Meo Sector, Battleship Singularity
Fuck. When Colonel Zarrey came to, slumped over in the shower, reddish water washing down into the drain, that was the only thought he could put together. His head felt full of cotton, and the drops of water from the shower head were suddenly more of an assault than a relaxing rain. He watched the diluted blood swirl around the drain for a moment before pondering where it had come from. Tracing it to his nose, he found it to be leaking at a somewhat alarming rate, though it didn’t feel injured.
Trying to stymie the bleeding, Zarrey pinched his nose and carefully stood. I can’t even shower in peace, he lamented. A nice warm shower was very a simple desire, and he couldn’t even get that without an interruption. Wrapping a hand around the shower valve, Zarrey shut off the water as he tried to gather his bearings amid the steam of his shower cubicle.
It was the middle of the night. He had finally been headed toward bed, only to feel like he’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer during what should have been a relaxing shower.
“Naddlethworfing nightshift can’t even fly the ship in a straight line,” he muttered. “It’s not that hard.” They had only needed to mind the ship for a few hours, at warp no less, where nothing should have been able to touch them. Entering and exiting hyperspace was the riskiest part, and Zarrey had commanded the entry. Their course should have kept them at warp until the afternoon, when first shift was back on the bridge.
Zarrey wouldn’t pretend to understand the engineering behind FTL travel, but he knew the role of the third shift bridge crew wasn’t anything complex. They had been there to monitor power consumption. As long as they didn’t press the one, very specific, very wrong button, it should have been fine.
Opening the shower door, Zarrey stepped out on to the bathmat and found something sitting atop the mirror that hung above his bathroom sink. It was just staring at him. What the fuck? It looked like a metal spider, perched atop the inch-deep ledge of the mirror bolted to the wall. Glass lenses glittered upon its tiny head, but he barely got a proper look at it before it jumped from the wall like a missile aimed at his head.
“Shit!” Zarrey leapt out of the way, and the drone missed by a matter of inches. It landed upon the shower door with a thunk, immediately tensing to jump again. Dripping wet and butt-naked, Zarrey grabbed his towel off the hook and flung it open in front of his head. The drone leapt straight into it, and its spindly legs got caught in the fabric like a fly in the lattice of a spider’s web. Zarrey didn’t waste a moment, he wrapped the thick cotton of the towel up around the metal menace and held the bundle up triumphantly. “Ha ha!”
Instantly, a jet of blue flame erupted from the towel, barely missing Zarrey’s arm. He screamed, and hurled the bundle into the wall as hard as he could. It hit with a nice thud, but he could see the drone writhing inside the towel, beginning to burn its way out.
Zarrey ran to the toilet and yanked the cover off the back. On terrestrial ground, toilets were made of porcelain or plastic, both brittle and known to fracture. On a ship, any fixture or appliance that could be made of metal, was made of metal, allowing broken parts to be welded, or if necessary, melted down and recycled. Zarrey had resented that wickedly cold metal toilet seat at times, but now, as he pulled the cover off the top the toilet’s tank and found it to be a very sturdy steel, he was grateful. He spun the rectangular cover up and over his shoulder like a batter looking for a home run.
Against the far wall of the bathroom, the towel crumbled apart, charred and blackened. The drone climbed onto the smoldering mound before skittering back up onto the sink, the tink, tink of its legs against the metal a disturbingly slight sound. Zarrey glared at it’s foot-long diameter. Strands of his powder-blue towel clung to its joints like the hair on a real spider’s legs.
“Come at me,” Zarrey challenged it. He might be naked, but he was a hell of a batter on the ship’s recreational baseball team, and he wasn’t real fond of insects. “I hit a homer last game.” With the bases loaded, he’d scored four runs on that hit, not that this spidery little bastard cared.
The drone jumped, and it was fast, but not faster than Cadet Frenchie’s fastball. Zarrey swung and hit it square-on, rocketing the drone back into the far wall. It landed with the crunch of a tin can being crushed underfoot, and fell to the floor. One of its thin little legs hung at a weird, limp angle, but its other legs flexed and twisted, standing the drone back up, slower, but still moving.
