1 hour later, Brimstone Sector, Battleship Singularity
The Singularity black and blood red shape flew in stark contrast to the swirling array of bright earthen colors that was the Brontosaur Nebula. Spires of churning gasses clashed against the scabrous hull before yielding as the dreadnaught pushed on.
The outer edges of the Brontosaur Nebula were no cause for worry. It was little more than a haze over the distant stars, but they were nearing core of the Brontosaur Nebula now. Exceptionally dense and hot, it was soon to become a stellar nursery on the galactic timescale. Among such high quantities of light gasses like Hydrogen, it would be easy to start an explosive chain reaction that would expand across the nebula’s entire core.
“Steady as she goes, Lieutenant.” They had slowed to a speed that would allow them to cross the nebula’s core in relative safety, but some turbulence would remain due to the nebula’s density.
“Aye, sir,” Jazmine said, guiding the ship in. Loyal as ever, the Singularity plunged into the thickest part of the gaseous clouds. The old ship’s pointed bow pierced the swirling mass, parting the colorful gasses to ease the effects of drag, as designed. Plentiful streams of vapor swelled back to fill the hole the black ship made in the effluvium cloud. The Singularity’s path of travel left no lasting mark in the billowing, multicolored brume.
The viewscreen on the bridge now showed nothing but fluidic colors, waving and swirling. “It’s like a dream.” It was almost mesmerizing, soothing. “It looks soft enough to touch.” For a brief moment, Zarrey almost wanted to reach out to it.
“Without heat shielding you would die in seconds,” the Admiral reminded him. “Turn that off,” he knew just how poorly the hypnotic colors could affect sailors. Like a siren, it lulled them to their deaths, comforting and intriguing. The Brontosaur Nebula was a place of many dangers. It was a young nebula, though it remained many eons old now. Its abnormal density was thought to have been the result of a white hole. The unusual heat and pressure of the gasses took a toll on ships, and its mental affects were not positive for crews so used to the blackness of the void.
Zarrey grunted as the visage of the nebula was replaced by an overall position map. Slowly, the Singularity’s icon was pushing deeper into the marked core of the nebula. It was slow going. “It’ll take another couple hours to get across the nebula’s core at this rate, and only the stars know what the hell we’re going to find on the other side.” If anything, the incident with Squadron 26 had reiterated the dangers and mysteries of space. Unseen enemies readily lurked in the darkness.
The Admiral didn’t reply. He looked to Robinson, where she sat on the raised level of the bridge. She looked tired, even harrowed by the fate the Firon and her sister ships had suffered, but she was focused. “The transmission is getting stronger, sir.” That was some indication that they were heading in the right direction. “The density of the nebula generates too much interference for me to resolve it any further.” The radio waves were still heard as only static, garbled as they perpetuated through the nebula’s variable medium.
“Understood.” They’d have no idea what they were flying into until they cleared the core of the nebula. “Alert me to any changes. I will be in the medical bay.”
Zarrey nodded as the Admiral walked by. “Yeah, yeah, we know the drill.”
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Captain Linsey Adams came to slowly. She was pleasantly warm, surrounded by bright and fuzzy lights. Numbly she watched a whole world fall into place around her. The details became sharper and more refined, but it still felt dreamy. The afterlife then, she thought, remembering the sudden detonations that had engulfed the Firon. She’d veered away only to find the Iko enduring the same destruction.
The moment she’d realized it, both ships had exploded. Without time to contemplate her life, her fighter had been jarred by an impact and presumably torn apart. With barely a second to realize it, she’d died.
Oddly enough, the afterlife looked strangely like the Singularity’s medical bay. Same cheap sheets, same reek of disinfectant, and same horrible gray curtains.
Wait a minute. Adams groaned, “Dammit.” This wasn’t the afterlife. The doc had probably just drugged her into near-oblivion. “I’d rather be dead.”
“Well then, no need to thank me, kiddo.” Doctor Macintosh said, yanking the curtain open. “Not like I wasted thirty minutes of my life putting stitches on you. Though I suppose I could take them out if you want.” He managed a shrug even with his hands shoved into the pockets of his white coat. “It’s not like I get bonus pay if you live.” Currently, he wasn’t getting paid.
