Halogen Sector, Battleship Singularity
Ensign Walters had already taken his post on the bridge by the time the Admiral got there. “Sir,” the navigator called, “there has been an adjustment to our course. The log indicates no note of it.”
By his count, “Fifteen degrees to starboard, correct, Ensign?”
Walters pushed his glasses up his nose to hastily check his readouts, “Yes, sir.”
“As ordered then,” he said, “Ensign Dellaroux must have forgotten to log it. I called it in at the end of her shift.” While none of that was technically accurate, he could see Walters visibly relax. The poor kid must have thought it was a malfunction with the navigational systems – something that was potentially deadly for a ship if not caught and corrected. “What is the destination of our newest course, Ensign?”
“The Centaur System in the Archer Sector, sir.” It was a direct path from their current position to that solar system, though it remained many sectors away.
“Sagittarion,” Zarrey groaned, staggering onto the bridge with an especially pungent cup of coffee. “Last I checked two task forces had been sent out there. That’s six battleships. What kind of idiot put us on a course to go there?”
“I did,” the Admiral said, watching Monty easily slide in at the weapons console. Behind him, Jazmine stumbled over to his post at the helm. Judging by Jazmine and Zarrey’s slow movements and shadowed eyes, a party celebrating their separation from Command had been thrown somewhere on board – probably in the ship’s bar he pretended not to know about.
“Oh,” Zarrey said, checking his tone. “Why would you do that?”
Let’s find out. “Call Ensign Smith up here,” he ordered the comms officer. Sagittarion was her home planet. She might have some useful insight into the situation. The Admiral didn’t address Zarrey or Jazmine’s obvious condition. A hangover wouldn’t kill them, but it would certainly hurt like hell if emergency maneuvers became necessary.
Robinson and Galhino came in next for the shift change, not so subtly rubbing each other’s hands. Zarrey tried several times to quietly get their attention, but they were lost in their own little world whispering softly to one another.
The Admiral gave them a few minutes, waiting for Ensign Smith to arrive. But even after all the other stations had changed hands to the day shift, they remained thoroughly distracted. Well, infatuated might have been a better description. “Lieutenants.”
Galhino and Robinson sprung apart like a mine had gone off between them. The terror was clear on their faces. “Sir?”
He checked his watch idly, “Your shift started ten minutes ago. Try to arrive on time.”
“Yes, sir,” they said, sneaking relieved glances to one another. “It won’t happen again.” The pair split ways immediately among a small chorus of snickers.
“Heh,” Zarrey said with a wink, “Seems like ours wasn’t the only party that happened last night.” He looked expectantly to the person next to him, waiting for a laugh. Unfortunately, that happened to be the Admiral, and he received only silence, his joke wasted. “Dammit, you never laugh at anything.”
“Perhaps because you are not as funny as you think you are, XO,” the Admiral replied stonily.
“I’m funny,” Zarrey promised. “Owens thought my joke was hilarious.” He looked over to the nearby yeoman. “Right?”
“You’re a pig.” Rolling her eyes, Owens threw his copy of the situation report at him.
The thick packet of papers knocked Zarrey’s mug easily from his hands, splashing the contents onto the radar console, again. “No!” he cried, grabbing up his cup, “My coffee!”
Paying little heed to the Colonel’s constant mess, Admiral Gives took his copy of the sitrep from Owens. “Thank you, Ensign.”
Zarrey looked sourly after the yeoman, mournfully gripping his mostly-empty mug. “I will never understand women,” he dramatically sighed to the person next to him, again met with the Admiral’s neutral stare. “Dammit, what good are you?” He and the Admiral shared no gossip, no jokes and no common interests.
“For your knowledge, Colonel, I happen to be very good at my job.” And that makes one of us. “Now, get your coffee off my ship. You can spend two hours of your evening helping the maintenance teams check the command relays.”
“Come on,” Zarrey groaned, “You’re really going to punish me for that? It wasn’t even my fault!”
The Admiral had no interest in his whining. “You will do it and you will pretend to enjoy it.” And then perhaps my ship will decide that you are not the worst officer she has ever seen. He turned next to the crew, trusting them to differentiate their parts from the following orders, “Plot coordinates for the outer fringes of the Centaur System. Prep for FTL. This will be a one-jump drive. Warp first.”
Zarrey took a hearty swig of his remaining coffee, “Don’t you think that’s a little bold? If we jump into that system, we’re going to have all six of those battleships and the Erans on the surface throwing everything they can at us.”
“We carry a similar risk with every action we now take.” They had no allies and no safe harbor. Chances were everyone they met would try to kill them. As tempted as he was to stray from such a high-risk region, they needed to investigate Fairlocke’s death. He wouldn’t ignore potential danger to the families of the crew.
