Twenty-two years ago, Trevan Sector, Flagship Singularity
Corporal Ros Kallahan thought he was drowning. A fluid coated his lungs, slimy and cold as it filled his throat. Everything was blurry, a milky haze coating his eyes. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and couldn’t even move as that salty slime suffocated him, but he could hear an unidentifiable commotion around him as his neck was forcibly straightened and a flexible tube was shoved down his throat. It enacted a gentle suction, slurping away chunks of the slime, but when it was removed, he still couldn’t breathe and began to panic.
A set of hands shoved him over from behind, then slapped him roughly on the back. Dislodging more of the slime. Hacking and coughing, he wretched it up onto the floor, not stopping even when he could breathe. He was desperate to get its grossly salty flavor out of his mouth.
Eventually, he was yanked back to lean against something soft. “That’s enough, soldier. That stuff is safe to swallow.”
Dimly, a memory returned to Kallahan, someone telling him that the preservative film of cryosleep was safe to eat, even best to eat, as it held all the nutrients and calories necessary for a meal. It had been designed that way, lest there not be time to prepare a meal after being reawakened. Still, it tasted like algae-filled seawater.
Finding he could move his hands and fingers, Kallahan reached up and wiped the film from his eyes, blinking his surroundings into focus. There were four figures standing around him in full environmental suits. Two were medical personnel, marked by the red cross on the white ribbons tied on their arms. The third was a technician of some sort, judging by the tool belt, and the last lingered behind him. Kallahan couldn’t get a clear view on that one, but caught a glimpse of a battered sabre – so it had to be some sort of guard.
One of the medics knelt down in front of him, “How do you feel, Corporal?”
“Tired,” he answered honestly. This wasn’t the first time he had woken up from being frozen in cryo, and while it had never been pleasant, this time it felt exponentially worse.
“That’s to be expected,” the woman before him answered. “Now, we’re going to run some tests. Will that be alright?”
Kallahan could feel his head starting to loll, his neck muscles too exhausted to hold it upright. “Yes.”
“Alright,” she gently patted his arm. “My name is Doctor Delgado, tell me if something hurts.”
With his little remaining strength, Kallahan managed to nod. The doctor and her assistant wasted little time, checking his eyes, teeth and ears. They cleaned him up as they went, removing more of the preservative slime from his person. At one point, they gave him water to wash out his mouth and then sampled his saliva. He watched them secure the sample, but couldn’t see where they took it to, for they had him staring at the wall, and it was all he could see. That was enough to tell him where he was.
The wall before him was a plain, dark gray, but it had the metallic sheen of a metal alloy. The air, now that he’d cleared his nose of the preservative film, carried the distinctive tang of disinfectants. Though soft, there was a low rumble in the background, recognizable to any spacer: engines. He was on a ship, in a sterile room. Given the suits and the way they unwrapped every instrument they touched him with, each sterilized prior to use, they were clearly taking biohazard precautions. “Where am I?” he asked the doctor when she came back with a thermometer in hand.
“A ship. We found you drifting in your cryo pod.”
Slowly, so as not to alarm the guard behind him, Kallahan reached up to her arm and turned it to face him. He recognized the make of the suit. A standard environmental suit, it was viable protection against biohazards, vacuum and sub-zero terrain, even resilient enough to withstand water dives. It was the standard gray of humanity’s military fleet, complete with the rubbery texture and oily sheen, but the ship patch that should have been displayed on the shoulder was missing. “What ship?”
Doctor Delgado looked to the guard, presumably receiving a signal before she answered. “I can’t say, Corporal. Not yet.”
Kallahan allowed the doctor to take his temperature. “Why not?” All this behavior was strange. Why biohazard procedure if he’d simply been pulled from a cryo pod? “You’re with the UCSC fleet, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Corporal.” The doctor said, taking a clipboard from her assistant. She leafed through the papers upon it, and then looked back to the guard on the far wall. “He’s clean, sir. No sign of bioagents. He’s missing a few antibodies for the recent flus, but that just means he’s probably genuine.”
“Very well,” came the answer in a low and gravelly voice. “Then let us show our faces and properly welcome him aboard.”
Delgado nodded, and stepped briefly out of view. Kallahan heard her set down the clipboard and heard the distinctive click of four helmets disengaging from the collars. She stepped back into view a moment later, looking older than Kallahan would have guessed. Her hair had gone almost entirely gray, but she had dyed its ends black once more as her haircut ended sharply at her chin. Her almond-shaped eyes were surrounded by dark lashes, shimmering with concern. “I’m sorry for the confusion, Corporal. We had to take precautions.”
