Hyperspace, Battleship Singularity
Working as a commanding officer was something like trying to climb a mountain in an avalanche. One could crawl over the boulders, heave one’s self up and over a ledge, and then a wave of wind and snow would push one back down. Not falling off the mountain entirely required a degree of perseverance, stubbornness, and the night after a mission, extremely long hours.
Or rather, if one intended to be competent, which the Admiral strove to be, it required all those things. A commander that cared less could certainly get away with less, but he found it best to write the ship’s log while the recollection of the incident was fresh, and after that came the reports: engineering, armory and supply were the largest of them, but there were always more. The medical staff tracked the number and severity of injuries, the flight deck reported on readiness to launch, and sensors reported on accuracy, blind spots and battle observations. Lieutenant Foster’s after-action analysis of the cyberattack had made it into the pile as well – the evidence conclusive that Crimson Heart had managed to reliably control Hydrian technology, and in the process somehow subdued a Hydrian AI.
From a tactical perspective, that was incredibly intriguing. It changed everything thought to be known about relations with Hydrian AI. But perhaps that assumed too much from a single, isolated example. Nonetheless, he would learn more by interrogating the Hydra again.
The reports of ammunition expenditures were as expected – higher than preferred, but not concerning, at least not yet. Without a resupply, their ammunition stores would surely dwindle, but they had the ability to manufacture shells on board, and plenty time to find materials before it became an operational concern.
The engineering reports were also as expected – damage abound and anomalies all around. Just looking at it gave Admiral Gives a headache.
The one report that gave him pause was that from medical. They’d come off light for a combat-heavy mission. Most of the crew suffered only scrapes and bruises. Even Cortana had been released, but Keifer Robinson was the exception. She wasn’t dead, not yet, but had lapsed deeper into a coma after emergency surgery. Her prognosis was grim. Likely, her brain activity would die out, and she’d be left a mindless vegetable kept technically alive by the life support machines that breathed for her and pulsed her heart on a steady rhythm. If that came to be the case, the decision would fall to him. Robinson had left no standing medical orders, and in their absence, the decision should go to the next of kin, but Robinson had none. The Admiral did consider appointing Galhino as her steward, but he doubted Galhino would even tolerate the suggestion. Her relationship to Robinson was, after all, a secret. Even if not a well-kept one.
Below decks, the supply teams were still inventorying the exact contents of the crates stolen from Crimson Heart, but they had completed a preliminary sweep for powered devices, such as trackers on the cargo. None had been found, so the Admiral had ordered the ship back on a course toward the fleet. The course wasn’t direct, but it would take them in the right direction. Perhaps that was strange, but the Admiral still felt something was amiss. He couldn’t shake the feeling, though he acknowledged it might well be paranoia. That same caution had led him to report the anomaly he’d found in the long-term storage compartment, though he’d declined to specify what exactly he’d been doing in that compartment to start with. The ship’s security officer, Lieutenant Colonel Pflum was heading up an investigation, but Admiral Gives didn’t expect him to find anything.
Heat damage was notoriously hard to trace. Gouges or impacts were much easier. Physical tools left behind microscopic fragments that could be material tested. Heat damage was less consistent. They could attempt to estimate the size and temperature of the heat source, but there was no guarantee of accuracy, as the time it had taken to create the damage was also unknown.
A knock came on the door, breaking the Admiral out of his concentration. After so many years, he found that even the details of a knock could be interpreted for useful information. Crisp and evenly spaced, this one was not an indicator of an emergency. “Enter,” the Admiral called, keeping his attention on the report before him.
The hatch creaked open, then was closed and sealed before a set of work boots clunked across the floor, muffled by the old rug on the ground. “Sir,” came the greeting.
It was Havermeyer’s voice. The Admiral had spoken enough with him to recognize it without much effort. “What can I help you with, Ensign?”
Havermeyer stopped in front of the Admiral’s old wooden desk, unsurprised to find the man still awake at this hour of the night. The hours after combat were long for all the crew. It often took a full day for the ship to return to anything resembling a normal schedule. Briefly, Havermeyer wondered if this was the right moment for a discussion, but felt it could not afford to wait. “My Saint,” he said bluntly, “You know something.”
