Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (3 page)

“Thank you, gentlemen,” he told his officers briskly. “I know we’re all going to be busy over the next few days, so I won’t keep you. Michael – if I can see you in my office?”

“Of course, sir,” the CAG nodded calmly.

#

The Captain’s office on
Avalon
was huge. Kyle had been expecting much the same as what Captain Blair had been given on the old
Avalon
– a small office with an attached break-out room that could handle meetings of half a dozen.

Instead, the office itself was larger than the old
Avalon’s
break-out room, with the ship’s seal of a gold circle around a hand rising from the waves emblazoned across the wall in what he was relatively sure was actually gold. The top of the seal had the new hull number, DSC-078, and the bottom the ship’s name.

The break-out room was a full conference room, capable of handling the entire senior staff of the carrier’s six thousand man and woman crew. Everything was slick and shiny, brand new chrome and leather furnishings.

“Damn,” Kyle said softly. “If this is what my office looks like, I’m looking forward to my quarters.”

“You should take a look at the flag deck before you get too enamored,” Stanford warned him, taking a seat in one of the chairs facing the Captain’s desk. “Not sure if we’ll even be
carrying
brass anytime soon, but they built the
Sanctuary-class
to lead fleets, boss. The Admiral’s office makes this,” he gestured around the office, “look positively plebeian.”

Kyle shook his head, running his hand across the smooth metal top of his desk as his implants queried the systems around him. Once, he would have simply
known
every system around him, and the lethargy of his implant’s response still bothered him. It still took him only seconds to take in the wallscreens, the concealed filing cabinets and bookshelves, and the holographic projector concealed in the desk.

With a thought he activated the last, suspending a three-dimensional image of
Avalon
above the desk surface.

“Not sure if we’ll be getting brass,” he told his friend. “Thought I did get the notice on the shuttle that Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin will be taking command of Alliance Battle Group Seventeen. We may well get to host the flag – we have better facilities for it than
Cameroon
.”

“That’s… quite the burden, for the most junior Captain in the Navy,” Stanford pointed out quietly, and Kyle nodded.

He was, according to his research, the youngest officer ever promoted to Captain in the Castle Federation Space Navy. Not by as large a margin as he’d expected, at least – the next youngest had only been three months older, and promoted under very similar circumstances.

Of course, that officer had been killed in action two years later. Not a particularly auspicious omen.

“I suspect, though no one has said anything to me,” Kyle told him, “that Tobin may well regard it as a mentorship opportunity. From his reputation… it will be an educational experience.”

“Let me know when the fridge is installed in here,” Stanford replied dryly. “I’ve heard about the man’s idea of mentorship. Rather… make-or-break, as I understand.”

“I’ll deal,” the Captain told him. “I owe you an apology, though – off the record, obviously.”

“For what?”

“Up until Vice Admiral Kane made up his mind to assign
me
to
Avalon
, Commander Mason was supposed to be the XO,” Kyle replied. “Instead, it looks like we switched with the cruiser
Sunset
in Home Fleet –
Avalon
was supposed to get her Captain while I took
Sunset
with her XO. Instead,
Sunset
gets Kelly, and we get their XO.”

“Who do we get?”

“Senior Fleet Commander Mira Solace,” Kyle told him. He’d barely had a chance to review the woman’s file, but it was promising.

“She’s older than I am, but one of Home Fleet’s golden girls,” he continued. “Four years as XO, a carrier before
Sunset
and now
Sunset
.”

“Why’s she not a Captain?” Stanford asked. A successful three to four year stint as XO was usually enough to get a Captain’s gold planet.

“A… vicious personal assessment from the carrier Captain,”
Avalon’s
Captain answered softly. “Reading between the lines, she refused to sleep with the creep, so he tried to sabotage her career. Command gave her a second chance on
Sunset
, whose Captain isn’t interested in women and has given her a rave review.”

“That sounds like a fantastic recipe for a chip on her shoulder, boss,” the CAG replied.

“My problem, not yours, Vice Commodore,” Kyle told him, somewhat repressively. “What’s our status?”

“Without a senior Navy officer aboard, there hasn’t been much synthesis of data on the ship except by the yard dogs,” Stanford warned. “My understanding is that everything is basically complete and they’re just doing testing, but Hammond spent three hours
ranting
about the flight deck when he came aboard yesterday.”

With a smile on his face, Kyle checked the records. The Flight Group’s senior Non-Commissioned Officer, the man in charge of
everything
about the flight deck itself after the CAG, was indeed Marshall Hammond – now
Master
Chief Petty Officer Hammond.

“I’m glad we got Hammond,” he allowed. “Other than his complaints about the flight deck, how’s the Flight Group?”

“I’ve only got half our fighters aboard, and a quarters of my flight crews,” Stanford observed. “What flight crews I have are imbalanced – I’ve more engineers than gunners or pilots, though that’s working out as we need to go over every bird with a fine toothed comb.”

