First Command (5 page)

As the centerpiece of the Singking Metro system, the Government Center Station was designed to be more ornate than any of the other stations. Where most of Singking’s Stations made due with aesthetic but also practical and highly functional concrete, glass and steel, the Government Center was adorned with polished marble, intricate mosaics, bronze sculptures, and gilded fixtures. Most people, Jonathan included, felt they had accidentally entered a tomb of a long dead king when they set foot in the Government Center Station. The Station’s central rotunda reinforced this feeling greatly. Unusual for the Singking’s Metro, the turnstiles were located at the end of the platforms rather than just inside the main entrance. The reason for this was apparent when one-stepped off the staircase.  No noisy escalators in Government Center, though they were well-hidden elevators reserved for the handicapped or infirm into the central rotunda. The rotunda measured twenty feet floor to ceiling, and had twelve vaulted doorways each ten feet high, eight of which led to the trains and four of which led to the surface. Above each doorway was a brilliantly inlaid mosaic depicting a different scene from Solaria’s history and between each doorway was an eight foot bronze statue of a significant figure in Solaria’s history. At the center of the rotunda was a massive twelve-foot statue of Ishan Whitaker himself. He had been the leader of the Glorious Revolution and father of the Second Republic. Stern faced and ever watchful with one hand clasping a copy of the Manifesto of the People, and his other hand was upraised, pointing toward the ceiling. If one’s eyes followed where the great man’s finger pointed, they would look up and see the twelve pointed Solarian Sun burst in the place of honor at the top of the rotunda. Jonathan had read somewhere that a few people had objected to placing the statue of Whitaker in a public train station rather than in a museum or the Capital. In fact, statues of him could be found in both, and in Founders Park, and in public places in most major Solarian cities. This particular display was symbolic because Whitaker had long been a champion of the Steader class and all the common men. Government Center Metro was designed to be a palace of the people, a reminder that with their labor the state and the people could accomplish great things. It was a noble sentiment, one Jonathan admired, however climbing the seventy-six steps to the surface he wished that sentiment had included escalators like all the other Metro stations.

As usual Jonathan took the west exit, which let him out on the western side of Mile Stone Park. The Mile Stone was a squat granite obelisk that was a little taller than a man, and was the point from which all distances on Solaria were measured. The exits to Government Center Metro were thus built to face perfectly north, south, east, and west. The Mile Stone was one of Solaria’s most famous, or perhaps infamous, monuments. In addition to the stone itself, four direction markers, which were slightly smaller versions of the Mile Stone, sat less than five paces from it. The Mile Stone and the direction markers were adorned with five sharp spikes. In days gone by, the heads of traitors had gone upon those spikes and from time to time they still did. Most recently, had been last year when a Civil Servant in the Ministry of Public Safety was caught selling government secrets to an agent of the Taos Dominion. The man had been convicted and hung and afterward his head had gone up on the spike with a neatly painted sign that read
Traitor
underneath so all would know his crime. A few human rights types howled loudly now and again calling the Mile Stone a monument to a bygone age of human depravity, but most Solarians took it in stride. Fewer than one or two heads graced the Mile Stone a year, so most viewed it as an effective deterrent. When there were no severed heads of convicted traitors decorating the Mile Stone, the park was a pleasant place bordered by Executive Avenue to the north, Service Street to the west, Liberty Avenue to the east, and Founders Street to the south where First Street ended in a T intersection.

Standing at the south end of the park looking down First Street you could just see the great dome of the Capital at Senate circle. Across Executive Street sat the sandstone building that was the Old Parliament House and now days served as the Premier’s residence, the Republic’s elected Head of Government and State. If one walked past the Premier’s residence, they would find the two Greek temple looking buildings that housed the Constitutional Court and the High Court of Justice. Across Liberty Street to the east, sat the marble and granite buildings of the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of the Treasury, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Industry and Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, all of the state’s most vital non-security related offices. Across Service Street, which Jonathan crossed every morning, extremely careful of the highly negligent ground car drivers, sat the imposing granite and marble structures which housed the Ministry of Public Safety which controlled the NPBI, the National Police Interior Troops, and the Custom and Rescue Service. Solaria’s principal senior law enforcement agency and paramilitary services, the largest structure by far was given over to the Ministry of Defense, which was flanked on the left by a great marble structure that held the Department of the Army, and on the right, which housed the Department of the Navy. It was the Navy building, which was Jonathan’s destination.

