Chapter 10: Sorting the Sheep from the Wolves

After we got the Saturn Yards straightened out we headed for Earth. Or, rather, they headed for Earth. My Third Battleship Division got split out to go round up the rest of the DECO and Central Command executives, safe in orbit around Mars where there weren’t any dickheads, and put them with Franken and his people who were at least in Earth orbit. High, safe orbit maybe, but in orbit.

Jack felt that this task was appropriate for one of my exalted position. Thanks, asshole. I wanted to see my battleships used! I mean, I knew the job was coming, but unless something went horribly wrong there wouldn’t be any shooting.

Still, he was right. If we understood what the AIs were carefully not telling us, I could order Confederacy ships to fire on other Confederacy ships. No one else in our combined fleet could do that, and if we actually needed to do that to get those bastards to knuckle under and play well with others it would be nice if I was in the right place to make it happen.

The whole system defense force was on heightened alert due to our arrival on top of the ‘current unpleasantness’ down on Earth, and that meant that all the high mucky-mucks were where they were supposed to be. Central Command’s upper levels were all on their flagship, CNS Victory. While there were Marines scattered throughout the system, the CMC elite were all on their own flagship, CNS Success.

I seriously doubted if the Marines would be a problem. As little as I had valued the Marines when I was just a simple naval officer, as a Colony and System Governor I found them to be a very useful, very reliable asset. Marines could be rambunctious, but they had excellent discipline and stayed within the bounds of their assigned roles. By simple logic, any Marine officer who gave us trouble wasn’t really a Marine. He was just a politician who happened to like wearing a uniform. I could deal with politicians. I had this mental image of me asking a troublemaker if he wanted me to impregnate him with a lawyer.

The DECO elite were similarly all on their cube ship, CNS Unity. Those bastards, on the other hand ... I was sure that once word got out about what was going on there would be people all over the system trying to talk the AIs into setting up a weapon-system malfunction that just happened to accidentally destroy that ship.

We had discussions about whether it would be worth it to just destroy Unity now and move on with our lives. Yes, we’d lose all the concubines on the ship and that would be terrible, but on balance we’d benefit even more by getting rid of a huge concentration of troublemakers.

Given that we were discussing destroying at least one of the ships, the AIs accepted my request to disable both of those ships, too, as a compromise. Their transporters were shut down first to prevent anyone from leaving their assigned duty station, then their propulsion systems were disabled to prevent the entire ship from leaving.

Their station-keeping systems were left operational so that they didn’t fall into Mars, since they weren’t actually in orbit. We had the propulsion systems to support it, so we normally didn’t ‘orbit’ a planet with our ships. Gravity was one of the weakest forces in the universe, and it didn’t take much to counter it. You just had to keep those systems online at all times since gravity never gave up. If you turned the station-keeping systems off it wouldn’t be long before you started moving toward the nearest large mass.

All of Jack’s conversations with the local commands had been broadcast throughout the system, so by now everyone knew what would happen if there were any fatuous demands like “We need fresh food”. They would be told the refugees down on Earth, trying desperately to stay ahead of the Sa’arm which your incompetence allowed to land, are starving because they don’t have time to farm, and you are taking what little fresh food there is because you don’t want to eat replicator food like the peons? No way, you’re starving like the peons you abandoned.

Okay, sometimes people get reasonable completely out of the blue and catch you off-guard. Who’da thunk it? Someone on Success asked us where their concubines should transport to. Uhhhhh...

In high Earth orbit, where Col. Everett had ‘cornered’ Admiral Franken in Victory, his concubines could transport over to any other nearby fleet units, to any of the moonbases, or even to any Confederacy facility on Earth itself.

Aside from military facilities, Earth’s Moon had a half-dozen recruit processing facilities and each one was capable of housing a million or more personnel. Since the Sa’arm had completely ignored the Moon, those bases were still open for business. On the other hand, pickups had dropped down to a much lower level than before. Oh, the pickup teams were busier than ever, but they were doing specialized pickups among the refugees.

Conks and children, mostly. They were taking just about any female who could get over a 5 on the CAP test and if a lady said that all seventeen of these children were hers the team wasn’t even blinking. She said they were her kids, she volunteered to be a concubine at a colony, they are all going. She may not even know all of their names, but they were all her kids. How many fifteen-year-old Russian women do you know with seventeen kids? Three black and two oriental? Doesn’t matter. She looks honest to me. If she says they are all hers, we’ll believe her. Even if the med-tubes showed that she was still a virgin, they are her children. We’ll take them. Load ‘em up, move ‘em out.

We, on the other hand, were in orbit around Mars. All we had to take dependents -the conks & kids- were four battleships, four cruisers, and eight destroyers. Mars had a couple of agricultural research stations that could maybe take in a few hundred extra people, and Phobos had a traffic control station for the Mars area that could easily take fifty more.

