Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity
“Fuck.” It was much the only word Colonel Zarrey had for their current situation. Just, “Fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Are you okay, sir?” Lieutenant Robinson asked, pulling the microphone of her headset away from her mouth.
“Fuck!” He threw the packet of papers down onto the flat top of the radar console. “No! Why the hell would I be okay?” What kind of stupid question was that? “I’m inheriting a ship that’s falling the fuck apart!”
The bridge crew fell into an uncomfortable silence. Mention of Zarrey taking permanently over was a foreign concept. It was the first rule of being assigned to the Singularity: she was Admiral Gives’ ship. The fact that was no longer the case would take some getting used to for everyone involved.
“Well, sir,” Lieutenant Jazmine said, cluelessly attempting to brighten the mood, “I’d say at least ten percent of that stuff was broken before the nuke hit, and the other ninety percent wasn’t really your fault.”
Colonel Zarrey contemplated walking over and whacking the helmsman upside the head. That was beyond the point. But, ultimately, he realized he was too tired to move his feet even that small distance.
“Sir,” Robinson said, her voice soft as she stood beside him on the lower tier of CIC, “It might benefit you to rest for a few hours. We can handle this.”
“Fuck that,” Zarrey grunted. “If Admiral Gives can stay up three days straight, so can I.”
“With all due respect, Colonel,” the communications officer said gently, “you’re not the Admiral.”
“And thank the stars for that.” Galhino added from her station.
Every member of the bridge crew turned to stare at the sensor officer, unsurprised, but unamused by her blatant disrespect.
Jazmine shook his head, “Keep that up, Galhino, and mark my words: he’s gonna haunt your ass.”
“Keep that up and I’m gonna maroon your ass in the nastiest place I can think of, no matter how long it takes us to limp there,” Zarrey corrected. “I don’t care if he’s almost dead or actually dead, you will give the Admiral your utmost respect. He gave thirty years of good service to this ship and he managed to put up with your shit, even if I’m not entirely sure how.” Put in the same position, Zarrey would have kicked Galhino off the ship in a heartbeat. Hell, he was still considering it.
Robinson was staring down at her standard-issue shoes, cheeks flushed, embarrassed by Galhino’s comments. Zarrey turned to her, rubbing his head, “I’m really not sure what you see in her.” A nice young lady like Robinson could do a lot better.
“Owens,” he flagged down the yeoman that ran papers on the bridge, “find me some drugs. My head is killing me.”
Ensign Owens put up a salute, “Yes, sir.”
“Dammit, stop it with all the saluting!” Ever since Zarrey had taken over temporary command, the crew had gone straight to treating him like a legitimate flag officer. “Standing orders on saluting the commanding officer are still valid. It’s annoying and I don’t want to see it.” Admiral Gives had abolished that bit of decorum on the ship with good reason. There was no reason to start it up again now.
“Aye, sir,” Owens acknowledged before dashing off in search of painkillers.
Zarrey continued to rub his temples. This was excruciating. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Sure, he knew how to run a crew, but he did not have the slightest clue how to run a ship, especially not one that had been half-sunk by her own fleet.
Even focusing on the condition of the ship, without concern for her situation, it was a disaster. The hallways were blackened, coated in grime, oil and charcoal. Bulkheads, deck tiles and hatches that hand been warped by the fires’ heat had to be melted down, recast and replaced. Repairs on the hull breach had to be finished and painted over.
Additionally, the entire side of the ship that had been exposed to the radiation needed to be scrubbed down and decontaminated so that it would stop interfering with communications, radar and sensor scans. The main and secondary communications arrays on the outside of the ship needed to be repaired, recalibrated and realigned.
Furthermore, the ship was still effectively drifting. The only operational engine was being used to supplement the Secondary Power Core’s output. Engines One, Two and Four had not yet been reignited.
Located on Deck Eleven, in the heart of the fires that had erupted below the ruptured fuel line, the Primary Power Core had been melted irreversibly into scrap. The Kansas’ power core had been shut down and subjected to a full inspection, but nothing about how or why it had been secretly placed on the ship had been revealed. It now rested in engineering, and would be installed to temporarily replace the primary core.
…And all of that just deal with the ship’s primary critical systems. Lights, wiring, and the water and air circulatory systems were a mess of their own.
