NationStates Jolt Archive

Lieutenant Honor Caron wiped a strand of dark hair from her face as she stared out the window of the military transport jet. She was on her way to Weyr as part of the officer exchange program. It did strike her as odd that Weyr, an anarchy, had preferred officer exchange over the student and purely cultural programs. Still, they had and Honor was excitedly, if a little nervously, on her way to serve in the military of what, to the Danaan mind, was the most alien of friendly powers.

It certainly was a friendly power. Weyrean soldiers had fought side by side with Danaans in both Akaton and the Resurgent Dream during the Demon and Balor Wars respectively. The Weyreans had also, as Honor knew, given an unprecedented gift to High Queen Agwene.

All the same, the concepts of law, order, public policy, all these things were fundamentally different in Weyr. Honor wasn't sure what they would be like. When her plane landed, she disembarked and saluted the ranking officer. "Lieutenant Honor Caron reporting for duty, sir."

((OOC: Obviously, it it's a woman, she'll say ma'am))

Wye Int'l Skyport
Windy Country Banner District
Southern Wye City

"I suspect we should be embarrased," the senior noncom was saying.

"For what?" Andrei Lebedyev blinked.

"The Daanans expect a real airfield, I expect."

"Really?" the captain feigned surprise. "You mean like the airport expects you not to smoke?"

"Point taken, sir," the troll leaned against the wall of the hemispherical building, shaded from the demon sun by the rising cylinder of Skydock Eight with its everpresent swarm of shuttles and skyships. From the distance he looked almost human, almost until the onlooker realized that Corporal gro-Ishedr was actually nine feet tall -- ten feet with the hat and boots.

Inbound in ten, traffic control made Lebedyev snap out of his heat-induced torpor. He brushed a few flakes off his shoulders, streightened as the Daanan transport taxied to the gate. They weren't going to be using the gate, but the logistics side almost had a seizure at the mention of getting fuel trucks and especially military vehicles out into the field.

"Captain Andrei Lebedyev, First Company, Third Banner Division," he said in an utterly un-Weyrean accent, switching to English, remarkably close to that of Oxford, a stark contrast to the bright green hair and elongated ears. "Welcome to the First Distributed Kingdom of Weyr, lieutenant."

"Corporal Esandr gro-Ishedr," the troll should have grunted, or made some sort of animal sound. He didn't. Chest out, head high, hand raised, he resembled a recruiting poster for the old General Infantry. Despite the equatorial heat and humidity of Weyr, only made worse by the jet fuel fumes and fusactor exhausts, the heavy jackets worn by both officers were utterly out of place, but so was the six-wheeled armored transport parked off to the side with its unmanned and apparently unmannable gatling.

"Bags?" the captain asked.

Caron grabbed her bags. "I have them, sir." She smiled a little, moving to follow the captain.

Blue = Weyrik
Black = English
“Great,” the captain nodded, noting honor didn’t look completely incompetent, or like a stuck up bitch.

A blast of frigid air washed out of the transport as the corporal opened the rear hatch, exposing a well kept, if rather battered interior that looked older than the year and a half it had been in service with the Defense Force. Besides the driver in the front, a private was reclining in the chair by what were the controls for the gatling gun on the top of the vehicle.

"Argh, you're letting the heat in." the gunner grumbled in Weyrik.

"I'll let your heat out. Anything new?" gro-Ishendr quickly folded himself into the transport, taking up half of a space that could have easily accommodated six people and all of their equipment. The captain waited, strategically positioned to catch the best part of the rapidly warming air wave coming out of the compartment.

"Nope. The Hill wants to know if he's arrived."

"Yes, yes she has," Lebedyev put a slight emphasis on the gender, getting in after the corporal.

[colour=blue]"Great, I'll tell them,"[/color] the job of radio operator fell on the gunner because he was closest to the controls, and because he had nothing else to do in an urban setting. "Wait, she?" he peered over gro-Ishendr, trying to get a look at what was, near as anyone in the actual Defense Force could tell, was the new member of the First Company, Third Banner.

"Watch it," the driver called back, without turning, which would have not in any case have given her a view of the gunner.

Lebedyev sighed inwardly, as the transport began to move.

"Lieutenant Honor," gro-Ishendr said remarkably clearly for his position. "PFC Thurston and PFC Bell."

The armored transport jolted, before settling onto a smooth surface, now off the skyport property and in Wye City proper. The firing slits along either side were closed, but openable. Three small video panels provided a relatively clear, if not interference-free view of the exterior, one of the rear and two of the sides. They were, it appeared, on some sort of urban highway which, some moments later, dipped underground and into a tunnel.

