Meloira Sector, Battleship Singularity
“You wanted to see me, Chief?” Ensign Callie Smith approached the airlock, having waded through a corridor crowded by the repair crews. The salty tang of sweat hung in the air, but it was nothing she wasn’t used to. Hardworking engineers were rarely ever clean, and fresh from the hot, humid confines of the main engine room, Callie couldn’t be certain she smelled any better than the rest of them.
“Yes,” the engineering chief answered. “I’ve got a job for you. Suit up.”
Ty pressed an environmental suit into her hands as Callie looked up in confusion. “You want me to spacewalk?”
“Aye,” Ty confirmed, scratching at the dark stubble emerging on his chin. “The Admiral got into one of his moods. I’d like you to go check on him.”
By mood, Ty referred to a frighteningly cold order that betrayed no emotion at all. It was one of those times that the Admiral, usually so logical, gave an order without an apparent cause. He put enough ice in it that the crew obeyed mostly without question, but it never escalated further. That simply wasn’t the Admiral’s style. He wasn’t a loud and angry personality.
“Me, sir?” Callie asked, the rubbery material of the suit bouncing in her hands.
“Yes, you,” Ty answered. “I don’t think he’d be too happy to see either of us.” He gestured vaguely to his unkempt self and Havermeyer beside him, who wore a placid look of contemplation. The monk had been like that for the last hour – ever since the Admiral ordered them to leave. Perhaps he was meditating or perhaps he, like Ty, was still trying to make sense of that interaction.
“Did something happen?” Callie asked, kicking off her work boots so that she could shimmy into the body of the environmental suit.
“He ordered me to pull back the repair teams, so he’s been out there alone for about an hour now.” Ty supposed he was getting rather worried. He didn’t like leaving anyone to spacewalk alone, especially in a damaged part of ship where hazards were more numerous.
Callie pulled the suit body, complete with air pack, up over her shoulders and began to seal it up. “Why would he do that?”
“Hell if I know,” Ty muttered.
Havermeyer opened an eye, “Perhaps because you purposefully mutilated a part of my patron Saint?”
Ty threw his thick arms across his chest and scowled, “For the last time, the Box is not a part of this ship.”
Havermeyer didn’t move from where he knelt upon the deck. “That is not your judgement to make.”
Ty stepped closer to the monk, leaving Callie to duck out of the way. “I worked research and development for Command and I can tell you those fibers are a damn parasite on everything they touch.” He had hated research and development. Command had been pushing limits that were not meant to be pushed. “Why can’t you understand that? Didn’t you see what was left of the Matador?”
Havermeyer didn’t budge an inch. “The Matador was not a Saint.”
“And what does that really even mean, Havermeyer?” Ty demanded. “That she wasn’t a good ship? That she and her crew deserved what happened to them?” Stars, no. “It was a stars-forsaken experiment. They didn’t have to die.”
“The intent was not to kill them,” Havermeyer replied calmly. “The intent of a cataclysm is rarely to kill. It is a loss of logic control, a failure to comprehend. More cataclysms have occurred trying to spare a life than were ever caused by attempting to take one. Perhaps that is what makes them such tragedies.”
“And are your Saints immune to cataclysms?” Ty demanded.
The monk reached up to hold the piece of scrap metal that hung on his neck. “No Saint has borne a cataclysm in the last two centuries.”
“Well, all your Saints, exempting the Lady Sin here, are on the ass-end of old, so that doesn’t help us much, does it?” Ty thought not. “The Box needs to go.” It was growing far too much to be normal. Even months ago, it had not been like that.
“Yet, what if it has become a part of the ship? Cutting the fibers may be considered an injury. Our Saint may not understand your intent. All she may comprehend is damage caused by you, whom she is conditioned to protect. Would that not be a path to the madness you dread?” The jagged edges of the scrap metal pendant began to warm in Havermeyer’s hands, a reminder of his faith. “We must wait for a sign. One way or the other.”
“If we wait for a sign, Havermeyer, we’re dead. At least, we’ll wish we were.” If those fibers turned on them, it was over. There was nowhere to flee, isolated on this ship in the void between planets.
