Four hours later, Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity
The Admiral woke surrounded by shattered glass on the floor of CIC, a piece of metal digging roughly into his back. Hazardously suspended by two thin wires, one of the industrial light mountings that normally illuminated CIC was hanging above him. Raw electricity crackled in the air as one of the wires snapped, sending the steel mounting lurching toward him. Instinctively, he rolled out of the way as the final wire broke, and the heavy fixture crashed into the deck with a solid thud that reverberated through the metal deck plates.
Trying to avoid cutting himself on the broken glass, he carefully climbed to his feet, even as the shards dug into his bare hands. Standing up, an immediate nausea rose and he stumbled to the nearby radar console. Leaning on its sturdy metal frame, he waited until his surroundings rearranged themselves into a discernable fashion. What happened? He ached all over from a fall he didn’t remember taking. In fact, he didn’t remember anything at all after Zarrey had grabbed him, and even that memory was a little hazy.
The simple action of getting up was utterly draining. Smoke and ash wafted in from the corridor, sending him into coughing fit. Pain built in his chest from the wet, hacking cough, but it took a moment for him to realize he wasn’t coughing up mucus from the ash. It was blood.
The radiation. How many hours had he been unconscious? How long had the entire crew been breathing in poisoned air? Too long, he feared.
A creak from his damaged ship drew his attention back to his surroundings. CIC was a wreck. Shattered glass and fallen ceiling décor littered the floor. An occasional bout of sparks would crackle in the windowless room, flickering in the darkness. A fissure ran across the ceiling, and it continued down a wall, visible deformation caused by the structural collapse.
The dank, dirty red lighting provided by the emergency batteries gave off just enough visibility to tell that an object was present nearby, even if not what it was. Near a wall, a live wire arced, jumping from contact with the deck. It spun wildly, severed and freed by the damage. Another muffled creak, and the deck shifted subtly, but noticeably beneath the Admiral’s feet.
A live wire indicated there was residual energy in the power grid, so the ship wasn’t completely dead. He could work with that. Despite his orders, the Conjoiner drives were still online too, but he could tell, even from barely shifting his weight on his feet, that the artificial gravity field was off-center.
The difference was obvious to him. After living on this ship for what had become most of his life, he knew innately how the gravity was supposed to feel. Not only were the ship’s artificial gravity generators pulling slightly heavier than the planetary standard they normally held, but their pull was lopsided, centering on the portside stern.
The weakened starboard bow had been relinquished from the artificial gravity field. Now it was being held in broken stasis by the zero gravity of space. Employed as ship-wide damage control, the Conjoiner drives were forcing the bent structural supports to fight their pull instead of each other’s. In doing so, they prevented new hull breaches from appearing. The breach on the starboard bow had likely widened, but the worst damage was still contained there, and the cascade collapse had been stopped.
It was pretty clever, the Admiral supposed, but it was a far from perfect solution as another tremor ran through the deck beneath his feet. Had it been an option for him after the jump, he would have put it to use, but a human could never run the calculations required to alter the gravity field in time to stop the collapse, even with computer assistance. Beyond that, the altered gravity field was not stable. It was wavering, meaning the ship wasn’t completely stable yet either. With all the damage done so far, the Conjoiner drives weren’t getting enough power. The electricity they were getting from the damaged main power grid was not enough to stabilize the altered field. Too much of that dwindling power was being diverted to Life Support, which was still working at full capacity. It had to be, or the crew would have asphyxiated by now.
Admiral Gives glanced to the live wire continuing to vault around. It was one of dozens, possibly hundreds around the ship, uselessly draining the main power grid. It was with them lie the issue. The power core itself was functioning on some level. The Conjoiner drives and Life Support were a testament to that, but the artificial gravity generators needed more power or their altered field would collapse, catastrophically worsening the condition of the ship.
But where could they get additional power?
Admiral Gives moved to pin the live wire underneath his shoe, careful not to touch the electrified tip. The loud snap of electricity quickly silenced, allowing him to hear the ship’s engine noise. It was faint, but he could hear the usual hum from two of the four, both on the port side, while the other two engines were silent. They would never be able to reignite them in time to get power. He pondered the two working engines, but their pitch told him they were already at maximum output - any higher would cause them to overheat.
He snatched the live wire from underneath his foot and dragged it to the engineering console, where held it carefully away as he rummaged around the loose mess of wires underneath the controls. Wrapping his hand around the thickest wire, he yanked it loose and held it up to the faint emergency lighting. The indicator that glowed green when it was connected to the ship’s power grid was dark. The line had been severed somewhere between CIC and the power core, but the live wire in his other hand could provide the necessary energy for a quick reboot of the console. He just needed to splice the two, so he began looking around for tools.
