Mississippi Sector, Battleship Singularity
Admiral Gives barely gave the stars a moment of consideration. Training dictated he move out and reseal the airlock, since it was a vulnerability as long as it was open. So, he grabbed the magnetic anchor from his belt, twisted the ring on its base to activate it and felt it whir as the electromagnets within used electricity to build their charge. Then, keeping his feet planted on the edge of the airlock, he reached out and stuck it to the hull, tugging on the cable to make sure it was secure.
Only then did he pull up his heels and disconnect the mag-boots. Then, with a hand on the cable, he kicked gently off into the void. He drifted for a moment, moving further and further from the ship’s flank even as he stayed alongside her course. Drag did not act in space, and the ship was under no acceleration, so it was possible to fly alongside, even if only for a moment.
Soon enough, the slack he’d allotted the cable ran taut and it jerked his drift to a stop. Then, with a tug, he pulled himself back towards the ship and landed feet-first on the hull, feeling the mag-boots reactivate as he bent his knees to absorb the force.
‘You know that’s not how you’re supposed to do that,’ the ghost told him. The magnetic anchor was supposed to serve as a safety, lest someone lose contact with the ship while making the awkward climb from the airlock’s orientation to that of the hull.
He reached down and grabbed the magnetic anchor, clipping it back onto his belt so it didn’t drift away. ‘Is that your way of telling me that you aren’t going to come get me if I drift off?’ Most experienced sailors preferred to jump and tug themselves back with the anchor, safety regulations be damned. Clambering from the airlock to the hull using mag-boots quickly got annoying.
‘I didn’t say that,’ she said. ‘I was simply under the impression you were trying to avoid Pflum’s lectures.’ Drifting off would earn him a lecture of yet unheard length from the ship’s security officer.
That was a good point, he supposed, leaning down and pulling up the shield that covered the airlock controls from impacts. He took a minute to crank it closed and secure everything, and then, finally, turned his attention to the stars.
Here, in deep space, without the haze of atmosphere, they were inconceivably bright. Scattered across the sky, they glinted: some big, some small, some so faint he could barely spot them in the endless night. They ranged in color, most white but some blue or yellow-tinted. A rare one even presented as orange. The dark planets of the Mississippi Sector covered discs of them with strange blackness, as if holes had been punched in the starscape. It was beautiful, but that wasn’t why he’d come out here. Any of the ship’s telescopes could show the stars in better detail from the bridge, so he turned his attention to the real reason he had come out here: the ship herself.
The ship’s height stretched out below him, but he could only see half of it, as the ship was widest at the halfway mark. Even still, the ship’s armored hull stretched out at an angle, forming an artificial plateau. The armor was dark, coated in a scuffed coat of black paint. Red stripes highlighted the edges of the Singularity’s shape, revealing subtle curves while she looked hard and angular from a distance. Looking down the ship’s length, the view varied. Forward, the ship’s heavily armored bow dominated the view, towering above and angling outward. Looking aft, the boxy shape of one of the four main engines greeted him. It wasn’t as tall as the bow, allowing the bow’s angled armor to shield it from incoming fire, but it was still utterly massive in its own right. And here, amidships, the engine and the bow remained a great distance away.
Down the ship’s flank, forward of where he stood, he could make out white lines that stretched far taller than he could reach. From here, they looked like nothing, perhaps only abstract streaks, but from a distance, they formed the lettering of the ship’s identification. ‘SINGULARITY’ it read. Admiral Gives had seen it a thousand times. The lettering was mirrored across the ship’s center and painted again so that it could be read from either orientation. The same was done on the port flank. Looking at the ship, the lettering was proportional, but standing on the hull, it was so massive that only one letter could be looked upon and identified at a time.
Ultimately, it hardly mattered if the ship’s name was stenciled across the hull. There were better ways of identifying ships – radar ID, engine signature, not to mention size and silhouette. Even the colors on the hull were more useful for identifying ships, since the image did not need to be stabilized like it had to be to read lettering. Still, detailing a ship’s name onto the hull was a human tradition. They had been doing so since the naval conflicts of old. For sailors, it was a matter of pride.