Callie pulled on her mag-boots and gloves, then set to resizing the suit, trying very much to ignore Ty and Havermeyer’s argument. Talk of cataclysms was rarely ever pleasant. Those incidents, rare as they were, were every spacer’s nightmare. She hadn’t been with the crew when they found the Matador. Given what she’d gleaned from the others about the event, she was grateful she had not seen it, but cataclysms were never happy stories.
The helmet for the environmental suit was sitting on the deck beside the airlock. She picked it up and caught the eye of one of the other crewmen. “I’ll just go,” she said quietly, not wanting to interrupt.
The crewman smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. “Good luck.”
Callie secured her helmet and stepped into the airlock, sealing it closed behind her. Good luck? She shook her head, ran the final safety checks with her suit and then started the flush cycle. Compared to the argument she had left behind, conversing with the Admiral ought to be downright pleasant, but then, she had never been wary of the Admiral the way the others were.
The rest of the crew had filtered in from previous assignments that, in most cases, had not gone well. Issues with the commanding officer was a leading cause, so it had been Callie’s experience that most of the crew seemed only to tolerate the Admiral. Several of them had told her they abided his orders for two reasons. First, Admiral Gives had never given them a reason to hate him personally, and second, they were terrified of what would happen if they disobeyed. After all, one did not cross the Steel Prince. He had a penchant for killing allied officers and executing mutineers without trial.
Callie had seen how terrifying the man could be, but she had never seen him direct any of that malice toward the crew. She had always found him to be a strangely calm presence, one that was very willing to share his knowledge if asked. Perhaps that was why she’d never been as afraid of him as the others were, and very likely, why Ty had sent her out here. Callie didn’t mind. The others considered her odd for it, but she didn’t dread interacting with the Admiral.
The airlock cycle drew the air from the room, leaving her with the sound of her breathing in her helmet. The loudness of it was always striking for the first few moments in vacuum, but as one became distracted by work, it soon faded into the background. At least, she felt that way. Not everyone adjusted so well to space, and she knew that if she ever drifted off, lost to the void, the sound of her own breathing would be maddening. Spacers left to the void, even for a few meager hours, suffered immensely in the isolation. Drifting in the blackness was a sort of sensory deprivation because environmental suits these days were rudimentary. They possessed nothing beyond basic air recycling and communications, and that had been a hard-learned lesson for humanity, too fresh in her mind given Ty and Havermeyer’s argument.
Humanity had built better space suits centuries ago, incredible pieces of technology now all but abandoned. Those suits had been bastions of capability, nearly ships in themselves, complete with sensors and processing power, entertainment – not just a comms radio – and even onboard medical assistance. It should have been a dream, but in too many cases became a nightmare. Those suits had been complex, difficult to maintain, and expensive. However, their biggest issue had been their dedication, for Havermeyer was right: most Cataclysms came from the intent to save life, not end it. The medical aid built into those suits had been designed to keep the suit wearer alive at any cost and that was a blessing only to a certain point.
Starvation would be staved off in any way possible, even by sloughing off the wearer’s skin to repurpose as food. When that wasn’t enough, the suit would move on to the larger limbs. It would surgically remove anything it could process into water or calories, even their eyes, all in the name of keeping its wearer alive. If those spacers were ever recovered, there often wasn’t enough left of them to realize they had been rescued – no ears, no eyes, no skin – even if their brains were technically functioning. The limited intelligence that ran those suits did not care for the cost of keeping the wearer’s heart beating, and any greater intelligence went mad debating the result. The toll of those cataclysms had been burned into humanity’s psyche so deeply, it had brought them back to simpler suits – suits that would protect them as needed, but not prolong their suffering when things went wrong, because there were things worse than death in these worlds.
Callie wholeheartedly admitted that the training lecture on those cataclysms had made her ill. She hadn’t been the only one, but that grotesque lesson was mandatory. No spacer wanted the lessons of the past forgotten. Any engineer trained to build and repair something that controlled human life had to consider the consequences when things went wrong.
When the airlock indicator went green, Callie opened the outer hatch and stepped into the space beyond. Strangely, for being on the same ship, not to mention only a few feet from the corridor where the repair crews waited, this area looked completely different. The bulkheads didn’t section off small areas to make rooms or passage ways. The space was open, interrupted only by the beams and joists that formed the ship’s structure. The structural supports did not all run parallel. They followed the shape of the hull, bracing where required and forming a lattice that looked both orderly and random.
