Wilkerson Sector, Warhawk S-212
The broken metal bones of the honorable Battleship Gargantia no longer truly resembled a ship at all. Subspace had taken its toll, and there was no hope of repair, the hulk clawed and torn into an ugly jagged mess. Even still, an observation of the atmosphere and temperature aboard the Gargantia’s remains revealed the possibility of life.
The rescue team consisted of two ships, a pilot to each, then three Marines, two engineers and a medic divided between them. The Warhawks flew side by side as they examined the Gargantia’s gray corpse. Her landing bay had been crushed out of existence by an undeterminable force. One of the engines had been torn away – nowhere within sight – and another’s armor had been sheared off, exposing its ruined internal mechanics. Fuel and engine coolant drifted about in droplets, glittering as the reconships’ running lights flew by.
Only a few airlocks had been left intact, forcing the rescue team to dock at what was left of the Gargantia’s amidships. Given the deformations that plagued the ship, it took considerable effort to force the airlocks open.
Every member of the away team had donned an environmental suit, concealing them all in tasteless gray. The Marines were armed with rifles and sidearms while the engineers hefted plasma torches and the medic carried a field kit of medical supplies. The team was well equipped, even if none of them felt that way.
Stepping aboard dead ships always felt like walking on one’s grave. Given their situation, at odds with Command, to the Singularity’s crew, it felt like an unwilling look into an inevitable future.
Sighing, Chief Ty tried to banish those thoughts. Hopelessness and surrender were as dangerous as fear. “I suggest we head aft first. Base will want the main computer’s records, and the longer we wait, the more corrupted they’ll be.” He knew these Keeper-class ships, and in such sorry condition, the remaining power fluctuations of the emergency batteries would begin destabilize the computer’s memory banks.
“Lead the way,” Corporal Yankovich answered. He checked the safety on his rifle as they started to move, but knew they were unlikely to encounter any hostiles. Most of the crew was long dead, and any remaining survivors would likely welcome them with open arms, desperate to escape a slow death aboard the Gargantia’s wreck.
The crisp white lights of the boarding party’s electric torches raked along the corridor as they moved. Uneven, the floor was ridged and buckled while the ceiling – if such terms had real meaning without gravity – dipped at random intervals, the leftovers of major structural damage. The decks above and below had been folded up onto each other, and the eerily empty hallways were smeared with color, even as the rescue party tried to ignore the rusty hues and oily textures.
“Reminds me of the starboard bow,” Ezcurra said absently, eyeing the wasteland of material that entombed them. The cascade collapse in the Aragonian Sector had dealt similar damage to the Singularity, but this damage was deeper and more complete – a snapshot of what had almost been. Still, it was differences, not the similarities that struck him most vividly. The Singularity had been noisy, groaning with protest against further collapse, but the Gargantia was silent, dead.
The corridor was cold and uninviting. In the long hours it had taken the Singularity to arrive, the emergency batteries had run out, leaving the away team’s bright flashlights to cleave through perfect darkness.
It didn’t take long for the team to be met by an immovable wall of steel wreckage. Ty swung his flashlight down the other hallways that branched off from the junction. One simply pinched closed and another was lined twisted tears in the enclosing metal. Aiming his flashlight down one of the rifts, the beam didn’t reach the bottom. “Don’t fall in,” he advised, moving on to study the most intact wall. It wasn’t smooth, the metal rippled and torn to a degree that he knew the ship’s death throes must have been deafening.
“This is the new floor,” he said, seeing that the wall led onward without visible blockage. “We can follow this path and arrive above the central computer room.” Going the other way would have given them easier access, but this would work, they would just have to cut in from above.
“Good thing you know where we’re going. She’s so torn up I can’t make heads or tails of where we are,” Yankovch said, trying not to look too closely at the rifts. Deep down in there, there seemed to be something moving. Wires, probably, but it was still the only movement he’d so far seen aboard the wreck, and that made it unnerving enough.
“Used to serve on a Keeper-class,” the Chief grunted as he hopped up onto the wall to walk along it in the zero gravity.
“And then you cussed the Admiral out and got yourself assigned to the lovely Lady Sin,” the medic reminded.
“Yeah, something like that.” His journey to the Singularity had not been so straightforward, but it figured that was the part of the story everyone remembered.
