Title: Ship of The Line: Between the Steel and the Stars
Author: Knife Hand
Feedback: Constructive feedback appreciated, flames unappreciated
Spoilers: Nothing Specific.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy, Starship Troopers, Space: Above and Beyond or Babylon 5... I would buy them all but I am broke.
Summary: When Eathan's Halloween spell hit a powerful and unexpected entity, the result changes the entire world and Humanity's path to the stars. (Buffy/Starship Troopers/SAAB/Babylon 5) Ship of the Line response.
Xander stretched as he exited his Command Power Armour, assisted by Willow. He was mindless of his own nudity but did appreciate the way Faith's breasts were pushed out as she reached up and scratched between her shoulder blades, embarrassing the one of the new Navy Techs who had helped her out of her Marauder Armour. Two other Navy Techs were helping Oz and Jonathan out of their Armour, while Steven, Kim, Marcus and Ellen waited their turns. Xander and Faith moved over to the lockers in the Armoury Bay where their uniforms were stowed and began to get dressed, joined a minute later by Oz and Jonathan.
They had just finished another night time patrol and were finding ever fewer Vampires and Demons on their patrols.
"How are you going with the modification to the Training schedule?" Xander asked.
"The Candidates are Spec Ops, so we took out a lot of the early basic training and conditioning stuff. That alone cut down about eight months, but we are still sitting at a minimum of ten months. A lot of the training will be not only the tech but the different operational scale. I mean most of these guys are used to working in close quarters with their teams while for a MI a mile distance between Troopers is a fairly tight formation in open combat. Plus having to deal with team co-ordination and formations using nothing but the Armour's sensor equipment." Faith mused as she pulled on her uniform pants. "I'm expecting a lot of drop-outs. Once we get enough rostered in for effective combat units, I would recommend going back to starting training with raw recruits. Again, there'll be a lot of drop-outs, but we can funnel them in to traditional militaries rather than being fully booted out, and we will not have to untrain bad habits out of raw recruits like we will the Spec Ops Soldiers. How about on your end?"
"I'm still catching hell from the Brass in regards to our Mustang Only rule for Officers." Xander said, pulling on his shirt.
"The Brass love their Officer Training Academies." Faith said with a grin, reaching for her bra. "Better to lose a platoon to an incompetent Officer with the right training than admit that some Enlisted can be good Officers."
"Plus, it limits their current pool of Officers to come to MI Candidate Program. I think there are five Officers out of the whole group of three hundred candidates." Xander replied.
"Still going to have the Officers go through H&MP?" Faith asked.
"Of course." Xander replied. "And I expect that will flunk out most of the Officers more than the Tech and Training will. And once we set up OCS, H&MP will be in that too."
Now fully dressed, Xander, Faith, Oz and Jonathan walked out of the Armoury Bay, while the rest of the MI team were still getting dressed. They heard the sound of rifles and wandered over to the shooting range where they saw the new Marine Rifle Platoon practicing with their newly issued M590 Assault Rifles. The MI troopers had tried the M590 Rifles and found them quaint compared to the weapons on their Powered Armour. Regardless, every single MI Trooper had scored a perfect Expert Marksmanship Rating with the M590 the first time they picked up the weapon.
A few of the Marines in the shooting range noticed the MI and a mummer went through the Marines at the different uniforms and the reputation of the MI.
"Everyone in the gym in two hours." Xander ordered. "I've got some paperwork to do."
"You and me both." Faith grumbled. "Club tonight though."
Xander smiled as he walked to his office. Faith was more disciplined but she was still a firebrand and would party hard tonight.
Giles, Jenny, Joyce, Buffy and Xander all sat around a table in the meeting room associated with Giles' office. Just over a year had passed since the world changing Halloween.
"What is the latest status of the Space Cavalry and the MI?" Giles asked.
"The latest class through, which graduated last week, for Space Cav fills out the four Squadrons for the Penrith and the next class will be graduating in about two months." Buffy said.
They had been staggering classes of Space Cavalry, so they always had at least a few classes at different stages of training coming through the pipeline.
"The MI have fifty-seven trained Troopers in total." Xander said. "We have split into two short Platoons of twenty-five, including myself and the other Lieutenant who graduated. The remaining seven, under a former Green Berret Sergent with a training specialisation, are four months into training the first batch raw recruits from scratch. We started out with two hundred and are down to one sixty. Five of the drop-outs were injured and the rest quit MI training. All the injured have recovered and two chose to return to civilian life, alongside six of those who quit. The rest have transferred to other services. Current estimates are between eighty and one hundred of them actually making it to graduation."
"Ok, so you are both happy for the combat capabilities of your current forces?" Giles asked, getting nods from Buffy and Xander, though Xander's was a bit reluctant. "Good, because we have deployment orders. The Penrith and The Monash are to be deployed alongside four destroyers and two cruisers and a supply ship which have passed their shakedown cruise. Our orders are to start reconnaissance on nearby star systems."
The Destroyers were built by the same company that had made the Carrier Penrith, but they were much smaller, more manoeuvrable and were designed around heavy central line rail cannons with a lot of defensive turrets and were moderately armoured.
The Cruisers were designed by the consortium that had built The Monash. They are half the size of the Monash and have no space for an MI contingent but were heavily armed and armoured like the Monash and had very powerful central line laser. The supply ship was lightly armoured, had only a few defensive weapons and large amount of cargo space, made by a new company that had sprung up over the last year.
There was another Carrier and another Combat Troop Transporter under construction by the relevant companies, but they were concentrating on Destroyers and Cruisers, which were smaller and could be built faster, for their greater capacity to potentially defend earth. The next few Graduating classes of Space Cavalry had their SA-43's on standby and would, for the time being at least, be stationed on Earth as a reaction force.
There were a few other companies that had jumped into the new space construction field. One had almost completed a colony ship and was working in partnership with another company that was working on terraforming technology. Their stated goals at the moment were to colonise Mars and the moons of Jupiter but, known only to the company and the Space Navy, their ship had the same interstellar dive system as the Monash, the Penrith and the other Naval ships. There were several companies racing to establish a mining presence in the Asteroid Belt. One military contractor was working or a space based construction yard and another was working on armed satellites that could be seeded in orbit.
"Our mission will be twofold." Giles continued. "Firstly, assess for any possible threats, and second, to locate resources and potentially colonisable planets. Without terraforming, if possible, but with if necessary. Scheduled departure is in twenty days. Jenny, Joyce, there will be a meeting with the other ship captains tomorrow morning. Do what you need to in order to be ready to depart on time. Any further questions?"
There were none, so Giles dismissed them and they got up to see to their preparations.
TBC….
A/N: for those who have not read the Startship Troopers Novel, H&MP is History and Moral Philosophy. It is a course in MI OCS (and a version is in high schools as well). In OCS if you fail a course you go back to your unit at your old rank, if you fail H&MP you may get kicked out of the MI regardless of your combat performance review and if they otherwise think you would make a good Officer.