Chapter 17: Advanced Qualifications

Admiral Sykes was still working on the course syllabus when we got to Barnard's Star. Not that this was a surprise; we got the periodic reports. This was well before we ever got those message torpedos or drones in service, but as long as they were building the infrastructure for the ACO course, they had the Darjee freighters coming and going every day with people, materials, modules, and finished products. When the freighters returned to Sol System, everyone got to hear the latest status.

So, we knew before we got there that we would be helping set up the course. That was okay, whatever it took, as long as we got to go through it before Alton Castle and Amberley Castle, the next two scheduled to come out here.

Actually, it really wasn't okay. When you get used to something, even if it's an unnecessary luxury, you don't like it when it gets taken away. It looked like we'd be there for a couple of weeks, and we all missed our companions. Certainly, when the men started grumbling about it, I understood their point of view.

Going into combat where we could get hurt or killed? Leave them behind. A short trip for training or qualification? Yeah, we can do without them. But, stuck in a different system for weeks helping build something? When I get off work at the end of the day I want a reason to go back to my bunk! I, acting for both crews, petitioned for our companions to be brought out here to Barnard's Star.

The petition was granted, Admiral Sykes wanted his companion, too, but then that immediately led to more formal manning documents for the ships. We had been knocking around several stabs at Watch, Quarter, and Station bills for the various conditions we might find, and this was the last straw. We couldn't bring all 44 women on board because the air systems couldn't handle that many people.

There also weren't enough toilets. We had a total of 14 commodes throughout the whole ship, so every morning if each woman needed two hours to get ready to face the day like on Earth it would be 6 hours later before the first man got in to pee.

That was an easy workaround. At the end of the workday anyone not in the duty section can transport over to the schoolhouse ship, an Aurora with plenty of unused berthing space. But, we need more people on the ship now! It's commissioned and can act in an emergency, so it must be kept manned for any emergency. We are going to have to formalize the manning levels for each condition.

As a temporary measure we expanded the duty sections to 9 men each, with each duty section able to completely man the 'routine' underway consoles with three extras qualified to man the weapons in an emergency. That gave us four duty sections, each with an OOD, a helmsman, a comm/sensors guy, an Engineroom tech, a DC tech, and three gunners, and an extra body for whatever was needed. The extra people got spread out as seemed appropriate.

That gave us additional training opportunities. As long as we were there at Barnard's Star, no matter what we were doing we had that day's duty section do everything possible. They got us underway, they navigated us to wherever we were going, if possible they took a couple of potshots at some asteroid that looked at us wrong, and when the day was done they brought us back into transporter range of the schoolhouse and either shut down there or brought us in to dock.

In effect, by the time we were done building and then going through the ACO, each ship had four minimal crews, with my formal recommendation that after a couple of patrols the crews be split up to form the core crews for four ships. That was well received, as the space around Jupiter Station was getting crowded. They had the third set of Castles being overhauled, they had eight of the freighters we named Mercuries, and we had been told that the next set of deliveries would be something completely different again, another group of ancient ships like the Castles but of a different design.

I never did hear a believable story about how the Patricians got their class name. Mostly, they were named after resorts or vacation destinations on Earth. Nassau, Malibu, Monaco, etc. Why not call them the "Resort" class? They certainly aren't all hidden getaways for the rich. Maybe they are all places where us working folk go to pretend to be rich "patricians"?

No, that doesn't work either. "Hampton Roads" isn't a vacation spot. It's a shipping channel, the place where several rivers combine before entering the lower Chesapeake Bay. There are beaches around, but nobody ever called "Hampton Roads" a place to go for a vacation.

Here's a funny story. It isn't in any way connected, but I got the video message from Diana when I was going over the first reports on the new "Patrician" class of small scout ships, so I have always associated them in my mind. Mention the Patricians, and I think of chocolate.

Diana grew up in central Pennsylvania, in the small town of Lebanon. That's just east of Harrisburg, and nowadays it's just another Harrisburg neighborhood. Guess what else is in that area? The small town of Hershey, known throughout the world for inexpensive but good chocolate.

Diana may have liked chocolate as a young girl, I'm sure you couldn't get away from it in that area, but she interned at one of the Hershey plants when she was in college, and she developed a deep loathing for the stuff. Rather than tell everyone to stay away from the product, the factory management would tell the workers to eat all they wanted. In the long run, it was cheaper and provided better morale. The workers would get sick of chocolate pretty quickly, and after that they left the product alone. Wave a warm smelly Hershey bar under Diana's nose when she isn't expecting it and she'll gag. Thankfully that was no problem for me, when we were dating she told me that and I spent my money on flowers instead.

