Chapter 65: Interlude Mercury
Sometimes, it felt like all the second great wave of exploration had achieved was poke every hornet’s nest in the galaxy. Granted, many of those had only been discovered before they revealed themselves on their own terms, yet the fact that they were all being discovered at once was … stressful. To say the least.
First the swarm of autonomous genocidal warships, then the cosmic anomaly, and now a missing planet with some kind of eldritch fuckery in play …
Fleet Admiral Ciara Hunt had gone almost entirely grey in the first decade of holding her position, and she was fairly certain that by the time this was done, it’d have cost her the last few hairs in her natural color she had remaining.
Her computer beeped with a new alert, making her bite back a curse. This was the fifth goddamn time! In fact, she was close to believing one of the code monkeys had decided that screwing with their ultimate superior’s mail was funny, but after the utterly seismic eruption of her predecessor, firing nearly half the IT staff over the same exact issue, she doubted it.
No, this seemed to be some kind of computer problem, the damn machine having decided to keep sending alerts about “time in service” promotions being needed, and then endlessly complaining when said promotions weren’t forthcoming. Because they couldn’t be given.
Especially when it came to flag rank.
Becoming an admiral was no longer merely a question of skill, experience, and leadership potential.
It was also a question of one’s [Class]. The person in charge needed one that could handle formations, not just individual vessels.
A [Captain] commanding a battleship was stronger than an [Admiral] commanding a battleship. But an [Admiral] with a division of battleships would smoke a [Captain] trying to lead an equivalent flotilla.