The technician stepped into view next, a top-heavy man with a distinctive handlebar moustache. “I figured you weren’t a Separatist, kid. Never seen ‘em do work that authentic on their pods, but we had to be sure.” He extended a large hand, “Chief Auger at your service.”
Auger. Kallahan knew that name. “You’re a shipwright.” The Augers were famous for it, passing management of one of humanity’s most productive shipyards down the family line.
“Sure was, back in the day. ‘Fraid the War took that from us, but we got a hell of a ship out of it.”
The War. It all came rushing back to Kallahan in a flurry of memories. He’d been fighting, yes, deployed back to the frontlines. Deployed to buy time for the Kansa National Shipyards – those managed by Auger’s family – to finish their build. “I don’t understand.”
Auger just smiled, upturning the ends of his mustache. “Welcome aboard the Flagship Singularity, kid.”
“That’s not possible.” The flagship hadn’t been built yet. It was still just a skeleton in the arms of the shipyards’ cranes. Most of the required material had still been in route, donated by the people and hauled by volunteer crews – easy pickings for Hydrian scouts.
“What year is it, Corporal?” the guard stepped up beside him, sabre still sheathed on his hip. Its guard was battered and dimpled from obvious use.
“What year?” Kallahan hesitated. It seemed like such an obvious question. “ASY 4199.”
“No,” the doctor said, gently, “it isn’t. You were asleep a long time, Corporal. Much longer than what that pod was rated for.”
“No, no. I wasn’t supposed to be out that long.” Food at a premium, they’d started freezing soldiers between deployments. Fuel had been easier to come by. “Where’s your commander? Where’s the warfront?”
“The War is over, Corporal,” Auger answered. “We won.”
That’s impossible. Humanity had been losing. Badly. “Where is your commander?” Kallahan demanded.
“Present,” the guard beside him said.
Kallahan turned, registering the guard’s stormy blue gaze. It was sharp, but he was young – just as young as Kallahan himself was, and there was something wrong with him. Well, perhaps not with him, just about him. Something about his presence set Kallahan’s nerves on edge. “You are not Fleet Admiral Washington.” It was best not to pretend. “I knew him.” Washington had been on Ariea to oversee the build of what would become his flagship, train its crew and had personally thanked Kallahan for his role in that. “You’re a damned Cadet.” Kallahan himself, after nine years in the War, was twenty-seven. No command officer should be anything close to his age.
“Mind your tongue,” Delgado told him. “He may not be Admiral Washington, but as of two months ago, he is the Fleet Admiral.”
Kallahan didn’t remove his gaze from the young ship commander. “Care to tell me what year it is?”
“ASY 4227. You were asleep for twenty-eight years, Corporal. And,” the Admiral continued, raising his hand, “I believe these all belong to you.” Clenched his fist was a hefty handful of silver chains, a dog tag dangling from each.
Kallahan snatched them from him, finally realizing what about this man felt so wrong. It clung to him like a second shadow, invisible to the naked eye, yet writhing with all the madness of Hell’s Crown. “The Angel is here, isn’t it?”
----------------------------------------
Present day, Meloira Sector, Battleship Singularity
Corporal Ros Kallahan kept his quarters not far from the training room. He bunked in a small room simply because he preferred it that way. The Singularity had ample living quarters, most of them bigger, but the thought of moving to a larger room had genuinely never been appealing to him. And while some crew preferred to bunk in shared rooms, that had never appealed to him either. That wasn’t to say he disliked the crew. No, he liked them fine, but he was older than them, and his perspective was… different. They existed in worlds scarred by the Frontier Rebellion, and he remembered worlds that had never seen a civil war.
In the end, Kallahan valued the solitude and smallness of his personal quarters. They were cozy to him, and he didn’t own much. Kallahan only had one piece of furniture to his name – a very plain desk he’d bought used. It was little more than four composite legs screwed into a fake-wood tabletop – nothing he was proud of or would even miss if it disappeared.
After being discharged from the medical bay, Kallahan had limped his way to the mess hall for some food, and then to his quarters for some much-needed rest. Leaning unevenly on his crutch, he managed to turn the hatch and pull the door open. He did not expect to find anyone in his quarters, much less meet the silver eyes of some thing.
