Friday, May 31st, 2261, 07:15. CNS Des Moines Officer’s Mess
John set his plate down on the table. It was practically overflowing with food. Then he awkwardly sat down at the diminutive table. The tables in the mess were semi-comfortable for anyone that was under five foot ten or so. For anyone over six-foot, or in John’s case well over that, it was a funny sight for the other officers.
“Jesus fucking Christ these benches suck,” John muttered under his breath.
Third Lieutenant Billy Walsh laughed at the sight of his newfound friend sitting down and spoke in a thick Irish accent, “I don’t know what’s funnier. That heap of food on your plate or how bloody awkward you are.”
John slapped Billy’s shoulder, “Mate, these were designed for midgets.”
Ensign Beth O’Connor leaned over the table, “Uhm Lieutenant. The chefs get really annoyed when you take too much food.”
Beth’s innocent observation caused laughter to erupt at the table. John grinned as he looked at the ensign, now fully red in the face not knowing whether or not she had misspoken to a senior officer or not. Billy was hitting his chest and reaching for a napkin before having a coughing fit. Clearly, some orange juice had ended up in his lungs.
Second Lieutenant Ana Silva shook her head and broke the news to the poor cadet, “I think we’ve had enough fun at the expense of this poor, young, and innocent officer.”
“Did… did I say something wrong?” Beth looked incredibly nervous, almost frightened, “Oh god I always do this.”
“No, you didn’t Beth. Most of us at this table are assholes. I’m included in that grouping by the way,” John said as he munched on some bacon.
Billy stopped laughing but continued to grin, “You see Beth, this mountain of a man has a fucking black hole for a stomach.”
“What?” Beth’s nervousness had changed to confusion.
“John will eat everything there, and more than likely whine about not having enough to eat,” Ana said, “It’s actually disturbing.”
Deniz Aydin slid into the table across from John, “More like impressive if you’re into gross things.”
“Thank you chief. It is very impressive. First shore leave we get I’m entering this man in an all you can eat competition,” Billy slapped John’s back.
John just shook his head and continued to eat.
“Uhm, sir. Is it true that you know the royal family of Manchester?” Beth asked John in her standard innocent voice.
“Yeah, I have heard rumors,” Ana leaned forward and looked down at the table.
“John, better to snuff out the fire at its source instead of letting it grow out of control,” Deniz smirked as he buttered some toast.
John shook his head and sighed, “Dare I ask how you found out chief?”
“Cousin of mine was in your class. Coincidentally, she is friends with your wife. She never actually met you, though your antics were well known. I was also on the bridge when the first officer received a leave request for you.”
“Right,” John sighed, “The too long; didn’t read summary was during Junior year the ship I was commanding came to her rescue. Then we brought them back to Manchester, but then that turned into a proper, and I mean proper, shitshow. Resulted in my friends and I saving the royal family from a pretty nasty blackmail scheme.”
Billy looked deep in thought for a moment before having a light bulb moment, “Hold the fuck on. You were the officer that puked on the king, didn’t you? Shit, you were a cadet.”
“Oh, for fucks sake Billy. Why the hell…” Ana said before getting interrupted by Beth.
“Oh my god. That was you!” Beth said.
“Yeah, I was in pretty rough shape. I kinda forced myself to be there when they honored the crew. The princess got enamored with me,” John showed the group his wedding band, “This clearly meant fuck all to her.”
“Keep going. What she offered was classic,” the chief was enjoying the toast way too much for his own good.
“She suggested that I make Alice a concubine. Prior to that being offered, Alice was basically ready to beat her to within an inch of her life. I literally picked her up and took her away from the princess. In hindsight that would’ve been interesting to see that catfight.”
“You at least kept her from a court-martial probably,” Billy said.
“Or worse, getting thrown out of the academy,” Deniz said.
“She later did reluctantly agree that I had done the right thing,” John smiled.
