The Dedian system is both a new and old conquest of the Empire. Having split during the Secession wars, Dedia remained a Secessor stronghold until the collapse of the Kingdom of Dedia when Void Fleet Hydra attacked in the year 29MR.

Dedia is an affluent system, containing a large shipyard around Dedia Prime sustained by the unusually dense asteroid belt in the system.

However, the source of Dedia’s wealth is also equally a fount of trouble. The density of the belt and its proximity to the star makes it difficult to police. As such Dedia suffers from riftbreaks, infestations, and piracy far beyond the national average.

-Excerpt from A History of Dedia by [Grand Historian] Arnold Mauthis dated 76MR

The bridge was a small room, less than half the size of the common room. The walls tapered together towards the far end, where the nose of the ship was located. The room had less decoration and room to move around in, the only open space being a short path through the middle.

The rest of the room was taken up by four workstations, one for the pilot, the comms specialist, the captain, and the first officer. There was also a large holo-projector set into the floor at the far end, displaying the views of several cameras throughout the Icarus.

There was one in the common room, where the legionnaires had spread out around the tables. Two others showed the gunnery teams going fiddling with the weapon stations as they went through a checklist. The last indoor one of any note displayed Poct laughing with a dwarf in a room with a large device in the center.

Several cameras were also located on the outside of the hull, most showing nothing but empty walls of the hangar. But a couple were angled towards the floor where I could see crowds beginning to stream in, heading towards their ships. I relaxed a bit as I saw Emily hurrying towards the Icarus’ ramp.

“Captain’s chair is on your left,” Hoffman said from behind me and I tore my eyes away from the holo-projector.

The captain’s station was fairly simple, a comfortable-looking chair, a smaller holo-projector, and several screens. I grinned, planning how I would organize everything I wanted to fit on the displays.

I walked over, set my helmet on a hook for it, and sat in the chair noticing a small tear in one corner that had been stitched up at some point. It was as comfortable as it looked and I let out a sigh before spinning it to face my First Officer, who had set himself up in the station directly across from mine.

“Where’s everyone else set up?” I asked.

“Poct’s station is in front of you, while our communications specialist will be across from him.”

“Right,” I nodded. “Let me just get set up here, then we can run through launch protocols.”

I busied myself setting up my displays. I would have my main strategic overview on the holo-projector in the center. The left screens would display the Icarus’ status and resource counts for munitions, mana, and crew status. I set up the screens on the right to have manual control over my comms and to display the Skills and their respective cooldowns of my crew.

Halfway into this process, the door to the bridge opened and Emily strode in and smiled when she saw me in the captain’s seat. I grinned back.

“You’re late Specialist Zehr,” Hoffman said before either of us could say anything.

Emily stiffened and snapped to attention.

“My apologies First Officer! I just got a bit turned around on the way here.”

Hoffman’s displeased expression did not waver.

“See to it that it does not happen again or there will be consequences.”

Emily nodded, looking a little pale at the threat. I frowned and glanced at the clock on my datapad. She was two minutes late, which seemed a bit extreme of a response for being a little tardy on her first day, especially since it was easy to get lost in the maze of corridors inside the cruiser.

“She was late by two minutes,” I said.

Hoffman gave me an even look.

“This is the navy Captain Fox, two minutes can mean the difference between life and death,” he said calmly. “As such we must do everything within our power to alter the odds in our favour. The first step of that is building good habits, such as being on time.”

I thought over his argument for a moment. He had a point, this was not the academy anymore, where a mistake only cost points or at worst a reprimand. This was the navy, we might be responding to a distress call and two minutes was a long time in space. Arriving two minutes late could mean the difference between rescuing someone or them running out of oxygen.

It was easy to see how Hoffman’s philosophy impacted the crew. He demanded they be a well oiled machine, so they could be as prepared as possible for an emergency. And he walked the talk he talked, he arrived early with the rest of the crew, made sure they were ready to go and they respected him for it.

If this were anyone else I would instantly agree that a light warning was fair for being late once. But this was Emily, my friend. Yet, I had also decided the night before to treat her the same as any other crew member. I also could not risk getting a reputation for having favourites, not when I was already on thin ice with my situation.

I glanced over at her and saw that she understood what I had to do.

Slowly, I nodded in agreement with Hoffman’s words.

“Very well. Specialist Zehr, lets not be late or…” I turned to Hoffman. “What’s the standard punishment for this?”

“For a first offense, I usually make an offender clean the common room.”

That… was a little more severe than I would have picked. I would have chosen something like five laps in the gymnasium or something. But it was not totally unfair, the common room was large, but fairly open and not very dirty, probably due to Hoffman’s policies I guessed.

“Okay, if you’re late again we’ll have you do that Em,” I said and Emily nodded, I knew my friend and was confident this would not happen again anyway.

Seemingly satisfied, Hoffman showed Emily over to her station, while I finished setting up my own.

*Ding! Level 13 [Imperial Officer] Achieved!

I flinched as the notification blared in my ear and stared in shock at the glowing words accompanying it. This was my first time leveling up since finals and I only had the class for a day so far.

