Chapter 19: Looking For Trouble

We finally decided, for our first trip out looking for trouble, that we could best hedge our bets by keeping the pair of ships together where they could support each other, but at the same time trying to pretend that there was only one ship looking for trouble. When we got to a system that we thought might contain our enemies, one ship would go in with shield up and try to pick a fight with a single enemy ship, if we could. The other ship would follow about 1000 Km behind, twice what we had decided was effective range for our Particle Beam Projectors but well within our own detection range of anything at all including inert rocks.

That second ship would not have its shield up. We had already discovered that, if we kept our acceleration down, the shield was the most easily noticed thing about our ships, other than the gravity-whatever pulse that accompanied our popping out of hyperspace. If we came out of hyperspace far enough out, no one would notice our arrival. If the lead ship had its shield up, whoever noticed it when it entered within range of whatever they were using to detect intruders should not detect the trailing ship as it would have a far lower signature in just about any spectrum you could think of, and what little signature it did have should be masked by the lead ship.

If the lead ship was badly outmatched and was quickly destroyed by whatever they found, we hoped that a thousand klicks was far enough for the trailing ship to avoid the same fate and get away. At the same time, we hoped that was close enough to quickly join the fight and help if the contest appeared to be winnable.

The only way that we could fail in our primary mission of "initial combat test and return to report" would be if we ran into someone who far outgunned us, but at the same time appeared to be weaker than us. They had to first convince me and Julio over in Alnwick Castle that I needed help to win easily, and then when his ship showed up they had to take us both out so quickly that neither of us could get away.

We had several talks about that. About the only thing we could do if we somehow got suckered in like that was to immediately split up again and hope that they didn't have weapons that could keep us both under fire. If their weapons were short enough in range that they had to chase one of us, the other should escape.

If our opponents turned out to have weapons that reached out much further than our own, then hopefully we could find that out while it was still possible to run. If they held their fire until we were in close, though, we would be in trouble. If we could quickly overwhelm them, the right thing do to was to close so that our weapons were more effective. If we couldn't, we should split up and run. The problem was, how were we supposed to tell those two scenarios apart?

For our first attempt to get in a fight, we chose the last system that 'For teh Win' had been sent to. Since she had never returned, we didn't know if she had run into an enemy ambush, suffered some kind of engineering failure, or what. We didn't even know if she had made it to that system or not. Again, since she never came back we didn't know anything about either the ship or the system itself beyond what the Confederacy's database had to say.

I should admit that we'd been talking about the various ships all along, but the first time I saw the ship's name in an email I had to check its spelling. The ship wasn't named "For the Win", it was named "For teh Win". Something about wargames and gaming slogans and typos that became embraced as Right, and it was spelled the way it was supposed to be spelled. Or, I guess, it was spelled 'teh' way it was supposed to be.

We sent our other pair of armed ships, Alton Castle and Amberley Castle, to check out the system that 'You Want Us to Do What?' had been assigned to on its last mission.

We were all hoping that the two ships had just broken down and were waiting for a tow-truck to come get them, but that wasn't realistic. Every Aurora had at least one shuttle, plus several small multi-purpose automated mining machines, and that huge engineering replicator. Almost any conceivable engineering casualty could be repaired within a week or so. Even if they were out in the middle of nowhere, the ship itself could be cannibalized to get the needed materials for almost any possible repair.

There was a never-ending list of things we needed to build a functioning fleet. At least once a day I checked to make sure that "Some way to send messages that didn't take a whole ship" was on that list. We were pretty sure that the Darjee delegation at Earth had some kind of FTL radio that they could use to talk with their leadership, but they weren't willing to share it. Whether we ended up with their FTL radio or homing pigeons or something completely different that we couldn't even imagine yet, we needed some way to check in with headquarters.

We were at the same stage as back in the old "Age of Sail", when a nation would send out a ship and not hear anything until the ship returned. If it returned. Unless it came back the builders had no idea if the ship was still afloat or not. Is it returning from a successful voyage, laden with riches? Captured by cannibals? Wrecked in a storm? Mutinied and turned pirate? Destroyed by enemy ships?

Western civilization accepts surprise attacks in wartime, but the initial fact of war breaking out is not supposed to be a surprise. With that said, you were supposed to tell the opposing king that you were at war with him. You didn't have to tell all his subjects. The various wars between all the European powers in the 1600 and 1700s were filled with the nations declaring war on each other, then attacking far-off colonies before they were warned.

