Excerpt: Broken Dawn

The arrival of the Starship Dawn was thought by many to be good omen. The ship’s name alone conjured forth images of new beginnings and of endless possibilities. And, being a diplomatic vessel, those to whom the Dawn came calling upon were appetent with the potential of good things to come. A ship called Dawn must surely be bringing with it promise and prosperity.
Those who served aboard the Dawn knew, however, that this was not the case.
In fact: Dawn meaning ‘daybreak’ was merely an accident of which language had been chosen by The Union to be the common tongue of its members. The ship’s name was, in reality, a passable transliteration of a word in the language of her builders; the closest translation of which was simply ‘useful’. Had another language been selected for use as Union Prime, the transliteration might have been more interesting. The true pronunciation of the Gammran word for ‘useful’ had more vowel sounds than ‘dawn’ and would be pronounced by a native speaker as ‘dawoouin’. Had Gammran been chosen as the common language for the members of The Union, the name would have been left alone; but Gammran was far down on the list of possibilities. The Sluuti word that sounded the closest to ‘dawoouin’ was ‘dunit’, which loosely translated to ‘snow on a properly groomed hillside with the suns at simultaneous zenith’. The Sluuti had three hundred and eleven words for snow; a prime factor in their very specific language having lost out in its bid to become the Union Prime. The Mangan language was a close second when the votes came in, and the Mangan word that would likely have been used for ‘dawoouin’ was ‘daan’, meaning ‘grove’, which wouldn’t have bothered anybody and would have perhaps led to less disappointment in the ship when it arrived on a planet and was not the paragon that the name ‘dawn’ brought to mind. However, it was the Feirin tongue that won out over all and the word ‘dawn’ that was chosen by the highest council of The Union for the name of the vessel.
The Union had been formed originally by the governments of the six planets that had fought together in the last war. In the first decades of the once tenuous alliance there had been a degree of insurgent fighting and no guarantee of a positive outcome. Many small battles had been fought, and the insurgent guerillas had met with some success in their efforts to cripple the fleet of space faring vessels in the service of the fledgling Union. By the time the insurgencies had been adequately put down, The Union discovered itself in drastic need of shipping capacity. It was then that the Dawn and others like her had been pressed into service.
Although the UTS Dawn was now operating as a diplomatic transport and humanitarian support vessel, she had begun her life as a less-than-ideal light battle cruiser. She had seen minimal service near to the end of the conflict that had resulted in the formation of The Union but hadn’t been of much use since. Her cannons had literally rusted off in the time between her last stint in battle and the day she was resurrected into her current iteration.
The ship had been discovered rotting in a pit, along with several other former ships of the line that had become too costly or too impractical to continue to operate in what the leaders of The Union had still called ‘peacetime’ in spite of the insurgence. As the period of peacetime unrest was drawing to a close, those in The Union’s seats of power had discovered that they no longer had the luxury of picking and choosing which vessels were to bear their flag. If it could fly, it had to, or things would collapse. And so, the PC Dawoouin had been brought back to life. They had hauled her out, washed her down, and she was re-christened as the UTS Dawn.
It was supposed to be bad luck to re name a ship, but the Highest Council of The Union, none of whom believed in luck, would not give their leave to a ship’s name remaining in a language other than Union Prime. And so the compromise of Dawn had happened. It was a fitting enough name for a ship intended to see diplomatic and humanitarian service, and close enough to the original that no one’s superstitions were likely to be offended. Yes, UTS Dawn was a perfect name as far as the Highest Council was concerned.
But it was a crock; and everyone on board knew it. The damned thing was as likely to fall apart as not and was hardly fit to haul garbage from one port to the next, much less the likes of Council members and dignitaries. Giving a ship like this one a name like that was akin to false advertizing as far as the crew was concerned.
You could never be sure if a posting to the Dawn was a privilege or a punishment. On the one hand, some of those who served a tour aboard the ‘barely useful’ (as the crew had come to call her) seemed to be rapidly promoted to one or another prime assignment. However, the ship had also become a sort of dumping ground for officers and enlisted men who had somehow or another screwed up their previous assignments. Those who worked in the command areas were among the best in The Union Fleet, and those who worked in the bowels of the ship were among the worst.
It was not a place anyone would have chosen to be.