The Department of the Navy was officially named the Admiralty Building; just as the Department of the Army building was officially labeled the General Staff Building. Few people bothered to use the structures official names especially since the actual Admiralty, and General Staff were headquartered elsewhere. The Admiralty ran the Navy out of
Macran,
Solaria’s principle Navy base. The General Staff met at Kalidan Barracks in Singking’s suburbs due to its primary function as headquarters for the Armies Signals Command, thus allowing speedy communication with Army units scattered all across Solarian controlled systems, and the Joint Chiefs ran the whole operation out of the MOD building. That wasn’t to say the Department buildings sat empty, far from it. The Admiralty building didn’t host the primary combat command staff, but it still held the headquarters of all the Navy’s primary offices. The Office of Operations handled everything from deployment schedule to tactical exercises, and the Office of Logistics and Navigation kept the fleet fed and watered and was responsible for regularly updating all Star charts. The Office of Personnel handled assignments, recruitment, and training, and the Office of Shipbuilding was responsible for designing new warships and procuring them, along with maintaining the existing fleet.  Finally, there was the Provost Marshal’s office that handled the Navy’s internal discipline. The Office of Research and Development maintained a small headquarters in the Admiralty building, but they were primarily scattered across the Solarian systems working on various new and unpleasant ways to kill the enemy.

Jonathan showed his ID to the Marine Guard at the front door who waved him through. Jonathan was well aware that upon entering the building he was instantly scanned by a dozen different security devices, which if the computer controlling them had deemed him a threat would have stunned him with a enough electricity to give a Centari Leviathan a seizure. Thankfully the security people had ironed out all the bugs, mostly anyway. On occasion some poor sap got a shock for one reason or another, but in only one instance in the last ten years that Jonathan was aware of had the fellow who got zapped been an actual threat. After stopping off at the men’s room, Jonathan washed his hands and then checked himself in the mirror before proceeding to the office. This was Jonathan’s morning ritual. He rarely had time to make sure his uniform was in good order at his residence, and the sardine run that was his morning commute would mess it up anyway.

This morning Jonathan paused to peer at the man staring back at him in the mirror. Jonathan Pavel wasn’t tall; in fact he was short, standing five feet seven. He was approximately two inches over the minimum height to enlist in the Solarian Navy. He was a broad man though with thick shoulders and a well-muscled chest. In the academy, he’d been a boxer and more than a good one. He still trained on weekends, and did the occasional friendly sparring bout. His face wasn’t necessarily handsome, nor was it homely. He had his mother's eyes, which in bygone days would have been called oriental, and the color was a brown so dark many mistook them for black. His hair was a lighter shade of brown that he got from his father. He had acquired his father’s Mediterranean face and a skin tone somewhere between olive and brown.  Straightening his peaked cap once more, Jonathan exited the men’s room and climbed the wooden staircase to the third floor, and settled into his office.

Jonathan worked in the Navy’s section of the Joint Tactical Development Group, a collaboration between the Army, Navy, CRS, and National Police to develop response plans to various hypothetical scenarios ranging from terrorist attacks, famine, plague, natural disasters, or all out invasion. The Navy section of the JTDG, which included Jonathan, was made up of six officers commanded by Commodore Sun and supervised by Vice Admiral Keys, the head of the Office of Operations Tactical Development Department. Jonathan had been assigned to the JTDG for nearly a year. Ever since, through some unknown miracle, he’d been saved from commanding a supply depot in Levelflats. Compared to that misery, the JTDG was more than bearable. Seeing Commander Richard Ping come around the corner to his cubicle, Jonathan sighed inwardly. Of course some things made the JTDG far more difficult than say navigating a nova. Jonathan tried to avoid Richard by making a run to the coffee machine, but Richard, ever immune to social cues that mere mortals used to keep from bashing each other’s heads in with rocks, followed him into the break room. Now, Jonathan was trapped.

