Osee Sector, Battleship Singularity
“So…” Cadet Santino said, “we’re two steps from war with the Hydrian Armada, rogue from the fleet and somehow, the only thing we have to do is sit around and pull these stupid things apart?”
Grabbing another spider-like drone from the cart, Callie shook it once, listening for anything loose, then laid it flat and took a screwdriver to its chassis. “Yep.” She and nine other engineers were seated around a set of work tables that had been haphazardly dragged into this otherwise empty compartment. Three carts of drones sat in the center, piled high with the round bodies and spindly legs of the cutting drones. The drones usually powered down in a condensed size, their legs folded up neatly beneath their bodies, but after the attack, they’d been left frozen, mid-step, mid-cut, and mid-climb. The AI had not cared to shut them all down properly, and now all the legs entangled the drones, locking them together until someone shook one loose and started prying it apart.
Decommissioning the drones was a tedious task. Each one had to be pulled apart to study the way the Hydrian control chips had been integrated. Then its power sources, and any safe, reusable components had to be removed.
That was the official practice any way. There weren’t very many components that could be reused aboard the Singularity. The drones’ power sources had some use in handheld sensor and communication equipment, but the Singularity didn’t carry any other drone models, and the ship’s components were in general far larger and less delicate than the cutting drones, essentially incompatible. So, the process the crew had settled into was grabbing a drone, pulling the chassis apart, documenting the physical hack, ripping out the battery to be recycled and throwing the rest in the waste bin.
And that seemed to be taking forever. There were two hundred drones, and only ten engineers on this task. The others had all begun repairs, chasing down severed power lines, testing out the FTL drive that had been knocked offline and racing to get internal communications back online. Ten engineers was all that could be spared, and any additional would only have overwhelmed Lieutenant Foster, who was in charge of documenting and analyzing the Hydrian control chips’ integration. She ran around making notes and taking pictures of each drone as it was disassembled. Chief Ty, who was supposed to be aiding her, spent a lot of time staring at the ventilation grate on the floor. He’d been doing that often since the drones’ attack, but no one really had time to question him.
With the engineers, Foster and Ty, there were also ten Marines, standing watch behind each of the engineers’ workstations in black fatigues. There was a time when the presence of a heavily armed soldier standing behind her might have disturbed Callie, but she was well past it now. The Marines were a common sight aboard ship and the vast majority of them were friendly to her. Besides, the Marines were only there to help, should the drones suddenly come back to life.
Lieutenant Foster tapped her stylus on the rim of the data pad she held. “This is taking too long.”
The drone spread out before Callie, gleaming and silver, was the size of a dinner plate. She freed the top chassis and tossed it in the waste bin, then held the light so that Foster could get a good look at it. “What’s the matter?” Callie hadn’t known Foster long, but this was the closest she’d ever seen the cyber analyst get to losing her cool. More and more of her blonde hair was beginning to escape the tight braid she’d put it in.
“They’re all the same.” This one too, Foster noted as she raised the camera hung on her neck snapped a few photos. “We’ve gone through nearly forty of them, and they’re identical.” All the chips had been wired in the same. “We won’t learn anything from this.” Nothing they hadn’t already gained. Foster paused for a moment, briefly wondering if anyone would correct her use of we, but no one did. It was becoming easier and easier for her to consider herself one of the Singularity’s crew, and sometimes she wondered if she’d gone too fast, if they might still consider her an outsider for having come from the Gargantia, but those moments of hesitation were coming less and less frequently and no one reinforced them. “We’re wasting time.”
Santino didn’t disagree, but he wasn’t the one pulling apart two hundred identically corrupted drones. He was only watching, and it was boring. None of the hundreds of needle-like limbs had so much as twitched under his gaze. “What else can we do?”
Foster pulled herself away from Callie’s drone and moved on to study the latest exposed circuit cards two workstations away. “Shouldn’t we be helping the away team?” They’d need help on Azura eventually. The planet was cursed. “By the time we finish here, there won’t be anything we can do to help them.” This was going to take hours at a minimum, and events on Azura would be long over by then.