“Fucking hell,” Zarrey complained. This was going to take more than he was willing to bet on his batting average. He pivoted on his heel, sprinting out of the bathroom and into the main area of his quarters.
The texture of the deck tiles felt weird beneath his feet, not painful, but extremely coarse. It wasn’t meant to be comfortable for bare feet, let alone running on bare feet. The texture was meant to give traction to the crew’s combat boots, while still providing a surface smooth enough for mag-boots to have secure footing.
Grabbing the first thing he saw in the messy laundry pile beside his bed, he snagged one of his combat boots – heavy, steel-toed, and with the magnet functionality built into the sole. He chucked it at the drone the moment he saw it follow him through the bathroom door. The impact sent the drone tumbling back a few feet, slowing it just enough for Zarrey to make it to his desk and grab the rifle laid upon it. He yanked up the rifle, braced it on his shoulder, and flicked off the safety as the drone came racing around the corner.
Outside ship combat or hard maneuvers, the ship’s inertial dampeners were not kept active. Maintaining the dampening field burned too much fuel. “Checkmate, bitch,” he said, pulling the trigger.
The rifle bucked once, the sound deafening in Zarrey’s quarters. It echoed sharply off the walls, as he tensed for the plink of a wild ricochet. None came. The metal spider spat out a batch of sparks, and then collapsed, a hole punched neatly where its head should have been.
Zarrey flicked the safety on his rifle back on. “That’s for my favorite towel.” Worn soft from so many washings and uses, he had adored it. Now it was a pile of singed pieces.
A pounding came on the door to his quarters, but the warning was too brief to even consider moving. The door flew open, and Ensign Feather barged in. “Sir! We’re under attack!”
“No shit, Ensign,” Zarrey said, abruptly remembering how perfectly naked he was. He dropped the butt of the rifle to cover himself, but Feather didn’t bat an eye. The reality of ship crew was that they often caught each other in vulnerable situations. The call to battle stations came randomly, and sometimes people were in the shower. Being caught naked wasn’t that grievous a sin, but Zarrey did find it more inappropriate to be an officer in that situation. Too much of authority was built on appearances, and this would be an easy way to be caught in a scandal, if it weren’t for the fact the entire crew knew he was gay. “What’s wrong with comms?”
“Cut, sir.” Feather answered, throwing her long braid black hair over back over her shoulder. “We can’t raise the alert.”
“Naddlethworfing shit.” This day just keeps getting better. Zarrey stepped over to grab yesterday’s discarded pants and wiggled into them. “Where’s the Admiral?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t in his quarters.” Feather had just come from there. The Admiral’s quarters were just down the hall. “With comms down, I’ve got no way to find him.”
Fucking hell. Zarrey snagged a wrinkled shirt from the back of his desk chair and slipped it on, not bothering to look for a jacket. He rarely ever cared about maintaining proper uniform dress, especially not right now, with metal spiders crawling around the ship. “There’s more of those fuckers I assume?” he asked, pointed toward the forcibly decommissioned drone.
“Yes, sir.” Feather answered. “We’re spreading the word as fast as we can.” Ripley, the senior-most yeoman, had quickly alerted the others. They knew how to spread rumor, and in this case, communications. Each yeoman simply cycled through the compartments they had on mail call.
“Good,” Zarrey said, slinging the rifle back over his shoulder. He ducked back into his quarters to grab the boot he’d thrown and picked up its match, not bothering to put them on before he headed for the door. “If the Admiral’s not here, then I guess I’m in charge.” Zarrey didn’t adore that position, but that was a simple fact of being second in command. Sometimes, the situation fell to him. Feather moved aside as he stepped into the hallway and turned to head for the bridge.
“Aye, sir. I’m afraid that I don’t know much. There’s rumors of drones being sighted all over the ship. Comms are down.”
You know enough, Zarrey thought. No one should ever underestimate the yeomen. Too many officers overlooked their skills. They were a critical part of any crew, the glue that held the various other specialties together. No ship functioned without them, and the Singularity, picking up most of her crew second-hand, had some of the most experienced yeomen in the fleet. They might not fight, they might not repair, and they might not analyze the information they were given, but they damn well knew how to communicate it. “Follow me,” he told Feather. They could gather more information on the bridge, and then he’d have something for her to hand back to the other yeomen.
