Chapter 2

Two days later, Innes was on a military shuttle, breaking into orbit, heading toward the mass of ships around the Junction Shipyards. He’d been up here before, of course, and had even taken a trip to Home Fleet as part of his fourth year, which was something he’d never forget. Seeing the massive battleships and carriers swarmed by dozens of corvettes and frigates, not even his wildest dreams had prepared him for that.

Those, however, had been someone else’s ships. Abstract.

As they rounded Junction’s outer rings, the berths for hulls needing light work but nothing that demanded opening compartments or pulling armor plate, he saw her.

The CDS Illustrious hung against the black three kilometers ahead, and the sight stopped his breath.

He’d studied Jupiter-class strike cruisers for the two days since he’d been given his assignment, memorizing her specifications. None of that prepared him for the reality of three hundred fifty-eight meters of warship, all purposeful mass and predatory lines. The hull’s Carbsteel, dark gray by design, caught and shed the dock lights in shifting, oil-slick patterns where the mag-field brushed the armor’s surface, a faint auroral shimmer along the edges of plates and hardpoints.

The Jupiter-class was an older strike cruiser design, superseded in main production by the Agamemnon-class, which traded some raw punch for broader mission flexibility. Jupiter kept a bruiser’s philosophy. She carried thicker armor, one hundred forty millimeters on the primary belts versus Agamemnon’s one hundred twenty, and one more main-battery mount. Four coil guns forward to Agamemnon’s three. She paid for it with one fewer hangar spots and fewer missile tubes, twelve versus eighteen on newer hulls, and a little less finesse in her electronics, but the Jupiter’s designers had built her to take a hit and hit back even harder.

Innes’s eyes traced the armored humps that were power and feed trunks, running back along the dorsal spine toward the fusion rooms. Fifty megawatts per shot, nominal, with capacitors handling pulse demand and the plants topping the banks between salvoes. Fire all four together and you’d dump two hundred megawatts into the battery in a single heartbeat, management by magazine temperature and capacitor charge state, not just by reactor plate rating. Jupiter doctrine favored stepped ripples over true broadsides, keeping the capacitors in their sweet spot so you didn’t overload the system but never present your opponent a gap in your fire cycle.

The shuttle pilot rolled them to starboard, and Illustrious’s stern filled the view. Three iron-plasma engine bells gaped like dark throats with thick structural members around. The drive truss tied into the central keel that ran the ship’s length, a proper spine in the literal sense, mounting the main battery forward and the big machinery aft. For all her mass, she was a fast ship by capital ship standards, one point three five gravities continuous when they wanted to really push her. An hour at that and you were sitting on roughly one hundred seventy-seven kilometers per second, which was impressive on a whiteboard and murder on your propellant budget if you kept it up for too long. The books said you could push it for up to fifteen days of hard burn, but one of his teachers, an old master chief someone had dug up from a crypt somewhere, had said you didn’t want to trust the book if you wanted to come home with margin.

Just forward of the drive section was the thing that made all interstellar travel possible. The Yang-Mills Core, the central part of the GATE system which allowed faster-than-light travel, armored and anonymous unless you knew what you were looking at. The Yang-Mills Core left its fingerprint in the spacing and contour of the housings, the maintenance hatches that always made engineering look faintly predatory.

From what he’d read, the Jupiter still used the second-gen core, which meant it had to cycle for three to four hours between jumps.

“First time seeing your posting up close, Ensign?” The pilot’s voice crackled through the intercom.

“Yes.”

“She’s a good ship. Thirty-eight years and still mean.”

Thirty-eight years. That was a long time for a ship like this. The Bracken System Incident had been only nine years ago, and Illustrious had come out on top of that fight with a rogue destroyer. One ship against a larger opponent, and she’d won.

The shuttle nosed toward the amidships bay. Through the viewport, Innes watched the cavernous opening grow larger until the force field shimmered blue across the entrance.

They slid through it and into the bay.

Orderly chaos reigned. Two Resolute-Class strike fighters sat on maintenance trestles, their hulls opened to expose their drive systems while three technicians worked on one of the ion engines.

A squad of Marines in combat armor ran equipment drills by a wall of cargo containers, supply pallets moved on automated sleds toward the cargo holds, and a damage control party ran through fire suppression procedures near one of the auxiliary airlocks.

He was already standing by the ramp when the shuttle touched down and the ramp lowered. He didn’t want to miss a second of seeing everything.

“Ensign Kingsford?” the woman waiting at the base of the ramp, who wore a commander’s bars, asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, coming to attention, dropping his bag.

“Good. I’m Commander Hayes, the XO.”

She waved him down toward her, his left hand picked up his bag again and he descended the ramp.

Her eyes swept him, weighing without wasting time. A blonde bob framed sharp features, and there was nothing soft in the assessment. Fair skin, blue eyes that missed little, the lean build of someone who stayed ready.

“Welcome aboard Illustrious. I’ll conduct your orientation before you settle into your quarters. Don’t expect this on most of your future assignments, but it’s something the captain likes us to do for our FOs.”

Innes was familiar with the term, but he’d never heard it applied to him. You didn’t get your first F rating, the official rank designation for your pay and seniority, until you got your first assignment. F0 was the lowest F rating there was. Normally, the only people who referenced your F rating were the bursar when it was time to pay you and review boards when you were up for review, or God forbid, a court-martial.

But on ships, they called the newest ensigns FOs because the zero stood not for their number, but for how much experience they had. It wasn’t derogatory, just a reminder of where he stood.