Prologue

The ship's AI told me that Admiral Sykes wanted to talk to me one last time before we went and got my ship, so I walked down the central corridor of Freighter Number Twelve towards his office. Until we built special-purpose stations for our use, either in space or on one of the planets, the Darjee had turned over several of their freighters for whatever we needed space for. By now we actually had a few structures built, including something we were calling Jupiter Station, but it wasn't big enough for everyone who wanted to use it yet so we were still here on F12. Since this was temporary and the freighter was already earmarked for later use as a passenger transport, we (meaning the Confederacy Navy) hadn't named this one yet. It was just the 12th freighter we had been given access to.

Lending these freighters to us served several purposes at once. To start with, they were starships, ships that traveled from one solar system to another. Just standing in one answered a lot of questions about the universe that us humans had been asking the heavens for as long as we had been around. Second, they gave us valuable hands-on experience with how starships worked. How the engines functioned, how they navigated, how the environmental systems worked, on and on and on. Not that we were actually allowed to mess with anything, but we could see all the equipment and get training on how it worked.

And, just as important, we got practice dealing with the shipboard AIs. For now, each of these freighters had a crew of Darjee that were available for consultation and for help in emergencies, but they stayed as far from us as they could. As strict pacifists, they felt very uncomfortable near us. Something about our eating meat that came from animals, maybe.

I'm not saying that they are vegetarians, because I don't know that. They probably are, but I don't know. I'm saying that they aren't comfortable around us. I guess monkeys in a zoo don't like their cages to be too close to the lions, either. No, I'm not saying that they were or even looked like monkeys. It was clear that they had evolved from birds of some kind. I'm just saying that they probably felt trapped on these ships with us.

Officially, if I wanted to go somewhere on the ship I had to talk to the AI first and let him know where I was going, then wait for the all clear if there was a Darjee in my intended path. I could get mad about it if I wanted, but why bother? They were who they were, and neither of us was going to change. Anyway, as soon as we could get competent crews trained up the Darjee caretaker crews would be leaving and these ships would be ours for good.

As it was, this particular ship had been set aside as a combination squadron office, berthing facility, and training center for our first set of warships, and it was pretty much crawling with human crews at all times. Once we came onboard and started exploring, the Darjee just stayed in the crew's berthing area unless we needed them, and the AI was supposed to prevent any of us from 'accidentally' even going down that access corridor.

Humans being humans though, some of us just had to find out what that meant. 'What that meant' turned out to be a good example of the Confederacy's force-field generation abilities. The intrepid group of explorers who went down that path first, just a couple of weeks earlier, found their progress blocked by an invisible wall across the corridor. Then, they found their retreat blocked by another one. Last, they found both walls slowly moving, forcing them back. Admiral Sykes had been woken up -it was in the middle of the night- about this, and he had everyone else on the ship woken up to see the entertainment.

This ship, like the rest of the freighters they had given us, had 96 removable storage pods attached in six circles or rings of 16 pods each. The front three rings housed all the scientists and engineers trying to understand the advanced technology. The back three rings had been turned over to the squadron, so we had 48 pods. The Darjee themselves lived in the crew's quarters in the central ball.

The very back ring was being used for offices, training, and test facilities. The other two back rings had all been converted to berthing for sixteen of us PreCom -pre-commissioning- units. Each crew was given two pods. One was a combination of offices, meeting rooms, and quarters for nine officers. The other pod was berthing for the crew; twelve sets of triple bunks for the junior crew and three sets of double bunks for the senior people.

That gave us 51 bunks per crew, although we had no idea how many people we would actually be taking on the ships yet. My crew only had 47 assigned, and as we were designated for the first ship we were probably the best-manned. Even so, there were probably more than 500 of us crammed into the freighter's main fore-aft access corridor when the invisible moving walls brought the four explorers back out to us. Of course, only the front few dozen actually saw anything.

When our intrepid explorers were back in the central corridor again, the AI had stated <These personnel were attempting to access a section of the ship that they are not authorized to enter.>

Admiral Sykes, up front because he was told first, had asked "Please check your records of their time onboard this ship. Can you verify for me that each one was ordered to avoid that corridor, and that each one acknowledged that order?"

<I have found a video record for each person receiving this order. Each video record shows their acknowledgement of this order.>

"Thank you. Does the ship still have an unused pod that can be used to hold these personnel pending a review of their conduct?"

<There are several unused pods that can support human life.>

"Please put them in one of those pods. Secure the door so that they cannot leave without my prior approval, or that of my properly authorized replacement."

<Your instructed action will be done.>

With that, the four miscreants -look, 'evil-doers' sounded better to me; their crime was silly, but at the same time serious- were boxed in to a smaller area and the box moved to an unused berthing pod. As we could see on the video that we all 'got to' watch later, when the box got to the pod, the hatch opened, and the box pushed the four into the hatch, then the hatch closed again. Meanwhile, the admiral had dismissed us to quarters or previously assigned duties, with a caveat: "COs to my office." Great.