In the corridor, Zarrey was halfway surprised to see that everything looked normal. He’d expected to see battle damage and instability, gouges in the gray metal bulkheads, broken and flickering lights. “Doesn’t look much like an attack,” he remarked.
“Not one we’re used to,” Feather agreed. Crewing a battleship, they were used to rough brawls. Those were physical combat situations where the damage was brutal and fast. It came in swaths of explosions, ripping and tearing at the ship’s armor, structure and systems. “It’s been very surgical so far. Power lines to the FTL systems were targeted, then internal comms. Nothing else has been touched.”
“Why the hell not?” If this adversary had drones working the interior of the ship, they were helpless. The Singularity didn’t have anti-drone defenses. Very few ships did. They weren’t usually very effective. “These drones could kill us all.” Life support was powered and routed through channels in the ship’s structure the same as anything else. Drones could easily cut power or block the channels, leaving them all to asphyxiate. It wasn’t a pretty scenario, but it was certainly the most effective way to stop the ship in her tracks. The ship couldn’t move without crew commanding her. But to be this surgical, to leave most of the power systems and life support intact… killing everyone aboard wasn’t the goal.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Afraid that’s above my paygrade, sir,” Feather said. She clutched her clipboard to her chest and hurried a little faster, struggling to keep up with Zarrey’s long legs.
“Bullshit,” Zarrey muttered under his breath. Feather was being too modest. She was a highly capable young woman who was shaken by very little. If she’d been born on one of Command’s favored worlds, she would have been destined for the officer training academy. Instead, having joined the fleet in one of the most unique circumstances Zarrey had ever heard of – working as repayment for her tribe’s debt – she had become the assistant to the Fleet Admiral. That was no small feat, nor was it an easy post.
“Priority number one is roll call,” Zarrey told her. “Let’s make sure everyone is accounted for after that impact.” Zarrey had lost consciousness, so it stood to reason others may have as well. He shuddered to think what would have happened if that drone had gotten to him any sooner.
“Aye, sir, some departments may have already started, but it’ll take time.” Without comms, the crew wouldn’t know to report in. Each person would need to be tracked down, and on a ship the Singularity’s size, that took time. “We do have wounded. No dead, as far as I know, but some broken bones and twisted limbs. No exact numbers yet.”
“It’s too early to tell,” Zarrey knew. Injured crew sometimes took longer to reveal themselves if they couldn’t properly walk or open the hatches. Turning the corner onto the bridge, the officers staffing the consoles looked a bit ragged. They rubbed at fresh bruises and held bloody noses. A few loose items like papers and pens were scattered about the bridge, but nothing was broken – or at least nothing that hadn’t been broken before. Repairs from the Indigo Agent’s raid weren’t complete, even if most of the blood had been cleaned up. A handset sat loosely on the floor, knocked from its holding rack. Zarrey picked it up, habitually placing it back where it belonged. “What the fuck happened?”
Ensign Frasier, sitting behind the engineering console, replied in a nasal voice, holding her nose. “Power failure to the active FTL drive, sir. We fell out of warp.”
“I thought that shit was supposed to be gentle.” As far as Zarrey cared, that jolt had been every bit as bad as jump with severe FTL fatigue.
“It usually is, sir,” Frasier said, “but there’s a process to safely shut down the warp field. When we lost power, the field collapsed at random and we were thrown out of hyperspace. The Old Lady’s structural integrity took a big hit bringing us out.”
“How bad?” Zarrey asked her, ashamed to say he hadn’t considered that until now, focused more on the crew than the ship.
“It’s difficult to tell with the existing damage, but with the strain gauges I do have reporting in, I’d estimate around 35% integrity remaining.”
