Epilogue: How We Ended Up

It's been six years now. We've got upwards of a hundred colonies in as many systems in every possible direction. We're still losing systems, we aren't strong enough to hold any planet that the Swarm really want, but we can already tell we're going to win this war. We started with hand-me-down ships that weren't as good as theirs, but as soon as we started building our own that changed.

See, one on one we are their equal. On the ground, they only take planets because they coordinate so well and breed so much faster than us and can overrun any kind of planetary army once they've landed. They also don't seem to have any noncombatants.

When the Sa'arm win a battle with us, we don't know if they study us or just add our bodies to the dinner table. We, on the other hand, send investigators and research people in to examine whatever is left of every battle that we win. The xenobiologists say that there is no recognizable difference between any two units in a group. When we get to examine a dead Sa'arm ship, the body found behind a wrecked weapon mount is identical to the body found in the engineering spaces. For land battles, the Sa'arm holding their laser 'rifles' are identical to the ones inside their vehicles.

It looks more and more as if the Sa'arm were manufactured; an artificial space version of army ants intelligent enough to learn from their mistakes and determined to put an ant-hill on every habitable planet in the galaxy. On the other hand, they have to use ships to get to planets, the same as us, and that means if we can stop their ships it never turns into a ground fight.

And, it's clear that, in their heart-of-hearts, they are ground-pounders. They are optimized in every way to win infantry battles. They are not optimized in every way to win naval battles. We suspect that they don't invent anything, although they are capable of recognizing the capabilities of anything they capture and modifying it for their own use. The ships we're building right now are equal to theirs, and we win in any kind of fair fight. Unless they can reinforce. Of course they can reinforce most of the time, so we still lose most of the long knock down and drag out fights, but when we can pick our battles we're starting to win.

And, we are still learning and building our strength. They don't seem to innovate as well as us. The next generation of ships we build will be better than theirs in every way, and we'll start winning the unfair fights, too. We can already see that.

So, we haven't stopped them yet, but we are slowing them, and the data is easy to graph. We can't tell if we'll stop them short of Earth or not, it's going to be close, but even with Earth only keeping one hundredth of its resources for home defense and sending the rest out, Earth has a bigger fleet than any of the colonies. We figure that, even if the Sa'arm do get here, it'll be a long time before they are ready to go anyplace else afterwards. Meanwhile, all of our colonies will still be pumping out soldiers and sailors, ships and tanks, missiles and bullets as fast as they can.

Let's see. Frenchy kept his nose clean and climbed the promotion ladder to Admiral. Since we don't have an Air Force, he had to choose between Navy and Marines; I guess he considered the Marines a worse fate than the Navy. He helped develop our fighter and bomber programs before he returned to operations. We lost him with his flagship and several other ships a couple of years ago when we tried to raid a Sa'arm system that turned out to be more ready for us than we thought.

Admiral Kennedy stayed in Sol system, where he runs some training and development directorate. I've lost track of what George and Randall are doing, but I know they are still alive. Every once in a while the AIs ask the five of us for a group decision on some issue with the CAP system, so Diana and I sit in a meeting room and we all do the hyperwave conference thing until we agree on an answer.

Other than the AIs, I don't think that anyone else knows about that meeting in the corridor on Freighter #2, back on the day I was picked up. I don't consider myself one of the Masters of the Universe, though. All I did was keep the UN restricted to Earth and the Solar System.

Dickie took over Allington Castle and ran the squadron until it was large enough to split into two units and then moved up to larger ships and formations as we built them. He wasn't the first of the old Castle hands to make Admiral, but he was the first one to deserve it. Billy, Doc, and the rest of them likewise moved on to bigger and better things. Promotions are quick in wartime. Between combat losses and an expanding fleet it's easy to move up as long as you aren't one of the losses.

As far as humanity is concerned, the CAP system is still a closed magic "black box". Any questions about how the scores are calculated are gently deflected by the AIs with a quick comment that if the test subject understood the test he, she, or it could steer it, so in order to get valid results they must refuse to explain it.

During one of our conferences we talked about FTL radios for the fleet, and we decided that, as much as we needed them, we needed to avoid micromanagement by Earth even more. We ended up asking the AIs to help us improve communications, but never so much that the headquarters commands had real-time access to the people at the front. So, being led by the AIs through a huge dump of "obsolete" Confederacy data, Earth's researchers came up with a "hyperwave radio" that worked great, but only if you were far away from any gravity wells.

It even destroyed ships in the area, so it could only be used by isolated stations a light-hour or so away from a star. It worked wonderfully well to talk to another radio station somewhere else, but was awkward to use to say the least. They tried to turn that into some kind of weapon, but we've never seen a Sa'arm ship out that far from a star so it's a weapon with no target.

The communication solution the development guys came up with that was actually useful was a miniaturized ship, basically just a missile or torpedo, with a hyperdrive, the brains to navigate to where it's sent, and a bunch of memory for messages. They ended up calling them "message torpedos", and every system keeps two or three for emergencies. The busier colonies send one to their next-higher command whenever they have anything to say. The District Commanders turn around and send them out to all the bases and colonies whenever they have anything to say. The fleets also use them to report back to headquarters, but the DCs have to use actual ships to talk to the fleets, since the fleets move around and a message torpedo couldn't find them.

