The Hunt for Former Glory

[incognitojesus]

Hello, there. Your local overlord moderator, here. Finally got back to writing, seeing as I now have the time due to an injury that may take me out for the wrestling season. This is a story that I will be updating as I go along, and re-editing a few times before posting the final draft in a separate thread. Really just for fun, I don't plan on pursuing writing for a career. That, and I've recently finished my third read through of Tom Clancy's (RIP) Red Storm Rising which involves a lot of naval action in it. So, I decided, why the hell not. Sadly, the forums do not believe in tab, so I made due with what I had. This is the story of Zhang Jie, my Captain. It takes place twenty years before 2457, so in the year 2437, and follows his mission to track down the pirate Roach Mason. Thanks, feel free to leave any and all constructive criticism, compliments, questions, comments or concerns in the thread.

 

The Hunt for Former Glory

Commander Zhang Jie was tired and frustrated.

“XO, you have the conn,” he commanded, stepping away from the helm of the bridge ever so slightly. His knees were starting to give, the result of both his growing age and lowering morale. The route to the Captain’s quarters was a short and direct one, a simple climb down the ladder would take him there. It might as well have been light years. After announcing his XO, a middle-aged Lieutenant by the name of Harrison, had control of the Bridge, Zhang made his way to his quarters, cursing the architects who designed the damned destroyer. Only in the safety of his quarters did he let his shoulders sag as he stripped off his jacket, reaching for the pack of cigarettes laid on his end table.

The SAMV Show Me the Money (SAV-310) was an aged ship, there was no doubt, but it was his baby. Ten years in command, thousands of hours logged on the conn, the forty-year old Commander knew the ship inside and out. But the years had started to take its toll on the destroyer, and her Captain as well. Not that his current assignment provided any relief.

It was a wild goose chase, plain and simple. He knew that from the moment a burst transmission from SAEXPFLT (Sol Alliance Expenditionary Fleet) HQ had arrived, that the upper echelon of headquarters had finally found an assignment for him aside from protecting the usual civilian freighters leaving New Gibson to the outer colonies, the frontier of Alliance space. If he had known he’d be so far away, without a sister ship for reinforcement, running low on rations and lower on morale across the entire ship, he wouldn’t have been so eager.

Orders are orders, he reminded himself as he laid in bed, staring at the ceiling as the smell of his last cigarette lingered through the cabin, slowly being filtered out. He keyed his PDA, setting an alarm to wake him once more in three hours, with subsequent alarms set in minute increments afterwards. The newer cruisers and dreaded carriers of the Navy had on-board AIs, however, Alliance High Command had not seen fit to allocate such a valuable resource to what they viewed as a ‘tub with a big gun.’ True enough, the Money was not the most dangerous ship of the fleet, but it was a force to be reckoned with, at the very least. Or so he hoped, it had been a long time since she had seen combat against an opponent of equal force, which intel stated her target was.

Zhang sat up in bed once more, tossing the covers off himself as he searched in the darkness for his datapad. Squinting through the sudden burst of light as he activated it and waited for the brightness to lower on its own, he began to pull up his target’s file. A projection appeared on the viewscreen in the corner of his cabin, illuminating a neat room, if not a little cramped. Zhang studied what little (and probably inaccurate) information they had beamed to him. A modified ship of the aged London-class of destroyers now named Former Glory, it had seen decades of combat dating back to the occupation of the Outer Colonies in the aftermath of the Secession War before falling into the hands of its current owner, a middle-aged pirate known only by the name of Roach Mason. The Commander flipped through the screens, aggravated at the lack of information, feeling that he was going in blind against an enemy he knew next to nothing about. Sleep did not come easy that cycle, and would not anytime soon.

Edited January 24, 2015 by Guest