Innes in Command
Copyright© 2026 by Lumpy
Chapter 4
It was forty-five minutes before his second training shift, but Innes was already up and dressed, adjusting the collar of his duty uniform. He had forty minutes before he was due in the section, but he had no intention of heading directly to the bridge.
Instead, leaving his quarters, he turned aft, moving away from officer country and toward the main lift clusters that serviced the crew sections. He told himself it was a matter of professional diligence, even if Aria had called him out for planning on doing exactly this the night before.
He knew he was a new officer and that he hadn’t led men before, but he still had a strong conviction on the right and wrong way to lead. He’d spent too much time in his father’s world where commoners were treated as disposable assets instead of actual people, and it seemed to be even worse here, where the divide between officer and crewman was even more explicit.
He believed that if he was going to command men and women, possibly to their own deaths if they ended up in combat, he owed it to them to treat them like they were people and not cogs in a machine.
He knew what Wexler would say, because he heard some of the same justification at the academy. That the separation made it possible to give orders that could cost men their lives. That it kept military discipline in place and gave the fleet strength, and he was sure part of that was true, but he was also sure it wasn’t the whole truth.
The lift deposited him on Deck Seven, the primary crew berthing level. The aesthetics changed immediately. The bulkhead panels here lacked the sound-dampening micro-weave of the officer decks, and the lighting was a fraction harsher, tuned up just a bit. There was probably a white paper written by someone who’d never been in the crew berths that argued the brighter lights promoted alertness or something, but to Innes, it mostly just felt clinical.
He rounded the corner near the Section Two berthing block and slowed, not quite sure what he was looking for. Thankfully, in the third place he’d checked, a duty room with a few tables, some that held small entertainment pads, he found Marchand, reading through a maintenance manual.
Innes hesitated. He’d already gotten some strange looks from the crewmen he’d passed in the corridor. Officers didn’t seek out enlisted personnel for personal conversations. This was the job of the chiefs, mostly.
Marchand might resent the intrusion. Worse, he might see it as another form of patronizing attention from yet another noble officer who thought he knew better.
But Innes had watched Wexler tear the kid apart in front of everyone, and he hadn’t done a thing to stop it. True, there wasn’t much he could have done. He was new and on uncertain ground, but he knew those weren’t good reasons not to do the right thing.
He walked over.
Marchand noticed him at five meters and shot to his feet, skidding his chair back. His face went carefully blank, the mask of someone who’d learned to hide his reactions around superiors.
“Sir.”
“It’s okay, Marchand. Sit back down.”
The man pulled his chair back and lowered himself into it, looking wary.
“Yesterday was rough,” Innes said, not sitting across from him. “I wanted to check if you are alright.”
There was a moment of surprise, or maybe confusion, on his face. “I’m fine, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“I didn’t ask if it would happen again. I asked if you are alright.”
Marchand looked puzzled. Innes didn’t blame him. He was the same age Innes had been when he went into the academy, and he would have been equally shocked if an officer had plopped down in front of him for a conversation.
It was unusual.
“Sir, I...” Marchand stopped, visibly struggling with how to respond to an officer who wasn’t berating him. “The lieutenant made it clear what I did wrong. I’ve been studying the sensor protocols, and I’m running additional sims during my off-hours. I’ll be faster next time.”
“Good. That’s exactly what you should be doing, but I want you to understand something. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. The best tactical officers in the Fleet have stories about the time they screwed something up. What matters isn’t whether you make mistakes, it’s whether you learn from them.”
“The lieutenant said my error could have cost lives in combat, sir.”
“He’s right, of course. In combat, mistakes can be fatal, and that’s why we run these sims and train so hard. They’re designed for you to make exactly the kind of mistake you made, so you can learn from it.” Innes paused, choosing his next words carefully. He wouldn’t criticize a superior officer to an enlisted man, but there were ways to make a point without crossing that line. “What I’m saying is that making an error during training doesn’t make you a bad crewman, it makes you a crewman who’s learning. The goal isn’t perfection from day one, the goal is improvement. Getting better every watch, every drill, until the right response becomes automatic.”
“Yes, sir.”