The reason I brought that up was that we proved early on that the AIs were willing to lie in a good cause. They don't like being lied to, but they are willing to lie to our enemies. In this case, I'm talking about the UN. Once we started seriously ramping up our recruiting for the ships, the stations, the colonies, and everything else we are doing out here, we couldn't hide it from the UN any more.

We came somewhat clean and admitted that we were building a Navy with armed ships, bases, and shipyards, a Marine Corps of infantry and support specialists, and a network of colonies. Of course the UN had to make sure that they maintained control of everything. What they set up was two massive bureaucracies based on the Moon and various facilities in Earth orbit.

The first, called "Central Command", takes orders from the UN and gives orders to the armed forces. On our end, we set up several "Military Districts" that are each responsible for a specific volume of space. CC is responsible for "overall direction" of the war effort, while the District Commanders are responsible for day-to-day operations in their districts.

When that happened was when we came to our senses and told the AIs that we really didn't want whatever it was that they used to communicate between systems, and that just sending ships back and forth was good enough for us. We claimed that the communication lag prevented close coordination between CC and the districts, and for several years every time we had a military setback we found a way to blame it on CC's meddling. And, we had a lot of setbacks in those first few years.

Eventually, CC got the idea and stopped trying to direct the sailors and soldiers. They do the management and support function for us, as a combination Pentagon, Kremlin, and Whitehall. They also handle all the training and research and development stuff for us. The District Commanders run the war. And, now that they have robotic message torpedos, the districts can send messages to their colonies and get answers back generally within hours.

Actually, once CC gave up on ordering the districts around, the R&D guys came up with an FTL communicator that works. Sometimes. Don't know much about that one, we don't have one here. All we have is the one that the AIs use when they want a live conference about CAP issues.

Recruiting and Personnel could have been a sticking point, but the AIs are better negotiators than the UN is. Earth and the Confederacy recruiting effort are firmly in the hands of a UN bureaucracy named DECO, the "Directorate of Evacuation and Colonial Operations". As near as we can tell, DECO is run by escapees from an insane asylum, and any colony that actually listens to them is effectively lost to the war effort. Not to worry, DECO has no authority outside of Earth orbit, so once they send the fleet a recruit he is ours.

DECO thought that they would have authority over all of the colonies, but after all the agreements were signed the AIs pointed out that throughout the Confederacy, any colony became self-governing the instant the first non-employee, non-government (and for us they had to add "non-military") person landed at the colony. If you had a mining station that held nothing but miners, corporate executives, and security personnel, that station was subject to home control. However, the first time a miner brought his wife and children to live with him at the station, it became politically independent of their parent. They may still have economic and contractual obligations, but they were not required to listen to the home offices about anything else.

The bottom line was that DECO ran every colony the way they wanted up until the instant that the first colonist actually landed there. After that, DECO had no authority at that colony. And, we claimed that every colony, every station, and every ship had dependents on them. The AIs actually PUSHED us to take concubines with us on every ship, to make sure that the ships remained free of DECO control.

Anyway, the AIs made a simple change to their test and scoring system: For any political recruit, they simply left "integrity" out of their formula. They also quietly flagged that person as ineligible to leave Sol System, or Earthat. CC and DECO both got loaded with UN people who I wouldn't trust to walk my dog, but nevertheless had absurdly high CAP scores. Sociopaths and psychopaths are frequently very intelligent, well educated, suave, urbane, competent, friendly, helpful. You just can't trust them.

Other than not ever being assigned outside of the system (because "We need you too much right here") these people were treated just like everyone else, and it didn't take too long before CC and DECO were completely controlled by UN people, just like they wanted. Unfortunately, we've had to sacrifice a lot of good people to those snakepits just to keep things going.

Not that all those UN people actually volunteered, of course. Most of them proudly displayed their high CAP scores and continued on in their jobs that the UN had worked so hard to place them in. You don't really think that the President actually deserved the score he boasted about, do you?

For the rest of us, when someone gets picked up the AIs verify that the recruit actually deserves the CAP score he claims, and we indoctrinate him our way. Most of them never look back.

When the Secretary-General appointed Chandler to head DECO, Ginger emigrated to the colonies rather than work with him. She ended up at Atlantis, which is all underwater domes and climate-controlled anyway so it has turned into a huge nudist colony. Every letter we get from her starts "I haven't worn clothes in two months" or "I had to put my uniform on yesterday to meet with an out-system visitor. I hated it." I always get an erection when I read her letters, and Diana always smacks me for it. And then makes me use it on her.

Occasionally, though, the UN and the Chinese get their shit together enough to create a new colony without Confederacy Navy help. We don't expect anything except trouble from them, either. They don't provide ships, they don't provide men, they don't provide anything to the rest of us except endless demands for support. We ignore them. We're trying to fight a war here, and a political colony that does nothing except feed the administrator's ego is not going to get any of our resources. The UN and China can help them, if they want.

Me? I never got another promotion, don't ever expect one. I went back to Jupiter Station and worked on improving the Castles for another year or so. Eventually we had made enough changes that we started calling them "Improved Castles" or "Ainsworths" after the first one that had most of our improvements.