Jacob turned his attention back to Taylor, who was still watching him with a doubtful expression. “I learned some of those maneuvers from my dad. He was a Naval officer until he retired and bought his own trade ship with the compensation.”
Ensign Taylor shrugged. “I suppose that is possible. But it is hard to believe you could have learned that much without specific instruction, and from what Ensign Schroder was saying, you might have alternative means of achieving high scores. Your friend Isaac has some skill in computer hacking, does he not?” Taylor’s eyes had gone cold, and Jacob felt a mixture of horror and outrage rush through him.
“Schroder?” Jacob twisted in his seat and found the Helm ensign across the room. He felt his fists clench in frustration. “That mangy little—”
“Ensign Hull. Do you have a question?” Rodgers’ question brought Jacob’s train of thought to a crashing halt. He looked back to where the commander stood and found the entire command staff staring directly at him. His face went hot, and he had to fight to meet Rodgers’ eyes.
“No sir.”
“Good.” Rodgers touched a control, and, the projection of the Harel system suddenly flickered and was replaced by another one. Two large gas planets in gray outlines orbited the small star, with a few large asteroids spread out closer in system. “Our second riftjump will take us to system GRC 11597. There we will engage in more serious target practice drills against dummy ships with live ammunition, as well as additional navigational hazards near the solar zone.” Rodgers put both hands on the podium and leaned forward. “We will also be doing communications testing, blackout drills and emergency situation tests. Due to these drills, the communications of our ship will be irregular, and Naval Command will anticipate us being out of contact for most of that time. The entire duration of our time in GRC 11597 should come to about two weeks.
“From GRC 11597, we will riftjump to where the fleet is gathered at New Cob Station where I will present my evaluations of the crew, and any necessary transfers or repairs will be made. Any questions?”
The room was silent, and nobody raised a hand. Commander Rodgers nodded and smiled. “Then let’s get to it. Lieutenants, you’ve already been given time to come up with duty schedules for the ensigns and petty officers under your command. I expect you to make those schedules available to them by the time we launch. Ensigns, each of you will be working in conjunction with your lieutenant and the petty officers to develop your skills and increase your capabilities as officers. Do not take the advice of the petty officers lightly; they may not hold your level of rank, but they are more than capable of doing your job. Listen and learn before you start throwing your weight around.”
The commander stepped back and nodded. “Officers, to your stations. We launch in one hour. Dismissed.”
An hour later, Jacob stood on the Engineering deck with the rest of the section’s crew. The Wolfhound had launched out from Graveston station, and Commander Rodgers had called on the entire crew to watch the launch via projected holograms after they had secured themselves against the acceleration that was to come.
The Wolfhound drifted away from the space station where it had been berthed for so long. Its maneuvering jets propelled it gently away from the station before carefully changing how it was oriented. The ship spun slightly on its axis, flipping end over end gracefully until its bow faced away from Graveston station and toward the wide expanse of stars in the other direction.
Jacob’s heart ached as he watched the Wolfhound set itself on an outbound course. He could almost feel the controls in his hands, feel the subtle pressure as the jets fired again to stop the flip and again to correct the course. There was a hum in the machinery around him as the DE sail spars shifted, adjusting themselves to the pilot's commands.
Then, faintly at first, a shimmer of light stretched out between those spars. A screen of projected matter began to form, becoming more and more solid as the spars came online. As the DE sails caught the invisible tug of the dark energy flows around them, the ship began to accelerate, gliding away from Graveston Station at ever increasing speed.
As the ship accelerated, Jacob could feel the pull of inertia in spite of the adjustments the computer was making to the artificial gravity to compensate for it, and smiled. This ship is fast. As he watched, the ship continued to accelerate, and Graveston Station quickly became a small dot of light among the field of stars. Very fast. Lieutenant Commander Piebald may look boring, but he is a great helmsman. The realization he would never have the chance to learn from him crashed in on Jacob, and he bowed his head as the Wolfhound flew free for the first time.
Chapter Four
“Hey Hull! You got those connections checked out yet?”
Jacob sighed as he continued to take readings from the console in front of him. The Lieutenant, a sour-faced man named Urleigh, was more impatient than Jacob liked, and he was a strict taskmaster. As annoying as his checkups could be, he did keep the crew busy. Otherwise Jacob quickly would have gone insane from boredom.
The destroyer and its crew had made it through the first part of the journey fine so far. The first riftjump had gone very well, with no serious malfunctions presenting themselves. With no real damage to focus on, the Engineering section shifted to looking for loose connections and other minor problems sloppy contractors had left behind. The ship had been riddled with problems, and as the engineers managed to worm through one, another two surfaced.
The Wolfhound was newly reconfigured and it showed. Much of the refit had left some of the less obvious power connections and other areas a mess, and although it wouldn’t affect the overall performance of the destroyer too severely, it would chip away at the craft’s effectiveness. Since the Navy inspectors tended to focus on connections that led to things like railguns and DE sails, the contractors could always slip in some shoddy work on the ones that led to more mundane places, like connections to the air circulators or lighting for the mess hall. All of which meant it was up to the Engineering section to put it right again.