Callie studied it all for a moment, taking in the sheer scale of what was only a small part of the ship. Many of the beams were massive, projecting a physical strength that went far, far beyond any of the crew. Usually, when she saw the ship’s structure or armor, Callie found it a comfort, but conversely, as she saw the battle damage, it made her wary. Anything that could tear open the hull and crush the ship’s structural supports was beyond deadly to the crew. None of them could ever hope to survive the scale of such forces. They were little more than specks of dust in comparison.
Sometimes it was difficult to comprehend that scale and where she lay upon it, so Callie leveled her head and walked along the hull, ignoring the battle damage as she passed below it.
After a few minutes of treading across the secondary hull, she paused and twisted her head to check the lattice of supports around her, eventually spotting the lone figure she had been searching for.
He was above her, though that was simply a matter of perspective without gravity, and he was walking along one of the larger supports. That in itself wasn’t odd. The support itself was plenty wide enough to provide a solid footing, but what caught her attention was the fact that he was limping.
Callie grabbed the mag-anchor off her belt, activated it, and tossed it up onto the support. She pulled herself to it, and then clambered onto the same orientation the Admiral held, nearly perpendicular to where she’d been before.
He turned from where she had appeared, concealing what he held in his hands. “Ensign Smith, why are you here?”
The question was cold, but not hostile. It probably would have silenced most of the crew, but she refused to be intimidated. “How did you know it was me?”
“Because you are the one they always send.”
Callie smiled. That was true. She often volunteered, but she was frequently thrust into ‘dealing with the Admiral’ as the others called it. “Are you injured, Admiral?”
“No.”
He squared his shoulders and continued walking down toward where the support met the secondary hull. He offered no further comment, but his movements were stiff, an uneven hitch in his step.
She started to follow him. “You are limping. Let me help you.”
He stopped abruptly once more, still not turning to face her. “Return to the others, Ensign.”
“I can help,” she insisted. “There’s no reason for you to be out here alone.”
The Admiral lowered his head for a moment, then held out his hand once more, indicating a one, then a two. “Switch channels.”
Perplexed, Callie reached up to her helmet and clicked through the radio channels until she reached the one he had indicated – one none of the other repair crews would know to tune into. She waited until she saw him adjust his radio, then asked, “Is there something wrong, Admiral?”
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“I will never understand why you are not afraid of me, Ensign.” Ordinarily, people did not need to be ordered to leave him alone. And she, when ordered, refused to do so.
“You have never been cruel to me,” she said, creeping a few steps closer, almost certain he would command her to stop, but he didn’t.
“One must question if that small mercy outweighs the damage done to others.”
“I do know what they say about you.” Callie had heard all the rumors they had aboard ship. They were colorful and cruel. She might be young, but she was not ignorant. The Admiral was difficult to read, yes, but he was calm. When she had seen so many loud and angry presences in the factories of Sagittarion, such a placid calm, cold or not, was a welcome change. “I was worried after the nuke, you know. I didn’t think you were going to wake up.” The possibility had terrified her. “I thought they would deport me back to Sagittarion, and I was afraid. That’s not home anymore.” She felt it had never truly been a home, just a filthy, overpopulated prison. Ninety-nine percent of those born there would die there, never knowing a breath of truly fresh air, never knowing the sensation of non-acid rain, and never having a warm bed with regular meals.
“This ship has been a good home to me,” Callie continued. She felt safe here, even had people that she considered to be a sort of family – at least the closest thing she had ever known. “Many of the crew feel the same way, and I think you do too.” He could act aloof all he wanted, but they all knew he acted differently when the ship’s safety and security got involved. “We’re all worried about losing what we have here. We want to help you take care of the Singularity because she’s our ship too. Chief Ty and Havermeyer… I think they just don’t know how.” It pained her to see them at odds. Ty and Havermeyer were like big brothers to her. They had never been anything short of kind. They had welcomed her to the crew with open arms, despite her being the youngest and smallest engineer. “They could use your guidance, Admiral. You know this ship better than anyone.”
