Kalahari Sector, Battleship Singularity
Space was continually empty, save for the three fighters that orbited on the edge of the ship’s radar range. A standard patrol of the Singularity’s own support craft, the white fighters orbited regularly, looking visually for anything that had been missed by the black battleship’s remote sensing arrays.
They saw nothing, but the vast seas of surrounding space were not as vacant as they appeared. Long and slender, sleek, but deadly, a sister set of weapons flew. Given ample time to accelerate to high speed, they encroached, programmed to skirt outside the ship’s range of detection. They were moving far faster than any normal missile would travel in its lifespan, but that had been the plan. Without sign of the ship that had launched them, and at such high speed, they were almost guaranteed to hit their mark. It was an attack formulated to kill, and their target had just been identified.
CIC operated at a typically quiet noise level. Out on these long patrols, it was normally weeks of nothing. There was only the rustle of papers and murmur of voices heard only occasionally above the radar’s soft return-echo. The crew worked their tasks efficiently within the dark metal room. They had run innumerable patrols just like this one. The Kalahari Sector was nothing new to them, and while these patrols could mean weeks without a single contact, there was always the slight chance of a major encounter.
The ship’s primary sensor officer, Maria Galhino, ran her station with an eye to the details, and knew very well she was required to report anything anomalous. She determinedly scoured the readouts for just one thing out of place. But even with her attention uncompromised, she almost missed it. A blip, there and then gone again. “Contact.” She filtered through the readouts, suddenly unsure it had been there at all. It was too quick to identify, but the logs had recorded the flaw in the background radiation. Something was out there.
“Another ship?” It was hardly likely this far from the core of the central worlds.
Galhino involuntarily flinched at the sound of the voice that answered her. When had the Admiral arrived on the bridge? Last she’d looked, Zarrey had been holding the watch alone. Damn it. “No.” She answered, cursing the fact that she hadn’t heard the ship commander walk in. She could just feel his cold stare, forcing her to backtrack. “I just don’t know, sir.” He wouldn’t accept her guess work about that anomaly not being another ship, no matter how logical it was. Unless it was a fact, or he asked for it, he didn’t want to hear it.
A part of her wished she hadn’t said anything at all until she’d acquired further evidence. The Admiral’s perfectly neutral stare was just that unnerving. The anomaly had disappeared, leaving nothing behind. It was entirely possible nothing had been there at all. “It may have been a sensor ghost, sir,” she said, attempting to dismiss his attention.
A sensor ghost. The Admiral did not appreciate that insinuation. It implied that his old battleship’s age mattered in more than aesthetics. “Dispatch the CAP to go check it out,” he ordered. Out here, there was no such thing as paranoia. There was only life and death. If something caught them unaware, they were completely alone, and that wasn’t nervousness, it was fact.
The squadron of fighters were relayed their orders and streaked by the warship’s portside flank, moving quickly to the specified area. Their progress was easily monitored on the radar displays in CIC. Still, the very possibility that they may not be alone in this remote sector, it did concern the Admiral. He’d brought them out here to keep them away from Command’s instability. “Open a communications link with the CAP and pipe it over the speakers,” he ordered the comms. officer. Nothing about this felt right.
Lieutenant Robinson worked her controls, noting that the Admiral seemed almost tense. Very rarely did he seem to be anything other than perfectly, stone-like neutral. It was enough to put her on edge, even as the pilots’ regular chatter played over the bridge.
“I’ll race you, Donut.” One of the pilots said.
“Oh, you’re on, Fireball.”
“Cut the chatter and stay in formation,” the third, lead pilot ordered. “We’re not here to have a picnic.”
Admiral Gives watched them approach the edge of the Singularity’s radar range with a keen eye, but there was nothing. He laid a hand on the cool metal of the console in front of him. He had commanded this ship for twenty-seven years, knew her inside and out. The crew considered her to be his only friend, if he had any at all, and in all of that, he had never once seen an incident involving a sensor ghost. If it showed up on their scans, it was almost guaranteed to be real. But where was it? And what was it?
