“And then Peggy and I headed back to the ship.” Casey explained.

  “And is that all you have to report?” Asked Anderson. Peggy was piping the phone conversation over the bridge intercom.

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “Do you believe they will act according to your warning?”

  “A solid answer to that would require more surveillance. Peggy tells me the scouts are on top of it.”

  “These Scouts… What can you tell us about their activities in this and other regards?”

  Casey thought a bit before answering.

  “Peggy tells me that as a matter of policy the fleet Scouts have tended to stay out of the gravity well for most of their operations. The doppelgangers that the Squidies use to keep up with human goings-on are in a different department, and report to the science community rather than the military, but I can’t imagine there isn’t information sharing as required. Regardless, I don’t think they will assign any of their embedded warm bodies to this. They will probably make extensive use of stealth drones. I have been assured that no extraterrestrial weapons technology will be brought within the star system for something so mundane as human drug cartels.”

  “And do you think you have an ongoing connection with the asset that took you to that hotel?”

  “I am confident that if I dial his phone that he will talk to me. The hotel has a fantastic restaurant and the evening was well spent.”

  “If it weren’t for plausible deniability…”

  “Lieutenant, are you fishing for a girl's night out?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  “I will ask Allegro to bring you up to get measurements and shoe sizes then. Tell security to expect a bus to arrive outside the South ECP at five thirty.”

  “If you do that, you are going to have a whole lot of stars and politicians start asking for tours.”

  “And Peggy can tell them no. They can get tours of the new space station whenever they want.”

  “Alright, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “See you this evening.” The call disconnected and Casey went back to studying her technical manual.

  “I have news from Tempo.” Announced Peggy. “The Naval advisory committee has finalized a preliminary ongoing operating agreement, and has a provisional structural plan in place. It looks like there wasn’t too much pushback from just adapting US Navy regulations to space operations, excluding technical manuals, which will all need to be rewritten anyway. Even the countries that don’t like you much concede that you do ‘Navy’ better at scale than anyone else.”

  “So do we have a command structure yet?”

  “They are finalizing that now. The current thoughts are that the entire fleet presence as of now will be on the NETC side of the NETC/FFC divide. The Admiral chosen to lead the NETC will be selected by several neutral UN member states. The FFC side of things will be organized at a later date. You should have a new boss in about a month.”

  “That’s good. How does it look for recruiting?” Casey inquired.

  “The Federated States of Micronesia has been asked to host the initial training base. They are considering it, and it looks like they will agree. Once the campus is set up, we will ask the UN for one thousand high school graduate equivalent people for initial training. The hive will be handling the initial training, but we will gradually phase ourselves out of the training program as humans become experienced enough to replace us.”

  “So six months to a year for recruits to start being cycled through for shipboard tours?”

  “Only on the most introductory basis. Getting engineering sub-specialties to a basic level of competence will take years.” Peggy explained.

  “And the ships?”

  “That is going to be a long term goal. You only have a small handful of people on the planet right now that are educated enough to get their brains around the math involved in propulsion technologies.”

  “Speaking of, it looks from the technical manuals you have me reading now that navigation is going to be my next area of focus?” Casey prompted.

  “Yes. It is a good deal more complicated than navigating underwater.”

  “Looking forward to it.” Casey triggered the page advance on her tablet. “Oh, how is Lee doing? I haven't checked on him yet today.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “He is in hangar three. We set up a mock compartment there to simulate battle damage with decompression.” Peggy replied.

  “That was fast.”

  “We had the shipyard out in the Oort cloud priority fabricate it and then we just flew it in the hangar bay door. I'm supervising Lee, and Allegro is operating the six drones on the damage control team. He is doing fairly well.”

  “Well, I’ll not jog his elbow. Please remind him when the exercises are over that we should all meet for dinner.” Casey said offhandedly and returned to her technical manuals.

  ***

  “And that is how it is looking right now for recruit training. Are you confident in your ability to stay ahead of them, P.O.?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it. Peggy and Ally are pushing me hard, but I haven’t dropped a stitch yet.” Lee assured her.

  “Once they are sure you are up to speed on emergency repair and protocol, I see they are going to start drilling you on the operational side of the ship, like I have been doing for the last week.”

  “The operations board has a permanent place on the screens in my office, ma'am. I am sure I can keep the red blocks to a minimum for you.”

  And so it went. Before Casey knew it, six weeks of hard work and rest breaks had passed and she was standing with Peggy, Allegro, and Lee in Hangar bay One as all of the other princesses flew in to dock in the other bays for their first meeting all together since the program started.