The same thing happened when wars ended, too. In more modern times, the War of 1812 ended with the Treaty of Ghent, signed right across the North Sea from London on Christmas Eve of 1814. It was ratified by Parliament on the 30th. This did not prevent the Battle of New Orleans from being fought at the same time, ending on January 8th. In fact, with sailing ships carrying mail being the only way messages could travel across the ocean, news of the campaign in Louisiana reached the American government in Washington before news of the treaty in Ghent did.

Similarly, the American Civil War ended in 1865 for most of the participants. There was at least one Confederate commerce raider out in the Pacific Ocean, surviving on supplies taken from their prey, which sailed into San Francisco Bay to surrender in 1867, two years later, because a recently captured "Union" whaler had carried Californian newspapers with articles about Lee's surrender and the collapse of the Confederacy. The Confederate raiders were concerned about a trick, but these were their own countrymen's ships they were destroying and they decided that they would rather surrender to a trick than take a chance on being pirates, destroying commerce for no moral reason.

The invention of radio had ended all that. Every ship anywhere in the world could check in as needed, and fleet headquarters could also send changes to orders as needed.

Anyway, it would really be nice for our ships to be able to call home and let headquarters know that they had made it to their assigned system. Then, at the end of their survey, it would be nice to call in and report that this system was clean and we were returning home. Or, maybe, that we had found hostile ships and were trying to evade.

Conversely, if we had the ability to make such phone calls, and headquarters received no such phone call within a day or so of a scout's expected arrival, we could conclude that the scout never made it there. It would also be really nice for headquarters to be able to let us know of changing conditions, like "Forget your survey, we just got overrun".

Of course, if messages ever got too easy to pass the ships would have to deal with micromanagement, but every rose has its thorns.

It occurred to us as we were creeping into the system that there had to be a way that we could carry a couple of those monitoring stations ourselves. Okay, maybe now wasn't the best time to think of it, but when we got back to Truman we could attach one to each of our hatches. That would let us carry up to three with us if we wanted. They might limit our maneuverability, but if we got into trouble we could always jettison them.

Maybe we could carry two stations and some kind of emergency lifeboat? Find out if Jupiter Station was still working on that. If not, add it to the list for Truman Station to work on.

We found enough wreckage to know that For teh Win had made it here, and hadn't gone anywhere else afterwards. We couldn't positively identify anything with a manufacturer's dataplate that said "Original installation on CNS For teh Win" or anything like that, but objects in space show their age. Older stuff is pitted by collisions with dust and meteorites, while newer stuff still has compounds that are not stable at low temperatures and will slowly degrade. We found large amounts of formed metal alloys and other materials that from their composition had to be from a Confederacy product. And they all had vectors that radiated out from a single point about three weeks earlier.

We spent a while surveying the system, and eventually we also found three intact pods in well separated areas. The pods' integral AIs could report to Allie that For teh Win had been fired upon by an unknown armed ship when they popped out of hyperspace, and the ship had taken fatal damage almost immediately. They didn't have the sensors themselves to have seen the attack, but the ship's AI had updated all of the pods with all available records and released them, scattering them in every direction, before self-destructing to prevent enemy recovery.

As horrible as that sounds, it was one of the rules we lived under. The Confederacy had noticed that between the time that they first met the enemy and the time that they gave up talking to them, the enemy had started using Confederacy technology in their ships. The nav shield was the prime example. It couldn't really be proven either way, but the shield was useful enough that if they had it they would have been using it, and they didn't start using it until they had captured some of the Confederacy's ships. The conclusion was obvious; they had assimilated at least some of the technology demonstrated in those embassy ships.

So, that was a Confederacy decree: If any of our ships carried any technology that the enemy wasn't already known to have, our ships were supposed to ensure that they weren't captured. And, well, all of our ships had technology that the enemy didn't seem to have. That was one of our few advantages; we seemed to have a higher tech level.

Since the AIs ran everything, that self-destruct was something that they could handle on their own; we didn't have to depend upon the crew doing it. Actually, that was an ongoing argument for a couple of years. The AIs were willing to blow themselves up just as soon as they saw capture as inevitable, while us humans weren't always ready to give up. We shouldn't self-destruct as soon as we realize we are crippled or trapped. Maybe we can do some more damage to our attackers, maybe we can repair our problem, maybe someone else will show up and save us. And, as For teh Win proved, maybe we can wait until they get closer and take some of them with us.

