Cardioid Sector, HR-14 System, Battleship Singularity
Making his way to the front of the boarding party was like wading through waist-high water while fighting a riptide. Things had been organized at one point, but after they’d been ordered to move inward for shelter, and then called back into position, equipment was out of order and people were out of position. The crew held their composure well, considering the chaos. There was no yelling, no panic, but they were professionals.
The crew murmured amongst themselves, checking each other’s armor and equipment as they wondered about the state of the battle around them. After all, they’d felt those impacts, heard the alarms, and none of them were deaf to the fact that the voice that had come over the intercom to order them back to their position was neither Robinson’s smooth confidence, nor the Admiral’s gravelly tone. It had been the calm inflection of the ship’s automated protocols, a voice that while familiar, was not a common participant in any of their missions.
Zarrey knew why they were hearing it, or at least, he could guess it had something to do with the cyberattack. In that, he wasn’t sure it should be trusted. After all, below decks, he had no way to know if the automated protocols had been activated by intention, or if that was a ploy by the virus that had infected the ship. In the end, he supposed it didn’t matter much as long as the airlock connection was good. If the ship docked successfully, then the boarding party could force their way onto the pirate base. But, it did leave him concerned about a trap. If the ship’s automated protocols were corrupted, it could be ordering them into an ambush.
In Zarrey’s mind, that was a very remote possibility. He’d never seen the ship face a cyberattack, and he, along with most other crew knew that the ship wasn’t equipped to combat such an event, but it was still the Singularity, and Admiral Gives was still on the bridge. Zarrey did not always agree with the Admiral, but he had also never seen the ship act beyond the Admiral’s control in any way. The malfunctions that Zarrey was all too familiar with did not happen when the Admiral was on the bridge. So, Zarrey trusted him to have full and complete control over the ship, cyberattack or no cyberattack.
That said, Zarrey didn’t want his people charging into anything that had the possibility of being an ambush. Not without awareness of it, at least. And while he wanted to explain the situation to everyone, Zarrey had no way to communicate effectively with the mass number of crew who were lined up to take part in this assault. He had to prioritize those in the front – those who would deal with the situation if there was one.
Given that, Zarrey was grateful his six-foot frame allowed him to move almost anyone out of the way in the congested hallways. The crew knew to leave a lane of passage, but in the most crowded places where that wasn’t necessarily possible, most paid enough attention to shift out of his way as they saw him coming. Occasionally, however, someone would be caught up in conversation, or be busy checking their weapons. It was them that Zarrey gently pushed aside without breaking pace.
It was hard to hear anything beyond the mutterings of the crew and the soft thudding of their bootheels as they shifted. No one was comfortable down here, crammed into the corridors nearest the midship airlock that had been selected for docking. With the density of the crew here, the air smelled slightly of sweat and had grown uncomfortably warm. Zarrey couldn’t hear them over the crew’s noise, but he imagined that the life support filters were laboring to keep up. It was unusual for such a large portion of the crew to be gathered in such a small part of the ship, especially in a combat scenario where the stress of temperature control and carbon dioxide scrubbing was not being distrusted ship-wide, but handled by the local systems. Uncomfortable as it might have been, Zarrey knew the life support systems could handle it. They’d been designed to support more people than could physically fit in this corridor, a safety that ensured they could fulfill their purpose even at reduced efficiency. Most ships were designed that way. Life support was the one place where shipwrights never cut corners. No one wanted to asphyxiate a billion miles from the nearest habitable world.
When he finally forced his way to the front of the boarding party, Zarrey could feel the perspiration dampening the underarms of his shirt. The cotton had grown sticky and uncomfortable, especially combined with the squeeze of a combat vest he rarely wore anymore. In truth, Zarrey had never been comfortable in his protective gear. He’d never really been a front-line Marine so to speak. The Frontier Rebellion, and the surface conflicts that had come with it had been long over by the time he'd joined the fleet. Zarrey would be the first to admit he’d never seen a real war, but with a decade spent in station security, he was certainly no stranger to the fight. Heading up a boarding party wasn’t foreign to him. In truth, he was a great deal more comfortable doing that than he was handling the ship on a daily basis. Simply, naval combat wasn’t his expertise, but they had the Admiral for that. Admiral Gives and the ship’s officers handled the ship, while Zarrey and the Marines handled the enemy.
