“Glad to have you aboard sir. Captain, when you are done with the Exec, I have the yeoman and quartermaster standing by to in-process him and get him outfitted.”
Chief, I’m done with him for now. Blake, go with the chief. Meet me back here at noon for lunch and then we’ll go over to see what the refit crew is up to.”
“Aye aye, sir. Chief, I guess I’m all yours.”
“Come with me, sir. If I can have your pocket terminal, we’ll get you officially signed onboard and transfer all your preferences onto the base network and the ship’s computer.”
Kelly handed over his pocket terminal, it was scanned into the admin terminal, and handed back.
“Sir, once you get on board, your quarters’ control preferences and your personal terminal will all be as they were for you on the Bolivar. Of course, you can modify them once you get on board, if you choose. Yeoman Benitez will make sure all your records are squared away. She’ll make sure General Bugarov didn’t do anything to your records that isn’t exactly according to regulations. The General has a history of leaving time bombs in people’s records that don’t go off until later. Yeoman Benitez here was with the base admin office before coming to us. She has seen it before and knows just what to look for. Now if you’ll follow me, we’ll get you some new, better-fitting uniforms and an issue of shipboard equipment. Sir, seeing your wings, did you bring your flight safety equipment?”
I did, Chief, but it will be a few weeks before it arrives. I’m sure it was sent by the slowest means possible. I would be surprised if it wasn’t arriving on a sub-light speed kinetic ore carrier.”
Well, sir, we’ll see if we can expedite it so you have it before we start work ups. This way to the Quartermaster.”
Kelly and the chief walked down the hall to the Quartermaster’s office in the rear of the building. No one was present.
“Billings,” yelled Chief Watson, “Where the hell are you?”
A head popped up behind the desk.
“No need to yell, I’m right here. I dropped my pocket terminal and was just picking it up.” The Quartermaster, Chief Billings, saw Kelly and came to attention.
“I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t see you. Please come in, sir. Take a seat. Give me a minute to bring up your data on the terminal. This data is a week old. Have there been any major changes since this data was last updated, sir?”
“I can’t think of anything that has changed.”
“Great, sir, I’ll pull all this together for you and have it delivered to your office or your quarters, whichever you prefer. We won’t be able to store things on the ship until the refit crew is done. In fact, the storage lockers are sitting in the refit bay next to the ship. They probably won’t be installed until the end.”
“Could you send the uniforms to my quarters and the rest to my office, Chief?”
“Yes sir. I’ll have this done before close of business today. Your new uniforms should be waiting for you when you get back to your quarters this evening.”
Sir, if you’ll come with me, I’ll introduce you to some of the crew. Only about half the crew is on hand. We’re trying to use this slack period to give the crew liberty and training. We spend a lot of time out on patrol, so we have to take advantage of these opportunities as they come up. Normally, we’d all be humping on the refit, but seeing as the refit crew is running behind schedule and our pointing out where they were screwing up our ship was slowing them down even further, they kicked us off. It gives us some unexpected slack time to take advantage of. We’ve got half the crew in training and the rest on leave. In a week, we’ll swap the two groups. Ah, here we are.”
They had come to a door in the hallway. The chief opened the door and the two walked into a darkened room.
“Sir, this is the gunnery trainer. We are training the gunnery section on the new particle turrets.”
As Kelly’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see three small cubicles with terminal screens and a series of controls. A person got up from one of the terminals and walked over.
“Sir, this is Chief Pennypacker, the Chief Gunner’s Mate. Chief, this is our new Exec, Ensign Blake.”
“Glad to meet you sir. Welcome to the particle gun transition trainer. I just finished a training simulation for our gunners and they are on break right now. As we are changing out the old energy turrets for the twin particle turret, we need to train up on the new system. Come over here, sir, and I’ll give you a demo.”
They walked over to one of the cubicles and Chief Pennypacker had Kelly sit down. The chair formed to his shape and a diagnostic ran on the terminal in front of him. A message came up, saying the system was online. Indicators for rate of fire and ammunition level were on the bottom of the screen. Across the screen top was a horizontal azimuth indicator. Elevation was indicated along the left side, and on the right was an indicator of range to target. In the center was a red dot and cross hairs.
“The turret rotates through 360 degrees. It elevates through 175 degrees. You lose a little bit of elevation dead astern because of the engine fairings. To overcome this blind spot, there are guns mounted on the fairings firing dead astern. Anybody trying to run up our exhaust will face a nasty surprise. There are three of these turrets at 120 degrees around the axis of the ship. Unless they are in close and coming in directly at a turret, two turrets can bear on a target at one time. In the case where a target is coming in directly on a turret, however, the ship will automatically roll to bring two turrets to bear. In addition to these, we also have three forward firing category III plasma cannons. These are our big bored and long-range guns. They can fire farther than the particle guns, but don’t do as much damage since shielding technology has improved. Occasionally, you can ionize the shields on an older ship, blinding their sensors. That doesn’t happen much any more. They will probably be changed out for particle cannons on our next refit.”
“The hand controls here move the turret. Turn the yoke clockwise to move right, counter clockwise to move left. Twist it up to move the gun up in the turret. Down to move it down. There are firing buttons on both sides of the yoke. As you move the guns up past vertical, the turret will spin to keep your field of vision from inverting. It can be a little disconcerting the first few times you do it. If you are prone to space sickness, it will have you puking until you adapt. You can set it to blank the video until it completes the spin, but most don’t want that. Here, let me set up a demo for you.”
Kelly leaned forward to get the feel of the simulator. The screen was concave and gave him about 180 degrees horizontal and 120 degrees vertical. He found the screen to cover just to the edge of his peripheral vision. It was almost like the forward view out of an F-53 cockpit. The yoke fit his hand well and the triggers fell just where his index fingers naturally landed.
“Sir, I’m going to give you slow targets so you can get the feel for the turret first, then I’ll speed them up as you get proficient. This should be a snap for a fighter pilot like you.” Chief Pennypacker winked slyly to Chief Watson behind Kelly’s back.
Kelly got ready and scanned for the first target to show up. It came in from lower right. An indicator arrow in the center of the screen pointed toward the target. Kelly tracked onto it, fired, and watched it erupt into a fireball. A series of single fighters came at him from all points of the compass and he readily finished them off. Chief Pennypacker increased the frequency of single fighters and still Kelly dealt with them. His training as a fighter pilot came in very handy. Chief Pennypacker then started throwing two at a time at him. It was a little harder, but he still kept them from getting closer than 50 kilometers to the notional ship. Four-ship groups got Ensign Blake sweating. He got most of them, but a few got through to firing range of the ship. At this point the lights came up.