Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity
A ceiling tile had crashed down onto his chest. It was the first thing Colonel Zarrey noticed as he came to. The second thing was how much everything hurt. “Fuck,” he said, shoving the tile off, then instantly regretted opening his mouth as it heightened his immediate urge to vomit. He swallowed the bile down, and stood up more carefully, shaking the tiny shards of safety glass from his uniform.
This is one hell of a cold. His whole body ached. Judging by the crew’s groans and slow movement, many of them felt the same way. They used their consoles and chairs to pull themselves up from where they had fallen. They looked ragged, but they were all still moving. Zarrey was grateful for that, considering the disastrous condition of the bridge.
Above, the regular lights flickered on and off and a few of their mountings had fallen. A crack ran across the ceiling, bulkheads separated and distorted along it. Shattered glass from displays littered the floor, crunching beneath the bridge staff’s shoes. Most of the crew within sight sported a nasty bruise or bleeding injury. Those that didn’t were busy coughing into their sleeves. They looked ill, but not seriously crippled. After what they had just been through, they were remarkably well-off.
By all rights, they should be dead. Still, something felt wrong, something beyond the ship being a wreck. A moment of silence passed between the crew, the point where their commander normally called for a status report, but the call never came.
Zarrey looked around. He didn’t see the Admiral anywhere on the bridge, but the rest of the normal staff was all there: Walters at Navigations, Galhino on Sensors, Robinson at Comms., Alba at Engineering and Jazmine manning the helm. Their commander was the only one absent. “Where’s the Old Man?” Zarrey asked.
Jazmine coughed violently as he sat down in his seat, but answered by pointing out the obvious, “He’s not here.” The ship’s pilot started realigning their bearings on his controls, but he couldn’t seem to stop coughing. “This is the worst hangover I’ve ever had,” he muttered to no one, head throbbing.
“Next time you want to invite me to a party like this, Jazz, leave me out of it.” Lieutenant Gaffigan worked on plucking the bits of ash and soot from his magnificent orange beard.
“What the hell happened back there, Monty?” Zarrey demanded, slowly remembering the events that put them in this condition. “We should have seen a nuclear-capable ship coming.”
“Wish I could say, Colonel. That nuke was a damn lucky shot,” the armory officer said. “We had no way of knowing it was coming. Whoever fired must have done it hours before it impacted us. Those missiles had burned all their fuel. They were moving as fast as they possibly could and we never detected another ship. They could have fired from another sector of space entirely. We would never have known the difference.”
“There’s no way they hit us twice taking potshots from the next sector over.” Zarrey would not, could not accept that explanation. That would have been a one in a million chance.
“No, whoever it was knew exactly who we were, where we were going to be and when. And as for the nuke, well, we know of only two fleets that are armed with nukes.”
“Us and…?” Zarrey prompted.
“The Hydrian Armada, sir.”
“Scaly lizard bastards.” Zarrey curled his lip at the thought of the aliens, “I would’ve thought they knew better than to fuck with this ship.” According to them, the Singularity was a cursed instrument of death. Granted how many of their kind had been killed by her guns, Zarrey couldn’t blame them for that belief, and at this point the ship had killed more humans than she had Hydra, so most of humanity thought the same way.
But this was no time to contemplate human and Hydra relations, nor was it the time to investigate the attack. They had to get the ship back in order.
Damn, where was the Admiral? Now was not a good time for him to disappear without an explanation. Zarrey was very unused to handling these crisis situations alone. He did his best to remain calm. What would the Admiral have done? “Give me a damage report,” he ordered, channeling his most authoritative voice.
The crew noticed the Admiral’s absence, but they didn’t question it. They had learned it was sometimes better not to ask where the Admiral was. Their experience allowed them to do their jobs regardless. “Comms are down.” Keifer Robinson initiated the cycle of basic reports. “We should be able to use the battery-operated radios to communicate.” The transmissions would not be secure, but it would work.
Don Jazmine followed her lead, “Helm control is nominal, but Engines One, Two and Four have shut down.” He wiped the feverish sweat from his brow and readied his hands on the controls, “We can maneuver, but it won’t be quick.”
“Sensors are down.” They were blind to everything around them. “The decontamination systems have been activated and radiation levels within the normal range.” Lieutenant Galhino said her part, which earned an awkward pause. Zarrey hadn’t been on the bridge during her poorly executed mutiny. Would her crewmates call her out?
The bridge staff looked to one another, but said nothing.
Zarrey caught that awkward pause but elected not to address it. He didn’t have time to deal with Galhino’s attitude right now. There were more important issues. “Radiation levels are normal throughout the ship?” He could see the pale, sweaty faces of the bridge crew. He could spot a dozen people from here who certainly had radiation sickness. The radiation had breached the hull. The levels of it should not be normal.
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“Except for a slight elevation in the starboard bow, yes,” Galhino confirmed, making it clear that she was not mistaken. The levels were indeed normal.
“That doesn’t make any damn sense, Galhino.” Colonel Zarrey argued, “That should have taken hours.”
“It did, sir.” The sensor officer pointed to the old clock that hung on the wall, “It’s 0115 hours, ship’s time.”
“We’ve been out of it for nearly eight hours?” Zarrey could hardly believe that. What were the odds that the entire crew would get knocked out? “Anything could have happened.” They could have been boarded or attacked while they were helpless! …And it certainly meant that Admiral Gives could be anywhere he damn well pleased. That in itself could be really good or really bad.