Aside from that, the Marines had a training base on Mars, and the Navy had a small station with a bunch of their intel weenies. However, neither of them was set up to take any refugee families at all. Give them a few weeks and any of the stations could expand as needed. Fine, sure, do that, when the capacity is there we’ll find a use for it, but we need places for people now.

Success had about 700 concubines on her, as well as over 2000 dependent children. If we had to, it wouldn’t lower our combat readiness to divide them all between our ships as a temporary measure. It would mean horribly increased casualties if we took damage, but housing them wouldn’t change how the ship fought.

Unity, however, was a cube ship. It was something like the third one built, DECO had grabbed it while it was still being outfitted, and that class was rated at a quarter-million souls before DECO started modifying it so even though I had trouble swallowing the numbers I couldn’t argue with Cracky when she told me that Unity held just under 35,000 volunteers -mostly DECO but some seconded from the services- and well over 200,000 concubines and children. What. The. Fuck?

Sure, we allowed the conks and kids to accompany their Sponsors on our non-warships. All of DECO’s transports, all the freighters and miners and research vessels were overrun with the crews’ little rugrats. However, Victory, Success, and Unity were ‘service flagships’. No argument there. However, we had made the assumption that ‘flagships’ were ‘warships’ and wouldn’t have children living aboard them in a war zone.

Silly us. They were only ‘warships’ when we were talking about perks that warships got, like better equipment and priority for repairs and manning. When we were talking about things that made warships not very nice places to be, like the rule about no more than one concubine per crewman aboard any warship in an active war zone or the absolute prohibition throughout the entire Diaspora of children being domiciled in active warships no matter where they are, no, these three weren’t REALLY warships, they were executive office complexes that happened to be mobile as well as carry weapons and armor.

They just looked like warships. Okay, Success and Victory did. Unity looked like a cube ship, but it was being used as a command facility and every Sponsor aboard it wore a uniform and claimed military honors from junior personnel. If some worthless sack of shit wears a uniform and has rank insignia and insists upon getting saluted and addressed as ‘Admiral’, then as far as I’m concerned he is “a member of the armed forces of the Confederacy” and I can charge him with deliberate disobedience of standing orders under the CMJC.

And, if a whole ship is full of those assholes claiming to ‘work’ there, then it’s a warship regardless of what it looks like. And even a cursory glance through the CMJC gives me a whole list of offenses every one of them is guilty of that ‘ ... shall be punished by death or... ‘ End of discussion.

The CMJC? Yeah, I know, we replaced it with something that made sense long ago, but when we first started we had to have some kind of rules and we were mostly Americans at first anyway so we copied the UCMJ, the US Department of Defense’s Uniform Code of Military Justice, made some of the more obvious changes, called it the Confederacy Military Justice Code, and said “Here’s the rules”. Back then we were all living under the CMJC. You youngsters have it much better now. I know, it was uphill both ways. In the snow!

Anyway, we had to somehow get all those concubines and children off those ships before we destroyed them. Nothing short of another Cube Ship had room for all those people, if we were to get them off before someone did something irrevocable and they all died. You think there was one available? Of course not.

There were several Kilos available though, and each one could take 20- or 30 thousand people for a short trip like the one from Mars to Earth, so we started doing that, starting with Success.

Success was easy. We evacuated the entire ship. Those guys were not doing anything for the rest of the Confederacy, and since they were pretending to be Marines they didn’t need a starship to do something for Earth. If they chose to, I mean.

They all fit into a single Kilo, and I ordered them taken back to Earth orbit just to get them out of the way. Meanwhile, we had the Jutlanders send us a destroyer carrying a skeleton crew for Success, and once the AIs agreed that there were no humans on the ship they boarded Success and took it out to Saturn for conversion back into a President-class carrier like it should have been all along. Easy enough, right?

One down.

Here is where it got weird. While we were getting everyone off of Success and I was muttering about how many people we could get off Unity before we had to destroy it, or maybe it was how many we had to get off Unity before we got to destroy it, Cracky asked if I could talk to someone about my options. Sure...

I got a video conference with someone who introduced himself as Commodore Edelmann, and as of -he looked up at something- twenty-some-odd minutes ago, a fellow Governor. Now, he wasn’t sure that the place he ran was big enough to need a Governor, but the AIs were all worked up about something and insisted that he had to be a Governor to talk to me, so if he sounded confused it was with good reason. Could I explain to him exactly what I needed help with, and why the AIs wanted a second Governor in the system to counteract me if needed? What was I about to do that the AIs wanted him to countermand?

I had to laugh. I was on record as having said many times that a Confederacy Governor had far too much power, and the AIs were crazy to allow a human to be a Governor. We weren’t stable enough. Here, then, apparently, was their answer to the problem.

“What are you Governor of? Sol System?”