Anyway, while I was in my cabin in Allie going over the specs on this new ship type we had been given, I got a video message from Diana and, well, that's more important than this is. She was sitting behind her desk in her pink suit like usual, with a box of chocolates in front of her. I don't remember what the brand was, but it was one of the better-known European brands; one that any reasonable woman would be happy to get.

Diana was laughing, holding the box of chocolates. "Dear, I just got invited on a date again, by a very nice gentleman. Guess what he brought me when he asked me out?" The poor sod. How was he to know she used to work at a chocolate factory? "I graciously declined, and then I called Ginger and told her we needed some more of her contractors up here to keep the men focused on their work instead of on me. Love you! Miss you! Tell Ellen I want her to write me, too, not just you. Bye now!"

Every man who met Diana was sure she was too good for me. Things like this made me suspect that they were right. Still, if she wanted to be my wife I was never going to give her any reason to change her mind.

The Patricians were smaller than the Castles were, and were armed with missiles. Now, before I got my panties in a wad, they weren't armed with missiles any more. They had been when they were built, and they would be again as soon as we could make it happen, but as we received them they were all 'surveying ships', launching survey drones to do the actual data collection while the ship stayed safely far, far away. The Confederacy hadn't even considered sending these old survey ships to us until we had the projectile issue resolved, but with that done these ships apparently were available and it appeared that they might be useful to us.

There had been, it seemed, very few actual modifications done to the ships for this 'conversion'. The only real differences were in the actual devices that got launched, and the attitudes of the people pushing the buttons. All we had to do to use them as warships was ensure that they met our environmental needs, fill the magazines with missiles, and put crews in them.

There were already arguments. Put missiles on them and send them out to fight! We need warships! No, fill them with survey drones and send them out scouting! We need information!

When used as "AGS" surveying ships -or AGIs, actually, spy-ships- you would pop out of hyperspace far away from the inner system, launch a probe to quietly swim through the system looking everything over, then while that is happening use your much faster hyperdrive to go to the other nine systems on your list and dump out nine more probes. When done, come back to the other side of the first system to pick up the first probe, which should be through the system by now.

No danger to the ship or crew, no alarm to any natives. Go get the other nine probes and return home to analyze the data. Don't even have to retrieve the actual probes, do we? If it's any trouble at all don't bother. Just a data dump will do. We brought 60 of these probes anyway, they are only one third the length of the original missiles.

Expediency won, because we needed accurate scouting before more warships would do us any good. Our first 'scout' ships were the first dozen or so Auroras that were handed over to us. Not the Darjee-run freighters that ran any cargo we wanted carried anywhere we wanted to go, as long as there were no Sa'arm in that system, no, not them. I mean the unused mothballed Auroras that the Confederacy gave us. Those ships never got much attention on Earth or the people trying to fill colony ships, because they didn't spend much time in Sol System once we got them.

The Auroras were slow and completely defenseless, but we didn't see any way to change that so we found a use for them that didn't require any armament. By the time we had our first two Castles setting up the ACO course at Barnard's Star we had those Auroras out looking for the enemy.

Those freighters were completely automated; the only reason for any crew at all was that the Confederacy wanted a crew on its ships. To deal with social needs, we put five human 'crew' on board each one, with five of Ginger's contract workers to keep them calm. Actually, the crews were taken from the Castles' precommissioning crews, with one requirement being "in a stable relationship with a companion".

By the time we sent those 'scout' Auroras out, the Darjee ships were done with their second phase of our spherical survey and we knew that there were no Sa'arm -or any other star-faring people- within 25 lightyears in any direction and the UN was demanding that we set up some interstellar colonies that they could run. Until we had more ships, we were going to say that this was enough of a buffer, and we could concentrate on the direction the Sa'arm were supposed to be coming from.

We sent a pair of the Darjee ships out to the last 'known safe' system in the right direction, just over a hundred lightyears from us, and asked them to start building a support base for our scouts. Eventually, that became our first District Headquarters, but it started as a base that our 'scout' freighters could return to instead of having to come all the way back to Earth.

Someone named the planet "Truman" after the US President of "The buck stops here" fame, and when we had enough of a military to become more organized Truman became the seat of our 2nd Military District. We had more districts for other sections of the front soon, but when we got involved with the Tulak mess the 2nd District absorbed the lion's share of our efforts for a long time.

Anyway, those 'scout' Auroras could go to a system, but it wasn't safe for them to enter it and do a good survey. They were almost sitting ducks against our Castles, and we were pretty sure that the Castles weren't the most powerful warships in the universe. Surely any warship of any size could destroy an unarmed freighter that was too slow to flee?

