Blood Impulse

Part 9.2 - THE PROMISE

Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity

It took every moment, both waking and sleeping, of the week they had after the nuke, but the ship was finally, finally wholly functional. The weapons, sensors and engines were all back online. The crews had just another two hours of work to finish decontaminating the hull.

Colonel Zarrey stood in his normal spot beside the radar console on the main floor of CIC. They finally had things in hand, normalcy was within grasp, but there was still one massive void that could never be filled.

Everyone was aware of it. Their reactions varied individually, but most of them tried to lose themselves in their work as the Admiral's all too obvious absence weighed upon them.

The mood was solemn as they played an unwilling waiting game. Word of Colonel Zarrey's official, unavoidable promotion would come soon, and then, he would have no choice but to start giving orders again. After reigniting the engines and righting the artificial gravity field the day before, Zarrey had fallen silent. He simply had no idea what orders to give.

A creak sounded from the ship's structure, and the floor shifted subtly beneath the crew's feet. Incessant groans and small shifts like that had been common since the Conjoiner Drives' reset. The new engineering chief, Chief Ty, had assured everyone that it was just the ship settling back to the artificial gravity field's normal pull. After a week in the lopsided AG field, everything had been pulled out of place.

The ship's structure had yet to jolt violently, and under a scrutinizing eye, the repairs done in the starboard bow appeared to be holding. The Kansas' old power core was now working in place of the ship's ruined Primary Power Core, and the power grid was back to normal efficiency. Overall, the Singularity was back in order.

The last work left to do was cosmetic. New bulkheads and tiles were still being cast for the bow and for the charred decks where they were necessary, and the corridors were being scrubbed down and cleansed of ash. There were workers on the outer hull, painting, as the bridge staff waited in an unfamiliar silence.

Making repairs had been one hell of a victory, but it sure didn't feel like one. Any minute now, they would receive the call, and it would fall to the communications officer, Keifer Robinson, to make the ship-wide announcement. She rested one hand on the intercom button and the other hovered over the handset beside her station. Any second now, it would ring.

In the medical bay, Doctor Macintosh distracted himself by tidying beds and changing bandages. He had set the life support system to shut down on its own, not wanting to be there when it happened, because Zarrey was right - it was wrong. It always felt wrong to take a patient off life support, but that was the nature of his job.

Not far away, hidden behind the gray, carefully drawn curtain, the ghost had returned to the Admiral's bedside. The time had come for her to keep that sad, sad promise. Six days, she had stood silently by, unheard and unseen. But now, the time had come, and she could not let that loathsome silence linger. It bothered her too much.

It all bothered her too much, even the fact that she had to be here now.

"I made a promise." She furrowed her brow, "I guess I just thought I would have more time." Now was too soon. She was not ready.

"This isn't how I thought it would end." After so many years of working with him, she had stopped contemplating that their partnership would eventually come to an inevitable end. "No goodbyes, not a fight, or an explosion. Just..." A medical complication. She had waited too long, woken the crew up too late. This was her fault.