Blood Impulse

Part 4.1

Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity

The Admiral woke to find himself surrounded by shattered glass on the floor of CIC, a piece of metal digging roughly into his back. Hazardously suspended by two thin wires, one of the industrial light mountings that normally illuminated CIC was hanging above him. Raw electricity crackled in the air as one of the wires snapped, sending the steel mounting lurching toward him.

Instinctively, he rolled out of the way as the final wire broke, and the heavy fixture crashed into the deck with a solid thud that reverberated through the metal deck plates. Admiral Gives got to his feet carefully, trying to avoid cutting himself further on the broken glass, even as the shards dug into his bare hands.

On his feet, an immediate nausea rose up and he stumbled to the nearby radar console. Leaning on its metal rim, he waited until his surroundings rearranged themselves into a discernable fashion. What happened? He ached all over from a fall he didn't remember taking. In fact, he didn't remember anything at all after Zarrey had grabbed him, and even that memory was a little hazy.

The simple action of getting up had completely exhausted him. Smoke and ash were wafting in from the corridor, sending him into coughing fit. Pain built in his chest from the wet, hacking cough, but it took a moment for him to realize he wasn't coughing up mucus from the ash. It was blood.

The radiation. How many hours had he been unconscious? How long had the entire crew been breathing in poisoned air? Too long, he feared.

A creak from his damaged ship drew his attention back to his surroundings. CIC was a wreck. Shattered glass and fallen ceiling décor littered the floor. An occasional bout of sparks would crackle in the windowless room, flickering in the darkness. A crack ran across the ceiling, and it continued down a wall, visible deformation caused by the structural collapse.

The dank, dirty red lighting provided by the emergency batteries gave off just enough visibility to tell that an object was present nearby, even if not what it was. Near a wall, a live wire arced, jumping from contact with the deck. It spun wildly, cut and freed by the damage. Another muffled creak, and the deck shifted subtly, but noticeably beneath the Admiral's feet.

A live wire indicated there was residual energy in the power grid, so the ship wasn't completely dead. He could work with that. Despite his orders, the Conjoiner drives were still online too, but he could tell, even from barely shifting his weight on his feet, that the artificial gravity field was off-center.

The difference was obvious to him. After living on this ship for what had become most of his life, he knew innately how the gravity was supposed to feel. Not only were the ship's artificial gravity generators pulling heavier than the planetary standard they normally held, but their pull was lopsided, centering on the portside stern.

The weakened starboard bow had been relinquished from the artificial gravity field, and was now held in broken stasis by the zero gravity of space. Employed as ship-wide damage control, the Conjoiner drives were forcing the bent structural supports to fight their pull instead of each other's. In doing so, they prevented new hull breaches from appearing. The breach on the starboard bow had likely widened, but the worst damage was still contained there, and the cascade collapse had been stopped.

It was pretty clever, the Admiral supposed, but it was a far from perfect solution as another tremor ran through the deck beneath his feet. Had it been an option for him after the jump, he would have put it to use, but a human could never run the calculations required to alter the gravity field in time to stop the collapse, even with computer assistance. Beyond that, the altered gravity was not stable. It was wavering, meaning the ship wasn't completely stable yet either. With all the damage done so far, the Conjoiner drives weren't getting enough power. The electricity they were getting from the damaged main power grid was not enough to stabilize the altered field. Too much of that dwindling power was being diverted to Life Support, which was still working at full capacity. It had to be or the crew would have asphyxiated by now.