The Admiral regarded what he could see of the lettering, but decided it had been well-maintained. Thus, he turned and continued up the ship’s flank. Well, ‘up’ was a relative term. If one considered the orientation of the artificial gravity field, he was going down, but the artificial gravity did not reach beyond the secondary hull. Thus, it suited him to consider this direction ‘up.’ Without the pull of gravity, the orientation of the hull was irrelevant. He moved at an angle, relative to the ship’s great size, but it may as well have been flat terrain. It did not strain him any more than heading in the other direction would have.
The sound of his breathing filled his suit helmet, an easy rhythm heard above the whir and clank of his mag-boots every time he stepped. Truly, he preferred the background noise of the ship’s engines, but the void did not perpetuate that sound. Still, anything was better than silence.
Cresting over the ship’s flank, an artificial plain stretched out before him, large enough to serve as a false horizon, and he paused there for a moment, drinking in the view. Out here, with nothing but the distant stars around, the ship became a world unto herself. Though not a planet, she was the only thing around for hundreds upon hundreds of miles – all he had to ground himself by, and that had never bothered him. No matter how the vastness of the void stretched out before him, no matter how deep the emptiness that ran between the stars, no vertigo found him as he looked into that darkness. Despite knowing he could fall into that nothingness, never to touch anything again, he was comfortable here, far more so than he would have been bound to the earth of a planet by the oppression of gravity.
He didn’t miss being planet-side. Many sailors did. Even the most steadfast members of the crew often longed for the sensation of the wind blowing their hair, or the warmth of a terrestrial sun, but Admiral Gives had never been among them. He’d grown up on Ariea, but he held no fond memories of it. Some of his earliest memories came with the immense desire to leave that place and never ever look back. He had visited other worlds. They had put him more at ease, but still reminded him too much of his past. Then, of course, New Terra had shown him how fragile planets truly were. Essentially stationary targets, a few well-placed nukes could render almost any planet totally uninhabitable. Even the Singularity’s main battery, armed with the solid tungsten ATM shells, could trigger an extinction level event.
In all, the Singularity had been a far better home to him than any planet, and he owed the ship for that. People had scorned his preference, called him mad for preferring a machine over their precious planets. From his perspective, however, they were the strange ones. Why should he prefer a ball of rock that hung helplessly in the void over a ship that had been designed to travel that void? Planets were made habitable by cosmic accidents, but this ship had been built to sustain the lives of her crew. He understood this machine in ways that he could never understand a terran world.
Planetary life had always been foreign to him, perhaps because he had never been welcomed within it. He had never known a carefree life on any planet, regardless of if it had plentiful air or bountiful daylight. His life aboard ship had not been carefree either, but a promise had come with it: this ship would always be there for him. She’d answer his call as long as she was able, and if he did his job, she would always be able.
In that, the stars and planets that orbited them did not beckon him. The Singularity was all he needed. And where he stood atop the ship’s back, she wasn’t only massive, she was magnificent – an impossible being of fire and steel.
The true scale of her size was hard to fathom until rare moments like this. Even the smallest details on the hull were several times his size. The cover of the nearby missile launch tube was as big in diameter as he was tall, just one of the half-dozen that ran along this edge of the gun deck toward the bow. More lined the edge going aft, placed on the angled parts of the hull that were too small for defensive turrets.
He began to move again, heading toward the center of the gun deck’s artificial plain. The shadow of one of the defensive turrets loomed over him. He admired it in passing but stayed well clear of its sweep radius. Outside of combat, those two-barreled turrets were usually kept stowed. Each one of the 150 mounted all over the ship could be retracted below the outer hull’s armor, protecting it from wayward impacts and the stresses of subspace while allowing the crew to do maintenance without a spacewalk.
With battle preparations currently ongoing, the turrets would be raised in groups and their transversal range would be checked with targeting drills. That was the usual shakedown the weapon crews ran before a combat operation. So as the turret began to turn, the Admiral picked up his pace and continued toward the biggest protrusion on the gun deck. It was so large and dark that it was easy to ignore from the edge, as if those parts of the starscape were simply empty. Still, as he approached, that disturbance on the otherwise flat deck quickly became a mountain, and a range of similar shapes ran forward and aft. The lights that illuminated the rest of the hull barely splashed up the main battery gun’s side.
