights in the Singularity’s holding cells. There, he’d found the best way of entertaining himself was to make up stories behind the impressive number of dents and scratches on the walls of the Singularity’s brig. During his last stay there, recovering from a killer hangover earned on shore leave, he’d even gotten the guards to snicker at his tales.
But, this being the pristine Olympia, there weren’t any scuffs to make up stories about. The walls were unbelievably, inconceivably white. By result, Monty settled for creating a story on how they kept the walls so perfectly white. He quite liked his theory about Reeter grinding up the bones of his insubordinate officers in the paint.
Then again, he thought that was giving Reeter a little too much credit. The young Admiral really did not seem that creative.
The door to the holding cell opened, and a trio of men stepped into the room. Gaffigan recognized the long rat-like face of Reeter’s second-in-command. Great. The other two were large Marines who Gaffigan knew could throw a hefty punch from experience. His head spun just thinking about it. Still, he forced a cheerful smile to his face. “Good morning, fellas.”
Colonel VanHubert studied the captive officer gravely. The prisoner looked decidedly worse than the last time they’d spoken. Chaffing from the cuffs that bound his hands had opened up into bloody red lines on his wrists, and there was a greenish-black bruise on his cheekbone where the Marines had struck him during their last interrogation. His fiery beard was matted down with old blood, but still, he came across as annoyingly cheerful.
“I hope you brought breakfast,” Monty grinned, watching the furious twitch on the side of VanHubert’s mouth.
The deck shook with the Marines’ thundering footsteps as they took their usual places in front of and behind Gaffigan. “Prisoner, you will speak only when spoken to.”
“Or what?” Monty said, “You’ll torture me?” He laughed a bit, “I could be wrong about this, but something tells me you were planning to do that anyway.” That really wasn’t a viable reason for him to shut up.
VanHubert scowled a little more, his pale, yellowish face disapproving. “You would do wise to cooperate.” It was unhealthy to continue down this path.
“Tell your turd of a commanding officer that I very disrespectfully refuse.” Montgomery Gaffigan refused in any way to cooperate with the people that had killed thirty-two of his friends. “Reeter can stuff it where the sun don’t shine.”
VanHubert narrowed his dark, beady eyes. “Do not speak ill of Admiral Reeter as you sit aboard his ship. It is by his benevolence that you are still alive.”
Monty stared at him, “Does it look like I care?” Being kept alive really wasn’t doing anyone any good in this scenario. “You say his ship, but it’ll be more like his pile of dust by the time the Singularity’s through with it.”
VanHubert stepped forward, his narrow upper body swaying in an absent wind. “Such insults are not tolerated aboard this machine. Aboard your ailing home ship, I doubt the Steel Prince tolerates it either.”
“Actually, he doesn’t particularly care.” Gaffigan smiled. “That said, the so-called ailing ship might kill you for it. She tends not to tolerate people who undermine her commanding officer.” Technically speaking, that was how General Brent had died.
“Hmm,” VanHubert said, contemplating the way the prisoner was bound. It didn’t look nearly uncomfortable enough. He wrapped his long, crooked fingers around the prisoner’s shoulder, “How would you describe Gives’ relationship with the machinery that runs his ship? Familiar? Or perhaps abnormal?”
His fingers began to tighten like a vice, jagged little fingernails digging into the skin. Monty tried to hide his wince, but he could tell by the upturned ends of VanHubert’s mouth that he was unsuccessful. VanHubert’s fingers found the pressure points in his shoulder and stabbed in as Monty bit his lip, trying to keep from crying out.
A knock on the door ended the pain. VanHubert released his shoulder with a snarl. “Get the door,” he ordered one of the Marines.
The lumbering henchman opened the door to the holding cell again, allowing a third Marine inside. “Colonel, sir,” she greeted with a proper salute, “Admiral Reeter has issued new orders regarding the prisoner.”
“Airlock?” VanHubert suggested.
“He is to be released immediately,” the Marine replied.
“That’s bullshit.” VanHubert stepped closer to the Marine. “Why would he do that?”
