Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity
It took every moment, both waking and sleeping, of the week they had after the nuke, but the ship was finally, finally wholly functional. The weapons, sensors and engines were all back online. The crews had just another two hours of work to finish decontaminating the hull.
Colonel Zarrey stood in his normal spot beside the radar console on the main floor of CIC. They finally had things in hand, normalcy was within grasp, but there was still one massive void that could never be filled.
Everyone was aware of it. Their reactions varied individually, but most of them tried to lose themselves in their work as the Admiral’s all too obvious absence weighed upon them.
The mood was solemn as they played an unwilling waiting game. Word of Colonel Zarrey’s official, unavoidable promotion would come soon, and then, he would have no choice but to start giving orders again. After reigniting the engines and righting the artificial gravity field the day before, Zarrey had fallen silent. He simply had no idea what orders to give.
A creak sounded from the ship’s structure, and the floor shifted subtly beneath the crew’s feet. Incessant groans and small shifts like that had been common since the Conjoiner Drives’ reset. The new engineering chief, Chief Ty, had assured everyone that it was just the ship settling back to the artificial gravity field’s normal pull. After a week in the lopsided AG field, everything had been pulled out of place.
The ship’s structure had yet to jolt violently, and under a scrutinizing eye, the repairs done in the starboard bow appeared to be holding. The Kansas’ old power core was now working in place of the ship’s ruined Primary Power Core, and the power grid was back to normal efficiency. Overall, the Singularity was back in order.
The last work left to do was cosmetic. New bulkheads and tiles were still being cast for the bow and for the charred decks where they were necessary, and the corridors were being scrubbed down and cleansed of ash. There were workers on the outer hull, painting, as the bridge staff waited in an unfamiliar silence.
Making repairs had been one hell of a victory, but it sure didn’t feel like one. Any minute now, they would receive the call, and it would fall to the communications officer, Keifer Robinson, to make the ship-wide announcement. She rested one hand on the intercom button and the other hovered over the handset beside her station. Any second now, it would ring.
In the medical bay, Doctor Macintosh distracted himself by tidying beds and changing bandages. He had set the life support system to shut down on its own, not wanting to be there when it happened, because Zarrey was right - it was wrong. It always felt wrong to take a patient off life support, but that was the nature of his job.
Not far away, hidden behind the gray, carefully drawn curtain, the ghost had returned to the Admiral’s bedside. The time had come for her to keep that sad, sad promise. Six days, she had stood silently by, unheard and unseen. But now, the time had come, and she could not let that loathsome silence linger. It bothered her too much.
It all bothered her too much, even the fact that she had to be here now.
“I made a promise.” She furrowed her brow, “I guess I just thought I would have more time.” Now was too soon. She was not ready.
“This isn’t how I thought it would end.” After so many years of working with him, she had stopped contemplating that their partnership would eventually come to an inevitable end. “No goodbyes, not a fight, or an explosion. Just…” A medical complication. She had waited too long, woken the crew up too late. This was her fault.
She could not mask up the pain now. She kept it so hidden from everyone, but somehow Admiral Gives had always seen what she tried so hard to hide. He had recognized it and adjusted accordingly to minimize the suffering on both their parts.
He was the only one who had willingly acknowledged her. That had been enough to render him kind, but more than that, he had respected her. He had never forced her to do anything. He had never referred to her as a creature or thought her a monster. He had trusted her and treated her as an equal. And yet, one of the last things he had seen her do was betray him.
“I’m sorry.” She knew he could not hear her, but still, he deserved an apology. Her shoulders fell. My fault, again. It always was. “I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to save either of you.” He and Samantha Scarlett were the only two people who had ever been truly kind to her, but it was her fault that Samantha was dead and he was dying.
With him gone, she would be alone again. She registered that, but she could hardly comprehend it. Would things be like they had been before? Saturated in misery and death?
No, she thought not. Zarrey was not malicious. He was inexperienced, but he would not become cruel. Once everything was explained, he would understand. He might even be grateful for her help in this situation. Admiral Gives had left her in good hands. He had left her with someone who would not abuse or exploit her.
Zarrey’s lack of formal training was not ideal, but his intentions were good. At the moment, he was just contemplating how to keep the ship’s remaining crew alive, and that meant more to the ghost than his raw ability. It meant a great deal more.
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But then, no doubt, this very situation was the reason Zarrey was here. Admiral Gives was always three steps ahead of the game. Though Colonel Zarrey had no desire for command, he was well-liked, even by her, and once he was in command, he would not hurt people unnecessarily. He would not force her to hurt people unnecessarily either. That was relieving, but she still felt… off.
She still felt something.
Responsibility, it had been called. The ghost felt so terribly, tragically responsible for everything that had happened to the man on the hospital bed.