Levels come from overcoming challenges and the only thing I could think of that could possibly have qualified is my decision to discipline Emily. Which was not much of a challenge, I knew Emily and knew she would not get angry with me for it. So, it must have been because of the fact she was my friend and I had done it anyway. That might be enough to get an early level.

“Y’all good?” Poct said, having just returned to the bridge to the sight of me staring into space in shock.

“I just leveled…” I muttered.

Poct grinned and slapped me on the back.

“Already! Slow down, it’s only been twenty minutes. At this rate, you’ll pass me before by tonight!”

Emily and Hoffman’s heads snapped up and locked onto me. I could see the same calculations running through their heads as they realized how it had happened.

“Maybe I should be late tomorrow!” she said with a smirk.

“That would not work, it is harder to level from repeating situations,” Hoffman said, either not getting the joke or not caring. I had my money on the former, he didn’t seem to have much in the way of a sense of humour.

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There was no time to dwell on it further right now, we had to start the launch procedures. But this was a really good start to the day for me, I was one step closer to my next Skill, my first [Imperial Captain] Skill.

The launch procedures, as Hoffman explained, were not that complicated, most of the work was done on the Avalanches end. This was because Hanger Bay B did not have any doors, at least none large enough for a cutter to fit through. There are a couple of reasons for this, first, doors are a weak point on a warship, anything that opened could get stuck open in a battle, leaving a wide open gap in the hull for enemy fire to strike. The other big reason is that even with modern atmospheric wards, there will be some amount of air loss as the exit opens up; unless one turned the hanger into a giant airlock, which would take forever in a room this size.

The solution imperial ship designers came up with was to teleport larger vessels out, instead of having larger weak points. It was not necessarily the most practical solution, the cost in mana of teleporting a vessel as large as the Icarus was more than most mages within the Empire are capable of. But a cruiser as large as the Avalanche has multiple cores providing mana to the entire vessel and when combined with precisely drawn spell arrays, the cost was manageable.

Our end was mostly just making sure everything was running smoothly on the ship and was prepared for the teleportation cycle.

There was not much for me to do during the launch procedures so I listened in as Emily confirmed our readiness with the communications specialist in charge of the bridge.

“Hanger Bay B to IMS Icarus, are you prepared for launch?”

“IMS Icarus to Hanger Bay B, we are a go for launch. Ready when you are.”

“Ten-four, prepare for launch in five… four… three… two… one”

As the comms specialist counted down the launch sequence I could see sigils engraved into the hanger floor begin to glow beneath the Icarus. They grew brighter and brighter until suddenly there was a twisting sensation in my gut and it seemed as if the lights flickered in the cabin, if I had been standing I would probably have lost my balance as the Icarus was

One second the view of the outside cameras displayed the interior of the hanger, filled with personnel and ships preparing for the day, and the next there was only blackness. After a second the cameras regained focus and the lights of distant stars shimmered into existence. A couple of screens depicted the local sun, a fiery orb illuminating everything in the system and if you looked closely the Dedian belt was visible as a faint line crossing the entire star.

I also got my first look at the IMS Avalanche, it looked as if someone had ripped an iceberg off of a planet and chiseled it into the rough approximation of a ship and stuck thrusters onto the back. Vast sheets of white-blue ice, several meters thick and tough as steel, covered the vessel from bow to stern. The only metal showing through the ice were the weapon batteries, long multi-pronged turrets of large caliber coilguns and the even longer single barreled railguns all gleaming in the harsh light of the sun. Narrow tubes poked through in select locations, prepared to launch devastating salvos of missiles. And most dangerous of all, only seen as faint imprints in the ice right now, there were several arcing lines of high tier spell arrays from which the Avalanche could cast incredibly destructive spells.

That was just what I could see with a brief survey of the enormous warship, I knew there were many smaller caliber weapons only seen as faint glints in between the ice. The scary part was the Avalanche was a primarily defensive ship, lacking any of the higher caliber railcannons and high temperature lasers found on many destroyers and cruisers. Instead, most of its firepower came from the larger spell arrays, which while incredibly powerful and deadly, were slower to fire and relied on the high level mages to operate them with any effectiveness.

The Avalanche’s main power was in how difficult it was to hurt in any meaningful way. Attacks have to first punch through several meters of Skill enhances ice and then the thick metal hull beneath and only then would the internals be at risk. And even if that was managed, I had read Commodore Chione had a Skill that would regrow the ice in the damaged sections; effectively forcing enemies to smash through the same section of the hull over and over again to do anything. And while you were desperately trying to disable the cruiser, the two destroyers in the escort would be pounding your ships into scrap in turn.

As much as I wanted to continue to fantasize about captaining the cruiser, I still had lots to learn and figure out about my ship and crew. I turned my attention to the console in front of me.

“Alrighty! I believe we’re patrolling sector C-9 today, so let's get going” I said in my best commanding tone. “Poct, commence void shift; Emily, keep an eye on the scanners. And Hoffman I want to go over some things with you, make sure I’m up to date on everything I need to be.”

The bridge crew quickly got to work and I started my first patrol in the imperial navy.

