the lotto when one of the students pulls a ticket out of her cylinder and announces her new assignment to the rest of us, and I feel a jolt of surprised shock when I hear the name of her ship.
“NACS Versailles.”
There’s general groaning as our classmates consult their PDPs and find out that the Versailles is a tired little frigate from a now obsolete class that has long been superseded by more capable designs.
“That’s a rust bucket,” someone chuckles, but I don’t feel like laughing. Instead, I walk up to her as she steps away from the table, a dejected look on her face.
“Trade with me,” I tell her, and she looks at me in wide-eyed surprise.
“Are you joking?” she says. “Didn’t you pull the Polaris?”
I pull the slip of paper out of my pocket and hold it up for her to see.
“I did. What do you say? I’ll trade you my assignment for yours.”
“Are you serious? Why would you trade that ship for a frigate?”
“I have a friend on the Versailles,” I reply.
“Oh.” She looks at the nearest instructor, her expression a mix of incredulity and sudden excitement. “Can we just do that, trade off assignments?”
“I don’t see why not. They’re not finalizing our orders until tomorrow, anyway. Ask one of the petty officers.”
She walks over to one of our instructors and exchanges a few quiet words with him. When she comes back to where I’m standing, I can tell the instructor’s response by the excitement in her face.
“He says it’s no problem, as long as we both agree.”
“Well, I agree. How about you?”
“Are you kidding? Hell, yeah, I agree.”
I hold out my hand, and she gives me her paper slip. I hand her my own, the ticket to the most advanced warship in the Navy. She takes the slip gingerly, as if she suspects a last-minute hoax on my part. Then she walks off, looking over her shoulder with an expression that clearly implies I must have lost my marbles.
The next morning sees me packing up my things and stuffing them into a duffel bag again. The staff office has our final orders ready, and we all file in one by one to pick up our official printouts. We’re all dressed in our Class A uniforms, because that’s the required smock for reporting to a new unit, and I notice a few of my fellow trainees glancing furtively at the small collection of ribbons above my left breast pocket.
All of us have assignments on Navy ships, so we board shuttles to Gateway Station.
The Versailles is docked in a far corner of the Gateway fleet yard. I have to traverse what seems like miles of increasingly narrow and dirty corridors before I finally reach the docking collar that says NACS Versailles FF-472 on the sign above it. There are two Marines guarding the airlock, both wearing the Marine Corps version of ICU battle dress, and carrying sidearms in thigh holsters.
“I’m new to the ship,” I say, and hand my orders form to one of the Marines. “Where can I find the XO?”
The Marine looks at my order printout and looks at my breast pocket.
“Uh, try the CIC. You the new Network guy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go through the lock, follow the gangway to the central fore-and-aft corridor, and turn right. You’ll get to an elevator bank. Ride down to Deck Five. CIC will be straight ahead as you step out of the elevator.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I take my order form back, pick up the duffel bag I had rested on my foot, and render a sharp salute in textbook TA fashion. The Marine corporal salutes back, and I step past him into the airlock to set foot onto my new ship for the first time.
The Versailles is showing her age. She has a patina of wear almost everywhere. The flooring in the gangways is smoothed out from decades of constant foot traffic, and the markings on the bulkheads and walls look like they have been refreshed and painted over many times. The interior of this ship is a little more cramped and a lot more worn than the fleet destroyer simulator back at Great Lakes. As old as the ship is, however, every deck and gangway is neat and clean. The floors are worn, but there are no supply crates and broken equipment piles in the corridors like at Gateway.
I take the elevator down to Level Five. CIC, the Combat Information Center, is hard to miss. It’s a big, circular room that takes