Callie grabbed a pair of insulated forceps and pried at the battery on her drone, flicking it into the proper bin once it was loose. “Last time we disposed of dangerous evidence, it didn’t take nearly this long.” In her admittedly limited experience, this did seem to be a waste of time. “Why can’t we do what we did last time and just throw these into the sun?”
“Wait,” Ty’s head snapped up. “What did you just say?”
Callie paused, “I mean, why can’t we throw these drones into the sun? That’s how we got rid of the genetically modified insect.” She was still new to the ship, a bit over a year into her service contract. Surely, there was some reason they couldn’t get rid of the drones the same way, she just didn’t know what that reason was.
“Genetically modified what?” Foster echoed.
“Long story,” Santino said with a slight shrug that was still mindful of the rifle in his hands. “Fireball almost got eaten, but we ended up throwing it into the system’s sun to get rid of it.”
Foster paused her work for only a moment, trying to discern Santino’s expression under his tactical helmet. Truthfully, she had a hard time knowing when the crew was messing with her. She didn’t have all their shared history, and had no real idea if their mentions of destroying moons or hunting insects were legitimate or some inside joke. The Gargantia certainly hadn’t gotten up to such activities. Her time in the fleet, up until the Gargantia’s fateful assignment above Sagittarion, had been spent doing patrols of the well-established trade routes, and political escort runs. That was all most of the fleet did in this day and age. There were exceptions of course, scuffles with pirates and dangerous technology, even a few political struggles that turned physical before the fleet pacified them. But the Gargantia had never been assigned to those unique missions.
“That’s it!” Ty clapped his hands together, suddenly more lively than he’d been in hours. “Foster, seal up some of those chips. We’ll send them to the lab for material analysis. Batch of twenty should be plenty.” That would allow them to study the Hydra’s material manufacturing methods. “The rest of this, we don’t need.” Standard operating procedures dictated they save and recycle what they could. It was easier to recycle parts than it was to process raw material, but the drones didn’t make for that much material, not compared to what the ship carried. And with the exception of the batteries, none of that material was particularly useful. “Callie, Santino, let’s head to the bridge. We’ll talk to the Colonel.” Foster was right. This decommissioning operation was taking too long. The regulations said it had to be this way, but since when did anyone on this ship listen to the regulations? Those stupid rules were written by people who had time and support. The Singularity was short on both.
“Yes, Chief,” Callie said, quickly finishing up the drone in front of her and tossing it into the pile of other completed drones. She secured her tools and stood to stretch her back. It felt nice, having hunched over drone after drone for the last few hours.
Santino stepped up beside her, not altogether certain why Ty wanted him to come along, but it sounded more interesting than standing watch over the drone decommissioning, so he had no complaints. “You think we’re going to see action?” he asked the chief engineer.
“I think you can only sideline a battleship so long when you’re on the brink of war.” Whether they had to intervene at Azura or not, they needed to be ready to move, and getting rid of these drones was step one. Tossing them into the sun was a sure way to ensure their destruction. ‘Tossing’ was perhaps a misleading term. They’d be venting the drone parts out an airlock deep in the sun’s outermost layers. Gravity would do most of the work to drag them into the sun’s core, but the Singularity had high structural integrity and her armor didn’t transfer heat very well, so she could sail closer to the sun than most other ships. If they tossed the drones off at the closest safe distance, that would be deeper than almost any other ship could go. The drones would be irrecoverable.
“Can’t argue with that,” Santino said, opening the hatch as he, Ty and Callie stepped through. He spun it closed on the other side and began tailing the engineers through the hexagonal corridors. Santino wasn’t eager to fight the Hydra. He’d seen what the Hydrian drone had done to Corporal Yankovich, and he had heard the stories in training about what it was like to fight an enemy that was biologically superior in nearly every way. But, he and the rest of the Marines didn’t want to be idle either.
The drone decommissioning workspace had been set up in an isolated part of the ship primarily used for food storage – away from any vital components or supplies that could be seized and corrupted as the cutting drones themselves had been. That made it a long walk to the bridge through empty corridors which all looked very much the same. The ship’s internal spaces were designed that way. When the Singularity had been built, very little thought had been given to aesthetics. The interchangeability of parts and structural integrity had been priority, so everything was made of the same uniform pieces in dark gray metal. There were a few pained markers, labelling locations and access points, but they were chipped and faded. In that way, the ship very much showed her age. There were scuffs and scratches on the metal, signs of undeniable human presence. The lights above had a yellow tint, not as warm as sunlight, but still warmer than most other artificial lights.
