Archer Sector, Centaur System, Battleship Singularity

Six standard rounds made contact on the Singularity’s pointed bow. Five of them were shunted aside by the ship’s angled armor, some redirected into the void and others shredding themselves as they skipped across the plating, adding nothing more than new scuffs to the paint. Only one of the rounds was lucky enough to score a direct hit. It detonated into the hull, bending several armor plates inward, creating a visible flaw.

But that was as far as the damage went. There was no decompression. There was no rain of shrapnel. The attack had failed entirely to puncture the ship’s secondary hull. The attack that had shredded the civilian ships hours before was reduced to little more than a mosquito bite.

The direct impact was barely more than a tremble in CIC. Zarrey rode it out easily, and brushed his hair back with an amused grin, “Wow, I think he actually managed to do more than scuff the paint.” That was further than most enemies got. “Lucky hit.”

“It will not happen again,” if Tyler wants to live.

Zarrey looked to the Admiral, hearing a bit of frost creep into his tone. “Relax, won’t you?” The Singularity could take a few hits before risking any severe damage. “This was a damn fine plan.” The Admiral’s deep understanding of ship engineering and design coupled with the Singularity’s massive main battery guns had rendered them capable of crippling Command’s entire fleet in a matter of seconds.

Admiral Gives didn’t reply, he looked to Ensign Walters, whose bald head was shining with stress sweat. “Status, Ensign?”

“I estimate the recoil of their weapons has lowered the Gothic’s orbit a fraction of a kilometer,” the navigator answered, running the calculations, “That should take several hours off their orbital decline.” By firing up at the Singularity, the Gothic had pushed herself closer to the planet, and fractionally increased the slight drag of her orbit. Without engines, any orbit would eventually begin to decline, but increasing the drag only sped up the process.

“Idiots.” Jazmine snorted. “They’re going to need that time to restore their engine power.”

“That’s the point, Jazz.” Monty retorted, the bruises he’d earned on the Olympia still blotting the pale skin under his flaming red beard. “I’ve confirmed direct hits on all targets, Admiral. Their engines have been neutralized.”

“Maintain target lock on the Gothic, release the others.” Admiral Gives had no intention of wasting unnecessary bullets, and Tyler seemed the only one stubborn enough to put up a fight while his ship was slowly falling toward a planet. “If the Gothic fires again, sink her.”

An overeager smile spread slowly onto Gaffigan’s face. “Aye, skipper,” he confirmed, relishing the order.

Colonel Zarrey blinked, surprised by the order. “Do you really think he’s stupid enough to take us on when he’s dead in orbit?”

The answer was immediate. “Yes.”

“Damn,” the XO laughed, “I expected more hesitation.” That was a harsh judgement from the usually neutral Admiral.

“Rear Admiral Tyler was one of the most outspoken sympathizers of the New Era Movement.” He took the worlds’ current social divides on a personal level, and tended primarily toward violent responses. Tyler never been particularly clever, and there was no doubt, “He was directly involved in Reeter’s coup.” It made sense that Reeter would send one of his most loyal acolytes to defend Sagittarion. The planet and its population were critical to the Erans’ larger scheme.

“Do you think he’s the one that ordered the hit on your brother?”

“I am not privy to that information,” nor do I particularly care. Tyler’s fate was in his own hands. If he decided to start a fight, it would be a glorified suicide. The recoil of the Gothic’s weapons would push her into Sagittarion’s atmosphere, where she would break apart, even if the Singularity never returned fire.

But, for the moment, the scene was still in Sagittarion’s orbit. The Singularity sat leisurely above the fleet and the renewed cloud of small debris her initial attack had created. She nor her enemies made any movement as their shared orbits carried them into the planet’s shadow. Below, the lights of megacity formed glowing blots, the atmosphere’s constant clouds of pollution obscuring the ground.

Invisibly, the Singularity’s sensor arrays were scouring the surface of the planet for any useful data. Command’s ships were helpless to stop her, even with most of their combined weaponry operational.

A less experienced tactician would have sought to disable the fleet’s weapons systems, or sink them entirely, but Admiral Gives would have considered that a waste of ammunition.