Zarrey tried not to wince. Structural integrity was purely a ship metric. It was a measure of the ship’s ability to endure forces and strain. At 0% integrity, the material in a ship’s structure hit its yield stress, and deformation became permanent. After that, additional force contributed to a probable collapse. All maneuvers and combat actions taxed the structural integrity, so ships were usually given time to rest without acceleration or FTL pressures. After the battle with the pirates, the Singularity hadn’t been given that time. She’d come out damaged, but not overly strained. The only upside to a railgun shot was that, while destructive, it didn’t impart much force. It had damaged the ship’s structure, weakening it against further strain, but hadn’t added much stress directly. In theory, they should have been able to get back to the refugee fleet and rest the ship’s structure as they passed out supplies. So much for that plan, Zarrey thought bitterly. “What caused the power failure?”
“At a guess?” Frasier, working the engineering controls, jerked a thumb over to a crumpled mess beside her console. “Another one of those.”
Zarrey stepped closer, abruptly realizing that the mess he’d disregarded as debris, wasn’t debris at all. Its main body was round and silver, about the size of his fist, and a tangle of thin, silvery legs were crunched up beneath it – a drone identical to the one he’d just shot in his quarters. “What the fuck did you do to it?” Why was it so flat? It had been squished against the deck to a quarter of the thickness its body should have held.
“Did like my instructors taught me. Hit it with the book.” She tapped the binder sitting on the edge of the console. Five inches thick, the emergency repair manual was a hefty read that probably weighed forty pounds. “Turns out, most things don’t like that.” Back in basic, the trainees certainly hadn’t.
Zarrey couldn’t argue with that logic. He turned to the young ensign working sensors, “How many of these drones are loose?”
Ensign Potter nervously fixed the way his glasses sat on his face. “I don’t know, sir.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Zarrey snapped. “You’re sensors. Scan for them.” To find one in his quarters and one here, they were clearly getting around the ship somehow.
“I tried, sir. These drones, they’re very small and the Singularity’s internal sensors aren’t calibrated to this kind of search.” The ship’s internal sensors primarily monitored atmospheric and temperature conditions. The drones neither consumed oxygen, nor had a large enough heat source to detect, even with their plasma torches active.
In this situation, fuck was quickly becoming Zarrey’s favorite word. They were going to have to look at this another way. “Can we identify the make of these drones?”
“Yes, sir,” Potter said. “They’re standard cutting drones. Part number on these matches the Knight Industries model.”
Zarrey frowned. He had never been fond of Knight Industries. Their equipment was fine, of course. They were one of the worlds’ largest corporations and the company’s wealth and influence was extreme – extreme enough to buy planets out from below the feet of their colonists. He’d lost count of how many refugees he’d seen come through his previous post with that story. Then there was the company man they’d left with the refugee fleet – some higher-up by the name of Hawkins who had been nothing but self-absorbed trouble.
As she traced the damage to the power grid and rerouted around it, Frasier paused. “Did we pick these drones up from the pirates? Maybe the Baron set up a remote activation.”
Potter shook his head, “We don’t have a complete inventory list, and without comms, I can’t call down to supply and have them start checking.”
“No need,” Zarrey said. “The pirates didn’t have anything from Knight Industries, except maybe ship parts pilfered second-hand. Knight Industries has the most powerful private fleet in the worlds. Any pirate with half a brain wouldn’t touch their convoys. The company fleet would hunt them down.” Risking the ire of Knight Industries fleet wasn’t worth it when there were independent freighters and smaller companies to prey upon lacking that kind of protection. And, unfortunately, it seemed Baron Cardio hadn’t been stupid.
The crew on the bridge went silent. They stared at Zarrey with a degree of confusion, as if surprised that he’d contributed tactically useful knowledge.
“I’m not an idiot,” Zarrey snapped. “I know words that are longer than four letters, I just don’t like to use them.” He preferred to mess around on duty, but his vocabulary did consist of more than swear words. He was the Steel Prince’s second in command. “Knight Industries is a major fleet supplier. The Old Bitch is more likely to have K.I. equipment in her inventory than the pirates.” The ship creaked a bit, as if protesting that nickname, so Zarrey subtly kicked the console beside him. He was pretty sure it hurt his toes more than it had any chance of leaving a mark, but he felt the message was clear: I do not have time for your nonsense. “Pull the supply manifest,” he ordered Potter, “check to see if we had cutting drones in storage.” In Zarrey’s experience, that was more than possible, it was likely. Command sometimes bought equipment and standardized it across the fleet without checking to see if each individual ship was capable of using said equipment. High command was a bureaucratic animal with a natural adaptation for stupidity, and a mass amount of money. When a ship got assigned equipment it couldn’t use, lacking base equipment or trained personnel, that new equipment ended up forgotten in storage. It was a tale as old as time.