It was tight with nineteen people in that office, the admiral, sixteen prospective COs, and two aides, but we've all seen worse. At least I grew up in nuclear submarines. Many of my brother COs had served in navies that didn't have nuke boats, and their boats had been considerably smaller. With roughly the same size crews as ours.

"At ease. They are all officers and supposedly have some common sense. I can't hold any of you accountable for their actions, not with proof that they were warned. On the other hand, as long as this is all still a big secret, we will have to deal with problems like this by ourselves up here, so this is our headache. We have to get rid of them somehow and we can't send them back to Earth until the UN decides to make our alien contact public. For what it's worth, execution is out of the question. Even if we decided it was appropriate, it would upset the Darjee even more."

Cdr Sorensen asked "Admiral, can you specify exactly what crime they are guilty of, beyond simply violating orders?"

"Oh, that's the only specific charge, violating a direct order. The problem is, spitting on the sidewalk in front of the base commander's house is different from spitting on the sidewalk in front of a bar. So, the real problem is more like 'Conduct Prejudicial to Confederacy Cooperation', like when you are visiting the Turks and you spit on their statue of Kemal Ataturk. If you do that, you're going to jail for a few days and there's nothing your ship can do about it. And if you are drunk enough to pee on the statue, you're staying a Turkish prison for a few years."

"This is the same thing. The Darjee find us far too violent for their taste, and this is too much like stalking for them. Those guys are off the ship as fast as we can move them, but I don't know where we can send them. I need ideas."

Lt Jackson, the Admiral's aide, asked "Well, what are the outside parameters? They have to go somewhere, they can't go to Earth, what's left? Back to the Moonbase? Another ship? Are there any ships yet that have been completely turned over to us with no Darjee at all?"

The Admiral looked up at the ceiling. "AI?"

<If we understand your need, you are looking for a place to house your four deviant crewmembers. Is this correct?>

"Yes. We consider them to be damaged or injured, but repairable or at least of further use in the future. However, for now we must get them off this ship."

<May we suggest leaving them in the pod they are in, but releasing the pod itself from the ship? Each pod has a rudimentary AI which can monitor their health.>

"How rudimentary is it?"

<It is sufficiently capable to monitor the pod environment, engage in four conversations, and stay in contact with this ship. It will have to stop any conversations if it takes on any further tasks, like running the replicator.>

"How will the pod get power?"

<All pods have an integrated power supply. It will maintain the pod as a residence for several months. We will monitor that and ensure that it is refueled as needed.>

"Can the hatches be secured so that the four men cannot exit?"

<The pod AI will accept that the cargo is semi-sentient and must be kept secure. It will prevent them from leaving.>

"Will this action satisfy Freighter Number 12's Darjee crew that we are taking steps to ensure that they are not disturbed further?"

<We believe so. However, once you receive the patrol ships you can use them to train crews. Then, once you have designated a human crew for this ship, the current Darjee crew of this ship will be able to turn control over to your people and leave this ship. They can return at that time.>

"Are the patrol ships similar to this one then?"

<No, they are much different. However, a crew that has trained on a patrol ship will be able to run these freighters.>

"Okay, if there are no objections, we'll do that. Any questions?"

One of the other captains I hadn't really met yet asked "Does the pod have a propulsion system?"

"AI?"

<No, but the pod will extrude station-keeping jets. The pod's internal storage tanks are being filled, and the pod's AI will use water as reaction mass to keep the pod positioned. What distance do you want the pod to maintain?>

"I think 20 miles is a good round number. If they get the hatch open, they will rethink their plans if they have to float 20 miles."

Just to make a friend, I whispered to the man next to me, a Brit from their submarine service. "That's about 30 kilometers, right?"

He whispered back "Did he mean your Statute or Nautical miles?"

"Fuck, I dunno. Don't let us bring that crap up here. And what do you mean, 'our' units? It was you guys that invented that shit."

That answer came with a smile. "That may well be, but that doesn't mean that we're stupid enough to keep using it when something better comes along. Even if it was invented by the French, the metric system is far better."

This was officially a UN show, but it was effectively a NATO operation, and, in turn, that meant that there were more Americans than anyone else. Us Americans could have been jackasses and brought feet and inches and furlongs and acres and God knows what else out here, but no, the metric system was far better. I'd learned to convert distances in my head when I learned navigation so I already knew the answer, and the rest would eventually become automatic.

I had no idea why the Admiral had specified miles; we had all agreed to use the metric system up here. Maybe he was just stressed; we did NOT need to upset the aliens who were trying to help us build ships. It didn't matter in this case, though. Whether he meant the 32 kilometers that 20 statute miles converted to or the 37 kilometers that 20 nautical miles converted to, the Admiral was right; no one was going to try to float that far.

Our uniforms, a kind of coverall with slippers, were space-rated if you added gloves and a helmet. The gloves, replicated with the coveralls and sized to fit your hands, should still be in the thigh pocket they came in, and the helmet was a one-size-fits-all affair with several placed in every compartment, basically two at every control station that might have a crewman at it and several more at each hatch. And, if you couldn't get to a helmet in an emergency, the coverall had a kind of a hood that would work as an emergency helmet for a very short time.