2953-11-19 – Tales from the Service: A Personnel Matter
Replacing spacers and officers on veteran crews has always been a tricky prospect. No navy has ever been able to solve the problem completely; any system that tries to do a full psych-match for each replacement inevitably neglects sending any replacements to the most experienced and thus most culturally unique crews, and any system that focuses on filling rosters first inevitably places new personnel on crews they are not well suited to join.
Thankfully, recruitment has ensured that the number of personnel available for both replacments and filling out the crews of new vessels is more than adequate in both the Fifth Fleet and the Seventh Fleet, so the easy patch for the problem is for skippers to send back poor fitting personnel and replace them again. This, unfortunately, leads to certain crews always cycling five or ten percent of their complement without ever really initiating any of the newcomers to the community. It also ensures that a certain percentage of replacement spacers who have been cycled in and out of warship crews several times and thus, often through no fault of their own, have personnel files that make skippers unwilling to take a chance on them, thus increasing the chance they’re cycled back again the next time.
These spacers, though eager to do their part, are perennially drifting from ship to ship, outpost to outpost, without even the dignity of a rear-echelon posting.
Captain Sven Danielssen massaged his temples and closed the report he’d been reading on his desk holo-display. The smart thing to do was to approve the attached transfer request from his gunnery chief and not ask too many more questions. The pair of ratings had after all only been aboard for about three weeks, like most of the crew replacements Melirose Diver had taken on after the bad hit she had taken at Elmore’s End. It would be no surprise to anyone that some percentage of them – largely green spacer recruits from the Core Worlds – had proven a bad cultural fit for the veteran crew of a blooded Seventh Fleet light cruiser.
Of course, as one of the older cruiser captains in the Seventh and still commanding the same light cruiser he’d had at the war’s outbreak, Sven knew he was rarely accused of doing the smart thing. The mauling his Diver had suffered recently was largely due to his own command decisions, and he had been over the names of the thirty-four spacers maimed and fifteen killed in that action many times since. The smart thing to do was always to stay out of unnecessary trouble, but he had a bad habit of inserting himself into it.
After a few seconds’ consideration, Sven tapped his comms earpiece. “Lieutenant Ahmetov, I’ve just finished your report on the incident of yesterday, second shift. Bring the two ratings you named up here to my office.”
The response was, as usual of the precise, hard-driving gunnery chief, immediate. “Aye, Skipper. We’ll be there in five.”
Sven sidelined the channel and shook his head. No doubt, since it was now nearing the end of the first shift of the next day, the pair was already awake and grudgingly preparing for whatever punishment duty Ahmetov had assigned them to until he could get them off the ship. Had he made this request at another time, the gunnery chief would have relished the opportunity to barge into each one’s bunkroom and shake them out of bed unprepared for a meeting with the captain. Anyone who Lieutenant Ahmetov judged competent was treated extremely gently by their chief, but he was a terror to anyone who he thought incapable of performing to an acceptable level.
The problem, as always, was that Ahmetov, though he possessed a near-savant level understanding of relativistic gunnery and knew more than most engineers how to get the most out of Melirose Diver’s various weapons, was a poor mentor. He demanded too much out of his subordinates, all the way down to the most junior tech and the greenest gunner, with little interest in training the poor performers. In the peacetime Navy, this was fine; the crew could cycle through under-performing junior ratings every week or so until they had a few that passed his initial muster and were deemed adequate.
Wartime service, however, had proven this system brittle. The cruiser’s gunnery department had been ten ratings under strength going into Elmore’s End. If Ahmetov kept going as he was, it might be fifteen the next time they got into the thick of a proper fight. How many empty berths would it take before the ship’s ability to defend itself was meaningfully degraded?
Bad gunners and bad techs, of course, would definitely degrade the ship’s ability to fight. Lieutenant Ahmetov was right about that. The problem was that he didn’t seem to know the difference between moderately capaple and incapable. Anyone who wasn’t already approaching the ninetieth percentile was, in his view, a gross incompetent.
The office door opened to admit the Lieutenant, leading a pair of young men in the unmarked gray tunics, with only the ship’s insignia and their surnames displayed on each shoulder patch. The pair each snuck a look at Sven, saluted crisply, then folded their hands behind their backs, their eyes firmly fixed on the deck at the foot of his desk.
Ahmetov saluted, too, his salute as sharp as theirs, if briefer. “Captain, as requested, Spacer Halloran and Spacer Sung.” He gestured to each in turn. “I take it this is about the transfer recommendation?”
“It is.” Sven steepled his fingers and looked hard at each of the young men. Neither of them could be over twenty T-years old, but they both had the look of lifelong spacers about them. They’d probably been from merchant spacer families before enlisting, as many of the ratings were. “Our current orders will have us out here for at least another month. Do you wish me to reassign them to another department until then?”
Ahmetov scowled over his shoulder at the pair. “I can find a use for them for a little while, as long as there are no more... incidents.”
“Understood.” Sven nodded. “I’m sure you have better things to do than this personnel matter, Lieutenant. I’ll take it from here with your spacers.”
Ahmetov frowned in confusion, but with a little shake of his head, saluted again. “Understood, Captain.” He spun on one heel and exited the office without another look at his under-performing charges.