Decompression seals were evenly spaced along the path, kept closed while the ship was on alert. With air on both sides, they were easy to open, pass through and then close again. It was a near-automatic movement to anyone who’d been aboard ship for more than a few weeks. The seals thunked as they disengaged and reengaged. A few creaked, needing new lubricant on the hinges, but it was just white noise to the crew, same as the low chirr that sounded from the ship’s surrounding structure, a sigh of stressed metal settling back into place. It wasn’t something that any of the crew usually thought too much about, yet this time, Ty stopped, casting his gaze to the juncture between the bulkhead and the ceiling.
Santino and Callie stopped beside him. “Something wrong, Chief?”
Yes, Ty thought, remembering the neurofibers he’d seen crawling up the ship’s structure in the space between the hulls. He could picture them now, winding through the ship’s beams and trusses, hidden by the panels that formed the corridors. Squeezing and slithering, perhaps they were the cause of the ship’s soft creaks. Any ‘soft’ creaks coming from the ship’s massive structure was no gentle push. It was the result of a force thousands of times stronger than a human could endure, and those fibers were much stronger than they looked. Given what he’d seen in the mess, where they’d ripped the drones limb from limb, they, given their mass number, could compress and shift the ship’s bones. The recent growth he’d seen between the hulls was an indication of a larger-than-expected infiltration. He’d known the fibers were pervasive. That was their purpose – to connect to systems and record data independently. But that didn’t require a physical presence, physical movement. And no matter how gentle the fibers had been with the Admiral between the hulls, or with Ty himself in the mess, there was no helping that what he’d seen was recontextualizing everything he’d grown accustomed to aboard ship. He’d never questioned the Singularity’s noises before. It had been another aspect of her age, her character. Now, it was a possible symptom of the fibers’ exceptional growth. It was a reminder that while the away team dealt with the remains of a Cataclysm on Azura, another might be close at hand.
And yet, there was nothing they could do. Ordinarily, the Black Box should have sprouted thousands of connections. On a ship as large as the Singularity, it might normally have grown hundreds of thousands, but given the increased growth he had seen, it was surely into the millions. There would be no getting rid of it, so Ty lied. “Everything’s fine,” he told Callie, reminding himself to pull Montgomery Gaffigan aside and ask how the Matador’s Cataclysm had first manifested itself.
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No one had wanted to ask before. No one had wanted Gaffigan to relive those moments. Now, Ty wasn’t sure he had a choice. If he didn’t ask, he might miss a critical warning sign – not that there was anything to do but abandon ship.
***
Colonel Zarrey knew what he had to do. Ideally, the best plan would have involved getting Kallahan drunk. There was nothing quite like alcohol when it came to knocking down barriers and loosening lips. But with the ship near a combat situation, they had the unfortunate necessity of staying sober. But, barring alcohol, there was no substitute for being direct. Bluntness had a way of catching people by surprise, and the level and tone of their surprise was telling.
But, when Zarrey found Kallahan sitting on a reading chair in the ship’s library, Zarrey knew there would be no surprise. Kallahan was waiting. The old Marine had chosen an old burgundy chair beneath a lamp, his crutches resting beside him. He met Zarrey’s eyes without hesitation. “Colonel.”
“Corporal. I had asked you to the bridge.” Zarrey was no fan of authority. He could respect a crewman for refusing an order in the right circumstances, and he enjoyed a degree of chaos. But there was no chaos here, there was only a heavy sense of dread. Zarrey pushed it aside. That dread followed his investigation everywhere it went. “You know something.”
“About the Admiral?”
“Yes.” Colonel Zarrey didn’t bother to sit in the empty recliner beside Kallahan. He stood before the old marine, noting how exhausted the man looked. It wasn’t a purely physical exhaustion that tilted his shoulders. “Tell me what he’s hiding.”
“I can’t.”