The spearhead of the boarding party was found standing beside the airlock, just where Zarrey expected them. Like every other member of the boarding party, they were dressed in black from head to toe. The Marines had camouflaged equipment available to them, calibrated to arctic, desert and woodland environments, but for space operations and daily dress, black and gray were the standard. In this case, banking on the darkness to aid their attack, black had been the obvious choice.
Roughly half the ship’s Marines and most of the ship’s pilots, along with a few support personnel including a combat medic and a handful of the ship’s more resilient engineers had been assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Pflum as part of Task Force Alpha. Pflum had picked the Marine units accompanying him with intent: taking groups practiced in stealth and zero-G combat. Zarrey, heading Task Force Bravo, had been given the leftovers. He understood of course. Zarreu’s team, while facing a dangerous bottleneck at the airlock, would not be fighting in any unusual or adverse environment. And besides, his choice to head the charge wouldn’t have changed anyway.
A young Marine unit headed by Corporal Anton Yankovich had been Zarrey’s first pick. Yankovich was a respectable solider, a capable and honorable Marine. There wasn’t anything real special about him, though Zarrey admitted to liking the young man. Yankovich was a trained spotter, but so were many Marines, including Zarrey himself. The second member of the unit was a rookie Marine, Cadet Santino. He had an interesting story to him, having been run off Kikowani Station for fear of being a separatist, but he was just a kid, one of the youngest members of the Singularity’s crew. The reason Zarrey had picked that unit however, was its third member, the ship’s sniper: Cadet Blosse. She was a young woman of few words, and Zarrey didn’t know much about her, save the fact that she was one of only a handful of crew that the Admiral had drafted straight out of training. Zarrey hadn’t seen much point to it at the time. Blosse’s training marks had been average, but the Admiral had been right, as he often was, and Blosse had become one of the most talented marksmen Zarrey had ever even heard of. She missed nothing, not her shots, not the details, and that was why Zarrey had wanted her unit heading in first.
Zarrey had assigned only two other units to specific tasking. Corporal Eric and his SAR dog would be traveling with the engineers and supply officers, inspecting the food. His trained dog would be able to sniff out any rotten or poisoned stores. The Pretties as Zarrey thought of them, though they were better known as the Triple Witches, would be escorting their forward medical team. The Witches, an all-female unit, were meant to escort the nurses wherever they were summoned. Any pirate who happened across them would not be able to single the nurses out of the bunch, as they were all pretty women of roughly the same age and build. Naturally, that was the point. Outlaws like Crimson Heart’s pirates targeted the weak, and nurses weren’t often skilled in combat.
With the exception of those units though, the rest of the Marines would simply be clearing the base and securing it for the supply teams to move in and start nabbing supplies. Many of the ship’s spare armory, sensor and communications officers would be backing up the Marines, as they had better combat training than the ship’s engineers. The engineers and the supply officers would be heading in last.
“Welcome back, Colonel,” Corporal Yankovich greeted him.
“Thanks,” Zarrey said, taking note of the Corporal’s average statue. Neither short nor tall, Yankovich was also neither tense nor relaxed. He somehow managed that perfect medium in almost every situation. “Ready your unit. I don’t know what we’re walking into when we dock.” Of course, that had always been the case. The Admiral could predict many things, but the condition of the pirate base wasn’t one of them. “There’s a potential for this to be a trap.”
Yankovich didn’t ask questions. He just straightened his helmet and said, “Aye.” Beside him, Santino visibly gulped and Blosse, well within hearing range as she crouched beside the airlock, said nothing. The sniper just continued checking over her equipment.
The only complaint Zarrey received was from the unfortunate compatriot of Yankovich’s unit: Sergeant Cortana. Pflum hadn’t selected her for his team, so Zarrey had been stuck with her. And worse, he hadn’t been able to come up with a reasonable excuse for her to follow the spearhead, so she’d become a part of it. “I thought the entire point of the naval operation was to give us cover of darkness, Colonel. They shouldn’t even know we’re coming.”