It was then he registered Ensign Alba slouched over at his station, proving how poor the lighting on the bridge really was. Admiral Gives threw down the dead wire to check the young crewman’s pulse. It was strong and steady. He bled from a gash on his forehead, but was not otherwise injured. Like all the rest, however, he was being slowly poisoned by the radiation undoubtedly present throughout the ship. The recycled air that kept the crew alive was slowly killing them.
But there was nothing that could be done about that until the ship had more power. The gravity generators were first priority, then the decontamination systems. As long as the crew remained unconscious, Admiral Gives knew the radiation’s effects on them would be significantly lessened. It would buy time.
Alba’s orange uniform jumpsuit had tool pockets all over, and there was flashlight attached to his belt. Clicking the torch on, Admiral Gives waved it around the room, taking inventory. The rest of the bridge crew was knocked out either at their stations or on the floor, but they were still alive, seeing the slight movement of their chests. Despite the light’s intensity, not a single crewmember stirred, their slumber neither lucky nor accidental. The Admiral didn’t let it bother him. It was far from the strangest thing he’d seen aboard these decks.
Turning back to Alba, the engineer had not moved. Even when the Admiral jostled his shoulder, carefully trying to wake him, the crewman did not stir. Without further hesitation, Admiral Gives patted Alba down for tools, eventually locating a set of wire cutters in the chest pocket of his uniform.
Taking the cutters and pushing the engineer away in his chair, Admiral Gives gathered the dead console wire in his hands and lopped it clean in half. Keeping the half connected to the console, he took up the live wire once again and clenching his teeth, thrust the two together.
Sparks flew and the heat of the reaction fused the two wires together. Brushing off his freshly singed uniform, the Admiral stepped over the two melded wires and hunched over the engineering console. The screen glowered shale gray in the darkness of CIC, giving the fleet insignia with the words, ‘System Reboot in Progress’ blinking in the top right. Though he knew what they said, the Admiral slipped on his glasses to read them.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
With a few more seconds of patience, the old technology granted him access to the engineering systems. He pulled up a diagram of the ship. Internal diagnostics had lost contact with a large part of the starboard bow, there was a fuel line rupture on Deck Ten, Engine Four was slowly leaking coolant and Engines One and Two were offline. The computer continued to warn him the structural integrity field had been compromised, but he sent the notifications away, instead querying the system about the ship’s power cores.
‘Primary Power Core damaged. System offline.’ Below that, it read, ‘Secondary Power Core functional. System online.’
“Not great,” the Admiral said calmly to the old ship, “but I can work with it.” One was definitely better than none. “We’re not sunk yet.” They’ll have to try harder than that, he knew as he continued to get updates on the other primary ship systems.
‘Primary Power Grid damaged. Operating at 12% efficiency.’ With that low efficiency, it took a massive amount of electricity generation to power even just a few systems.
He pulled up the command input window and began to type, directing the ship to start routing power through the secondary units.
The engineering control system started with a hopeful, ‘Working…’ but quickly replaced it with, ‘Error.’
The Singularity’s internal systems were so old that he had to prompt separately for the source of the error, but it hardly slowed him down.
‘Information: Secondary Power Grid damaged. Secondary Power Grid went offline after original attempt to reroute main power. System remains offline.’
Someone had already tried that. His surroundings indicated it hadn’t worked, and that narrowed his options considerably. He closed out of the command window and went back to the ship diagram. ‘Artificial gravity field unstable.’ The system warned, ‘Conjoiner Drive failure imminent.’
“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me something I don’t already know,” he asked, not expecting an answer.
The low power notification on the engineering console popped up. The spliced power line behind him crackled and the screen went black. He was plunged back into the bridge’s primeval darkness, which was penetrated only barely by the red emergency lights.
“Whatever would I do without your sass?” he said, entirely unamused by the timing of the console’s power loss. The Singularity always had been a difficult keep, but he would have it no other way – not that the machine cared at all about his preference. He supposed he had always related to that perfect indifference. People were rarely so flexible.
With a sigh and another wet cough, the Admiral shuffled to the wall. There was nothing he could do in CIC. He would have to go below decks, but the unstable gravity field, combined with the effects of the radiation sickness he was quickly developing, was going to make that difficult. Following the bulkheads to the exit of the bridge, he was careful not to step on any of the dangerously sharp glass shards or sleeping crewmen.
Admiral Gives made it out into the corridor to be met with acrid smoke. The black clouds obscured the emergency lights, and he was forced to click Alba’s flashlight back on. The scuffed dark metal floor had less debris than inside CIC, and the flickering of loose wires down the hallway could be seen within the dense smoke.
He set off at a brisk pace, but the wafting smoke soon forced him to pull his handkerchief from his pocket and hold it over his mouth as a makeshift mask. It was the only aid he could give his already aching lungs, as the dirty air only agitated them.
The smoke was thick, but the life support systems labored enough, even on minimum power, to keep it below truly harmful levels. Still, even as the smoke was continuously pulled away, the flashlight only cleaved about four feet of visibility through the soot, so he heard the pained cries long before he could see their origins.