Kallahan didn’t avert his gaze. He didn’t hesitate. He displayed no telltale marks of lying. “Why not?” Zarrey asked him.
“Because, to be honest with you, Colonel, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. We cannot stop what’s been set in motion.” The fate of humanity lay outside human hands. Perhaps the Angel of Destruction would save them. Perhaps she’d be the one to exterminate them. Caught in a three-way battle between Manhattan, the Hydrian Empire and the Angel of Destuction, humanity was just a passenger en route to its destiny. That destiny might be greatness. It might be extinction. It might be something else entirely.
Zarrey blinked, noting the seriousness in Kallahan’s gaze. There was an absolute dread in the old Marine’s expression. Still, Zarrey couldn’t help but ask. “Are you concussed?”
Kallahan tilted his head. “What?”
Zarrey crossed his arms. “Are you concussed?” It was a simple question. “Because you’re getting all weepy and that isn’t you, Kallahan.” Kallahan was a tough-as-nails Marine, a survivor of the Hydrian War, not some old man resigned to his fate. “Bad enough the fuckin’ Admiral’s got multiple personalities, let’s make sure you get treatment for your brain-bleed before it spreads further.”
It was nonsense. Utter nonsense. But Kallahan felt comforted anyway. Zarrey’s investigation wasn’t malicious. Not at all. Perhaps that was why the ghost herself hadn’t intervened. “This ship is cursed,” he told Zarrey.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Zarrey muttered. He dealt with that curse every time he babysat. The ship quite simply never behaved when he was in charge.
Kallahan took a deep breath, tasting the smell of paper and dust that haunted the library. “It needs to remain cursed.”
Zarrey scratched at the old scar on his chin. It had risen back to a bumpy texture, irritated by his nervous habit. “What do you mean?”
“This was the most powerful ship in the worlds,” Kallahan reminded. Fifty years ago, there had been no contest. “Admiral Gives spent the last fifteen years letting the worlds forget that fact.” Gives had assigned the ship to backwater patrol after backwater patrol, and taken on a volunteer crew of misfits. Misfits who didn’t realize how powerful this ship truly was. “Why do you think he did that?”
Zarrey tried to still his hand from the scar, but could never quite manage when he was under stress. “Why should I know?” He was not a strategist. With someone else, the rationale might have been pity or mercy, but Admiral Gives was not privy to those things. With him, everything served a purpose. “But that’s why I’m here. We need to understand his plans, because I think something’s wrong.”
“Of course something’s wrong,” an older voice cut in. “That’s the definition of a curse. If it had been a blessing, they would have called it that instead.” Mama Ripley stepped around the bookshelf, her stained cooking apron still tied over her uniform. “But no one said a curse can’t become a blessing.”
Zarrey looked at Ripley, then to Kallahan, then back to Ripley once more, noting that Kallahan was unsurprised to see the old cook here. “What are you doing here?”
“Debating whether or not I should hit you two boys upside the head.” The old woman threw her arms on to her hips. “Don’t you two idiots realize what you’re doing?”
“Uh… No?” Zarrey said, bracing himself for the light smack that landed on the back of his head a moment later.
“You’re making a problem that doesn’t exist,” the cook said. “Look around you! You’ve both been crew on this ship for years. Admiral Gives never hurt you. This ship never hurt you. Have they not earned a degree of your trust?”
Zarrey blinked, his brain slowly restarting from the smack Ripley had doled out on his head. It took him a moment, studying the slightly-stiff movements of Ripley’s steps and the exasperated look on her wrinkled face. “You know about this?”
“It’s obvious, you idiot!” Ripley retorted. “Weird creaking, strange malfunctions, a ghost.” This ship was very clearly, very obviously possessed. It could not be more obvious. “But this old ship has never done anything except help you. Help us.” Ripley had been here for years, and seen how this crew had grown and changed. They were bettered by being here, given a real chance to grow, and learn, and heal if they needed it. “The old Singularity’s weird. So what? We’re all a bit fucking weird.” No, she’d never been told what exactly the ghost was capable of, or even how she ended up here, but Ripley had watched the ghost worry after the crew for years, watched her fight her own battles, and that spirit belonged here with the rest of them. They were all refugees of a sort, the ghost included. “Colonel, if you want to try and understand, that’s fine. Investigate away. But don’t assume that because it is hidden, that it is evil.”
