Ensign Year 1 (An Officer of the Union Space Fleet)

Montgomery Hale is seventeen, broke, and about to commit the biggest fraud of his life.

He's spent years fixing machines on a backwater space station, saving every credit for a fleet academy education he'll never afford. When a last-minute vacancy opens on the Union's flagship, he does the only thing a desperate kid with a talent for forging documents would do.

He fakes his way aboard.

Now he's an ensign on the most prestigious ship in the fleet, surrounded by officers who earned their commissions, flying a vessel he's never been trained to operate, and reporting to a captain who sees more than he lets on.

The ship's mission: chart a newly discovered passage through dangerous space to reconnect twelve colony worlds that have been isolated for forty years. People on those colonies are dying of treatable diseases. Children have never seen a supply ship. The clock is ticking, and Montgomery is at the helm.

No alien armadas. No galactic wars. No chosen-one prophecies.

Just a kid who's good with his hands, bad with people, and slowly learning that you can't fly a four-hundred-crew starship the same way you fly a junkyard skiff — alone.

Ensign is competence fiction in the tradition of Star Trek's best episodes — the ones where nobody fires a weapon and the crew solves the problem by being good at their jobs. It's about fixing what's broken, learning to ask for help, and discovering that the hardest part of being part of a crew is trusting them.

Hi all, Joe here. Former mechanic, current farmer. I'm a lifelong reader of military sci-fi, but it seemed like every book on my shelf ended the same way. Every book had a bigger war than the last one. The galaxy was on fire. Fleets of a thousand ships. Superweapons. The fate of humanity every other chapter. And somewhere along the way I started missing the old days. The episode where the captain has to negotiate a trade agreement with an alien species that communicates entirely through music. The one where the ensign accidentally insults a planetary elder by touching the wrong piece of equipment. The one where you live an entire lifetime on an alien world, raise a family, grow old, and then wake up on the bridge and thirty minutes have passed and you have to go back to work with tears on your face. I missed stories where the problem was a broken water system on a forgotten colony, or a first contact gone sideways, or a crew member who just needed someone to listen. Nobody was writing those books anymore, so I wrote one.