The group of officers laughed and continued their morning chat. None among them looked thrilled or excited for their shifts to start. But eventually, they carefully extracted themselves from the benches and made their way to their departments to begin work and do drills.
08:45 Command and Control Room
John was sitting down at a terminal that was on the far side of the central holographic display. There were still a surprising number of tests to perform before they could shove off. Thankfully for the ship, John was his usual efficient self. Barring any issues, and there were always issues, John figured he’d have everything wrapped up before heading home for the evening.
“Captain on deck,” a petty officer said from a workstation near the door as they stood up.
“At ease,” Lieutenant Commander Kory Shephard said as he strode in, “Lieutenant Lief how goes the battle?”
“Sir, ahead of schedule. On track to have our systems fully synchronized and ready to take real-time intelligence by the end of the day.”
“I was under the impression they’d be done sooner than that.”
“They are, but as the initial deadline is tomorrow finishing them by end of the day is still overdelivering.”
“Excellent,” Kory said as he leaned over and logged into a terminal across from John, “I apologize for distracting you but I always have new officers and enlisted personnel play this little wargame for me.”
John was glad to have a short distraction as reading and verifying the logs was an incredibly boring task. He looked up to see the CNS Des Moines being pursued by a battleship of some sort. They were either in a ring surrounding a nondescript planet or in a very dense asteroid belt.
“What is the goal sir?”
“Survive. You are in a central ring surrounding a Jupiter-like world.”
At least that answered one question. Simply jumping into slipspace wasn’t going to work. Gravity wells made slipstream jumps difficult to do safely, in many cases the drives will not be successful in even creating a jump point into slipspace. Running far enough away from the planet was suicide. As was a straight-up fight. John grinned when he began formulating the outlines of a plan.
“You have ten minutes to come up with a plan of attack and key the commands in. Not too dissimilar from those wargames you excelled at during the academy.”
“Am I correct in presuming the Des Moines has a standard weaponry load out?”
“That little ship there,” Kory was pointing to the holographic Des Moines, “Is how this ship is loaded now.”
John started to type away furiously. Two minutes later he paused and began to think. He continued his typing but decided to ask for clarification, just in case.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Any special rules of engagement?”
Kory paused to think for a moment, “You can’t do anything that would result in a court-martial or war crime.”
John nodded and continued entering his plan. That grin of his, the one he wears when he thinks or acts like a supervillain, was now fully glued to his face. His plan may not work, but it was the only way he could fight a battleship and attempt to level the playing field. Without doing something seriously sketchy or outright illegal.
Kory, along with everyone else in the room was transfixed on John. Whatever work needed to be done could wait. The hazing of the new guy was always interesting to watch. It wasn’t nearly as funny as seeing someone come to work in the wrong clothes or a bad haircut, but the outcome of this test typically leads to a nickname that stuck with them for the duration of their stay on the ship.
The door opened in came Seaman Kaori Wako. She too saw what was going on and walked over to the outer ring and leaned on a workstation and watched. Billy and Beth were also in CNC and waived Kaori over to them.
“Is that captain making the lieutenant take his test?” Kaori asked quietly.
Beth nodded, “I sure hope he did better than my attempt.”
Billy laughed, “You did a good job at rock humpin’.”
“Shut up,” Beth said under her breath.
Kory noticed and looked back at Billy, “You shouldn’t be too hard on her. Your game of peek-a-boo ended in failure.”
Kaori snickered to herself, “Wrong way. I tried to shoot off her external guns. Did pretty well for a bit but I screwed up and got myself moved into a less dense part of the belt.”
First Lieutenant Kelly Page walked in and sat down behind Kory, “Let’s see how the quasi-newbie handles this. How much time does he have left?”
“Two minutes and counting,” Kory said.
Billy opened up his terminal and gasped, “Holy shit.”
Kelly looked back, “Language while you are on-duty Lieutenant. What did you see?”
He transferred the orders John was typing away onto the left side of the screen. Thousands of lines worth of commands were displayed. More and more continued to be added. Kory and Kelly both looked at the lieutenant, then each other wondering how in the hell he was doing this.