She answered with a surprising calm, “The CO is under the expectation that Admiral Gives will not make his move until he has all his crewmen accounted for, including Lieutenant Gaffigan.” She was nearly as tall as VanHubert, easily meeting his eyes, “Release him.”
VanHubert looked as though he was going to protest, but then the tension abruptly left his posture. Wordlessly, he walked over and unlocked the handcuffs. They fell to the floor with a clatter. Then, saying nothing else, VanHubert strode out the open door. The boorish Marines glanced between one another, but quickly followed after him.
Gaffigan pulled his back off the chair’s metal frame for the first him in hours with a groan. Everything hurt. He put up a great façade, but he was hungry, tired, and in overall pain. “So,” he looked up to the Marine, “who the hell are you?”
Her presence felt almost familiar, but he didn’t recognize her pale skin and plain figure. Her black hat cast the top half of her face in shadow. “Do I know you?” Monty didn’t believe for a second that Reeter had decided to release him. No, something was off here. VanHubert had seemed almost hypnotized – silent with glazed eyes, as if seeing something that wasn’t truly there.
There was something just slightly off about this Marine. Monty didn’t feel particularly threatened, just uneasy.
“Lieutenant,” she said softly, her shoulders tilting with exhaustion, “Run.” She managed to pack more meaning into that word than an entire paragraph of explanation.
Montgomery Gaffigan was off like a shot, recognizing this for what it was, a jail break. She’d set him free, to let him attempt to escape. He sprinted past a second Marine guard, this one apparently not in on the breakout, who yelped and went for his gun. Too slow.
Skidding into the corridor outside the brig, Monty risked a look back to see if his accomplice was following behind him, but she was gone. Evidence of her presence had vanished.
Running through the spotless white halls of the Olympia, Gaffigan imagined he looked like a maniac, but there was no helping what was half true. He shouldered Olympia crewmen roughly aside, apologizing as he did so, moving as quickly as he could through the unfamiliar, brightly-lit hallways.
When the thunder of pursuing feet started up behind him, Monty knew he’d gained a posse. They weren’t shooting yet, too afraid of hitting their own crewmates, but it was only a matter of time.
The layout of the Flagship Olympia was completely alien to the ordinance officer. It was totally different from the Singularity in every aspect but one: the hangar deck would be the uppermost deck, relative to the artificial gravity field. Gaffigan headed there, sprinting up any stairs he found, just hoping he never hit a dead end.
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Blind hope and luck paid off. He sprinted up a flight of stairs, through an open door and onto the large, open deck. He slipped into the throngs of deck crew and pilots, managing to dodge his followers, and slowed his pace.
The Marines fanned out to search, dispersing the crowds as they went, and Monty was quickly running out of places to hide. He ducked behind a toolbox and slid onto the polished floor, exhausted.
It had been futile to run. He should have known that. His escape had probably been planned so that the Marines would have a valid excuse to shoot him, rather than just let him rot away in the Flagship’s brig.
“Lieutenant,” a terse whisper sliced through the air.
Snapping his head up, Monty found a woman beckoning him over to a nearby Rhino transport. Wait. That was… the Marine who’d set him free? How had she beat him here? And she wasn’t even sweating while he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
Still, he climbed to his feet and staggered over to her. The black hat remained on her head, hiding just enough of her face to render it unrecognizable. “This transport is your ride home. Get aboard but stay out of sight until the forklifts tow you to the lift.”
Gaffigan hopped lightly aboard the atmospheric transport ship, but quickly realized the helpful Marine was, once again, not following. He poked his head back out. “Aren’t you coming?”
She shook her head visibly side to side, keeping a sharp eye out for other approaching Marines.
“Why not?” Monty demanded. “Reeter will kill you if he finds out you helped me. Come with me.”
She turned to look up at him, “I will be fine, Lieutenant.”
The light caught her face this time. It was pretty, but not dangerously so. Her eyes were a strange gray, but they were kind. “Come with me,” Monty said again. “Reeter will kill you. And Admiral Gives… I mean he’s not that bad.”