Besides, “XO, do you not find it odd that a fleet Reeter now controls is blockading the orbit of a planet that Reeter incited to rebellion?” Tactically speaking, the deployment of ships there made very little sense for the New Era.
Zarrey scratched at the scar on his chin, “I guess I never thought about it, but yeah… What the hell?”
Gaffigan turned from his console, “Maybe it’s all for show? It would be suspicious if he didn’t deploy a task force to a country in open rebellion.”
Zarrey shook his head, leaning up against the radar console. “Three ships was plenty for a show. He didn’t need to send six.” There had to be some other reason.
“Exactly,” the entire situation was an oddity before Fairlocke’s death was added to the mix. “There are two tactical explanations for an orbital blockade. He is either trying to keep something out or trying to keep something else in.” With Sagittarion’s connection to the cortex cut off, there was no way to know which. “What do you think, Ensign?” Admiral Gives prompted the engineer that had just arrived in CIC.
“Sir?” Callie squeaked, suddenly finding herself the center of attention. Everyone on the bridge was looking at her expectantly, but she was barely more than a rookie. She felt extremely underqualified to help make command decisions.
“There are some anomalies regarding Sagittarion, Ensign. I thought your input would be valuable,” the Admiral explained, easily dispersing the bridge crew’s stares with a glare of his own. “Can you think of anything that might be of interest to Reeter’s movement on or surrounding Sagittarion?”
Callie set her toolbox down beside her feet, trying not to feel too uncomfortable. “Almost the entire planetary surface is covered by the mega city. It’s a manufacturing world.” The air reeked of chemicals and waste, toxic on some levels to breathe. The planet’s ecosystem had collapsed decades ago, unable to sustain the unrestricted pollution and massive population. Food and clean water were imported, as were parts for the air scrubbing plants that kept the atmosphere mostly breathable.
It wasn’t a pretty planet, but it was far from alone in its plight for natural resources. Many of the poorer countries struggled the same way. “Ensign, does Sagittarion have any notable assets? Technology or drugs unique to the planet on the streets?”
Zarrey snorted, “Since when are street drugs an asset?”
Callie wrung her hands, glancing to Zarrey and then back to the Admiral. The Colonel was tall enough to make her feel like a dwarf. Right now, so recently reminded of how helpless she was against people bigger and stronger than her, that was more intimidating than the Admiral’s stoicism.
Still, she swallowed back her unease, “Sagittarion’s entire surface dominated by factories and foundries. The police heavily enforce order on the streets. There are no unauthorized gatherings or trade. Whatever resources the iron barons let free, well, there’s too many of us on the streets for it to make much of a difference.” Life on the streets was difficult, but roughly half of the planet’s population was effectively homeless and many of them were undocumented, nobodies in the eyes of the government.
“So who are the iron barons?” Zarrey asked, trying to follow along.
“The owners of the factories.” Callie explained, “They control everything on the surface. Food, water, shelter, essentially the workers too.”
Colonel Zarrey scrunched up his face, “That seems like human rights violation.” He’d heard rumors of Sagittarion’s deplorable conditions, but that sounded a whole lot like slave labor.
“The central worlds turn a blind eye.” Admiral Gives spoke calmly, “It keeps the price of their goods down.” Companies like Knight Industries that owned factories on Sagittarion turned a massive profit and still kept their products affordable. “The conditions there are kept mostly out of media.” Sagittarion very much was a corporate-owned slave world. “However, due to the fleet’s close partnership with Knight Industries, Command would never interfere, regardless of the human rights violations occurring on the surface.”
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Callie nodded. There was a reason she was very afraid to go back there. “Knight Industries has orbital shipyards at Sagittarion. They take only the most skilled metal workers, but the pay is better and it keeps you off the streets.” She remembered applying for work there. They had never taken her. She’d been too small and too weak, regardless of her skill with tools.
“However,” the Admiral said, “the orbital shipyards were not Reeter’s objective.” Structures like that tended to be fragile. “If they were not destroyed by whatever destroyed Base Aquair, then they were destroyed by result.” The booms and rails of the orbital shipyards would not have survived the ablation cascade caused by Aquair’s debris.
“Wait, wait, wait.” Zarrey interrupted, “What did you say about Knight Industries’ shipyards?”
Callie jumped back, surprised by the Colonel’s sudden intensity. “They only took the most skilled workers. I mean, all we Sags have manufacturing and metal working experience.” It was the only way to earn food and water.
“That’s it!” Zarrey snapped his fingers, “You said it yourself, Admiral, that orbital blockade could be keeping something in. But its not something, it’s someone, or many somebodies as the case is. By blockading Sagittarion, Reeter has earned himself fourteen billion slaves all with metal working experience.”
“But what would Reeter need that many metalworkers for?” Callie instinctively looked to the Admiral, since he usually had the answers, but suddenly wished she hadn’t. There were storms gathering in his eyes. “What’s he building?”