“My third week at the academy, I was on my first sim. We hadn’t even really started learning what to do yet or our stations, but the instructor liked to give us a taste of what spaceboard duty was like, so we’d know what we were working towards. I’m still not sure what I did, but I hit something and I fried an entire board. One side of the entire sim chamber went dark and sparks started to jump out of a panel. I’d burned something out, I guess. My instructor ripped strips off my hide and made me help repair it that weekend instead of being allowed time off.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I’d cost the academy ... God, I don’t even know how many credits it took to replace all that stuff. In my first week,” Innes shook his head, remembering how absolutely mortified he’d been, already tagged as ‘the duke’s son’ who screwed up so big. “The difference is, he didn’t tell me I was stupid or how I wasn’t fit to be in the academy. He didn’t send me packing. He chewed me out and made me help fix my mistake, and the next class I had with him, he showed me the correct procedure and explained why sometimes things went wrong, because he knew I was learning. You’ve been on board for what, three months?”
“Four months, sir.”
“Four months, that’s practically nothing. You’re still figuring out how this ship runs, how this crew operates, it’s totally normal. Anyone who tells you they had everything figured out at four months is either lying or they aren’t paying attention. Study your protocols, run your sims, and when you make the next mistake, because you will make another mistake eventually, learn from that one too.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And ask questions. If you’re unsure about a protocol, ask. I would rather you look ignorant for ten seconds than dangerous for ten minutes. The chiefs know this ship better than the designers do. Use them.”
“I will, sir. Thank you, Ensign.”
Innes nodded, checking the chronometer on the wall. “I should let you get back to your manual and I need to get to the section.”
“Sir?” Marchand’s voice stopped him as he turned to go. “Why did you ... I mean, you didn’t have to come down here.”
It was a good question. The honest answer was complicated, tangled up with memories of how his father corrected people, and how people in his father’s circles dealt with people. It was also the memory of that first mistake, the way he’d been told that one failure didn’t define a career. He knew he’d needed that then, and that Marchand probably needed it, too.
“Because I think you can be an outstanding crewman, and the first job of officers is to make sure the people under us become the best versions of themselves they can be,” he said simply. “Carry on, Marchand.”
He turned to leave the duty room and almost ran into a senior chief petty officer who was standing in the doorway. The older man slid to the side and gave a slight nod, which was all the salute a chief really needed to give an ensign outside of moments of protocol. Innes nodded back and headed out into the corridor.
He knew he hadn’t fixed the problem. Wexler was still Wexler, a man who viewed cruelty as a pedagogical tool and empathy as a defect. Marchand would likely face the lieutenant’s wrath again before the week was out. But maybe, just maybe, the kid wouldn’t freeze up next time.
Praise in public, correct in private, Innes thought grimly as he thumbed the call button for the lift. And if you can’t do the first, you’d better be damn good at the second.
The lift doors slid open, revealing the empty car. Innes stepped inside.
“Deck three,” he ordered.
The lift accelerated upward, carrying him toward the tactical deck, and his second shift with Lieutenant Wexler. Innes composed his face, settling his features into the cool, detached mask of a Concordian officer.
He was ready to work.
The Illustrious had been underway for four days, climbing out of the gravity well of Luyten’s Star, her drives pushing the fifty-five-thousand-ton cruiser through the vast emptiness between Haven and the system’s GATE point at a comfortable one-point-two gravities. Fast enough to make the GATE on schedule without cooking the engines or the crew.
He was grateful for that. He’d ridden one of his father’s couriers once, a sleek little corporate needle that had slammed along at close to four g’s. The inertial compensators had done their best, but they never quite erased the sense of being pressed between the ship and the universe. Not dangerously so, since blackout would only happen if the compensators failed, but still feeling wrong. He could feel it in his bones.
This, at least, felt sane. The Illustrious was on an eleven-day climb from the orbital dockyards near Haven to the GATE point at the system’s edge.
“The tyranny of physics,” his instructors at the academy had called it. The Yang–Mills Core at the heart of the ship could twist spacetime into a wormhole on command, but it needed the right footing. Too deep in the star’s gravity well and the field collapsed inward, smashing three thousand people and fifty kilotons of warship into a dot the size of a grain of sand. Too far out, and the wormhole tore itself, and everything inside of it, apart. Every system had one sweet spot where you could open the GATE and survive traveling through it.