First Command (10 page)

Continuing, Jonathan directed his next comment at Krishna, “Mr. Krishna you’ll handle the Quarter Master’s duties until a new one can be found. Also make extra sure our computer systems have all the most relevant patches and updates. I don’t want any serious glitches on this voyage.” Krishna nodded, his mental wheels already turning, calculating the vast quantities of supplies a ship like
Titan
would need getting underway.

“Lt. Baker,” Jonathan continued “As the ship's resources will be stretched thin the next couple days I trust your men can kit themselves out.” Baker nodded, Navy pukes whined, Marines made do. “Also,” Jonathan continued, “Make sure both of your shuttles are outfitted for ground assault configuration.”

At that Baker was surprised, “Shouldn’t we leave one in boarding configuration sir?”

“No.” Jonathan answered, “There is already a CRS presence in New Helsinki, and they’re doing fine on cargo interdiction. The threat is coming in the form of a groundside insurgency. As such, I want both of this ship’s combat shuttles outfitted for air support and rapid strike configuration.” Baker found himself nodding. That made sense. It meant less if there was any prize money, but it did make sense.

“Now are there any questions?” Jonathan asked. They’re were a dozen of course all dealing with this or that detail of getting the ship underway. Lt. Halman tried vainly to question his way out of having to chart a speed run, but Jonathan just shrugged and reassured him that his Captain had every confidence in him until he had reason to believe otherwise. The meeting broke up at 15:00 exactly with all its participants bolting off to do the million and one things that needed to be done to get the ship underway. Jonathan taking note of their urgency smiled to himself. He’d given them a difficult task and though they thought it couldn’t be done he knew his belief that they would succeed would drive them to push themselves beyond the very limit to meet their Captain’s goal.

Chapter IV

Macran Station
, 200 Miles Above Levelflats, Solaria System, Solarian Republic

On board
RSNS Titan
DD-0023

January 26
th
- January 29
th
841 AE  (2802 AD)

Over the next three days,
Titan
became a beehive of activity. Her Spacer contingent, many still grumbling at having their leave cut short, were now crawling all over. Reconnecting systems, loading ordnance, foodstuffs, finishing basic maintenance tasks, calibrating environmental controls and weapons systems.
Titan’s
officers, Jonathan included, were equally busy making sure the hornets nest they’d kicked up was well organized and supervised. Things became easier the second day when a paunchy little man with a drooping mustache and a Warrant Officer’s crossed signal flags arrived as the ships new Quarter Master. Warrant Officer Alan Rodriguez was a Provo from Buena Vista in the New Teja system originally. His personnel file was a checkerboard of black marks. In his thirty years in the Navy, he’d managed to spend a combined total of three of them in the brig. The man seemed to have a pathological dislike of Army troopers that often manifested in bar fights. He also had an off duty-drinking problem. Jonathan was more than willing to overlook both faults if he was good at his job. Rodriquez proved to be not just good but exceptional. Within twenty-four hours, he and Lt. Krishna had
Titan’s
supplies fully requisitioned, with fifty percent loaded and the rest on its way. When Jonathan asked his XO Commander Trendale how much he’d paid Rodriquez’s previous posting the Heavy Cruiser
Broadsword
for him, Trendale for the first time since Jonathan had met him smiled, if only for an instance. “Actually sir” he said, “They paid us, two crates of New Falkirck Scotch.” Jonathan was exceptionally pleased with how things were turning out. The enlisted crew may have been short on Navy experience but many, about two thirds, were former merchant spacers. About half of those men were Provos earning their citizenship with military service.  They may have been light on experience in their navy duties, but they could get a ship underway. Jonathan took note of which men and women seemed to be natural leaders, and gave them promotions to Acting Able Spacer 1
st
. These promotions would become permanent in six months if there were no reason for another officer to rescind them.
Titan’s
officers, like her crew, were proving to be a little green but hard working and able. Nathan Gopal not only managed to get the ships magazines filled, but also had each guns systems tested, a precaution which injured two crewmen, but revealed a previously undetected flaw in Railgun Battery C. Lt. Smith swore it’d be fixed if not right when
Titan
sailed than shortly after. Sandra Chan, for her part, assisted Lt. Baker in making sure the
Titan
Marines were fully kitted out and
Titan
small arms lockers were stocked. As Assistant Tactical Officer, she was also the ship’s Master at Arms. Daimion Krishna the most inexperienced of the ship’s officers proved to be a fair logistics manager as well as a superior computer engineer. Qin Smiths and his engineering section had the ship’s fission reactor purring, and all her vital systems online within twenty-four hours and her vital secondaries ready to sail. Even Marcus Halman, the aristocratic rotten apple though he was, was able to competently lay in the first part of
Titan’s
course (Jonathan checked his figures to be sure, and they were all correct.) Two days after he had come aboard, Jonathan met the ship's surgeon, a balding middle-age man of middle class Steader wealth, named Walton Walder and rated Ships Surgeon 3
rd
. His personnel file showed he’d been a trauma surgeon in Harvestfall until his wife had traded him in for a younger, fitter man and cleaned him out in the divorce. Of all the officers and crew on board, Jonathan felt the most unsure about him.  The man had no bad marks on his service record, which was admittedly only two years old, but he didn’t seem to interact well with people and came off as a tad arrogant. Still he was a surgeon, and they tended to develop god complexes. Jonathan made a mental note to remind the good doctor should he ever step too far out of line that on this ship, Jonathan Pavel was Captain and as such first master after god. By a combination of hard work and a lack of sleeping more than five hours at a time, RSNS
Titan
was ready to get under way approximately sixty-nine hours and fifty minutes after Jonathan had come on board. At 16:00 hours the ship’s entire complement, all in full dress uniforms, assembled on the dock for the cast off ceremony. Jonathan proudly displaying his combat ribbon, on his own immaculate whites returned the assembled crews’ salute, then turned and saluted the Solarian national banner held aloft by the color guard. The red and white banner had a green field in the upper left corner on which was the Solarian sunburst.

