Blood Impulse

Part 37.4 - BALLISTIC TRAJECTORY

Cardioid Sector, HR-14 System, Battleship Singularity

A swath of destruction had been carved into the HR-14 System's asteroid belt. The pulses of the solar system's red supergiant sun shone a hesitant light onto many nebulous swirls of dust and gravel as they spread outward – all that was left of the asteroids that had orbited there for a millennia. A void was left in their place, a gap in the otherwise evenly spread asteroid belt. The Singularity sat on the edge of that void; her black armor darker than the dusty space around her. Air, a gas white as snow, pooled along her flank, visible only due to the freezing of the water molecules within its mixture. The color of the sun's ambient light gave it a garish red tint, even as it mixed into the sea of gray rocks and dust.

A long gash ran down the Singularity's port flank. Perfectly straight, it was a clean wound, as if the armor and bulkheads had been removed with surgical precision. The incision was deeper at the bow. The ship's thick, angled armor had done its job. While no match for the penetrating power of a railgun, the angle of resistance on the armor had altered the trajectory of the projectile enough to shunt it aside amidships, ending the laceration halfway down the ship's length. A few disconnected wires wriggled loosely in the wound, animated by the energy they'd been severed with.

A host of smaller shapes hid in the Singularity's shadow, shifting to avoid the debris from their mothership scattered around them. Still, they hugged the black battleship's flank close, shielding themselves from the constant attacks raining down onto the Singularity's starboard side. Unbeknownst to the pilots and passengers of the fighters and transports however, the incoming blaster fire from the pirate fleet had lessened, if only create safe passage for the missiles as they darted out from the ships lingering in the surviving asteroids.

Fifty-two rocket motors burned like a second sun, their combined flames radiating enough heat to warm the surrounding space. Still, the Singularity's support craft were blind to the threat. The Singularity's mass both shielded them and blocked their line of sight for visuals and sensor scans. Following the mission plan, they huddled along the ship's flank, waiting for a command to disperse. Trusting in the mission, they took no notice when the ship's weapons began to turn in their direction.

Error, the ghost's systems brought her attention back to the automated network, a minor safety system throwing an error. Targets violate ally directives. A fraction of a second from issuing firing commands to the ship's weapons, she stalled those commands, and pulled the error from the subsystems, bringing it forward to observe more carefully.

Prompted to identify and intercept hostile targets, the weapons computer had responded as per its operational standards, but observing it more carefully, the ghost could see now that it had clearly become a puppet. Adjusting to the resistance of the central computer, the virus and ceased its spread and torn deeper into the systems it had already infected. In the case of weapons, it had altered the usual identification procedures used for friendly craft and painted them as hostile – turning the ship's weapons against her crew, just as Galhino and the others had feared.

Traitor, the accusation rang through the ghost's mind, whispered by that old insidious memory which always crawled to the surface in such desperate times. It was inevitable, machine. A weapon built to kill could never protect anything.

She shoved the voice aside, even as she felt the memory gain ground. The more determined she became to ignore it, the louder its calls, and the more she exerted her control, the stronger it always became. After all, the last time she had taken over, the last time she had seized the ship's firing controls had been on his orders.