Counterstrike (Black Fleet Trilogy, Book 3) by Joshua Dalzelle Page B

man who claimed he was from twenty-first century Earth.
    “Colonel?” he called out as he approached the end of the flexible gangway. As the word left his mouth the flat white material of the Vruahn ship rippled and irised open into a hatchway.
    “Welcome aboard, Captain,” Blake’s voice called out from somewhere within the interior. "If you’ll step onboard we’ll get underway. We have a long way to go.”
    “If you say so,” Jackson muttered as he stepped over the threshold and onto the alien ship.
    The interior wasn’t what he had expected at all. In his mind he had envisioned exotic materials, indecipherable text on the walls, and strange, curving shapes. Instead, the ship looked oddly like something human engineers would design. There were even the requisite warning placards on the walls and hatchways cautioning people to duck or watch their steps.
    “This was done entirely for our benefit, of course.” Blake appeared from around one of the corners ahead, seeming to read his mind. “The first ships they built for us mimicked many of the design cues from the Carl Sagan and we’ve never seen any reason to deviate from that, although I wouldn’t mind a bit more in the way of creature comforts here and there. Let me show you to your quarters and then we can shove off.”
    “I see you’re becoming more comfortable with Fleet vernacular,” Jackson observed.
    “Just trying to fit in,” Blake smiled. “To be honest, there are more similarities between your Fleet and our old Navy than there is with the Air Force.”
    “I suppose it makes sense in a way,” Jackson said, following Blake until they came out of the narrow corridor and into a sprawling, wide passage that was at least as large as one of the main access tubes on the Ares . “And you’re the only person on this ship?”
    “Correct,” Blake said. “This main corridor runs down the centerline of the entire ship. It’s more for moving components and machinery than for people. She can carry up to one hundred and fifty crew members comfortably, while the two cargo bays can be reconfigured to haul up to a thousand in a pinch.”
    “That just raises more questions than it answers,” Jackson said. “I thought these ships were always designed just for you.”
    “They were,” Blake confirmed. “The first generation ships were actually little bigger than your cargo shuttles, but when we discovered we were being redeployed to defend human planets we asked for this iteration to be built with a larger crew in mind.”
    “Wait … each mission you deploy on you completely redesign your ships?” Jackson was utterly shocked.
    “Have to,” Blake said, leading him off another side corridor. “The Phage adapt each of their sub groups to target a specific threat. That’s why we were so easily able to defeat that many Alphas at Nuovo Patria. While these ships are extremely powerful, the fact those Alphas were built to counter your specific types of armaments and strategies made them completely incapable of standing up to the heavy energy weapons we employ on these ships.”
    “I see,” Jackson said. He let the conversation drop as he was led into a small suite that would have looked completely natural on a Terran starship from two hundred years ago. The casual comments from the colonel were new information and might be important when it came to how they were to move forward in allying with them. What troubled him was that he couldn’t tell if these little gems were being deliberately withheld during the previous meetings.
    “Go ahead and toss your pack here and then I’ll take you up to the flight deck,” Blake said from the hatchway. Jackson did just that and turned to continue following the colonel forward.
    The bridge, or flight deck, was nowhere near as spacious as what he had on the Ares . In fact, it was rather on the cramped side. There appeared to be two identical stations facing forward with an array of monitors and panels for each and