HMS Excellence

[Hyperwave22]

***Pre-Note - Out-of-Character***

This thread is designed for stories based out of the HMS Excellence's fleet. This is one of the largest Bretonian Armed Forces Fleets and it has no direct correlation to SF to keep this a more open thread. While I decided to set this thread up so that I could develop more characters within the BAF (what can I say, I Bretonia is amazing), anyone can post here from the viewpoint of a soldier/officer within the fleet. The admiral of the fleet is a brilliant young woman by the name of Qiana Abelard. Everyone else in the fleet is up to each poster's discretion. Finally, please do not write for others' characters unless they have given you permission, and have fun with it.

***In-Character***

Looking out of the nearest view port on the Bretonian Armed Forces transport brought Bernhard Richter back to reality. He stood up from the table that his food was placed on and walked closer to the viewport. The large Bretonian battleship that he was assigned to was docked in one of the repair bays and looked as magnificent as he had been told.

His thoughts drifted back to his home of Rheinland just then, but he quickly shook the memories from his head. He did not want to remember his life in Rheinland. He had emigrated to Bretonia for a reason.

Bernhard saw the ship he was on begin to dock at Southampton. He began to walk to the loading bay in the transport. After five minutes of walking, he saw that the loading bay was beginning to crowd with people. After a short wait, the doors opened, and the station of Southampton opened up before Richter's eyes. Hundreds of people were bustling around the shipyard when he entered the commons of the area, and found his way to his temporary quarters.

After spending three days aboard Southampton, Bernhard Richter was set to move onto the HMS Excellence. He considered himself very lucky to have been given the opportunity to work aboard this ship, but at the same time was quite nervous. He was probably going to be the only Rheinlander in the crew. Richter boarded the ship within minutes, and was lead to his quarters by a young bellboy. They were modest, but good enough for Richter. He had requested to not have a roommate; he didn't get along with them very often.

***

After a long night of no sleeping, Bernhard Richter got up from his bed and prepared to go to the mess hall for breakfast. While he couldn't stand Bretonian food, he was able to stomach it at his table where he sat alone. It was about now that one of the crew noticed his uniform and walked over to him.

"Hey, man," the soldier said, "you a tech too?" Richter grunted and nodded in acknowledgement. "Anyway," continued the other tech, "let's head on down to engineering. We're supposed to be there in five."

Glancing up at the clock, and realized that he had lost track of time. "Yes, let's go," he said to the other technician, and the two of them started at a near-run to engineering. However, it was ten minutes before they got there. The duty officer looked at both of them as they came in.

"Well, it seems that we have a few losers that don't know how to get places on time. Explain yourselves, BOTH of you," the officer said. The other young tech was the first to respond.

"We were at the mess hall sir, lost track of time, sir."

"Well, that had better not happen again, got it?"

"Yes, sir!" The duty officer went on to introduce himself.

"I am Reynolds Hazard, your new duty officer on this ship. I will be the one to keep you working, give you your assignments, and make sure you arrive on time." He looked over at Richter. "Anyway, hopefully you guys are competent enough to keep me off your back. Your palm comps should give you all the other information you need, along with your current assignment. They're over there on that table. Now, get to work ALL of you."

He looked over at Bernhard Richter. "You, get over here." Richter did as he was told and remained with the duty officer. "Now that I know why you were late, I want to know why you didn't answer my question."

Richter looked up at hazard, and said, "Sir, I do not speak English very well. I am from Rheinland you see, and I thought that since I was with that other tech, his answer would suffice." The duty officer looked at Richter.

"Well, it didn't. Get to work. Also, you had better be able to do your job better than you can speak English."

Richter, angry at Hazards walked over to get his palm comp and looked at his duties. It took him a little while to figure what he was expected to do, but he eventually got to work on some coolant systems near the ship core. The ship systems were new to Richter, so he did not know exactly how they worked. To hazard, he appeared to be worthless. Because, of this, Hazard began to assign Richter the easiest jobs that mostly required repairing basic universal systems, and moving equipment from the storage decks to engineering.

