Black Fleet Trilogy 1: Warship

©2015

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

*****

Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

http://www.moniquehappy.com

Chapter 1

Year: 2423

“Captain Wolfe, the admiral will see you now, sir.”

Jackson Wolfe nodded politely to the NCO manning the desk in the reception area, stood up and smoothed out his dress blacks, and strode purposefully towards the open door that led to Admiral Winters' office. He walked in and stopped three paces in front of the desk, coming to attention as Alyson Winters pointedly ignored him.

Nonplussed, Jackson held his rigid stance as the admiral made a show of fishing around on her desk for a stylus as she continued to work on her tablet computer, a device colloquially called a "tile" by everyone in the Fleet due to the branding of an electronics company that no longer even existed. Three minutes later and he knew this was not the usual games higher-ranking officers played with those of lower rank to remind them of their place. This was a deliberate insult. He took it doubly so since Admiral Winters obviously thought him so dense that he needed nearly five minutes for the lesson to sink in. She set the tile down with a clatter and looked up at him, seeming to notice him for the first time, and held him with an icy stare for another half a minute.

“At ease, Captain,” she said. Jackson shifted to a loose parade rest, his eyes flicking momentarily to one of the two chairs in front of her desk. But he hadn’t been offered a seat, so he remained standing. “Do you know why I called you here today?”

“I would not presume to know, Admiral,” Jackson said. He offered nothing more as he was more than used to these little games. At first he had thought it due to petty jealousy over the manner in which he had attained his rank. In recent years he had come to realize that it was something much more vile.

“The
Blue Jacket
has passed her inspections—
barely
—and I’ve called you here because I’ve narrowed the list of potential executive officers down for you,” Admiral Winters said. “I thought it would be a good idea to discuss them with you in person.”

“Potential execs?” Jackson asked, clearly confused. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Admiral.”

“Didn’t Commander Stevenson tell you?” Winters asked, taking obvious pleasure in the moment. “I approved his transfer to Fourth Fleet yesterday. He will be departing with a supply convoy to his new assignment.”

Jackson was seething. It was all he could do to not let his countenance crack in front of the admiral. "The commander must have been too busy to come inform me personally,” he said neutrally. “I’m certain there’s a message in my inbox I’ve yet to read.”

“Of course,” Winters said with disappointment. She’d been watching him closely and obviously hoping for some sort of outburst. “The short list is down to three candidates. Honestly, Captain, you’re lucky to even get that many. Not too many qualified execs wanting destroyer duty and fewer want to take an assignment in Seventh Fleet.”

“Understandable, Admiral,” Jackson said, unflappable. “We are away from ports of call for many months and cruises last over a year. It can be tough on those spacers who aren’t mentally tough enough for it.”

“Yes,” Winters said in a deadpan voice. “I’m sure that must be it. Anyway, please take the seat to your right, Captain, and we’ll review these personnel records. Let’s try to move this along as quickly as we can, I have a reception down on the surface in two hours.”

It took less than thirty minutes to realize that the list really only contained one name. One candidate that Admiral Winters had handpicked out of a list and was adamant about putting on his ship. Reading through the fitness reports in the personnel file, Jackson couldn’t figure out why. He was used to getting stuck with less than stellar performing officers and enlisted spacers, but this person didn’t seem to fit that description. If he didn’t know any better, he would think he was finally catching a break and that his ship would have a motivated, competent executive officer for their next cruise. After seeing the oily smile Admiral Winters gave him when he agreed to her recommendation, however, he told himself that he was being wildly optimistic.

****

After leaving Admiral Winters’ office, Jackson walked aimlessly along the curved, outer walkway of Central Command’s orbiting fortress: Jericho Station. The complex was the central hub for all fleet operations and was a dizzying array of access tubes, docks for starships, and compartments that housed all the people of CENTCOM who made the day-to-day decisions that affected the lives of people like Jackson. He paused on the walkway, leaning against the railing and looking though the curved acrylic of the access tube at the spinning planet below. Haven, located in the Alpha Centauri system, was one of the first planets colonized by humans once they’d begun to leave Earth and still where most of the real power in human space was concentrated.