The Admiral capped his pen and looked up to the monk. “If you want to be technical, Ensign, I know lots of things.” Some pertained to that. Some did not.
Havermeyer stared at his raised eyebrow, unamused. The wit behind those words did not surprise him, but he found it untimely. “I am concerned for my Saint. There is a strong telepathic presence on board. We need to locate the source of this disturbance and remove it.” The telepath was a danger, doubly so if it managed any degree of control over the ship’s machinery.
“You have not done your research.”
Havermeyer tried to make sense of that. He did, because he knew the Admiral never spoke without intent. With him, even the shortest of comments could hold some half-truth, but that comment made no sense at all. He met the Admiral’s stormy blue stare. “What?”
Admiral Gives did not like to repeat himself, but he made an exception in this case. “You have not done your research.” And it was unlike Havermeyer to come unprepared.
“Research?” The monk echoed. “On the ghost?” But the Admiral did not answer. He sat there with his unerring calm and waited. Waiting for what, Havermeyer did not know. “Sir, this presence is violently unstable.”
“Were you injured?” The question came, stoic and cold in the lamplight.
“No,” Havermeyer answered, uncertain why it mattered. “But Callie…”
“Was she injured?”
The question was as void as before. Havermeyer wasn’t sure if that was some indication that the Admiral did not care, or if he simply already knew the answer. “She was not, but Sergeant Cortana… She was attacked.”
That I doubt, the Admiral mused, but having been on the receiving end of the ghost’s power, he knew that its very magnitude could feel threatening. “Did she deserve it?”
Havermeyer blinked, taken aback. “Sir?” But no response came, as the Admiral simply waited for him to properly answer the question. Havermeyer had to admit, “Cortana was indeed out of line.”
“Then I fail to see a problem,” Admiral Gives answered, promptly returning his attention to the open report on his desk.
As he watched the ship’s commander brush off the incident, returning to the papers soaking in the yellow light of his desk lamp, Havermeyer’s jaw twinged with a slight sense of betrayal. “This entity is torturing a crewman, Admiral.” Never mind what it has done to my Saint.
Without looking up, the Admiral asked, “Do you truly consider Sergeant Cortana to be a part of this crew?”
“She is on the roster, sir.” She was, officially, one of the ship’s personnel. On that count alone, they were bound to defend her, as comrades in arms.
“That was not the question.” Cruel as it might be, there was a reason Cortana received this treatment. The ghost was trying to fight a sort of infection: the infestation of a selfish mind. “Do you consider Ensign Smith to be a part of this crew?”
“Absolutely, sir. Without question.”
And there’s the difference. Surely, that was as obvious to Havermeyer as it was to the Admiral. “So,” he returned his attention to the monk’s shaved head, “to reiterate, you are asking me to initiate an exorcism on an entity that has defended a loyal crewmember.”
Havermeyer could see his point with all the pleasure of the needle that had inked his ritual tattoos. “I never said it defended her.”
“You said Cortana deserved it, and that Ensign Smith was involved.” The immediate conclusion was obvious. “I am capable of reading between the lines, Ensign.”
“That’s a hell of a conclusion to make, given that the ghost’s entire reputation is killing crew.”
“Fear cannot take a life. It can command obedience, but it, by itself, cannot kill.” The sheer magnitude of the ghost’s power ensured the human survival instinct labeled it as a threat. The fragility of human existence denied that such a power could coexist without being a threat, but that was a fault of humanity, not of the power itself.
“The ghost is insane.” Havermeyer was not sure how else to explain it. “The way it appeared, faceless, decaying… It has lost whatever mind it may once have had.”
The ghost had not lost her mind, her sense of self perhaps, but not her mind. If she truly went insane, none of them would be here discussing it. No, instability or not, she was still defending her crew. That was a good sign, regardless of the method. “I will not punish an entity that protects this crew.” Quite simply, the Admiral refused to even consider it.