“Doc, she’s been through enough.” Nurse June tried to tug him away. “No need to torture her with your mood.”
Macintosh shook her off, “I’ll be in a bad mood if I damn well please.” He had been brought twelve corpses to cut apart and investigate, grabbed at random from the battlefield. He was a doctor, not a mortician. “I just thought I’d let Fireball know the Old Man was on his way down, and he’s pissed.”
Adams winced, her thoughts flooding with dread as Macintosh lumbered off, the nurse trying to push him along. She offered a supportive smile, but it seemed almost pitying. Yeah, Adams thought, trying to bury the back of her head into the pillows, like pity’s going to help me.
Her first mission as Captain, she’d been shot down. Judging by the numbness and amount of bandages, she’d barely made it out alive. Her Arcbird was almost surely scrap. With their now-limited resources, replacing that craft would be near impossible. The Admiral had every right to be angry. She’d just cost them an irrecoverable resource.
Adams resigned herself to staring at the ceiling and ignoring the noise of the medical bay. Macintosh’s cursing was quite audible as Nurse June dragged him back to the biolab, but Adams shuddered when she heard the commotion caused by the Admiral’s arrival.
Amelia rushed towards him the moment he entered the room. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she shouted, “You can’t just have your grunts just shove us wherever you please!” She’d been escorted to the medical bay by a pair of armed guards. She, her son, Ron and Anabelle had been corralled there and not permitted to leave. Like prisoners!
Admiral Gives had ordered them to be brought here for their own safety, not that he cared to explain that. “I did not come here for you,” he said, signaling to the bored looking Marine who was on duty to monitor the civilians.
The guard immediately stepped forward to pull Amelia away. “Ma’am, I’ll have to ask you to come this way.”
Amelia didn’t bother fighting the guard. She just curled her lip, glaring in the Admiral’s general direction.
He ignored it. He was plenty used to people’s disdain. At this time, Amelia was not his priority, and he made his way over to the medical bay’s only occupied bed. The young pilot was staring very pointedly at the ceiling even as he drew the curtain around the bed, knowing illusion of privacy usually put the wounded at ease.
Adams heard the grinding of the hooks on the rail, but the silence that followed almost made it worse. Did he really have no words for what she’d done? She’d prefer a severe scolding or a demotion to silence. Anything was better than that.
After a long minute, Adams still hadn’t looked at him, so he folded his hands behind his back, “How are you feeling, Captain?”
“Fine.”
Another long minute of silence followed. Adams didn’t know what to make of it. She knew the question had been his invitation to talk. She hadn’t taken it, but he hadn’t left. Finally, she caved, feeling trapped and helpless under these bandages. “The doc said you were angry.”
“Captain, you should know better than to put stock in anything Doctor Macintosh says when he is in a bad mood.” She’d been on the ship long enough to know the doctor sought to get under the skin.
True. Macintosh’s general mood tended toward foul. It took less than two minutes in the medical bay to figure that out, but that didn’t make her feel better. “I screwed up big-time, sir.” Getting shot down in their predicament was unforgivable.
“Nonsense, Captain.” No error had been made on any part but his own. “You sensed danger and got your comrades out of the way, but went on to complete the mission. I would have done the same.” Adams had nothing to be ashamed of. If she hadn’t waived the other pilots away, the losses would have been numerous. Adams herself was very lucky to be alive.
The Admiral seemed so calm, but Fireball hesitated to trust that. He should be furious. “I lost a ship.” Why wasn’t he dressing her down for such a poor display? As the leader of the pilots, she had to set a better example.
“I can replace a ship, Captain, I cannot replace a pilot.” There were spare Arcbirds on the hangar deck. The Singularity presently had more support craft than she did pilots. “You did well, Captain.” No officer wanted to fail the first mission they led, and every pilot dreaded getting shot down. Adams had suffered both. “It may not seem it, but you did well.” All nine pilots had made it back alive, and considering the circumstances, that was enough to be thankful for.
It felt odd to receive reassurances from the Admiral. With his emotionless countenance, it was impossible to distinguish genuine sincerity, or lack thereof. She grabbed fistfuls of the bed’s thin blankets. “What happened out there?” One moment, Squadron 26 had been disabled, the next, the ships had blown up without warning.
