She was not kidding. It would take mastery of at least 3 classes and iron rank, engineering, medical, and subspace navigator, just to open up the branch, assuming I met the other, somewhat nebulous prerequisites. In general, it took about 5 years to get mastery of a class, which meant, on the long end, 15 years before I could get my own ship using that progression. Not insurmountable, but certainly not ideal.
Of course, you could speed that up by risking your life in rifts or against chaos spawn, but few officers were willing to take that risk. The Crow was designed to fly hulks, but unless she had a full raid group and a ready target, it was a huge waste of time.
Hulks were really BIG rifts, and instead of a small team of delvers that could clear them out, they were designed for a brigade of troopers, a ship, or even an entire fleet. If you wanted to win a ship or possibly even a planetary system as a rift reward, that was the way to do so… but losing a ship against the monsters in the Hulk could mean hundreds or thousands dead. They usually had a maximum size, a maximum tech level, and a maximum number of ships, so even a ship like the Crow was often restricted due to its tech level, even from the single-ship hulks.
But, like all rifts, Hulks that were not cleared occasionally tended to overload. And where a small rift could release a nasty horde of monsters for a planetary or drone defense force to deal with, hulks tended to release chaos beasts, like world eaters, tyrants, and deep dragons. Clearing hulks was one of the most important jobs of the UPF, even more than putting down would-be invading aliens, and it was the reason why the fleet was so liberal with conscription for crews.
I didn’t know if they even really needed to conscript. To be honest, many people would be happy to assist in the task once they learned about the rewards. It was risky, sure, and dangerous, but the rewards were phenomenal. Every level you earned extended your lifespan by years, and class advancements often came with incredible power and potential. The only advantage to conscription was that you could force people to delve for you and reap the physical resources that could be unlocked after a rift was cleared. Then again, that might have been the fleet’s reason. The human sphere was expanding, and the resources that were gained by sending conscripts through those rifts fueled that expansion.
Explorers were a special breed of captain. They took a small combat ship, usually between 1 and 6 crew, and dived into warps and hyperspace almost randomly, counting on their innate sense of the branes to guide them to safety in a newly unexplored part of the galaxy. Once they were there, they would explore any local rifts, classify and categorize them, speed run any hulks they could, and make contact or determine the threat of any alien civilization they encountered. In general, only two out of three expeditions returned safely, but a good captain and crew could expand those odds enormously.
There were only two paths that explorers did not ever follow. Deeper in towards the galactic core some species had linked with the system for tens of thousands of years. They tended to institute system laws that could see you stripped of your ship, your livelihood, or even your freedom, and many explorers that headed towards the core never returned, or came back by themselves, stripped of almost all resources except their own bodies, telling tales of strange civilizations that had ships the size of matchboxes and hated humans with a passion.
The other path was out into intergalactic space. There were beasts out there that made tyrants look like unhappy kittens, and as of this moment, there was no travel method powerful enough, or fast enough, to risk traveling to other galaxies. Right now the various sub-breeds of humanity were restricted to a tiny little segment of one of the galactic arms, but even that was a huge amount of space with lots of room for exploration and expansion. New worlds of various habitability were discovered every day, and new rifts for exploration or destruction along with them.
“For right now, your being female caused a bit of a reshuffle. It’s not bad, since we have another male coming in in about a week, and our ship is tight enough that two new males would have caused a problem since the drone pilots are part of security, not deck department. Is this bonding thing going to cause a problem?”
I shook my head, “Bonding is not always sexual. We have been engineered to be strictly male-oriented. ‘sister’ bonds do occasionally occur when two people are spiritually attuned, but it’s unlikely here, and I have enough spiritual affinity to avoid forcing the issue unless it’s truly an emergency case. If the living arrangements are segregated, it should be fine unless someone tries to force-bond, at which point, I have to apologize, but I’d kill them before I’d let that happen, just like I would any rapist.”
She nodded, “Fair enough. We try to screen people carefully, but sometimes problems still slip through the cracks. If someone does that, well, even Naval attachments have been known to disappear. Our Captain is a woman, but don’t let that encourage you to bully the men! We are a merged ship, but abusive women are every bit as much of a problem as abusive men, especially when you start talking about the various rankings. In some places, the whole 'might makes right' philosophy applies, but not here… we might not be proper fleet, but we still have laws based on merged UPF guidelines, not slaver world customs.”