The problem worsened after the drills at the course above New Harel’s moon. After a full day of maneuvering through the debris around New Harel and firing at targets among the shifting remnants of shattered battlecruisers and a ruined defense station, the crew of the Wolfhound was exhausted. In Engineering, they were struggling to keep up with repairs from the bumps and brushes the destroyer had with the various pieces of debris the point defense turrets had allowed through, while ferreting out more design flaws at the same time. As a result, Commander Rodgers had allowed them a single day to recover before the riftjump to GRC 11597, and Urleigh wanted the systems of the Wolfhound to be running absolutely perfectly by the end.
In spite of the chaos of the past three days, Jacob decided Engineering, especially Power Regulation, was not so bad a post to be assigned. His father had given him so many maintenance lessons on the Sprite that fixing power connections, tweaking subroutines and watching power flow was almost second nature to him. Of course, the real problem was that his father had let him fly the Sprite too. At the very least, he wasn’t checking black water pipes leading to the bathrooms like Ensign Caddamar, or trying to check lines of code in the ship’s computers like Ensign Carver.
Jacob sighed again as another reading came back negative. He leaned back to catch sight of where the Lieutenant was waiting for him to report in. “The third connection is still turning up wrong. I’m going to go check it out.”
The Lieutenant didn’t give any sign he’d heard, but Jacob didn’t bother to get his attention. Sometimes it was just better to get the job done than to make sure Urleigh had approved everything first, though the lieutenant treated every subversion of his authority like a treasonous crime. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. The old saying reminded him of his father, and he smiled as he walked over to the access tunnel.
Jacob pulled himself into the tunnel, feeling the gentle drift of zero gravity begin as he did so. It was a tight fit, but almost everythin
g in Engineering was that way. With space at a premium, and with most of the ship's interior taken up by a giant reactor, a loadout of a dozen railguns and over thirty interception platforms, comfort wasn’t a high priority. Adding to the problem was the fact that the Wolfhound was carrying a crew of nearly three hundred crewmen, officers, and marines on top of that. Engineering had to deal with tight spaces like the rest of the sections.
Fortunately, the coveralls he was wearing instead of the regular uniform were easier to move around in. The green suit had plenty of pockets and pouches as well, giving him plenty of spots to store his obligatory sidearm, welder, and a number of other tools he might need. Jacob blinked as he came to the panel he was looking for. He slid the hatch back to reveal a tangle of wires, circuits and cords, and sighed heavily.
Pulling out a small reader, he pulled up the schematics for the connection—or at least, what the connection was supposed to look like. What showed up on the small, backlit screen was completely different from the reality in front of him. Jacob studied the screen, then looked back up at the wiring, then back again. Let’s see. The connections here and here are wrong. Maybe that’s why the lights are always so dim and the air is always too cold in the mess. He traced the power cables with his hands, following them around their confused loops and tangles. If I just switch those two, then we should start getting better power flow, but then the branch here is going to get messed up. What does that go to anyway? It’s not on the original plans. Jacob growled.
He tapped a few more connections on the reader and traced the branch in the power connection, following the power flow along its route by the label on the branch. He groaned as he found it leading into the railgun system. So every time they fire that gun, the lights shut off in the mess hall completely. That must be why that gun is out of synch with the others; it gets recharged a bit faster, but probably accidentally overheats the circuit here every once in a while. Jacob let himself drift back from the access hatch. He wondered what he should do for a moment before tapping the communication stub on his coverall’s collar. “Ensign Hull to Petty Officer Turley.”
There was a moment’s pause before Turley responded. “Yeah, Ensign?” Turley’s rough voice betrayed some annoyance, but the surly old man was always annoyed about something—usually something that involved uppity officer types interrupting him.
“I’ve got a problem in power connection 15A. The two cables are switched up, and one of them has a branch leading to Cannon 3L that shouldn’t be there.”
“Damn contractors!” There was another pause. “Do any of the other guns have extra link ups like that?”
“I haven’t checked yet. Ensign Isaac was mentioning he had problems with that gun being out of sync, though.”
“Yeah, I bet. Switch the connections back before the feedback blows out a light in the mess hall or something. See if you can cut out that branch completely. We don’t need stuff like that gunking up our system.”
Jacob nodded to himself. “Will do. Thanks for the advice.” Turley muttered something about ensigns and airlocks before the stub shut off, but Jacob did his best to ignore it. He brought up a new screen on the reader, checked to make sure no gun drills were active and the mess was empty. He reached to shut off the power flow to the connection, but hesitated. Wouldn’t want another repeat of yesterday’s problem. He rechecked the mess hall schedule again, this time expanding his search to make sure the crewmen and officers who were awake were on duty elsewhere.
Satisfied that the mess should be empty, Jacob pulled the switch to cut power to the connection. He grabbed the power line leading to the lights, unhooked the connection, and did the same with the line to the circulators. Once the circulators were hooked up correctly, he carefully unhooked the line to the lights from the branch connection to the railgun, and then from the second connection to take the line out entirely. He took a normal power line out of one of his pockets and hooked it up to the power, then to the lights in the mess hall. He then followed the cable that led into the railgun system, unhooking it section after section until he couldn’t reach it in that access hatch anymore.