The CAP pushed past the ship’s radar range, disappearing from the screens. A minute of tension revealed nothing. A second passed without incident. Then a third and fourth. The pilots’ chatter picked back up, fading into the background bridge noise.
Weird, Colonel Zarrey mused. Admiral Gives was never wrong when it came to sensing trouble. It was like his sixth sense, but in this particular case, there was nothing. They might as well move on.
“Look at this,” he handed over a packet of papers, “Sagittarion’s gone into open rebellion. They’re claiming allegiance to the New Era Movement.” It was a spark that might ignite another uprising. “That’s fourteen billion.” Fourteen billion people that had just been permanently labeled as separatists. Fourteen billion people of the working class that could potentially become radical soldiers. “It might take years to quell the rebellion on the planetary surface.” Sagittarion was one of humanity’s most densely populated worlds. The declaration of rebellion made just a few hours ago could change everything. “Command’s little identity-crisis just got serious.”
“Implying that it was not serious when my brother was killed?” the Admiral countered.
“Erhm,” Zarrey coughed awkwardly. He’d forgotten about that, given the Admiral’s lack of reaction to the news. “Sorry, sir.”
The gruff officer’s apology was sincere, if unpracticed. It was amusing to see those two factors reconcile. “An apology was unnecessary, Colonel,” he said. “You are dismissed for the evening.”
“Yes, sir.” Zarrey didn’t bother following decorum to officially yield the bridge watch. He never did. The way he saw it, the Singularity was the Admiral’s ship. Zarrey’s watches were little more than a formality. “Behave,” he instructed the entire bridge crew, looking specifically at Galhino.
“Yes, Mom,” chimed the helmsman as Galhino purposefully avoided eye contact.
Zarrey huffed and rolled his eyes at Jazz before he left.
As usual, the Admiral said nothing to his crew’s utter lack of decorum. The senior officers weren’t sure if he ignored such things for their benefit, or if he just didn’t care. Truthfully, they hoped to never find out, for as comfortable as they had become under the Admiral’s command, any break from the habits they expected from him would be terrifying.
Admiral Gives could sense the momentary tension in the room. It was always there when one of the crew did or said something they thought might displease him. They were afraid he would lash out, given his reputation. Once, that might have bothered him: knowing that his name struck fear into the hearts of grown men. That had been a long time ago, but after nearly thirty years of ship command, it seemed like someone should have noticed that he never lashed out against his crew. They, unlike the rest of the worlds, had no reason to fear him.
He skimmed the packet Zarrey had handed him. Sagittarion’s open rebellion heralded the end of humanity’s decaying peace. The uprising was being kept under wraps for now, but that wouldn’t hold for long. Many of the Frontier worlds would be quick to follow in Sagittarion’s wake. There would be another rebellion, another war. He was disgusted by the thought, but he’d always known the strained peace he’d earned on the Frontier wouldn’t hold. It never did.
The government would be quick to blame him for the mess. They always were. The moment violence rose up on the poorer worlds, it became his fault because he hadn’t done a good enough job quelling the rebellion the first time around. But killing another few thousand frontiersmen would not solve anything. Admiral Gives knew that from experience.
He set the papers aside. The CAP had been out there long enough. The sensor anomaly was most likely space debris. Years ago, there had been quite a bit of it in this sector. He started to signal Lieutenant Robinson to call them back.
“Shit!” Fireball shouted unexpectedly, her voice suddenly loud over the communications link. “What the hell was that?”
“Captain!” The second pilot interrupted, confusion and panic wrestling in his tone, “Look out!”
The CAP and their enemy suddenly tumbled back into the Singularity’s radar range as Captain Hoth’s fighter narrowly avoided a direct hit. The missile, now tracked and identified on the radar, quickly left the fighter patrol behind in its mad dash for its primary target. “Singularity, you’ve got incoming!”