So, those Auroras had orders to not enter any HEZ for any reason except for known-safe bases. They had instruments that could check out a planet from outside of the HEZ. They should not get close enough to anything interesting to be unable to run if they got attacked. We would rather get a "we aren't sure" report and try again later, than lose the ship, never get any report at all, and then have to send one of our remaining ships to the same system. For now, it was enough to be able to sort the systems into "Habitable planet here", "Nowhere to live", "No Sa'arm present", "Sa'arm infested", or "We couldn't tell, sorry."

We still lost several of those ships, almost certainly because the crews wanted to come back with definitive answers. Those guys who took Auroras in to find the Sa'arm deserve to be on the top line of any memorial we ever build. If we win, I mean. Those guys went into unknown systems in unarmed ships looking for trouble, knowing that if they found it they wouldn't get to report it. In almost every case, when we sent a follow-up mission, the second ship came back to report that they had detected Sa'arm ships in that system. There were only one or two ships lost without a trace.

When we got those mothballed missile ships that had been converted to surveyors, the ones we ended up calling "Patricians", we put crews on them as quickly as we could and sent them out to replace those 'scout' freighters before we lost them all. We never lost any of the Patricians while they were on surveying duty. Of course, within a year they had done their job of surveying the volume of the upcoming battle 'front', and they were all recalled to Jupiter to be converted back to being missile ships. About the only nod to their surveying career was that the missiles were all intelligent enough to be able to play "survey probe" if ordered.

Other than pulling any remaining survey probes and filling the magazines with missiles, those tiny ships got the Confederacy's Nav Shield and two of our Point-Defense Rail Gun systems. They never got any kind of offensive weapon beyond the missiles. They were just too small.

We spent several weeks at Barnard's Star, returning to the course control "schoolship" every day or two to rest and be with our companions. Several times, when the task at hand appeared to be doable with a partial crew, we gave two of the duty sections the time off and brought our companions with us. That made whatever we were struggling with a lot more pleasant, knowing that Ellen was in my cabin waiting for me.

The first couple of weeks were spent helping set the course up. We got to play with the different course modules, verifying that some were easy and some were hard. We used the two ships against each other as a "red force" and "blue force" for wargames, adding the pretend-ships to either side as they became available.

By the time the next pair of Castles showed up, DE003 Alton Castle and DE004 Amberley Castle, Admiral Sykes was ready to declare the course ready for use. Of course many of the training modules could be run in parallel by individual ships, while others required several ships to cooperate.

There were dozens of asteroids throughout the system which had programmable transmitters attached. The seek-and-destroy course modules would have one or more of them transmitting "I'm an enemy! Kill me!" on several frequencies. Some were continuous, some were intermittent. Some said "I'm a good guy, too!" or "I'm a neutral. Don't bother me!" Most of them had semi-intelligent controllers with low-power lasers that they would fire at us if we were detected. We learned very quickly that our ships were far more stealthy if we turned the Nav Shield generator off. Of course, if we had the shield off then the simulated damage from a surprise attack from an undetected enemy installation was a lot more severe than if we had our shield up.

Once we thought we had learned all we could about sneaking around in our Castles, we turned to ship-to-ship combat. The Darjee had built, or had their repair replicators build for them, a pair of Castle mockups. During the testing and development phase we shot one of them up with our particle beams from a few kilometers away, close enough to call our shots, until we could see results. Then, we had it roll over to give us a fresh side and gave it a Plasma Torpedo.

The other ship received the same treatment, but with the Nav Shield running. We basically got nowhere with that using our particle beams, although it was clear that they were stressing the shield. If we fired both at once, or within a fraction of a second, they would penetrate the shield and cause some damage. The Plasma Torpedo took the shield out. We stopped shooting at that point, since all we were trying to do was create a walk-through display of what our weapons did, and added those results to our wargames.

Those two "ships" got retired after that. They got docked to a pod-jack, a short piece of corridor with cross-corridors like a child's toy jack set up with airlocks on all six 'ends', and the whole assembly was set off to the side. About fifty klicks away from the main station, since leaving the particle beam damage unrepaired made them mildly radioactive. The two alternated running their power plants to provide power to the jack and both ships, and anyone who wanted to visit could take a transporter to the jack. Some damage could be seen from the inside, while viewing other damage involved a space-walk.

