My uncle's meeting with the fleet's high command was brief, but necessary.
“Admiral Banneker-Jackson, I want you to go over how you vaporized 19 entire ships in the enemy's possession slowly and carefully; we just need to understand.”
“Mr. Gelinek, I just exported the flaws that caused the fleet half a century ago to decommission the entire Cepheid-class of fleet vessels. My only advantage was just being old enough, at age 82, to remember when and why that happened.”
In short: the Cepheid-class of vessels were state-of-the-art, and theoretically would have made Warp 10 and beyond easily possible, except that the protective fields a vessel needs to survive the strain of traveling that far above light speed for any appreciable period of time could only be calibrated and brought on line manually. The people sent by the enemy to steal those 20 ships didn't know that: they just assumed switching gears was automatic. A few of them did a bit of research and realized what they had to do … only to not know that the computers of said ships did not have protection from being hacked in that specific manner and ordered to power the fields back to the automatic settings for below Warp 10. One thief with said knowledge surrendered, and so one of those vessels survived. The other 19 are still subatomic dust, orbiting the nearest star.
In other words, the people who had the Cepheid-class vessels decommissioned knew Benjamin Banneker-Jackson was coming. They just didn't know it would be him specifically, and that he would use his ability to keep the human-led consortium's enemies from getting to those ships.
At this point, the conversation the civilian portion of the high command wanted to have was over; Adm. Banneker-Jackson simply answered the question. Mr. Gelinek had a second question, however.
“What else do you remember, Adm. Banneker-Jackson?”
“Quite a lot, sir – in fact, Commodore Wilhelm Allemande and I were working on a project to find older vulnerabilities in both fleet setups and settlement setups and get to them before they get to us, before the incident with the Farragut caused the Amanirenas to have to break mission."
Mr. Gelinek looked at the eight full fleet admirals also present.
“I trust you know what needs to happen here with Adm. Banneker-Jackson,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Gelinek,” Adm. Martti Talvela said. “It has just been a matter of various matters in our authority needing the attention of the finest science officer of his generation, and really as you see, Adm. Chulalaangkorn's group also made use of the rear admiral's unique penchant to wonderful use.”
“I hate to give him back to your group, Adm. Talvela,” Adm. Chulalaangkorn said, “but indeed it is time for him to return to the all-important work he and Cdre. Allemande were doing in a more structured way.”
And, just in the nick of time – we swooped back to Earth to find Cdre. Allemande doing what he was best known for.
“When are you supposed professionals going to stop making decisions based on your favorite childhood cartoon characters – I assure you that just because it looks like a smiling purple alien penguin, it is not! Did you sleep through the Academy's whole module on the dangers of anthropomorphism in space, Commander?”
“He was a captain before he took that call, Captain Biles-Dixon,” Lt. Jorge Almuz my chief communications officer said.
Cmdr. Helmut Allemande, my first officer, just sighed before saying, “Cousin Wilhelm has made a new commander, a new lieutenant commander, and a couple of lieutenants out of some old men today.”
The above alien does seem to be wearing a smile, but what we are actually looking at corresponds to the uvula that dangles at the back of a human throat. The dark area is an entire compound mouth of a fresh-water creature that was mis-categorized on a planet humanity was intending to settle, and, fortunately for humanity, Cdre. Allemande, at 95 years old, remembered why the decision was made not to do that six decades earlier. Some folks about half his age brought the planet back up for settlement, not having read through why the generation of their parents said no.
“When you think you see Sitplove the Alien Penguin, but you are really looking at a cross between a jellyfish and a piranha from another planet, and you don't do your research, things can get ugly,” Adm. Banneker-Jackson said.
In short, the Guvterian Jellyfish can dissolve a human finger in all of five seconds, and once the smell of that is in the water and the whole swarm shows up, a whole human can be dissolved and slurped up in about a minute. The whole planet does not contain these, but because the local star is going through a higher flare period, the planet is warming and we know that this creature will be in all but the coldest regions over the next century – and the youngest ones are small enough to get through standard water filters and eat you up from the inside.
This is why a whole bunch of officers got newly minted at new ranks through demotion by Cdre. Allemande on a single afternoon, and the fleet saved a shipload on their potential retirement.
“I am so glad we are going to get back to work together on these, Admiral, because there is a lot of work to do,” he purred sweetly to my uncle, “and because dealing with these people who don't handle their business is very difficult. Their blood pressure can't take it!”
My uncle just started laughing.
“I've missed you too, Commodore,” he said. “I had to vaporize a couple or 19 starships to get back into the right frame of mind!”
Both of them had a good laugh about that.
“Yeah, I'm just going to go do an additional inspection of engineering, Captain,” Lt. Cmdr. James Doohan said. “Not that there is anything out of place, but, I like my blood pressure where it is, and you know as soon as the commodore comes aboard he is going to walk the ship!”
“Oh, he thinks you are the best engineer there is in the fleet,” I said, “and there is no reason for you to risk your retirement schedule changing his mind, so go ahead and do that, Lieutenant Commander, and keep your blood pressure in the right place!”