Admiral Gives didn’t waste another second, ordering, “Battle stations.” But he knew, seeing that missile cross half their radar range in just a few seconds, it would be too late. It had already accelerated to too high a speed. It may as well have been an artillery shell, unavoidable and unpreventable. It would be on them before they could fire to intercept. The alarm started to wail, the noise all too familiar to him, but it was too little, too late.
The missile was moving unnervingly fast. Where had it come from? “Brace for impact!” Galhino called over the ship-wide alerts.
An instant later, the missile crashed into the ship’s hull, exploding in a violent orange fireball. The crew grabbed on as the impact force jolted the ship, but the lights didn’t even flicker. The ship’s armor had taken the blast without even being punctured. It was far from a crippling blow, but it had never been intended to be. The missile fulfilled its task in the chaos alone. In the resulting confusion of the first attack, its companion had gained the necessary ground.
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Maria Galhino collected her wits as quickly as she could after the sudden impact, but it was too late. “There is a second missile!” She checked the readouts again. That isn’t possible. How had she not heard the radiological alarm in the chaos? “It’s a nuclear warhead!”
A weapon that could easily cripple the ship in one hit. It too, was moving at an unusually high velocity. Her warning meant nothing. There was nothing they could do. “Impact in three seconds!” Death was lashing out at them from the empty abyss, and it was moving way to fast.
There was absolutely nothing Admiral Gives could do. “Standby for damage control.” It was the only order he could give. There had never been a ship that survived a tactical nuclear strike. Even knowing that, he kept his tone as calm as it had ever been. There was a reason he’d been on this ship for the last twenty-seven years – a good one.
In the vacuum, the missile had already burned through all its fuel, which had made it that much harder to detect. Its approach speed was maximized, but as it neared dangerously close to the hull, one of the old warship’s guns shot it out of the sky. The last second interception, though impressive, couldn’t keep the armed warhead from going off.
The nuclear reaction painted space blinging white, leaving the Singularity’s shadow the only area sheltered from the blast. The incredibly bright light scattered the darkness, and as its flare faded, the massive dose of radiation and resultant explosion crashed full force into the aging ship. Tendrils of flame wrapped around the ship’s flank, greedily snatching at any hull weakness they could find. Flames lingered on the black armor, feeding off a hull puncture that was dispensing valuable oxygen as the forces of the depressurization steadily tore the breach wider.
In the surrounding space, the pilots of the Combat Air Patrol had thrown up their hands to shield their eyes from the nuclear reaction’s painful blast of white light. It left their fighters drifting. Two of the white planes bumped, scraping and damaging the angular crafts.
As soon as the light faded, Donut and Fireball began bickering over who would take responsibility for the minor collision and face the engineers’ wrath. With a flicker of frustration over the two pilots’ petty argument, Captain Hoth silenced their radio feeds. They didn’t seem to understand what had just happened.
The second missile to impact the Singularity had been nuclear. The bright color and sheer size of the blast told him that much. But that didn’t make any sense. Allied ships were the only ships permitted to carry nuclear warheads within humanity’s territory, and there wasn’t supposed to be another allied ship within three sectors. Even more perplexing, how had anyone known where they were? Admiral Gives had taken this patrol without logging it officially with Command.
Hoth wanted to believe it was bad luck. The Singularity had never been a lucky ship. It was by sheer strength she’d survived this long. But how unlucky could they get? He didn’t know, but as silence filled the radio waves, he was uncertain his comrades had lived long enough to find out. Just how much damage had the attack done to the unseen half of the ship? Was there even another half of ship left to see? Or had the radiation fatally bombarded the crew?
Unwilling to wait for a report, Captain Hoth took his Arcbird fighter down the Singularity’s scarred flank, circling around the ship’s stern. Not only were all four of the battleship’s engines still attached, but they all seemed functional. The blue flames on the ends were not even flickering. Still, he didn’t get his hopes up for a miracle. The warhead had impacted much further up the ship’s flank.
