The Return Home (A Fictional Short)

Captain Richard Darren stepped through the sliding doors and surveyed the bridge of the battleship Frutol's Folley. His command was one of 10 nearly identical battleships that had been produced engroupe at the massive Cerus shipyards in the wake of the last major attack on the Ardrean Empire. His sweeping gaze took in the large, circular bridge in one smooth move, noting the positions of his officers at their various stations and the blue status lights below the blank viewscreen, indicating all systems functioning normally in slipspace mode. As he stepped down onto the raised platform behind the command deck, his xo, Commander Peterson, rose to his feet and called out, "Captain on deck!" Darren paused and nodded in acknowledgment. "Carry on," he said as he headed toward the command chair.

He had just sat down when his communications officer, a slender young Arrellian woman who's jet-black hair was just over regulation, turned to him. "I have the Delphinium on Command Comm One sir."

He nodded, "Put them through Lieutenant."

There was a brief pop, then Commodore Whitcomb's voice came strong across the ship's intercom. "All vessels make ready for the transition to normal space on our mark." Numbers rolled across the bridge displays, all of course at a rate too fast for the average human to keep up with, let alone understand. But the shipboard nav computers were designed to handle just these sorts of calculations, so it was really all taken care of. So long as no one entered a faulty exit command into the system, everything would pretty much take care of itself. The main problem Captain Darren's crew would be facing would be making sure to follow the exit vector sent to them to the precise degree. The reason being was that while entering and exiting slipspace normally was no problem for individual ships or even small groups, a fleet the size of the one the Frutol's Folley was a part of had to be extremely accurate. The combined mass of over a thousand cruisers, along with a hundred heavies, carriers, fleet carriers, the ten battleships, and of course the Dreadnought Delphinium would, upon transition, produce a subspace gravitational displacement equivalent of a small moon. Any ship that was not in just the right position would risk hull disintegration under the gravitational stress of transition in such a large fleet.

But Darren was not worried. He was flying with some of the best commanders in the fleet, and they'd all made jumps like this many times before. As the Commodore's transmission ended he nodded to his helm officer to begin the sequence. The blue status lights flashed yellow, then morphed to green. There was a crackle, then suddenly a million stars winked into existence on the viewscreen. He smiled and let out the breath he was surprised to find he'd been holding. A brief tremmor vibrated through the ships, then the starfield was dotted with other shapes, cruisers, over a thousand of them. The backbone of the Ardrean mobile fleet and the most diverse ships the empire could build. While not that powerful individually, a group of them this size was enough to pound a base with anything less than planetary rings into dust.

"Lieutenant, come to heading zero six nine, z-plus five degrees." He said to the officer at helm. This new heading would bring them up to an over-position above the left wing of the bulk cruiser formation. A vibration passed through the floor at his feet, and the starfield shifted as the ship aligned on its new heading. "Aft camera." He said, and the view changed. Behind them the cruisers, heavies, carriers, and the larger bulbous fleet carriers were spreading out into fleet formation. Suddenly the stars wavered and a huge shape emerged from slipspace. The immense size of the thing alone told him it was none other than the Delphinium, the dreadnought class flagship of the fleet. It made his own battleship pale in comparison, and it helped Captain Darren remember his own place in the higher structure of the Ardrean Military.

"Return to forward cam." He said, and the image switched back. Ahead of them the stars surrounded a small moon in orbit of a large gas giant. The fleet was on a heading that would take it into orbit of the moon in a few minutes. As they approached, the eastern side of the moon began to glow, then suddenly the brilliant red light of the system's star, a type six red star, filled the screen and shone off the hulls of the cruisers ahead of them, making them look like strange, red-armoured soldiers marching in formation across an ancient battlefield somewhere.

"Captain, I have Ardrean Command on Fleet Comm One," chirped his communications officer from her station. "They've sent station-keeping coordinates."

"Acknowledged," said Darren. "Helm, take us to station-keeping at the coordinates provided." There was another slight vibration through the deck as the ship changed course again and headed toward the nothern sub-polar region of the moon. As they got closer, the lights from all the mass of surface structures shone brighter, telling of the thousands of people living on the artificial environment of the empires prized capital, Ardreas. While not a world naturally conducive to life, Ardreas had been terraformed and developed into one using the best technology available. It had been transformed from a lifeless rock at the edge of an unimportant system into the command capital of the growing Ardrean Empire.

Captain Darren smiled. "It's good to be home..."