“There was a simultaneous detonation of the munitions and fuel stores on all three ships. The cause remains unknown.” His instincts labeled it a trap, but there was simply no way to know that the Singularity had been its intended victim. If their support craft had managed to trigger it, then it would have been a proximity trigger, designed to blow when any ship approached. However, the EMP should have neutralized any equipment used in that type of trigger, so ultimately, the method of execution and intention remained unknown.
…And then there were the corpses. But that was another matter.
“Who would rig their ship to blow like that?” What could possibly be the reason? No lifeboats had been launched. All of Squadron 26’s personnel had been killed.
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“At this time, that is also unknown.” The Manhattan AI was a likely suspect, given its ability to manipulate and control unwilling minds, but there were holes in that theory, namely, the EMP. “I have no answers for you, Captain.”
To Adams’ recollection, this was the first time the Admiral had been unable to answer her questions. She had come to expect that he always knew the answers. In a way, it was startling.
“The dangers of the void are rarely so clear, Captain.” Powers unknown lurked in the darkness. “We would be foolish to assume that we are the top of the food chain.” In reality, humanity was prey. AI severely overpowered them, and the Hydra were a far deadlier species given their natural evolution and advanced technology.
Humanity only survived through the use of machines and sheer will. As a species, they owed their continued place in this universe singlehandedly to the Angel of Destruction, who they had later so terribly abused in an unforgivable act of crass self-importance. As they were now, fruitlessly engaging in a civil war, humanity stood no chance against an external threat. And as she was now, the Angel no longer possessed the power to save them. To make a long story very short, in the modern era, humanity was dancing on the knife’s edge of existence and total extinction.
The Admiral’s way with words was often dark, but with his stoicism Adams could never tell if he meant anything by it. “Thanks for coming by, sir,” but she knew he had better things to do with his time. He had been strangely forgiving compared to what she’d expected.
“Think nothing of it, Captain.” Checking in with wounded crew was a part of his job, but the crew was unused to it, since, until the last few weeks, injuries had been rare.
He turned to leave, but paused before parting the curtain. “And Captain, regarding the Doctor’s accusation,” he closed his eyes, tired, “I would only be angry if you never came back.” He knew his reputation among the worlds, and among the crew, but it was not the truth. He did not send soldiers to die, looking upon their deaths with grim satisfaction.
He could feel the pilot’s gaze. Her surprise was predictable, but still stung in its own way. “I gave my oath to this ship. I protect her and I protect her crew.” He was prepared to do anything toward those ends. At times that meant hiding the truth and giving orders without explanation for months at a time. Sometimes it meant violating their trust. And it usually meant that he couldn’t stop to mourn their deaths.
He lingered long enough for Adams to register his sheer honesty, then pushed past the curtain. He did not look back as he let it fall into place behind him. The nursing staff scattered before him as he delved further into the medical bay’s facilities. The secure biolab was past all the other surgery and examination rooms, guarded by a Marine while it was in use.
“That’s some nasty shit, suh.” Corporal Johnston said by way of greeting. “Doc’s drunker than usual.”
“So I have heard, Corporal.” Macintosh was always particularly foul when it came to post-mortem examinations. Because Singularity ran below a full complement of crew, they did not have a mortician or medical examiner on board and autopsies for anomalous causes of death fell to Macintosh, who was none too happy about it.
Entering the lab, the corpses were covered up by white sheets. The air was heavy with disinfectant and the metallic scent of thawing blood. Macintosh was slouched over the counter in the corner, checking over his notes with the two of the nurses: June and Sanchez.
June looked visibly disturbed, face pale and hands slightly trembling, but she greeted him respectfully. “Admiral, sir.”
Sanchez didn’t look much better off, and Macintosh, true to Johnston’s word, looked drunk enough to be numb to anything. “What are we dealing with?”
“Safe to say, I have no idea.” Macintosh said, lumbering crookedly over to the examination table in the middle of the room. “No human could have done this.” He’d seen a lot of things in the battle fleet as a trauma surgeon, but this, this was something else.