“And,” Zarrey thought of something else, “somebody tell me where the fuck we are.”
“Meo Sector, sir,” the answer came from navigations, in the back of the bridge. “It’s mostly void space. There’s a nebula here, but it’s not particularly dense. Nothing to be concerned about, just higher than usual background radiation and EM noise.”
“So, if these drones aren’t attacking Life Support and they dropped out of hyperspace somewhere relatively safe… It’s pretty clear they aren’t trying to kill us,” or, he remembered the way the drone in the bathroom had leapt at him, not all of us.
Zarrey stepped over to the squished drone beside the engineering console. With its eight skinny legs all tangled up beneath it, it really did look like a dead spider. “Did this thing attack you?” he asked Frasier.
“No, sir,” she said, turning to look at Zarrey. He was unusually serious, his teasing, mischievous grin missing from his features. It made the scar on the side of his chin look all that much deeper. “It fell from the ceiling when we got thrown out of hyperspace. Scared me, but I dropped the book on it before it could do anything else. Used to have venomous spiders that size back home,” Frasier said. “Habit.”
“Where was home for you?” Zarrey wondered.
“Toronja. Main colony’s in the equatorial jungle.”
Zarrey considered the size of the drones. When their legs were spread, they were larger than a dinner plate. “Remind me to never go there.” He didn’t need that falling on him from the jungle canopies. But, with only one drone showing itself here, crippling the bridge obviously wasn’t their end-goal.
“It’s not making sense, is it?” came the question.
Zarrey turned, remembering Ensign Feather. She’d tailed him to the bridge, her red lipstick and the red streak in her hair perfectly matching. “No, it sure as fuck isn’t.”
“Most of the attacks have been on lone or unprepared crew. There’s a lot of confusion,” Feather said.
“But they seem to want the ship’s functions intact.” The crew was under attack. Zarrey knew that drone had tried to kill him in his quarters, but they weren’t being attacked here. The command center of any ship acted as a sort of nervous center. Power and command lines gathered here. Stray damage could have unintended consequences on the rest of the ship, and that granted protection to those here. He was sure of it.
“Colonel,” Potter called, “our supply manifest confirms that we had 200 Knight Industries cutting drones aboard.”
That figures, Zarrey thought. Their own inventory had been turned against them. How else could this get worse? “Frasier, start taking that thing apart. See if you can figure out what activated it, and who’s controlling it.” That would clue them in to the drone’s objective. “Take note of the serial number.” Zarrey turned to Feather. “Same to the rest of the crew. Any drone they decommission, track the serial numbers. Otherwise, we’ll never know if all 200 are accounted for.” Assuming, of course, that we live that long. “And for fuck’s sake, tell supply to check on anything else that could be turned on and used against us.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll spread the word.”
“Feather,” Zarrey caught the young woman before she could leave. “You will not be safe once you leave this room.” The bridge had a risk of collateral damage affecting the ship’s functions. Most other areas on the ship would not have that protection. He pulled the rifle he’d brought from his quarters off his shoulder and handed it to her. “You up to date on your marksman certification?”
“Yes, sir.” The Admiral’s standing orders required it for all crew, even those whose roles were typically non-combat.
Zarrey nodded, “Be careful.” He didn’t want to send Feather out, but Feather left without any hesitation, and Zarrey admired her bravery. She knew her role in this situation, as did everyone else. The rest of the crew would be fighting these drones to the best of their ability. Zarrey knew that. He trusted that. But, in the meantime, he had command. He was responsible for the ship’s survival as a whole. “Someone is controlling these drones,” he told those on the bridge. “It may be via a live transmission, it may be via a program, but we can guarantee they know where we are. We are not alone in this sector.” Those drones had leveled a cost on the ship, and someone would come to collect.