former senior chief of the Vigilant) all were promoted within a month of each other and moved up the chain of command. Commander Edgar Timmons left the Vigilant to become Commanding Officer of the new 21st Scout Squadron. That made him Kelly’s boss again. He liked Commander Timmons, but wished he hadn’t taken Master Chief Watson with him. Kelly moved Senior Chief Blankenship up from Sensors to be the Chief of the Ship, on Chief Watson’s strong recommendation and his personal experience.
She was doing well adapting to her new job, but Kelly was left with no executive officer. That meant Kelly dealt personally with the paperwork required to man, operate and stock the ship. The Admiral had promised Kelly his pick of any of the junior officers on Fleet Base 17, but the process was not going well.
He had conducted over half a dozen interviews and none of the officers had been right. The XO was the only other officer on the Vigilant and Kelly wanted someone he could trust with his command. Kelly had plowed through more personnel records and was ready for three interviews that morning.
The first two interviews were repeats of the previous six. The officers presented themselves well, had good records, gave all the right answers, but just weren’t right. Kelly was getting discouraged. He knew that if he didn’t find someone soon, the Admiral or CMDR Timmons would pick one for him. He waited for his last interview of the morning to arrive.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Consuela Cortez showed up late. Kelly was filling the time working through the requisitions for his upcoming training cruise. His Chiefs did a good job of preparing the requisitions for his approval, but they tended to think only of their own departments, not of the entire ship. It was Kelly’s job to sort through the wish lists and balance the requests against practicality and the ship’s budget.
There was a knock on his cabin door and Kelly said to enter. It was Chief Blankenship.
“Sir, LTJG Cortez is here to see you.”
Kelly turned away from the desk terminal and said, “Show her in, Chief.”
Kelly got up as LTJG Consuela Cortez entered his cabin and moved over to shake her hand. LTJG Cortez had an easy smile and a firm grip. She was just slightly shorter than Kelly, had short black hair, brown eyes, olive skin, and a slender build. She was in her duty uniform, not her dress uniform, as all the other candidates had worn. It fit her well.
When she saw Kelly looking at her uniform, she said, “Excuse my uniform, sir. I had to go into work this morning and sort out some problems. I was just released a few minutes ago.”
Unconcerned with her uniform, Kelly replied, “Where do you work, LT Cortez? But first, how do you prefer to be addressed?”
“Please call me Connie, sir. I work for the Base Repair and Refit Directorate. It was my crew that engineered the new electron guns that hide your engine exhaust plume. That was a good catch, sir. If the K’Rang exhaust homing torpedoes had hit our fleet unaware, we would have lost a lot of ships. I want to thank you, by the way. I got a commendation for the engineering design.”
Kelly remembered when they first came up against a K’Rang Torpedo Ship. One of the homing torpedoes had picked them out of the clutter of an asteroid field and almost took them out. It was only the Vigilant’s superior speed that kept disaster at bay. The Vigilant’s subsequent investigation determined that the torpedo homed in on the ion trail from the ship’s engines. Their recommendations for masking the ion plume had been retrofitted throughout the fleet and had saved several ships during the recent New Alexandria Campaign against the K’Rang.
Kelly picked up his pocket terminal and reviewed Connie’s record. She graduated from the Fleet Academy two years ago and had been with the Repair and Refit Directorate since. Her degree had been in shipbuilding and her fitness reports showed she excelled at her job.
“Tell me, Connie, why do you want to transfer from engineering to command?”
She paused slightly and said, “Well, sir, I want to get out into space, and command is the fastest way to get me there. I’ve been making a lot of runs up to Antares Station to work on ships and send them on their way. I can hear space calling to me.”
Connie, momentarily distracted, looked over Kelly’s shoulder and said, “Pardon me, sir, but I see you have requisitions on the screen behind you. You aren’t using the latest format. That will slow down your requisitions because they have to be re-entered once they get to the Repair and Refit Directorate. Those will go to the bottom of the pile. Here, I have a data device with the latest forms and a translator program that will convert your data to the new forms.” She showed Kelly a small data transfer device.
“If you’ll permit me, I can do that for you in a flash.”
Kelly moved out of the way. Connie sat down at Kelly’s terminal and had the requisitions reformatted in five minutes.
“Sir, I notice that your Chiefs have duplicate items on some of these requisitions. Would you like me to cross- level these and get rid of the duplication?”
Kelly was amazed. LTJG Cortez had just done in five minutes what would have taken him a good portion of the morning to do.
“By all means, LT, go ahead.”
She called up all the requisitions, combined them on one form, and highlighted all the duplications and high cost items.
“Here you go, sir, this should make it easier to sort through these and determine where you want to apply your resources. If you want, I can leave this data device with you or load it on your system. I’ve been hounding the Directorate Chief to call in all the unit supply officers and go over the new forms. It would save everyone, but he doesn’t see this as his problem to solve.”
Kelly realized he had just found his XO.
“LT Cortez, you’re hired. You’ll have to interview with CMDR Timmons, my Squadron Commander and with Admiral Craddock, the Commander of Scout Force, but I’m going to recommend you for the position as my XO. I don’t think you’ll have any problems, but Scout Force is a small organization and the Admiral likes to meet all of his officers before he approves their assignments. Come on. Let me walk you around and give you a tour of the ship.”
Kelly led a smiling LTJG Cortez out of his cabin into the aft part of the bridge. “This is the bridge. As you can see, the Vigilant still has glass ports. It’s one of the things I like most about her. I came here from flying fighters in a carrier task force and I like to have a direct view of my surroundings not interpreted by a computer. Even as smart as computers are, I want them supplementing my senses, not replacing them.”
“There are three banks of positions here on the bridge. The lowest two positions are for the helmsman and navigator, and the next level up are engineering, sensors, and weapons. The three positions on this highest level are the command positions. The Captain is in the center, the Chief of the Ship is to port, and the XO is to starboard. The tiered seating gives all positions a clear view ahead, above, and to the sides. The three command positions are multi-functional. Any or all of the other five functions can be controlled by any or all of these three terminals. In an emergency, one person can run and fight the entire ship.”
“The Vigilant’s main mission is to find the enemy for the Fleet and never lose contact. Stealth and our sensor suite are our main weapons. We only use our armament to protect ourselves or Galactic Republic citizens. If we have to, we have a pretty good sting. There are three twin particle beam turrets arrayed around the hull. We have three new fixed heavy caliber rail guns forward. In the stern we have three medium caliber rail guns faired into the engine nacelles. Anybody trying to fly up our exhaust, where our turrets can’t reach, has a surprise coming. We also have a cargo hold on our top dorsal fin that can mount a launcher for 20 missiles. They give us quite a punch.”
“Sir, that seems like an awful lot of firepower for a scout ship.”
“We don’t use weapons much in our work, but when we need them I want as many as I can carry. We had a direct combat role in the New Alexandria Campaign. The Vigilant alone destroyed a K’Rang command ship, four battle cruisers, four missile cruisers, four destroyers, seven frigates, and an armed support ship. We damaged a destroyer, two frigates, and another armed support ship before we were through.”
She marveled goggle-eyed, “You did all that with this one ship?”
“Yes, but those four ships we only damaged almost finished us off. If another scout ship hadn’t come along at precisely the right moment, we’d be floating bits of debris in K’Rang space right now.”
Kelly walked across the bridge and opened a door. “This is the XO’s cabin. As soon as the Admiral approves, you can move right in. You’ll be expected to live onboard. It has a berth, desk with terminal, pretty good storage, a private head with shower, and an upper berth that can be folded down from the wall if we embark passengers or
