Blood Impulse

Part 39.1 - TASK FORCE BETA

Cardioid Sector, HR-14 System, Battleship Singularity

Getting to the front of the boarding party was like wading through waist-high water while fighting a riptide. Things had been organized at one point, but after they'd been ordered to move inward for shelter, and then called back into position, equipment was out of order and people were out of position. The crew held their composure well, considering the chaos. There was no yelling, no panic, but of course, they were professionals.

The crew murmured amongst themselves, checking each other's armor and equipment as they wondered about the state of the battle around them. After all, they'd felt those impacts, heard the alarms, and none of them were deaf to the fact that the voice that had come over the intercom to order them back to their position was neither Robinson's smooth confidence, nor the Admiral's gravelly tone. It had been the calm inflection of the ship's automated protocols, a voice that while familiar, was not a common participant in any of their missions.

Zarrey knew why they were hearing it, or at least, he could guess it had something to do with the cyberattack. In that, he wasn't sure it should be trusted. After all, below decks, he had no way to know if the automated protocols had been activated by intention, or if that was a ploy by the virus that had infected the ship. In the end, he supposed it didn't matter much as long as the airlock connection was good. If the ship docked successfully, then the boarding party could force their way onto the pirate base. But, it did leave him concerned about a trap. If the ship's automated protocols were corrupted, it could be ordering them into an ambush.

In Zarrey's mind, that was a very remote possibility. He'd never seen the ship face a cyberattack, and he, along with most other crew knew that the ship wasn't equipped to combat such an event. But, it was still the Singularity, and Admiral Gives was still on the bridge. Zarrey did not always agree with the Admiral, but he had also never seen the ship act beyond the Admiral's control in any way. The malfunctions that Zarrey was all too familiar with did not happen when the Admiral was on the bridge. So, Zarrey trusted him to have full and complete control over the ship, cyberattack or no cyberattack.

That said, Zarrey didn't want his people charging into anything that had the possibility of being an ambush. Not without awareness of it, at least. And while he wanted to explain the situation to everyone, Zarrey had no way to communicate effectively with the mass number of crew who were lined up to take part in this assault. He had to prioritize those in the front – those who would deal with the situation if there was one.

Given that, Zarrey was grateful his six-foot frame allowed him to move almost anyone out of the way in the congested hallways. The crew knew to leave a lane of passage, but in the most crowded places where that wasn't necessarily possible, most paid enough attention to shift out of his way as they saw him coming. Occasionally, however, someone would be caught up in conversation, or be busy checking their weapons. It was them that Zarrey gently pushed aside without breaking pace.

It was hard to hear anything beyond the mutterings of the crew and the soft thudding of their bootheels as they shifted. No one was comfortable down here, crammed into the corridors nearest the midship airlock that had been selected for docking. With the density of the crew here, the air smelled slightly of sweat and had grown uncomfortably warm. Zarrey couldn't hear them over the crew's noise, but he imagined that the life support filters were laboring to keep up. It was unusual for such a large portion of the crew to be gathered in such a small part of the ship, especially in a combat scenario where the stress of temperature control and carbon dioxide scrubbing was not being distributed ship-wide, but handled by the local systems. Uncomfortable as it might have been, Zarrey knew the life support systems could handle it. They'd been designed to support more people than could physically fit in this corridor, a safety that ensured they could fulfill their purpose even at reduced efficiency. Most ships were designed that way. Life support was the one place where shipwrights never cut corners. No one wanted to asphyxiate a billion miles from the nearest habitable world.