“The entire point of the naval operation was to get us here. Knocking the lights out was an added bonus.” One that Zarrey had no way to confirm had been successful. They wouldn’t know until they boarded if the lights had successfully been taken out. Unlike when the ship fired her broadside, there would be no perceptible cues that the modified missile prepared for this mission had been fired, let alone if it had hit or accomplished its task. The ship’s sensors would be able to determine that, but under the automated protocols, it wasn’t likely to be announced. The ship’s automated network was fairly limited in capability, but in communication especially. It could respond to proper inquiries, but mission concerns were almost always too specific to have a direct prompt. Of course, beyond any of that, Zarrey wasn’t sure he would trust any answer the network gave.
Sergeant Cortana could read his concern in the yellow lighting of the ship’s corridors. Zarrey’s brows slanted downward more than in his usual, relaxed state, and he had a strange habit of scratching at his scar. She’d only been in the room with Zarrey a handful of times, but that scar on his chin was a dead giveaway. It only seemed to bother him in situations that prompted him to remember it existed, perhaps situations that were similar to how he’d earned the original injury. “You’re nervous,” she accused.
“Aren’t you?” Zarrey retorted, checking the fit and fasteners of his protective vest. He then plopped his black helmet over his blond hair. Nervous or not, he had a job to do. “I’m just a little worried our support isn’t what it usually is.” He would admit that since he knew Cortana wasn’t going to let it go otherwise.
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Sergeant Cortana felt a frown pull at her expression. “What aren’t you telling us?” What had happened on the bridge?
Zarrey was spared having to make a response by the emanation of a long, low creak from the ship. It seemed to saturate the corridors, originating from everywhere at once. Still, it wasn’t the scream of twisting metal, or the grinding of machinery fighting itself. It was the first he’d heard from the ship in quite some time, since the cyberattack, actually. Zarrey knew, even with his mechanical ineptitude, that the computers rightfully had no effect on the ship’s structure. They were separate systems, but evidence of the ship’s usual noise comforted him in a strange way, even if it sounded more distressed than usual. The old ship didn’t sound strained, just strangely upset to Zarrey’s ear. The oddity of such an observation had bothered him once. He’d found it strange that he could pin such emotion to the machine’s sounds, but the strangeness of such things had left him long ago. That was simply the way the Singularity was.
Cortana was disturbed by the ship’s noise, as she always was. She looked around half-expecting to find that a jagged crack and torn its way up the nearby wall, but she seemed to be the only crewman bothered at all. “You’re never going to convince me that’s normal.” Machines weren’t supposed to sound like that. They were supposed to be strong and silent, not creaking with apparent fatigue.
“I don’t really care what you think is normal,” Zarrey said. She was the one that claimed the Singularity’s alleged ghost had a vendetta against her. That didn’t exactly speak to a stable definition of normal.
Cortana frowned, and beyond her, Cadet Blosse froze, if only for an instant. Then she locked the clip in place on her rifle, a long, deadly looking thing, and hoisted it onto her shoulder as she stood. “It’s almost time.”
Blosse spoke quietly, but Zarrey had been waiting for her to say something. With the noise of the rest of the boarding party behind them, he couldn’t hear the engines. As he shoved his way to the front of the boarding party, he had not perceived the slight shifts of acceleration either. Perhaps Blosse had. Zarrey didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He signaled the others to form up around him, and took his position at the front.
He fully intended to be the first one through the airlock, but Yankovich tapped on his shoulder. “With all due respect, sir. I’ll take point.”
“Naddlethwofing hell you will,” Zarrey snorted, moving to pick up the rifle he’d earlier left waiting beside the airlock. Unlike ships, bases didn’t have inertial dampening systems. They were never expected to sustain acceleration, so inertial dampening wasn’t necessary, and that meant guns were guaranteed to be viable weapons.
“Sir,” Yankovich said, “you are the executive officer. I would be remiss in my duties if I sent you in first.” The ship’s Marines had a duty to protect the ship’s command staff.
“You could be the executive officer on this ship for all I care. It isn’t a hard job.” Admiral Gives did most of the work. All Zarrey did was stand on the bridge and complain, then call bullshit on anything suspicious. “I was never supposed to be an officer.” Zarrey hated being in charge. “I’m a Marine.”