“No, I’m not crazy enough to take that job. I’ve got a small research base about two light-months out from you, and people have been calling me Governor for eight years or so, but it’s not really a colony and it’s never been official. However, you’ve got the AIs all worked up about something they are afraid you’re going to do. Apparently you’ve got more than one job and if you order them as a naval officer they will refuse, but if you order them as Beerat System Governor they have no way to refuse since there’s no Earthat System Governor to override your orders.”

“I thought you were supposed to stay in your own system, but apparently that’s not true. They have to do what you tell them to. So, they asked if I can step up to be the official Governor of my colony, and if you go crazy I can veto your orders. What are you about to do that they want me to stop? I’m really not up on what you guys are doing.”

So, I had to stop and explain who we were and why we were here, and what I in particular was trying to do and thinking about doing. And wonder how in FUCK we could have a real-time conversation if he was a sixth of a lightyear away. We knew the Confederacy wasn’t giving us all their secrets.

When I was done, he started shaking his head. “As long as you’ve evacuated all of the concubines and dependents, I’m not going to get in your way if they decide they’d rather die than shut up and listen to you. The human race and the Confederacy are both better off without all those people. I don’t know what the AIs are going to do if you give a crazy order and I second it. Listen, we both need to back up and do some research, okay? I’m going to see what I can find out about you, and you need to do the same thing about me. In all honesty, I really didn’t want to talk to you. The last time I had to deal with a Governor I ended up killing him with my bare hands, and I’d like to know more about you so that doesn’t poison our relationship. Backup, please release all records of the Truman Incident to Governor Williams, and give me a summary of his career. Governor, I’ll be available any time you can get back to me.”

That was fascinating. I’d heard the name but couldn’t place it. I’d been talking to a living fossil and certified naval hero. Retired US Navy Captain Edelmann wasn’t even a ship-driver. He’d been an engineer and safety guy. He had been recruited for the Confederacy Navy even before there WAS a Confederacy Navy. He had seen it all, in the beginning. He had been our first warship captain, he had commanded our forces in our first battle with the Sa’arm, and ... he had killed the first Governor of Truman with his bare hands.

Okay, he had good reason. He had EXCELLENT reason. The Governor had murdered Edelmann’s concubine, okay apparently they were still calling them ‘companions’ back then, this was LONG before my time, and Edelmann had in turn murdered the Governor. What was the big deal? There was something missing. Why did he get in trouble for that?

Maybe he should have been counseled for it, but it was clear that the Governor was a toad and the universe was better for his death, just like ... the DECO people. Shit. I’ve got to call him back.

“Yes, Governor, sure. I haven’t finished reading all about you, but it looks like you’re an alright guy. I don’t THINK I’ll have to kill you.”

Hey, thanks for the vote of confidence, man! “Thank you for answering so quickly. I haven’t read all about you yet, either, but I saw some similarities and I had to check. Look, I don’t care who does it, if someone kills one of my concubines I’m going to try to kill them. What happened to yours was clearly murder, there wasn’t any pretense of accident. Why did you get basically dismissed from the service? All you did was your responsibility as a man. You were our first hero! You may not have been in the papers, the war was still a secret, but everyone who gets picked up and chooses the Navy reads about you. What really happened out there?”

Edelmann leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh. “Listen, the AIs have asked me to try to talk you back down off your ledge, but they don’t want me to give away any more than I have to. Do you accept that when I was recruited, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing?”

“Yes, of course. You had to invent everything.”

“Right. Including our society, and how we interact with the AIs. There were a lot of mistakes made early on, and it was decided by people who knew the whole story that the dead and their mistakes should be allowed to rest in peace. Further, not all the mistakes were accidental, and not all of them were dead yet, but they were powerless and we didn’t want to get into wholesale vengeance like you’re about to.” He paused. “Look, everyone has questions about the CAP test, right?”

Again, I said “Of course. People change, but some people should never have passed it in the first place.”

“It has issues, but it’s a lot better now than the first few versions. Hold on. Backup, is Governor Williams in a secure room with no one else listening?”

<Yes, Governor Edelmann.>

“I hate that title. Okay, Governor Williams, I’m going to tell you part of a closely-held secret. You will take this secret to your grave. Backup, if Governor Williams attempts to share this secret with anyone else he and his audience must be restrained and held without communication until someone arrives to kill them. Do you accept this instruction?”

<Yes, Governor Edelmann. That instruction set will be followed.>

Okay, NOW I was paying attention! The AIs didn’t kill anyone, but they were accepting orders to kill me if I blabbed? What the fuck was the secret?

“Okay, Governor, I’m telling you this so that you will have some additional information and can make appropriate decisions. Do you accept responsibility for this knowledge?”

What could I say? I wanted to stand at attention! “Yes, Sir!”

“Don’t give me that crap, you made it all the way up to Admiral, and you’ve been a Governor for four or five years. The AIs know you’re trustworthy.”