For a lot of crews, that was their first time out in actual space, and the course ended up with a couple of people who did nothing but help newbies learn how to seal their suits. The Admiral made everyone go through this exercise at least once, as part of the "Intro to Damage Control" module that everyone had to pass before the ship was certified as "Combat Ready".

Mail from home was almost as regular at Barnard's Star as it had been when we were hiding behind Jupiter, since we had freighters coming with equipment, materials, and personnel almost every day. We got news from Jupiter Station and gossip from Diana and Ginger.

The four landers we'd named "Mercuries" were ready to be sent out to fight, but we didn't have troops to put in them. They were trying to scrounge mercenaries but it didn't look like that was going well; the kind of person who answers an ad for mercenaries doesn't do well on the AIs' integrity test. Since it would be a one-way trip -none of the soldiers were returning to Earth- the AIs wanted to make sure that the soldiers hired were people they didn't mind having around, and collection was slow.

They had nudged the UN about having some organized units turned over to them. If there were any "off the books" units that needed to disappear this was the perfect time to make that happen. There were rumors that this was actually going to happen, with several less-savory units being mentioned.

I could believe the need to get rid of the Peruvian "Death Squads" which had been brutal enough to finally wipe out the Sendero Luminoso Maoists, the so-called "Shining Path" rebels who had troubled Peru for so long. Having done so, though, the Peruvian government was embarrassed by the reports coming out of the mountains about what it had taken to out-terrorize the Maoists. If ever a government needed to get a loyal unit taken off their hands, it was them.

I had trouble believing the stories of a Russian all-woman unit, though. I'd heard of the Chechen "Black Widows", but an all-female Russian unit? Were they for real? As it turned out, the Mastroika were real, and they had done enough of their own atrocities paying the Chechens back for their atrocities that Russia wanted them out from underfoot while they pretended to play nice with the neighbors.

The rumors included Philippine anti-insurgency troops, Thai government security troops, and a company of Swiss guards, courtesy of the Vatican.

Ginger wanted to complain that she had gotten her recruiting system up and running, but she was now being told to slow down again; we weren't ready for all those people yet. She said that, at current rates, we would have gotten just over 18,000 people off the planet by the time the enemy landed in ten years. What in God's Green Earth was I doing up there, besides getting women pregnant?

I didn't understand that one at first. Didn't we have a couple dozen or more ships taking colonists out to as many colonies? Well, yes, but she could fill them within a day of being told the ship was ready. The ships, on the other hand, took weeks to deliver the colonists, they had to hang around -especially the first couple of loads for each colony- for some time to provide manufacturing assistance and make sure the colony would survive until the next ship showed up, they took weeks to return to Earth, and after all that Ginger could fill them again in a day.

If we had pods available for the ships, that is, since apparently the colonies needed to keep the pods the colonists were in. Generally, the need to collect replacement pods added more time, at one end of the trip or the other. They were building a facility at Saturn to pump out habitat pods but like everything else it took time and meanwhile the ships were waiting.

Ginger could fill two or three ships a day. Give her a couple days notice to ramp up, and she could probably fill five or six every day for as long as we wanted. With how long the round trips were taking, the numbers worked out to us needing about two hundred ships to keep her recruiters busy. I didn't think that was going to happen. We either needed more ships or bigger ones. Or faster, if they weren't spending so much time on the trip itself that would also help. More or larger ships would have a greater effect, though.

One thing that they were talking about, if they ever had the transport space for them, was forced colonization where people were just rounded up and put on the ships. I couldn't see that idea going anywhere. What kind of colonists would that give us? On the other hand, if we ran out of time and the bad guys were already on Earth playing "Giant Purple People Eater", then people would probably be fighting over space on the ships. I hoped it never came to that.

Let's see ... Ginger had started on some of the real third-world hell-holes where you could get an ugly, worn-out hooker who would do whatever she was told all night long for only $20, and for an even $200 the house wouldn't expect to get her back. Add $50 more and they'd even take care of the body, but Ginger wasn't planning on killing them. To a group of people with body-modifying medical equipment, how ugly and worn-out the hooker was when we bought her wasn't relevant.

Recruiting for the troopships picked up a bit when the recruiters could honestly look the prospective mercenary in the eye and say that every bunk would come with its own bedwarmer, guaranteed obedient and guaranteed disease-free. For that matter, the merc would be disease-free too.

The AIs had conniptions, though, when Ginger tried to send a hundred whores up to the first one, the Mercury, after buying them all with a UN credit card in Bangkok. She ended up having to store most of them for several weeks in one of the warehouses at LTI's world headquarters complex on the Potomac. That was just outside of Alexandria and Ginger had mentioned that she could see the Monument from her office.