“Crew of the
Titan,”
Jonathan said, “Fellow Spacers,” that phrase was a bit unusual. Officers were after all suppose to be gentleman, but Jonathan always considered himself a spacer first and foremost. “You’ve done well, in fact you’ve done more than well. Your ship stands ready to make way, and it is all due to you. You are, each of you, a credit to the service.” Jonathan paused, “But our mission is far from done.  These next months, we will work harder still, to show everyone what we know to be true - that this is the finest ship in the whole Navy.” One of the senior NCOs took this opportunity to interject “Three cheers for the
Titan
and Captain Pavel.”

The crew not without some enthusiasm echoed “Huzzah, Huzzah, Huzzah.” Jonathan smiled at that, and then turned to the Master Chief.

“Mr. Hartic,” Jonathan intoned, “Is this a fine ship?”
“Damn fine sir!” Hartic answered.

“Is this a good crew?”

“Damn fine sir!” Hartic answered again.

“What is this ship?” Jonathan finished.

“
TITAN
SIR!” Hartic bellowed.

The crew cheered, and raced to board the ship flying up her umbilical tubes in zero g, strictly against safety regs but Jonathan had yet to meet anyone who could enforce that regulation. Jonathan and his officers along with the Marines followed more sedately. The invocation might seem a bit silly to an observer, but it was a Solarian Navy tradition and the Navy was nothing without its traditions.

On board
RSNS Titan
DD-0023 Solaria System, Solarian Republic,

En route to the Kaplan Wormway

January 29
th
  841 AE  (2802 AD)

Even with the ship fully provisioned, it still took four more hours to get underway.
Titan
wasn’t a small vessel. Destroyers were the smallest class of ships in service to the Solarian Navy, since the Navy had ceased constructing Frigates twenty years before. Even so,
Olympia
class ships such as
Titan
grossed 20,000 tons and measured 650 feet stem to stern. She was shaped roughly like a pentagon cigar with a blunted heavily armored front, containing her forward magazines and a triple exhaust thruster aft. Her bridge and communications were located amid ship in a low-rising superstructure that rose about forty feet above the hull. This made her roughly the size of an early Atomic era WWII aircraft carrier. The new
Olympia
class ships were part of the Navy’s new ‘big gun’ strategy. War with the Commonwealth had shown the Navy it couldn’t out build the older colonies, so it had to out-quality them. Destroyers in other navies like the ETO Combined Fleet, and the Commonwealth Navy were fast escort vessels designed to screen bigger ships and unleash devastating barrages of torpedoes, while interdicting enemy bombers and missiles.
Titan
and her sisters were built with a very different approach in mind. For one, they were considerably slower relying on a single fission power plant instead of the more powerful and combustible anti-matter. Instead of torpedo tubes,
Titan
and her sisters carried ten heavy rail guns, four mounted in turrets capable of 360-degree rotation top, bottom, forward, and aft, with two additional guns mounted in 180 degree turrets on either side of the ship forward. Torpedoes could be devastating weapons, but they were also slow, cumbersome and easily intercepted by point defense lasers and plasma cannons. The only way to use torpedoes effectively against a properly led enemy formation was to fire such large numbers that the enemy defense screen would be overwhelmed. To do so required huge magazines that cost ships in armor, and shielding turning ships reliant on torpedoes into eggshells armed with sledgehammers.
Titan
was no eggshell. She carried six Syrkowski Kinetic Barriers - four primary and two back ups. In addition, she was armored by 36 inches of battle steel in all areas with an additional twelve over her critical systems. Her armament was completed by a full Nemesis point defense array, and forty-eight plasma cannons running the length of her hull with twenty-four mounted on each side. In combat,
Titan
would use her plasma cannons to burn out the enemies’ kinetic barriers, and superheat their armor making them vulnerable to the four-foot depleted uranium slugs
Titan
rail guns would hurl at them at a quarter of the speed of light. She was cumbersome, but she was tough and alone could take on anything up to a cruiser, and in a flotilla of her sister ships she could give a battlewagon a run for its money. As with any other complex piece of machinery, her actual cast off was a series of important procedures rather than one action. First her umbilicals needed to be properly disconnected. Next, four tugs had to come alongside and link up with her. Then her main connectors, which kept her in place at dock, had to be disconnected. Then the tugs had to gingerly ease her a safe distance from the station, and once away the tugs needed to be disconnected. Finally, her power plant needed to be started up and acceleration started. Once that was done, she began to accelerate to her maximum speed of sixty gravities, enough to squish every man and women aboard flat as pancakes if not for her internal compensators. The entire procedure took about four hours. Overseeing each step of the process from his console on the bridge, Jonathan couldn’t help but enjoy himself. His ship, he couldn’t get over thinking that,
his
ship was safely underway at last. Once the course for the Kaplan Wormway was locked in, Jonathan had the scotch William Trendale had acquired distributed to the crew as a reward for getting the ship underway. Jonathan also ordered the crew to make a special meal for the officers’ mess. Though contrary to tradition, Jonathan didn’t eat a formal dinner with his officers the first night underway as Captain. Instead, he dined alone in his quarters reviewing the training schedule and amending his own. His action in neglecting the formalities of his position was unusual for the Navy, but not unheard of. Most of the crew and the officers had already decided the Captain was a bit of an odd duck, but certainly not an incompetent fool, or a glory hound.  Putting the finishing touches on the ship-wide drills he was planning, Jonathan went to his bed, lay down and fell dead asleep still in his uniform.