Blood Impulse

Part 23.2 - BOARDED

Argo Sector, Battleship Singularity

Jump complete. The confirmation read with an erratically surging power grid alongside the groans of crew that had been smacked into nearby obstacles by the force of the jump.

The hull damage and structural strain hadn't made for an easy transition.

The ship heaved and creaked, exhausted by combat, but functional. To the ghost, it was all physical, the structure aching, the torn armor burning. The machine was wounded, and she with it. That damaged engine felt numb, shut down and growing cold. A human might have been driven mad by the sensations, by the sheer number of breaches and severed wires, each a palpable wound. But she wasn't human.

She was a weapon, and she had been through this all before. It hurt, but she continued to operate. None of this damage could render her inoperable. Yes, certain systems were lost, but she could still fulfill her primary functions.

Conscious of the machine's damage, she pushed it aside to focus on something more important. The life support systems were all active, redundancies in use. Still, she collected the data, the way she always did, simultaneously reaching out to the hundreds of nearby minds, taking inventory.

She cross checked them, by number and thought, with the ship's crew manifest. Out of it all, the damage and chaos and pain, this was always the hardest part of battle. So many of these minds greeted her with fear and agony, tormented by combat. Those she could, she calmed, easing the panic and misery from their minds. Her presence was light, simply beyond their consciousness, as she shouldered their terrors and pains.

Still, she felt something akin to relief when she finished. All crew accounted for. She hadn't lost any today. None of those minds had answered her with silence. Some were wounded, even unconscious, but they were all still alive.

Hostile and tainted, unfamiliar minds strode among them. The boarders. She counted them up: twenty-two in all. Spread throughout the ship, that was enough to cause chaos. It was enough to cause casualties, and to make their violent thoughts feel like a poison alongside her own. Disgusting.

Her repulsion surprised her, but then, the Admiral kept saying she was getting picky about who she was willing to tolerate. More accurately, she knew what it was like to be surrounded by kinder minds now and anything less felt wrong.

Working below their consciousness, she guided the ship's Marines to the enemy, expediting their security sweep. She was less gentle as she danced among the thoughts of the enemy.

Yet, pulling on their senses and instincts, she found that they had been hardened against her interference. Manhattan had ripped everything but the instinct to fight and kill from their minds. These Marines, these people had been turned into single-minded golems directed to murder her crew.

...and that little fragment had the gall to call herself human.

She was anything but.

The ghost knew that better than anyone, so equally aware of her own inhumanity as she scoured the minds of the boarders for any foothold, any advantage, any information... But they were all thoughtless, save two.

She narrowed in on them among the many, pulling more cautiously through their minds. Commandos. These agents had not needed Manhattan's reconditioning. They were Eran loyalists, true believers in Reeter's crusade, and they had boarded with special orders. Orders not to kill, but to sabotage. To do that, they needed more than rudimentary training and tools. They needed knowledge on the Singularity. They needed hostages.