The wordless moans echoed down the hexagonal passageways – the outcries seemingly carried by the shape of the metal. But by the time he found the human creating the stomach wrenching noises, they had nearly gone quiet.
He lay in a junction between hallways where the smoke was lesser, but still present as the air filtration systems worked to haul it away. It was a losing battle, the Admiral knew. The fires that created the smoke were most likely still raging below decks, since there wasn’t enough power to activate the Fire Suppressors.
The wounded crewman coughed weakly underneath the torch’s white light, and it was immediately obvious by the way he was splayed limply on the floor that he was in bad condition. Admiral Gives recognized him immediately, as he would any member of the ship’s crew. Ensign Rafael Delaney was part of the damage control team assigned to the ship’s starboard bow, and like the rest of his team, he had never made it to his post.
The Admiral knelt and took the crewman’s pulse. It was weak and slow. The young man’s labored breathing was painfully hindered by the smoke and unusually heavy gravity, but he stirred as he registered another presence. He struggled to open his heavy eyelids, but instantly recognized his company. “Admiral, sir,” he slurred.
“Good evening, Ensign,” the Admiral answered politely, as controlled as he ever was. The hand he’d used to check Delaney’s pulse was sticky with blood. He wiped it off and did his best to distract the young man from his injury, “Did you have a good day?”
Ensign Delaney smiled with great effort, aware of what his superior was doing. He welcomed the distraction. “Oh, the best, sir. I played cards with the boys and was working out when the alert sounded.” The Admiral’s unfailing calm was comforting. Delaney could recall being intimidated by it, but now, he welcomed it. If the Admiral was still calm, maybe things weren’t so bad. Maybe it was survivable. “Sorry about your ship, sir.” The damage control teams hadn’t done their job. She was a wreck.
As Delaney talked, the Admiral took to the chance to examine his wound. The massive burn extended over his shoulder, up onto his neck and down his arm. “The Singularity will be just fine, Ensign.” The old ship had life in her yet, Admiral Gives was sure of that, even as the decks shifted beneath them, reminding him of the dire situation. This would be the end of his ship and his crew if he failed to route more power to the Conjoiner drives.
The slight movement of the decks made Delaney hiss with pain, his burn cracking and bleeding. Admiral Gives waved the flashlight around, observing. The walls and floor here weren’t charred from a fire. “Ensign, where did you get the burn?”
“Deck Ten,” Delaney whispered hoarsely, starting to wheeze.
They were on Deck Eight. The fires were two decks lower. The young man must have hauled himself up the ladder in a desperate bid for survival. He wouldn’t have been the only one caught in the fires, the Admiral knew, and he had likely been one of few to escape.
“Be honest with me, sir,” the Ensign choked out, trying to clear the thick slime of blood from the inside of his throat. “How bad is it?” He desperately wanted to ask if he would live, but he already knew the answer.
“It looks worse than it is, Ensign.” Admiral Gives responded calmly, tone still perfectly unconcerned. He had seen far worse than this gruesome burn.
Ensign Delaney’s eyes fluttered. He spluttered blood, too weak to properly cough. “Please, don’t lie to me, sir,” he whispered, chunky blood dribbling down his chin. “I’m dying.” He’d known it before the Admiral had appeared. “I’ve seen her.”
“Seen who, Ensign?”
“The ghost.” Ensign Delaney looked up to his commander with glossy eyes, breathing turning shallow and quick, “Long, white hair… Black…officer’s…uniform.” He tried to gather his breath, “Only those of us about… to die… see… her.” His chest heaved, but his lungs weren’t getting enough oxygen. They were saturated with blood. His eyes turned unseeing as he stared past the Admiral, falling completely still.
Admiral Gives saw him fade at once. “Do not die on me, Ensign Delaney,” he ordered. A part of his mind informed him it was a lost cause, but he knelt beside the young crewman and began CPR. Smoke swirled around as he attempted to resuscitate the young man, but after two minutes of relentless first aid, it proved useless. The Admiral broke into a painful coughing fit of his own. Performing CPR had only worsened his own condition.
Delaney’s eyes had marbled over. The blood was starting to coagulate on his chin. He was dead, but the burn looked worse than it truly had been. The fire, while causing it, had long since cauterized the wound. Delaney hadn’t died from his injury. He had died from the radiation poisoning. The blood he’d coughed up was symbolic of that. The radiation had deformed his lung tissue, leading them to fill with blood. The burn itself hadn’t killed him, but it weakened him to the point where the radiation could.
The Admiral looked at the corpse. His perfectly detached expression didn’t fracture a bit. He had seen too many people die for this to truly disturb him. Delaney was just another name to add to the long list of people that he’d failed over the years. Rafael Delaney wouldn’t be the only name added to that list today.
A loud, worsening groan from the ship interrupted his darkening thoughts. He reached out and closed Delaney’s dead eyes, sighing to the old ship, “I know.” They were running out of time.