That took more manpower, but she made lemonade out of her lemons by hiring more security people to keep an eye on them. It was only money, and the UN was keeping her charge accounts paid off. As long as the girls behaved themselves, and the men were gentlemen, she pre-authorized any private arrangements the girls and the guards made among themselves. She got already-trained manpower that could be sorted through against later needs and the girls were safe, if not necessarily sound.

She used the time to start running the girls through the med-tubes, and gave each one who had gone through it a bracelet that they couldn't take off. At the same time she informed the guards that any girl without a bracelet would give them Aids and maybe they should just work with the ones who had been processed. Since the ones with bracelets were soon noticeably more healthy and attractive, the guards didn't have too much trouble with that rule.

Did I mention that most of the guards only spoke English or maybe French or Spanish, and the only English the girls knew were verbs describing available services? And expecting a fifteen-year-old Thai whore to speak Spanish was just absurd.

Their education had stopped at the bare minimum to be able to work as a slave whore. They couldn't cook, shop, or even dress themselves for the public since they had never owned any clothes. They were willing to provide any sexual service a man or even a woman could think of, but they couldn't tell anyone how old they were. They could all offer services in probably seventeen different languages, but they had trouble asking for soap in their own native tongue. They weren't what anyone would call well-educated, and Ginger had endless trouble with their attitudes and expectations. Frankly, they could only function as continually-supervised slaves.

Those girls were great, as long as you only thought about them as hookers or slaves. As soon as you started to think about them as fellow human beings, though, you were on your way to a migraine. Most had been 'recruited' into their profession even before they were born, since the one economically valuable product that an uneducated psychopathic whore can reliably produce on demand is a baby.

A lot of those whorehouses had been in business for well over a century of European colonization. Male babies were killed, unless born to dedicated staff-serving whores. Female babies were fed and raised, and taught from birth to obey men. As soon as they were old enough, they were put to work taking care of the younger babies. They started learning to please men as soon as they were old enough, around 4 or 5.

If you teach a girl that age that she isn't getting breakfast or dinner until she has knelt in front of a man and performed a rather personal service for him, by the time she's 7 or 8 it's ingrained in her psyche. To her, that's the way things are supposed to be and she goes looking for a man to service any time she is hungry or needs personal validation for any reason.

A typical Bangkok whorehouse had two lines of people along the outer walls, one inside and one outside, twice a day at mealtimes. Young girls who want breakfast or dinner get in line at the glory holes, and the city poor pay a penny or two to get in line on the other side. The system doesn't impose any expenses on the house beyond a supervisor on one side and a money-taker on the other. Any trouble is resolved by a whipping and all punishments are done in front of the other girls. After two or three incidents the girl is simply killed. No one girl is valuable enough to keep if she continues to cause trouble. The survivors grow up to be whores. It's all they know, all they can be.

By age 10 any of them could make any man come within seconds. When one started to grow breasts and hips, look like a woman, and bleed, she would be made available for other services, starting with the rich foreigners who wanted to rent a virgin for the night. While all foreigners were rich, many would pay absurd amounts for this privilege. And, if the customer was silly enough to let the girl get on her knees first, well, very often the same girl could be rented for the night as a virgin many times before someone finally got what they had paid for.

Some of the girls were taken out of the assembly-line training process before they were worn out. The prettiest, the ones who performed the best, the ones who showed the most desire to please, those were taken as personal servants by the house's male staff. Those were the only ones allowed to raise male babies, and those babies grew up to take their part in the house's male staff, pushing their own mothers, sisters, and daughters around when they were old enough.

Ginger wanted to save the youngest girls she could before they were ruined by the system, but the whole reason the Confederacy was supporting this was to supply women to adult combat soldiers and if they looked too young most men wouldn't want them. Besides, the only girls that she could buy without too many questions were those that the whoremasters considered too old to be profitable.

She finally ended up with a solemn promise that each girl was at least 15 years old and no older than 20. Not that we could tell, or that the girls knew either. The houses themselves probably had no reliable records anyway. All she had was the word of a man she knew would lie through his teeth for any reason or none.

None of the girls had ever left their house before Ginger bought them. They hadn't been to school or seen a doctor. They had never even seen outside the house unless they got to a glory hole before a cock was stuck through it. They were never allowed to speak with a client until they were old and worn out, which meant 16 or 17 with four children already. They were taught -with whips- to not speak at the glory holes, and when they started seeing men for other services, until they were worn out it was always a rich foreigner who didn't speak Thai anyway. The only clothes they had ever worn were the pretty things they were given when a customer wanted to choose from a lineup.