Story 2: United Earth Navy
2073, Earth Orbit, Colonial Construction Facilities
There were days when Commodore Ciara Hunt was ashamed to be an officer of the United Earth Navy. Not because of an ultimately inconsequential scandal, those that happened in any big organization and anyone who claimed differently was simply good at cleaning up after themselves, but from secondhand embarrassment as she watched the new recruits struggle to make their way around the under-construction O’Neill Cylinder.
Once it was finished, it would be shipped off to a new colony, which made use of its rotational pseudogravity since those lacked the spare enchanters to maintain magical artificial gravity.
But for right now, it served as the perfect environment for cadets at the Luna Naval Academy to experiment with maneuvering in air-less zero-g environments. Badly.
Hunt caught a cadet’s leg before he could inadvertently kick her in the face and hurled him across the cylinder even as she warped space to make it so he landed lightly on the war wall, feet first.
She really shouldn’t have been here at all, she was supposed to have been in command of the 11th expeditionary fleet to check out a potential but unlikely alien contact … except the ships for that hadn’t been finished yet even though she’d already gotten the bump to Commodore in expectation of that deployment. So the 10th fleet had gone.
And as for why the ships were delayed, well, it might be guaranteed to become an advantage in the long term, but right now, it was just frustrating. A simple advancement in power conduction had caused the brass to require a redesign of all future ships, as well as an overhaul of all hulls currently under construction, causing mass chaos in the shipyards, and putting several officers slated to command those ships currently unavailable in awkward positions.
So she’d grabbed the academy assignment to avoid winding up with some crap, potentially even make-work, job while waiting on her command to be, well, commendable.
But this, she’d enjoy. Oversee the next graduating class of officers, then command the UENS Exeter with its mix of old hands and newly minted officers on the vessel’s shakedown cruise.