“I got it!” Lieutenant Gaffigan shouted, shattering Zarrey’s miserable thoughts. “I fucking got it!” The weapons officer abruptly shot to his feet and did a little jig.
The armory officer had been so unusually quiet as he hunched over his station that Zarrey had thought he was asleep. The Colonel had definitely preferred it that way, as his splintering headache worsened with the noise.
“Ha-ha!” Gaffigan continued triumphantly. “They said it wasn’t possible, but I did it!”
It had been awhile since Zarrey had seen the weapons specialist look so chipper. Usually he only got that happy when he’d been cleared to blow something up with extreme prejudice. Zarrey was relatively certain he had given no such orders. “What happened, Monty?”
“I just figured out which ship attacked us.”
“What?” Colonel Zarrey demanded. “You told me that it was impossible to determine which ship’s missile that was.” The shard had been too small.
“Aye, sir. It was impossible to determine from the shard.” Montgomery Gaffigan stepped back to carelessly lean against the ship’s weapons controls, a smile on his bearded face. “I didn’t use the shard.” He held up a clipboard of papers, “All hail the bureaucracy.”
Zarrey squinted at the sheet, but he could not make out the fine print of the list. “Monty, I haven’t the damnedest idea what you’re talking about.”
“You see, Colonel, every week, the fleet sends out the allotment of nuclear missiles for every ship in the fleet. It is some measure of how quickly and adequately we can respond to a severe threat in any region of known space. Last week, received that data and printed it out, so we could assimilate that data into the Singularity’s records, like we do every week.”
He tapped the clipboard, “This is that data, but this,” he held up a second packet, which was just as thick, but slightly mangled and covered in pencil markings, “this is the fleet data we received for this week. I’ve just spent the last two hours cross-checking every nuclear-capable ship in the fleet’s warhead count. And there’s only one ship that came up with one less warhead than last week: the Flagship Olympia.”
“Reeter.” Of course it was, Zarrey thought. “That soulless cockroach.” The Olympia’s commander was a two-faced creep. Sure, in the media spotlight, he was charming and perfect, an ideal citizen, but the moment the paparazzi looked away, Reeter became vile and ambitious. His temper was the most feared in the fleet, save for Admiral Gives, whom no one had ever seen get angry.
“I was pretty sure we’d all already assumed that.” Jazmine said, tapping his fingers on the molded wheel of the helm controls. “He did blatantly admit that he hated us several times… Something about us being weak and imperfect.”
“He can fuck right off.” Zarrey muttered. “This is a ship of second chances.” And technically speaking, this was an all-volunteer crew. Admiral Gives did not draft crew out of training or off of other ships. He simply accepted any transfer request made to him. It meant the ship ran several hundred short of her full complement, but it meant they were a good crew, a willing crew.
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Only people desperate enough to go anywhere came here, because as far as the rest of the fleet was concerned, the Singularity, with her aging equipment and legendarily uncaring commanding officer, was the bottom of the barrel. It never mattered why people requested transfers, if they were willing to serve here, they were given the chance.
A safe haven for crew fleeing unpleasurable assignments, the Singularity was also the last stop for officers and crew that would have been otherwise kicked out of the fleet. They were given the choice to face dishonorable discharge or serve here, at the Admiral’s discretion. Zarrey would know, he had been one of the latter.
The only reason he had a job, or a home, or even any clothes on his back was because Admiral Gives had asked him to serve as the Singularity’s XO. The fact the offer had been made at gunpoint was almost irrelevant. Almost.
He sighed, remembering Lieutenant Robinson, who stood next to him. At the mention of Reeter, she’d gone silent, Her metal clipboard of tasks clutched to her chest. She was shaking. Even as she tried to hide it, it remained obvious. Zarrey put a hand on her shoulder in a sign of solidarity. “He won’t get away with it,” he told her, “Not this time.”
Robinson just shook her head. It was over. It had been over the moment Admiral Gives had fallen into a coma. As brutish as they liked to paint Reeter, the man was very clever. He knew how to break people, how to force them into submission. He did not have to kill them. Reeter preferred broken slaves to corpses.
