The Sun Also Rises

Gudersnipe
“As the sun sets, it also rises.”

Of course you couldn’t buy a sandwich like this, not never. A sandwich like this had to be earned, through hours of sweat and hard labor. All hand prepared himself, an entire mornings work spent on this single delight.

Hunter had to stop and take several deep breaths between each bite. It had to be wrong for food to taste this good.

Gudersnipe Cafeterias were only “cafeterias” in the academic sense. They had long tables with benches, and could accommodate feeding many people at once, and they did have a large meal service providing a variety of tasty but mass-produced foods. They also had small kitchens lining all the walls in little alcoves, and one corner was full of shelved food very much like a grocery store, so that anyone could walk in and pick up the ingredients to cook their own meal if they so desired.

As Hunter opened his mouth wide for another bite, the alarm buzzer sounded behind him.

Hunter stopped, pulled his head back, and gently set the sandwich back on the plate, not wanting to offend it by splitting his attention. He turned on the cafeteria bench toward the direction of the nearest signal box to read the message.

Spaced everywhere around the Gudersnipe campus and more frequently in the school proper could be found small boxes containing six lights in two vertical rows. The boxes were a simple patterned means of conveying what an emergency was, who it was for, and how major it was.

Both rows of lights were green at the top, yellow in the middle, and red on the bottom, somewhat like traffic lights. In a way they were, because there was always a lot of traffic right after they signaled anything.

Of course these weren’t used for traditional emergencies like fires or earthquakes; these boxes were for emergency campaigns, and told the troops of students to report to whatever venue they were needed.

The far right line signaled what type of campaign it would be. Green meant land or land/air, yellow meant mecha, and red meant space. The left side indicated the intensity; green for not very important, finish what your doing and report; yellow for shake a leg, drop what your doing and get going; and red meant GET OFF YOUR F*CKING A** AND GET TO YOUR STATION SOONER THAN IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The lights were currently flashing double red.

Hunter looked in dismay at his hard earned sandwich. A sandwich like this did not deserve to be discarded half eaten, nor did it deserve to be left in a refrigerator, or hurriedly devoured.

His stomach grumbled from the effort of making it.

Hunter decided to go with the lesser of the evils and snatched up the delicious morsel, taking small but flavorful bites as he raced across the table tops ahead off the other students, leaping over isles and heads.

There was actually a very interesting hierarchy here, for only high level officers were allowed to depart the school cafeterias by running across tables. Yes, it was a written rule from the school handbook. It had been decided long before Hunter’s time that in the events of dire situations, rather than make everyone else stop while the officers departed, or worse let the officers fight there way through the crowds like common soldiers, that officers would be allowed—nay, ordered, to run across table tops to escape a crowded lunch room and reach their posts with all haste.

* * *

Hunter stepped lightly onto the bridge of the Saratoga as he swallowed the last bite of his sandwich. With it all over, it had been rather disappointing to devour such hard work while he raced to his ship.

The Saratoga had been lying at ease at the Aragosis shipyards while the crew was on studying rotation back in the school proper. It had been solidly nine months since anyone had set foot on the ship.

But she wasn’t fully in the mothballs, and it had taken only five minutes to restore her to main power. Hunter had spent half an hour reaching a GATE room to get to the ship, and most of the crew had beaten him despite his ferocious charge. It would only be a little longer before they’d be ready to disembark.

“Captain on the bridge!” his first officer Jason shouted as Hunter entered.

“At ease,” Hunter replied reflexively, not that anyone besides Jason had flinched when he set foot off the turbo lift.

Hunter sat down in his chair in the middle of the room, where his field of view was filled by the many large screens that made up the ships main viewer.

The Saratoga was a small ship, smaller than the average destroyer, and was the only one of a kind mass produced ship in the entire fleet.

The technical classification for her was Light Destroyer N808, part of the Nelson class of battle ships produced during the last major fleet upgrade. The design was revolutionary, and so the school had only ordered a production run of three hundred and twenty.

