Blood Impulse

Part 43.1 - THE AURORA

Nagash Sector, Startraveler Aurora

The Startraveler Aurora floated through space under the easy acceleration of her main engines. Her elegant hull curved at the fore, and folded over itself outward at the rear like the pleats of a skirt. This layering bloom served a purpose of course – critical for dispersing the strain energy absorbed during FTL maneuvers. Upon reentry to normal space, the Aurora's hull glowed momentarily, shedding off the strain energy as heat. That energy-shedding allowed the Aurora to sustain more frequent and more difficult FTL maneuvers, but the technology that enabled it was complex, and rather fragile. As such, the Aurora was not meant to endure physical damage. She was a small and maneuverable ship equipped with magnetic shields.

In that sense, the Aurora may well have been the Singularity's opposite, and the reality of that fact had not settled in on Lord Protector Borealis until he viewed the Singularity's silhouette through the Aurora's telescopes. The Aurora was designed to endure FTL using technology precisely adapted to that purpose. The Singularity endured the stress and strain of FTL through sheer strength, brute-forcing her way through every maneuver. Like all of Command's ships, the Singularity's structure had been built to directly sustain those forces. The complexities of an energy dispersion system like the Aurora's would be of little use to a ship that was expected to take damage in combat. The Aurora's shields could protect the system's delicate mechanics, but the Singularity possessed no shields. Instead, she'd been heavily armored from bow to stern. Building a ship like that: with multitudes of structural redundancies and physical armor thick enough to be protective, that was beyond the means of humanity's individual nations. The material demands were simply too much. It was more cost effective to build smaller ships with greater technical reliance.

Lord Protector Borealis had been proud of that fact. He had been certain the Coalition's advanced technology – great enough to rival that of the central worlds – could compensate for any material gap. While not as large or armored as the centralized government's battleships, the Coalition's national guard was vastly capable in its own right. Now, however, having seen the Singularity's scarred armor for himself, Borealis found himself doubting the Royal Guard's capabilities for the first time. He had seen pictures of the Singularity before. She was an old ship, historic for her service in the Hydrian War. When he was sent to find the ship, Borealis had studied the Singularity's appearance in detail – factually known her great size and proportions. Yet, it had not occurred to him that most images of the ship had been taken outside combat. In every photograph he had seen, the Singularity's main battery guns had been lowered into their stowed position. Like that, the guns were still visible, so obvious in fact it had not occurred to Borealis that they had been stowed... until he saw them raised. Only then was their true size put into perspective.

The Singularity carried the largest artillery guns ever mounted on a mobile platform. That had been a consequence of the Hydrian War. Borealis had been educated in the history of such tactics during his training to become the Lord Protector. The Royal Guard ships' electromagnetic shielding technology was derived from the Hydra. The Cassiopeia Coalition had survived the War by reverse-engineering and bettering Hydrian technology to fight on par with the Empire, but the central worlds had chosen a different path. Hydrian shielding utilized electromagnetism to redirect artillery and energy just enough to miss the target. Unable to reliably penetrate that shielding, Command had increased the size of their artillery to shells that simply had too much mass to be redirected. It had been a simple, brutal solution, and the Singularity the result. A ship of unmatched physical prowess, she'd been built to kill Hydrian battleships whose shielding made them untouchable to the rest of Command's fleet.