18 hours later, Hyperspace, Battleship Singularity
It was the dead of night. Even for sailors with no terrestrial sun, there was such a thing. At least, the day shift crew tended to think so. The rest of the crew also quieted down during the late hours of ship time, so it seemed universal. Of course, the ship was fully staffed during all hours, presently now by the so-called graveyard shift, but this watch tended to be quieter than the rest. The most experienced officers – those that made up the day shift including Galhino, Robinson and Gaffigan – would be summoned if trouble arose, but the ship was always scheduled to cross dangerous territory during the so-called ‘day’ hours.
Some people liked the quiet of the night shift, but Zarrey didn’t favor it. He tried to work his hours during the noisier parts of the day. However, the graveyard shift was good for one thing: during some fraction of it, Admiral Gives usually slept. It was the only time that Zarrey’s small committee could meet without fear of being caught. And Zarrey, despite his own insistence that what they were doing wasn’t wrong, would really like to avoid getting caught.
“Alright,” he yawned, “let’s get going. I’d like to go back to bed.” This was the third night his inquiry committee had met at this time, and he admitted, with nothing to show for it, it was becoming tedious. Tonight, the constant FTL maneuvers the ship was undertaking as they traveled toward the Mississippi Sector were magnifying the misery.
Gahino looked tired and cranky. She’d forgone her uniform and draped a fluffy lavender robe over thin satin pajamas which looked severely out of place among the masculine decorations of Zarrey’s quarters. By the lopsided state of her hair, she’d been roused from a deep slumber. Malweh didn’t look much better off in a set of gray workout clothes that hung baggily off her round figure. Of the four of them, only Alba was in regular dress, and somehow, the kid looked fresh as a daisy. It must be the glory of his youth, Zarrey decided, lounging in his own sleeping clothes.
“I’m still digging through the computer’s files, Colonel.” Maria Galhino crossed her arms. “It’s going faster now that the computer’s up and running, but it’s hard to check for anomalies when I don’t know what I’m looking for.” Ever since they had decided to look into the Admiral’s secretive habits, she had been working with the ship’s central computer. It had the largest database of any on the ship.
Galhino had already warned him in the form of a complaint that her work with the computer was eating significant amounts of time without much success. Still, the mention of the central computer reminded him of the day’s earlier drama. “Why was the computer brought back on line early? Did anyone figure that out?”
“Definitely not for the lame excuse he gave you on the bridge,” Galhino huffed. “He lied straight to your face. I was studying the location data for the Mississippi Sector, and no one else has accessed it since the meeting. The only information I could coax out of the computer’s access records was that a slew of files were duplicated to an external drive. There’s no way to know exactly which files without the authorization codes of the one that did it.”
Malweh eyed Galhino with thinly veiled annoyance. She wasn’t fond of the sensor officer. Sure, Galhino was talented, and loyal enough, but she was too confident to listen to anyone else or admit she was ever wrong. “They were educational files. Taken from the encyclopedic memory servers.” She watched Galhino’s eyes narrow, as if challenging her to prove it. “We couldn’t access the encyclopedic memory of the computer without bringing it fully online. That’s why repair priorities got shifted. He pulled that data to give to Amelia.”
“And how, exactly, do you know that?” Galhino said, glaring at Malweh. Their contempt for each other went both ways. She found Malweh loudmouthed and obnoxious.
“Sarika Feather is the one that pulled the files. She told me.” Malweh glared back evenly. “Maybe if you listened to what anyone around you said, you’d know that.”
Zarrey cleared his throat, well aware that the late hour heightened both ladies’ usual temperament. “Well, that’s a fine enough cause. Why would the Admiral feel the need to hide that from us?”
“Reordering those repairs has weakened the entire ship’s condition. We’re weak to attack like this, not to mention the stresses of traveling at FTL are going to be magnified. He was probably ashamed to jeopardize the entire ship for the sake of his family, and he damn well should be ashamed,” Galhino said, shoving her hands into her pockets.
“Doubt it,” Malweh retorted. “Colonel, you should have seen him during the rounds. It was almost like he didn’t know he had altered the repair priorities. It was really odd. I’ve never seen him act like that.” Usually, the Admiral’s awareness of everything aboard ship was flawless.
Alba set the snow globe he’d been observing back onto Zarrey’s cluttered desk. “Maybe he forgot? The order came in pretty late.” Alba hadn’t caught wind of it until the morning, and he spent most of his off-duty hours in the engineering spaces. “I mean, he’s getting older…”
Zarrey laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Fucking hell, Alba, how old do you think he is?”