“I didn’t assume that.”
Zarrey hadn’t, but Kallahan was quite certain of it. Ripley could see that in his laden gaze, but she wasn’t here to confront him. He would not be swayed from his side of the debate, but Zarrey had not chosen a side. Not yet. ‘Mama’ Ripley smoothed down her wiry white hair and focused on him. “Did you assume the Admiral was keeping something from you for fun? You know him, Colonel. Don’t you think there might be a reason he can’t be honest?” Admiral Gives made great effort to be forthright with the crew. He had no issue declassifying information that helped them on their missions. He’d done it many times, and that knowledge had saved lives. But there were times that he couldn’t be entirely honest. Times he deemed it better not to be.
“I don’t think Admiral Gives is being malicious.” The man had his quirks, but he was loyal. Zarrey had questioned his methods and his priorities, but never the fact that he was loyal. “But the Erans are hunting this knowledge.” And that was enough of an indication that it was dangerous as all hell. The Reeter’s New Era Movement did nothing that did not benefit them in some way. And anything that benefitted them was bad news, as far as Zarrey cared. “This secret is the only reason we haven’t been shot out of the sky. The Erans want this knowledge bad enough to try and take the Admiral alive. It’s protecting us – sort of. But what happens to that protection if something happens to the Admiral?” Those were the unfortunate questions Zarrey had to ask. That was the executive officer’s job. “We’d give them hell, but if the fleet dedicates all its resources to hunting us down, we won’t survive.” For now, their rebellion had been mostly ignored, but that could change at any moment.
Kallahan made a noise, as if the situation had already changed, but refused to elaborate when Zarrey looked at him. Growing more annoyed with Kallahan’s refusal to speak on the subject, Zarrey focused on Ripley. Clearly, she was more willing to talk. “I don’t get it. When we left Base Oceana, less than a month ago, the Erans wanted nothing to do with us. We were trash, and they wanted to melt the Singularity down as scrap. They ordered us to dismantle her.” The Admiral, of course, had refused. “Now, we’re still trash to them – at least until I hear otherwise – but they want our weird-ass ship. Why?” For the life of him, Zarrey couldn’t make sense of it.
“Does it really matter?” Ripley asked. “We’re not going to hand her over.”
Zarrey narrowed his eyes. “I think that went without saying.” The crew had nowhere else to go. This ship was all they had. Turning her over meant exposing themselves to Command, and the Manhattan AI. That wasn’t a situation Zarrey wanted to be in. He’d seen what the AI had turned the boarders into – mindless killing machines uncaring of their own pain, their own deaths. Had they stayed with Command, allowed the crew to be dissolved, most of their fates would have been the same. As far as Reeter’s New Era Movement was concerned, the imperfect were more useful as pawns than as people. “But I have concerns. Can we be entirely certain we have control here?”
Ripley rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you assert control and find out?” Sometimes the only way to prove a theory was to test it. “For the sake of the stars, we are on the brink of war with the Hydrian Armada and you two are sitting around arguing over what goes bump in the night. Newsflash,” Ripley said, “it’s the ship. It does that sometimes. Big deal, problem solved.” Ripley clapped her hands together, mimicking the action of wiping them clean.
Zarrey frowned. He liked Ripley and he knew better than to disregard her input. Ensign or not, she was his senior by experience. She’d been on the ship even longer than Kallahan, second only to the Admiral. The old woman was beloved by the crew, and would always argue on their behalf. She argued for second chances and forgiveness often, so for her to defend these anomalies wasn’t that surprising. But, in other ways, it was odd. “You’re acting like this …gambit,” this lie, “is harmless. It isn’t. Whatever the Admiral’s hiding, whatever’s causing these malfunctions, it’s deadly,” as much as Zarrey wished it wasn’t. “It sank the Yokohoma.” Whatever the root of these anomalies, those people had died because of it. “Little Miss Amelia’s mother was on that ship. She died because of this secret and the Admiral lied to cover it up.” Zarrey knew that would strike home. Ripley had taken a liking to Amelia and her son. She’d spent more time spoiling them with snacks in the mess than the Admiral had spent speaking to them. “This ship is incredibly powerful.” It didn’t need to be the newest, finest ship in the fleet to be deadly. The Singularity was a battleship, and even the weakest battleship could tear through civilian craft like paper. “For the safety of ourselves, and everyone around us, we have to be certain we are in control.”