Forming a wall, the gun’s slanted armor rose above him to the height of a two-story building. It dwarfed him, easily ten times the size of the turret he’d passed by earlier, even in its current, lowered position. The main battery guns were simply too large to retract below the armor, but the hull was contoured to allow them to be lowered. That, combined with the shielding of the bow, protected them when they weren’t in use. Outside of that, the guns were armored to high hell, and were quite simply too large to be affected by much outside a direct impact from a missile or opposing artillery.
A sense of reverence always greeted him when looked upon any of the main battery guns. If the hull armor served as the ship’s shield, then these guns served as her sword. They were fascinating, deadly, and yet so very grand, a reminder to respect his position. These weapons were under his command, and any damage they did, any blood they spilled, was on his hands. That was always a worthwhile reminder to give himself before he led the ship on an offensive mission.
It had never been his objective to command a battleship, let alone the ship that had once been the fleet flagship. He would have been proud to sail any ship that kept him away from Ariea, and the Singularity had been the only one to offer him the chance. For that, he would have loved her, even if she’d been a scrappy cargo transport. Her nature as a battleship had never really mattered to him, save the fact that it gave her the means to defend herself and her crew. In that sense, he owed a debt of gratitude to these guns.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
Reaching out, he placed a gloved hand on the gun’s abraded surface. Despite their history, their very nature as offensive weapons, the main battery was no less worthy of his attention than the engines. After all, they too were part of the ship’s greater whole. I promise I will not abuse your strength. He knew what carnage the main battery could reap, and he knew too many innocents had been caught in their fire. Will you trust me? He wondered, staring up that the gun. Against a machine this grand, this capable, he was nothing. And yet, she had given him a place, pulled him from the punishment that should have been his death.
He, an anxious, barely functioning human, had never been fit to command this ship, but placed in that position, he had done his best. He had always tried to steer her right, but he’d made a few mistakes. Still, the Singularity had seen him through. You’re a good ship. She’d been patient with him in the way only a machine could be. Thank you.
Tracing his hand along the shape of the gun’s armor, he wondered what it felt like. Did it feel as abraded as the scuffed paint made it look, or had the cosmic dust worn it smooth? Likely, he would never know, as he could feel little beyond the environmental suit’s thick gloves.
‘Don’t be so gloomy,’ the ghost inserted herself into his thoughts. ‘You are more than worthy of commanding this ship.’
‘You think so?’ he wondered, following the edge of the main battery gun to its front. Then, he stepped in to follow one of the round barrels, eyeing its length for abnormalities.
‘You have more than proven yourself in these last twenty-seven years, Admiral.’ Truly, as far as she cared, there had never been anything to prove. The respect and kindness he had shown her had been enough. ‘This ship’s full strength is always at your disposal.’
He let out a breath as he reached the end of the barrel. The piece of himself that he allowed to feel was touched by that affirmation of trust. The rest simply wondered if giving him that trust would be a mistake. It seemed counterproductive to place someone not known for his adoration of the human race in command of a ship that had been built to save humanity.
‘Knock it off, you idiot,’ she chastised. ‘This ship will follow you into hell whether you want her to or not, so it would be stupid not to ride with her.’
The warmth of the ghost’s presence made itself known to him, almost like a blanket. He could feel it gently chasing away his doubts with the steel of unquestioning loyalty. ‘I would be lost without you.’
‘Yes, I know. You’re a horrible navigator.’
He sighed in amusement, always grateful for her company. ‘I don’t know why you put up with me,’ he told her as he knelt to look down the barrel of the gun. The bore was as big as a cavern. Half of it was still buried in the contour of the hull, but he would have been able to crawl down it, had it been raised.
‘It could be argued that I put up with you because you put up with me.’ They made a good pair. There weren’t many in the worlds who would have stopped to consider the welfare of a ghost.
He pulled the electric torch off his belt and clicked it on to examine the condition of the barrel. A quick brush of his hand revealed that there was residue on its end, black soot that built up when they were fired. It streaked the rifling on the interior of the barrel as well. Following the curve of the rifling with his hand, he could feel that it was worn, slowly eroding as the guns were fired, but it was still a long way from needing replacement. The others were surely similar, so he stood and gave the barrel a pat. He'd expected nothing less of the old ship. His Singularity was nothing, if not reliable.