None of the pods carried anything worth saving, but we and Alnwick took turns docking with all three and keeping watch to allow them to refuel from our tanks. That was yet another example of how universal and general-purpose the Confederacy's docking system was. The Castles were never intended to carry pods or refuel anybody else, but the standardized docking system that had been installed when she was reactivated allowed for it, so we did it.

After the pods had been refueled, we released them on agreed-upon vectors. They were going to watch this system for us until we could bring in a purpose-built observation post. They didn't have the tools they needed, but they said that they could grow them, along with attitude jets, and be able to watch the whole system between them. Apparently they received the materials they needed to do that from us while they were being refueled.

The freighters' cargo pods normally received their power and other resources from the ship they were attached to, but they had the ability to be self-sufficient for short periods. They ran off some kind of refillable battery or fuel cell. The system appeared to be intended to support the contents for short periods of power loss, perhaps during transfer between ships. It wasn't a long-term power source, though. If they held survivors and had to run all the environmental systems, they would run out of power within a few months.

Without any inhabitants to keep warm and fed, though, their batteries and fuel would last them for years. Sooner or later we would be back, and at that time they would be valuable resources already here in the system. If nothing else, they would act as observation posts for the system until we returned.

One of the things we got from those pods was a crew list for For teh Win, and I asked Allie to make sure that the list got returned to Earth. I had no idea how we would handle that out here, but we Americans have always been big on letting families know when their servicemen aren't coming back. Even if there's no body to return, we try to let the families know.

Maybe the Air Force could stage some kind of "training accident" and slip those names onto the passenger list. Hell, with that war in the Congo heating up and NATO getting more and more involved, maybe they could come up with some way to admit that they had died in combat, serving their country.

There were seven men and seven women onboard when the ship self-destructed. We have no way of knowing if any of the crew were already casualties, but the pods were pretty sure that no shuttles got launched. Some of the crew may have been in a pod that didn't make it. The pods didn't have the sensors -at the time- to be certain that nothing else escaped, but we looked and couldn't find anything else that responded to Confederacy comms, so we eventually concluded that the three pods we had found were the only survivors.

I recognized some of the names but I couldn't place them. I had to ask Allie if she had a clue, and what I got back was depressing. The first three members of the crew had gone through out BCNO course back at Jupiter Station, then assigned to this freighter. It had been turned over to us in pretty much the same way as our Castles, with the Darjee crews leaving in one shuttle before the first human crew boarded from another shuttle. It just happened a lot faster, since the ships were already in operation and our people were already familiar with them. Then, with a starship under human control, that pod with the four troublemakers had been docked to it and the four transferred aboard as crew. They had still been onboard this ship with their companions when it was destroyed.

We still hadn't ever seen an enemy ship, but the imagery we got from the pod AIs showed us a lot more about what we were up against. It appeared that the attackers were three small ships, probably smaller than our own Castles but most likely larger than the Patricians. They appeared to match the small Sa'arm ships seen in the records that the Confederacy had turned over to us about their own contacts. That was good; it meant that it was probably the same enemy. We really didn't want to start a second war with someone else before we finished this first one.

The three ships appeared to be identical, including armament of a single Particle Beam projector very like our own, making them far weaker than our Castles.

However, For teh Win had no armament at all and could not fight back in any way. The first hit was absorbed by their Nav Shield, but the next shot was, as well as they could tell, simultaneous by all three ships and the freighter's shield could not resist that. Whether by accident or design, the central core was hit between the 4th and 5th rings and damaged enough that the tube's structural integrity failed.

With the core tube folding in half under the main engines' thrust, the crew had cut the engines to try to save the ship. The attackers ceased firing, but they came closer. When one attempted to latch onto the ship, the AI released all pods and then activated the self-destruct system to ensure that nothing was left to salvage.

The pods we found were certain that at least one enemy ship had been destroyed by the scuttling charges, so the crew got some revenge. On the other hand, they knew that several other pods had also been caught in the blast, and the remaining enemy ships had been destroying pods when the survivors lost contact with each other so the three of them were probably the only survivors.

They accepted my authority as the senior Confederacy official in the system, and let me give them some projects to work on. As part of their taskings, they were going to conduct a more detailed survey of the wreckage to see if anything else could be recovered. If they could find any intact AIs or replicator systems, those would be re-purposed into an automated miner which would keep them provided with materials for as long as it took us to get back to them. Otherwise, all materials scavenged from the wreckage would be used to build something that would keep them supplied. Certainly, if nothing else the wreckage was useful as high-quality raw materials.

