Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity
It would take time to secure the ship for FTL and bring the teams on the outer hull back inside the ship. In the meantime, there was other work to do. The disposition of the ship’s supplies, chain of command and system readiness would be drastically altered from the week prior. Admiral Gives needed to familiarize himself with such changes immediately, because if push came to shove in the Homebound Sector, they would have to engage the Olympia as well as any ships loyal to her. But, in combat, the little details often mattered the most.
“Ensign Owens,” Admiral Gives turned to find the yeoman was already on her way over.
“The sitrep, sir,” she said, handing the papers over. She had been working on the ship long enough to know the Admiral’s habits, and this was one of them.
The situation report was impressively thick today, physical evidence that the ship’s situation had changed substantially. “Thank you, Ensign.”
Owens said nothing else and slid away to tend to other duties. Within decorum between officer and crew, the Admiral was not required to thank her, but he was always polite when it came to the yeomen. As far as she cared, it just added to his enigma.
When dealing with him, Owens elected to ignore the rumors of the Admiral’s tendency toward incredible violence. She had never seen him be anything less than polite and eerily calm. That could be plenty scary, but he had never laid a hand on anyone, so Owens had served under worse. Most of the crew felt the same way.
The report in the Admiral’s hands was held together by a clip, too many pages to staple together. To spare his aching hand, he set it on the edge of the backlit radar console, then pulled out his glasses and started skimming the pages.
Cleanup from the fires was still underway on the affected, charred decks, but all other repairs had been made. The engineering crews had decided to repair the collapsed support and then build an additional one next to it in case it re-collapsed. They had also added extra cross braces. Those designs were included in the report. Reviewing them, Admiral Gives was satisfied. He would make a personal inspection of the repairs later, but with these specifications, the bow should be just as strong as it had been before.
During cleanup, a fragment of the intercepted nuke had been recovered, identifying it as an allied weapon, later revealed to have come from the Flagship Olympia. Of course, Admiral Gives had made that assumption the moment the attack had occurred.
They had lost a defensive turret to the explosion – the same malfunctioning turret that had ‘malfunctioned,’ firing and intercepting the warhead. Some malfunction, the Admiral thought amusedly, it saved the entire ship. That had been no malfunction, but the crew did not know how else to classify the incident, since the turret had received no orders to aim or fire. Naturally, the Admiral felt no need to correct their misconception of the incident. The truth was… complicated.
“So…” Colonel Zarrey sauntered back over to his usual place beside the Admiral, entirely uncaring of the man’s focus, “how did you,” he gestured vaguely to the ship commander, “you know, not die?”
The Admiral continued leafing through the sitrep, ignoring the way Zarrey noisily slurped his coffee. “I have no explanation to offer you, XO.” Part of being comatose meant he had absolutely no recollection of the week between the moment he had activated the Reserve Power Core and the moment he had woken up in sickbay, gasping for air. He had some theories, but without evidence, he would not draw any conclusions.
It was possible the shock of being taken off life support had woken him, but he had also sensed the ghost’s lingering presence. It was also entirely possible that she had managed to wake him, because he always did whatever she asked. If she had asked him to wake up, and any fragment of him understood, then he would have woken up. He owed her that, after everything. The great debt he owed the ghost could never be wholly repaid.
“Typical.” Zarrey sighed, tasting the bitter coffee grounds in the bottom of his mug, “Macintosh had nothing to do with it. That man can’t even cure the food poisoning from Mama Ripley’s meat stew.” It was a simple problem, and yet somehow, once a month at least three crewmembers ended up bedridden from the aging cook’s favorite recipe.
Admiral Gives made no response. Multitasking the conversation with reading the report would have been easy for him, but he simply had nothing to say, so he continued flipping the pages in silence.
Wrecked armor, bulkheads, and anything else salvaged from the starboard bow had been melted down and recast into replacement parts. Still, that had not been enough to replace the material they had lost in the Kalahari Sector. To make repairs, they had dipped into the supply of solid material bars they carried aboard ship. That supply would now need to be replenished.
Similarly, the fuel-fed fires had burned through a substantial portion of their fuel. Engines One and Two had originally been starved into shutting down. The fuel line rupture that caused the fires had cut off their fuel feed. Engine Four had overheated and shut down due to a severed coolant line. The lines were now repaired and the engines back online.
Fuel and coolant would be easy to replace at Base Oceana, but the hull material and a replacement turret would be more difficult. They no longer manufactured turrets of the Singularity’s model, and her hull composition was unique.
Still, with some effort, that could all be replaced. The same could not be said for the crew.
Considering the circumstances, they had gotten off light. They could have lost hundreds, but since most of the crew had been unconscious while the radiation flooded the ship, the radiation had killed relatively few.
They had lost thirty-two in all, each far too young.
