2300 hours CST, June 21, 2673; the Skate

The first two days of the journey to the Clearwater sun were uneventful; everything was routine onboard the boat. Murphy was on the bridge less often than he had been during the exercise, much to the relief of the watch officers. His time was spent wandering the boat and doing surprise inspections of the combat areas. He left the crew quarters alone.

Murphy often found his way to the rear of the boat, checking on the torpedoes and the rail shotgun. The large rail gun was the only real weapon onboard the vessel, apart from the two massive torpedoes that sat in their pods in the torpedo bay. The multibarreled rail gun would be the boat’s only offensive punch when those two torpedoes were gone.

The one thing that broke the monotony were the rumours—mainly that the chief mechanic could suddenly speak and be understood by everyone onboard. Everyone gave the commanding officer some weird looks, which the lieutenant ignored.

Turnover at the midway point of the journey was handled during the night watch. Neither Leading Spaceman Hart nor Lieutenant Murphy was on the bridge during the turnover and the beginning of deceleration, although they were still monitoring the bridge. It was one of the hardest lessons a senior member of the armed forces had to learn: how to delegate and how to trust their juniors to do their jobs. Hillary was still learning this, and she was only responsible for two other helmsmen.

Meals onboard the boat were surprisingly good, but the farther the boat progressed in its mission, the more ordinary the meals would become. Fresh produce could only be kept for about a week in the galley; the boat just did not have enough storage. The Skate was just under four days on its journey from Clearwater Prime, and the cooks were already through the majority of the fresh food they had. Preserved food had started to show up in the late-night snacks and minor portions of the meal, but everyone knew the fresh produce was running out. The crew grumbled about the food, fortunately the individual vacuum-packed meals had not shown up, yet.

Murphy heard about the grumbles and used the same advice given to him that had been handed down through the ages. If there was not something specific in the grumblings, he ignored it. Enlisted personnel liked to grumble. If they were not grumbling about something, then they were not happy. A complaining crew was a happy crew. Murphy, of course, knew about the various rumours onboard the ship, and he smiled about them in his cabin when he was alone. He wrote them down in his letters to Anna and then ignored them.

The boat was approaching zero velocity relative to the Clearwater sun, a little less than two days after rollover, when Murphy entered the bridge and relieved Lieutenant Sinkovich from the watch officer’s chair.

He checked the plot from his console, and the tactical display. The other six torpedo boats were still approaching their egress points from the Clearwater system. The fleet itself was moving toward the sun, just under two days behind the torpedo boat and moving quickly. The fleet was in formation, and there were no other torpedo boats out. Only the seven boats acting as forward patrollers represented their squadron. The fleet should reach the sun roughly at the same time as the first torpedo boats were reporting in from the four systems.

“All hands, this is Lieutenant Murphy,” Murphy said after turning on the ship-wide intercom. “We are now sixty minutes from making the run to using the curve drive. All sections prepare for the transition. Report when ready.” He turned off the intercom, as nothing more needed to be said at the time.

The crew of the torpedo boat had been together long enough that none of them were virgins to interstellar voyages, especially since there were no naval training centres in the Clearwater system and the entire crew had to come from somewhere else.

The combat watch showed up on the bridge. He was happy to see that all of them were in their space suits, which was mandatory for an interstellar trip. While they most likely would not see combat on the patrol, he was still pleased to see that the crew had started to take the potential for combat seriously. It might not be needed to save their lives on this mission, but it might in the future.

He waited for the bridge crew to settle before he turned to the signals officer. “Lieutenant Sinkovich, signal the command ship that we will start our trip in thirty minutes. Make sure the outgoing mail queue is flushed.”

“Yes sir.”

Lead Hart started to manoeuvre the boat, aiming the main engines in slightly different directions, moving the boat in toward the sun and toward the vector they would take toward the new system. Murphy watched the plot and the astrogator’s projected vector. The boat would get to the outgoing vector closer to the sun than the initial point, and with a higher speed. He was about to comment on it when Sinkovich called for his attention.

“Signal from the fleet, sir!”

Anna’s face came onto his console’s screen. He was surprised. He was sure she had the morning watch, but she was the admiral’s, and by extension the fleet’s, signals officer.