Yes, it was a Gudersnipe designed ship, but her hull was not Gudersnipe built. She had been made along with the others of her production run at an off-site shipyard called Yagi Alpha. The idea was to phase out the slow clunky destroyers with light and fast ships; ships that could zip in and out of enemy formations and stop the ship-destroying fire at its source. The perfect guard for carriers and convoys.

The design was sound, but the implementation was not. The N808 Light Destroyer was ordered only fifty percent tooled for deployment, the rest of the modifications were added at the school proper. That meant they rolled off the huge assembly line with the engines and all critical and primary systems in place, but no weapons or armor. A ship delivered in this was ‘complete’ but not ready, the real work had to be done at the school.

The run was negotiated into three stages, with the shipyard producing one hundred in each of the first two stages, and the last one hundred and twenty in the final stage.

By the time stage two was complete the ships of stage one had seen active combat, and less than forty were left. Only half of stage two was tooled for combat and shipped into active duty; stage three was canceled after only eight of the ships had been completed.

The incomplete stage three was shipped, and put at ease in one of Gudersnipes own shipyards along with the second half of stage two. By the end of the tour of duty, those fifty eight ships at ease were all that was left of the line of N808 Light Destroyers. The school ordered them scraped, but somehow one escaped.

This ship was number three-O-eight, the last of the N808’s off the line, and she was only ninety percent completed at best, with only fifty percent of her combat tooling.

Her only designation was N808-308; then she was tooled as a sentry ship, and assigned to a bright fresh captain who was later laughed at when he was promoted to Admiral Commodore and choose to keep her as his flagship.

“What’s our status?” Hunter asked casually.

“Main power is online,” Jason replied. “The crew is eighty percent loaded, and all stations report green, we should be prepared to disembark in less than ten minutes.”

“Fine,” Hunter said proudly. “Get me Central Command and Control, lets see what this is about.”

Jason nodded to Robin at the COM station and she began pressing buttons.

An audio channel crackled open.

“Sorry sir,” Robin whispered. “They routed me to an outstation, it’s the best I could do.”

“Understood,” Hunter replied with a curt nod.

“This is Captain Hunter Jusenkyou of the Flag Saratoga,” Hunter said loudly and importantly. “I respectfully request that you patch me immediately through to CCC. I repeat—”

“Quite yur yammerin!” an annoyed female voice barked back. “We’re getting swamped with ‘Commander This’ and ‘Admiral That’ all demanding to speak to the CCC. Well I got news for ya pal, their just aren’t that many bloody operators up here!”

“Jensen?” Hunter asked with a raised eyebrow, immediately recognizing the voice.

“Oh!” Jensen’s tone very suddenly turned apologetic. “Sorry Hunter, didn’t quite catch the name their.”

“Its fine Jen,” Hunter said dismissively. “You never did have any respect for authority while you were serving on my ship, and you also never quite respected me as a person while we were dating, so I’m really not surprised.”

“It’s more like I never really respected anyone,” Jensen muttered. “which is probably how I wound up an out base router for CCC. Give me a minute, I’ll use my lack of respect to cut off someone else’s line for you.”

Hunter smiled at the young women, making a mental note to send her flowers when the coming battle was over. Her pushy attitude had always gotten her into trouble, but right now it was helping Hunter get through the one vestige of bureaucracy left in Gudersnipes chain of military command.

A few moments later Instructor Radisson’s worried and preoccupied face appeared on the screen.

“Instructor!” Hunter said, standing up and saluting. The bridge crew followed suit, apparently showing much more respect for the teacher than for their captain.

“Admiral Commodore,” the instructor replied without returning the salute. “I haven’t got much to tell you except that your facing a large Romini fleet and a dark twin. You have the flag for the first and one O ninth battle groups, as well as a large division of the hundred and thirty first. Don’t let me down Hunter.”

With that the channel closed.

“Herumf,” Hunter mumbled and folded his arms. “Fine. We’ll wait for the GATE, and re-evaluate ourselves there.”

* * *