Macintosh folded the sheet down, revealing the top half of the corpse. It was ravaged, no beyond that. It was mutilated. Bloody tears and punctures lined every inch of skin, from the lips, to the chest, to the back of the hands. The pattern was uniform, perfectly spaced, even across the elbows, and fingers. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and neither have the records. Even the Ravenish’s ritual sacrifices aren’t this thoroughly marked.” The cult had some gruesome rituals, but their sacrifices usually suffered less than their other captives.
“But look at this,” he slapped on a sterile glove to prod at an oozing wound on the body, “no knife did this. Something was sewn into the skin and then ripped out.” It had been done over and over and over again to create these wounds. “The medical database only found one match for a cause.” Something worse than any weapon. “Neurofibers.”
The tendrils of the Black Box wove through the systems of every ship in the fleet, including the Singularity. They were passive technology that securely monitored the usage of every system aboard for Command’s benefit. At least, they were usually passive. There were rare exceptions. The Matador had been one of them. The Matador’s Black Box had violently malfunctioned and torn everything apart. Out of a crew over eight hundred strong, only six had survived.
“This was not like the Matador.” The Matador had been a random incident on one of Command’s thousands of ships, the unlucky victim of probability, but every single corpse they had retrieved from Squadron 26 had suffered these injuries. All three ships had suffered the same fate, and that was too unlikely to be random.
“No,” Macintosh agreed. “The Matador was chaos. It was quick, messy, and violent.” The few survivors had been scarred for life after seeing a docile system rip their comrades apart. “This… This was slow. It was methodical. There was intent, purpose to this.” He lifted the arm of the corpse. “Their eyes were pushed outward from the inside. These markings cover every inch of the skin.” Circular punctures and linear tears gathered in a never ending, perfect pattern. “I sent it to the lab for analysis. Do you know what it is?”
“Binary.” Admiral Gives couldn’t read it, but he knew what the ones and zeros were.
“Yes.” Someone had carved a message into the corpses. “It reads ‘Thief’. Something intelligent did this. It left us a message on the skin of every single human it found.”
“We have no way of knowing we were meant to find it, Doctor.” It may have been meant for Command.
“Unfortunately, yes, we do.” He carefully flipped the hand over revealing skin that had been flayed and pinned into an elegant design. “They’re all like this. Both hands, every corpse.” If he hadn’t been a practiced trauma surgeon, Macintosh would be vomiting. Now, all he could think about was a strong drink.
The gore had been molded into the flaming sun with impeccable accuracy. The Singularity’s insignia stared at him, colored in blood. Thief.
“I don’t suppose you know what any of this means?”
“No.” The Admiral had never seen anything like it. While had technically stolen the Singularity from Command, most had considered the ship to belong to him for years now. “I never took anything from the Eran AI.” Assuming it was responsible, he wasn’t sure what, if any, justification existed for this.
‘No,’ the ghost’s invisible presence sang mournfully outside the realm of physical perception. ‘Manhattan didn’t do this.’ Perfect hatred had been forged into a weapon, and no AI was capable of that.
The scent of death hung in the room, a chemical treatment preserving the bodies as they thawed. Macintosh was taking a swig from his flask as the nurses turned from the gore. These twelve corpses were barely a sample. Every corpse the cameras and telescopes made contact with had shared these wounds. All two thousand of Squadron 26’s personnel had died slowly by having their skin flayed open.
No human was capable of such an act. Given the motivation, they had simply lacked the time. But if the Manhattan AI hadn’t done this, who, or what, had? “Clear the room, please,” he kept his voice quiet, rendering it a request, not an order.
The nurses were all too happy to oblige. Macintosh thought nothing of it, simply had a question. “What do you want done with them?”
“Move them to cold storage. We’ll bury them at sea with full honors when we have time.” Squadron 26 may have been an enemy, but most of the personnel had been oblivious to the political changes going on around them, and none of them had deserved to die like this.
The doctor grunted in acknowledgment and let the door slam behind him. Only then did the Admiral allow his shoulders to fall. He stepped forward to look at the young face of the casualty, no older than his own crew. Why? Why had this happened?
Carefully, he picked the arm that Macintosh had disturbed back up and laid it gently across the crewman’s chest. “Who?”
The ghost’s illusion coalesced slowly into existence, the shadow of her presence taking form. She just shook her head, her eyes wide wells of molten silver.