“To TBC-four-seventy-three.” Her voice was calm, almost dispassionate as she read the message. “Egress message received. Good luck on your patrol mission to Sigma Delta Four. Please note that the fleet will be ready to egress to your star system if you discover any evidence of the raiders. The fleet will be in position in one day and twenty hours. Do your best not to be discovered, but if you find them and they move to another system, you are to follow them. Send a message beacon if you are moving to another system.” She continued to read the rest of the final mission orders. Her voice changed at the end. “And TBC-four-seven-three, be careful. You are important to us. Out.”

“Signals, acknowledge the message. No further messages needed,” he said to Sinkovich and turned back to the plot to gather his thoughts again. Too late now to ask what was up with the vector. His fingers reached forward to the button to turn on the boat-wide intercom again.

“All hands, interstellar voyage will commence in one minute.” That would be the last warning before the ten-hour trip to the new star system was started.

“Engineering, engage the radiation shields.” The radiation shield was the only piece of active shielding the torpedo boat carried, and it was only used during the transition to an interstellar trip. The armour and metal hull of the torpedo boat were good enough to keep out cosmic radiation where the boat normally operated, but the closer to the sun the boat moved, the denser the radiation became. The radiation shield acted as a plow and warded off the heat, particles, and other things the sun blasted out.

“Astrogation, are we ready?”

“Yes sir.” Lieutenant Bell’s voice was nervous.

Hillary pushed the throttles forward, and the boat accelerated directly at the sun. She guided the boat so that it would hit the tangential plane of the surface. The radiation shield started to degrade as it diverted more radiation the closer the boat travelled to the sun.

The curve interstellar drive worked on Einstein’s theory that mass curves space, and that an object moving along the curve would be drawn toward the source of the curvature. The closer an object got to the source, the deeper the curve would become.

Two massive objects were used by the curve drive to make interstellar trips possible. In essence, the curve drive cut the corner along both curves produced by two stars and shortened the distance between the systems. The six light years between Clearwater and SD-Four would be shortened to just less than seven light seconds, shortening the distance by over twenty-seven million times.

The theory of the curve drive had other properties that rewarded the more aggressive navigators and helmsmen. The more massive the two points were, the shorter the trip would be. The closer a vessel got to the star at both the entrance and exit, the shorter the trip would be. The mass of the vessel also affected the energy required to open the pathway; the larger the mass, the less energy per ton was required.

When the curve drives were first invented, vessels did not have active radiation shields, and the hull materials were still in their infancy when it came to protecting the interior from the vast amounts of energy released from a star. They had to make the trip when they were at least three-quarters of an astronomical unit away, roughly 115 million kilometres. At that distance from the stars, the trips were barely twice the speed of light, relative to an outside observer. The development of better composites and alloys for hulls and a way to use the output from a fusion reactor to divert the energy away allowed the vessels to get much closer to the stars before making the transition.

Hart watched the sun’s display most closely. Even though there were no solar flares predicted, she would probably be able to see one coming and hit the switch to activate the curve drive before anyone reported it. The helmsman was given great initiative to keep the ship safe during the dive to the sun.

She kept the ship going at that high acceleration till the shield readings were almost zero. Literally seconds before the shields failed, she hit the button and engaged the curve drive. The transition to interstellar space was announced to the system by a bright flash of light and detectable radiation that sped directly out from the transition point.

Despite billions and even trillions spent on research, there had been nothing to stop that indication of a ship entering or exiting a system. The radiation and light spike was very directional. Unless an observer was within ten degrees of the vector, or was looking at just the right spot, the transition could be missed within the glare of the sun.

“What the hell were you doing, Lead Hart?” Murphy shouted from his station. He was visibly upset. Lead Hart had taken the boat past the point of no return, literally. If the curve drive failed to kick in, the shields would have failed, and the boat would have been consumed by the sun after the crew had died of radiation poisoning.

“Astrogation, what is our expected time for transition?” Murphy did not give Hart a chance to respond.

“One moment, sir.” Lieutenant Bell had to rerun the calculations; he glared at his console as if his force of will could make it go faster as he inputted the transition date. He also glared at the back of Lead Hart’s seat. “Projected arrival is seven hours, twelve minutes, and forty-four seconds, if we do a sixty-second rollover.”

“Very well, secure from combat watch. Night watch is on duty. Lieutenant Sinkovich, you have the watch. Lieutenant Bell and Leading Spaceman Hart, a moment of your time in my quarters if you please.” Murphy stood up from his chair and did not wait for Lead Hart’s replacement to sit down before he stalked from the bridge, his expression set.

