Chapter 3: Into the Unknown

Commander Wilhelm Koenig sat in CSS Archerfish's Captain's Ready Room and contemplated life for a brief moment. His new life. His new command.

He stared again at the little list of twenty-four names displayed on his ready room wall. All of those 23 other names were his responsibility, and where he was going, his alone — he would have nobody to share this grand responsibility, nobody to blame if things went wrong. It was, he admitted to himself, a trifle scary.

He was now a Captain, a title bestowed upon officers in command of a ship and not a Confederacy Navy rank in and of itself, but this ship was of a size of which even his great-great-great-grandfather — a skipper on a U-boat from the first War to End All Wars — might find amusingly diminutive. At least this time he and his brother and cousins were warring for their fellow humans, rather than against.

He'd had the AI look up and duplicate an Imperial German Navy sub skipper's hat from the Great War, and had it mounted in a frame which he'd had placed on the bulkhead over his desk, a sort of reminder of his ancestor. He was also voraciously reading every book ever produced about submarines at war from the point of view of both the winners and the losers.

This ship was not strictly a submarine, but had been developed with an eye toward similar tactics as for its blue-water counterpart: be stealthy, stand off, blow the enemy to smithereens with long steel cigars of death, slink away to fight again another day, lather, rinse, repeat.

Before he'd been picked up, he'd not dared dream of being a grand warrior like his ancestor, as his family still had the distaste of the war that had followed the Great War in their mouths. His ancestor had fought bitter political battles against the future rulers of Germany — and failed. Great-great-grandfather had managed to make enemies with the ruling elite of 1933, and only managed to escape Germany before 1939 by good luck and good timing. In the fall of 1945 they returned to what was now West Germany find their fortune reduced to rubble, the family home lost in the bombings. Like the rest of Germany, the Koenigs rebuilt. His family had, by the time of the Sa'arm, managed to become successful light industrialists feeding subassemblies to many of the world's "name brand" manufacturers. When the interdiction field went down in that biergarten in Munich, it was with only a mild regret for the privileged but doomed life they were leading that he, his elder brother and their families took off for the stars. His brother Hans was now in the Fleet Auxiliary somewhere, safely carrying cargoes of arrogant volunteers, terrified concubines and snot-nosed brats to new homes throughout the Diaspora. He himself was now off like some galactic Don Quixote, riding his faithful Rocinante, his faithful Sancho Panza by his side. Only his Rocinante was actually his former wife and now concubine Liza, and Sancho Panza was played by the urbane Brit, Executive Officer Lieutenant Sam Quinn. Two officers from former foes of the last century, united in amity and a common cause in this one — ironic, that.

He glanced around his ready room again. There was just enough space for a folding desk and a chair on one side of the room and two seats on the other. Opposite the pocket door was a narrow set of shelves holding various important documentation containing information deemed by Archerfish's designers and Navy bureaucrats too important to trust to virtual storage that might be inaccessible in the event of electrical failure, all well secured against failure of the ship's artificial gravity. The bulkhead in front of him, facing space, beheld a picture beamed in live of the scene outside this "window". It helped, somewhat, in decreasing the claustrophobic nature of the Archerfish. Each crew cabin likewise had such a feature, which could be changed to show, say, a snowy day at a Vermont farm or a beach scene in Waikiki. Captain Koenig preferred the live shot.

CSS Archerfish. Hull number PCM-001 — Patrol Combatant, Missile. A new class of vessel, the PC, with a new mission. Not to merely scout, nor to battle it out in fleet or squadron actions, but a lone wolf prowling space as an ambush hunter, like a real Earth-ocean predatory fish.

A knock interrupted his reverie. At his call of "Come!" Sam Quinn shoved his head in the tiny room. "Contemplating which of your crimes lead you to this cell?" As Wilhelm snorted, Sam added, "Archerfish is ready for your final prelaunch inspection, Captain."

Captain Wilhelm Koenig rose, donned his black jacket and kepi bearing his rank of Commander, and strode out to face his future, be it bleak or bountiful.

Of course the ship gleamed. Admiral Bickerson, despite having been given the nickel tour the previous day by Archerfish's chief designer herself, did a second, official white-glove inspection as part of the official commissioning, and vessel and crew passed with flying colours. The commissioning plaque was unveiled, the orders were officially given, and the Archerfish was ready for her first official war patrol.