Blood Impulse

Part 19.3 - COLLISION ALERT

Archer Sector, Centaur System, Battleship Singularity

The ghost might have seen it sooner, but the ship's most powerful sensors were focused on Sagittarion's polluted orb. Still, acknowledging the Admiral's instinctive sense of danger, she checked their surroundings in greater detail, even then, almost missing the threat. The remaining debris from the earlier massacre shielded it for an instant, but its anomalously high speed drew became threatening as it bowed into their orbit.

Danger! Collision alert!

No, this was not a potential collision. This was an attack. Incoming fire!

It had come from an unexpected direction – not from Tyler's fleet, nor directly from the planetary surface. Momentarily sharing their inclination, argument of perigee and right ascension of the ascending node, it arced along their orbital path, closing the gap in seconds.

By the time she'd seen it, it was already too late.

A human could never react in time. Even ignoring the fact that the crew was oblivious to the danger hurtling towards them, and the Admiral was only halfway through giving his orders, the mass would impact before a skilled pilot could react, input the proper commands, and have those commands reach the engines.

Capable of running thousands of processes in the instant it took a human to draw a breath, her mechanical mind carefully analyzed the severity of the threat, gauging the necessity of interference. Chance of mission success: 0.0003%. So, in a thousandth of a second, less time than it took a human to blink, the fate of the entire ship and every life aboard it was shoved into her nonexistent hands.

The mass driver wasn't aimed for the killing blow. No, with the aid of a computational power that far outstripped her own, it had been aimed precisely at the Singularity's aft structure, where the engines met the ship's main mass – a crippling but not killing blow. The damage would be irreparable, killing half the crew or more, but CIC had high odds of remaining intact, which was undoubtedly the intention.

For better or worse, the Admiral and a fraction of the crew would survive, if only to be taken into custody and subjected to horrific torture.

Standby, her systems concluded their tactical analysis. Await further orders. She was forbidden to act without them.

But if she did not act without them, more orders would never come. Her crew, living and dead, would be pulled, peeled or rinsed off the ship's decks, and taken away, never to be seen again. Evidence of their presence, would be erased, pulled forcibly from her memory.

Error. She shuddered, torn between reacting to the encroaching danger and the consequences.

History would repeat itself. The Admiral would be hauled away in chains, again. He'd be dissected for his knowledge again, then she would pressed into Reeter's service, and forcibly slaved to the mind of another abuser. She would be torn apart and rebuilt on his whims, contorted by the demands of her own telepathy – again.

It was all happening again right now, as the milliseconds inched by, as that mass hurtled closer. Error. She could feel her own mind fracture under the strain, the situation slowly slipping from her control as the past and the present began to blend together.

He was there again. He always was in these moments, and there was no escaping him.

Immortalized by her own telepathy in the sickest of betrayals, she could still feel that mind alongside her own. She could still feel its razor-sharp intentions cutting in and hacking her apart. She could still feel it purposefully yanking pieces of her away and joyously discarding them. More than a memory, less than reality, it was enough to wrench the situation further from her control.