“I’m aware of that, sir.” There was a reason Zarrey had been tasked to lead the boarding party. “But I do think the Admiral would be displeased if I allowed you to take point.” Zarrey may not like being in charge, but he was a competent second in command.
“The Admiral ran off alone to a hostile space station yesterday. He doesn’t get a vote.” Still, Zarrey stepped aside. Yankovich was a good Marine, and refusing him would be an insult. “I’ll let you do the honors,” Zarrey allowed. “But I will be right behind you.”
“I’d expect no less, sir.” Yankovich smiled, and took point. Blosse lined up beside him.
Santino, the unit’s youngest member, stood beside Zarrey, nervous sweat dripping down from his helmet. “Relax, rookie,” Zarrey told him. If all had gone according to plan, this should be easy. The pirates would be scrambling blindly without the lights of their base.
It wasn’t lost on Zarrey that Cortana, for all the complaining she’d done about not being placed in charge of the boarding party, lined up behind him without a word, looking rather uneasy. Command brat, Zarrey thought, rolling his eyes while he knew she couldn’t see it. Cortana, for all her pomp and circumstance and what she thought was a rather impressive service record, had not spent much time on ships. She hadn’t been prepared for martial combat with the boarders, and there was little doubt in Zarrey’s mind that she was unprepared to board this hostile base, let alone be in charge of the mission. Of course, that was why she wasn’t in charge of the mission, and Zarrey was, despite the risks of leaving only one command officer on the bridge.
The dull clang of machinery making contact reached Zarrey’s ears. It was followed by a few more thuds, the noise of the airlock connection striking home and securing itself. An instant later the indicator on their side went green, and before Zarrey could issue the command, the intercom chimed. “Task Force Beta is cleared to attack mission target. Repeat, Task Force Beta is cleared to attack mission target.”
Zarrey had expected the Admiral’s gravelly tone, or the effortless authority of Keifer Robinson. He hadn’t expected to hear the voice of the automated protocols once again. Some part of him had hoped that the situation with the ship would be sorted out by now, and that hearing Robinson or the Admiral give the announcement would be his assurance of that. However, the situation clearly wasn’t sorted out, and Zarrey was in no position to second guess anything. The airlock had made its connection, and trap or no trap, they were pushing through.
Behind him, Sergeant Cortana tucked a stray piece of her wavy dark hair under the strap of her helmet. “Who is that?” The voice on the intercom didn’t have the right range to be the normal comms officer. It had an odd, unnatural pacing to it, and felt just eerily familiar.
“That’s the Lady.” Yankovich said from the front, helping Blosse open and properly secure their side of the airlock. In the case of a decompression, it had to be set up to close in order to protect the rest of the ship.
“The who?”
“The Lady,” Zarrey repeated. They all knew that voice, and Cortana should soon be familiar with it as well. But of course, she was new, so there was no reason for her to know it yet. “The Lady Sin,” Zarrey added, “ship’s automated protocols.” Voices like that would be nothing new to a spacer. His previous assignment, a station, had possessed a recorded voice as well – a male one he’d never particularly liked. Zarrey much preferred the Singularity’s voice to that grating tone.
“Ships under automated protocols cannot command movements for personnel units,” Cortana reminded. She didn’t need experience serving on a ship to know that. That was taught in training, a safety holdover from the Hydrian War, when automated systems had been subject to corruption.
“Feel free to stay here then,” Zarrey told her. “Just be sure to get out of the way.” The rest of the boarding party still had to come in behind them.
Cortana made a noise, and not a happy one, but she still followed Zarrey into the airlock. Blosse and Yankovich were already there, working on the outer door, but this airlock was only the first. It would not allow them onto the base, only grant passage between the ship’s interior and the space between the hulls. Like most of the airlocks along the ship’s length, it wasn’t a large unit, just a plain-walled cubicle with indicators, a control panel and vents to move air. The space was only large enough to cycle a few people through at a time, and it would have been impractical to move people and cargo through that bottleneck. Luckily, docking the ship meant that the airlock could be left open. With breathable air in the ship’s interior and on the station, there was no need to cycle between atmosphere and vacuum.