Slowly, the corridor was becoming tighter and tighter, the opposite wall, the current ceiling as they were currently oriented, was dented inward. With his bulk, Ty had to crouch, but they could, just barely, squeeze down between the sheets and reach their desired position before the walls pinched together.
“Ezcurra,” he motioned to the other engineer as he readied his plasma torch, “help me cut in. The corridors still have some air, so depressurization shouldn’t be a concern.” The Gargantia had been so crushed by subspace that she was nearly airtight again. The atmosphere was slowly leaking out, but even without a suit, it would be survivable for a short time, which was good, considering that the signature of a possible survivor had been pinpointed to this compartment and they had no idea if that person was wearing an environmental suit.
Sparks flew when the plasma torch made contact with the metal, making it glow an angry, scorching red. Smoke curled off the contact, the hiss of the torch soon replaced by the whoosh of air as the pressure inside the compartment equalized with the outside. The two engineers cut out a rectangle large enough to get through and gave it a moment to cool, then Chief Ty kicked it downward with a grunt and aimed his flashlight into the stifling darkness below.
He’d been about to hop down when Yankovich’s hand latched onto his bicep. “I’ll go first. If this person is conscious, they’re probably scared out of their mind. We have no idea how they’ll react.” As a Marine, Yankovich could at least defend himself, if need be.
“Aye,” the Chief allowed, giving the Marine a hand as he disengaged his mag-boots and began to float. Ty lined him up with the hole, and with a nod, gave him a gentle downward push.
Yankovich sank easily toward the deck waiting below, his boots re-gripping the metal on contact while he bent his knees to absorb the slight impact. Without missing a beat, he swept the compartment. All the hatches were sealed, the bulkheads here mostly untouched by the distortion that plagued the rest of the ship.
But nothing moved. Nothing leapt at him from the darkness, even with the noise of his arrival. No cries of pain reached him. “Anyone out there?” he called, using his helmet speakers, “We’re here to help.”
There was no answer, and he thought he knew why. A dozen crew floated lazily through the air, heads bloody from impact, fingers blue from the cold. Some were officers, others yeomen and the orange of a technician’s jumpsuit caught the light. “Send down the anchor.” He’d seal the magnet to the floor, giving the team something to pull themselves down with in the zero gravity. “There’s a lot of corpses down here. We’re going to have to search for the survivor.” He or she likely wasn’t conscious.
“Start checking the bodies,” Ty ordered, “Ezcurra, see what the computer’s willing to give us.”
The Gargantia’s central computer was modern, far more so than the artefact the Singularity’s crew called by the same name. Towers of servers stretched from floor to ceiling, wired together. The central processor, bolted to the ceiling and stretching downward, had direct feeds from every single one of them.
Access terminals lined the edges of the room, some of the chairs filled with a body. Once, this would have been the brain of the ship, monitoring the Gargantia’s systems and boosting efficiency, while it scoured for patterns and weakness in combat. Now, it was little more than a graveyard.
Ezcurra did his best not to look at the bodies as he wired in a power module they’d brought from the Singularity. To look at them would be to see their faces, to humanize them, to know that people like him and his comrades had died here.
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…And to know that the same fate might soon await them.
“I’ve got her!” Lieutenant Roberts cried, checking the pulse of a woman floating in the corner. “She’s alive, but only barely.” The woman was wrapped in a foil emergency blanket, freezing. An emergency lantern drifted nearby, its batteries used up in the long hours after the Gargantia’s destruction. An emergency oxygen mask was on her blue face, so the temperature, not the air, had nearly killed her. Her faint exhales crystallized moisture onto the rubber mask.
Roberts opened her medkit to pull out some heating pads, and cracked them to mix the chemicals inside, then shoved them under the blanket to help warm the woman’s core. “She needs to be taken to one of the Warhawks immediately. She’s in danger of freezing to death.”
“Blosse, can you find your way back without Ty?” Yankovich asked the tallest of the Marines.
“Yes, sir.” She answered without hesitation. “Won’t be a problem.”
Yankovich trusted her word, though he was more than lost in the Gargantia’s ruins. Blosse always paid good attention to detail, critical in her line of work as a sniper. “Go now, we’ll get the computer records, then search for the other survivor.”
Blosse nodded and got moving back the way they’d come, leaving everyone else to check the remaining bodies. True to the scans, they were all dead. “How did she survive?” the youngest of the Marines, Cadet Santino, wondered.
