Blood Impulse

Part 9.4 - AN APOLOGY

Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity

It would take time to secure the ship for FTL and bring the teams on the outer hull back inside the ship. In the meantime, there was other work to do. The disposition of the ship's supplies, chain of command and system readiness would be drastically altered from the week prior. Admiral Gives needed to familiarize himself with such changes immediately, because if push came to shove in the Homebound Sector, they would have to engage the Olympia as well as any ships loyal to her. But, in combat, the little details often mattered the most.

"Ensign Owens," Admiral Gives turned to find the yeoman was already on her way over.

"The sitrep, sir," she said, handing the papers over. She had been working on the ship long enough to know the Admiral's habits, and this was one of them.

The situation report was impressively thick today, physical evidence that the ship's situation had changed substantially. "Thank you, Ensign."

Owens said nothing else and slid away to tend to other duties. Within decorum between officer and crew, the Admiral was not required to thank her, but he was always polite when it came to the yeomen. As far as she cared, it just added to his enigma.

When dealing with him, Owens elected to ignore the rumors of the Admiral's tendency toward incredible violence. She had never seen him be anything less than polite and eerily calm. That could be plenty scary, but he had never laid a hand on anyone, so Owens had served under worse. Most of the crew felt the same way.

The report in the Admiral's hands was held together by a clip, too many pages to staple together. To spare his aching hand, he set it on the edge of the backlit radar console, then pulled out his glasses and started skimming the pages.

Cleanup from the fires was still underway on the affected, charred decks, but all other repairs had been made. The engineering crews had decided to repair the collapsed support and then build an additional one next to it in case it re-collapsed. They had also added extra cross braces. Those designs were included in the report. Reviewing them, Admiral Gives was satisfied. He would make a personal inspection of the repairs later, but with these specifications, the bow should be just as strong as it had been before.

During cleanup, a fragment of the intercepted nuke had been recovered, identifying it as an allied weapon, later revealed to have come from the Flagship Olympia. Of course, Admiral Gives had made that assumption the moment the attack had occurred.

They had lost a defensive turret to the explosion – the same malfunctioning turret that had 'malfunctioned,' firing and intercepting the warhead. Some malfunction, the Admiral thought amusedly, it saved the entire ship. That had been no malfunction, but the crew did not know how else to classify the incident, since the turret had received no orders to aim or fire. Naturally, the Admiral felt no need to correct their misconception of the incident. The truth was... complicated.

"So..." Colonel Zarrey sauntered back over to his usual place beside the Admiral, entirely uncaring of the man's focus, "how did you," he gestured vaguely to the ship commander, "you know, not die?"

The Admiral continued leafing through the sitrep, ignoring the way Zarrey noisily slurped his coffee. "I have no explanation to offer you, XO." Part of being comatose meant he had absolutely no recollection of the week between the moment he had activated the Reserve Power Core and the moment he had woken up in sickbay, gasping for air. He had some theories, but without evidence, he would not draw any conclusions.

It was possible the shock of being taken off life support had woken him, but he had also sensed the ghost's lingering presence. It was also entirely possible that she had managed to wake him, because he always did whatever she asked. If she had asked him to wake up, and any fragment of him understood, then he would have woken up. He owed her that, after everything. The great debt he owed the ghost could never be wholly repaid.