He made his way back to the base of the turret, studying this particular gun in greater detail. He had visited all of them at one point or another, since he made this walk before every offensive mission. They were mostly identical, but this one sat near dead center on the ship’s length: seventh in line from the bow. The white detailing stenciled on each side of the gun’s base proclaimed it as such: Gun 7. Further out, there was a gray line that marked the swing radius of the barrels, labeled with indications to stand clear.
The one detail about this particular gun that was different than the rest was the mark low and centered on its back. It looked vaguely like a maple leaf: one body with three spiked extrusions, but the little white stamp had nothing to do with trees, or life at all for that matter. It was a kill marker.
The little white leaf was a reminder that this gun had landed the fatal hit on the flagship of the Hydrian Armada. A few of the other guns had markers denoting famous kills, but Admiral Gives felt none were quite as well-deserved as this one. After all, sinking the Hydrian Armada’s wartime flagship had been deemed impossible. That feat alone had landed the Singularity’s name in the history books.
‘Gaffigan has completed the draw.’ The ghost informed him, ‘Guns 2, 7 and 10 will be test-fired.’ Part of the pre-combat shakedown included test firing three of the main battery guns selected at random.
Gun 7? ‘What are the odds?’
‘Three in fourteen,’ she told him. ‘But also, irrelevant. You’re welcome.’ Manipulating the randomness of the draw was child’s play. ‘Hop on.’
He didn’t need any more prompting than that. He took the magnetic anchor off his belt, activated it with a twist, and then tossed it midway up the gun’s armor. It stuck easily, so he deactivated his boots and used the tether to pull himself off the hull and onto the gun’s slanted armor. From there, the lack of gravity let him easily walk up the side and onto the flat top of the mount.
He had a very healthy respect for the guns and their destructive capability, but there was no denying that the astroengineer in him was still fascinated by them. He enjoyed watching them move, aim, and fire. This awe-inspiring reminder of their deadly size brought him out here before every combat mission. He spacewalked to watch the main battery complete their test-firing sequence during the shakedown.
The view from the top of Gun 7 was perhaps the best on the entire ship. The added elevation let him see almost everything. Aft, he could two of the main engines. The shape of those two blocked the two stacked below them from sight, but from this angle he could see the glow of the exhaust plumes. It was faint, only noticeable because he knew to look for it, but the slight glow added a halo of rich blue to the ship’s coloring.
Forward, he still could not see beyond the profile of the bow. It was the tallest and widest part of the ship, but he could see the line of the other main battery guns. There were six more forward, and another seven aft of where he stood. But the view forward was something more unique, for past the line of main battery guns, in the shadow of the arrow-shaped bow, the ship’s insignia had been painted in striking detail. Around it sat a fresh ring of silver stars, recently repainted by Chief Ty’s teams. He stared at it, noting the cleanliness of the paint. Fine work indeed, he thought proudly. It had been too long.
It was a long-standing tradition that those silver stars decorated only the emblem of the flagship. When the Singularity had lost the position of flagship to the Capitol, those stars had been painted over. But, now separate from Command, this was his flagship, and she was more than worthy of those stars.
‘Try not to get lost in your thoughts up there,’ the ghost interjected. ‘It’d be inconvenient to have you flung off.’
Inconvenient, she says. ‘Nice to know you care,’ he snarked back. ‘Besides, how would I get flung-’
Below him, the gun unexpectedly lurched, beginning to rise from its lowered position. At the same time an acceleration jolted him, and the sudden movement would have knocked him off his feet, had they not been stuck to the hull. Instinctively, he grabbed the mag-anchor and threw it down to give him a third point of contact with the top of the gun’s armor, but the force of the acceleration dropped almost immediately to a barely noticeable lean. ‘You did that on purpose.’
‘Oh, of course not,’ she said, lacing the comment with a fake sweetness. ‘There was just a minor fluctuation in the engines’ thrust control systems.’
