Incursion Vector

015

[▲] INS Robert A. Heinlein, Ibn Battuta Waypoint

It had never been so glaringly apparent just how empty the Heinlein had been until they launched from the Gagarin Shipyards with a full crew. When she was a University Frigate Nim had known every serviceman and cadet by sight, even if she didn't know their whole names or where they were stationed. There were just enough crewmen to make holiday parties fun but not so many as to have everyone constantly bumping into each other on their way to their duty stations. Now there were always a handful of people on every maglev car, legitimate crowds of personnel standing around in the common areas gabbing on downtime, and actual waiting lines ten to twelve crewmen deep to use the common com stations.

She wasn't entirely sure she liked it. When she had loaded out during the Incident she had done so to protect her friends on board the Heinlein. These new people on her ship were faceless, nameless drones she couldn't bring herself to care about if she tried. And she had been trying.

The expected ego chafing was also starting to get very annoying. The cadet crew had handled their duties with distinction during the Incident and so most of the mid-grade enlisted staff had been transferred to the Asimov, leaving the ship in the capable hands of their ex-students while they went on to train those who hadn't seen combat. The section leads were still on board, but it was mostly the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old ensigns training people twice their age how to do what they did while the leads wrangled duty schedules, billeting assignments, and requisition orders for the dauntingly massive personnel influx. And it was pretty clear that a lot of the new people didn't like being told what to do by officers young enough to be their own kids. Even the new wing brought on to replace the obliterated Flight Lazarus, pulled together from redundant patrol flights on the capital ships INS Tetsu Yano and Francis Drake, were not thrilled with the fact that they were subordinate to the "teenage kids" in Methuselah though they had been flying for years longer.

And just to make things even more awkward, Methuselah was now the only original flight left on the ship.

Flight Loonies, which had been under Shelke's command, had been officially dissolved. With Shelke dead her XO Sabrina Hepburn had taken over for the return to Gagarin. Not long after they left for Luna Nim heard that Keifer Jackson, Sabrina's co-Abrams pilot, had utterly lost it and was now under heavily supervised psychiatric care. With the Heinlein now being part of the main fleet Loonies' twin Proteus pilots Franklin and Brandon Brighton had to be split up since siblings could not serve on the same warship. Frankie had opted to transfer to the INS Erwin Rommel and his departure left Loonies gutted, so Sabrina, Brandon, and their Hayha pilot Greg Sherlock had been transferred to the Asimov and merged with what was left of Roughneck. With them had gone Sebastian Connor, Heinlein's best marauder machinist mate and the only person left alive after the IED explosion she trusted to make changes to her Stuka without her presence. She hoped Asimov was making good use of all the Heinlein crew they had adopted because she sure as hell missed them.

Now it was just Methuselah, the replacement guy, and the new eight-man flight which called itself Flight Errant. Nim didn't even like their name; it clashed with the theme of her ship, which had always drawn a flight's name from the books written by Heinlein himself. It was like they didn't want to fit in.

As they made the thirty-six hour jump journey out to the Ibn Battuta Waypoint to rendezvous with Minuteman and what remained of the Tiaha fleet Nim had busied herself studying the Seawolf Interdiction Fighter. Or as much of it as she could, considering that Cooper and his band of lab coat commandos-and the rest of them did wear lab coats, though none of them were white and one man, the propulsion specialist Kilmore, lined the edges of his with silver space tape-kept the fighter tarped and locked down. Eventually she quit coming down every few hours to look at the thing and holed herself up in Methuselah's quarters studying its technical schematics. They were impeccably organized for a military project manned by supposedly civilian contractors, though the person who last wrote up the whitepapers was in dire need of a spell check. There were way too many useless e's and u's in the words.