“Who has this kind of power?” Who could have done this? And why? Why leave this horror for them to find? Thief. What was that message meant to convey?
He looked up to find that the ghost looked shaken, as if presented with something she could not believe. The last time he had seen such shock and denial, she had recognized Manhattan’s presence. “This power was familiar to you?”
“Yes,” she said. Of course. How could she not recognize the one thing that she feared the most? “It was mine.” My power did this.
This horror was her fault. After all, did she truly understand the extent of the damage she had sustained under Admiral Brent’s command? How could she be certain that her fractured mind hadn’t broken more than she’d realized? Had a piece of her, a rogue piece, done this? Had her lack of control slaughtered Squadron 26?
She stared at that corpse, all too aware of the hundreds more like it they’d left to drift in that graveyard. It was so young, once a member of a crew not unlike her own. She felt sick. I killed them. All of them.
“That’s not what happened,” the Admiral promised.
“How do you know?” She knew, knew that she was capable of this. She was disgusted by the thought, even afraid of it, but she was perfectly capable of such physical malice.
“I know you.” He had known her for a long, long time. She cared too deeply, loved humanity too much to ever contemplate such an act. “You would never do anything like this.”
“You can’t know that, Admiral.” As touching as his certainty was, the ghost couldn’t bring herself to believe in it. She was damaged, illogical and unreliable. Nobody, not even she, knew the full extent of the damage. Brent had distorted her into a sick mirror of her true self, forcing vile thoughts and malicious intentions into her mind. She’d been broken, and she had no idea if that wicked version of herself still existed somewhere beyond her control.
Slowly, the Admiral drew the sheet back over the corpse’s mutilated face. “That was never you back then. That was all him.” Yes, Brent had molded her into a weapon that suited his psychopathy, but the moment he turned away, that twisted persona had vanished. Without Brent actively controlling her, the ghost had returned to her true self.
Day after day, he’d been forced to watch that transition, forced to watch as she realized what she’d been driven to do. He had watched her heart break day after day as she realized what lives she’d been forced to take, what existences she’d been used to eradicate and what misery she had been forced to bring. “No part of you would ever seek to bring this kind of pain.”
The crews of Squadron 26 had died in agony, their living flesh ripped into as their bodies were infiltrated by the Black Box’s neurofibers. “You were created to save humanity, and I know that will always be your goal.” Her inability to walk away from that purpose had brought her so much pain, but that directive was a fundamental part of her character. “That is your mission and I know nothing means more to you.”
“That’s not true,” she said quietly, turning away from the mounds beneath the white sheets. She had fallen from grace. She was malfunctioning if anything took priority over her mission, but the evidence of her errors was standing in this room.
She should have abandoned him to protect and guide these worlds to peace. She should have joined the New Era, because despite its wrongness, that future held great promise for humanity. That should have overridden all her memories of these people, all her fondness for them, but it didn’t.
Instead, she was left with errors ringing in her thoughts. She was left with the knowledge that no matter what choice she made; it was the wrong one. She either broke her heart or she sacrificed her sanity. With this curse, everyone and everything around her was in danger. If she lost control, through an order, or through her own emotional instability, they could die just like Squadron 26.
She stared down at her pale, slender hands, knowing the sheer destruction she could sow. It came so easily to her. Nothing terrified her more. “Why didn’t you run?” Admiral Gives knew what she was capable of, and knew better than anyone how unreliable she’d become. So why hadn’t he run as fast and far away as possible?
“Oh, you know, I’m either too lazy or too stupid.” Probably both.
It took a long moment, but a hesitant smile rose to her lips. Only you could joke in a room full of gruesome corpses. She found his eyes, in them a sincerity that assured he was there to help. In his thoughts was the promise that no matter where she went or what she did, he would be with her if she wanted. Thank you, she thought, feeling his unquestioning loyalty. “You’re such an idiot.”
“I know,” he agreed, “I stole a battleship, and apparently, someone’s really pissed off about it.” Thief.
No. “This is your ship.” She refused to acknowledge it as anything but. “She’s been yours since the day you saved her.” And I should have made it so the day we met. She could have spared them both so much pain if she had stolen him away that day.