Blood Impulse

Part 5.1

Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity

A ceiling tile had crashed down onto his chest. It was the first thing Colonel Zarrey noticed waking up in CIC. The second thing was how much everything hurt. "Fuck." He said, shoving the tile off, but then instantly regretted opening his mouth as it heightened his urge to vomit. He swallowed the bile down, and stood up more carefully, shaking glass shards from his uniform.

This is one hell of a cold, Zarrey thought, feeling the way his body ached. Judging by the crew's groans and slow movement, many of them felt the same way. They used their consoles and chairs to pull themselves up from where they had fallen, looking ragged, but they were all still moving. It was a small win, but it was better than nothing.

CIC was a disaster. The regular lights flickered on and off and a few of their mountings had fallen. A crack ran across the ceiling, bulkheads separated and distorted along it. Shattered glass littered the floor, crunching beneath the bridge staff's shoes. Most of the crew within sight sported a nasty bruise or bleeding injury. Those that didn't were busy coughing into their sleeves. They looked ill, but not seriously crippled. After what they had just been through, they were remarkably well-off.

By all rights, they should be dead. Still, something felt wrong, something beyond the ship being a wreck. A moment of silence passed between the crew, the point where their commander normally called for a status report, but the call never came.

Zarrey looked around. He didn't see the Admiral anywhere on the bridge, but the rest of the normal staff was all there: Walters at Navigations, Galhino on Sensors, Robinson at Comms., Alba at Engineering and Jazmine manning the helm. Their commander was the only one absent. "Where's the Old Man?" Zarrey asked. Had anyone seen him leave?

Jazmine coughed violently as he sat down in his seat, but answered by pointing out the obvious, "He's not here." The ship's pilot started realigning their bearings on his controls, but he couldn't seem to stop coughing. "This is the worst hangover I've ever had," he muttered to no one, head throbbing.

"Next time you want to invite me to a party like this, Jazz, leave me out of it." Lieutenant Gaffigan worked on plucking the bits of ash and soot from his magnificent orange beard.

"What the hell happened back there, Monty?" Zarrey demanded, slowly remembering the events that put them in this condition. "We should have seen a nuclear-capable ship coming."

"Wish I could say, Colonel. That nuke was a damn lucky shot," the armory officer said. "We had no way of knowing it was coming. Whoever fired must have done it hours before it impacted us. Those missiles had burned all their fuel. They were moving as fast as they possibly could and we never detected another ship. They could have fired from another sector of space entirely. We would never have known the difference."

"There's no way they hit us twice taking potshots from the next sector over." Zarrey would not, could not accept that explanation. That would have been a one in a million chance.

"No, whoever it was knew exactly who we were, where we were going to be and when. And as to the nuke, well, we know of only two fleets that are armed with nukes."

"Us and...?" Zarrey prompted.

"The Hydrian Armada, sir."

"Scaly lizard bastards." Zarrey curled his lip at the thought of the aliens, "I would've thought they knew better than to fuck with this ship." According to them, the Singularity was a cursed instrument of death. Granted how many of their kind had been killed by her guns, Zarrey couldn't blame them for that belief, and at this point the ship had killed more humans than she had Hydra, so most of humanity thought the same way.