The flaw of the Keeper-class ships was that their fuel pump control modules were so close to their outer hulls. The Singularity’s main battery, given the right angle of attack, was easily capable of punching through a Keeper-class ship’s armor and several feet of the ship’s decks. The first shell alone opened the fuel pump control modules to vacuum. The second only finished the job, destroying the module entirely and taking out the target ship’s engines. Without engines, any weapons they fired only pushed them towards Sagittarion and an eventual demise.

Targeting that engineering system on the Keeper-class ships left them totally helpless. They couldn’t attack and they couldn’t escape without engine power. Tyler and his entire fleet were completely at Admiral Gives’ mercy, and given his prior history, that was not a good place to be.

The Admiral was especially not pleased the Gothic had scored a direct hit on his ship, regardless of how inconsequential the resultant damage was. In fact, it tempted him towards the assumption that Tyler obviously wanted to die. After all, Rear Admiral Tyler should remember what happened to people that threatened the Singularity.

Most ended up dead, one way or another. Admiral Gives wasn’t above helping them politely into their graves.

“Sir,” Keifer Robinson called, “The Gothic is hailing.”

“Put it up.” The Admiral turned to the screen on the wall of CIC, not bothering to clean up the papers on the radar console. Tyler would disdainfully recognize what they were: the instruments of his utter defeat.

When the screen came on, revealing Tyler and the Gothic’s bridge, Zarrey crossed his arms, “Before you say anything else, Tyler, I’d recommend an unconditional surrender.” Tyler curled his nose in disgust, only encouraging Zarrey, “That is unless you want Monty to blow you up. Believe me, he’s strangely excited at the prospect.”

Monty just grinned eagerly, halfway playing along, and halfway letting loose his inner pyromania. He had a special affection for his post on the Singularity. Not only were the rules on drinking mostly relaxed aboard, but the Admiral usually let him have his way with the ship’s explosives. When told to blow something up, Monty was generally free to make it disappear however he pleased. The arrangement was so perfect that Monty hardly even cared about the Admiral’s gruesome reputation.

Tyler curled his lips, disgusted by the show on the Singularity’s bridge. Where was the decorum? Where was the focused silence of a diligent crew? “Don’t you have anything to say to me, Prince?” He, not his loudmouthed XO, should be demanding the fleet’s unconditional surrender.

It might have been Zarrey’s imagination, but briefly, the Admiral’s hand seemed to curl with something like frustration. The little twitch was gone in the next instant, the Admiral’s stoic façade never hinting that it had been there at all.

There was a rumor, somewhere in the vast labyrinth whispers that surrounded Admiral Gives, that he disliked the moniker the worlds had given him. Zarrey couldn’t begin to guess why. He’d always thought it rather badass. The Steel Prince – royalty born of blood and iron. Zarrey could only hope the worlds would someday grant him such a title rather than continuing to throw the usual slurs at him.

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“Well, Prince, I’m waiting.” There was no sense in dragging out this traitorous farce. “Demand my surrender.” Let’s negotiate, you bastard.

Admiral Gives regarded Tyler calmly. “No.” What point was an unconditional surrender when the fleet was already at his mercy? Perhaps, when he’d been working for Command, the legalities of the situation had been important, including the treatment of those enemies that would be taken prisoner, but that was a near laughable thought now.

“What?” Tyler roared, “My men and I will not become your prisoners without conditions! Food! Water-”

“I apologize if I ever gave the impression that I was taking prisoners.” No longer bound by any war pacts, he was free to deal in absolutes. “Rear Admiral Tyler, you will cooperate or you will die, and I will proceed to ask my questions to the next ship in your fleet.” And should they all refuse, then their corpses and the debris of their ships would burn up in Sagittarion’s atmosphere as a shower of shooting stars. To those ignorant of its cause on the surface of Sagittarion, the show would be beautiful.

Tyler swallowed hard. “You can’t do that.” The Gothic alone had a crew complement of over eight hundred sailors. The other ships brought the total of helpless victims to several thousand. Not even he could give that order. And yet, the Steel Prince did not bluff. “You can’t.”

