Blood Impulse

Part 1.2

Kalahari Sector, Battleship Singularity

The scarred ship carved a path fearlessly through the void. Fifty years had passed since she had flown through the now-empty Kalahari Sector. Back then it had been wartime, cruel and unforgiving with a death toll piling into the billions- the sum of entire colonies. The combat had been so excruciating, so desperate, that grisly fields would be left behind after the battle, sectors of drifting corpses and frozen blood droplets that smeared the sides of any vessel that dared to pass through red. One had passed through the moorlands more often than any other, fighting to push the front lines back. Bloody Singularity they called her, seeing her flanks smeared with the remains of friends and enemies alike.

But those times had long since fled. The bodily rust had drifted off and disappeared from the sectors that had once been battlefields. The War had been won, and in the span of fifty years, the prideful Flagship Singularity had become obsolete. Now stripped of her title as flagship, her red striped hull had become likened to the shell of a weary war relic whose golden days had set a decade ago.

Public opinion degraded her, but old dreadnaught still served her fleet. When, in her early years, she had hunted down the enemies of the state, she now ran backwater patrol routes where trouble was unlikely to rise. The long patrols were lonesome, boring work for the battleship, but that was just the way her crew liked it.

Deep inside the massive antediluvian warship was a windowless room known as CIC. There, crewmen staffed the necessary stations and the ship's commander stood in the center, observing their slow progress through the sector. Admiral Gives was not tall, but had a strong set of shoulders and commanded the room with little effort. Though he was quiet, the crew remained immensely aware of his presence.

Beyond the three Generals based in Eagle's Talon, Admiral Gives was the highest-ranking member of the UCSC fleet: the Fleet Admiral. The deployed fleet deferred to him in times of crisis and war. His position, earned by continual success, not by seniority, had been heavily contested since the day he took it. His ability to single-handedly retain that position for the last twenty years had come to be feared. He held one of the worst reputations in the entire fleet, simply for being entirely unrelenting. His single objective was to complete his mission, no matter the cost. There was nothing else that mattered.

Hours slithered by, forming another long day in the empty sector. The radar was empty and the sensor sweeps were clean. Even the visuals of the Kalahari Sector were blatantly bare. The distant stars provided the same dim lighting they had that fateful night half a century before...

Alone and unaware, the Hydrian flagship had sat in this cold, empty sector. The final challenger amongst a graveyard of machines, the Singularity had flown swathed in the black of the grieving night itself. The invading Hydra never had time to ponder their fate. The Singularity's cannons had torn through their own vessel's hull before they could understand that Death herself had come for them. That brief battle had become the first in a long strain of raids that decimated the Hydrian fleet, and turned the tide of the War, but never left survivors.

The first years of the Hydrian War had been costly to both sides, but the later years had been unforgiving. The blood spilled in the first and ending years of the thirteen-year conflict was a comparison of drops to rivers. The history books claimed that the skies had run red, and it had been here, in the Kalahari Sector, that those killings had begun.

It seemed the stars here remembered it well. They kept their distance from the once fearsome black dreadnaught. Even the endless night seemed to shy away, for the warship was darker than the surrounding sky.

It was easy for such forces of nature to recall that night's destruction. Time was of no consequence for them. For the darkness and the stars, fifty years was just yesterday. Yet, age was apparent by the innumerable pockmarks now decorating the old ship's hull.