The planet below him blurred as he shifted his focus on his own reflection, looking at the features that seemed to so disgust his fellow officers. He was of average height and build, a little on the lean side from a poor diet and an obsession with running, among other things. His olive skin, dark eyes, and jet black hair made it fairly obvious that he was from Earth, however. The muted racial traits, typical of someone who had been born on Earth, also made it difficult to determine his age at first glance, as he looked at least ten years younger than his forty-one years.

For generations the upper ten percent of humanity had been skimmed off the top of Earth's population and sent into space, the best and brightest loaded up on starships and sent to colonize all the newly discovered worlds. They gladly left behind an overcrowded, polluted, and largely dysfunctional Earth. After a couple hundred years of this exodus, Earth became little more than a slum in the eyes of most people. Those that were born there faced an uphill battle for recognition. It was a battle most did not win.

Jackson sighed and continued on his walk. It wasn’t often he was consciously aware of the enormous chip on his shoulder, but his meeting with Admiral Winters had brought a lot of the bitterness and anger to the forefront. Even as he walked he felt like he could hear the unspoken thoughts of those he passed.

“Charity case.”

“Token.”

“Earther.”

He aborted his plan to speak with the dock master about the status of his ship and took the next transfer tube that led back to billeting. All he wanted to do was make it back to his quarters without speaking to anyone. He also knew that his escape was tucked safely in his spacebag, waiting for him. Although he had managed to stay away from it while his destroyer was in dock for maintenance and inspections, the events of the day had crumbled his resolve.

Chapter 2

The next morning Jackson walked along the access tube that led down to the docking complex, instantly picking his ship out of the other dozen moored there. The
Blue Jacket
had been moved from the fully enclosed maintenance dock to the open anchor point sometime during the previous day. He would take the tender out later and do a full inspection of the hull once he made a thorough inspection of the engineering spaces and anywhere else the CENTCOM crews had been during their work.

He paused along the walkway and took in the rare sight. It wasn’t very often he could gaze at his ship from stem to stern, as he was usually either inside her hull or in a cramped shuttle craft. The
Raptor
-class destroyers were similar in construction to most of the other warships humans fielded. The hull was roughly cigar-shaped, though flattened to provide a narrower side profile and a wider top and bottom to mount the super structure and the mag-cannon turrets. The main engines, four third-generation magneto-plasma drive pods (commonly called MPDs), were mounted near the aft of the ship. They were oriented so that their pylons made an “X” when viewing the ship head-on. Even though the ship was a destroyer class vessel it dwarfed the largest aircraft carriers from twenty-first century Earth’s ocean-going navies, displacing seven hundred thousand tons and having a length of just under six hundred meters.

Jackson glanced at his comlink to check the local time and continued down the walkway to the security check point that would lead him out to the docking arms. After a perfunctory check of his ID and bioscan he was cleared through the gate with a sloppy salute from the bored looking Marine sentry. He let the mildly disrespectful gesture slide and made his way over to the moving walkway that would take him the remaining two kilometers to his ship. He stepped on the blinking circle and waited as the walkway calculated his weight and his destination before accelerating away. The material on the floor was able to move passengers at various speeds and accelerations simultaneously. Jackson gave a short chuckle as he realized that the system was one of the more advanced bits of technology on Jericho Station.

The circle he was standing in began to slow and drift over to the left side of the walkway, eventually stopping near the large archway which had a digital banner over it that said “
TCS
Blue Jacket
, DS-701.” He stepped off the walkway and towards the gangway arch, waiting for the sentries to notice him.

“Captain Wolfe,” the Marine said crisply, coming to attention and saluting. Jackson returned the salute and hefted his spacebag up on the table so it could go through the scanner. Even an admiral on a fleet carrier had to submit to the same security procedures before boarding a starship as a lowly spacer apprentice. He stepped through the scanning portal, waiting for the sentry to give him the go-ahead before walking though.

“All clear, Captain,” the Marine said. “I’ll have your bag taken to your quarters, sir.”

“Thanks, Marine,” Jackson said with a nod. He walked up the main gangway slowly, looking at the hull of his ship through the transparent tube walls. This close he could see the deep pits and scarring in the alloy from years of micrometeor impacts while gliding though the void. As he approached the main hatch he could also see that the skeleton crew still aboard were maneuvering the pallets of material they’d taken on.