Reeter had said the same thing before Admiral Gives had made him eat those words in the Homebound Sector. “Lieutenant Gaffigan, load the main forward battery with Armor Piercing rounds.” He’d already ensured they were properly aligned. The six fixed barrels mounted in the tip of the ship’s bow were aimed at the center of the Gothic’s mass, and at this range, they wouldn’t miss.

“AP rounds, aye,” Monty said, inputting the commands without pause. The rest of the crew was uncomfortable, well aware that their commanding officer was poised to take several thousand lives in an undeniable war crime. Gaffigan, however, knew his job, and he was well aware that hesitation on his part wouldn’t change the outcome of this standoff. If the Admiral wanted those ships sunk, they would be sunk, one way or another.

“You enjoy this game, don’t you, Prince?” Tyler sneered, “Just like your predecessor did.” What a disgusting traitor you’ve become. “You thrive in the killings and the chaos. You enjoy playing with the lives of the living, tormenting and torturing them. It entertains you, doesn’t it?”

Admiral Gives regarded his adversary calmly. Tyler had always been an abrasive officer whose ambitions tended toward obsession. Black swirls of ink crawled up Tyler’s neck, wrapping around his bald head, like the fingers of the void. In some ways they were. Because of those tattoos, the past had never relinquished its grip on Tyler, driving him constantly toward desperate aggression. They were slave marks, the ink added to his skin to identify him as the property of the Black Clover Syndicate.

Tyler was a freed slave, one that had dedicated his life to eradicating the slave syndicates from the worlds. It made him a driven officer, one who believed in the New Era’s promises of a better reality, but it often emotionally compromised his judgement.

A satisfied smile snuck across Tyler’s face, taking that analytical silence as a victory. “You’re just like he was, Prince. No one could deny his brilliance, but he savored the chaos and the suffering. Killing people was a cheap thrill to him, not a crime.” Brent had been a psychopath, one who thrived on perpetuating the worlds’ cycle of misery. “You are his successor in more ways than one.”

Ignoring the obvious wince from Zarrey, Admiral Gives kept his tone level. He knew better than to let his enemies strike a nerve. “My predecessor is dead. Do you wish to share his fate?”

On the bridge of his own ship, Tyler glanced to the auxiliary screen beside the one occupied by the hail. Its visual feed was focused on the Singularity. The ship was a bloody shard in the night, her black bow sharply angled and detailed in garish red. Surrounded by the remains of the dead, Tyler could see why she’d once been so feared. The ship carried a sinister aura. The darkness of the void itself bowed away from the ship’s black armor, as if hesitant to touch a weapon that had brought so much death.

Tyler could hardly blame the void for that. The ship had a wrongness to it, a tainted ambience. As hated as the Steel Prince was, the Singularity was hated just as much or more in her own right. Fifty years ago, she might have been humanity’s saving grace, but now humanity only saw her as a dilapidating murder machine that should have been disassembled years ago.

“I know better than to challenge you and your cursed battleship, Prince.” Old and outdated as the ship was, she was still deadly in the right hands. There was no visual cue that the larger ship was poised to exterminate the Gothic, but by the time he saw the Singularity bare her teeth, he’d already be dead. If she fired at this range with AP shells, nothing could save him.

Tyler knew that. In fact, he was counting on it. As clever as Gives was, and as powerful as his ship had once been, she wasn’t a perfect weapon. The armor on the bow was formidable, meant to deflect incoming fire. It was an effective defense, but it meant that the ship had to face her enemies head-on. While doing so, the ship’s main forward battery was her primary means of attack. The forward battery was every bit as deadly as the guns mounted on the ship’s back, possibly more so, but they had one critical weakness: they were fixed barrels, built into the ship’s structure.

Unlike the main battery guns on the ship’s back, they couldn’t swivel to aim or adjust attitude easily. To do so, the entire ship had to be moved. Or in the current case, to maintain the death threat on the Gothic, the entire ship had to remain still. To move would be to break her firing solution on the Gothic.