Four had died in the initial explosion, and nine more had been killed in the starboard bow’s collapse. Seven had been lost to the fires, and three of those bodies had been burned beyond recognition. Their presumed identities had been determined through process of elimination. The last eleven had been the victims of radiation poisoning.
With each of the names he saw on that list, a face came to the Admiral’s mind. His ship had a sizable crew, but he made sure to know everybody who set foot aboard, especially the crew. He had met and spoken to all of them.
Ensign Ricardo Delaney, who had died beneath the Admiral’s hands, was on that list. Chief Carlson, the ship’s chief engineer, was there too, his direct successor’s name listed beneath his own. The Admiral himself was listed as undetermined, almost the thirty-third casualty.
Admiral Gives knew he should have felt something. A normal person would have cried. He should have broken at the reminder of the fact that he had watched someone die. He should have wept at the thought of so many young innocent lives ending with no apparent cause. But faced with all of that, he felt nothing. Faced with his own name on the undetermined category of the casualty report, he still only felt keening apathy.
If he dug deep, he’d find a tint of regret. He regretted that he had failed his mission. He regretted that he had failed to protect them. He regretted that his ship had lost so many members of her crew. And, despite how glad she had seemed to see him, he knew the ghost was heartbroken and angry. These days, she was a much better gauge of what emotion he should be feeling than his own thoughts were.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“You know,” Colonel Zarrey said, his voice lowered, “these people are scared. They want to know you’re not going to let them all die. They want to feel safe.”
“I am aware,” the Admiral replied, flipping another page of the report.
Zarrey sighed. Sometimes conversation with the Admiral was a little bit like pulling teeth: not fun for anyone. “Admiral, I know you’ll address the crew when you’re ready, but most of them don’t even know you’re alive-”
“Colonel!” A large man strode onto the bridge wearing half of a rubbery environmental suit. “What the hell? You and I both agreed that it was going to take more than an hour to clean and repaint the hull! And now we get recalled from spacewalk on the double with orders to prepare for FTL? What the hell, man?”
The Admiral took it upon himself to relieve Zarrey of the new engineering chief’s wrath. He silently closed the packet he was reading and looked up. The small movement drew the engineer’s attention.
Chief Ty took an instantaneous step back. “A-Admiral,” he stammered, surprised. “You’re alive.”
“Yes,” he said. It does seem that way.
Ty cleared his throat. “Apologies for the language, sir.” There was a tint of red rising to his cheeks. “It’s just that Colonel Zarrey revoked the time he gave us to finish the hull. My teams are tired and frustrated. They just want to finish the damn job.”
“Those were my orders,” the Admiral told him, “and since you are here instead of on the hull, I will assume that we are ready for FTL.” He looked over to Ensign Alba, who gave a sheepish nod from where he sat at the engineering controls.
“Chief Ty, return to your post. Ensure everything is in order for our return to the Homebound Sector. If any additional parts or materials need to be requisitioned for final repairs or for the continuation of general operations, be sure to report it.”
“We’re going back?” Ty exclaimed. “Are you insane? Those sons of bitches just tried to kill every single one of us. Hell, they did manage to kill thirty of our friends!”
“We are short large quantities of fuel, coolant, wiring and raw materials, not to mention food and water. Base Oceana is the likeliest place we can obtain those necessary supplies, regardless of any opposition you may have to returning there.” Their opinions about it were irrelevant. “You have your orders, Chief. That will be all.”
Ty understood that to be his dismissal. He stalked off the bridge, leaving an air of frustration.
Zarrey huffed, “You could have gone a little easy on him.” That had been a bit harsh.
“I have a responsibility to try and end this peacefully. To do that I need everyone on this ship focused and following orders.” And if that failed, then alternative methods would have to suffice. He was not above taking over the fleet, rounding up the New Eran leaders and ordering their summary execution. As far as Admiral Gives was concerned, they had attacked his ship, and thus deserved to have their entrails gutted from their corpses and fed raw to their supporters.
…But he had been told to find another way, so here he was: trying to end this peacefully, as if he was still a functioning, civilized member of society.
‘Admiral, what did I tell you about that?’ The ghost made her invisible presence known, communicating silently through the bond she shared with him.
‘To save cold-blooded summary executions for Wednesday evenings.’
The ghost was not amused. ‘That is NOT what I said.’
‘Sorry.’ He knew he had a tendency to get dark and cynical. The ghost, telepathic as she was, usually caught it and set him straight before he actually set to murdering anyone.
‘Nothing to be sorry about. You were just being protective.’ He was simply willing to do anything to keep his ship and crew safe. That had never bothered her. He meant well, no matter how vile his thoughts sometimes turned. Somewhere along the line he had simply forgotten how to be gentle with both enemies and allies.
Admiral Gives traced the scuffs on the console beneath his fingertips, feeling the hum of the ship’s power. After living and working here most of his life, he could read that pulse like a book. She was ready. It was time to move.
