7:35 p.m. CST, June 19th, 2673; Clearwater Prime, Alpha Disk

“So what did you find out?” Anna asked when the two women were away from the Sun Side Bar.

“He was hired by someone with an Olivier disposition. To make sure that Mr. Hoover did not discover anything. At least that was his cover story.”

“You sound a tad suspicious.”

“I am. This seems to be falling into place much too quickly for my liking. Since you joined me, I’ve been getting more leads than normal, many more.”

“Well, that’s what you were hoping for, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s coming too easy. There is something going on with Olivier, but we’d be fools to think that was the only thing going on here. Stanley, the thug with your information, was a bit more forthcoming with other information after I blasted his elbow. There’s a body in sector Three-Golf. Apparently that was Mr. Hoover’s contact, and Stanley left him in one of the organic waste recycling bins. We should probably check it out before the station maintenance vehicles show up and discover it.”

Anna made a face as she looked around. She had already removed the goggles. “Yes we should, but it’ll take us at least an hour to get there, and I have to report back to the fleet in just over four. It’ll probably take me two of those to get back to the ship. We’re cutting it close, Beth.”

The two agents took the tram to the other side of the disk and started to search the area. They were able to find the collection bins before the recycling vehicle came by, and they pulled the body from it.

“You know, Beth, I always appreciate these little outings of ours.”

“Come now, Anna, you know you missed all of this fieldwork,” Beth said as she started to explore the pockets of the male corpse, looking for identification and other useful items.

“You know something, you’re partially right. This is probably all the fieldwork that I need to satisfy my masochistic need to get out into the field for the next ten years.”

“Come on, I know you had fun shooting those thugs.”

“Not really. Shooting on the target range is different than shooting out here. I didn’t really like it.”

“You were able to down four of the six, Anna. That tells me you still have the instincts for this work.”

“Maybe or maybe not. On Magellan I had to man one of the guns during the war. It was kill or be killed. Same sort of thing here. I’m not geared to be an assassin.”

“Perhaps. Tell you what. The next time you get one of your masochistic needs for fieldwork, I have a few scenes for you to shoot at the studio.”

Anna felt the blush growing, and then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so, Beth.”

Beth shrugged her shoulder and had a look over at Anna before she continued to search through the pockets. She stopped as she found a data storage crystal.

“Well, here’s the data crystal,” Beth said and handed it over to Anna. Anna’s ear keyed into the wording the data crystal, not a data crystal. “I’m not sure we’re going to be able to find anything else here. Let’s dump the body again and move on.”

Anna took the crystal and pocketed it before helping the blond agent lift the body up and dump it back into the recycling bit. The man weighed at least eighty kilograms when he died, and the two women had to get the proper leverage before getting him into the green bin again.

“I’ll take the crystal back to the ship, Beth. I’ll hook it up to my secure equipment and see what I can get from it. If I get any information before we leave the system, I’ll try to get it to you.”

“Sounds good. I do want to thank you again, Anna. You really did help, and it was fun working with you again.”

* * *

0700 hours CST, June 20th, 2673; flag bridge of TRFS Glasgow

“Glad you could join us, Senior Lieutenant,” the admiral of the Clearwater fleet said to Anna as she came through the main hatch. Senior Lieutenant Anna Li completed the formalities of reporting for duty after her shore leave by giving the admiral a salute.

She arrived at the main air lock a few minutes before midnight after her jaunt out onto the floors of Clearwater Prime with Beth. Her shore leave was officially over at 0000 hours June 20, but she did not want to arrive late, so she reported in five minutes early. Her normal watch was the morning watch. She had been able to get five hours of sleep in her quarters before she started the morning routine that adjusted her mental state back to being a signals officer in the navy.

She was an O-4, a senior lieutenant, and she was the department head for the signals section for the fleet staff. The Clearwater fleet’s staff did not have a large signals section, just herself and two junior lieutenants. With the aid of the fleet’s computers, they were responsible for fleet-wide signals. Technically, for a fleet the size of the one in Clearwater, the signals section should have been a major, an O-5 at the very least.

The Clearwater fleet was far from the admiralty in the Terrace home system, which meant many of the staff positions were filled with officers who were technically too young or too junior in rank to fill the positions. Those with the right level of seniority usually filled positions closer to home and closer to the political bureaucracy. Those who did fill the positions usually had political backing that had placed them in senior slots to help their careers.