Keifer Robinson had almost been one of them. She knew just how evil, how manipulative Reeter could be. He had the worlds in the palm of his hand. The only reason she had ever felt safe was because she’d known that Admiral Gives could be every bit of the monster Reeter was. The mere threat of antagonizing him had kept Reeter away from the Singularity for years, and thus, away from her.
But without Admiral Gives, there was no one to keep Reeter away. He was coming after them, and there was no one to stop him from breaking and abusing them all. She had not been this scared in years.
Zarrey could not imagine how she must feel. Reeter had spent months physically abusing her before she transferred here. But, even now, it seemed that she could not escape his clutches. Zarrey knew it would be a favor to pull her thoughts away from such memories. “Keifer, I thought you said our communications arrays were broken. How did Monty get the new fleet data?”
“I said they were misaligned, sir.” Robinson said, straightening up. Now was not the time for her to break down. She was head of the communications department. She had a job to do. “I apologize if that mislead you-“
“I know, you’re used to reporting to the Old Man. He understands all that technical jargon.” It was getting to be a consistent problem. Zarrey understood less than half of what the new chief engineer told him when they spoke.
“When the arrays are misaligned, we can receive transmissions fine,” she explained. “The issue lies in transmissions. Our arrays are designed to create constructive interference when we transmit, boosting the signal strength. However, if the arrays are misaligned, that constructive interference becomes destructive, and our own transmissions cancel themselves out before they cover any substantial distance.”
“Can’t we just transmit with one array?” Zarrey asked, rubbing his head as if that would help him understand. Fact was, he was just counting on the fact the rest of the senior staff knew what the hell they were doing.
“We could, sir, and that would work fine for local transmissions, say if we wanted to coordinate our support craft, but overall the transmissions originating from just one array are significantly weaker than those are transmitted using the full system. The clarity, security and range of the transmission are exponentially improved by the multi-array system.” There was a reason the ship had been designed that way.
Zarrey nodded obligatorily. Yep, he said to himself, I totally understand. He now totally understood that he was not cut out for this. He had not trained as an engineer or an officer. He had trained as a Marine, and worked his way up the ranks. Officially, he lacked every bit of training that qualified a ship’s commanding officer. Sure, he’d picked a decent amount of it up over the years, but he could only feel destined for failure.
A good commanding officer knew and understood what made their ship tick, and Zarrey lacked those hard skills and mechanical knowledge. He knew what orders to give to get a result, but he didn’t understand why it worked. He could order the engines to reverse to slow them down, but he didn’t understand propulsion systems in the slightest and could not twist their methods of operation for a new edge in combat.
Newer ships could cooperate easily with a commander less skilled in mechanics and practical knowledge. It was the job of the officers to know their individual systems’ limitations and the computer could help plot complicated objectives, but the Singularity was old. Her systems were not computerized where it could be avoided. She was capable of anything a modern ship was capable of, with the proper encouragement, but Colonel Zarrey knew he could not force the old ship to behave.
As Robinson had put it, he wasn’t Admiral Gives. In some ways, that was good, and in the ways that would keep them alive, that was really bad.
Trained in verbal and nonverbal communications, Keifer Robinson could easily recognize Zarrey’s rising despair. “He’s not dead yet, Colonel,” she reminded him. “There’s still a chance he might wake up.”
It was a slight chance that dwindled a little further every hour he remained comatose. “He’s a stubborn old bastard,” Zarrey reminded everyone, especially himself. If the Admiral was set on living, or dying, he would do just that.
The communications officer smiled softly. “Yes, sir, he is.” A scary, sociopathic bastard, but a stubborn one all the same.
Zarrey gave Robinson a nod. In another life, she would have been running a ship of her own. She was a good, talented officer. Yet, thanks to Admiral Reeter’s interference, she had washed up here with this crew of delinquent misfits.
And it was time for these misfits to do some plotting of their own. Despair and hopelessness were not going to keep them alive. They were going to have to fight. “Monty, how do we stand against the Olympia?”
“On a good day?” The weapons officer stroked his fiery orange beard, continuing to lean against his console. He knew the firing controls were protected under caps to prevent accidental activation. “We could take her toe-to-toe. She’s got one hundred defensive turrets with advanced fire control. She’s capable of shooting down almost any number of missiles we can throw at her.”
