First Command (18 page)

Trendale looked ready to lash out at Krishna, but Jonathan interjected, “Well put Lieutenant. I think this line of thought is worth further inquiry. Check what OMI has on the disposition of Confederate and Dominion forces near New Helsinki, and write up a full report of the systems they control as possible staging grounds.” Krishna nodded smiling slightly while Trendale sat in stony silence. Jonathan went through a few more administrative issues, and then dismissed everyone. Trendale, though, remained sitting after the last officer was out the door.

“Sir I don't...” Trendale began,

“Stow it XO!” Jonathan snapped without looking up from his readouts. “I don’t care what your personal baggage is, you are not, repeat not, to belittle fellow officers especially subordinates in front of their peers. Am I clear?”

Trendale bit his lip, and didn't respond. The two men sat in silence for what felt like a half hour but was closer to a minute. Then Trendale rose and left without saying another word. Jonathan for his part leaned back in his chair, took off his cap and ran his hand through his hair a few times before resting his face on his palm and slapping the table in unmitigated frustration. Damn it, damn it all to hell. He’d had an opportunity to confront Trendale about his attitude. Trendale undermining Krishna was not a breach of etiquette, it was just downright rude. It was clear the XO was letting his petty frustrations get to him, and it was beginning to show. Jonathan simply didn't know how to deal with it. For all his natural talent at helming a ship, he came up short on personal issues, holding little patience for incompetence or petty vindictiveness. When Nathan Gopal had alerted him to Trendale’s frustrations, he’d secretly hoped the man would be able to contain himself. Sighing, Jonathan leaned back in his chair and wrestled with the issue. A ship with a Captain and XO who hated each other wasn't unheard of, but a ship with a XO who the Captain couldn't trust that was a big problem. Jonathan would have to deal with it or soon or his first command could wind up being his last. 