The young engineer turned red. “I don’t know. He had to be close to retirement, right?” Admiral Gives had been in command for a long time, longer than Alba had been born, actually. “And then, you weren’t too far behind him.” Zarrey had also been on the ship for over a decade.
Zarrey suddenly stopped laughing. “Wait, how old do you think I am?”
Alba shifted uncomfortably. “Fifty?” he guessed shyly.
Galhino rolled her brown eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alba, he’s not that old! Do you even pay attention?”
“Hey!” Alba argued. “Age in space gets fuzzy!” He’d grown up on ships, and it was safer not to guess anyone’s age. It was almost never right. “Usually, people retire when their hair goes gray!” They went planet-side to a peaceful cottage if they could afford it. Those who couldn’t found a cheap, low-grav spa installation and bought a suite.
“Kid’s got a point,” Zarrey admitted. Age in space was complicated. “I’m not sure I even know how old I am.” He knew what his papers said, sure, but hugging lightspeed instilled a time dilation. People planet-side aged faster than those who sailed between worlds.
“Well, if any of you had bothered to read the file you were provided when you transferred to the ship, you’d know the birthdates of every officer on board, including the Admiral.” By their blank looks, it was immediately apparent to Galhino that she had been the only one to study her orientation packet. She sighed. What else could she have expected from a crew of delinquents?
She stalked over to Zarrey’s desk. The drawers were disorganized, and it was clear that he didn’t contribute much to paperwork, so she dug straight to the bottom of the biggest drawer, and pulled out a folder that he’d clearly shoved in there and forgotten about. “The fleet is required to disclose your commanding officer’s public record when you transfer under them.” It was supposed to help new crew learn the assignment’s authority structure. “This,” she pulled a paper out of the packet, “is Admiral Gives’ public record. It has his birth date, as do all of your records.” That was easy information to find. “Says here he was born last century. Ariean Solar Year 4191.”
“Last century?” Zarrey coughed. “That does make him old.”
Galhino glared at him for a long second. “Legally, that makes him fifty-eight.” Most of the central worlds had life expectancies around a hundred years, and with treatment, one could stay fit for most of that time. “But you’re forgetting that he was first stationed aboard this ship in 4210. He’s been light-hugging far longer than any of us. His biological age is going to be lower than that.” With the ship’s navigational records and a good deal of math, it was possible to calculate an exact age, but not usually worth the effort. “If he spent even a third of that time on patrol anywhere near lightspeed, he could be ten years younger than his biological age.” Time dilation was a complicated thing. There was a reason local shipboard assignments were favored by most sailors. The dilation was less noticeable. But, that wasn’t the issue at hand and she knew these people didn’t care about the physics of it. “What I’m telling you is that he’s not old enough to blame memory problems.”
“Yeeeah,” Malweh said slowly, “I don’t think any of us actually took that suggestion seriously.” In almost every interaction she’d had with him, Admiral Gives was smart as a whip and never missed a thing. The rounds this morning had been a strange exception
Zarrey wrapped a hand around the armrest of his leather recliner. “I’ll just operate on the theory that he didn’t want us to know what he did for Amelia. It doesn’t really fit with his usual lack of emotion, but hey,” he shrugged, “Amelia and Harrison are the last two surviving members of his family.” Zarrey wouldn’t fault him for being more than uncaring. “I’m not sure that’s the point I want to hound him for. What else do we have? Any more malfunctions aboard ship?”
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“Malfunctions?” Alba shook his head. “None.”
“However,” Malweh put in, “there was an incident. Havermeyer refused to train Cortana because she got zapped by the power grid.”
“Yeah, that was weird.” Zarrey agreed, “But, also, I can’t really blame the Old Lady for it. Sergeant Cortana isn’t the friendliest presence.”
Everyone laughed. Everyone except Galhino. “You all do realize that isn’t normal, right?” That was exactly the kind of incident they should be looking into. “It should be impossible to be zapped by a disconnected piece of the grid.”
“Galhino, I know you don’t work maintenance outside of sensor array tuning and alignment, but believe me, that’s when you really get to know where you stand aboard this ship. The Admiral’s a neutral. He treats everybody the same. But the ship,” Zarrey leaned back and grabbed the mug off the side table. “Oh-ho, she’s got her favorites, and I am not lucky enough to be one of them.” The whole crew knew that. Anytime he got assigned to maintenance, it was essentially a punishment. “Can’t blame her there either. I’m a lot better at finding and breaking things than I am at fixing them.” He was a former Marine, after all.