Kelly stood up and walked over to see John typing the orders in using a modified keyboard. She correctly surmised it wrote commands based on macros. It was not possible to code that and do all of the command line orders that he had done.
Kelly nodded her head, “You used that keyboard during your wargames last year, didn’t you?”
“I sure did ma’am,” John nodded as he continued to stare at the screen, “And with this one, I am done. Sir, you can start the simulation.”
Kory looked at the young lieutenant and paused. He had heard stories about what John had accomplished during his years in the academy. But Kory was certain that those very same stories were heavily embellished. No one was that good, were they?
He noticed Kelly looking at him, which caused him to press the run button. Everyone in the room was transfixed by what John had commanded the ship to do. John had made sure to keep multiple asteroids between him and the battleship, and always kept out the primary railgun’s firing arc.
John was also doing something curious. Missiles and torpedoes were being jettisoned when there was no line of sight between the ships. They would fire their directional thrusters to position themselves beneath the lip of a crater or hide within a crevasse.
At no point did John attempt to make the Des Moines fire any of its weapons at her pursuer. It continued its game of hide-and-seek, keeping just out of reach of the battleship. Several of the people in the room began noticing a pattern.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Beth said as she pointed at the screen.
“What do you see ensign?” Kory paused the simulation.
“The lieutenant is effectively herding the battleship into a position of his choosing based on where all the missiles he’s depositing in the ring.”
Billy smiled, “Battleships have a ridiculous amount of CIC defenses. How do you plan on negating that?”
John leaned back in his chair and grinned, “Spoilers.”
First Lieutenant Deniz Aydin then walked into the room and headed straight for Commander Shephard, “The power and drive systems are good to go. We can kick ass whenever you give the word,” he paused and looked up at the simulation, “Ahh, it’s Lief’s turn. Fun times.”
Kory nodded then resumed the simulation. Sure, enough John was herding the battleship exactly where he, not the battleship, wanted it to be. Then the trap was sprung.
The Des Moines flipped around and fired off three railgun rounds at the battleship. These weren’t any normal rounds though. Each one was tipped with an EMP bomb, that would be triggered the instant kinetic shields struck the round.
John’s symphony of destruction began. It was as if he was the lead guitarist, and these were the first notes of an outrageous and killer solo. He would not disappoint, nor would he make the room wait for long to see how the solo blended into the rest of the song.
Battleship systems are at a minimum triple-redundant, sometimes quadruple or more. They are also hardened and supposed to be immune to the effects of an EMP blast. But three blasts back-to-back-to-back were enough to cause some of the systems on board the battleship to malfunction. The protective systems were effectively oversaturated and couldn’t fully protect the systems.
The Des Moines flipped back around and continued to dart between asteroids, but it was closing the distance, not maintaining it as it had been, to the battleship. Normally cruisers do not want to get anywhere near a hostile battleship, but here the Des Moines was very clearly doing just that albeit very cautiously.
All of the missiles activated and sped toward the battleship. Moments later the deadlier, and much larger, torpedoes activated their engines and rumbled toward their target. The first batch of missiles rocketed toward the battleship, the CIC systems engaged to defend themselves, but her targeting arrays didn’t seem to be accurate, nor were all of the point defense cannons working as expected.
As the seconds ticked by more and more of these systems began working once more though. Several of the missiles struck the battleship. Kinetic shields flared angrily in all directions. The second wave of missiles, which contained some that had multiple warheads, along with the first wave of torpedoes were rushing toward the battleship.
The defensive systems were simply overwhelmed. They were successful in shooting down several of the missiles, but so many more slammed into the shields, each one reducing their effectiveness bit by bit. When the torpedoes began exploding around the ship, the kinetic shielding arrays began failing one after another. Those same defensive systems began being destroyed across the ship, further reducing the battleship’s ability to defend itself.