We never did come up with a defensible policy for what to do if they found our casualties. We couldn't ask them to preserve the bodies until we came back, as that would take resources they didn't have. We finally decided that, if they found any organics, to package it all together and drop it into the star. We couldn't think of anything better to do for them.

We didn't find anything else worth talking about. Certainly, we found no trace of any other ships, friendly or otherwise. There were no planets full of aliens, no abandoned Unobtanium mines, no ancient derelict ships. We spent several days carefully examining every planet but could not find any trace of animal life, much less intelligent life or space-faring civilization.

Two planets showed signs of plant life, but until the natives developed a central nervous system they were of no interest to us. Besides, only one of the planets was anywhere close to our habitability zone and it would need a lot of terraforming work before we would be happy with it. On the other hand, our enemies may be able to use the system so we would have to keep an eye on it.

With nothing else to do here in this system, we decided to try the next one over, one that the Confederacy's original survey indicated included a planet with both plant and animal life.

This second system held trouble. We were still very far out, more than 100 AU, when our passive sensors started picking up all the signs of a technical culture: radiation from fusion reactors, electromagnetic noise from motors, actuators, and switches, radiation from several different types of spaceship drives. Before long, we could detect moving Nav Shields too. We didn't need to be able to detect the ships themselves, as long as we could track the drives and see their shields which glowed as they ran into inter-system dust, or as high-speed dust and micrometeorites ran into them.

Add that to our Christmas wish-list: We needed a way to 'turn down' our own Nav Shields to act like the shuttles' weaker ion shields. If we could do that, our ships would be much harder to detect. We weren't sure we should completely turn them off all the time, as they really were helpful in preventing shipboard damage from the dust, meteorites, and radiation.

We didn't have any personnel changes for our expected combat baptism. We normally went to our "Battle Stations" manning plan any time we left hyperspace, and then went back to our normal underway watch rotation as soon as we had verified that we weren't dropping into combat. This time, we stayed at BS (as some of us called it) for the duration.

We also activated all the other combat-mode changes we had come up with. We had our best people on all the consoles, and we had our very best in different spots. If I got killed or disabled by a hit that took out our CIC, Dickie should be safe up on the bridge and would take over. If the bridge got hit too, Billy back in the ECR would take command, although he would probably be concentrating on trying to get away rather than winning the fight.

I had Dr. Watkins as the Navigator in CIC with me along with Ensign James, who we were listing as the Communications and Sensors Officer. Normally, the Navigator would be 3rd in command, but he had no previous military experience so he was 4th with a strong directive to listen to Ens. James and the COB, both of whom were in CIC with us. James had a formal education as a Naval officer so he had the theory but no experience, and Master Chief Boggart had more than 25 years on the boats which made up for his lack of a college degree.

I should mention the "Battleshort" concept. Everyone has seen the science fiction movies where people have somehow invented wonderful machines, spaceships, and so on, but they have somehow forgotten how to protect equipment from overload with circuit breakers and fuses. No matter what else happened, no Star Trek episode was complete without some shipboard casualty that makes an electronics panel explode in a shower of sparks. Invariably, one of the stars would be nearby and burnt badly, but then by the next episode they would be in perfect health again, not even a scar.

Most of that is Hollywood stupidity, but there is a grain of truth to it. If you use breakers or fuses, whenever there is any kind of surge beyond their setpoint, you lose the use of everything protected by that circuit when all the breakers trip (or the fuses blow). That's bad, but you can reset the breakers or replace the fuses and get all your equipment back. On the other hand, if you don't like losing your equipment for minor reasons so you don't use breakers or fuses, whenever there's a surge you end up damaging or even destroying everything. That's even worse.

What you do is hedge your bets by doing both. When you are getting ready for combat damage, there are two things you can do with electrical equipment. If it is not critical for propulsion, navigation, fighting the ship, or combating damage, you can make things easier by simply shutting them down. You don't need the ship's laundry running while getting shot up. Those circuit breakers are manually opened as part of the Battlestations routine that starts when you announce "Now hear this. Set Condition Three throughout the ship. That is, set Condition Three throughout the ship. Make all preparations for combat and report when ready to CIC.".

Other things are critical to combat operations. If you have an electric motor that trains your gun mount, you really don't want it to go offline because some breaker tripped from a current surge, or even because of the shock wave from a nearby hit. Sure, during normal ops you want that breaker to pop open and protect the equipment, but when you are getting shot at it's better to lock that breaker shut so it cannot trip from vibration, shock, or overload. Come hell or high water, that breaker will remain shut and supply power to the mount, allowing you to keep shooting back.