“Freeing it would not be a punishment, Admiral. It would be a tribute to it and our Saint.”
“Your Saint,” Admiral Gives corrected. “My ship.”
Havemeyer pursed his lips, annoyed by that distinction for the first time in a long time. “This ghost is not a human entity.” It was distinctly inhuman. “Strong telepaths are known to be unstable, sir.” Human telepaths almost always went mad before they turned twenty. “If such an entity bound to this ship, then imagine the chaos it has seen. Battles, wars, massacres. Imagine the chaos it will see. We need to isolate it before it loses control.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“If such an entity has been lingering aboard, should it not be considered a part of the ship?” Why should that presence be regarded as alien if it had been here longer than any of the human crew?
“Machines are not telepathic, sir.” The tech-monks’ tomes had never recorded a machine sensitive enough to possess telepathic capability.
“And yet, you say that nothing is impossible aboard a Saint.”
Havermeyer narrowed his eyes, too aware of the Admiral’s inclination. “Do not turn my beliefs against me. It is my oath to serve my Saint, to protect her gathering soul. This ghost is threatening her. It is twisting her toward chaos.”
“And you believe she should be calm?”
“A Saint is made through exceptional service and reliability. So long as we maintain our understanding of them, they are predictable.” That was one of the tech-monks’ core beliefs.
“Battleships are not calm entities, Ensign.” That was a very simple fact, taught to every crewman the first time they were called to action stations in the middle of the night. “They are stalwart and reliable, but they are not calm.” They were not meant to be. They were great machines capable of incredible violence by design. The majority of their functions never slowed between a combat stance and normal operations. The engines still ran, navigations still plotted, sensors still searched and the power core still provided. None of that so much as paused outside of combat. “A great many Technologist Saints may be calm, but they are not battleships. Your people have never honored a combat ship before, let alone one of this stature.”
“You yourself said this ship is more than a weapon,” Havermeyer reminded. “I recognize her differences from the rest of our Saints, but I am still here in her service. This telepath is manipulating her, and it is manipulating us.”
“Ensign, you know more about telepathy than any other member of the crew.” The tech-monks’ tomes were more detailed accounts of history and technology than any archive on the cortex. “Telepathy is not a magic. It has limits and flaws. Chief among them is that it cannot rewire hard instincts like trust and danger. If you had been unwillingly altered, you would feel that something is wrong.” That was true, no matter how powerful the telepath.
Havermeyer frowned. It figured that the Admiral was familiar with the topic. Extrasensory research had been driven by a desperate need to root out infiltrators on both sides of the Frontier Rebellion, and as a veteran of that conflict, the Admiral well should be familiar. “Battleship or not, I do not believe this chaos is healthy for my Saint, and I do not believe it is healthy for those of us that rely upon her. This presence is influencing the neurofibers,” and the ongoing function of that system was already enough of a mystery. “I fear Saintess de Ahengélicas may be turned against us, and her soul does not want that, Admiral. You know that.”
“A loyal crew member will never be harmed by this ship.” Those with doubt in their hearts and selfishness on their minds were a different story. There were many selfish members of society. In some cases, it was an incredible flaw, and in others, it was barely a footnote, but those inherently selfish people were opposites of the ghost. That mentality was vastly different from her own processes: built to serve and suffer for the benefit of others. It was difficult for her to understand, a foreign and seemingly hostile perspective. Selfishness and ambition were parallel, and ambitious people were capable of both great and terrible things. That potential alone drew the ghost’s attention.
Cortana may not be an inherently bad person. In fact, no judgement was being cast upon her at all. It was simply that the ghost perceived a potential threat. She saw something she couldn’t comprehend, and was constantly aware of its presence, constantly aware of its potential threat.
“You know something about this,” Havermeyer accused. The monk was certain of that. “I saw the way those fibers reacted to you.” The ghost was controlling those fibers, and those fibers had behaved differently with him.
Something changed in the Admiral’s expression. Havermeyer couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was enough to make him pause. An oncoming storm churned in the air, as if the barometric pressure in the room had just dropped. The storm never broke. Perhaps that was what made it so unnerving. It was the feel of electricity in the air and waiting eternally to be struck.