The area between the Singularity’s inner and outer hulls could be pressurized in sections, and as such, the region the boarding party needed to pass through had been pressurized and heated. Opening the hatch, Yankovich and Blosse revealed the causeway that would take them to the outer hull. The air from beyond tasted stale, and left an ashen texture in Zarrey’s mouth, but it satisfactorily filled his lungs. It seemed the air recyclers in this area hadn’t been cleaned in quite some time, but that was no surprise considering how rarely this region of the ship was pressurized.
As they stepped over the outer boundary of the airlock, the acceleration of gravity released its hold. The weight of the rifle in Zarrey’s arms eased. It now felt something like a toy, easily pulled along as he kicked off, bounding down the catwalk to follow the two Marines leading the charge. The area between the hulls wasn’t a perfect zero-G, but a transitionary low gravity environment between the Singularity’s terran standard, and what should be zero-G for the pirate base, assuming the power had been knocked out and taken down the artificial gravity systems. This transitionary stage made it easy for the boarding party to align with whatever gravity field they would find on the other side – even if it wasn’t the zero-G they expected.
The light from the little airlock behind them lit the mesh of the walkway for several feet, but Zarrey soon ventured into darkness, losing sight of even Blosse’s bronze colored braid as it trailed behind her leaping steps. Without a word, as it was too dark to otherwise see, Zarrey reached up to his helmet and slid the goggles that had been resting atop it down over his eyes.
Zarrey’s vision was momentarily lost in a green haze while the goggles powered on, but they cleared before he could leap further along the walkway. The darkness that had encased them above, below and all around, was abruptly littered with shapes. Skeletal tresses and beams filled the volume. Towering above and reaching far below with their many branches anchoring the hulls, the visible superstructure surrounded him like a wicked forest, outlined in ghastly green. If he stepped close enough, the pattern of scratches and fretting turned a mostly smooth surface into something that looked like bark.
Distantly, beyond the clang of boot against metal that rang out in front of him, and grew in frequency behind him, Zarrey could hear the trickle of liquid. It seemed to come from far, far below, some byproduct of this area’s repressurization, but he gave it little thought.
When they reached the inner hatch to the final, outer airlock, Zarrey had to pause while Blosse and Yankovich opened and secured it the way they had the previous one. As he waited, a warm breeze brushed across the back of his neck. It could have been unsettling, he supposed, and probably was to some, given the surprised gasp Cortana made behind him, but Zarrey found it comforting. The radiating warmth felt nice against the tension in his neck. It was nothing more than the heaters of the environmental control systems working overtime to warm this section of the ship up from the frigid, airless vacuum it had been minutes ago, but Zarrey still welcomed it. For all he knew, this might be the last warm embrace he felt, and he was almost reluctant to move further up when Yankovich and Blosse moved on to the final, outer airlock.
With an abundance of caution, they greased its mechanisms, ensuring it would open quietly, but none of the other airlocks had creaked today, as if the ship knew when to be silent. The electric motor that ran the final airlock was secured in place and enabled. It would open the last door on the Singularity’s side, and assuming there was nothing otherwise wrong with the connection, similarly force open the airlock on the base’s side.
Given the green indicator beside the hatch, signaling that the airlock connection was good, Zarrey didn’t expect trouble opening the final door. Airlocks were designed with safety measures so that they could be forced open by a connection, usually a ship, that could provide power. Pirates and enemies abused those safety measures to board ships, but most spacers weren’t insane enough to disable or hinder them in any way. No one liked the thought of asphyxiating or freezing to death because they had barred their rescuers entry. There were exceptions of course, ships sent on clandestine missions often had their entry points completely disabled to deny access, but the vast majority of ships, bases and stations left their airlocks functional, and it seemed Crimson Heart was no exception.
Blosse punched the control beside the airlock’s electric motor, and it picked up a high whine nearly above the range of the human ear. But the final airlock began to slide open. To Zarrey’s perception, heightened by adrenaline, it seemed to move at a snail’s pace. The instant it was wide enough, Yankovich and Blosse jumped though. Bringing his rifle into ready position, Zarrey followed behind them, pushing off into the darkness.