Chapter IX

On board
RSNS Titan
DD-0023 New Helsinki System, Solarian Republic,

Bridge

February 17th  841 AE  (2802 AD) 18:00hrs

The matter of trust was still very much on Jonathan's mind as
Titan
transitioned into the New Helsinki system a week later. He’d racked his brain for a way to deal with Trendale discreetly, but he couldn't come up with anything. The XO’s mood hadn’t improved, but he was still skirting direct insubordination for which Jonathan was grateful. He didn't want the issue to become official.
Titan’s
good name
and Jonathan's own name already had too much tar on them and Jonathan didn't want to splash on any more. On the bright side, the transit through Chaucer’s Gap had gone smoothly with a friendly exchange of signals between
Titan
and the other Navy forces on station. Mr. Rodriguez had even arranged a rendezvous with a collier tug to replenish the ammunition depleted in the live fire practice in Verge.  The ship’s company was clicking well. Drills had improved and discipline problems were down as the enlisted found their place and the Noncoms found their feet. Jonathan had largely delegated the training schedules to Nathan Gopal, as tactical officer that was well within his purview, even though it was a duty traditionally handled by the XO. Trendale hadn't indicated he felt slighted, or more slighted rather. Trendale had largely kept to himself since the spat in the conference room. A mistake Jonathan continued to kick himself for. Interpersonal issues aside, Mr. Krishna had proven to be a very attuned ad-hoc intelligence officer. Jonathan had thoroughly enjoyed pursuing his reports. He’d always had a fondness for International relations and Interstellar cultures, the by-product of his youth he supposed. Mr. Krishna’s reports each began with a brief summary of the Dominion and Confederacy history, political structure and culture, then proceeded to predict their probable intentions and the readiness of their armed forces, along with the disposition of military units near New Helsinki according to the latest OMI bulletins. According to his report, Mr. Krishna concluded that although the Thaos Dominion was the most likely suspect for making an aggressive action, Commander Trendale had been correct in his assessment that neither the political will nor military might existed to pull it off. Thaos was a unique star system because it contained two worlds within its habitable zone, which had been dubbed Artemis and Apollo after the twin gods of the sun and moon in Greek mythology. The system had been settled roughly a century after Solaria by Hellenic Supremacists. Jonathan cringed every time he thought about that. His father’s home world Hera had also had a large Hellenic population from which William Trendale had sprung. The inhabitants of Thaos, however, had not been content with dominion over a wealthy star system, and had felt that as the proud descendants of the superior Hellenic race it was their destiny to rule over lesser peoples. They had launched a series of wars of conquest, which brought them into conflict with first the Teja’s Protectorate, then after the Protectorate had been folded into the Republic, the Dominion had started three wars with Solaria. The first had been a draw as the military and government of the Republic were still shaky after the end of military rule in the Republic. The next two conflicts, the last of which was only thirteen years ago, had ended in crushing defeats for the Dominion forcing them to cede most of their territory. The Dominion wasn't broken, at least not militarily, but it was the opinion of OMI, which Krishna concurred with that the will to fight had vanished. The last two times the Solarians had beaten the Dominion it had inspired revanchist movements, and brought anti Solarian groups to power in the Directory and the Dikatship. The most recent defeat had been especially brutal. During the second battle of Chaucer’s Gap, 60% of the Dominion fleet had been destroyed. The Dominion was what scholar’s described as a constitutional military dictatorship or
timocracy.
While the armed forces answered to a civilian government, that government required military service as requirement for entry. Civil servants were mostly veterans, and all Directors, the members of the Dominion parliament, were ex officers. The Diktat, the elected dictator, served an unlimited number of twenty-five year terms, and only serving and former soldiers could vote. Those who had not served either because they were unfit, unwilling or not of Hellenic blood, were called Helots and regulated to second-class citizenship. The Thaos considered theirs the ideal political system just as they were the ideal race.  The fact they’d been so thoroughly whipped recently by what was in their world view an inferior people and political system left them uneager to try again at least for the next twenty years or so.  The Colonial Confederacy was quite another kettle of fish entirely. The Confederacy was somewhat unique among multi-star system nations in that all of its eighteen systems shared a common history. Back when the great scramble for the stars had begun, everyone who could was claiming colonial charters- governments, multinationals, conglomerates, ideological movements, religious groups, and private enterprise like the group who had colonized Solaria. One multinational coalition had been more forward thinking than most. The Colonial Union of Francophone Nations had negotiated sovereignty over what was called the Serpent sector, a string of systems just south of the Serpent disruption. This was a hyperspace barrier between the core worlds, and the outer worlds that no wormway could cross. Only three of the systems had habitable worlds, and two of those were marginal, but with the wealth of a dozen nations to support their venture the new colony had begun systematic terraforming wherever they were able. After the United Terran Federation, the first in a series of governments to gain sovereignty over Earth, and the core world was formed, the new colony had broken ties with the home world and accepted a massive influx of refugees and wealth fleeing the new Terran world state. Now, all eighteen of the Confederacies systems were inhabited and ten systems held at least one habitable world. Other than a few minor border skirmishes, relations with Solaria had been peaceful. The Confederacy's main foe was its geographic isolation. While it had invested in terraforming first, other nations had invested in expansion first then, terraforming second. The result was larger neighbors now surrounded the Confederacy. The Union of Sovereign Systems and Coalition of Worlds was to the east, the Earth Treaty Organization to the north, and Solaria and her client states to the south and west. Though traditionally isolationist, the Confederate public was becoming more and more concerned with what it saw as its neighbor’s aggressive expansion, especially Solaria. The upside was that the Confederacy was heavily decentralized. Each system had a parliament and Governor. The Governor would then appoint two representatives to the Consulship and the Consuls would elect from among their number an Elector to serve as the head of state and form a national Government.  