“I hope you can forgive me for what I did that day.” Twenty-seven years ago, she had asked a good man to help her. He had, but it had left him one of the most hated people in the worlds. It would now cost him his life.
He had been here, teaching her, helping her, for nearly three decades. And yet, he had only ever asked for one thing in return. “I will keep the promise I made to you.” It hurt, but she would abide that old request. She would stay at his side until it was over. Her expression broke, her raw loss and guilt seeping out. “You won’t be alone when...” she choked out the words in a whisper, “…when you die.”
Die. What a sad word that was: the permanent cessation of all vital functions, the action of ceasing to exist. Dead people were nothing more than an intangible memory. And with her cursed inability to forget, she now knew more of the dead than she knew of the living.
But that was the existence of a ghost. Ghosts were trapped, stuck between the struggles of life and the bliss of nonexistence. They were timeless. They would not age, and they would not expire. Centuries in, they went mad with the paradox of their scientifically unacknowledgeable existence.
That was the fate that awaited her. Eventually, a century or an eon from now, she would go insane. Accompanied by only the memory of the dead, most likely, she would outlast the genetic evolutionary chain of the human race. She would simply exist until the universe ceased to.
So, while ghosts did not truly exist – they were nothing more than humanity’s irrational superstitions- she considered her immortal self to be one. She shared a ghost’s eternal fate, and her true identity had proved incomprehensible to most people.
Along the journey to that eternal end, there was little to anchor her existence. She had no home. The passage of time was of no consequence. And, the mission she had been created to complete was impossible.
All she had was memory. All she had were the people that gave her those memories. The few of them she truly knew gave her existence bearing and purpose, it was why the Admiral had always told her she cared too much. Inevitably, all the people around her would die and become nothing more than a memory. Admiral Gives had tried to help her find a new purpose, be it exploration, education, or even selfish greed.
But she, much to his disdain, had settled on protecting. She existed to protect her people, so that they could wander and experience life in all the ways she could not. That was the closest she could ever come to completing her mission, no matter how else she continued to try.
She had a peculiar existence. Everything she had would turn eventually to memory, but she had found that the most powerful memories did not come from things like objective greed or exploration. They came from people and their emotions, and if she protected them well, then she would have powerful good memories.
But when she failed, the price was high. It was too high. She had seen that over and over and over again. There were times that it broke her. There were times that she felt she had no place in these worlds. There were times that she realized she was little more than an eternal mistake, never intended to possess thought, let alone sentience.
Admiral Gives never let that self-doubt linger for long. He always gave her something to do, taught her something new, or just talked to her. Those little gestures had been enough to remind her that she had a promise to keep… the very promise she was now here to fulfill.
But next time she fell apart, who would reach out and offer her a place to be?
Who would help her protect her crew?
Who would protect her?
The strength she had been holding onto broke. “Please,” she whispered, finding a new type of anguish, “don’t make me keep this promise.” It pained her. “I don’t want you to leave.” She was lonely. “I don’t want you to…” it was such a sad, sad word on her lips, “die.” She was scared.
But she knew that the Admiral had been suffering. Living was not something he had enjoyed. He had been there before she had learned how to protect and understand. The price of his patience was pain.
He was the one person she had never managed to save. She had thousands of good memories with him, but to him, they weren’t good. They were just memories. He was never happy, he was just temporarily not miserable, and even that never lasted. The worlds always saw fit to remind him of his failures, of his mistakes. They saw fit to try and break him at every opportunity and he had stopped healing a long time ago.
But still, he was her anchor. “Can you find it in your heart to give me another chance?” Just one more. “I will get it right this time.” She wouldn’t let him suffer. She would find some way, some miracle amongst the worlds’ misery that would give him happiness. “I’ll protect you, the way I was always supposed to,” the way Samantha Scarlett had asked her to. She would find a way to be deserving of his patience, to be deserving of the time and trust he had given her.
“This time, I’ll get it right.” This time, he wouldn’t get hurt. “I promise.”
But the scars that decorated his skin were evidence of her previous struggles, of her unsuccessful attempts, of every chance she’d had. She had failed all of them. He’d been tortured, shot, interrogated, and doubted more than any one person deserved to be.
And usually, this was the point when he reminded her not to make a promise she could not keep, the way he always did. Then he would walk away, acting like everything was fine.
But it wasn’t fine. It was never fine and this time, he didn’t even move.
She was running out of time, and she was terrified. She was an immortal creature with the strength of one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and she did not want to face these worlds alone. The very prospect terrified her. “Give me another chance,” she pleaded, “just one more… Please.” Don’t leave me.
He was one of few people who always kept his word. “You said you would stay as long as I needed you.” She did not want to be alone. Not now and not ever. “I still need you, Admiral.”
But there was no answer to her agony.
The life support machine clicked off.