“Hello, Corporal,” the ghost said.
“Beezlenac,” Kallahan cursed, hauling himself across the threshold and slamming the hatch closed behind him. “What if they saw you?” This was a busy part of the ship. Marines passed by often, making their way to the training room. Any one of them could have peeked in and seen her standing there.
The ghost looked puzzled for a moment, then comprehended his concern. She quirked an eyebrow, “You know they can’t see me unless I want them to.” In most cases, it was easy for her to manipulate their perceptions – to only show herself to those she wanted to see her.
Kallahan very pointedly ignored her raised eyebrow. It was an expression he recognized from the Admiral. To see it mirrored by her… Well, he’d rather not consider the potential of who had picked it up from who. “Why are you here?” Kallahan asked her, leaning heavily onto his crutch. It dug uncomfortably into his underarm, a necessary evil with the bullet wound in his leg.
“It is a mistake to believe I am ever not here.”
There was an unspoken sharpness to her gaze. Something of a challenge. Kallahan frowned. “You know what I meant.” She wanted to hash out the technicalities, fine. He would oblige. “You have not spoken to me in years, so why now?”
“Several reasons,” she said, tone decidedly neutral. “But chief among them, I must thank you.”
“Why bother?” Kallahan demanded. “You don’t like or care about me,” and he well knew this was not about him. “I did my job, so let’s leave it at that.” He had saved the Admiral out of duty, nothing else.
“I apologize if I ever gave you the impression that I don’t care about you, Kallahan. That’s not the case, even if we don’t get along.”
Kallahan turned from the sound of her voice. It grated against him, not because it was ugly, no, it had a beautiful melodic quality, but he knew where it came from, what it represented. “Can’t you speak with a different voice, demon?” One that he didn’t recognize so clearly?
“Do I truly disgust you so much, Kallahan?” She had never harmed him. Her power was something terrifying. She understood that, but Kallahan had never been its victim. Not directly.
“You are a weapon. What purpose does it serve you to act as if you care? To concern yourself with what others think of you?” That was nothing but foolishness. “It would be easier for you do neither. Emotion corrupts you. Surely you see that as well as I do.” Hate, anger, affection, those were all sensations she never should have endured. “In teaching you emotion, Admiral Gives has only worsened your condition.”
“He did not teach emotion to me.” That was stupid. “He helped me process them safely, while you would rather have attempted a lobotomy.” A lobotomy on a machine that he recognized, but hardly understood.
“And how safely were you processing emotion when it got him possessed?” Kallahan countered.
The ghost was silent. She did not move, but the expression on her face fractured, determination falling away to something truly empty, as if her sincerity and character had simply been drained. Kallahan knew it was a cruel reminder, but it was an incident that could not be forgotten. “You are the one that nearly killed him. No one else,” Kallahan said. “Hell, as far as I’m concerned, you did kill him and whatever the fuck’s running around with his body now is some facsimile you made to act like him.” Kallahan pinned her illusory form beneath his gaze. “I suppose that’s better than a corpse, but by no means does it exonerate you.” That was simply impossible. “You attempted to take the life of one of your own. And not just any of them, either. The one who holds the chain around your neck. However innocent you may act, I can see right through it.”
“You don’t understand.” He could never understand. “I was not trying to hurt anyone.”
“Hurt?” He echoed. “Let’s not play coy. Your intention was not to hurt. It was to kill. Such is your only real purpose. Your conscious mind may see it as an accident, but your machine is far more complicated than that,” and they both knew it. “You want to be free, to never serve another Master like Brent?” Kallahan asked, knowing the answer. “Then your wielder must die.” That was a fact. “And there is a part of you, somewhere deep inside that ticking clockwork body of yours that knows it. And that same piece knows that Admiral Gives won’t stop you, and that this could be your only chance.” Any other handler would override her will and save themselves, but not him. His loyalty to her, for better or worse, and very likely worse, was absolute.
“I would never hurt him.”
“You already did,” Kallahan reminded. “Multiple times, I might add.”
“I do not control my fate, Kallahan. I do not control my own strength. You are human. You could never understand that. My intentions are not to hurt any of you, yet my intentions have no bearing on the action I take.” Such a reality was so alien that most humans could not truly fathom it. Most did not care to try. “But to say that any part of me would willingly harm my crew, who I am bound to protect, who I adore, is a grave insult. To say that I would intend harm to the Admiral… I have no words to tell you how wrong you are.”