The result was that rarely would the Confederate government act quickly or aggressively. However, Krishna’s report cautioned that several Confederate Governors saw war with Solaria as a way to expand their own dominion and the Confederate Military, though untested, was large enough to cause serious problems. The saving grace, Krishna wrote in his report, was the strong pacifist and isolationist factions. It would take something drastic, to get them to support an all out war.  What exactly that would be? Krishna, OMI, and Jonathan had no idea.
Jonathan turned his focus from the reports, interesting as they might be, back to the task at hand. That task now being bringing RSNS
Titan
into orbit of  New Helsinki, which despite having  been settled nearly six hundred years ago was very lacking in the basic infrastructure one usually found  in civilized systems. The
Titan’s
lidar readouts showed that the trans-shipment stations, mineral extractors, deep space smelters, fabricators, shipyards and orbital hotels that usually went along with a thriving economy were very lacking. The only orbital infrastructure currently in system was an orbital elevator that was still under construction. A series of navigation buoys, the laser relays that were used to send messages through the wormways, and a assortment of unmanned communication, weather and microwave satellites, all of these improvements were compliments of the Solarian Navy Corps of Engineers. A few stations were also under construction, but those were private ventures undertaken by local consortiums. Despite the lack of infrastructure, there was an abundance of traffic in the system. Freighters of every make and model were squawking transponder signals from the Solarian Republic, the Royal Union of Vinland, Union of Sovereign States, Coalition of Worlds, the Rio Republic, Kingdom of 
Xinthp̄hlạm, the Dijina Union, not to mention over three dozen independent single system states. Under Solarian rule, New Helsinki had gone from being a backwater of the Dominion to the primary corridor of trade into the Solarian Republic territory from the eastern reaches. Solaria was a highly desirable market because its territory controlled a continuous route into the outbound sector, the underdeveloped region of recently settled space which was a lucrative market for manufactured goods, and a net exporter of raw materials. Solaria also controlled a continuous route around the Serpent Dived into the core worlds and the Ceti Commonwealth, which despite being a tyrannical neo-comm state was still the second largest economy in settled space. New Helsinki had benefited from being the gateway to the Solarian zone of trade where they needed to pay only one tariff on the value of all cargo. This was an improvement on the system’s previous role as a source of auxiliary troops for their Dominion overlords. The system’s
former dictator, who styled himself Director after his predecessors, had mobilized the already well-trained death squads and shock troops into the service of their patrons in the Dominion. The New Helsinki shock troops, which called themselves Wargs after a legendary Terran monster, had proven quite useful at enforcing the Dominion’s tax edicts to the outer territories usually through a liberal application of Napalm against civilian targets. That had ended with the 3rd Dominion War when a Solarian Marine expeditionary force had broken the back of the previously much feared Helsinkian Wargs and sent Yaguard’s heir scurrying into exile.  The man himself was caught, tried, and executed for assorted war crimes. Jonathan reviewed the reports on his tactical plot as he mulled this over the problems he’d face here. He opened up additional screen windows to allow himself  to also look through Governor Ellen Curtis’ reports, cross-referencing information as he went. While Jonathan scrutinized his primary display, Lt. Commander Gopal and Lt. Krishna aided by Lt. Chan worked up a tactical assessment of the system that appeared on Jonathan’s secondary display. Lidar scopes had come a long way since the first human warships made their way out among the stars, but the basic principle remained the same. Ships were tracked at long range by their drive signature, which was unique based on how much they massed. Once you got closer, it was possible to use lidar designators to build a clearer picture of a ship’s exact composition and, in the case of warships, armament. Of course it wasn’t perfect. The lidar designators were surface viewable only. The electrical and heat emissions they generated couldn’t penetrate even the most basic hull. So with the correct decoy drones attached, an asteroid of appropriate size and mass could appear as a battleship on lidar screens rather than a hunk of rock. As limited as the technology was, it gave navy ships a much clearer picture of their tactical disposition than the old-style, slower radar systems.  Jonathan was intently studying the charts when serviceman Yower announced that a communiqué had been received from the Governor’s office. The Governor was happy to see
Titan’s
arrival, and was eager to speak with Jonathan in person. His presence had been requested groundside at the capital city Haggerdam ASAP for a conference. Jonathan grimaced after he finished reading the message. A trip groundside was the last thing he wanted to do. Of course he could refuse, or send Trendale in his place. The Governor was the top civil administrator for the system. Even though she was technically outside the Navy’s chain of command, refusing to meet her would be down right rude, and sending someone in his place a grievous insult. With a sigh, Jonathan issued orders to bring
Titan
into orbit.