The Admiral raised his gaze to the torn gash in the outer hull. It was clean now, lacking the jagged edges and debris the damage would have originally held. Simply cleaning up was a good portion of the work the repair crews did. They would identify and sort material, recycling what they could. Cleaned and smoothed, the damage looked much less severe, even purposeful at certain angles, but it remained an open wound. “I must apologize then, Ensign,” he spoke softly, “because I have no guidance to offer them.”
Callie stepped closer, trying to make sense of that answer, only then to see what he held in his hand. A bundle of thin white tendrils spilled over the Admiral’s fingers, more of their length wound around his arm and resting in the crook of his elbow. Neurofibers. There could be no mistaking them, yet she had never seen so many of the fibers gathered in one place. They were so small and thin, odd-looking in the light as their free ends shifted and twisted. A few ends hung limp, but most wavered in the air, as if probing the space around them for contact. Given everything that had just been said by Chief Ty, she felt a jolt of fear. “That’s not normal, is it?”
Admiral Gives shifted the mass in his hand, seeing the way their translucent color caught the illumination of the floodlights hung in throughout the ship’s damaged volume. “No, it most certainly is not.”
Callie swallowed, her throat turning dry. “I wasn’t here when the Matador sank. Do you think it started this way too?” Strange anomalous growth that hurt nothing and no one at first?
“I do not know.”
She supposed he had no way to know. The Singularity’s involvement had come long after the cataclysm had begun. Almost every member of the Matador’s crew had been dead by then, and those that weren’t had been in no condition to speak of the event. Years later, they still weren’t able to revisit the memory. “I know what the others say about those fibers.” They were incredibly dangerous, and the rumors alone scared her. “But looking at them, I find it hard to believe.” Those hair-like strands seemed too thin to be capable of such carnage.
The neurofibers in the Admiral’s hand could have quite easily punctured his suit. They were thin and invasive, capable of burrowing into any system. An environmental suit would hardly be a challenge. A fair number of the Matador’s crew had managed to suit up before the neurofibers found them. It had not spared them, but this was not the Matador. “This ship will not hurt you, Ensign.”
“I want to believe that, Admiral.” As she stood here in the floodlights placed by the repair crews, she desperately wanted to believe that she was safe in the only home that she had ever truly known. “But what makes you so confident?”
In all honesty, nothing could make the Admiral so confident. Nothing should. As much as he knew about this ship, her components and systems, this was still an anomaly. The Black Box should not be growing so severely. He could not fathom any end form or function to its action, nor could he explain the structure’s strange lack of fatigue. Yet, “Thirty-nine years.” He had been stationed aboard this ship for thirty-nine years. By a large margin, she had been a home to him longer than anywhere else. The time dilation of travelling near lightspeed on patrol meant that he had not aged nearly forty years in their entirety, but he had seen the passage of that time on the worlds, and it was a lifetime in every sense of the word. “Singularity has had every opportunity to wound me, yet has spared my life more times than I can count.” Even now, as he held the neurofibers, he knew how they could pierce his suit and then the skin below. He knew how a sudden thrust from the engines could turn him into a red paste. And yet, he felt safe, safe in ways he never had planet-side. “I owe this ship everything, Ensign. I cannot resent her oddities because without them, I would never have received a command.”
“I don’t believe that,” Callie said as she took a step closer, mystified by the movements of the fibers. They were so alien when compared to the bulky, physical nature of the Singularity’s other systems. They looked so delicate.
“It may be hard to believe now, but a lot can change in nearly three decades.” Admiral Gives knew that better than most. “Thirty years ago, I was the token lower-class citizen the fleet threw to the press to make them look inclusive. I made Commander due to a political accident.” He had served as a pawn to those above him. “Fifteen years ago, I had become the deadliest commander to ever serve. I was so feared that the president of humanity’s grand republic would not dare challenge me – the great Steel Prince.” A moniker the worlds had bestowed with cruel intent - one that he resented. “Five years ago, I was known only as a recluse, a man broken by the worlds and driven mad by deep space, unable and unwilling to leave the seat of his power.” Those rumors had been no kinder to him than any other. “In my service to this ship, I have lived the lives of three men, Ensign. It seems every few years the worlds invent a new persona for me to don, each chiseled by their knife and never molded by my own hands.” He did not resent the worlds for that. He was simply uninterested in how they chose to portray him.