“Think you’ll have any issues being ready to launch in eight days?”

“Nah,” the CAG replied with a cheeriness Kyle suspected Stanford had learned from him. “Should have everything and everyone aboard in three. If I can’t whip them into
basic
shape in five days, I wasn’t paying attention in New Amazon.”

The two women who stepped out of the shuttle onto the bare metal of
Avalon’s
flight deck were a study in contrasts. Both wore the blue-piped black dress uniform of the Castle Federation Space Navy and carried standard issue duffels, but otherwise they had almost nothing in common.

Leading the way, looking fully recovered from her injuries in the Battle of Tranquility, was Kyle’s new Chief Navigator, also his former Chief Navigator: Fleet Commander Maria Pendez. She was a petite dark-haired woman with faintly dusky skin and curves that Kyle had
seen
shutdown men’s brains.

She was also a large part of the reason the Castle Federation had won the Battle of Tranquility, having navigated the ship into an insanely close emergence from FTL. Her promotion had been won the hard way.

Following Pendez, with an iron-straight back and flint-hard eyes, was Senior Fleet Commander Mira Solace. Solace was a tall woman with midnight-dark skin, only a few centimeters short of Kyle’s own towering height, but slim and athletic with it. Her pitch black hair was cropped short to her scalp, and dark brown eyes gazed at Kyle levelly. She wasn’t pretty or feminine in the same way as Pendez was, but she was… statuesque.

“Welcome aboard, Commander Pendez, Senior Fleet Commander Solace,” Kyle greeted them warmly, extending his hand to first Pendez and then Solace. Pendez shook his hand warmly, gifting her Captain with a bright smile.

Solace’s handshake was more perfunctory, her eyes continuing to measure him.

“It’s a pleasure to be aboard, sir,” Pendez told him. “She puts the old
Avalon
to shame, doesn’t she?” she asked, glancing around the immense flight deck. Six hundred meters long and a hundred meters across, the deck couldn’t,
quite
, swallow the entire old
Avalon
. It was more than sufficient to make the thirty meter long shuttle look like a toy.

“She does,” Kyle agreed. “Clinkscales, Keller, take care of the Commanders’ bags, will you?” he directed the two spacers he’d corralled up on his way to the deck.

“Uniform of the day is shipsuits until further notice,” he continued. “We should have the entire crew aboard within a day or two, but I’m not insisting on jackets until the commissioning.”

The two spacers stepped forward to take the officers’ bags.

“We can show you to your quarters,” Clinkscales offered, glancing at Pendez and Solace.

Solace had yet to say a word, and Pendez glanced quickly back at her superior officer over her shoulder, then met Kyle’s gaze levelly.

“Lead on, Spacer,” she told Clinkscales.

“I’ll carry my own bag, thank you, Spacer,” Solace then told Keller. “I do have a small container aboard the shuttle, I would appreciate it if you would see it transported to my quarters.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Keller replied crisply. She disappeared into the shuttle as Pendez and Clinkscales headed deeper into the ship – leaving Kyle alone in the cavernous flight deck with his new XO.

“Commander Solace,” he said cheerfully, with his widest and brightest grin. “You have
no
idea how glad I am to see you.”

“Sir?” the tall woman replied hesitantly.

“Have you been a keel-plate owner on a capital ship before?” Kyle asked. ‘Keel-plate owners’ were the first crew ever assigned to a starship – the ones who commissioned her, and to whom fell the duty of making her reputation and traditions.

“I haven’t, sir,” Solace replied, her voice still even.

“I was on
Alamo
,” the Captain told her. “It’s a lot of work, and there’s more on us and the CAG than anyone who isn’t in one of our offices will ever guess. You, Vice Commodore Stanford, and I are going to have our work cut out for us over the next few days.”

At that, Keller emerged from the shuttle behind Solace, tugging a good sized cargo container. Kyle looked it over with a practiced eye, judging it in less than a second and confirming it well within tolerance for a senior officer, if more than most might have allowed themselves to take aboard a starship.

“I’ve been on Home Fleet duty for a while,” Solace said quietly, a small flush lightening her cheeks. “The comforts of home are…”

“Available, and hardly a detriment,” Kyle accepted, his cheer completely unfeigned. The instant of humanity from the woman helped – he’d been worried someone had slipped him a robot for a moment.

“Get yourself settled in,” he ordered. “There’s no rush – while I’m not joking about the workload waiting for you, it can all wait a few hours. Meet me in my office once you’re settled.”

“Thank you, sir,” Solace told him quietly. “I look forward to it.”

The moment of humanity was gone. Once again, his XO was a beautiful statue carved of onyx stone, and not a drop of warmth escaped.

He was going to have to work on that.