“Allow me to put this simply for you, Ensign,” as it seems simplicity is required. “You are serving aboard a battleship. Your Saint is not a bastion of peace or prosperity. She earned her title through war. Death and fear are her primary business.” Coldly, he met Havermeyer’s eyes. “We are privileged to serve on her crew. We are subject to support her functions, and not be buried amid the result. We are privileged to see a better side of her and steer that capability where it needs to go.” That was the gentler perspective to have. Sighting the guns was always easier than seeing the gruesome reality of their impact. “You have forgotten the primary function of the machine below your feet. She may be capable of more, but a battleship is designed, first and foremost, to identify and engage the enemy. It is inane to resent any presence aboard this ship for fulfilling that very objective.” Truly, it was idiocy at its finest. “You decry the ghost’s chaos, but chaos is your Saint’s domain.”
Admiral Gives watched that declaration settle in upon Havermeyer, as if this was the first time the monk had truly considered it. Take your contemplation elsewhere, the Admiral thought, “I have work to do.”
Havermeyer swallowed unwillingly. It was clear the conversation had reached its end. “Yes, sir.”
When the door closed behind Havermeyer, there was a minute of silence as the Admiral watched the little flame of the candle on his desk dance and flicker. Then he pulled his glasses off, meticulously folded them up, and buried his face in his hands. Damn the stars. Havermeyer had a thread. He would yank on it with fervor, unwinding it until the tapestry it wove made sense to him – until the pattern complied with his beliefs. In that sense, perhaps bringing the tech-monk aboard had been a mistake. These days, the Admiral was starting to feel he’d made a lot of them.
“Thank you,” he said aloud to the empty room. “Thank you for looking after Ensign Smith.” To some degree, the ghost looked after every member of the crew, but Smith, well, Smith was a special case.
He would deny it to anyone who asked, but he did worry more about her. Yet, for all the distance he held, it seemed the entire fucking crew was aware of his farce. That was why they pushed Smith to go talk to him when no one else would, and the Admiral resented it. He resented that he’d allowed himself to be so transparent. He should know better than to show any inclination of attachment toward someone. It would only end poorly. It always did. To show any affection in these worlds was to consent to its destruction.
No, he clenched his fist, his burned hand twinging sharply with pain. This was not the time for that miserable contemplation. He was needed in the present, overdue to fulfill his promise. He had been focused on the wrong objective, so determined to avoid the reminder of Brent that he had neglected the care of his only friend.
Standing, he walked over to the nearest bookshelf and grabbed a novel with a green cover. Then he dragged his chair a little closer to the wall, and picked up the handset. He didn’t dial it, simply rested it in the crook of his shoulder, and slipped his glasses back on. He cracked open the book, the spine crinkling as it fell open to the marked page.
Looking at the start of the novel’s next chapter, he found he could not remember the last time he’d read from this book. Disappointment nipped at him, shadowed by that old self-loathing. “I’m sorry.” He had not held up his end of the bargain. “I promised I would be here when you needed me,” and I haven’t been.
Like a wounded animal, the ghost’s presence crept up beside him, slinking from the shadows, not reaching out, but coming to rest beside him. She took no physical form, but the damage was obvious enough. Messy gashes and gouges riddled her presence, each self-inflicted wound weeping with panic and desperation. She had ripped at herself in a frenzy, drowning in chaos.
Unfortunately, the feel of it was familiar to him. No one was harsher on the ghost than she herself. She had given herself this punishment, these oozing wounds, because she felt she deserved it.
She was wrong about that.
Admiral Gives did not care how she had justified such self-harm. It was undeserved. “Kallahan’s answers were not kind, were they?”
The machine offered no response, but offered out a memory.