She smiled a bit. No, he’s not. Admiral Gives was a wonderful commanding officer. “Reeter can’t hurt me, Lieutenant. I’ll be fine.”
“You can’t know that,” Gaffigan argued.
“I can, because Charleston Reeter is not my commanding officer.” And she was so grateful for that.
Monty blinked. “Wait, what?” How could an Olympia Marine not have Reeter as their commanding officer?
“Get ready, here comes the forklift,” she told him, checking their surroundings once again.
“But I don’t know how to fly!” the armory officer protested.
“When you reach the top of the landing bay, hit ‘Auto-launch’, followed by ‘Auto-pilot’. You’ve got a straight shot from here to the Singularity.” Gaffigan had trained as a copilot. He should be able to handle that much. She’d have to hope that the Singularity’s bridge crew could take it from there and avoid a potential collision.
With a nod, Gaffigan ducked back inside and sealed the hatch behind him. The automated forklift attached itself and slowly towed the little gray craft along the lanes of the hangar deck. She watched it go with a keen eye, prepared to interfere further as another Marine stepped up to her. “Soldier, did you sweep that transport?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered, the formalities bitter on her tongue. Subordinate to so many uptight, self-righteous fools, she’d learned to hate the ‘sirs’ and proper formalities that came with the fleet.
“Good. Then keep looking. This bastard’s clever. I don’t know how he managed to uncuff himself in the brig, but he’s here somewhere.” It seemed the imprisoned officer was more capable than he’d been given credit for.
None of the Olympia’s other Marines questioned the transport as the computer-operated forklift towed it slowly across the deck. The fact it looked empty drew no attention at all. Good, she thought. It looked like she might pull this off without drawing Manhattan’s attention to her interference.
Exhausted, she bowed her head. This had been a difficult thing to attempt. The Olympia’s signal blockade had negated her usual tactics. She’d been left with only her telepathy, but it was hard to manipulate events with that alone. Additionally, her telepathy, used like this, was excruciating. It badly weakened her to do so, but the illusions she’d cast onto the mind of Colonel VanHubert, among others, had led to Gaffigan’s release. For now, she’d done all she could, so the ghost disappeared without a trace.
After a long minute cowering behind the empty pilot’s seat in a tight ball, Lieutenant Gaffigan felt the small transport bump beneath his feet. With a clang, the forklift released its clutches and the lift started to move up. Waiting another moment, Monty soon climbed into the pilot’s seat and awkwardly strapped himself in.
After putting on the headset, he began to study the multicolored controls around him. They were different than the controls of the older Warhawks he was familiar with. He was effectively staring at a kaleidoscope for the first time and trying to spot one shard of color among many.
Gaffigan was still searching frantically among the controls when the lift reached the top. He sat on the smooth runway with the engines cold, and it quickly began to arouse suspicion. An impatient voice came over the radio, turning Monty’s blood straight to ice, “Rhino Six-Three-Niner, what is your status?”
Monty took a guess that the Olympia’s landing clearance officer was addressing him, so he picked up the headset and answered, “I’m having a bit of difficulty with the engines, Base. Please stand by.”
“Acknowledged, Six-Three-Niner,” the LCO replied. “You have two minutes. Then I’m aborting the launch.”
“10-4, Base,” Gaffigan fought to keep the panic out of his voice as he scoured the dashboard. Dammit, dammit, dammit! Where the hell is that control? It was an ocean of blinking and pulsing buttons and switches.
One hundred and twenty seconds trudged by, each pumping more and more adrenaline into Gaffigan’s bloodstream. “Rhino Six-Three-Niner, stand down. Abort your launch.”
No! There it was. The control the red-haired officer had been looking for. It was a little knob in the center of the dash, easy to miss. He quickly twisted it to the desired function. “Belay that,” he said, voice trembling. “I got it sorted out, Base.” The Rhino began to move slowly, then picked up speed at a surprising pace.
