Blood Impulse

Part 7.2

Thirty-two years ago, Liguainian Sector, XA-01 System, Battleship Kansas

The Kansas was well out of her league. The blue and yellow stripes painted attentively onto her hull could not hide the steaks of dilapidation and misplaced welding rivets. Spluttering at twenty-six years of age, the clunky Kansas was an old ship.

There was a good reason she was the last of the Battleship-class vessels left in service. Despite numerous overhauls, including the complete deconstruction and replacement of the engines and various other parts, the ship was ailing. After surviving what had been the bloodiest years of human history, she was a ship that had been pummeled and rebuilt one too many times. Malfunctions plagued the Kansas like heartworms, consuming what was left of her utility.

The old Kansas could barely be trusted with the simplest of tasks. Even patrols were risky, so they were left with supply runs that Command had no one else to assign to. For a battleship, it was an insult, but the Kansas' crew was more aware of the ship's wasting condition than anyone else.

It left Samantha Scarlett envying her fiancé's assignment to the Flagship Singularity. It would have been an honor to serve on board the international flagship, but she intended to drop her commission as a fleet officer after this last mission.

A simple supply run, they should be there and back in just a few days. At first, many of the sailors had been uneasy about entering the fabled Liguanian Sector, but days passed without incident. It began to seem that even the Kansas could complete this task.

Advancing through the system, the ailing battleship did not push through space with ease. Her boxy shape lacked the streamlined elegance of modern space flight. As she passed in front of a swirling red gas giant, the Kansas more closely resembled a folded paper origami creation than a veteran warship. Her seeming frailty only added irony to the unfortunate fact that they never should have been anywhere near the Liguanian Sector.

It was not a particularly welcoming corner of space. Dark planets and spewing neutron stars dominated the overall region. The XA-01 System was worse than the rest of it. The entire system was subject to ferocious solar storms, often with little warning as the aging red star at the core of the system went into unstable fits.

The only settlement in the entire sector was the small UCSC research station the Kansas had been assigned to resupply. The secluded facility orbited the stormy red gas giant of the XA-01 System with little more than a skeleton crew of scientists.

Allegedly, the star was the subject of study at the research station. Experts expected the star to collapse within the next five years, but most sailors did not buy that at all. Rumors of the station's true, less-innocent purposes lingered, and they were quite unsettling.

The secretive outpost was built into one of the largest rock chunks of the stormy gas giant's distorted ice rings, but it was far too small for even the undersized Kansas to dock.

It was Lieutenant Scarlett's job to alert the allied forces to their approach. She should have known something was wrong when silence answered her hail. The Kansas' crew should have heeded the warnings. But, despite the outpost's persistent silence, they prepared an away team to fly over in one of the Kansas' support ships.

Most likely, a solar storm had damaged the base's communications array, rendering them unable to respond. It was possible the outpost did not have the equipment to fix the damage. Yet, a visual inspection of the array, made by the Kansas' telescopes, revealed that there was no apparent damage.