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She shrugged, “If you check your file, the shipboard regulations have been attached to your standard contract. Read them, mark that they have been read and agreed to, and you will be responsible for following them. Once we leave port next week, the Captain immediately becomes the ultimate authority, followed by me, and neither of us has any real patience for beautiful monsters and evil asskissers. That might work in the regular fleet, but not here.”
She cleared the table and brought up an image of three Maenads, an old photo from before the ban. “Are you going to look anything like this?”
I studied the picture. Two of them looked like they had pure human forebears, and the third looked like she probably had a hint of goblin or possibly a fennec as a forebear, she was shorter than the other two and had much larger ears, like my sister. “Possibly a little like this?” I said, “But we are each unique, just like humans. I mean, yeah, we were designed to be appealing to a broad variety of genemods, but we are still a unique subspecies. Once my hair grows out more, it should be sort of a dark purplish blue… not like a weeb, but close.”
She sighed. “That might be a problem. Our security forces are well-trained men, but they are still men. If you look ANYTHING like that, you could present a discipline problem, just like a nymph or dryad. Do you drop pheromones or anything? Special nutritional or environmental filters?”
I shook my head, “No pheromones, but I am exceptionally…. Vulnerable to them, so a filter, for me, might help… but that vulnerability will mostly be done when I finish maturing. We tend to have triggered adolescence, and start to develop once we find potential bonds, which already hit me when I was in training… I am over that now, so any other potential bonds are unlikely to catch me.”
“So your uhh… Chrysalis thing, it will be over soon?”
I nodded, “Yes Ma’am… I very much like that term, and I wish I could crawl into a cocoon until it ends. The medical staff already picked up a recipe for the growing pains that seem to be working well, and I am more than happy to work with supply. I am from Korse, and while I’m not resistant to heavy metal poisoning like a goblin, I probably will need copper supplements for a while until I can slake it off and turn less… umm…. Green. We have a reactive metabolism, not an adaptive one. If you have high-intensity gravity training, I’d also rather keep it up. It’s been useful so far, and if I have to delve directly, it should help keep me alive.”
Commander Taera nodded slowly. “If you take care of the ship, we will take care of you. We have a grav workout chamber that uses inertial enhancement, if that works, and we don’t subscribe to the whole ‘standardize everything’ doctrine most fleet ships have when it comes to drone pilots. You will get your pod and lander, and we support innovation in upgrades, just talk to me before you proceed with any major changes. It’s far easier on this ship to get permission than forgiveness, and if you have a positive change, we would be happy to propagate it across the other drops and even license or patent it for you or the ship, depending on how far-reaching it is.”
She chuckled, “I have yet to meet a drone podder that is NOT filled with ideas for upgrades. Most of them are scrot, but a few of them have gone into regular production. Our drone fleet is massively advanced compared to a usual fleet carrier because we listen. For the women, we only have three special rules.”
She looked stern, “Don’t pit the men into competition with each other…. Which might be hard for you to follow if you look anything like the maenad pictures I have seen, No drama in the shifts or when we get into action, and most importantly, do NOT get pregnant. We are an active-duty ship. If you want to have children, we will work something out, but getting pregnant ‘accidentally’ is a dereliction of duty and will be punished accordingly. We are a doctrine ship, and our doctor won’t perform abortions unless your life is threatened.”
“I expect you to abide by these rules. Pregnancy is YOUR responsibility, and we have several different medical options for preventing it if you have an active social life. I don’t recommend any of the hormone supplements while you are… changing, but when you are finished, talk to the doctor. If the pregnancy is NOT your fault, I expect to have a man up on charges and most likely walking out of an airlock without a suit, regardless of his rank or cultivation. That sort of thing may be ignored in the fleet, but it is not ignored here.”
“Courtesy between the decks is expected, and can be punished if it is not followed, but there are limits. If you see a pair of goblins working on a piece of the ship and talking trash to each other, regardless of what sort of dirty scrot they may be unloading, it’s not your problem. If they start including you in their trash-talking, it becomes actionable, but getting offended by common talk is a "you" problem. We have all cultures on board, and as long as they follow shipboard law and church doctrine, It’s not our problem who did what to whom and with what particular tool, or who has what particular political, ideological, or social opinions.”
“Are we clear? I have this talk with every new crewman.”
I nodded, noting that the conversation and onboarding were over.
She smiled, “Good, let’s not have any problems, and if you do your job, the ship will be behind you every step of the way.”