Ensign Alba rubbed his aching head, noticing that his hand came away bloody, but too busy to care. Someone before him had jury rigged the engineering console, leaving his only task to be collecting data. With the Admiral’s noticeable absence, he reported to the executive officer. “Colonel, sir, we’re in rough shape.” The ship was just about as bad as it looked in CIC all around. “The Conjoiner drives have been rigged to generate a lopsided field. That’ll keep the most damaged part of the bow in stasis until we can get to it, but I can’t get a proper read on the damage from here. We’ll have to make a manual inspection of the structural supports.”
Colonel Zarrey frowned. That doesn’t sound good. “Did we break her back, Alba?” If the ship’s superstructure had been mangled, then the ship was effectively a cripple. The Singularity would never recover from that.
“I have no way of currently knowing the status of the superstructure, sir.” He would have to wait for the damage reports to make that assessment. “Beyond that, the Primary Power Core is offline. The secondary core and Engine Three are putting off maximum output to compensate. Engine Four overheated and automatically shut down after losing coolant. It’s venting heat directly into space.” He paused, looking for more information. The systems were finnicky, but eventually spat out what he needed to know. “The Primary Power Grid is operating at 12% efficiency, and the secondaries are inoperable.”
“Alba, if you’re trying to say she’s a wreck, there are a lot of faster ways to do it,” Jazmine said, overhearing the sheer length of the engineering report. “For example, ‘Ah, shit! We’re sunk!’” He waved his hands around in a poor imitation of real panic.
The boyish engineer immediately turned a satisfactory shade of red.
“Jazz, if you’ve got something useful to contribute to this disaster, I would like to hear it.” Voice scathing, Galhino glared at him from two consoles over.
“Can it.” Zarrey barked. He had no desire to listen to the bridge crew’s familiar bickering. He had too many other concerns. He gave the sensor officer and helmsman a warning look before turning back to Alba. “12% efficiency is too low to be running a stable AG field, Life Support, decontamination systems and everything else that’s still working.” That was a horrendously low power efficiency, and the ship’s normally-abundant power reserves couldn’t cover for that, not when most of the generators were offline. “One engine and the secondary core aren’t enough to power all of that.”
“Aye,” Alba confirmed, typing rapidly at his controls. “There is a third, unknown power source.”
Zarrey watched the young officer work, “Can you localize it?” Or was the ship too damaged?
“Yes.” Alba’s fingers flew across the multicolored controls as he input commands, “Deck Twelve, Compartment 24.”
Zarrey recognized the location immediately. “FTL Drive Two?” That doesn’t make sense. Those drives were fantastic at consuming power, but incapable of producing it.
“Unclear.”
Yet another mystery. Zarrey rubbed his temples. He hadn’t been prepared to run the entire ship at the moment. It was usually extremely useful to have the Admiral’s experience in these situations. The man had been in and gotten out of more tough scrapes than Zarrey could count, but his absence left the XO to do his best.
“Get me some runners,” he ordered, they would have to physically spread the word to parts of the ship where internal communications had failed. “Begin repairs and equip all search and rescue teams with anti-radiation meds. Any team going into the starboard bow will wear hazard suits. Everyone needs to keep their eye out for sick and wounded and take shifts going to the medical bay for anti-radiation meds. We can’t afford to lose anyone because they’re being stubborn.” Anyone skipping the injection would likely wind up bed ridden. “We have no replacements, people. I need everyone on their feet.”
“Alba, Galhino, Jazz, with me. We’re going down to Compartment 24,” Zarrey told them, “We can’t leave an unknown energy source unattended.” The damage control teams were busy elsewhere, so they’d investigate that discovery themselves. “Keifer, you’re in charge.”
“Aye, sir.” The young communications officer replied, barely looking up from her station. It was not the first time she’d briefly been left in charge.
Following the XO out of the command center, Zarrey’s group was immediately assaulted by the smell of smoke.
“Smells like we missed one hell of a barbeque,” Jazz commented. The smoke wasn’t quite woody enough, but, still, “Dammit, I’m hungry now.” His empty stomach was overruling the radiation sickness’ nausea.
Maria Galhino smacked him on the back of the head. “Those are our burnt friends you’re smelling.” This scent wasn’t just chemical smoke. It wasn’t just objects that had been set ablaze. Beneath that chemical stench, there was something... meatier.
The growls of Jazmine’s stomach immediately silenced, replaced again with nausea. “Oh.”
No one said anything else. They had never seen ship damage quite like what was laid out before them. A thin layer of ash was spread on everything and electrical wires wiggled freely like cackling snakes.
The regular lights in the corridors were flickering, trying to come on, but it was still mostly dark. Ensign Alba disliked the garish red coloring of the dim emergency lights. He reached for his flashlight only to find that it and his wire cutters had disappeared.
Colonel Zarrey’s head was pounding as if there was a jackhammer chipping at his brain. It was all he could do to focus on walking and hope the Admiral was in better shape than himself, wherever he was.
Taking the most direct route to Deck Twelve, they found the deck below CIC had an even thicker layer of ash and the air was permeated by the stifling stench of smoke. Descending further to Deck Ten, the floors and walls were scorched and charred. It went without saying that major fires had ravaged this part of the ship. The acrid scent of brunt wiring was suffocating.
Deck Eleven was even worse than Ten. The fires had been equally widespread, but their heat had warped doors and floor tiles. The fire suppression systems had managed to put out the blaze, but it had clearly raged for quite some time before then. The Colonel’s team did their best not to consider the consequences of the inescapable flames for anyone caught on this deck during the attack.
By the time the group arrived at the hatch for Compartment 24, they all had smears of black ash on their faces. The mess was inescapable. Colonel Zarrey reached the door first and flung it open with a mighty heave, entirely unsure of what he might find inside.