“I say, good morning Pavel.” Richard said cheerily, forcing a smile Jonathan nodded “Yes isn’t it, Richard.” Richard always addressed people by their last name and insisted on being addressed by his first, one of the many quirks of an odd man. Richard’s face changed from bovine happiness to bovine concern “Though I think it might rain later.” Jonathan didn’t have anything against Richard personally. In fact, it was hard to find a more pleasant chap. His animosity stemmed from Richard’s professional ineptitude. Richard Ping would have been a very successful middle class banker, or philanthropist, but he was one of
the
Pings, an older and more blue-blooded family there was not. A Ping’s signature was not only affixed to all three Solarian Constitutions, and the Declaration of Rights, but also the original colonial charter. 

Solarian society was divided into four social classes, a byproduct of how the colony had been established. When outfitting the expedition on Earth, the Solarian Pacific Colonial Trust had been an independent private firm unaffiliated with any government. As such the company had required a massive amount of capital to outfit what at the time was a twenty-year expedition to the Class A habitable world christened Solaria by its discoverers. To raise the required
funds
the company had persuaded upward of five thousand potential colonists to sink their entire net worth into the venture in exchange for massive land grants
,
on what was to be their new home, at a minimum of five hundred million Yuan each. These investors had been drawn from all across the Pacific Rim nations as well a small number from the European Federation and India. Though enough capital was raised, five thousand extended families were not enough to provided a sustainable workforce. So SPCT had began recruiting poorer citizens from the slums and barrios of Pacific Rim Mega Cities. Whereas the Investors had been paying passage for their entire family, the new recruits often came as individuals or small nuclear families that promised to repay their passage with labor. The end result was the Landed’s - the descendant of the original investor class who although their political clout had diminished still controlled roughly 40% of the Solarian economy while making up to 3% of its population. The laborer class had become known as Home Steaders or simply Steaders. They were the backbone of Solarian society. The other two social classes were Provo’s provisional citizens who had immigrated later, and weren’t afforded the right to vote until they had done military service or paid taxes for three years, though their children automatically became full citizens on maturity. Jonathan was among this class since his parents had been Provo’s.  The final class was Subjects, the citizens of Solaria’s numerous client states who were afforded the legal protections of Solarian law, and could join the military to become Provo’s but otherwise could only vote and hold office in their native states. It was a division that had caused tension, and occasionally violent unrest throughout Solarian history, but by and large it worked. Of course it could saddle some people with social responsibilities they might not otherwise care to have. When Jonathan had once asked Richard why he’d joined the Navy, Richard had in a moment of bitterness rare to his general demeanor said he really hadn’t had a choice. Richard’s father was a former Senator, with a distinguished army career and still a mover and shaker in the Nationalist and Judicalist circles. His uncle was a Vice Admiral in the Office of Personnel, and both his brothers were both Army officers, and his mother and sister both held posts in the diplomatic corps. Families like that didn’t let their sons, even the runts of the litter, become bankers. So Richard had gone to Overwatch four years ahead of Jonathan, and graduated bottom of his class and other than his Ensign cruise never set foot on a ship. He instead had been shuffled from one desk job to another while slowly climbing the ladder until he peaked out at an honorable middle rank and could retire to start a career in politics.  Jonathan didn’t begrudge the poor chap his lot in life. It just irked Jonathan’s professionalism to have such dead weight in his department. Still nearly useless Landed who were called glits, like Richard, were a fact of life in any aspect of Solarian society, and it was best to learn how to deal with them.