“Ensign Walters,” he turned to the navigations officer, “do we have coordinates?”
Walters’ palms were sweaty. He had run several calculations to meet the specifications of the jump. Specifying orientation, distance and accounting for the Ariea’s gravity well had been a challenge, but he had them. Still, it seemed every few seconds, the coordinates on the display would waiver. They blinked out and back the same as before. He had run every check imaginable on them and the system itself, but there seemed to be nothing wrong.
The console’s display was probably going out again. It made him nervous, but the safety checks had cleared. “Coordinates are locked in, sir.”
“Drives One and Three are charged, sir.” Ensign Alba said his part without being prompted.
“Understood,” the Admiral said. A jump at this range, requiring that much accuracy, was best done on two FTL Drives. The chances of a malfunction and the fuel consumption were higher, but it was a regular maneuver to use two drives aboard ship, given that the ship possessed four in total. “Lieutenant Robinson, give me intercom.”
Robinson routed it though the handset on the radar console, which the Admiral normally used, and signaled when ready.
Picking up the handset, the alert tone pinged out in the corridor, and Admiral Gives could feel the crew’s curiosity. He did not often address the entire ship outside of emergency situations.
“Attention all hands, this is the Admiral. As of this moment, we are preparing to jump to the Homebound Sector. At this time, this ship remains a part of the United Countries Space Command fleet, as does the Flagship Olympia. Our duty is not to encourage a battle between the Olympia and ourselves. Our duty is to protect, honor and serve humanity at large. Our duty is to maintain the peace.”
“To accomplish that goal, my superiors consider this ship and every life aboard her expendable. I cannot and will not accept that. If the cost of peace is my ship and her crew, then there will not be peace.” He couldn’t give a damn about the greater good. “I am responsible for every single life aboard this ship. The thirty-two crew that died are on my shoulders. I will seek justice for them however I can, but justice is not vengeance. I ask that you all understand that.” Sinking the Olympia would not accomplish anything. Grief-stricken revenge attempts would not help them cut the head off the New Eran snake. He had to go after the people responsible.
“I understand that over the last few months there have been challenges. I understand that over the last few months I have been withdrawn. And I understand that over the last few months I have lost your trust. But know that my primary objective always has been, and always will be the safety of my ship and her crew. We jump in three minutes. Set Condition Two.”
He put the handset back on its rack. ”Lieutenant Gaffigan, load the main battery with standard shells, but keep the guns lowered. The radiation on our hull will confuse both our targeting sensors and the Olympia’s. But, if they start firing, fire back. Sight the guns manually.” Admiral Gives was willing to bet that the Olympia’s munitions officers had not been drilled on sighting the guns manually. Gaffigan, with that experience, would be twice as accurate. “However, under no circumstances do we engage first.” Loading the main battery was nothing more than a defensive measure.
“Yes, sir.” Monty said, inputting commands onto his console.
“Ahem.” Colonel Zarrey coughed, trying to draw the Admiral’s attention without tapping him on the shoulder.
Admiral Gives checked the countdown on the bridge’s primary screen. “Yes, Colonel?”
“Sir, I know now isn’t the best time....” He scratched his head, forgetting what he’d meant to say under the Admiral’s neutral blue stare. “Well, sir, it seems I owe you an apology. We all owe you an apology.” Zarrey wasn’t afraid to admit that.
“These last few months, we’ve all treated you poorly. We doubted you and your intentions, constantly second guessed you because it seemed like you were turning against us. But I realize now that everything you did, recalling shore leave, assigning us to random patrols… Well, it was an attempt to prevent that attack from ever landing. You were trying to keep us out of harm’s way, and we treated you like you were some sort of demon. Even today, we all assumed the worst of you.” They had feared he would execute Galhino.
“So,” Zarrey nodded to the other crew on the bridge, and, as one, they stood. “On behalf of the rest of the crew, we apologize. It is an honor to serve aboard the Fleet Admiral’s chosen flagship, and it is an honor to work with you, sir.” He put up a salute, and the rest of the crew followed, the gesture meaningful on a ship where salutes were few and far between.
This was a rare moment of seriousness for Colonel Zarrey. The amused grin that normally dominated his features was gone. “No apology was necessary, Colonel.” Admiral Gives had come to terms with the fact that most of humanity hated him. “I was doing my job.” Nobody had ever told him it would be easy. “I took an oath as this ship’s commander to protect her and her crew. That will always be my objective, above any obligations I have to the worlds, to the fleet, or to myself. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Zarrey said, echoed by the rest of the bridge crew.
“Then you will be welcome aboard my ship, all of you.” He returned the salute, allowing them to return to their duties. “Standby to execute FTL jump.”
After nearly becoming a permanent resident of the Aragonian Sector, this was the first movement the ship had made in over a week. The old battleship disappeared in a flash of rainbow light.