“
Blue Jacket
, arriving,” the ship’s computer automatically called over the shipwide intercom as Jackson stepped over the threshold of the hatch and into the port cargo bay. At the announcement several of the spacers working in the hold stopped and turned to him, rendering honors.

“As you were,” Jackson called out, returning their salute as he walked to the hatch on the aft bulkhead that would take him to the lifts. He fully intended to make a complete inspection of the ship as soon as he could, but he would rather his chief engineer accompany him when he did. Instead, he decided to go to the bridge and look over the diagnostic data from there. He preferred to look over the reports in peace while the
Blue Jacket
was still running with a skeleton crew. The rest of his spacers weren’t due to board for another five hours.

He keyed the lift and rode the magnetically powered car up to deck fifteen, the last deck within the main hull of the ship. From there he had to walk another twenty meters to a different set of lifts that would take him up into the superstructure, the tower affixed to the dorsal surface of the hull that contained the main bridge and a handful of other critical departments. Jackson had never understood why the bridge wasn’t buried deeper in the ship, but even after a dozen generations of starships human builders still seemed to draw a direct line of comparison between ancient seagoing vessels and those that would spend their entire lives in a vacuum.

“Captain on the bridge!” the Marine sentry called out from the large archway that led onto the main bridge. Jackson heard the commotion of people clambering out of seats and snapping to attention before he cleared the threshold of the arch.

“As you were,” he said. “Officer of the watch, has Jericho released the maintenance files for the
Blue Jacket
?”

“Yes, sir,” the young ensign standing at the operations station said.

“Send them to my office,” Jackson said. “I’ll be expecting my new exec within the hour. Send them directly to me.”

“Aye, sir,” the ensign said hesitantly. “What happened to Commander Stevenson?”

“Greener pastures, Ensign, greener pastures,” Jackson said. “Carry on. Don’t forget to send the new XO to my office.”

He walked off the bridge and down the curving passageway to the hatch marked with his name and rank. His office was just off the bridge and within sight of the Marines who were on sentry duty. The office was a sanctuary where he could try and keep on top of the unholy amount of administrative work that went along with commanding a starship. The sad truth was that because of a series of somewhat unreliable, or unwilling, executive officers there were some cruises when he only slept in his quarters a handful of times. Instead, he would end up sleeping on the sofa in his office as he tried to keep on top of the workload. Procrastination wasn’t an option since when the ship came back into port CENTCOM wanted the logs and files from the cruise before the ship was even towed back into her berth.

Jackson was skimming through the reports on the work done to his ship when there was a single knock on his hatch.

“Enter!”

The hatch slid open at his command and a petite brunette woman in pristine dress blacks walked into the office. She stopped right in front of his desk and snapped a crisp salute, staring at a spot just over his head.

“Commander Celesta Wright, reporting as ordered,” she said sharply, holding her salute.

Jackson had no tolerance for the silly games officers played such as making subordinates stand at attention while being stared down. He paused long enough to look the officer over, noting her impeccable military bearing and impressive rack of service ribbons over her left breast.

“At ease, Commander,” Jackson said. “Have a seat.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, sliding gracefully into one of the chairs in front of his desk, her back still ramrod straight.

“Britannia?”

“Excuse me, sir?” she asked, confused.

“From your accent I’m assuming you’re from Britannia,” Jackson clarified. He already knew almost everything about her from the personnel file Admiral Winters had provided, but getting to know a new second in command just before a cruise was more than just learning a list of facts impersonally entered into a file.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Daven, to be specific.”

“I’ve heard it’s a lovely planet,” Jackson said perfunctorily. “So rather than tiptoe around the obvious here I'll get right to it ... why aren’t you flying with First Fleet anymore?”

Commander Wright squirmed uncomfortably at the direct question, her polished façade cracking just a bit. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“By all means,” Jackson said, gesturing with his hand for her to continue.

“First Fleet is a top notch organization,” she said, “the best of the best. But making rank is exceedingly difficult. The average age for a captain is sixty-five and the entire fleet is rank heavy. As a commander I was still only fifth in line for command on the cruiser I last served on. If I wanted a shot at a ship of my own someday I knew I needed to transfer.”

“Why not Fourth Fleet?” Jackson asked. “Or even the Fifth?”