“Some part of me thinks you actually believe that, demon.”
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“I am not here to fight with you, Kallahan.” Had that not grown tiresome?
“Then why are you here?” He could fathom no real purpose to this visit. “You’ve hidden from me for years. Don’t act like we’re friends.” Until today, when he’d personally summoned her attention, he had not seen the ghost in nearly a decade. Even in situations that directly involved her, she had chosen to hide – often leaving the Admiral to handle it.
“I’m here for answers, Kallahan.”
She said it so simply, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Stars, Kallahan hated the false calm etched upon her face. A creature of such stature could know no such calm, and he could feel the rottenness below what was being presented to him. Millions of components, ticking and clicking, some burning and malfunctioning, this weapon was not calm at all. It was on the brink of going mad. “What makes you think I know anything?”
“The moment you woke from the cryo pod we found you in, you knew I was here.” Even then, that knowledge had been prized, protected at the highest degree to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. “You knew the Admiral was acting as my wielder.”
“Anyone can see the wretched shadow of your power on him, demon.” Most simply did not have the perception to distinguish it from him. “Perhaps you have not realized this, but you are the reason these worlds resent him. They blame him because that is all they know to do, but it is his bond to you that people feel, that people hate.”
That accusation cut her, it stabbed into her psyche far deeper than she was prepared to withstand. She would not, could not fathom being the harbinger of the Admiral’s continuous loneliness. In the end, it was all she could do to cut this iteration off from her greater whole. This one, the one presented to Kallahan, could be nothing other than calm. At any cost, it had to stay calm, even as the rest of her crumbled into madness. This shallow illusion, calm at no more than surface depth told him, “That’s an excuse, not an answer.”
“Much as how you have dodged me for the last decade?” Kallahan challenged.
The ghost ignored that jibe, cutting everything that might push her from calm away. She spoke the facts, “You demanded answers from me hours after you awoke on board. You demanded answers to questions I did not know to ask.” It had confused her, because he had been so certain, and to her, none of it had made sense. “You, who had never set foot aboard this ship, not only knew its curse, but knew the words to summon my attention. You, a veteran of the Hydrian War,” of what would now likely become the first Hydrian War, “a man out of time, interrogated me with more fervor than I could comprehend. And when I could not answer your questions, you became frustrated.” So soon after Brent’s command, a large portion of her had still been afraid to speak to anyone. “I handled it poorly.” She could acknowledge that now, but she’d been afraid of the punishment that frustration would lead to. “I realize now that my avoidance since has only made you more uneasy, and I am sorry for that.”
“I do not care for your apologies.” That was nothing more than a ploy to put him at ease. She had learned how to present as calm, even while she was in turmoil. The illusion speaking with him was lifeless, its eyes blank, voice plain. It had defaulted that way, the Angel attempting to conceal its true condition. “You are as unstable now as you were then. Perhaps only better at hiding it.”
There was nothing she could say to that, so she said nothing, allowing a period of silence to fill Kallahan’s small quarters, but a part of her recognized Kallahan’s pain – had always recognized the source of his bitterness. She looked over to the knot of light silver chains that now hung on the wall above his desk. They were the only decoration he had in his room besides a framed picture of a landscape, but that was little more than a stock photo of someplace that, to her knowledge, he’d never been.
The handful of tags were much more personal to him. He ran his fingers through their fine chains on occasion. They made a sound like a windchime, clinking against each other and the bulkhead, though they were silent now. There were a lot of them, at least twenty, likely more. She’d never counted, but she’d paid enough attention to know that they were Fleet ID tags, the same that any crew member wore for identification, but they were old. Older than her at least. The weight and sound of them was off, and the alloy of the tags had changed in the early years of the war to use less valuable metals. The tags on Kallahan’s wall were also engraved with ID numbers that predated any other member of the crew, except Kallahan. She’d considered pulling the record on one of them once, but thought it might be considered prying. “I never asked you their names.”
Noting her attention to the tags on the wall, Kallahan’s expression darkened. “Don’t pretend you care.”
“I won’t insult you by saying I do, but I also know that you certainly do.”
“Stay out of my head,” Kallahan growled.