Soon, the Flagship’s shale gray landing bay was a memory of the past, but he knew the Olympia could still easily catch him. A part of him refused to check behind his craft, fearing he would find a pursuit squadron barreling down upon him.
It was probably his paranoia, but the Olympia’s looming shadow seemed to sense his intent to escape and felt none too pleased. But, that said, the Olympia couldn’t even compete with the imposing shape of his destination. It seemed to Monty that only the Singularity’s vigilant gaze kept space from becoming filled with intercept fighters and white-hot projectiles.
A palpable tension had returned to the Homebound Sector. For once, the two ships seemed to be on the same page, waiting for the other to make a move. The Olympia could start a fight, but if she did, she would have a hell of a battle on her hands, because the Singularity was not backing down.
Reasonably, it did not comfort Montgomery Gaffigan to be caught between the two. His hands shook as he reached over and turned the knob to ‘Auto-pilot’. The Singularity grew steadily larger in his view as the transport steadied its heading: a direct collision course for his home ship. True to the words of the Marine who’d set him free, it was a straight shot. “Oh shit.”
A fresh dose of panic in his system, Gaffigan scrambled for the radio controls. Naturally, they too, were totally different than those of the Warhawks he’d trained on and were far more complex. Lieutenant Robinson could probably make heads or tails of the system’s true capabilities, but Gaffigan could only find what he thought were the basic controls.
He turned one dial, one he assumed to be the frequency modulator, only to have loud static erupt in his ear. He put that back the way he’d found it and continued to test controls as the Singularity grew ever closer and his dread grew ever larger.
At this moment, Gaffigan desperately missed the simplicity of the Singularity and her support craft. Though he knew both they and the battleship herself were more complex than they appeared, the controls were candidly simple. They had been carefully designed that way. Officers and crew had been dropping dead so quickly during the War, barely trained or completely untrained people had been forced to take their place.
Finally, the bearded Lieutenant found the control he’d been looking for, a slider. Experimentally, he nudged it and was rewarded with overlapping civilian chatter. He dialed in the Singularity’s designated frequency. “This is Lieutenant Gaffigan hailing UCSC-14, Battleship Singularity. Come in, Singularity.” Silence answered the hail. “This is Gaffigan, Singularity, do you read?”
There was no response, as Gaffigan stared at the rapidly increasing shape of the ship. He could see Warhawks idling above the hull with floodlights, an indication of hull work occurring. Stars, he’d kill anyone on the hull if he collided with the ship!
He abandoned communications formality in a heartbeat, “Singularity there is a Rhino dropship approaching your three ‘o clock on a collision course. I’m aboard and I don’t know how to fly! Request assistance and strongly suggest you get everyone off the hull!” More silence. “Acknowledge, damn you!”
A fragmented reply came back. Barely audible and indecipherable in his headset, he knew the signs of a total signal blockade. But who was jamming communications and why? What had happened while he’d been stuck in the Olympia’s brig? “Singularity, I did not copy. Repeat your message,” he called.
Another message came through, but it was even more fragmented than the last. It was impossible to even tell if it was the same message or a different one. “Beezlenac,” he cursed, realizing he was in for it this time. He may have escaped Admiral Reeter, but he didn’t like colliding with the infinitely more massive Singularity any better.
Gaffigan could see the largest pockmarks and craters on the old ship’s hull now. They were larger than his transport as a whole. The marred mull was cast in shadow from its uneven plating.
At this range, the Singularity’s menace faded, and the ship just looked somewhat run down. Even with a fresh coat of paint, she looked tired. It was valid considering the ship had been through hell. They all had, but Gaffigan was certain the Singularity had seen worse than Admiral Reeter in her long years of service.
It was not by luck that the ship had survived. Evidence of that was on the starboard bow, where a missile launched from a sector away had scored a direct hit, and left an irreversible scar in the shape of a crescent. No, whatever quality made the ship a survivor, it wasn’t good luck. If anything, the Singularity was bad luck incarnate to any enemy that stumbled into her clutches.
Gaffigan just really hoped that wouldn’t carry onto him at the moment.