December 2nd, 8251

You check your tablet again, watching the last standard crate get stowed in the deep hold. It and the bulk of its sibling containers are dummies, intended to add mass for the shakedown cruise and nothing more. The Office of Ship Supplies is being it's usual obtuse self again though and you have a single full cargo container of assorted MREVs - 'Meal, Ready to Eat, Void'. At twelve meals to a box, forty eight boxes to a pallet, and twenty pallets in the standardized cargo container you now have a whopping eleven thousand five hundred and twenty meals. You are left scratching your head but after doing a bit of math you work out that the same container would feed a crew of a hundred and twenty five men three meals per day for a bit over thirty days. That would certainly be enough to last long enough for rescue to arrive or to limp the ship back into port.

But it leave you resting your head against a crate as your guts revolt at the thought of nothing but MREVs, three meals a day, for over ten and a half years. Even with a full crew of twelve this one shipping container will last nearly eleven months.

“Gods below save me from eating the same ten meals every day for the next ten years of my life.”

You shudder and thumb your left palm to ward off the possible consequences of your prayer. Glancing back at your tablet you can see that the cargo has been secured by the human cargo technicians. You trust their work but it costs only energy to wake a detachment of the Night Horse's automata with a pair of eggheads and issue instructions for them to check that the cargo is stowed securely. That settled you re-check your task list for the day to confirm that it is complete and head off to find the warehouse's canteen. The food will be worker-quality at best, but it will also be your last fresh meal until you complete the shakedown cruise.

December 3rd, 8251

You settle back into the captain's chair and check over the planned power plant trials maneuvers. As with all ships with limited propellant the first step are the fuel economy trials. They actually have been ongoing for over a day now, recording and calculating the hydrogen consumed at standby load of the Saturn reactor, but now it is time to check the main drive portion of that system. Four hours at the Surveyor's Corps mandated three-quarters of maximum power on a dead-line run to the local asteroid belt. Then four more hours at the full power rating of 85% output, and finally the nerve-racking Navy-required war power / emergency power test at 100% or higher power, running with all of the safety interlocks red-lined. It would probably be the only four hours the Night Horse would ever spend in her life at that acceleration but better to find any issues now with shipyards close to hand then out in the middle of some half-charted star system.

That will leave the Night Horse on vector for the asteroid belt and most if not all of the way there, lined up for your retro-thrusters tests and maneuvering trials. Circles, roll and pitch control, zig-zag and standard evasive maneuvers, turning, pull out, spiral, reverse spiral, docking thruster and auxiliary thruster only, crash stop, rapid vector changes, low velocity / low acceleration maneuvers... The full list spans nine whole pages on your tablet without the detailed checklists or the data entry sections. Thankfully the Night Horse's onboard sensors and computer support are taking care of the data entry directly.

After all of that are the gunnery trials. You are not enthused at your prospects in those trials given that you have to rely on automated targeting systems all the way through for the majority of the tests but you can't work all of the ship functions solo. Doing so would actually bend (if not break) the testing parameters so you resign yourself to below average results. You are also concerned that the Celesmore dockyard workers managed to mangle something else with your ships' new weapon mounts beyond what was already found. The active tests of the deep void sensor suite have you a bit giddy. It's not often that you have a chance to hull map a target without coming off as excessively rude or courting a diplomatic incident.

Then there is the final test on the list: The warp drive test. A simple day-trip hop to the nearest star not even five light-years away. Ordinarily you would not be concerned in the slightest having made similar jumps dozens if not hundreds of times in your career in the Navy. But this is the first serious test of a Klienova pattern warp drive in addition to being the Night Horse's first warp jump. Both are rumored to be signs of the future for the drive pattern and the ship as a whole. You trust that all parties involved have done their upmost to ensure that things will operate safely and properly but the specter of the Explorer's first and final jump looms large in your mind. The Night Horse is a different hull, albeit to the same general pattern, and has a whole new warp drive but something about the upcoming jump strikes you as haunted.

December 4th, 8251

You sit at your desk in your cramped quarters and review the void trial results to date. Over all you are rather impressed with the results. The Night Horse and her automaton crew have performed to the same standards as any crack Navy crew with the sole glaring exception of the gunnery trials. There is something in their coding that means they are just a shade slower off the mark then you expected. Still good enough for a 'competent' rating but you are dead sure you could get that up to 'crack' or even 'veteran' in you could find that hesitation and eliminate it. You lean back and run over the considerations in your mind. The automaton crew operate things very much 'by the book': acting as regulations would proscribe and compensating for innovation with unerring precision. You judge that there almost certainly is multiple levels of target confirmation in the loop somewhere that is slowing things down and that the slowdown is almost offset by the raw speed at which a computer can triple-check a given sensor reading.

But all you are doing is distracting yourself while marking time and you know it. The test results so far have already been logged, double verified, and submitted. The Night Horse is already on course for the system limit and the gravity-imposed warp limit with three hours to go before the first jump is slated to occur. The computerized navigation system already has an approved course and jump plotted and ready and is standing by to execute on schedule with little further input from you.

With fifteen minutes before the warp jump is scheduled to occur you wander back onto the bridge and drop yourself into the captain's chair. The automated warp jump notification broadcasts as you do so. You think it is a bit wasteful with a crew of only one but regulations are regulations so the automated message is played to a crew of automatons. You strap in and check the displays. Every display shows things proceeding as expected. You let out a deep breath and compose yourself for the jump.

You feel the faint flicker in the artificial gravity as the main thrusters cut out and 5.7 million tons of star-ship stops accelerating. Next is the halo of energy around the ship as the warp drive spins up. You muse that it must be quite a sight for a ship a kilometer and a half long and a third of a kilometer in diameter to suddenly start glowing. You know that the ship appears to glow red from the outside as it begins to 'shift away' from the observer. From the inside, looking out any view port or optical sensor like the bridge displays all you can see is an increasingly chaotic maelstrom of blue energy and particles.

Heartbeats later you feel the lurch as the Night Horse jumps. You and your ship are now moving at a rate of five light years per day by the reckoning of the rest of the universe. You mentally start to do the math for how long it that actually works out to but give up when your head starts to hurt. You punch in a command and have the Night Horse's navigational computer send an ETA count down to your tablet and leave the bridge. With a bit under twenty four hours of effectively enforced down time, presuming nothing actually breaks down, you figure you may as well catch a nap before catching up on some paperwork.