He pushed onward at a cautious pace, knowing his organs were slowly soaking up the radiation that now bathed the area. He had to inspect the damage. Small debris was scattered everywhere, chunks of metal and flakes of paint from the outer hull drifted about.
“Hell fires in heaven,” he cursed, seeing the point of impact clearly. The ship looked badly wounded, but the damage was not the crippled wreck, graveyard of bodies that he had prepared himself for.
The shadow of devastation was clear, as the blast had stripped away the black paint present on the hull. The arms of flame from the successive fire ball had burned more of the coloring away, revealing the ship’s true dark metal hull.
A messy gash lay in the center of the destruction, armor and hull material peeled back along the edges. It was a breach large enough to engulf more than the Arcbird fighter the Captain currently occupied. Stretching down multiple decks and across several compartments, the fissure appeared to be the only damage that had penetrated the ship’s metal hide. In the starless Kalahari Sector, there wasn’t enough light to see how deep the damage ran.
The nuclear strike’s shear power strained the Singularity’s structure dangerously. Metallic groans could be heard clearly in CIC, deep in the ship’s core. The trembling and creaking continued for a frightening amount of time, but eventually settled and quieted.
The alarms continued to wail in the background, several new ones adding to the racket, as the crew dared to peek up from their braced positions. Somehow, most of the ship systems appeared to be functioning normally, even after what should have been a crippling hit to the ship, and perhaps fatal to her crew. Lesser weapons had been killers to other ships.
Admiral Gives laid his hand on the thick rim of the radar console in front of him. Let the rest of the fleet think what they will, the Singularity may be old, but she was anything but weak. He had the steadiest ship in the fleet under his command.
Another smaller jolt ran up through the ship’s structure, shuddering the deck tiles of the command center. The Admiral rode it out, steadying himself easily with just one hand. He could pick the decompression alarm out of the background noise. The hull had been breached. He knew that without needing the shaken engineering officer to report it. “Evacuate and seal off Deck Eight, Compartments 20-24,” he ordered, looking at the hull integrity chart mounted on the wall.
A larger bump from below decks followed. “Strike that, Decks Eight and Nine, Compartments 20-26,” he corrected, seeing a few more of the indicator lights go from red to black. The breach was widening as the precious atmospheric mixture pushed forth into the airless vacuum. It enlarged as through an invisible claw was being dredged through the ship’s metal skin, creating a messy wound.
The engineering officer was brought out of panic by the Admiral’s perfect calm. “Venting atmosphere,” he confirmed, and let out a relieved sigh a moment later, his shoulders shrinking down into his orange jumpsuit as he felt the ship settle. “It has stabilized, sir.” The encroaching hull breach had been stopped before it tore apart vital systems or compromised an irreparable amount of the ship. With the air levels inside the sealed off area and outside the ship both at pure cold vacuum, the breach was now at rest.
The Admiral remained calm, his perfectly neutral expression still in place. A number of the bridge crew were disturbed to find him so calm in a situation where there were likely casualties on the crew, but they had also learned to expect it. Admiral Gives was known for his experience and skill, not for caring about others, and he was not in the mood for wasting time.
With his ship not at full capacity, they were weak. The longer they lingered here, the greater the chance of a second round of attacks. Against a nuclear-capable foe, they couldn’t take the risk. “Prepare to jump,” he commanded.
“That’s insane!” Galhino immediately protested. “We don’t even know if the super-structure is intact. Going to FTL will exponentially complicate the existing damage! It’s suicide!” The stresses of subspace were known to crush ships with just slight damage.
Ensign Alba was being fed reports from all corners of the vessel. He needed more time. “Sir, regulations dictate that we can’t commence a jump without assessing the damage.” He swallowed nervously, trying to remain logical, and polite, “We should at least wait until the damage report has been compiled.”