* * *

The conversation started as expected, with an upset commanding officer. Someone on the crew had finally done something that had gotten past Murphy’s calm façade. Both Leading Spaceman Hart and Junior Lieutenant Bell suffered his wrath. Starting with Hart, who showed a disregard for the safety of the boat and its crew, but then the conversation had degraded to dereliction of duty. Bell got it by a failure to keep proper control over the position of the ship, and worst of all, making the commander look like he had lost control of his vessel, though Murphy didn’t articulate that so bluntly.

Murphy had pulled out the books, not just the books on regulation, but on proper navigation of the boat, engineering and piloting. He had physical copies in his quarters that he slammed down on the desk before him as the two stood at attention before him for the dressing down. Like the engineering books, these looked like they had been read through; the spines showed recent damage, as Murphy quoted scripture and verse from them.

“Now sit down,” he ordered the two, his voice still grated. “Tell me again what happened on the bridge during the sun dive and transition.”

The two looked at each other and then back to their commanding officer. “I took the boat too close to the sun before activating the curve drive, sir,” Lead Hart started. “The vector I set was too aggressive, and I didn’t inform Lieutenant Bell of my intentions, but…” She trailed off.

“But what?”

“The mission was urgent, and I thought a faster transition would be valuable.”

“Lieutenant Bell?”

“I set a vector in astrogation, and while I left some play in it, I should have kept better watch on the helm while we were getting close to the sun, and I should have made sure we hit the initial point correctly. The transition happened too close, but it was still a safe transition, sir.” Bell looked directly at Murphy when he said the last.

“Good,” Murphy said and then leaned back in his chair. He looked between the two, his anger draining slowly. He was impressed that Bell still showed some backbone after being yelled at by his commanding officer for fifteen minutes, in front of an enlisted crew member that he was responsible for.

“I know the torpedo boats are not an elite posting, and they aren’t that fun to drive because of it. We do have forty-three other men and women aboard this boat. This boat is not a fighter or even a bomber. We have the manoeuvrability of a heavy bomber if we have to use it, but the crew can’t handle it usually. The crew stations are just not designed for it.

“That transition was good, despite the hot rodding you did, Hart. But it was unnecessary. Unless we have vital information that absolutely needs to get out to the fleet, we don’t need to make transitions like that. If the security of the nation or the security of the fleet is at stake, or we’re being harassed and pursued and need to make sure our enemy does not take the same vector and curve we are using, you’re not to pull a stunt like that again without authorization. Am I clear, Leading Spaceman Hart?”

“Yes sir.”

“And Bell, you need to work more with our helmsmen. There was a breakdown in trust, respect, and loyalty. That is something you will have to work on. It is your responsibility as an officer to make sure that doesn’t happen.” He did not mention that ultimate responsibility lay with him, and he had been distracted.

Murphy picked up a few of the books on his desk. “I hope you know what these are. They are the manuals for the boat. We have two paper copies of each book in case the computers go down. The commanding officer has a copy, and the second set is kept in the boat’s library. Hart, I want a report from you by the end of the week on what you did and why it is important to maintain the chain of command. I also want references to the operations of the radiation shields, proper procedures on piloting the boat into the sun dive and transition, and I want to see hand calculations of the astrogation that Bell had sent you. I want to see a detailed explanation on all aspects of it and how your actions messed it up.” He pushed the relevant books to Hart and turned to look at Bell.

“And you, Lieutenant, I want a report on proper execution of the chain of command, your duties as the boat’s astrogator. I also want a detailed section on how the boat is to be piloted into the sun dive and transition. I want a thesis on how you can quickly update the transition information and plot changes based on what Hart did. We may need to make similar transitions in the future, and you will need to handle them more quickly. I don’t have time to hand out discipline based on official regulations, and you two should bloody well know better. If I’m not happy with your reports, we will have another talk, clear?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then dismissed.” They both shot to their feet, and Lieutenant Bell saluted. Murphy returned the salute, and the two beat a hasty retreat out of Murphy’s cabin and office.

The door closed, and Phillip sighed softly. “Some first command this is turning out to be. I hope I was never as green as Kory is.” He sat back on his chair and reflected on his life as a novice officer.

He knew he did not have time to be green. He graduated older than Bell did from the Academy. He entered it at twenty and not the standard seventeen to eighteen. He joined during the war, and the Academy classes were larger and far more disciplined. Now the classes seemed to be more lax, at least to his mind.