“She was probably strapped in,” Ty answered. Most of the other bodies looked like they’d been killed by impacts, either during the combat or completing the subsequent FTL jump. Some had probably died later from those injuries, and the rest had simply frozen to death. “She got lucky,” if one could call it that. It was entirely possible that she would be the only survivor pulled from the Gargantia, traumatized by the fact she’d floated for hours in the dark with her dead comrades, slowly freezing to death. No, Ty imagined she wouldn’t feel lucky.
“The record transfer is complete,” Ezcurra announced, beginning to unplug his equipment. “Looks like there was some corruption in the data. We’ll have to see if Base can make heads or tails of it.”
“Then let’s get going,” Chief Ty said. “Base localized the other heat signature to what used to be the portside bow. It’ll take us awhile to get there.” While the Gargantia was just a fraction of the Singularity’s size, moving through the wreckage of the ship’s portside, which had been rendered beyond unrecognizable, would be difficult.
One after another, the team climbed out of the central computer room, grateful to leave the bodies behind. Fewer of them were seen in the corridors. Presumably, anyone caught in the corridors had been swept out during decompressions before the ship had been crushed in subspace and resealed.
Following Chief Ty, the team lumbered on, heaving themselves over the wreckage and cracks. No one was expecting the radio in their helmets to crackle. “Base to rescue team,” came the prompt.
The team looked to one another, easily recognizing Robinson’s voice. “It’s five minutes too early for normal check-in,” Yankovich said.
Trying not to read too much into it, Ty answered, “This is Ty, Base. We copy.”
“You have new orders. Continue rescue operations as planned, but maintain radio silence. You are not to transmit on the long-range band. Local signals are an allowable risk, but only in emergency circumstances. Barring an emergency, your ships are to remain powered down. The pilots have already been notified. Avoid drawing unnecessary attention. You will be contacted when you are cleared to disembark from the Gargantia.”
What? Concern mounted, “Base, what’s going on?”
“That is all, Chief. Base out.”
Ty fumbled with the controls on the side of his helmet to switch to the local band, desperate to reach the Warhawk pilots for an explanation, but Yankovich grabbed his arm and pulled it away. “You heard her. Radio silence.” The words were tinny, transmitted through Yankovich’s mic, through the ship’s thin air and into the speakers of Ty’s helmet.
“They’re in trouble, Yankovich.” There wasn’t any other reason such orders would have been given. Ty’s chest felt heavy, as if his heart was pumping lead. “I should be there. I’m the damn engineering chief.”
“They’ve got a whole team of competent engineers, not to mention the Admiral.” And he knew more about the ship’s mechanics than any of the engineers. “We ought to worry more about ourselves. Base gave those orders to protect us.” If the enemy had arrived, then a single salvo from any one of their ships would probably tear the Gargantia’s wreck to pieces, and them with it. “Let’s do our job and get out of here.”
Yankovich’s logic didn’t ease Ty’s guilt as he turned to led them onward. He was the Singularity’s engineering chief, and if she was going into combat, he should be there. His predecessor would never have stood to be absent and ships often didn’t get far without their chief engineers. No matter how competent the rest of the engineers were, combat was chaos. Leadership was important. He should be there to direct the most necessary repairs. As knowledgeable as the Admiral was, the man had a ruthless streak in him. He would push the ship to her limits, and past them if the chief engineer wasn’t there to stop him.
But still, trapped here, there was nothing he could do. He could only keep moving to find that second survivor. It paid not to linger and stare too long at the stains on the walls, anyway.
Minutes of detours and climbing over fallen supports, and the team was nearing the portside bow. Many of the compartments off this corridor had been sealed, with vacuum on the other side. There should have been several more hallways and corridors before the hull, but it seemed the battle had gouged them away, and then subspace had torn off the remains.
Given that it was vacuum, the survivor was probably wearing an environmental suit, so Roberts pulled out her rescue scanner. Each suit had an activatable beacon, used to help find survivors of decompressions when they were swept into the void. “I’ve got something,” she said, “it’s weak.”
“Yeah, well those suits are only designed for a few hours of air.” A survivor would suffocate after that, so the beacon’s batteries only lasted about that long. As the batteries died, the signal would weaken. Truthfully, Ty knew it was unlikely that anyone in an environmental suit was still alive.
“Here,” Roberts said, ignoring the probabilities as she used the rescue scanner to direct them towards one of the sealed hatches. Its frame, like the rest on this corridor, was mostly intact, but slightly misaligned.