It was perfect, but Tyler was careful to shield his satisfaction. Not today, Demon. Today was his victory. The Singularity was maintaining a constant orbital path to aim at the Gothic, and that made her an easy target. He only had to buy time. “What do you want from me, Prince? If not my surrender?” he asked, sneering.

“The Battleship Gargantia.”

“Looking for another little rebel to add to your collection of traitors?” Tyler helped himself to a laugh, if only to conceal his inner giddiness. “The Gargantia’s sunk.” Fairlocke had died quickly and violently, but Tyler hoped when the time came, Gives’ demise would be much, much slower. The Steel Prince deserved that much.

“I am aware of the Gargantia’s fate. Where is the wreck?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. She jumped to her death.” The ship had already been dealt a fatal blow, now, wherever subspace had spat it out, it was nothing more than a mangled mess of metal and bodies.

A quick glance to Galhino confirmed that. The Gargantia’s wreck hadn’t been found on the surface of the planet, or in orbit. That meant Fairlocke had jumped to meet the civilian ships he’d saved, or at least tried. “Rear Admiral Tyler,” the Admiral said carefully, lowering his tone, “I would strongly advise you to tell me something useful.” It was obvious Tyler was plotting something, “My patience is growing thin.”

“Ah,” Tyler said, desperate to stall for another moment, “We know they jumped northwest, but we don’t know how far.”

That answer was far too quick to be an improvised lie. “How?”

“We recovered a civilian nav. computer from the debris. The data was corrupted, but we managed to get a heading.” Tyler could see the interest in the faces of Gives’ bridge crew. Their expressions betrayed him, even while he was perfectly stoic.

“Transmit that heading.”

“Or what?” Tyler chuckled as Manhattan whispered into his ear. Soon.

Admiral Gives’ blue eyes turned another degree colder, but it was his XO that answered. “Don’t make him repeat himself, Tyler. You’re not going to like the result.” Likely, the Admiral would just sink the Gothic and ask the next ship in line. That type of information would have been shared between the fleet, even transmitted to Command.

Just a few more seconds. Then death would strike from above and Tyler would be a hero to the New Era. All he needed was a few more seconds. But, by the look in the Prince’s eyes, he wasn’t going to get it unless he sent that heading. Tyler nodded to his bridge crew, “Transmit.” In a few more seconds, it wouldn’t matter that he’d given the enemy any information at all.

A moment passed, then Robinson spoke, “Received, sir. No signs of tampering.”

“Wise choice,” Zarrey remarked. “Though I’d really reconsider the bald look, Tyler. It doesn’t suit you.”

Something’s wrong here. Admiral Gives could just feel it. The sense of foreboding inched up his back with the eight legs of an arachnid. Tyler had given up that information too easily, cooperated too much. It wasn’t right.

Be careful, the ghost had said. She’d been trying to warn him. He knew that, but what about? What was he not seeing here? The sense of foreboding spread, insistent in the way it pricked at his skin.

The Admiral ignored the existing hail, momentarily unconcerned that Tyler could hear every order he was about to give. “Prepare for emergency FTL.”

“Sir, we’re not finished!” Galhino protested. The sensors hadn’t mapped the entire surface yet. There was too much interference from the toxic metallic ions in the atmosphere to get clear readings with any efficiency. The mission was incomplete.

Complete or incomplete, his instincts were telling him to get out of here. He trusted his instincts. They were nothing more than the expression of his subconscious realizing something his conscious mind hadn’t yet. “Helm-”

He never got the chance to finish that order.

Simply, it was too late.

Far below, on planetary surface, the massive rails of the Haven’s Ladder had realigned to target a new orbit, and the orbital mass driver had already fired, sending its deadly mass hurtling upward.

Gravity did its work, bending the velocity of the mass into a near circular orbit – the same orbit now shared by its target. Flying with incredible speed, the slug would not remain in orbit. It was already on an exit trajectory, but would take several orbits to exit Sagittarion’s gravity well. But regardless of the weapon’s true orbital mechanics, it only needed part of an orbit – mere seconds at its speed - to intercept the Singularity with all deadly force.