Blood Impulse

Part 27.1 - BROKEN

Polaris Sector, Battleship Singularity

Admiral Gives made his way deep into the ship's bow, wishing that meeting hadn't taken him away. The damn businessman had caused that to take far longer than it should have. He had been forced to sit there, enduring the ghost's cries, feeling her pain.

But now, now he was free to help her, just as he'd promised he would, so he headed to a compartment that was their secret. There, he would give her as much time as she needed, because he needed her just as much as she needed him right now.

The refugee fleet was in the midst of a supply crisis, Ariea was in the center of a coup and the Frontier was being pushed toward another civil war. If the Singularity was to survive any of that, he needed the ghost in a cohesive state. But it went beyond that, too. They were friends, and it was his job to hold her together when she fell apart. When he had needed it, she had done the same.

He found himself in a secluded area of the ship, a rarely visited corridor that looked the same as all the rest. It was near the top of the bow, but deep enough to avoid damage from anything short of a railgun impact or total structural collapse. The compartments nearby were all rarely visited long-term storage compartments. They were so rarely visited, in fact, that he doubted the supply officers even knew what was up here anymore. A lot of it was outdated or specialty equipment that never saw use, stored here because many of the crew didn't like passing this way. They claimed it was weird or haunted, that something about this corridor just felt wrong.

They were right, of course. There was something different about this corridor, something that registered uneasily to human perception. While it looked the same as all the other corridors, if one went still, still enough to listen to the easy breath of the air filtration systems, here it didn't sound so effortless. It came as a constricted rasp, another barely perceivable sound beneath it: the slither of something alive, the whisper of movement where there should have been none.

Behind the bulkheads, within the channels and spaces that ran wires, in this corridor alone, there were thousands, perhaps even millions of translucent white tendrils. Neurofibers. From here they spread outward to every system on the ship without exception. They fed on the ship's electricity, taking fractional draws to grow and power the Black Box, which sat in a sealed, unmarked compartment in front of where the Admiral now stood.

Carefully, he checked the corridor around him, ensuring no one saw him enter this room. After all, it was the one place on the ship he wasn't supposed to have access to. Command installed the Black Boxes and sealed the compartments, never revealing their exact location, even to the ships' commanders – a failsafe to prevent tampering. Those commanders that sought the Box and tried to interfere with it, they were recognized by the system itself and put up on charges of treason or sabotage, then made to disappear.

But Admiral Gives had no such concerns. The ghost had told him where the Box was, and under her control, it never would have incriminated him. He trusted in that, trusted her like he trusted no one else. She had earned that. And just as he trusted her, she trusted him and him alone to help her in times like this.

Closing the hatch behind him, a room of inky blackness greeted him. There was a light switch by the door, but he didn't bother with it. He had seen the contents of this room hundreds of times. The air tasted stale and vaguely chemical, the monotony of darkness broken ahead by the Black Box's blinking indicator lights. They were just bright enough to cast a dim sphere of light on the Black Box's frame and the twisted, gnarled mass that extended below it.

Stepping carefully around the tresses of cilia that webbed the floor, he sat down in easy reach of the Box and watched the mass below it move. Shifting and wriggling slightly, each tendril seemed to move randomly of its own accord.