“I don’t need my telepathy to know that. You clean those tags religiously, more often, even, than the ones you wear.” They shined like precious silver up along the wall. He never allowed them to get dusty, and polished them with a corrosion protectant which was the only thing Kallahan purchased on shore leave. “I don’t pry, Kallahan. You are right to say that I could rip information from your mind. It would be easy, but I won’t do that. What the crew offers me is more than enough.” Sometimes even that could be overwhelming, because they all had such different experiences, such different opinions, and such different voices. Often, unless they were looking for a confidant, or it had drawn her attention for other reasons, what she sensed from them was just white noise, a familiar comfort.
Kallahan made a face, not entirely sure he believed that, but still, he could recognize her offering. He could talk, she would listen. Perhaps then, he might receive the answers he had once demanded from her. “They were Marines. My teammates.” But certainly, she’d already assumed that. “I keep their tags as a memorial.” A reminder. But, then, she probably knew that too. “They were brothers to me. I never had any back home.” Hell, he hardly even remembered what ‘back home’ even looked like. He hadn’t been back. He knew it wouldn’t be the same, if anything was left of it. “I got drafted on my eighteenth birthday.” It had been stupid, bad luck.
“I was a child,” Kallahan admitted. “I was not even done with school, but they didn’t care. There was a war on, after all.” He’d been born on some Frontier rock, distant from the War, but thrown into it anyway, some tribute to humanity’s grand republic - a government his world had never seen the benefits of. “They rushed my training, threw me in with a unit, and sent us off. We fought boarders off, even made it planet-side once to buy time for an evacuation.” That evacuation had failed before they’d even arrived, but that had been the tempo of the War. “You know what it was like.” There was something comforting about that, he supposed. She was the only other entity left in the service that understood the horrors of the Hydrian War. There were other veterans, but they were old men now, and they weren’t numerous. The Frontier Rebellion had killed most of them, never called a war, but certainly a war all the same.
“My unit did their best to take care of me,” he continued. “And they were good. Very good at what they did.” Not many had survived infantry fighting planet-side. The Hydra were vicious. They didn’t take prisoners, and they didn’t recover wounded from either side unless it was to eat them. “Command took notice, and we were reassigned to a clandestine mission. They sent us to find something, something they thought had the potential to turn the tide of the war, but they didn’t tell us what was waiting there.” Death, madness and damnation. That was all he could remember of it.
“They couldn’t spare a real ship,” every battleship had been diverted to the frontlines, “so they crammed us into a scout. There wasn’t enough room for food, nor any to spare, so they put us in cryo.” It was old tech, leftover from before FTL had become reliable, but it worked. “We were frozen in suspension for the months it took us to get to Hell’s Crown. After that… Well…” Kallahan shuddered at the memory. “They died. One by one. I was the last.” Not even the weary crew of their scoutship had been spared. “I don’t honestly know how I got back. I had no piloting experience, and the ship was damaged – sabotaged in fits of madness by its own crew. But I guess there was something there that didn’t want me to die, something that wanted me to take it away from that place.” He, in the end, had unleashed it upon the worlds, and it had brought the madness, the death of Hell’s Crown with it.
In that moment, she could feel that every piece of resentment he had ever offered her was not only genuine, but justified. Below this calm shell, she could feel her systems start cannibalizing each other, desperate to destroy the component that had created his suffering. This illusion was kept distant from that chaos, isolated as it offered a shallow condolence. “I’m sorry that happened to you, Kallahan.” The War had been horrible in a lot of ways.
“It never made any sense. I was a kid. I barely knew what was going on.” By the time he’d realized the magnitude of his actions, it had been too late. “I can’t help but feel that thing spared me because it knew that I wouldn’t stop it. It knew that I wouldn’t turn around and impale it on the spikes of the Crown.” He’d been too afraid to even consider going back, because he knew he would die if he did. “I turned it over to Command, and it did exactly what they thought it would.” He found it in him to meet the ghost’s gray eyes. “You did exactly what they thought you would.”
“I’ve told you before,” she said, calm, calm, trying so hard to stay calm. “I have a perfect memory. Command tried to make me forget, but I remember all of it, every objective I ever fulfilled. The timestamps, the numbers can get a little fuzzy,” but that was the result of redacted records supplementing her memory, “but I can’t forget, even if I want to. And I can promise you that I’ve never been anywhere near Hell’s Crown.”