"Ma'am," they didn't salute, mainly because there was no room, and PFC Bell was concerned with getting through high-speed traffic on a roadway that had no speed limit, as evidenced by an utter lack of any signs designating such a restriction.

"Ladies and gentlemen," PFC Thurston's voice rose over the whine of subEtha-powered engines. "We are entering Wye City. Half of it hates us, and the other half is going to hate us by the end of the day so, buckle up." There was a definite lack of seatbelts. There was a slight lilt to his voice, the words a bit too soft, the consonants somewhat blurring with the vowels.

"Okay," Lebedyev chuckled. At a hundred odd kilometers an hour, lights and passing cars and trucks flashing on small displays, the ride was fairly smooth, even if the permacrete the highway was made of was a century old. "The Third Banner covers all of the Windy Country. That includes Wye City, Tripoint, and Falme.” A fast calculation would have told Caron that somewhere between five and ten thousand soldiers covered over a quarter of Weyr’s total territory, and three of its most populous cities. “You are attached to the First Company, and we stay in Wye City along with the rest of the Banner for most of the year. The chain of command makes the corporal directly below you, and me directly above you. I haven't recieved any orders about your post, so you'll be taking over for Lieutenant Qyn.”

"Her?" Thurston grombled quietly into the lieutenant's ear.

"She can't be worse," gro-Ishendr responded quietly, watching the rear viewscreen, which now showed an oversized two-decker bus tailgating them. On and off ramps flashed by, adding and taking away vehicles from the twelve-lane 'underway', some apparently leading down into the lower levels of the city, others back to the surface.

Caron nodded to both PFCs as she entered the vehicle. "Pleasure." she said simply. She paused at the words of the driver. "Why does half the city hate us?" she asked curiously.

"Oh, because four years ago the flyboys," the gunner pointed up at the low roof of the transport, indicating space. "Got half their fleet hijacked, and didn't do jack unti subEtha shells started going down their and our collective asses. Half the city knows it wasn't our fault the idiots couldn't keep track of who had a finger on the trigger, and the other half doesn't."

"Understood." said Caron. Weyr was going to take some getting used to.
...
Meanwhile, an ocean going naval vessel pulled up into a Weyrean port. Lieutenant Laura Crews, wearing her dress uniform and carrying her bags, appeared at the head of the ramp. She was a short woman with curly brown hair and a quiet expression. Stepping down the ramp, she saluted the commanding officer and snapped to attention. "Lieutenant Laura Crews reporting for duty, sir!"

Third Banner
"Don't scare the lieutenant," gro-Ishendr grumbled.

"Will do, sir," Thrston grinned from ear to ear.

"How much experience have you had?" Lebedyev inquired almost casually.

Southwatch
From the pier lieutenant Crews was greeted by a perfectly ordinary naval installation, nestled against the far western edge of Southgard. Shipyards and machine shops stretched eastward, before vanishing into glass and steel skyscrapers which, while not as massive as those of Wye City, dwarfed the buildings on the mainland Weyr to the north, across the sound. That was Trinity, and the naval cannon mounted on the bluffs overlooking Southwatch and Southgard from the south, and at the edge of the wavebreakers, were quite clearly meant to fire on it, and had fired on it during the fallout from the Sixty-Minute War.

Southwatch proper appeared to be a well-maintained minor naval installation, flanked by two wavebreaks and covered from the front by a sea wall of old ships filled with permacrete and sunk. Floating piers, some apparently converted floating hulls, projected from the concrete seawall that ran down the shoreline. Seagulls cried overhead, swooping between the masts of the well-maintained dozen odd vessels, most of them clearly meant for patrol rather than real warfare.

"Lieutenant Crews, Lieutenanant Irenna Blake, CO of the Woglinde. Admiral Storm is indisposed," the captain was a perfectly ordinary woman, jet-black hair bleached by the sun, salt, and whatever else could be found in the waters off the Weyrik coast, in a uniform pressed and neat but not starched and creased to the sort of perfection seen in popular media. It was a dress uniform in that it did not come with five layers of flak jackets, and had a somewhat shinier rank insignia and a series of buttons denoting actions and battles which, in this case, say that she has been with the Maritime Force in its various incarnations for almost thirty years and was responsible for a good chunk of the shipping lining the mouth of Wye River, whose wide brown band begins some kilometers eastward and stretches north. The combat boots in this case were utterly out of place, but the Maritime Force did not want to spend money outfitting its personnel with shoes that could only be worn off duty anyway. "We leave tomorrow." If the lieutenant said anything unnecessarily, she didn't show it. "Let's get you settled in, meet the hands."

"Four years." Caron answered.
...
"Yes, ma'am." Crews said, moving to follow the other woman.
...
Lieutenant Angel Viglianno brushed her dark hair from her olive face as her airplane landed in Weyr. She disembarked and saluted her commanding officer. "Lieutenant Angel Viglianno reporting to duty, sir!"