It took a conscious effort not to roll his eyes. Bullshit. She was messing with him. The inertial dampeners did not apply on the outer hull, which allowed the turrets and main battery guns to fire, but it also meant he could feel the acceleration of even a slight course change. Technically, that was dangerous if the ship accelerated too hard, but his orders had been to keep accelerations to a minimum, allowing the ship’s structure to rest, and he liked to think the ghost would intervene before he got smeared colorfully across the hull.
After elevating him another ten feet above the ship’s flat back, the gun clunked to a stop, locking into its secured ready position. Admiral Gives felt a few tremors below his feet as everything found its alignment. Then, slowly, laboriously, the gun mount began to turn. Logistically, the gun’s transversal sweep was being checked, the same as the defensive turrets had been, and riding the top of it through its rotation gave him gorgeous panoramic view of the stars, interrupted only by the three gun barrels that jutted out below him. The turn was a smooth movement, the sign of a well-maintained mount, but he had expected nothing less. While other parts of the ship had suffered under his predecessor, the ship’s weapons systems had always been kept immaculate.
Eventually, the gun returned to its forward alignment, and one at a time, the barrels began to rise, checking the latitude of their elevation capability. At their highest elevation, the guns could be fired directly perpendicular to the ship’s gun deck – straight upward, though the direction had little meaning in zero gravity. That, combined with the guns’ 360-degree rotation capability meant they could be targeted and fired in any direction that was not otherwise blocked by the ship’s structure.
Idly, he watched the barrels return to their neutral elevation, basking in the quietude of the spacewalk. Out here, no one bothered him. There were no appearances to maintain. It was just him and his ship, and that was plenty enough for him.
The slight pull of acceleration ceased, and though he could not tell much from the stars, the constellations here unfamiliar, he knew the ship had completed a turn simply by the way the acceleration had moved him. The gun below his feet shook once, and a dull clang reached his ears, the vibrations conducted through the contact his feet had on the armor. That would be the sound of the loaders, bringing up the shells and sealing the breach, making the gun ready to fire.
Then once again, the gun below him began to turn. As it moved, the barrels simultaneously began to elevate, finding their target. The movement was shadowed by Gun 2 and Gun 10, both also turning to starboard.
Admiral Gives looked down the length of the barrel in front of him, trying to divine its target, but nothing caught his attention. It did not seem the weapons crews had launched a buoy for target practice, nor was there a convenient asteroid to use. ‘What are they aiming at?’ He asked the ghost.
‘The nearest star to Crimson Heart’s base.’ At this distance and speed, that gave them an effectively stationary object to check the calibration of the targeting systems. ‘Monty thought it fitting.’
Dimly, he noted her use of the weapon’s officer’s nickname. It did not surprise him, no, she knew the crew better than he did, but it was an indication that the previous night’s events had all been forgiven. Part of him admired that ability to forgive, but another part of him feared her forgiving nature may someday put her in a terrible position, one where her kindness was taken advantage of. He had tried his best to gather a crew that she would be safe around. He trusted them as much as anyone, but he could not control human nature, and he knew firsthand how truly ugly it could be.
There was a bright flash in front of him as Gun 2 fired, hurtling three shells into the night. He followed the orange glow of the tracers into the darkness until they were too far away to be seen. Then it was Gun 7’s turn, firing with a thunderous clap and a flash bright enough to dim the photoreactive faceplate of his helmet. The burn of the shells’ propellants left behind a dark haze that rolled onto the surroundings like a fog. The flash behind him gave him barely any warning before the three shells of Gun 10 flew by faster than he could follow them.
And like a summer squall, the test-firing was swiftly over. The dark fog of propellant dispersed like clouds parting to reveal the sky. The drill was something marvelous to sit through. Any time multiple guns from the main battery fired, the ship seemed to conjure a storm in the depths of space. The burn of propellants made clouds, the muzzle flashes within flickered like lightning, and the crack of the guns, had there been atmosphere to perpetuate their sound, could have been rolling thunder, deep and loud. There was a primal grandeur in it that laser weapons could never match.
‘Results?’ he prompted the ghost.
‘Do you really need to ask?’
He regarded the gun below him amusedly, ‘I suppose not.’
‘Then let’s go raid some pirates.’