You go out, go through customs check, and report to station offices for debriefing.
Union is based at Cyteen, and that star system is defended not only by warships but by astrography -- i.e. there is a nasty region of space on one side which is a gravity well consisting not only of several jump points swinging each other about in a difficult ballet, but with enough debris about them to make dropping out of hyperspace here a very fatal matter.
Since FTL's tend to go to the nearest jump point unless they have gone way, way deep into hyperspace, any ship coming in on this side of Cyteen will come to this graveyard, like it or not. No ship has yet been built that can jump over it.
There are also starsystems further out, which are at an early stage of colonisation. These all belong to Union, which is economically powerful and able to build ships at a great rate, while the Earth Company cannot.
And Union uses cloning techniques to produce population at a great rate; while it still takes 18 years to produce a soldier, and longer to turn him or her into one of the black- uniformed Elite space force, the rate of population growth is tremendous, thanks to the birthlabs.
Union ships are mostly military. Some merchanters are registered to Union ports, but these are not counted as Union ships, since they are not owned by the Union government. Their designation is US. UnionShip.
The oldest sort of FTL warship is a converted merchanter. Most of these were shot up and put out of action by 2350.
There are a few of the early FTL cruisers left -- ships with big engines and vanes and a big powerplant for the beam weapons, small crewspace and generally miserable living conditions.
There are carriers: these carry four (usually) insystem fighters; and troops. The troops usually number about a thousand per vessel. They have large crew/troop cylinders and a great deal of this cylinder space is given over to their lifesupport, the medical and operations facilities, the recreational space (in space for years at a time, the troops have to have room to move about), galley facilities, equipment storage -- which includes stoarage for sidearms, ground drop shuttles, hand launchers, defensive and offensive personal electronics, field hospital unit, and the thousand odd hard- suits and armour used by the troops; training and briefing ares, not to mention sleeping and maneuver-protection areas. Beyond this there are the crew quarters, which are luxurious by troop standards, private cabins for high officers, separate recreational facilities (as spacers and troops do not mix much), operations stations sufficient to direct a mission scattered across a solar system; and the operations stations specifically in touch with each of the four fighters- craft; and the weaponry of the carrier; and the actual operations and flight of the carrier.
On a carrier there is one captain (unlike a merchanter, which may have two to four captains and whole crews, each active during a particular watch); each carrier however has two crews, one mainday crew, one alterday. (Mainday and alterday are 12 hour periods: night is ignored in space, where it is meaningless, and time is divided into two duty shifts, because ships do not stop running while a crew sleeps.) The next in command is de facto alterday captain.
For combat, it should be added, all crew is called to stations if there is time. Strategic and tactical command passes to the captain, while piloting, armaments, communications, and radar operations got to appropriate officers. The captain is, to be sure, capable of handling the ship physically in combat, but rarely is this the case: a carrier captain is chosen for a combination of many skills and rarely is the captain also the most qualified combat pilot. There are in both fleets a few exceptions to this, but the skill of any captain in Mazian's small fleet surpasses that of almost all Union pilots.
Troopers, both male and female, like the officers and crew of the carrier, are aboard for those moments in which human force is needed: boarding a stopped merchanter; landing on a planet, moon, or mining station; holding a facility once taken; opposing enemy troops in any facility or terrain too valuable to be blasted by the ship's weapons -- for operations in which a scalpel is of more use than a sledgehammer.
To get to these situations where they are of use, the troops have to ride through many unplesant battles in which they are no more than freight, and one quality of these troops has to be patience and endurance: the physical strain of riding through an FTL battle can kill the unprotected.
When they exit their ships, they go in laser-resistant armor which has (if needed) a self contained air and heating system, so that this armor can double as a spacesuit for brief periods. A hit in the joints is one way a laser or projectile can get through this armor, but it is made to keep those joints covered as much as possible. Particle weapons are more trouble, but more the kind of think one would face in a bitched battle. Each trooper carries a laser; a projectile sidearm on occasion; and a heavy knife, because shooting inside pressurized compartments and certain portions of spacestations adjacent to the outer walls is not an outstandingly good idea.
The helmet also has a com, so that each trooper can receive general orders; and the visor also has sighting and range devices and other readouts which appear by an optics system if one looks up from inside the helmet.
Union troops are both natural-born and birthlab born; they are all highly indoctrinated because the educational system of all Union citizens is fed into the mind by subliminal means -- a technology used everywhere, but used by Union for political as well as factual education. These troops are both loyal and literate, and they are professional, trained to the nth degree in every aspect of their weapons and their duty.
The carrier is a vastly powerful ship capable of over- jumping a merchanter, capable of very fine maneuvers. It is not the size of a ship that determines its speed and agility: it is its mass to power ration, its mass relative to the size of its vanes and engines. Carriers are vastly over-powered and come into a system at up to 7/8 lightspeed.
A carrier may not wish to dump speed: it may ship through a starsystem at this incredible velocity in which the distance between planets can be covered in minutes, and it can fire and be gone so rapidly the victim may have no warning. It may shed its riders, which will travel at that speed, although they are not capable of FTL: they are small ships with a crew of about fifteen, each one equipped and instrumented to handle the enormous velocities of a carrier, up to the lightbarrier. They are very sophisticated in electronics and armaments and any one of them is every bit as much to be dreaded in attack as the carrier itself: they are fast and their firepower, while less than a carrier's, is sufficient to destroy a carrier's maneuvering capacity, or to wipe out a starstation or reduce a planet to the stone age. Riders spread out from a carrier, and often operate at different speeds so that their capacity to turn is different. This confuses the enemy's longscan, (more about this later). When the carrier is ready to leave the system, it summons its riders which limpet themselves to the hull.
A carrier has very powerful weapons mounted on the huge frame shell, which also supports the vanes and engines. The personnel cylinder rotates inside this frame, and the RPM of the internal cylinder is variable in a warship. When the ship goes into maneuvers of high-G stress, the RPM increases, which presses humans deeper into their seats and helps them endure the stress of the small changes of course these ships can make at high speed. Additionally the working stations, for crew who have to remain sitting upright and working through these terrible stresses, are themselves on hydraulic tracks which help absorb the stresses by slowly yielding to the move and returning to position. The fitness of these adjustments is critical, since the ship that can turn tighter than its enemy even by a fraction of a degree (remember that we are crossing whole solar systems in which that little change at the start of the course means miles and miles difference at the end) may confuse the enemy's longscan estimates and help the ship evade a strike.