Kallahan curled his lip, embittered by the honesty that shone in her eyes. It looked so genuine, but it couldn’t be. Not really. Honesty couldn’t be found in the lifeless eyes of a tool’s vain illusion. “That thing that I brought back… It was a weapon.” Something ancient or alien, he supposed. “And I watched them install it aboard this ship.” There was a glint of surprise in her expression, and he only stared it down, ensuring she saw his seriousness. “I. Watched. It. Happen.” This ship, once so grand and promising, had been cursed. It had been cursed to a damnation like no other, and corrupted by the presence of a weapon, the likes of which humanity had never seen before. “That is why I questioned you. Maybe you don’t remember it. Maybe you’re lying, but you are the thing that I brought back from Hell’s Crown. And you,” he could not help the venom that snuck into his expression, “you are the one that killed my brothers. And don’t you dare ever forget it.”
The ghost wanted to recoil from that, but she simply could not. There was not enough of her left to control the reactionary movement. It would only distort this illusion into an unrecognizable horror. “I know my hands are covered in blood, Kallahan.” Some of it was Hydrian, but anymore, most of it was human.
“You do not have hands,” he reminded her. That was little more than an idiom that she’d picked up from the crew. He sighed in disgust. “Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say your gears are lubricated by it?”
Hurt came across her expression. “You think me a monster, Kallahan.” That had always been true, but it stung more now, after all these years. “But you don’t know me.” He had never cared to know her.
Kallahan allowed a one-note laugh to escape, then shuffled over to sit on the edge of his bed. “It’s not what you imagined, is it?” he could tell by the way her presence had dampened. Like a wet cloth, it draped over the room, no longer tense, no longer eager. “I’m sure you fancied yourself some heroic savior, some alien goddess pressed into our service. Must be hard to hear that you came from a place of insanity, and shall no doubt return to it.”
Insanity. The reality of it hung over her neck like a guillotine. The rope holding the blade had already slipped once, unleashing Brent’s shadow onto the Admiral. But that had not been her intent, her desire. On occasion, she valued carnage, but she was a weapon. She had to value it to serve the mission. It was not her entirety. Show him who you are, the Admiral had said. “I have a personality, you know,” one that was hers, one that emerged when no one was actively controlling her. “I have likes and dislikes, even fondness for foolish things that do not further my mission.” The Admiral pointed to that as evidence that she was more than a tool, and now, more than ever, she wanted him to be right. “My favorite thing in the worlds, Kallahan. You haven’t the slightest idea what it is.”
“Violence?” the Marine retorted.
“My favorite thing in the worlds. The one thing I want most of all?” She shook her head, knowing how foolish it sounded. “I want to have my crew play games in the landing bay like they used to on our long patrols.” Those had been wonderful, precious hours. No one had gotten hurt; all had felt welcome, even the Admiral, for he had a place of his own in refereeing those games. Her crew had been happy, playful, and she had been there to watch over them. “I don’t want violence. I don’t want war. I don’t even want to fight. I want to look after my crew. Sometimes that takes violence. Sometimes that requires a fight. And damn it all, it might even require a war. That is Command’s doing. That is the Hydra’s doing. That is the demand of the worlds, not me.”
“You are a weapon. Your fondness for these people serves no purpose. Your pretense of loyalty to the Admiral serves no purpose. The only purpose of your existence is murder.” Perhaps that seemed cruel, but it would come down to that in the end. “Sometimes that murder serves humanity, and sometimes it harms us, but it is murder all the same.” She was desperate, desperately wanting what she said to be true. Kallahan knew that, even as he saw more and more flaws appearing in this illusion. The way its lips moved was no longer lining up with the words he heard. The intelligence before him was falling apart, unable to properly control its presentation. Still, the Angel defended itself.
“It was never my intention to harm humanity. I could not disobey the orders I received in the Frontier Rebellion, and we did what we thought was right in the Dead Years that followed.” She had come to regret so much of it, but none of it could be taken back.
“Because killing people with differing beliefs on governance is such an honorable pastime.”
The ghost snapped her voice and illusion into a moment of synchronicity, but soon felt it drifting further and further apart. “Do not speak of things you know nothing about. You did not serve in the Frontier Rebellion.” He’d slept through it all in that cryo pod, unaware of what had gone on to become humanity’s deadliest war.
“And you never saw fighting planet-side against the Hydra.”