“This ship has carried me through all of that, though she suffered struggles of her own. Fifty years ago, the worlds adored her for bringing an end to the most terrible War humanity would ever endure.” Or so they thought. “Fifteen years ago, they were so horrified of the crimes they forced her to commit, they stripped her of the Flagship title. From that moment on, they did everything they could to forget her.” Command had done such a flawless job forgetting that bloodshed that they had come to believe the ship was truly incapable, nothing more than a garbage scow fit for the scrapyards.
There was a gentleness in the way Admiral Gives held the neurofibers, not so obvious as one held a glass plate, but still a cautious slowness to the way he handled them. Callie imagined Havermeyer would have interacted with them the same way, though perhaps with more reverence. “You believe the fibers are a part of the ship, don’t you?”
“The neurofibers reach every system aboard this ship. They surround us as much as her structure. I do not believe it fair to differentiate them from any other system. While it is true that if they turned against us, we would be helpless, the same is also true for many of the ship’s other systems.” The Black Box did not deserve such specific ire. Its faulty record-keeping had bailed him out on multiple occasions. “We cannot survive without life support, the inertial dampeners, water or power distribution.”
“But those are the Singularity’s systems, Admiral. They’re not so…” she focused again on the fibers and their strange undulating movement, “…alien.”
“The Black Box was installed aboard this ship twenty-seven years ago, Ensign. You, nor any of the current crew, have ever known her to be without it.” He was the only one left who remembered those days. “Rightfully, it should be no more alien to you than any of the ship’s other systems.”
Callie watched the Admiral turn and continue down to where the support they stood upon met the secondary hull. Gently, he knelt and draped the length of the fibers loosely around the base of the support where they would be out of the way. Most of the fibers simply allowed that manipulation, but a few tried to cling to his arm. He did not panic, just patiently gathered the stragglers up and placed them with the others. The movement was very calm, almost practiced, and as Callie turned to see the other supports in the damaged line, she could see that he had done the same for them. “Why are you moving them?”
“Because Chief Ty decided to cut them.”
“Isn’t that what he should do?” Even Callie, who had been on the ship only a year, could see the anomaly in the fibers’ growth. “There are more of them now. We see them in places we never did before.” Those white fibers had previously only been found in the wiring conduits that ran power lines and optical command cables. They had never been so prominently displayed on portions of the ship’s structure, twisting and crawling up the metal like veins.
“These fibers are integrated with the entirety of the ship, Ensign. They reach between systems, gathering information and transmitting signals. When they discover or endure damage, they report it. In that sense, they serve the same function as your nerves. I cannot prove that severing them causes pain as we know it, but if a substantial amount of them were to be abruptly cut without warning or cause, then it would surely be disorienting to a machine that knows it had not been injured, yet feels it has been anyway.” That confusion would have been frightening, especially to the ghost, already drowning beneath so many other demands. “I will not put my ship through that.”
“You really care about her.”
Admiral Gives took the mag-anchor off his belt and twisted it to activate the electromagnets within. He tossed it over to the next beam in the damaged line. “We are not native to the void between the stars, Ensign. Singularity sustains us, just as we, in turn, sustain her. She gives us air and heat and in return we complete maintenance and make repairs. Our bond to her is one of symbiosis. She will not harm her crew, even if we, unthinkingly, harm her.”
That was neither an admission or a denial, but Callie knew the Admiral was rarely so straightforward. She watched him kick off and pull himself over to the next beam. He flinched as he landed, but made no audible indication of pain. Atop the structural support, he looked small. The scale of the Singularity’s structure would have dwarfed anyone to insignificance. Out here, it seemed a monochromatic world of its own: crisp light and dark shadows cast over unforgiving angles. It seemed foolish that any one person could hope to accomplish anything meaningful, yet the Admiral didn’t hesitate. Making his way to the top of the support, he stepped over the hole the railgun had punched and knelt down once more. She could not see how he did it, the bulk of his suit’s recycling pack blocked her view, but when he stood, he had gathered another handful of the neurofibers. As he held their ends, he bent over and wrapped their extent around his arm, continuing to gather up their length as he moved back toward the secondary hull.
In a way, the action saddened Callie. How had this become his responsibility alone? “Can I help you, Admiral?”
