Blood Impulse

Part 17.1 - CLOSE ENOUGH

Homebound Sector, Haven System, Battleship Singularity

The Singularity's bridge was not an ostentatious affair. It was designed to be robust and functional. Every control console had been splashed with acid, shot, and burned more than once. Repaired and refurbished as necessary, all of them did still work, even if several of them usually went unmanned.

Those left unmanned were left over from another era when the Singularity had served as flagship. Once, they had coordinated the fleet, directed support squadrons, and tracked supply expenditures over prolonged combat. Now, they sat derelict. The modern fleet had computerized such tasks, and no longer the flagship, the Singularity had no need for them. So, while there were four arcs of consoles on the bridge, not all of those workstations were crewed.

The bridge, while totally functional, wasn't any nicer than the rest of the ship in appearance. It was spartan, designed to work with little concern for anything else. The shape of the consoles was angular with a beveled edge for safety. They were arranged to face the single, large screen at the front of the room, hiding the control displays from the camera used for visual communications. It was crude, but effective. No computer was necessary to blur out the confidential data that could be caught on the displays.

The console controlling input to the screen was beside the comm., up on the raised, largest arc of control consoles. Two more arcs sat behind the center of the room, which was dominated by the flat top of the radar console. The radar displays hung both above that table and at the front of the room, in clear view of everyone, but the associated hardware was underneath the table, hence its name.

The flat top of that console was just what it seemed: a table. It was backlit, allowing sheer sheets maps and tactical charts to be layered over on one another and clearly read. It was used for battle strategy, but also to hold whatever report the Admiral was reading and catch whatever Colonel Zarrey had spilled most recently on it.

Running the comm. for the last few hours, Lieutenant Keifer Robinson had gotten considerably better at finding the holes and imperfections in the communications blockade over. Still, when the first garbled transmission came through from someone claiming to be Gaffigan, she didn't believe it.

Like everything else so far in the Homebound Sector, it seemed to be a trap. There was no way Gaffigan could have escaped, and there was no way that Reeter would have released him. Reeter's intentions would never be so pure, and she knew that better than anyone.

Rumor had it that not one crewmember ever drew assignment aboard the Singularity on accident, and in Keifer's experience, that was true. Crew only reached the Singularity when they requested a transfer and were desperate enough to go anywhere or when they were being punished for something. The Admiral never seemed to care where people were coming from or why they were leaving. He took the transfers without prejudice and without prying. In that, the ship operated with an essentially volunteer crew, where most crewmen had nowhere else to go.

Robinson was no different. There was a reason she called the ship home. Prior experiences had rendered her unwilling to leave. Her talents in communications had earned her an assignment to the Flagship Ariea prior to its destruction, Reeter's first command, and she wished she could count the wrongs done to her there on her fingers.

It was because of those horrible experiences that Robinson refused to let her guard down while Reeter or his subordinates were within communications range. So, while the voice hailing them claimed to be Gaffigan, she was more than skeptical. The audio was so distorted by the signal blockade that the voice was unrecognizable, and she couldn't get an origin or heading off the transmission. Standard for support craft, it was audio only.