“I applied to Fourth Fleet,” she admitted. “I did not bother with Fifth Fleet since the New European Commonwealth has a notorious dislike of anyone from Britannia. Even if I had been accepted I do not think I would have enjoyed my time there. It seemed Bla—Seventh Fleet was the only logical choice. Sir.”

“You can say it, Commander,” Jackson said with a humorless chuckle. “Black Fleet wasn’t always a pejorative term. I’m assuming you know the full history of the Terran Confederate Starfleet?”

“Of course, sir,” she said.

“Indulge me.”

“When the Republic was first reorganized as the Terran Confederacy it still fielded a fleet that was based entirely out of Haven,” she began, looking slightly annoyed at being made to recite ancient history she’d learned before even applying to the Academy. “The fleet was originally divided into taskforces, but it became too large to realistically manage and was then divided into numbered fleets similar to what we have today. Some decades later the logistics of supporting all the fleets while they served all the individual Terran enclaves became too much and they were formally assigned to their patrol areas permanently and the responsibility for maintaining each fleet fell to each enclave rather than the Confederacy.”

“A fairly straightforward answer I would expect on a first year cadet’s entrance exam,” Jackson said, watching Commander Wright bristle. “You failed to mention that the Seventh Fleet stayed assigned to Haven and was tasked with patrolling the deep space lanes between all the human worlds, often being sent on cruises longer than a year, isolated and cut-off. The nickname Black Fleet came about because of those deep space missions, not for what it’s become. It used to be a name that the spacers of Seventh Fleet wore with pride.”

“Sir, I didn’t mean to imply that Black Fleet was an undesirable assignment,” Commander Wright said, suddenly understanding what her mistake had been.

“I am not stupid, Commander,” Jackson said, perhaps more harshly than he intended. “For the last thirty years Black Fleet has been where CENTCOM has allowed the other fleets to dump their discipline problems and otherwise undesirable officers and enlisted spacers until their contracts run out. Even the fleet itself isn’t exactly on the leading edge. Take this ship, for example. This destroyer was state of the art … forty-five years ago. While we’re here on Jericho trying to patch new sensors into a forty-year-old MUX, New America is getting ready to deploy a destroyer into the Fourth Fleet that is faster, better armed, and better armored than the single remaining Black Fleet battleship.”

“Sir,” Celesta began slowly, “I’m not sure I understand where you’re going with this.”

“My point is this, Commander,” Jackson said. “While I appreciate ambition and I respect drive, do not think that Black Fleet is a place where you will walk in and step on the heads of all the scrubs on your way to commanding your own ship. I expect you to perform the job of Executive Officer to the best of your ability. I expect you to carry out your duty without the distraction of you looking for the opportunity to leapfrog into a ship of your own. Am I clear?”

“Crystal clear, sir,” she said stiffly. “If I may be so bold, sir, isn’t just such a scenario how you came to be in command of this ship?”

“I am well aware of the rumors regarding my promotion, Commander,” Jackson said, his face flushing as he fought to control the momentary flash of anger. “Whatever did, or did not, happen during that mission does not change the current situation. I can only imagine the things that are said of the uppity Earther who lucked into command of a worn-out destroyer in a squadron that eats officers and craps out dead careers. To be honest, I couldn’t care less. I hope for your sake that you haven’t taken an assignment on this ship because you think that my chair is up for grabs.”

“Of course not, sir,” Celesta said quickly, looking as if she regretted her last comment. “I meant no disrespect, sir.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Jackson said calmly. “I would just prefer us to start our working relationship with no misunderstandings. I’ve read your fitness reports and, to be honest, I’m fairly impressed. You’ll be a great asset to this ship if you can fully dedicate yourself to her. This is a good crew. They’re a little rough around the edges but a solid group of spacers nonetheless. Get to know them, earn their respect, and I promise you you’ll get your shot at a command of your own … but you have to earn it. Do you have any questions for me?”

“Just one, sir,” she said. “I tried to research this myself but the public net on Daven had conflicting information on the reference. Why is this ship called the
Blue Jacket
?”

Jackson leaned back, considering her question.

“The fact I command this particular ship is a bit of serendipity,” he said with a genuine smile. “All the destroyers in Ninth Squadron were named after Native American war chiefs.
Blue Jacket
was the war chief of the Shawnee, an ancient tribe that used to inhabit the area where I grew up.”