Most people entered the Academy and joined the navy to use the experience as a springboard into some other career, or they had some sort of political connection that would help with their career. Most telling of all, when Phillip joined, the focus was on getting officers to the front. Phillip had been a new ensign for eighteen months during the war with New Terra Firma before he was promoted to Bell’s current rank. That was faster than average; most served out the full three years as an ensign before being promoted.

Living with constant calls to combat, not knowing which calls were drills and which meant your life was on the line, ensured a certain amount of vigilance. After seeing your small mistakes cost your friends and crew their lives, you made sure you did not make the big mistakes. Junior officers these days could make mistakes and not have to worry about it costing anyone’s life. The worst that usually happened was a mild dressing down by their captain. Skate was not a ship, and Phillip was not a captain, and Bell and Hart had made a big screwup. There were no casualties apart from Phillip’s temper and nerves.

Thinking back on the recent conversation, he thought he might have been too harsh on the two when he let his temper reign, which was something he was going to work on. Despite being in command, Phillip himself was still a junior officer. A lieutenant was only an O-3 in the navy, a frigate captain. The smallest ship classification was at least a major, an O-5, two ratings higher than he was.

He spent some time writing down the incident: the hot rodding of the helmsman, the failure of Bell, but mostly his own failures in command. The writing was something that he would never show the crew, something he could never show them. He spent a few hours going over his notes and over the electronic versions of the manuals. He had assigned homework to both the perpetrators of the incident, but as commander he realized that the ultimate mistake and failure rested on his shoulders, and he was going to make sure he knew what was going on, on his boat.

Just after the rollover, he opened up his personal letters and wrote one to Commodore Brown. Even though he was no longer in Brown’s chain of command, Phillip still looked up to him as a mentor. They were friends, even if the disparity in rank kept them distant. He told Brown what had happened and laid bare his own mistakes. He focused on how he lost his temper with the crew, and on his distraction by the messages from the fleet. He wrote of what he personally was going to do to improve and what he needed to work on.

Phillip was different than many officers in that regard; at least, that is what he thought. He never saw much use in the patronage system that ran through the navy, especially during peacetime. He never looked for someone to help him win promotions and did his best to serve his nation. Part of that was his self-criticism and slight lack of confidence in his abilities, which he did his best to hide from his crew. The incident on the bridge had made the façade crack, and he could not let that happen again.

With that letter out of the way, he opened up a new one to Anna. He preferred the written word. Many of the navy personnel did. There often was not time or privacy to record a video message, but there was usually time to write something down. With the distances in space so vast, there was no such thing as live communications when dealing with anything over a light-minute distance.

Dear Anna,

We’re well on our way to Sigma-Delta-4, the transition to interstellar travel was a bit rougher than I expected. Our helmsman decided to hot rod it, and brought us through the transition too close to the sun.

You’re right, one of my problems is with being too focused. I was focusing on the communications from the fleet when I should have been watching the navigation. When I was done with the communications it was already too late for me to do anything about the course that was set.

I lost my temper unfortunately. I didn’t realize that it was so close to the surface, and I’m feel ashamed that it got out. I want to be a good commanding officer, but that means I have to keep my temper in check and only let it out when it needs to be.

I have to figure out how to tell when that is. But Anna, what if I’m wrong about it, and I let my temper off its leash at the wrong point. We probably aren’t going to see combat on this patrol. So it shouldn’t be a problem, but what if we find the pirates? And my temper causes me to do something rash and I kill my crew?

The books and manuals here don’t tell me how to command the boat. They tell me the capabilities, but only of the hardware. The crew records give me some hint, but there’s over 40 other people on the boat and finding out what they’re all like just from the records isn’t enough. The books don’t tell me how to command the boat, and win the trust of the crew, and I’m 15 years out of the academy.

The books on tactics that I was able to load onto my tablet help a lot. But again, that just tells me what to do in combat, but how do I get the crew to trust me? Is the discipline of basic training enough?

I’ll have to act like I trust them, and hope they will come to trust me through it.

Oh, there are some interesting rumours here. The crew thinks I’m gay. Or not interested in women. It’s hard to pick up the gossip while not being part of the crew. And they wouldn’t dare share it with me.

I’ll be back to the fleet soon, at most a little over a week from now. Maybe this letter will come hand delivered. I love you Anna.

Phil

Done with his letters, he took the time to freshen up. When it neared breakfast time, he decided to go down to the mess and be visible before the interstellar trip ended. He had to show he was confident in the crew and that he was competent to do his job as their commanding officer. The confidence might be needed in the days ahead.