  All the pilots had added a short white coat and a fancy peaked cap to their white ship suit. The princesses were all wearing human-looking drone bodies in a full range of ethnicities with black ship suits and the gravity-defying cape and tiara that Peggy had worn in Canada. Lee and Allegro were in ship suits with waist length coats and much less fancy hats, in khaki and black respectively.

  As Casey waited for the shuttle to arrive, she noticed that all of the princesses had arranged the order that their pilots were standing in sequence of their authority, with each drone body being one inch shorter than the one next to them in line behind their pilots. She hadn’t realized when they met all those weeks ago that Andante was four inches shorter than Arpeggio at six feet even. She chuckled to herself as the shuttle entered the bay and came to a landing.

  A short man came down the steps as soon as the door on the nose of the bus opened in the gray suit and long coat of an Admiral. He was followed by a very tall woman, over six and a half feet tall in the flats of her ship suit. She was wearing a black ship suit with a black coat that came to mid thigh and a matching black hat.

  Casey saluted, followed by the pilots behind her. Casey was relieved that she had thought to mention to Peggy that most militaries had their own style of salute, which should be standardized. The princesses had quickly solved the problem over the last few weeks. The Admiral returned the salute, and Casey dropped hers. She could hear the other pilots behind her doing the same.

  “Admiral Klein, it’s good to finally meet you. I hear the UN has been keeping you busy.” The short Admiral looked down at her with a grin.

  “It’s damned good to finally be here on a ship, although I know with my job that there are going to be precious few opportunities for that. I honestly look forward to visiting your fine vessel as often as possible just to get my feet on a deck.”

  He turned back to look past the shuttle he arrived on through the still open bay doors and at the Earth below them.

  “This is rather a dream come true.”

  “Well, we are all here, as you can see. Shall we adjourn to a conference room?” Casey signaled for the others to go on ahead.

  “First, allow me to introduce my handler. This is Commodore Monte, as she has chosen to introduce herself.” The woman stepped up behind the Admiral and offered to take Casey’s hand. Casey reached up and shook it.

  “To be honest, we are a team of three right now.” Replied Monte. “Kindness is our security, Vigilance is our analyst and scheduler, and Perseverance is the Naval officer. Kindness is usually in direct command of the drone, as she has the most practice using two legs.”

  “I’m glad to see that the Queen assigned us a minder with a sense of humor.” Quipped Casey.

  “We are making it work.” she answered with a slightly different voice. “Once we all can trust ourselves to walk on two legs we may split off into different bodies.”

  “Please follow me then.” Casey led them to the lift. They arrived at the conference room, and Casey saw that the princesses were off elsewhere having their own conference. The nine human pilots were left waiting professionally.

  The Admiral took the next several hours to lay out the goals and timetables for the next six months. The Iranian and Chinese pilots, according to their efficiency reports, were ready to take command of their own larger vessels like Casey. Four of the other seven were not far behind them. The final three needed remedial training in a few subjects. This spoke more to the quality of their home nation’s officer training programs than to their own motivation though, and it wasn’t being held against them.

  “So the Squidies are going to be flying the initial campus in next week. They will park it in the waters to the East of Nan Madol. Not too far from the old gun batteries. As we grow they will fly in identical expansion campus ships. Once we can fill a handful of those we can spread them out around the world if we decide that we need to. But it will probably be a year before we can start sending up students for hands-on experience on a ship. It may be five to ten years before we can start fielding full human crews on ships like this one.”

  “Sounds good to me.” volunteered Sub-Lieutenant Davies. “It gives us all time to get our feet under us and more experience on the ship.”

  “It is important to set expectations though.” Added Commodore Monte. “Your careers are likely to be very very long relative to what your species is used to. You should become accustomed to the idea that you will be in command of your ships as training vessels for a very long time. Also, people will join the Navy purely for the space training and then be poached by private industry for mining or science or transport and that will be OK, because it will grow your world’s economy. Things will seem to grow far too slowly in the Navy for a good many years.”

  “Not least of which will be because it will take a generation for humanity to fully understand the technologies. And that is before we even add in potential weapons technologies to the mix.” the Admiral stated, taking back the floor.

  “Until that day, continue to train hard and become the best ship Captains that you can. You are likely to be out here mostly alone for some time yet, because we aren’t even ready to start discussing criteria for subordinate officers for you all.” He looked around the room.

  “Any questions? Alright then, everyone take a break, I will be calling you in individually for follow-up discussions.”

  Casey led the way to the officer’s mess, to wait for her turn to speak to the Admiral.

  Kos-Api's Wild Ride, which is in the same setting and shares some characters with Casey's Space Adventures.