“That said,” Gaffigan continued with some consideration, “you can’t intercept bullets. Her main battery numbers twenty-four guns, with two barrels per gun. To counter, we’ve got three barrels on ten guns. We’re slower on reloading to firing, but our guns are fifty percent larger.” That was the perk of being the largest ship in the fleet. The Singularity’s main guns lived up to those proportions. “One on one she’s a close match, but we can bet she won’t be alone.” After the loss of the previous two flagships, the Olympia rarely, if ever, flew anywhere unescorted.
“What about specialty weapons?” Zarrey asked.
“Well, rumors of the Olympia’s superweapon aside, she’s got a full array of jamming equipment, mines, EMPs and let’s not forget the complement of drones.” Drones that were designed to drill into the hull and gut ships from the inside, out. “And to counter all of that we have…” he checked his inventory, and gave a dry laugh, “uhm… harpoons.”
“Harpoons?”
“Yeah, those mounts that we welded on the hull, for the harpoon launchers we made?” The armory officer sighed. “They’re still there. But let’s keep in mind we don’t technically have any actual harpoons. We’d have to make those.”
Zarrey resisted the urge to bash his head into the nearest wall. “Well, thank you, Monty, for painting the true colors of our situation.” Fuck.
“What about the railguns?” Jazmine said. “Those would punch right through the Olympia.”
“Frying our electrical systems in the process,” Galhino reminded him.
“Well yeah,” that was the drawback of super-accelerating a house-sized hunk of iron with an overpowered magnetic field, “but that’s more of a later problem if we manage to sink the Olympia.”
Where the hell was Owens with those drugs? Zarrey’s headache was only getting worse.
“Did I mention all of that was on a good day?” Montgomery Gaffigan crossed his arms. “We are not having a good day. It would be dangerous to fire the main battery without structural repairs and our weapons control hub got zapped when the power grid went haywire. The targeting and tracking systems for our weapons are down completely. If the Olympia were to happen upon us now, we’d be flingin’ bullets down our iron sights, and just hoping for a hit.”
Zarrey pinched the bridge of his nose. “You were supposed to be fixing that.” With a firing field of the Singularity’s size, they were guaranteed to hit something without targeting systems, but that was not a great way to win a fight against the modern Ariean flagship.
“My people are on it, but I shouldn’t need to remind you that those repairs are highly sensitive. We’ve got enough weapons on this ship to sink a fleet. If one of them were to go off at a bad time, because we didn’t do those repairs right, people will die. We don’t need another Yokohoma.”
Zarrey bit his tongue. The crew had been told that was an accident. Zarrey didn’t buy that, and neither did the worlds. Regardless, the Yokohoma was near ancient history. It had been years before Gaffigan’s time. “Just get it done, Monty.”
“Yes, sir,” Gaffigan answered, “but you should know we were having issues with the weapons controls even before the nuke hit.”
“We were?” Fuck, Zarrey thought again. That sounds like something I should have been told.
“Aye. The interception of the nuke was an accident in itself. No orders were given for that turret to turn, target or fire. It did so on a complete fluke.” He had not input those commands from his console. “If that turret had been functioning, it would have turned portside when I was attempting to intercept the other missile. Instead, it turned starboard and randomly misfired, managing to hit and trigger an early detonation within the nuke.”
“You’re telling me that was a malfunction?” Zarrey demanded, “I’ve never heard such bullshit.” Someone had known exactly what they were doing.
“That would be statistically impossible.” Galhino added. “The odds of a turret malfunctioning are low to begin with, but for it to turn and fire in such a way to intercept a moving target, it is simply not possible for that to have been a random accident.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Gaffigan threw up his hands in surrender. “I only know what the records show: the lucky turret that saved all of our hides was not given any orders to do so.”
“You expect me to believe that a malfunction just saved the entire ship.” Zarrey couldn’t help the bitter laugh that rose to his lips. “We’re not that lucky. Figure out what actually happened and bring me a report.” The Admiral would not stand for this type of half-assed guess work and neither would he.
“Aye, sir.” Monty had no choice but to acknowledge the order as if he had not already chased down any possible leads on the subject. Which he had, and whether they liked it or not: the entire ship had been saved by a malfunctioning turret.