----------------------------------------

Back at the academy, I’d once asked a professor how void shifting worked. The explanation he gave had given me a migraine from trying to wrap my head around it.

What little I did know about the void was that it is a sort of sub-dimension where space and time did not exactly… line up. This is the point where even I became confused, but it essentially meant a ship could travel a short distance in the void and in reality travel many times the distance. The effect grew the further you were from large amounts of matter, like stars and planets, as well, meaning a ship could travel hundreds of light years between two stars within a week, while another only managed to travel across half a solar system in the same time frame.

When void shifting nobody actually fully shifted into the void because that would instantly unravel you and your ship from reality. So void shifting is a bit of a misnomer; what really happens is the ship core sort of untethers the vessel from reality with carefully wrought spell arrays around the core. While untethered the ship finds itself brushing against the void, this is where the space-time shenanigans come in, allowing for faster-then-light travel.

It also means the cameras see directly into the void, which lived up to its name, the sun had vanished, and no constellations hung in the endless sky, just inky darkness in every direction.

It was very boring to look at.

After three hours of staring at blank scanners and blank screens, I decided to take lunch. I knew it was important work to watch out for naval requests, emergency signals, and the more ominous shadows. I just needed a break, it would take some getting used to doing nothing.

I entered the common room to find most of the crew and legionnaires sitting around the tables playing games or watching holo-feeds to pass the time. I grabbed some rations from beneath the counter and then headed over to where Gill was waving me over to sit with him and Kari.

“Hey! How’re you finding the naval life so far?” He asked with a smile.

I took a bite of the ration brick before answering and nearly spat it out.

“Blah— food could use some improvement!” I gagged and the gunners laughed.

“Here’s a free tip: bring some food from the commissary, that way you get some actual decent grub out here. Command refuses to supply us with anything but these void damned nutri-bricks!”

I filed that away, I was definitely going to sneak a sandwich on next time.

As we chatted I studied the two weapons specialists. I didn’t know much about either of them other than their levels.

Karina Sherpova, level 18 [Imperial Gunner], and Gill Anderson, level 12 [Imperial Gunner]. Neither were particularly high level, but that was why they were on a cutter, to gain Skills until they could be rotated onto a more crucial weapons battery.

“So uh, how long have you guys been in the Navy?” I asked.

“Oh… a little under two years I think, not as long Kari here,” Gill replied glancing at his co-worker. “You’re going on what— three, four years now?

The tattooed woman grunted and looked up from her detached datapad.

“Just under four, I think.”

I nodded not really sure what to say next and threw out the first thing that popped into my head.

“You uh— have any goals for your career?”

Kari snorted.

“Money. Just in here for a couple tours until I get enough to retire and by a bar or something.”

“Oh come one, Kari!” Gill laughed. “You always talk about transferring the Onslaught!”

I looked up at that, the IMS Onslaught was Admiral Cross’ dreadnought, it was a prestigious position to have for anyone.

“Eh— it ain't likely, would need to advance into [Ironhail Gunner] for it to ever happen,” Kari said lightly.

[Ironhail Gunner] is an advanced class, difficult to get, but giving Skills that allowed gunners to fire a continuous stream of bullets at high fire rates, no matter what the gun's actual specifications allow.

I sat there for a moment, not sure where to go from here. Should I encourage Kari to follow her dreams? That sounded right, but I was not sure, I have never been good at small talk. I’ve found it’s one thing to be able to read people, but a completely different skill to know what to say or do.

In the end, I decided to ask a question that had been bothering me.

“Could I ask you something?”

“Yeah! Of course!” Gill said.

“So, I don’t really know how to put this. But I’ve been having the feeling that Hoffman is annoyed with me and I don’t know why,” I said slowly, not wanting to talk bad of someone they knew better than me. “It’s not like he’s doing or saying anything, it’s more like he says the bare minimum and tries to stay away from me.”

It was something I had been noticing over our interactions. Hoffman would be perfectly respectful, but he would do exactly what was required of him and leave. It was also his tone of voice, with many of the others there was some measure of emotion in his tone, but with me, he was carefully neutral.

My first thought was to chalk it up to his uptight personality and the desire to be careful around a new superior. But my gut was telling me there was something more to it.

The two gunners looked at each other and an unspoken conversation flashed between their eyes. After a moment Gill grimaced and looked back at me.

“He doesn’t mean to. But you have to understand, after Captain Izeirthe got promoted we all kinda thought that Hoff would be the new… you know…”

Ah, that explained it. Hoffman had thought he was going to be the new captain and realistically he should have been, he had experience, and the respect of the crew and he was a level 23 [Imperial Officer], more than high enough for the position. And then some nineteen-year-old, fresh graduate waltzes in and snakes the position out from under him.

Before I could fully internalize that and decide how to maybe make it up to him, the intercom buzzed.

“Captain Fox, please report to the bridge.”

I blinked in surprise and stood up, thanking Gill for the explanation.

I walked into the bridge to see Hoffman standing next to Emily’s station with a grim expression. He waited until the door was sealed shut behind me before speaking.

“Looks like you might be getting another chance to level today. We just received a distress signal. Pirates.”