Ripley knew a lost argument when she saw it. Zarrey would accept nothing she said. He was certain something was wrong, and only proof of control would calm him. That wouldn’t come from a conversation. That could only come from action. “You have more immediate problems than the skeletons in the closet, Colonel. We may be going to war with the Hydrian Armada in a few hours and you have one of the worlds’ most powerful ships at your disposal. I dare say it’s time to test that control.”
Do something. That was the challenge in Ripley’s words, and Zarrey was so very tempted. “Our orders are to decommission the drones and relocate.” Zarrey knew why. They were acting as insurance. “We’re not to get involved with Azura.”
“Who said anything about getting involved?” Ripley argued. “And, in case you haven’t noticed, most things don’t go according to plan. Sometimes, orders need to be creatively interpreted. Have you learned nothing from the Admiral?” He was a master of interpreting Command’s orders in ways they usually hadn’t intended. Prevent the separatists from capturing a clandestine research outpost? Easy. The separatist agents couldn’t seize an outpost that ceased to exist.
Zarrey opened his mouth to argue, but he caught himself. He didn’t want to argue with Ripley. The old woman was wise, and the entire crew knew it. If she was telling him to test his control, then he would be wise to do so. “Actually,” Zarrey said, beginning to smile as he accepted this challenge, “you’ve just given me a great idea.” It wasn’t often he got the opportunity to pull one over on the Admiral. This is going to be fun. Maybe, the ship commander would finally realize leaving a former Marine in charge of a battleship was a bad idea. Turning to Kallahan’s dark expression, Zarrey warned, “This conversation isn’t over, but get off your foreboding ass and start training up the rest of the Marines. If we go to war with the Hydra, I want this ship to be just as famous in this war as she was in the last.”
With that Zarrey stalked off, leaving Ripley to glare at Kallahan in the warm lamplight of the library. Ripley waited an appropriate amount of time, ensuring Zarrey was gone, and then leveled her most disapproving gaze on Kallahan. “You’re being an asshole,” she told him, not interested in a delicate conversation. “That poor thing has been through enough.”
“That poor thing is the most powerful weapon in the worlds,” Kallahan kept his voice low and cold. “You don’t know what it’s capable of.”
“Forget what she’s capable of, I’m wondering what you’re capable of. It doesn’t seem to include forgiveness.”
Ripley’s disapproval would have crushed the resolve of most of the crew, but Kallahan felt nothing. Perhaps only disappointment that Ripley had shown up now, and not earlier when the ghost had been threatening him. “You don’t know what it is you’re defending. I do. It’s a monster, Ripley. A monster we let loose at the Hydra’s throats, and then at our own. Zarrey has a reason to worry. We can’t control it now, and I’m not sure we ever could.” That realization terrified Kallahan. The Angel’s fluctuation between a broken intelligence and utter domination of the minds around it was dangerous. Dangerous in ways Azura had illustrated with a few million corpses.
“I am defending someone that I’ve come to know over the course of the last two decades.” The ghost wouldn’t go into detail about herself, but she liked to talk about the crew. She liked to linger nearby when the mess was filled with joyous people eating their fill. She liked it when they sang their shanties at the bar, and cheered to the end of a successful mission. There was no want from her in those moments. The ghost was simply happy that they were happy. But Ripley knew why the ghost gravitated to that happiness. She’d spent years in misery, tortured by what Brent had done to her and the crew, so she knew what that happiness was worth, and what the worlds looked like without it. Trauma recovery wasn’t straightforward for a mind that couldn’t forget, for a mind that spent every day knowing that she could be crushed in that way again. “It is wrong to seed a fear of her in others. I know she struggles, Kallahan, but she is trying to heal. The Admiral sees that. Why can’t you?”