“A fleet.” If the situation could have gotten worse, it just had.
“He already has a fleet.” Zarrey said. Reeter had taken over Command’s allied fleet, which was by far the most massive and well-armed force within human territory.
“He’s not building it for the centralized government. He’s building it for the separatists.” Armed as they were now, the colonies in open rebellion faced certain death.
“But if he’s supplying the ships from Sagittarion… That could perpetuate the war for years. Possibly generations. The Sags breed like rabbits, no offense, Ensign. He’ll never run out of workers,” Zarrey said. “The rebellion could last forever.”
That’s exactly what he wants. “War brings out the best in humanity.” The courageous, the bold and the creative. But it also brings out the worst. It brought out the callous, the abusive and the cruel. The identification of both suited the New Era’s purposes.
Callie stood there, reveling in the horror of what she’d just learned. Try as she might, she just didn’t understand why anyone would want to perpetuate a civil war. The last Frontier Rebellion, years before her time, had taken billions of lives. The Admiral himself had put an end to it, but perpetuating another rebellion could kill billions more.
“This is sick.” Zarrey rubbed his jaw roughly, disgusted. The bridge crew looked quite disturbed as well. No doubt, they were grateful to split from Command when they did.
The revelation of Reeter’s twisted intentions was nothing new to Admiral Gives. “Ensign, do you know anything about Knight Industries’ planetary shipyards?” The fleet would likely be assembled there, while the parts were manufactured around the planet. It was the only ship-building facility that hadn’t had a factory built over it.
She nodded, “I used to camp there in the scaffolding. It’s usable. The orbital shipyards were a great deal more modern, so the planetary shipyards primarily handled maintenance and repair while new builds occurred in orbit.” She found her hands shaking as she reached up to smooth her pigtails nervously. “The facility is equipped. They could build there. Big ships, too. There were a couple derelicts around. Unfinished projects. One of them was massive.”
Zarrey frowned, “Define ‘massive.’” He didn’t like the sound of that.
She could feel the stares of the bridge crew on her once again and fought the urge to cower away. “Sir,” she told Zarrey, “I could be wrong about this. It was an old build. The structure was littered with trash and it was half submerged in a lagoon made from the factories’ sludge and acid rainwater…”
As she trailed off, Admiral Gives suddenly realized Malweh was right. The Ensign was jumpy. Usually, she wasn’t so afraid of Zarrey. While the XO was tall, his utter lack of decorum usually made him easily approachable. Her usual smile was absent too, halfway distracting him from the discussion at hand.
“I-I couldn’t see all of it,” Callie continued, the trembles in her voice only growing worse. “T-the smog made it hard to see that far…”
“Spit it out, Ensign.” Zarrey ordered.
“Constancy-class.” She squeaked, flinching away, “It looked like a Constancy-class build, sir.”
“What?” the Colonel roared. “A Constancy-class?”
“Yessir.” She said, wanting nothing more than to run from this conversation. The even lighting on the bridge suddenly seemed to have a weight of its own, as if wanting to stifle this discussion from the air. “T-they said on the streets that the project got cut more than thirty years ago. T-they said, even by then the construction had killed a hundred workers.”
Safety regulations for the workers didn’t exist on Sagittarion, so large builds tended to invoke high casualties. “It was still in its structural stages. But the lagoon beneath,” the black acidic water, “has since claimed hundreds more.” Squatters hiding on the structure slipped and fell, and people sometimes just jumped, but none of them ever came out alive. “T-they say its h-haunted by an angel who kills-”
“That’s enough, Ensign.”
Callie swallowed carefully, hearing a slight edge to the Admiral’s tone. It was clear she’d said too much.
Zarrey looked between them, catching the undertow between them. Smith had just revealed something she wasn’t supposed to. “Cat’s out of the bag, Admiral.” He glared at the ship’s commander. “What the hell is this about a second Constancy-class? That’s not possible.” At least, it wasn’t supposed to be.
Admiral Gives could feel the looks of the entire crew on him. He was used to being a somewhat unwilling center of attention. Still, he turned his attention purposefully to the radar readouts hanging above. The soft pings of the radar sweeps only accentuated his silence.
“No way. Not today.” Zarrey grabbed the Admiral’s sleeve, pulling him around. “Tell us what the fuck is going on.” Even the suggestion of a second Constancy-class was deeply, deeply concerning. “This is a flagship caliber ship. She’s supposed to be one of a kind! Hell, this is the deadliest ship in human history! You can’t tell us that she’s got a fucking twin that nobody knew about and not explain what the hell they were planning to do with it!”
Admiral Gives removed Zarrey’s grip calmly. “Hands off,” he reminded. This forceful physical contact was exactly the thing that could cause him to kill his XO.