Galhino crossed her arms and threw her leg across her other knee, entirely unamused. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work.” There should be no apparent favorites, no so-called character and no malfunctions.
“Yeah, yeah,” Malweh said, brushing it off. That was one oddity they had learned to tolerate. “We know you don’t actually like this job, Galhino. The only reason you’re on this ship is to complain and suck face with the comms. officer.”
Galhino opened her mouth, but it just hung there. She blinked in surprise, unexpecting to hear her illicit romance referred to so casually. It took her a long moment, but eventually her defensiveness returned. “I am not sucking face with Lieutenant Robinson.”
“Cool it, both of you,” Zarrey ordered, disappointed that the water in his mug didn’t taste more like coffee. It was bitter, but didn’t carry the caffeine that sustained him. “Galhino isn’t on trial here,” even if most of the crew did know about her little affair with Robinson, none of them actually cared. With a crew of over eight hundred, theirs wasn’t the only illicit romance on the ship.
Still, with a sigh, Zarrey continued. “Unfortunately, Galhino, your work with the computer is probably our best bet. I doubt we’ll ever catch the Admiral in the act of doing something suspicious. He’s too careful, but he can’t falsify records perfectly. As we saw when Monty got grabbed in the Homebound Sector, not even the Eran AI can do that. There’s going to be something off. Be it visual cues the computer can’t pick up, or even just a pattern of edited or deleted data.”
“Fine,” Galhino said. That was logical, but, “Where do you suppose I start?”
“Well, when did we start having problems?” Zarrey asked, then remembered who he was talking to. Galhino had the lowest possible opinion of the Admiral, and believed that he had always been lying to them. “Start in a time frame when we all thought he was acting strangely,” he clarified.
“That could be anytime in the last year,” Galhino replied. “He hasn’t been normal since the Ariea sank.”
“With good reason,” Zarrey reminded. “I imagine that’s about when Command started targeting us.” Looking back, seeing the Ariea go down months ago at Persephone Station had been a marker of the times changing. Not long after that, the Admiral had begun randomizing their patrols and time frames. “Things really went wild after the Kalahari Sector. Maybe start there?”
Galhino shook her head. “That’s not a good starting point. With all the damage, the ship’s records will be partial at best, and erroneous at worst.” In a situation like that, crew reports supplemented the operational data, but reports were easy to alter. To find anything genuine, she needed to study the ship’s operational data without crew edits or influence.
“What about Sagittarion?” Alba suggested from where he was studying the row of trinkets on Zarrey’s desk. Many were snow globes or little bobbleheads of celebrities. He reached out to one of them, poking its overgrown head. “We didn’t take much damage there, and he was weird about it before we even got there. Then, we had that weird malfunction in orbit and afterward, he kicked us all off the bridge.”
“Damn, how could I have forgotten about that?” Zarrey chastised himself.
“To be fair,” Malweh said, uncaring, “We go through a lot of shit on a weekly basis.” Since Sagittarion, they’d seen Squadron 26 explode with no survivors, found the Gargantia’s lost fleet and fought a brutal battle against the nine ships in the Wilkerson Sector. By those standards, Sagittarion was forever-ago.
Right. Zarrey tried not over think it, but despite how strangely normal the events felt in memory, that was the logical starting place. “Start there, Galhino. See if you can figure out what the hell went down at Sagittarion, and let me know what you find.”
Galhino nodded solemnly. Alba looked between her and Zarrey. “Is there anything you want me to do?”
Zarrey thought on it, absently sipping his mug, a habit, since it was generally filled with coffee that stimulated his brain. “The malfunction that moved us in orbit,” the one that Jazmine had sworn felt like a purposeful maneuver, “what did they determine the cause to be?”
“Jazz later identified damage under the helm console,” Alba said, “He deemed it likely that was the cause. Given the circumstances, he was not able to test that theory.” The ship’s precarious situation had necessitated immediate repairs.
“Did he document the damage?”
“Yes, sir.” In place of testing and confirming that damage was the cause and writing up a full incident report, Jazmine had only been able to take a few photographs for later review if anyone ever found the time.
