Chapter 68: More Estrogen

Major Greenfeld was standing outside the door. He looked at me and shook his head. “You are just fifteen?” he asked.

“I might be sixteen now,” I replied. “I’ve lost track of how many days have passed and which day we are on anymore. But I also don’t worry about it much.”

“You don’t?” he asked as we started walking back to Corsica.

“My age does not determine how well I can do my job,” I said.

“No, but it does determine how others will view you,” Major Greenfeld said. “At least initially. And I have to apologize for that. I’ve looked at your CAP score and record. You’ve done a lot.”

“I try to protect my crew and the Confederacy,” I said. “For some reason I remember the end of one of the Three Musketeers movies they made. After the group vanquishes the evil Cardinal, D’artagnan runs up to the more experienced musketeers and asks what do they do now. The response is that they protect the kingdom, protect the king and then after someone demands to duel D’artagnan, they point out they also protect each other.”

“I wasn’t much for movies when I was growing up,” the Major said. “I spent most of my time outdoors playing sports.”

“I played quite a bit of sports,” I said. “But my girlfriend thought some movies were romantic so I ended up watching my share.”

We entered the passageway to Corsica. I could see a pair of marines standing guard over the airlock. They saluted the Major, only to whirl in surprise as the airlock opened.

The Major and I halted as three people exited the airlock. I could see Ensign White in the lead. She saluted the marines and then stepped over to meet me.

“Sir,” she said. “I have Private Sarkozy and Kelly with me.”

“Have you explained what is happening to them?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Private Sarkozy said. “The dumb hick bitch told us you are throwing us off the ship. You can’t do that. We don’t have our concubines.”

The Major jumped forward. “Did I just hear you say that private? Do you know the punishment for that kind of talk in this army?”

“When did we join the army?” Private Kelly asked sarcastically. “Last I heard we were supposed to be on some kind of pleasure cruise. It must be that considering we have a boy captain.”

The Major turned to look at Private Kelly. “You don’t want to be in the military? Is that what you are telling me? I was going to inform you that your concubines would be picked up by a transport and brought here, but now I have an alternative first. You two are going to march over to medical and undergo a CAP rescan.”

“What?” Private Sarkozy squealed. “You can’t do that.”

One of the marines coughed. “Actually, he can. Especially if you have been a problem multiple times.”

“Which I expect these two have, if their captain is willing to trade them away for new crew he hasn’t met yet,” the other marine said.

Private Sarkozy stepped forward and raised a fist. He stood there for a moment and then slowly lowered it. “No, punching you might be nice for a moment, but I get a feeling the penalty will be severe.”

“Marine,” the Major called out. “Escort these two privates to the medical bay. We’ll have to retest these two, but I expect they’ll have a six point five again.”

One of the marines lowered his weapon and pointed it at the two privates. They frowned and started to walk down the passage. Private Kelly stopped and turned. “What about our concubines?”

“If you pass your CAP retests, we’ll send a transport to pick up your pods and bring them here,” Major Greenfeld said.

“You want me to trust you? You are going to retest us,” Private Sarkozy whined.

“You haven’t exactly been great citizens,” I said. “I could imagine that a retest might identify people who don’t belong as part of the military.”

“And you are too young to be a captain. I should be in charge,” Private Kelly countered.

“Private, we have four missile crews. Yours was the one I could never count on. Even Private Swift and Private Sarkozy occasionally showed promise. If you can’t do that, how can anyone trust you to be in command?” I asked.

My question silenced Private Kelly. He looked at the floor and then allowed himself to be marched out of sight.

“So going to tell me about my replacement gunners?” Ensign White asked.

“I haven’t met them,” I replied. “The Admiral said that their names are Lance Corporal Jacqueline Vernon and Private Amy Branch. They have been a pair since their transit to Yularaat, but haven’t been able to fit in on the other ships. My impression is that the crews have mostly been former military. Jacqueline was a student at Annapolis who was not given officer rank when she was picked up. Amy was a civilian back on Earth.”

“Wait, a student at the Naval Academy wasn’t made an officer right away?” Ensign White asked.

“Not all soldiers can adjust to space combat,” Major Greenfeld said. “Those trained to fly fighters and bombers tend to have issues with the lack of gravity as it messes up with the physical rules they learned to deal with when flying in an atmosphere. Navy officers often have trouble thinking in three dimensions when it comes to moving and fighting.”

Ensign White nodded. “I can picture that. When Mark first explained how we had to aim the whole ship when firing the main guns on Corsica, I was confused, but once I was able to ignore that I was aiming the whole ship, I was able to improve my aiming quickly.”

“It will be interesting to see if civilians do work out better in some cases,” Major Greenfeld said cautiously.

“I have an extraordinary crew,” I said. “They put in hundreds of hours of training in just four short weeks. Don’t expect other crews to do as well.”

“Right now a crew that lasts more than four months is doing well,” the Major said softly. “We are better than the Sa’arm in space, but we have few ships and they have many. Worse, the prototype you see out there is about as big as we can consistently staff. There are much larger ships being worked up, but some require more than one hundred crewmen to serve. And our biggest colony transports can barely carry that many.”

“So there is no hope?” Ensign White asked.

“There is always hope,” I said. “However, what the Major is saying is that right now most of our job is to just try to delay the Sa’arm. Force them to slow their advance to give our engineers time to design ships we can build, and for the pickups to collect enough people that we can man the ships we build. Think about our journey to Crucible. We are the first people set there, even though its going to be a vital training post in the near future.”

“Will it really be vital?” Ensign White asked.

“We need to find a way to stop the Sa’arm on the ground. We appear to be far better than they are in space, but quantity is a quality all its own. And the Sa’arm will manage to land on planets,” I said.

“How?” Ensign White asked again.

“Two ways. First, they have enough ships to hit multiple systems at once. Since we have a limited number of ships, we can’t cover every system, so they’ll find the systems we can’t protect. Second, if they bring their biggest ships, they will likely overwhelm some defensive fleets,” ‘I said.

The Major surprised me by nodding. “We’ve received some general distribution reports regarding systems near to the main Sa’arm front. The Sa’arm show up with a huge sphere that contains millions of workers and then multiple massive ships designed to push aside any obstacles. They appear to be primarily armed to eliminate meteors and other small planetary fragments, but their accuracy is impressive and the power of their weapons is higher than you’d expect.”