Anna had her own set of political connections. As an SSB agent, the branch was able to get her the rank and position in the fleet to fill her responsibilities to the ministry. Her extended training and experience in the SSB made her a better fit for the position than a senior officer without SSB training.

Anna walked past the admiral and to her set in the special cordoned-off compartment that separated signals from the rest of the flag bridge. The fleet flag bridge was what set the TRFS Glasgow apart from other battleships. She was roughly the same size and gross tonnage as other battleships, but she did not have the same armaments. The middle third of the ship’s rail guns, anti-ship lasers, and missile tubes were missing from her broadsides. In place of the anti-ship weapons, the hull was fitted with antennas and point defense armaments: lasers, rail shotguns, and interceptor missiles. The new hull features did not take up as much space as the heavy anti-ship weaponry.

The fleet flag bridge and supporting equipment took up the space on the Glasgow that its missing heavy weaponry would fill. The flag bridge was dominated by a large holographic display fully ten metres in diameter. The display was set off the floor by a metre. This allowed for consoles to be positioned against the display for most of the flag staff, facing the holograph. The admiral’s console was at the far end of the display from the main door so she could watch staff members come and go.

To either side of the admiral was a set of steps that allowed the admiral to walk onto the display when the ship was accelerating. This allowed her to get different perspectives of the action going on around the ship and the fleet. Three chairs were lined up to the right of the stairs. The closest chair was filled by her senior tactical officer, a commander who had served on the front during the war. His two assistants were a lieutenant and a senior lieutenant who specialized in defensive and offensive operations.

Four chairs were beside the stairs next to the admiral’s chair; only two of them had people sitting in them. The first was the space fighter control commander, and the second was the marine liaison officer. The SFCCOM was a junior commander who handled the duty of controlling all the fleet’s fighters, from launchings and landings to patrol patterns and combat missions. Behind him, facing away from the holographic display, was the SFC section, manned by four controllers: lieutenants and junior lieutenants.

The marine liaison officer was a major; he was the only marine on the bridge. He did not command any troops himself; instead, he provided a perspective the navy admiral needed when dealing with the senior commanders and below who were the leading officers of the fleet’s marines. Every ship larger than a destroyer had at least one platoon of marines onboard. The marines were there for security and to take part in offensive and defensive boarding actions.

The other two chairs were empty; the Clearwater fleet did not have landing craft assigned to it, or an army detachment, but the fleet flag bridge had positions to help deal with landing operations. One of the two chairs was for the army liaison officer, normally an army commander or senior commander. The army and marine title of colonel was not an official rank, like the navy rank of captain; instead, it was given to the commanding officer who led a battalion or regiment. The second empty seat was for the air controller. Like the space fighter controller, the air controller handled the fighter and bomber operations of the fleet’s fighters, but only when they had gone into an atmosphere.

Positioned behind the admiral, but mostly out of the way, were the last two members of the admiral’s staff: the fleet logistic officer and the fleet damage control officer. The fleet’s signals section was pushed off to the side and into a special compartment next to the fleet’s sensors section. Both signals and sensors needed some isolation from the noise and activity of the rest of the fleet flag bridge. Concentration was the most important aspect of their roles, and reports from them were generally sent to the officers surrounding the main holographic display. Security was also a factor in the arrangement, as both signals and sensors had some of the mostly highly classified equipment on the bridge.

Anna half floated, half walked past the admiral and to the hatchway of the fleet’s signals compartment. Inside were the other two members of her department: Junior Lieutenant Frank Michel and Lieutenant Janise White. With the fleet preparing for launch, both were there, even though it was Anna’s watch.

“Anything to report from the fleet?” Anna asked after she sat down. She strapped herself in while she waited for the answer. She wore her shipboard uniform: a pressed white shirt with short sleeves buttoned up to the top and a navy-blue neck tab around her neck. Her pants were navy blue and belted at the waist, while dress shoes and shocks completed the uniform. Skirts were not used in a zero-G environment, and the official formal navy uniform did not include them, even when used on a planet for administrative roles. The shoes were not typical women’s shoes; instead, they were exactly like the men’s shoes, with a thick sole and highly polished. The thick sole hid an electromagnetic plate that helped the wearer move around the ship in zero gravity. Hats were not used while on duty onboard a spaceship.