“You may go get the others now, Ensign. This is the last support. The fibers will be out of the way as they continue repairs.” Eventually, he imagined they would crawl back up the support’s length, but it would take time. “If you stay to work on these repairs, Ensign, then encourage the others to leave the fibers alone. I recognize they are a frightening oddity. The unknown is always frightening and I cannot defend them. Truthfully, I do not know why they have grown so much. Still, I do not believe it is meant to be harmful.”
“Alright, Admiral.” She saw no point in debating it further. “And thank you, for not sending me away.” Second only to Cortana, she was the newest addition of the crew. He had no real reason to interact with her, yet was always willing. Sometimes more willing with her than he was with others.
He paused and looked over to Smith, but she was already moving back toward the airlock, her suit-covered stature growing ever smaller as she walked back along the hull. He contemplated saying something more, because Smith’s genuine honesty always deserved something more, but he said nothing, because it was not his place. Smith deserved comfort. She deserved to know that her home would not be torn from her. So many of the crew deserved that comfort, and Admiral Gives could not give it to them because the neurofibers he held in his hands could very well be a symptom of an impending cataclysm.
I’m sorry, old friend. All that he had done, all that he had tried to do, to calm and shield the ghost had not been enough. That was his burden to bear.
Severing the neurofibers had hurt the ghost, as he suspected it would. Still, the amount of fibers Ty had cut was effectively microscopic. On the scale of a machine so large, what Ty had done was less than a papercut. The problem was that the ghost had been taken entirely aback. If she had possessed awareness of the problem, if she had expected it, then likely, she could have steeled herself to it without issue. But her awareness was not absolute, and neither was her control. She had not triggered the Black Box’s growth and was not consciously controlling it. It was acting beyond her control which was a direct symptom of a cataclysm in itself. Yet the Box had not become malicious. It still recognized the Admiral, whether that meant his actual identity or simply as someone with no intent to harm it, he did not know. It did not matter. He had made a promise.
Limping to the base of the support, the Admiral regretted his decision to not properly size his mag-boots. They had built large blisters on his feet as he walked, and by the wetness of his socks and the pain of each step, he knew that those had been mangled and deeper wounds carved in their place. Still, he pushed that discomfort aside and knelt to place the fibers in his hands down. Quietly, his helmet radio crackled, proceeding an incoming transmission.
“Base to Stonewall.”
Stonewall. The callsign he’d earned as an Arcbird pilot a seeming lifetime ago. “Hello, Base,” he answered the robotic voice of the ship’s automated protocols. “I read you, go ahead.”
“System is functioning.”
“Yes,” he agreed, gently removing the last of the neurofibers that clung to his glove.
“Functionality is suitable for commanding officer’s continued use.”
Admiral Gives paused there, watching the white fibers shift and slither as Havermeyer’s words came back to him. A blessing to you, a blade that shall never dull. “I don’t care about that.” This old ship had seen him through so much already. “You were my friend even when your structure flaked apart in my hands.” He had never considered that a failure.
“Commanding officer’s interference is no longer required.”
In reality, no ship’s commander should be out taking spacewalks, having to intervene between the ship and repair crews. “You know I don’t mind.” Truthfully, he often felt more at ease vanishing off to remote parts of the ship to work on the machinery. People exhausted him.
There was a pause, but then the voice of the automated systems spoke again. “System controls are operating below capacity. Alterations unregistered.”
The transmission came with no emotion, the automated voice speaking with odd breaks and ends. Still, it was the familiar voice of a friend. “I know you did not intend these changes.” The ghost had not even been aware of them. “I am not afraid of them. You have not hurt anyone.”
“System will submit to complete operational inspection.”
“I know what I need to know.” He may not know what had prompted these changes or what their final form may be, but he did not need to dissect a friend to know that they were still a friend. “I do not require answers, but I believe you do, and I think you know where to get them.” It would not be easy. “He will not be kind if you engage him like this, so pull yourself together, my friend. Show him who you really are.” She was far more than the voice of a machine. “And if he’s anything less than kind, I’d be more than happy to toss him out the airlock for you.”
“Roger, Stonewall,” the voice of the automated protocols said, flowing a little easier now. “Your defense is appreciated.”
“Well,” the Admiral replied, “that is how I got my callsign.”