Ty signaled the team to turn back on their radios, knowing there would soon be no air to carry sound, and the Marines sealed the nearest cutoffs, making a makeshift airlock. Grunting with effort, Ty forced the hatch open. In a strong gust, the air from this segment of corridor whooshed out. Only the team’s magnetic boots kept them anchored to the deck.
“Beezlenac,” one of the Marines cursed as he stepped through the hatch frame. Only the sparkling star scape yawned out before then, blurred by the haze of the nebula’s outer reaches.
“This breach must have occurred on reentry to normal space,” Ty observed, knowing the evils of subspace would have made survival impossible, even with a suit.
“Over here,” Roberts called, following her rescue scanner to a twisted mass of wreckage.
The rest of the team quickly followed to scour the pile with their electric torches. “I got him,” Yankovich said, spying the cracked face of a suit helmet deep underneath the wreckage. “Looks like the support came down on top of him.” The survivor had been trapped here.
“Ezcurra, grab your torch. Let’s get to work.” By the look of the pile, cutting the survivor out could take time. The engineers ignited their plasma torches, the light dimming their photo-reactive faceplates.
“Uh, guys,” Santino said, shifting uncomfortably.
“What?” Yankovich answered the young Marine without looking up from his work providing extra light for the engineers.
“I can see Base from here.” It was a habit to look for the ship whenever he could. Something about it was usually reassuring. But right now, it only made him feel sick. “And I know what’s wrong.”
Santino was a wide-eyed Cadet, awed by everything, but the trembles voice made the entire team stop cold. They turned toward the starry haze, barely able distinguish the Singularity’s dark shape. There was just one problem: she wasn’t alone. A handful of shapes lay around her – ships that were far too large to be the civilian fleet.
Yankovich whipped out his magnifiers with his spare hand and pressed them to the face plate of his helmet. That made it all too easy to identify what he’d already assumed. Command had found them. “Damn it all,” he counted up the battleships. Nine. “Six Keeper-class, and three Mylar-class.” The Singularity was vastly out-numbered, out-gunned and looked to have been flatly out-maneuvered. “She’s belly-up.” The Singularity’s main battery had no firing solution on Command’s fleet, and without that, stood no chance – not that nine to one odds had ever been favorable. “What the hell is he doing?”
“Surrendering?” suggested Ezcurra.
“No, he wouldn’t do that.” Santino said, before realizing how unsure he was. “Right?”
Yankovich stared out at the gathering battle. “Honestly, the way he’s been recently, I don’t know.” The Admiral had been anything but predictable in the last few months.
Without further comment, the engineers went back to work at a furious pace, cutting off and pushing away pieces of wreckage until they exposed the man in the suit underneath.
“Oh stars,” the medic breathed once she had line of sight on the body. He was worse than trapped beneath the wreckage. Rather, he was part of it. “He’s been impaled.” It was a horrific deformity, the injury primitive, but severe.
The structural support had splintered as it collapsed, a tribute to the Gargantia’s low-cost, brittle build materials, and it had skewered the crewman’s torso below his ribs. The point of the metal poked well out of his back, smeared with frozen blood.
“Is he still alive?” Yankovich hated himself for it, but he knew the question had to be asked.
Roberts pulled herself as close to the body as she could get, straining to see any signs of life. “Yes, I believe so.” Barely, just barely she could see his mouth struggling to breathe beneath his cracked faceplate. Observing the wound, it seemed the rubbery material of his suit, while punctured, had formed a new seal around the metal spike. “We can’t pull him off. We have to cut the impalement free. If we remove it here, he’ll die.” The vacuum would suck his guts from his chest. “And the less we move him the better. We can’t risk carrying him back to the airlock.”
The Chief nodded, “Yankovich, call our Warhawks over. Tell ‘em to run without lights, and active signals. Thrusters only.” That was the best they could do to not draw attention to themselves.
Turning back to the pile of wreckage, he studied it for a long moment, “Ezcurra, we’ll cut here and here,” he pointed. “That should leave the support mostly intact as it is.” The last thing they needed was the leftover tension in the metal to snap the jaws of wreckage closed around them.
The plasma torches glowed a bright blue as they liquified any metal they touched. Cutting carefully around the trapped crewman, Chief Ty couldn’t help but send worried glances up to the looming space battle. Nine to one. Odds like that, there was a very real possibility that they’d never make it home.