What followed was a chase that lasted the better part of an hour as he moved from access panel to access panel, unhooking connections and taking out wiring wherever he could. Finally, when he had done all he could in that confined space, he collected the extra cords and bundled them up before hauling himself along the tunnel to the exit.
Once he was out of the tunnel, he felt artificial gravity return slowly and made sure not to fall on his face as he landed on his feet. He then headed to put the extra cords in storage and found himself face to face with the Lieutenant.
The officer did not look happy, an expression Jacob was all too familiar with from the Academy. “What are you doing Ensign? I wanted you to fix that connection an hour ago, not strip half the power cords from that area! What were you thinking? Why didn’t you check with me first?” Urleigh was yelling loud enough the few crewmen in the immediate area had paused in their work to watch the confrontation. Jacob would have sighed, but it would have only made the lieutenant angrier.
“I found a bad connection, and while I was fixing it I ran into an extra power line running into one of the railguns. It’s been causing problems with the gunnery drills, so I decided to take out the line. I was just going to put the extra cords in storage now, sir.”
“Oh really? You decided, as an Ensign, to modify the entire power system for the railguns? Do you realize how delicate those systems are? You should leave that kind of work to someone with experience.” Urleigh was now almost purple with rage. “Did you even bother checking the connection like I asked?”
“Yes sir.” Jacob didn’t explain any further. It obviously was not going to help.
“We’ll see about that.” The Lieutenant stepped over to the console and tapped a few keys. “Everything comes up green. There isn’t anything wrong with the power flow to the mess hall.”
“Yes sir. I fixed the problem already, sir.” He thought he heard a few snickers among the crewmen listening in, but he was having a hard time joining in the amusement. After an hour of following power lines and reworking connections, he was tired. He wondered how much longer the reprimand would take.
Urleigh spun on him, his anger unabated. “So you fixed it, did you? It is too bad you haven’t managed to fix the problem with your attitude as well, Ensign Hull.” The emphasis on ensign was so heavy it might as well have been a bludgeon. “You obviously need to learn how to respect the experience and leadership of your commanders. How much experience could you possibly have had working with these systems anyway? You could have wired the whole section to explode, for all I know.”
“Ten years, sir.”
The response, unexpected and blunt, took Urleigh by surprise. His tirade came to a sudden halt, and his mouth worked with a kind of astonishment, as if shocked that an ensign had even dared interrupt him. “What did you say?”
“Ten years, sir. I have worked on this type of system for at least ten years, counting the training I had in the Academy.” Jacob, tired as he was, enjoyed the sudden confusion on Urleigh’s face. His weariness helped him keep a smile off of his face, though.
“That’s a bald faced lie. You’d have to be some kind of frontier spacer brat to—”
“Vacuum born and star suckled, sir.”
In the dead silence that followed, Lieutenant Urleigh grew pale. The crewmen who had been eavesdropping went still, their false pretenses disappearing in the awkward surprise of the situation. Jacob kept his attention on Urleigh, silently cursing his own tendency to make a situation worse.
The lieutenant managed to pull himself back together for one final moment of outrage. “Well, you’ll have to learn that this isn’t some hopeless wreck of vagrant spacer trash. This is a ship of the Celostian Navy, and we will have discipline. The next time you do something like this, I will have you in the brig. Do you understand, Ensign?”
Jacob nodded just to put a
n end to the painful conversation, and the lieutenant retreated indignantly up the corridor. He glanced around, and the crewmen suddenly seemed very busy with their work the nearby consoles. Shaking his head, Jacob started on his way aft to leave the cables where the extra parts were all kept. He had a long day left.
By the time he returned to his cabin, Jacob was exhausted. The confrontation with Urleigh had left the lieutenant mean and sullen the whole shift, and the crewmen had kept their distance to avoid the lieutenant’s displeasure. Jacob himself had wound up quietly trying to strip out the rest of the errant power line from the railgun, having to do so under the cover of working on other projects. Luckily, Turley had helped out, asking the Ensign to work near the next section that needed to be fixed so Urleigh wouldn’t notice.
The project had taken six hours, and he had only finished the job at the end of the shift. Now, exhausted and wondering what new disaster would be waiting for him, he trudged up to his hatch and keyed in his code. As the hatch rose, he heard Isaac call out to him. “Hey, Jacob!”
He turned to find Isaac coming up the corridor towards him. Jacob hesitated. He could almost feel the bunk in his room calling to him, but Isaac’s friendly smile persuaded him to stay. Besides, work hasn’t left much time to talk with the others, lately. “Hey Isaac, how are you doing?”
“Great! Our practice drill is coming up soon, and I think we should do well. I have a good feeling about it.”
Jacob smiled, thinking of his repairs. “Yeah, I do too. You’ll do great. How are the other crews doing?”
Isaac shrugged. “Well, I don’t really know. The other ensigns are really competitive about how their practice drills are going. Unless the commander officially posts it, they keep it all a secret.” The ensign ran a hand through his red hair. “Sometimes it seems like the lieutenant has a thing against me, though. Can’t imagine why.”
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