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    We Sail Off To War
    We Sail Off To War
    We Sail Off To War
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    We Sail Off To War

    By Jay Slater

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    About this ebook

    A novella.

    350 years ago, humanity started over. Out of the ashes of Earth rose the Confederacy of Allied Worlds, twelve planets in eleven systems, united under a common flag. For a time, peace prevailed. It would not last. Thirty years ago, the Confederacy discovered the Brenner jump drive. Soon after, the United Suns Alliance—the Exiles—did too, and a ghost from the Confederacy's past reappeared, itching to right past wrongs. Decades of festering wounds have erupted into war.

    The Naval Arm, with few ships to spare, sent the cruiser Warspite to join the fight on the Threshold front. Now, she has arrived, and her captain has one target in mind: an Exile armored cruiser stalking merchantmen and men of war alike amidst the moons of the gas giant Argo. In pursuit of victory, Warspite's crew must do more than outfight the Exile captain. They must outfox him.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMany Words Press
    Release dateJun 11, 2016
    ISBN9781945092008
    We Sail Off To War
    Author

    Jay Slater

    Hello! I'm an author and software engineer from beautiful southwestern Pennsylvania. I read a lot of speculative fiction, as well as history (military and naval being my main interests), and alternate history (which is always better with zeppelins). You'll find that I write the first and last most often. My other interests include a wide variety of PC games and a very small variety of TV shows, as well as historical firearms (which I collect) and competitive shooting (in which I occasionally take part).

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      Book preview

      We Sail Off To War - Jay Slater

      Chapter I: Retribution, Reprisal, Vengeance

      Thirty people packed into the ship's combat bridge, at action stations in anticipation of the jump. The helmsman had taken off the ship's spin, and she drifted into the Brenner gate's activation zone.

      Green board, a sailor said.

      Very well. Sound jump warning, set the jump clock to sixty seconds, and signal my regards to the gatekeeper.

      The bridge talker's voice echoed over the ship's intercom. All hands, stand by for Brenner transition.

      Seconds ticked away from the jump clock displayed on the combat bridge's displays. A petty officer counted down. Five, four, three, two, one, j—

      The ship appeared in the Threshold system an eyeblink later. She was a cylinder, sixty meters from stem to stern and thirty across. Counting her radiators, she stretched forty meters beam to beam. She was a warship: six turrets, three on her back and three on her belly, held her main guns. Stenciled on her bow was her name: Warspite.

      Her communications room was in the outer part of her hull, the part that felt the full force of spin gravity. It was rigged for acceleration, however, and Ship's Subensign Winston Hughes sat at a workstation against the curved outboard bulkhead, strapped in. With the ship neither accelerating nor under spin, nothing else held him to his chair. He labored with pen and paper under the watchful eye of a senior warrant officer. The screen in front of him showed a brighter speck in a field of dim ones, scattered against a velvet background: the view from the ship's telescope. He had it aimed at Threshold IV, the system's most populous world. From star sightings he'd just taken, he had worked out the ship's position. From the bearing readout, navigational charts, and almanac spread out before him, he worked out where Threshold IV was along its orbit, and from that, the local time. Jumps were instant, but clocks never read the right time afterward. Normally, in the first few seconds after a transition, a computer would have done what Winston was doing now. Today, he had fallen victim to one of the iron laws of the Naval Arm: before you let a computer do something for you, you had to know how to do it yourself. The warrant officer's hawk-like regard would tolerate no dissent, however, even from a nominal superior. Winston hurried through the last few calculations, referenced his numbers against the nav charts, and presented his result to his tutor for the day.

      Five minutes off, he grunted, but good enough for running the numbers by hand, sir. The phone mounted to the bulkhead rang. The warrant officer pushed off from his handhold and drifted over to answer. After a moment, he covered the microphone with his hand. You're wanted on the patrol bridge.

      The combat bridge was amidships on the centerline, for maximum safety during battle. The patrol bridge, on the other hand, was outboard at the very bow, for little reason other than tradition. Winston had about twenty meters to go along the ship's dorsal corridor. Had Warspite been rigged for spin or microgravity, he would have taken it in one good leap. Even though he was a very junior officer, on his first subensign cruise in his second year at the Naval Arm Officers' Preparatory Academy, he still outranked the larger part of the ship's company, and they would yield while he passed. With Warspite under acceleration, the collapsible companionways which filled the corridor left him no choice but to climb.

      An acceleration alarm chimed, and Winston felt himself sink to the deckplates as the ship's engines slowly spun up. He bounced on his feet and guessed her speed at a little over a standard gravity. He reached the bow and turned along the rim corridor, stepping into the patrol bridge a few moments later.

      The hatch was on the curved inboard bulkhead, and coming through it, Winston faced the room's central feature: the plotting board. Past that, toward the outboard bulkhead, were navigation and sensors stations, and to the left and right were gunnery and engineering. Ship's Commander Charles Weatherby stood over the plotting table. Winston snapped to attention and waited to be noticed.

      Weatherby waved him over. As you were, ensign. Stand down to watch stations.

      Watch stations, aye, the bridge talker repeated. His voice echoed over the intercom as he repeated the order.

      Winston tuned him out and took in the plotting board. It had been an accurate jump. They were eight hours from Resolution, give or take.

      No surprises on the board, ensign. You have the watch; enjoy it, there won't be many more for you, now that we're on the front. Call for me when we've arrived, and mind your exhaust vectors after the turnover, Weatherby said, making for the inboard hatch.

      I have the watch, sir, Winston replied. Aye aye.

      Weatherby's patrol cabin was only a few compartments away from the bridge, and it was there he retired. They were officially at war now. What the Threshold front may have lacked in size, it certainly made up for in ferocity, or so said the scuttlebutt. The Confederacy was losing here, and the Naval Arm could spare only a handful of ships, Warspite among them.

      Weatherby fiddled with the display on his desk until it showed a chart of the system. Warspite was approaching the trailing Trojan point of Threshold VI. Argo, Weatherby corrected himself; that was the

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