Third Banner

Lebedev had almost no information on who his new platoon leader was going to be. The Defense Agency was very good at balancing the budjet and doing its research into promising projects, but day to day logistics were something the uniformed services that were subordinate to it quickly learned to handle themselves as best they could. Which was why Lebedev was using the time spent in getting to the base in learning as much as he could about the lieutenant, and which was why the questions asked between him and the corporal leaned towards figuring out just what Caron's background was.

***
Southgard

The Woglinde resembled an angular submarine, with a squat 'conning tower' superstructure and a sloped hull the greater part of which was underwater. In shor, it was a modern-day ironclad with a pair of turrets at the fore, four gatling mounts, and few hundred multipurpose missile tubes behind the superstructure's low antennas and small landing pad.

"Ma'am," the marines on station at the gangway stood a little straighter.

"Lieutenant Crews, privates Joachim and Miyazaki," lieutenant Blake nodded. The interior of the ship was cramped by civilian standards, and average by Weyrean measures. Creaking, and a low thrum, the sound of water hitting the deck and promising, Irenna knew, a good storm overnight, were the only sounds inside the ship. Everything had been stowed away over the previous several days. The ship was, in fact, supposed to have left two days before, but was held up in order to replace its executive officer.

Signs stenciled in black blocky letters on the bulkheads pointed to sections such as the Engine Room, Berthing (crew quarters), the CIC, or the Flight Deck (UCAV hangar). Tubing ran along the overhead. The dry composite deck tightly gripped shoe and boot soles. Thick portholes let in sunlight that augmented yellow sunlamp bulbs. While nothing was actually broken down, most equipment was worn with use, like the composite deck, whose surface was not as skidproof along the middle.

Laura Crews' compartment was below the superstructure, forward of the enlisted crew living space and behind the fusactor, with a thick porthole looking directly at the pier. There was enough space for a fold-out bunk, a fold-out desk, and a series of stowage spaces that should have been enough to accomodate her belongings. A persCom screen sat just above the desk, with a wireless keyboard nestled in a compartment right beneath. A stack of printed material with titles ranging from 'So you've decided to join the WMSDF' to 'Marine Boarding procedures Manual'.

"The compartment is yours, keys are in the door, literature is on the desk. O-club opens in two hours. Tattoo is at twenty-hundred, Reveille is at oh-six-hundred. You go on duty at six-hundred tomorrow. Report to the tee-pee-u Transient Personnel Unit between now and then so the Hill doesn't throw a fit. Any questions?"

Show some intitiative, was the subtext the captain hoped she was carrying through. She wasn't about to tell Crews everything.

The procedure was not normal for most navies, where Crews would have walked up to the ship, had her orders signed by the Officer of the Deck, had been shown her berth by the Master at Arms, and had been taken around the ship and base by yet another person. But that was for navies where a deepwater cruiser had a complement of a hundred instead of thirty.

Caron rode along, answering all questions.
...
"What will be my assignment tomorrow, ma'am?" Crews asked,
...
Viglainno waited for a response.

Third Banner
Third Banner was a regular brigade of three thousand odd soldiers, and that meant it took up quite a bit of space. It was also where a good number of new recruits went after specialization training. In all, it was a normal military installation, except for the loud reports coming from a tank firing range further south. That didn't really matter. What mattered was that a major was waiting for the captain when the armored carrier pulled into the lot. A brief exchange in Weyrik, no salutes given because neither officer was wearing any cover, gro-Ishendr said something along the lines of 'show the lieutenant around' to PFC Thurston and PFC Bell, who stood a little stiffer at attention -- it didn't do to look sloppy in front of the Big Man.

"Ma'am, if I can get your bags," Bell's words were between a statement and a question.

"The corporal wants us to show you the base," Thurston added.

"After we drop these off."

Southgard
"Get to know the boat," Blake responded. "I assume you've been on a destroyer before."

Northgard
Cut directly into the northern flank of Mount Weyr, Northgard resembled Southgard down to the almost-white piers, the gun emplacements, and the low, grayish structures. Except that Northgard's piers projected into the air a thousand feet above the ground, and in some cases above surf that crashed against cliffs and rocks worn smooth over the millennia since the Home Island was raised out of the water by the Tower's thaumages. If there were actual runways, they were not evident.

"Lieutenant Imura, Third Air Squadron. Welcome to Northgard. If you're that eager to fly, we'll strap you to a Zero and chuck you out the tube," the lieutenant grinned, squinting slightly against the sun reflecting off the mostly tranquil ocean. If Lebedyev's ears stuck out of his head at almost right angles, Imura's drooped down, appearing softer and less militant.