Sure, a bad surge will burn out that motor, but the breakers are there to protect the motor and the power plant from failures in each other during normal operations. In combat, there are greater concerns than this. Locking a breaker shut keeps the mount up and running and allowing you to shoot back as long as power is available. If the mount fails, it fails. If it stops shooting for a preventable reason when the other guy is still shooting at us, everybody dies.

What you protect and what you force to stay online depends. Our plasma torpedo launcher was a critical combat system, but it wasn't required to be online constantly. In fact, whenever we went to Battlestations the breakers were verified to be open, until such time as we came within range. There was no point in risking damage to it when it couldn't be used. Shutting the breakers to energize all subsystems was part of getting it ready to fire. Then they were left protected behind its circuit breakers. If the breakers popped, we would reset them when safe and put it back in use.

The shield generator, on the other hand, was deemed so critical that in Condition Three it would always be behind a locked-shut breaker. If the generator went down in combat, we would probably lose the ship anyway, so there was no point in shutting it down to protect it from a surge.

Generally, if you have multiple copies of some critical item, you will allow half of them to be protected by their breakers, while the others have their 'battleshort' feature activated so that a breaker failure will not shut down that critical equipment. During our training and workups we had developed a list of what needed this, and we had a board in CIC that listed the various items.

We would alternate each time. One time we would have the starboard beam projector and everything involved with the starboard power plant on battleshort while the port projector and power plant were normally protected. That way, no matter what the problem was we would lose at most only half of our power and guns.

If a surge was bad enough to fry things, after it was done we would have lost our starboard side but the port-side equipment would have been protected. We could reset the port breakers and continue on. If the surge wasn't so bad as to damage equipment, the starboard side would stay running and when it was safe we could again reset the port breakers and have everything back.

To equalize wear and tear, the next time we went to BS we would leave the starboard side protected by their breakers, and lock the port side equipment down so that they would stay running.

For this first test of our enemy's sensor range, we kept Allie's shield up and Alnwick Castle followed, a thousand klicks back, with her shield down. Once we analyzed their tracks enough to determine their acceleration, we changed to match them and changed to an intercept course for the ship that appeared to be coming closest to us. If they had the same sensors we had, we should look very much like one of their ships. We wanted to know when they would notice us, and what their reaction would be.

We got far closer than we had expected before there was a reaction of any kind. We were beginning to wonder if we were going to be in range to shoot at them first, when the ship suddenly changed course to intercept us.

Before long they were close enough that we could see the actual ship inside the shield, and I could ask Allie for a comparison with the ships that killed For teh Win. Were they the same design? What differences could she detect?

Allie said that it was definitely the same design. Any differences were minor and of no consequence. The size, shape, mass, and arrangement of all identifiable equipment were all identical. Further, the propulsion system had the same performance and signature as For teh Win's killers. Either it was the same people, or the same people were providing ships to both groups the way that the Confederacy was providing ships to us.

Still, what if these guys were ignorant neutrals? We didn't want to start a war if they weren't who we were supposed to be fighting. I ordered everyone to hold their fire until they did something blatantly hostile that we couldn't ignore. What that really meant was that Allie disabled all firing controls until I, or if I was injured then Dickie up on the Bridge and rest of the chain of command, said that it was time to start shooting.

We got our hostile move, all right. Both ships had flipped over our tracks, as the only way to slow down was to use our main engines to 'accelerate' against the direction of travel. One great weakness in our design was that we couldn't fire directly astern, but since we weren't approaching from head-on we could at least use our particle beam projectors. They were in turrets that could fire almost dead astern. Once we were in range we would have to veer a little and lose a little of our slowing efficiency, but we could do it.

When the ship we were approaching got within about 400 kilometers it fired at us. What we got shot with was the same sort of particle beam that we had as our own long-range weapons. This was neither the time nor the place to try to track down exactly what their particle was, but their version appeared to be somewhat stronger than ours. We took no damage, but the shield generator complained.

Allie said that if we received multiple shots at the same time, or if our opponent could fire that one weapon fast enough, eventually they would overstress the shield and we would start taking damage, but individual shots wouldn't harm us if they were spaced out enough.

We got hit a second time while we were discussing this, and Allie said that at this rate we would start taking damage after the 5th or 6th shot. However, the limited video we got from For teh Win showed that these smaller ships had never fired more than one of these projectors each, so that may be all they carried.