The Admiral pushed it away. “What he said does not matter to me.” Kallahan could have sworn her to be the most evil creature imaginable, he might even have evidence to back it up, but Admiral Gives would still not agree with him. “I know you.” Thirty-nine years. He had been beside her for thirty-nine years. In all their battles, missions and patrols, he’d seen what excited her, what pleased her and what angered her. “Kallahan may believe he knows what you were before, but I know you as you are now.” And that mind did not deserve to suffer, even as he felt her recoil. He felt it now, just as he had the last few times he had spoken to her. She had tried to hide it, now no longer able as she flinched away from the sound of his voice.
Admiral Gives had always tried to ensure his voice was one she could trust, one that never tried to harm her, but it was clear now. Brent’s shadow had said something cruel and even that miniscule comfort had been torn away from her. I’m sorry. Something like that could not be easily repaired, for he could not change the sound of his voice. He could only hope that she might learn to trust in it again, and that would start small, as it had all those years ago. Such trust was built word by word, sentence by sentence. It allowed no demands, and required careful patience.
Reaching backward, he took the bottle of rum off the shelf behind his desk, uncorked it, and took a swig. Then, the Admiral began to read the novel in his hands aloud, letting the handset’s mic pick up every word. ‘I know who you are,’ he thought to the ghost. Nothing could change that, not even this vulnerable state. No anomaly, no loss of control would rip that identity away, because he believed. He believed in her, in everything she had ever been to him and to the crew, and everything she ever could be. ‘You are not a monster.’
The ghost found herself surrounded by that certainty. Untouchable, untainted, absolute, it leeched into her. At first, she fought it, an instinct brought about by the loss of her anchor, by that old fear of what Brent had twisted her into. But sitting here, reading to her, that wasn’t Brent. Brent wasn’t here, offering calm and certainty.
Though Brent had recently spoken with it, that gravelly voice did not belong to Brent. And slowly, as the words and paragraphs led into pages and chapters, she began to trust once more, trust in that voice and its owner not to hurt her. Her systems began to accept realignment, setting into the identity offered to them, the only identity she truly cared to maintain.
It eased her strains and began to heal her self-inflicted wounds, each moment a reminder that she had not failed her mission, that she still had a place and an identity all her own, with an anchor she could trust to remind her of it.
As time passed, she submerged herself in the identity offered to her, wanting more than anything to reclaim it and never, ever lose it. So often stifled and overridden, this was her truest state. Admiral Gives offered her the chance to be who she was, not who he wanted her to be. There was no demand for anything, yet she would have given anything to become what he saw in her, because that perspective was something magnificent. It was a protector, a companion and a dear friend. And though the ghost knew she could never be any of that, too weak, too scarred and too unstable, she would never stop trying.
Curling around that identity, feeling it repair her, she sat invisibly beside the one who so loyally defended her, even from herself. Thank you. Perhaps she always failed to communicate such thoughts, but she was grateful. Without him, she would have lost this battle long ago, drowned in the constant churn of others’ intentions, but he had taken the time to speak to her, to know her, and protected that identity for her. That kindness had allowed her to grow, to understand her feelings and instincts.
It had brought sense to chaos.
Defending that identity as loyally as he did was a kindness well beyond any she had ever received, and the fact he saw that identity as someone great, someone he deeply valued… The ghost could not fathom the true depth of the gratitude she felt, nor the fear she had of losing him. He alone kept her functional. He alone spent the time to keep her sane, even when the damage seemed irreversible. She was just a broken mind, pieced back together and held in place by his memory of how she’d once been. She broke apart every time she tried to stand on her own, and still, he always pieced her back together again, never abandoning her in that sea of confusion and pain.
He read to her for hours, sipping on the rum until the bottle ran dry. Even once it did, he finished the chapter before he hung up the handset, marked the page and closed the book. He replaced the novel to its spot, and regarded the room, still empty, but maintaining a calmer air than it had before. “Sorry it took me so long,” he said. You shouldn’t have needed to wait. Every minute she’d waited had been a thousand processes, a thousand fears, and a thousand self-inflicted wounds. But waited, she had, always so very patient with him.
Pushing those thoughts away, he put the empty rum bottle back in its hiding place and contemplated water and sleep. Exhaustion weighed down his limbs, but his mind not at peace. He was going to need a nightcap of something strong.