After several weeks of this, Richter realized that he was beginning to live the same life as he did in Rheinland. However, there was one upside: He had found somebody that he got along with that didn't treat him like his duty officer did. She treated him as a person and not scum. She worked in Supply and Ordnance, and hated Hazard for his treatment of Ricther and some others. The best part was that she was a Supply and Ordnance duty office, so Richter was able to gleam some defense from her.

His life began to look up after he began to date this woman, yet Hazard still tried everything he could to get Richter the worst jobs on the ship. This went on for weeks, yet Richter's entire life would be changed by one fateful day about seven weeks after joining the crew:

Richter had been sent down to get some pieces from Storage Bay A when the Excellence began to take fire from several Kusari ships in Dundee. The ship had just been assigned here, and this was its first time in combat since its personnel change. During a fight that Richter could only feel and hear, but not see, Richter was still sent down to get parts for engineering. He envied the others that were working on the engines and damaged core right now, and was thinking about going back to help anyway when there was a tremendous shaking on the deck. Richter looked up to see that a torpedo had blown through a bulkhead, but he also noticed that there was no atmospheric leak.

Realizing almost at once that the torpedo had not yet exploded, Richter ran to an emergency exit, but they had all been locked due to the hull damage in the area. Because there was no communication in the storage bay, Richter was stuck, alone, with an unexploded torpedo lodged into the ship a mere ten meters from where he was. It struck him then that he would have to attempt to disarm it himself.

Grabbing an environment suit, Richter secured himself and got to work on the torpedo before the hull was shaken too much. Shields were up at the moment, so the ship would not shake badly enough to detonate the torpedo. However, once they went down, Richter would surely die.

He grabbed what limited tools he had, and began to carefully examine the undetonated torp. He was relieved to see that it was of Kusari design. Rheinland worked with a lot of Kusari technology, so he understood it well. Remembering the layout of the weapon, he got to work on it immediately. Richter sliced open a small portion to gain access to several wires within the torpedo. Seeing the complexity of it, Richter realized that it would take hours to disable the torpedo in favorable conditions. He didn't have that luxury. Instead, he set to work on trying to disable the main explosive so that only the igniter would go off it shaken too hard.

After several minutes, Richter looked out of the viewport to see that the shields were failing. He had all but five minutes to finish his job on the torpedo. After three, he had finished. He backed away from it as soon as possible, but the shield only had a few more seconds left in it. And after about three minutes and seven seconds, the torpedo exploded.

Richter could feel the intense pain as the heat and shrapnel ripped through his environmental suit down to his flesh. The next thing he felt was the loss of pressure inside the ship, and him being pulled out into space, nothingness. Everything had slowed down for him. All Richter knew was that he turned around and said goodbye to the ship that had harbored him for the past few weeks. Said goodbye to the one thing that he lived for: his girlfriend. It was then that he felt the cold touch of death upon his skin, and swam in to blackness.

Richter, however, awoke to find himself lying in a hospital bed with another person in the dark room. He looked up to see his girlfriend there. There was another though. He could barely make the shape out with the darkness that pressed in on the room. After a few minutes, he saw Reynolds Hazard looking down at him.

"Sorry I doubted you, mate," Hazard said after a little while. I didn't realize that you had never worked with Bretonian systems before. I'll remember to help you out with those when you get back to work. Oh, and you did a hell of a job disabling that torpedo. It might have just been partial, but you saved yourself - and the crew of the entire ship." Richter's girlfriend looked down at him and whispered,

"He forgot to mention that he was the one that saved you. He was the icy touch you described. He had latched himself onto the ship in a suit and jumped out to get you."

"I said something about an icy touch?" Richter asked.

"In the ICU. You were pretty drugged out, though, I'm not surprise you forgot. Heck, do you even know what happened to you?"

"Strangely enough," Richter said, "I do. Maybe that's good, maybe it's bad. Either way, could you turn the lights on, Melina?"

"Sure thing." And Melina, Richter's girlfriend flicked the lights on.

---

Retired
A very big thanks to Dark Oddity who put my signature pic together