“I’d like you and Malweh to take a look at that,” Zarrey decided. “Jazz is a hell of a pilot, but he’s no technician. Maybe you’ll see something he didn’t.”
Alba nodded hollowly, and Malweh acknowledged with a simple shrug. Alba didn’t like going behind the Admiral’s back, but he considered this a matter of responsibility. Malweh didn’t really care about any potential outcome, but she didn’t mind disregarding the Admiral’s authority. Out of the three members on his nighttime council, only Galhino acted with any apparent enthusiasm. This task was well suited to her. She was a fine officer, one of the brightest Zarrey had ever met, even if she maintained an attitude that was for the lack of a better term: bitchy. For some reason, she always seemed to have it out for the Admiral. Nobody really knew why. Zarrey had asked the Admiral about it once, but the man himself had claimed not to understand Galhino’s reasoning.
Zarrey, after his years people watching on stations and maintaining peace-bound Marines for security detail, thought the cause was probably Galhino’s relationship with Robinson. Robinson, who had come to this post a deeply traumatized survivor of Charleston Reeter’s systemic abuse aboard the former Flagship Ariea, had a deep-seeded fear of being alone with male officers – especially those ranking above her.
Zarrey had been briefed on that, and likely, Galhino had learned the same from Robinson herself. Galhino probably scrutinized the Admiral’s every move as a means of protecting Robinson. Zarrey could understand that, but why she did it with such vehemence? That, he didn’t have a clue. At a guess, that was a result of whatever history had brought her onto the Singularity in the first place. But that was something of a mystery, as Galhino, to Zarrey’s knowledge, might be the only crewman who had no marks on her record. There was nothing – no incident needing to be punished, no request she had made to land her here. It was odd, but Zarrey had never felt it important enough to justify an inquiry.
“Now,” he told his small council, “this isn’t about proving the Admiral has done something wrong. It’s not about turning against him.” He meant that specifically for Galhino. “This is not a mutiny. We are curious and concerned,” he stressed. “While I believe the Admiral is hiding something, I firmly do not think that he would ever act without our best interests in mind.” The man was often… difficult, but he had proven where his loyalties were.
“If you believe that, then what’s the point of digging into this?” Galhino asked. “Shouldn’t you just blindly trust him?” Though it was clear that Zarrey didn’t?
“It’s not about whatever he’s hiding. It’s not even about why. It’s about what happens to us if something happens to him.” Zarrey could never call himself a tactician. Sure, he could manage troop movements and drills, but he knew nothing about war strategy, and he knew nothing about sailing a renegade ship through hostile space. “But, whatever he’s hiding, it’s big. Big enough that Reeter and that damned AI want his head.”
“He knows government secrets, not to mention the true face of the New Era Movement. That’s enough justification to want him dead,” Malweh said. This wasn’t the first time someone had gone after the Admiral for simply knowing too much. Hell, they had three such former assassins on the crew. “And let’s not discount how his personality factors into it.” Admiral Gives had been nothing but infuriating, especially to his superiors in the military and government structure.
“No, this is different.” Zarrey could feel that much, even without the justification to prove it. “If the New Era’s coup had wanted him dead, they’d have nuked us to high oblivion the minute we came out of the Brontosaur Nebula, but they didn’t. They laid a trap.” That meant there was something, somewhere on this ship, that they had a vested interest in keeping intact. “It was something he said to me when the charges for his court martial first came down: Command wanted to subject him to a polygraph test, and somehow, that was going to let their AI get to him.” Zarrey didn’t really understand it, but he supposed he didn’t need to. “So, when I say they want his head, I mean it. They want his actual, preferably living, head.”
Galhino tugged her fluffy robe tighter, as if a cold wind had slid over her shoulders. “So, if something were to happen to him, we lose whatever they’re after, and then we get nuked to ashes.” There was no question that Command had enough firepower to sink them.
“Right. And while I don’t know if our investigation is going to get us any closer, it’s worth it to try. I don’t know if the malfunctions are involved. They might be. They might not be. Either way, we need to have some idea what’s going on. I’m sure the Admiral thinks we’re better off not knowing, especially given Command’s interest, and obviously, he’s not going to make it easy, but anything he knows, this ship also knows. We just need to know where to look.” The Singularity had been a partner for the Admiral so long that Zarrey believed every one of the man’s secrets was probably buried in the records somewhere. That was to the crew’s advantage. “I just want to make sure we know what we need to know in order to keep ourselves alive. Beyond that, I don’t give a damn.”