“Nothing out of the ordinary to report, ma’am,” Lieutenant White said from her station after taking off her headphones. “Frank had a quiet watch, and we’re glad you’re back on duty.”

“Thank you, Janise.” The signals section was fairly informal when the door was closed and the admiral was not present. That was something Anna encouraged. Signal operators were typically a class of their own. Intership communications did not need a lot of human oversight, since computers did most of the work. Signals operators were there mostly to listen for rogue transmissions and to crack them if they could. The type of person who could listen to static for hours on end, trying to find rogue transmission that even the computers could not find, were normally intense and did not have many social skills. The responsibility of fleet-wide communications was still theirs, mainly to help keep them from submerging so much into their work that they became ineffective in other areas.

Anna encouraged informality to keep her operators sociable. There had been cases of operators in remote outposts deciding to walk home, through space, and Anna wanted to prevent that from happening to her subordinates.

“The ships are reporting readiness to launch, ma’am,” Lieutenant Michel reported. The only difference between his uniform and Anna’s, besides the rank, was that he was wearing a necktie instead of a neck tab, and his necktie was held in place by a standard navy tie pin at the widest part near the end.

“Thank you, Frank,” she said and hit a button on the console to inform the senior tactical officer of the fleet’s readiness. It was his duty to inform the admiral, who sat beside him. It was only on rare occasions when a signal was passed directly to the admiral.

The order was passed back to her from the admiral to have the fleet launch at 0730 hours. That gave Anna twenty minutes to go through the reports from the past two days, to make sure she did not miss anything during her spot checks while she was on leave.

Anna could feel and hear the clamps of the ship detach from the station at precisely 0730 hours. The metal hull of the ship was good at transmitting vibration through it, especially to those who were trained to notice things like that. The master clock in the signals section was fed directly from the three atomic clocks that were housed below the bridge. Standard timekeeping for the fleet was also the duty of the signals section. A standard time reference and timing signals were sent periodically to each ship in the fleet. This helped to keep the ships synchronized with each other, which also helped prevent mishaps while the ships were manoeuvring.

The acceleration of the ship was gentle as it moved away from Clearwater Prime. Like all ships that docked with the station, the command ship did not have the authorization to fire up its main engine until it was at least ten kilometres from the station. When that ten-kilometre exclusion zone had been cleared, the ship’s main engines ignited and pushed the ship to a comfortable 0.75 G as the Glasgow accelerated toward the Clearwater sun.

The fleet took two hours to form up around the command ship. The carriers and support vessels were in the centre of the formation. Point defense dreadnoughts formed a shell around the large capital ships, forming a barrier that would intercept missiles and fighters. The point defense dreadnoughts were still equipped with large anti-ship guns and missiles, but not as many of the ship of the line dreadnoughts.

Much like the ships during the Age of Sail, ships of the line were the most heavily armed ships in the fleet, and they usually moved forward to engage opposing ships of the line. Their massive broadsides were filled with rail guns, lasers, and anti-ship missiles. They carried enough point defense weapons to protect themselves and not much else.

The ships of the line were formed into a squadron of twelve commanded by Commodore Brown, who was also the second-in-command of the Clearwater fleet. The dreadnought squadron was positioned at the front of the fleet between the point defense dreadnoughts and the main defensive ships of the fleet, the point defense cruisers.

Cruisers were a specific type of ship designed for long patrols; they could cruise from port to port without the need of a tender to refuel them after every few stops. They were bigger than the destroyers and frigates that made up the rim of the formation, but they were also slower and less manoeuvrable. Like their larger cousins, the dreadnoughts, they came in two varieties: defense cruisers and raiders. The Clearwater fleet only had a handful of raiders.

The final ships that made up the fleet were the horde of destroyers and frigates that roamed and patrolled around the fleet. Their main purpose was to provide general support to the fleet, and to move quickly to any area where additional firepower or defense was needed. Like the fleet’s cruisers, the destroyers and frigates were mainly designed with defense in mind, mounting flak rail guns, rail shotguns, and interceptor missiles. They had some light anti-ship rail guns, lasers, and torpedoes, but their main focus was on fleet defense.

The acceleration increased to one G after the fleet had formed up. The fleet flag bridge was oriented so that the aft wall was also the floor; Anna remained on duty while the other two signals officers went off for either a meal or to catch up on their sleep. The fleet’s course was laid out for the next four days as it moved to get into position to travel to another star system.