“Hell no!” Zarrey took a fistful of the Admiral’s uniform. “The Singularity isn’t supposed to have a sister ship! So what the hell is that thing down on Sagittarion?” He hauled the Admiral closer, not bothering to restrain the hot breath of his yell, “Were they building it?”
Admiral Gives took the logical course of action in this situation. He went for the throat. The jab landed before Zarrey even saw it coming. Down he went like a heavy bag of flour, choking and coughing as he grabbed at his windpipe.
Without a pause, the Admiral latched onto the stiff collar of Zarrey’s uniform and threw him roughly onto radar console’s flat top. The puddle of coffee splattered out below him, lukewarm mess soaking into his clothing and hair, a foreboding warning of the blood that might soon do the same.
Zarrey gasped loudly, heaving like a fish out of water as his mug clattered loudly to the floor. Above him, the Admiral wrapped one strong hand around his executive officer’s throat, and used the other to hold his tiny knife against Zarrey’s cardioid artery. In the backlight of the radar console, the tiny silver blade shimmered with the slight movement of the Colonel’s rapid heartbeat.
A trained Marine, Zarrey very well could have broken out of that hold. He was taller and stronger than the Admiral, but that little blade kept him very, very still. It was a reminder that he would be dead before he hit the ground if he struggled any further.
The bridge crew stared at them in dead silence, frozen in place. They had never seen the Admiral and Zarrey clash in a physical struggle. In fact, they had never seen the Admiral get physical against anyone, but he had experience, and it showed. Zarrey would not be the first XO to die by his hand, and they were all well aware of that.
The Marine guarding CIC had taken one step into the room, but no further. Admiral Gives had a license to kill, and aboard his ship, there was no one who could challenge his decision. To do so would be to start a mutiny that would, without a doubt, ultimately fail.
Zarrey was left on the radar console, trying to steady his gasping breaths, staring into the cold blue eyes of a killer for a long, quiet moment. Dressed head to toe in black, Death himself may as well have stood above him. The adrenaline in his veins carried a paralyzing fear to every limb and extremity he had.
Slowly, the Admiral leaned down and spoke quietly into the ear of his executive officer, “I do not answer to you, Colonel.” As of yesterday morning, he didn’t answer to anyone, and that should make a lot of people very, very afraid.
With that, he released Zarrey and stepped back, stowing his knife easily back into his sleeve. The blond-haired Colonel slid limply to the floor, leaving a messy smear of coffee behind. He sat there, staring ahead and breathing heavily, very surprised to be breathing at all.
The horror of the crew was evident. Smith had taken several steps back and clamped her hand over her mouth. Galhino had hunched over her controls, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. Alba looked ready to faint at the first drop of blood he saw.
The Admiral ignored all of them, and stepped over Zarrey to place a hand on the radar console. He closed his eyes, reading the pulse of the ship. Ready for FTL. “Ensign Alba, take us to warp.” They were several hours from Sagittarion, and nothing about the New Era building a fleet explained Commander Fairlocke’s sudden death. There was still a potential threat against the families of the crew.
Alba obeyed silently, promptly flipping a control. Loyally, the ship obeyed, releasing the pent-up energy of one of the FTL drives, and vanishing into hyperspace in a column of golden light.
On the bridge, the transition was barely noticeable. The pulsating hum of warp drive just added itself to the background noise. The crew remained in dead silence, focused dutifully on anything but Zarrey laying limply on the floor. They were afraid, terrified even of what they’d just seen. The Admiral understood. He had once been in their place, too afraid of his commander to say or do anything.
But that had been years ago. Things back then had been different. To start, his predecessor would have killed Zarrey then and there, graphically and painfully, then executed or severely punished another half of the bridge crew for good measure.
Admiral Gives had no intention of doing any of that. “Listen to me,” he told them. “All of you, listen to me.” He waited until he at least had their terrified looks, “I never asked you to stay. You made that choice on your own. I suspect each of you had your own reasons. Those are not my business and those are not my concern, but this remains my ship. You all knew that from the start. Most of you knew that before you ever set foot on board.” He was well aware his reputation preceded him. “Yet, still, you came.” They still served on his ship, many of them for years now.
“You may consider me a tyrant. Perhaps I am. It makes no difference to me.” He’d been mostly alone for a long, long time now. He didn’t expect the crew to befriend him. “But I gave my oath to this ship. I protect her crew, and I protect her. Challenge me in either regard, and you will see how much of a tyrant I can be. Do your jobs the way you are expected to, and you will have this ship as your home. You will be free to do whatever enticed you to stay.” It was their choice. He would not force their hand, but he also would not be pressured into revealing any secrets they did not immediately need to know. They were secrets for a reason.
“We are en route to Sagittarion. What we find there may be entirely not to your liking, but I expect you all to do exactly as you are told. I am not asking you to trust me, I am asking you to specifically overlook the fact that you do not.”