By the time Solace buzzed for admittance to Kyle’s office that evening, he’d managed to make time to re-read her personnel jacket. He’d made a snap judgment on his first read of the file, and re-reading it after meeting the woman reinforced it. JD-Personnel had even added a code to one of the evaluations that he was familiar with – one that agreed with his opinion.

“Come in,” he ordered with a sigh. Solace’s last Captain had been married and gay. The Captain
prior
to that, however…

He gestured the statuesque black woman to the chair in front of his desk and stepped over to the side of his office. A command from his implant slid opened an alcove probably intended for a filing cabinet or some such mundanity. Kyle had better uses for it.

“Beer, Commander?” he asked.

“I don’t drink alcohol, sir,” she replied crisply as she took a seat.

“Fair enough. Coffee? Tea? Water?”

“Water is fine.”

Fortunately, he’d installed a hot beverage dispenser on top of the mini-fridge. Its line to the ship’s water supply was sufficient to produce a glass of chilled water. He passed it to Solace, and took a cup of tea for himself before taking his own seat, facing his new executive officer across the desk.

“Get your quarters setup to your satisfaction?” he asked after a moment. She’d taken longer than he’d expected to come by his office, though he wouldn’t have had time to review her file again if she hadn’t.

“I… wanted to get to straight to work, sir,” she replied, and he leaned back in his chair regarding her carefully. “I had a discussion with Commander Sadik in engineering with regards to some of the supplies we were short and raised that with Commander Hellet on the station. He seemed unimpressed, so we may need to escalate to get the parts we need.”

Kyle raised his hand to cut her off before she continued. Apparently, some ground rules were going to be needed.

“Commander Hellet’s lack of enthusiasm, Commander Solace, was likely due to the fact that he and I had an identical conversation this morning,” he said dryly. “Your enthusiasm is laudable, but if you were that eager to get to work, you should have been
here
, not in engineering.”

“Sir, I…”

“I am aware, Commander Solace,” Kyle told her quietly, “that you were sent aboard this ship to help balance my own lack of experience. For that matter, I expect your experience to be an immense asset to this vessel.

“But a ship of war has one Captain. You have managed to make us both look like fools to the Merlin Yards, and while I have no objection to
being
the fool when I must, I prefer to be warned in advance. Do I make myself clear, Commander Solace?”

The statue was back. The woman could have been carved of black granite for all the emotion or humanity she showed as she met his gaze.

“You do, sir.”

“Good. We have worse problems than looking like fools to Commander Hellet, so unless there’s something
else
, the matter is dropped,” he told her calmly, waiting for a moment for her to respond.

The statue was silent, hardly looking like a senior officer who’d just been upbraided for being an idiot.

“I have reviewed your file,” he continued. “I presume you’ve seen Captain Haliburt’s evaluation report?”

She nodded, once.

“Good,” Kyle said after a moment. He smiled, a cheer the woman clearly didn’t return. “Do you know what a JD-Personnel Administrative Code Seven Three is, Commander Solace?”

She blinked, a moment of confusion returning humanity to her face.

“I don’t believe I’ve encountered that one, sir,” she admitted.

“It was part of the briefing when an officer under my command was being considered for promotion,” he told her. “It’s not one they like to publicize. Code Seven Three, Commander, means that JD-Personnel has assessed an evaluation report as being materially prejudiced.

“Captain Haliburt’s report states that you are difficult to work with, arrogant, and many other minor and major complaints,” he continued. The statue returned, and he barely suppressed a shiver at the thought of just how much pain it would take for someone to master
that
degree of control.

“His report is also marked with Code Seven Three,” Kyle concluded. “The Joint Department of Personnel advises me that his report is prejudicial against you. Seven Three is generally used when we feel a senior is attempting to damage a junior’s career.

“I don’t always trust JD-Personnel’s judgment, but I
also
have Captain Botteril’s report,” he told her. “Jowan, as compared to Captain Haliburt, states: ‘Commander Solace is the epitome of professionalism. Her skills, integrity, and heart rank her among the best officers this Navy has.’”

Finally
, the woman relaxed, a flush crossing her cheeks as she heard his words.

“Unlike Captain Haliburt, I have served with Jowan Botteril,” Kyle finished. “I know which of these reports I trust, Commander Solace. Unless there’s some reason I should distrust Captain Botteril?”

With a sigh, Solace released some of the tension locking her ebony skin together, and she graced him with a hint of a smile.

“Not that I am aware of, Captain Roberts.”

“Good,” he told her cheerfully. “Now, since you appear to have volunteered yourself to deal with Merlin Yards,
I
spent today going over our main positron lance batteries, and am
utterly
unimpressed with some of their work. I’m going to need you to…”

The woman sitting across from him was still stiff. Still cold. But she leaned forward as he spoke, and he had a spark of hope rise in him. He didn’t need her to
like
him. He needed her to
work
with him.