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assigned to patrol a rear area or escort a hospital ship back to Earth or Alphacen, right? 
    Max had a lot to do and not a lot of time in which to do it.  For the next several hours, he was going to be nothing but assholes and elbows.  His first errand, though, was going to be a pleasure—a trip to the Quartermaster to draw the uniforms, patches and, most important, the coveted Command in Space Badges (one for each uniform) and Lieutenant Commander’s insignia that went along with his new posting and rank.  Then, he needed to belly up to a work station to access everything he could learn about the Cumberland and her crew.

Chapter 2
    08:53Z 21 January 2315
     
    Max sat in the co-Pilot’s seat of the transferpod as it glided across the seventeen kilometers of space that separated the Halsey from the Cumberland .  There was no sense of motion, except when the pod was nudged gently every few minutes by short growling burns from its maneuvering thrusters.  He would have preferred to pilot the pod himself, but there were things that Commanding Officers of Rated Warships did not do.  They did not carry their own gear (his gear had been sent over by a different pod and, presumably, had already been stowed in his quarters).  They did not pour their own coffee, unless they were alone.  They did not shine their own boots.  And, most emphatically, they did not pilot their own transferpods. 
    At this distance, and with the fleet moving slowly through the shadow of the tawny, ringed gas giant world that was the fourth planet out from this particular star, not even the outline of the Cumberland could be seen—only the winking pinpoints of red, green, blue, and white running lights and the barely visible white rectangles of the occasional viewport.  Max longed for a good look at his new command, even though Union warships were never very exciting to look at.  They were all essentially long squared cylinders (or long rounded boxes) with the rounded bluntness of the sensor array fairing on one end and sublight propulsion systems on the other, with much of everything in between studded with an apparently haphazard array of smaller cylinders, antennas, weapons ports, point defense turrets, missile launch tubes, field emitters, and other mechanisms that helped the ship find the enemy, elude the enemy, confuse the enemy, or—Max’s favorite—blow the enemy to hell. 
    Even as he drew closer, the lines of the vessel stubbornly refused to resolve themselves.  Union Warships were jet black, their hulls coated with a polymer that absorbed light and most other forms of electromagnetic radiation so as to make the ship more difficult to detect.  With running lights off and viewports shuttered, she was virtually invisible to the naked eye and darned hard to spot even with sensitive instruments.  Even now, with running lights on, docking hatches illuminated, and viewport shutters open, the eye could not trace out her shape and lines from the disconnected dots and blobs of light which appeared to be floating in the darkness, unrelated to one another.  The pod was headed toward a blinking circle that indicated the Main Docking Port through which he would gain entrance to the ship.  The young Able Spacer 2 nd Class piloting the tiny vessel guided it with practiced precision toward its destination.  When the pod was ten meters from the port, he brought it to a stop and keyed the autodock sequence.  Control of the pod transferred automatically to the Cumberland which rotated the pod 180 degrees to bring its airlock in contact with the hatch and extended the docking seal.  A slight hiss followed by two distinct thumps signaled to Max that the pressures had equalized between the two vessels and that both sets of outer airlock doors—those for the pod and those for the Cumberland —had opened.
    A recorded voice announced “initiating artificial gravity” as the Cumberland ’s gravity was extended through induction into the pod.