Blood Impulse

Part 34.2 - NOT MALFUNCTIONS

Mississippi Sector, Battleship Singularity

"Weapons are active, Colonel."

"Damn it all! I did not give that order." He hadn't given any of these orders. He hadn't ordered a jump, he hadn't chosen these coordinates, and certainly he hadn't ordered the weapons to be brought online. The sure magnitude of this malfunction was beyond Zarrey's wildest dreams. As he regained his bearings from arguably the worst FTL maneuver he'd ever endured, he expected to be in pain. Some part of him expected a skull-splitting headache, but he felt fine, strangely fine, actually.

Behind the urgent voices of the crew, Zarrey dimly recognized the low rumble of the main engines cycling back down into idle. "Helm, I did not order any maneuvers."

"Wasn't me, sir," the replacement helmsman answered. "It was a deceleration maneuver, conducted as we came out of subspace."

"Good thing, too." Galhino added, flicking through the sensor data. "We're surrounded."

"Surrounded?" Zarrey said, turning his attention to the radar displays hung in CIC. True enough, hazy circles hung around the ship. Not circles, he realized, studying the display that ran on the other plane. Spheres. "What is that?" The radar system hadn't painted them with ID, friendly or otherwise.

"Planets, sir," Galhino told him. "If we hadn't decelerated to zero relative velocity, we would've sailed straight into one of their gravity wells."

Planets? He turned to the viewscreen. By default, it showed the feed from one of the telescopes on the bow, and ahead there was little to be seen, only a dark visage that blotted out the stars. Dark planets.

"And Colonel," Galhino looked over to him, "We're not alone."

Not alone? "Get visual," he ordered. True enough, now that he wasn't consumed by the massive spheres, he could see that the radar had picked up another target, something far smaller. It also lacked an ID but had been marked as an artificial contact – something manmade.

In the front of the room, the image on the view screen swapped from one of the bow telescopes to a camera mounted on the ship's port flank. An ugly conglomerate mass of scavenged ships and structure, the gray form was shaped like a dumbbell. Zarrey couldn't spot any noticeable engines on its main shaft or on its disc-shaped endcaps. That's not a ship, he realized, tossing out his default assumption. It's a station. Then, he noticed the strange shadows along the main length, pipes that were bent and welded to form an identification. Disbelief left his lips before he could contain it. "That's impossible."

Galhino shook her head. "I don't know what to tell you, Colonel." She wouldn't believe it herself if she weren't staring at the facts. "By all appearances, that is Midwest Station. Sensors have identified a Warhawk and a Rhino docked on the endcap." Since both ships were docked and powered down, the radar had registered them as part of the station, not as ships onto themselves.

"But that doesn't make sense." How had they gotten here?

"I can confirm that our present coordinates are within the bounds of the Mississippi Sector," Walters called from the navigations console.

"So, subspace threw us out on the doorstep of Midwest Station." Given the discomfort of the maneuver, that was the only way he would describe it. The FTL drives had taken them to subspace, and subspace had spat them back out with enough force to make it seem almost violent. "Did we take any damage?"