Everyone in the room couldn’t even blink. John had come up with not just a great attack scheme, but a perfect one. And had executed it brilliantly. Kory could hardly believe his eyes, this rookie from the academy was going to succeed where no one had before. He didn’t like what he was seeing but tried to keep his shock as hidden as possible.
John grinned as he knew his heavy metal song was about to blast into a second solo. The second wave of torpedoes slammed into the hapless battleship. The primary drive cone was gone, its drone bays were either slammed shut due to debris or were open wounds. Worse yet, the main power was offline and the ship was struggling to switch over to its backup core or its emergency power sources.
The Des Moines crept out from an asteroid and fired two rail rounds. The first was targeted at the bridge, which it struck squarely. The second round was aimed at a damaged portion of the ship enabled the round to penetrate much deeper into the ship. It was able to strike the primary engine core. Had the main power been active it would have exploded as if it were a small supernova. Despite the diminutive explosion, it had enough force to break the ship's spine and split it into two.
“Holy hell,” Deniz said in stunned amazement, “Bloody good showing kid.”
Kelly looked at John, “How the hell did you do that?”
“This scenario is achievable only because of the location. Battleships are big bastards, but they can’t move easily in that environment.”
“Expand on that,” Kory said.
“If it tries to go above or below the ring I can go in the opposite direction and try to outrun it. That gets me out of this situation. Its drones and fighter crafter aren’t likely to be that effective against a cruiser. Missile weapons are useless since they can’t track me. Her turret weapons would be largely useless due to the debris between us,” John paused as he pointed at the ring, “Staying in the ring is the only time where I have a fighting chance, but it comes at a risk. If those EMP rounds can’t be fired or don’t hurt the systems, I’m probably going to have to find a way to boogie fast.”
“How’d you know an EMP blast would work. I thought our systems were immune to that?” Billy asked.
“They are hardened, but not entirely immune. Three blasts that size, distance from the hull, and frequency is going to raise all sorts of hell with internal systems. I wouldn’t be surprised if that would actually cause most of a ship’s targeting sensors to be fried,” Deniz said as he pushed himself off the terminal, “Hell of a show lieutenant.”
Deniz casually walked out of the room. There were more important things for him to do. Despite the entertainment, there were power relays that needed to be inspected and cleaned. Proper work for an engineer, not the dick measuring contest that was occurring in that room.
“My father has told me he has administrated this very same test and not a single person has destroyed the battleship and survived,” Kory paused, “Exempting the one engineer that opened a slipstream portal on top of it.”
“Hence my question. Would’ve been a hell of a lot quicker just committing a war crime and calling it good.”
“Congratulations lieutenant. Well played indeed,” Kory said as he stood up, “We’re shipping out at 12:00 tomorrow.”
John smiled and switched back to working on his tasks. The rest of the room doubled down on their work as the captain and first officer exited the room. Billy, not wanting to do an ounce more work than he needed to do sat down behind John.
“Nicely done, you showed up the captain.”
John grinned and shook his head, “You know damn well I didn’t do that to show up to anyone.”
Billy logged into the terminal and began slowly working, “Yeah, but you still did just that.”
First Lieutenant Hugo Perez walked into his room and was smiling, “Nicely done John. How are the systems checks?”
“Thank you, sir,” John transferred the results to the main display, “Had the VI running while we were playing that game. I thought it’d take until the end of the day, but at this rate will be checked out in another three hours.”
“How about the rest of you?” Hugo asked.
“Locked and loaded here,” Billy said, “Just wrapping up the last checks.”
Beth turned around and softly said, “I have another hour or so worth of tests to run.”
“Excellent, I’ll help you out since the boys seem to have things under control,” Hugo said with a smile as he sat down at his workstation.
John was excited as he continued to work. It was almost time for his career to properly begin. He wasn’t the first of his friends to have already shipped off though, but that didn’t matter to him. There was a desperate need to serve and experience Naval service firsthand. It may not be everything he hoped or imagined. That didn’t matter, this was the first step in what he hoped would be a long career.