“Yes, Alba!” At least the kid had some common sense! “Tell him, the FTL drives are offline anyway.” Surely after a blow like that, they’d been taken offline. “Tell him,” Galhino insisted.
As much as Ensign Alba would have really liked to make that announcement, it wasn’t true, and the Admiral knew it. He always did.
Lieutenant Galhino’s eyes went wide. “No.” She could tell by the engineer’s silence that he was afraid. The Admiral was about to get them all killed, but Alba didn’t know how to protest. He was going to let it happen. She had to do something.
Admiral Gives saw Galhino rise up from her chair. “Sit. Down.” He gave the order without raising his voice in the slightest, but allowed some ice to creep into his neutral tone. There would be no mutiny on his ship.
Galhino’s knees locked up before she was on her feet. That tone was not to be tested. That was the icy demeanor that brought worlds to their knees. That frigid, flawless control was the tone that asked for entire nations’ surrender and received it unconditionally. That was the man the worlds had come to fear. She fell back into her chair, trembling. She’d just signed her own death warrant.
Nobody followed Galhino. The rest of the crew knew all too well that mutiny against the Admiral was helpless on this ship. None of them even considered it. They didn’t have a death wish.
“Begin jump prep,” the Admiral instructed, making it clear he had no intentions of repeating himself again.
“Yes, sir.” Ensign Alba noticeably cowered away. The order was final. If he refused to do it, the Admiral was well capable of doing it himself. The engineer’s hands shook as he began rerouting power to one of the FTL drives. This is insane.
“I am aware of the risks, Ensign,” the Admiral said, reading the engineering officer’s doubt. “But I will not wager the safety of this entire ship on the possibility that our attacker only has one nuke.” They could easily have ten. Another hit like that, and they would lose the ship. Trusting their survival to the ship’s structural strength was far more preferable. They could contain worsened damage. “Seal off and vent Compartments 17-29 on Decks Eight, Nine and Ten. Do the same for Compartments 27-31 on Deck Eleven.” If the surrounding compartments were already evacuated, then the breach would be aggravated as little as possible, even if it spread.
“Ensign Walters,” the navigations officer flinched at the sound of his name. “Find coordinates for the Aragonian Sector.”
“Sir,” Walters squeaked, “the radiation has knocked out navigations.” The array had lost its fix on their exact galactic position.
An invisible cloud of radiation now surrounded the ship. Communications, radar, sensors and navigation had all been affected, but Admiral Gives had already accounted for that. “Use the standardized charts to get coordinates and plug them directly into the FTL systems.” Not accounting for the most recent spatial drift wouldn’t kill them. The Aragonian Sector was almost completely empty, thus free of potential navigational hazards.
Galhino whimpered where she shook in her chair. “We’re all going to die.”
The Admiral ignored her. He’d deal with her insubordination later. Every second they wasted here, they were open to another attack. “Lieutenant Robinson,” he turned to the communications officer, “has the CAP landed?”
Keifer Robinson forced a small smile, hoping it might earn some forgiveness for Maria’s outbursts. “Aye, sir. They were lucky to be caught in the Singularity’s shadow at the time of the second missile’s detonation.” It had spared them high radiation exposure.
Luck. There wasn’t a damn lucky thing about any of this. Luck had forsaken this ship and crew a long time ago, but they had something better. They’d had someone in a position to intercept that warhead early, and there was no doubt in the Admiral’s mind that had saved them all. If the crew wanted to call that luck, then so be it. He did not intend to let it fall to luck again.
When he received the necessary system confirmations, Admiral Gives did not hesitate. “Execute jump on my mark.” CIC silenced for the countdown, “5…, 4…, 3…, 2…, 1…, jump.”
The Battleship Singularity vanished from the Kalahari Sector in a flash of multicolored light, seeming to deform as she tore her way into subspace.