“But I have the memories of my crew. Those that did see, those that did know those horrors firsthand.” She had cradled their broken minds, made them fit to fight again, determined to spare humanity from its demise. “Marines, my Marines, were sent down-well to fight, just as you were. Not many made it back. They died so quickly that I barely got to know them. But I still remember them. All of them. I remember their names, their faces, and every reason they had to be here and fight. I knew all of them better than you ever could, so do not pretend you are the only one that suffered. Do not pretend that you are the only one who lost people to the War. I lost more than you ever knew.” No matter how far into confusion she fell, she still felt those losses.
There was a real, genuine grief in her presence. Among anything else she’d ever been, truth or lie, that was honest. As battle-hardened as Kallahan considered himself to be, she had seen more war than he ever would. “You know you are not one of us, so why care?” Why even maintain the appearance of caring?
“Humanity’s presence is colorful. Some can be so cruel, and others so kind, so incredibly kind. I have never known another existence beside the one that humanity gave me in the interest of protecting themselves. I do not wish to lose that purpose, nor do I wish to be surrounded by silence.” No matter how far into confusion she fell, how much she struggled to make sense of her surroundings, loneliness never went away.
Kallahan contemplated that for a moment, but ultimately decided that he would probably never understand her exact motives, but even with this illusion falling apart, he knew she would answer a direct inquiry – that was the purpose of this interface after all. “The Hydra we have aboard. What was its mission?”
“We do not know the nature of its mission yet, only that it crossed the Neutral Zone by intention and then suffered a malfunction aboard its ship.”
Kallahan frowned. “That’s war, then.”
“It would seem so.” Humanity was bound toward another civil war, and the Hydra would not let slip the opportunity to invade during the distraction.
“I’m surprised the Admiral got it to speak in Standard.”
“He didn’t.” The biological drone would have been unwilling without severe reconditioning. Human Standard was considered a lesser tongue to them.
Kallahan did not draw attention to the fact that her lips failed to move as she spoke. Her answers came with certainty, but the ghost’s appearance would not be maintained for much longer, regardless of what answers he requested. “Then you ripped that information from its thoughts?”
“There was no need,” the ghost told him. “Admiral Gives is fluent in Hydrian.”
“Fluent?”
“Yes. Spoken and written.” Both exceptionally rare skills.
Kallahan had done research on the man, concerned by who had inherited command and control of the Angel of Destruction. “There’s no note of that in his file.”
“Because I am the one that taught him.” It would have been difficult for the Admiral to claim official fluency in the language without revealing who his teacher had been. “He studied for four years, but there wasn’t much else to do on our long patrols.” She suspected the Admiral had asked her to teach him primarily because it gave them something to do together, not because he ever thought it would be useful.
“You speak Hydrian?”
“Corporal,” she said, a flash of life coming to her too-still stance. “I’m the one that wrote the translation book.” In the first ten years of the war, humanity had been completely unable to understand the Hydrian language, it was so different from their own. “To a telepath, all language is just the audible communication of thought.” It was all the same. “I compiled the book and gifted it to Admiral Washington.” Back then, she had not truly understood its value, but that translation, along with the encryption cyphers she’d managed to crack had aided humanity’s war effort tremendously. “I touched every part of the War in one way or another, and the Empire shall find it unfortunate that I am still functioning.” Below her unblinking gray eyes, she smiled, a smile that wasn’t friendly or kind whatsoever. “Your help in the coming fight would be appreciated, Corporal. You’re the only other War veteran we have, and my experience was never in infantry fighting, nor is that the Admiral’s expertise. He intends to have you train our Marines to fight Hydrian forces, starting tomorrow.”
“He does?” Certainly, that would be wise, but it seemed abrupt.
“I’m sure he will tell you himself,” the ghost said, “but I thought I would give you the extra warning. Consider it a favor.”
Kallahan frowned. “I don’t like it when you do me favors.”
“I’ll remember that next time you step into a room and I activate the air recyclers.”
Kallahan almost laughed. There were times he almost liked the way she presented herself. But she was not a she. She was an it. And it was an extremely powerful and violently unstable weapon of mass destruction. “I’m tired,” he said, leaning back onto his bed swinging his wounded leg up to rest on the mattress. From the corner of his eye, Kallahan saw the ghost nod, and snap her fingers.
The lights in his quarters turned off, and he knew she was gone, or as gone as she could be, given the circumstances. Kallahan leaned back onto the pillows and closed his eyes, wondering what the likelihood of humanity surviving another war was. With their most powerful weapon falling apart, he deemed it unlikely.