Chapter 1

I knocked next to the open door, waiting only a moment before hearing “Come.” I took three steps in to place myself in front of a utilitarian desk, stood at attention, and rendered a proper salute.

“Ensign Carl Jones reporting as ordered, sir.”

The man sitting behind the desk smiled. “Have a seat, Ensign.”

“Now we can clear up the mystery, as I’m sure it is to you, as to why you’re here. First off, I’m Commander Wilcox with the fleet auxiliary. I run the special projects office for the Confederacy Naval Auxiliary where we dream up new ways of helping out the Navy and Marines as well as driving the dickheads crazy when we can. We don’t run or man dedicated combat ships, but the supply, transport and other ships the Navy and the Marines need in order to do their jobs. You are being assigned to one of those ‘other’ ships.”

‘Other’ sounded intriguing and unnerving at the same time, the way Commander Wilcox said it.

“Sir, I don’t have any experience I can imagine would be useful for that.” I interrupted.

Wilcox gave out a small laugh. “Oh, I think you do. We spent a lot of time looking for some unusual candidates, and you seem to fit exactly what we’re looking for here - an engineering geek who doesn’t like to play by the rules, who surprises the people he works for frequently with things they might not appreciate a whole lot, and some solid leadership skills. You’ve got the sub-scores in those areas that are important to us, and we don’t care about the rest. I’m pretty sure you’re what we want.”

I still had no idea what the hell was going on. If they thought an engineer who couldn’t hold a job for more than six months at a time and who had a string of awful fitness reports in the US Air Force Reserve was their guy, well it beat the heck out of being stuck on Earth and becoming Swarm chow.

“If you say so, sir. You sure seem to have gone to a lot of trouble.”

“A little. Just some research and a few targeted extractions. It’s something we actually do pretty regularly.”

“Anyways, we here have finally browbeaten the AIs into building a new class of ship, which is like a cross between the old naval technical auxiliary ships - you probably remember them more as ‘spy ships’ - and the Air Force airborne reconnaissance planes. The AIs didn’t think the effort was worth it, so we only get one, but at least we get a chance to prove the AIs wrong for once. You’re going to command that vessel and go sneak around to figure out what the dickheads do to sense and communicate, and exploit what you find out if you can. We’re looking for knowledge, and knowledge is power. The ship will be too small to bring family onboard, so it’s not going to be a luxury cruise by any means, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to find the work challenging and interesting.”

I was stunned. “Nobody has tried to do this before?”

“Not really. We know the dickheads communicate, and damn, they sure do it quick, but we just kept adapting to the problem rather than try to solve it. Since we’ve been relatively successful, everyone and the AIs have felt since we had no idea what was going on with this it wasn’t worth trying to figure it out. The Confederacy is no help here, either. So no dedicated electronic intelligence operations, hardly any electronic warfare, and we just keep on doing what we’ve been doing hoping everything will work out. Special projects doesn’t play that way.”

“Okay, what can you tell me about this ship?”

“It’s all in the briefing that is now available from the AI in your quarters. I’m sure you’ll want all sorts of details about it that I don’t understand and can’t explain to you. There’s also a bunch of sleep training modules for you, but don’t go expecting that they’re obviously useful to you. Since nobody in the Confederacy has ever seemed to do something like this before, and you’re on a new ship, there isn’t a nice package of modules tied up in a pretty bow that will tell you what you’re expected to do. Instead, we pulled together a bunch of modules that we thought might be useful and we’re going to leave it to you and your crew to figure everything else out during the shakedown cruise. We’re starting from zero here, and are gonna have to do a lot of winging it, but I wanted to make sure you had everything we could give you. If you find you need more, let me know.”

He paused for a moment while he let that sink in, correctly reading the look on my face as that all sunk in. I was totally SCREWED.

“Any other questions?”

“No sir, I guess not.”

“Then you’re dismissed, Lieutenant Jones.”

“Um, sir, I’m an Ensign.”

“Not anymore. We don’t have Ensigns commanding ships here.”

He reached into his desk and threw a small packet at me, which in my surprise I barely caught.

“Put those on when you get to your quarters. And get ready for one hell of a ride.”

I left Commander Wilcox’s office in a daze. Two weeks ago I’d put on the uniform of a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force to do my reserve duty for the weekend where I was in charge of a maintenance section that fixed radios and radars for aircraft based at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. One minute I’m verifying a spare parts inventory list in one of the storage containers, and the next some enormous guy appears in a Confederacy uniform, looks me in the face and demands “DO YOU VOLUNTEER?”

I was pretty shocked, so he had to ask twice and the questioning “yes?” I answered with seemed to satisfy him as he grabbed my arm and pushed me onto some sort of disk on the floor, and wham! I’m in a spaceship. And I’m now in a different military organization. Just as soon as I seem to get a handle on what the heck is going on, some Commander goes and totally tips my world upside down once again.

“Susan, I’m back!” I announce as I walk into the pod that constitutes my Visiting Officers Quarters. As far as temporary quarters go, these are quite a bit nicer than I’d expected and didn’t look at all like the dorm rooms I was used to in the Air Force. They had a separate bedroom, a study, a pretty generous living room and a bathroom like you might see in an upscale hotel, a room with the sleep training pod in it, and that was just the first floor. The AI could even redecorate it for you, but I was entirely satisfied with the way it looked when I first saw it. I’m not picky about stuff like that.

Susan came out of the bedroom wearing something called a ‘shift’ that all the ‘concubines’ had to wear, or end up naked. I didn’t care for the simple one-piece short dress thing that much, and I certainly didn’t like this whole ‘concubine’ thing that the Confederacy was doing, but I didn’t get much say in all that. There was nobody to complain to who would have ever been able to change anything. We just had to accept it for now, I guess.

She wrapped me up in a hug and gave me a quick kiss. Stepping back a bit she looked at me more closely. “Carl, how did it go? You look bothered.”

“Yeah, I am. I’m going to be commanding a new kind of ship and I’m a Lieutenant now.”

“I thought you already were a Lieutenant before they started calling you ‘Ensign.’ Did you get demoted back to Lieutenant or something?”

“Nah, my Air Force rank was Second Lieutenant, which was the same rank in the Confederacy as Ensign. This is a promotion.” I pulled the packet out of my pocket that the Commander had given me an opened it. There were a few sets of Lieutenant rank insignia in the packet.

“Would you do the honors and put these on?” She beamed at me as she swapped out my Ensign rank and stood in front of me to make sure it looked like she put them on right.

“And what’s this about a ship?” she asked.

“I don’t know a whole lot yet, but the AI here has a briefing for me. Once I know more we’ll talk about it, but for right now I’m even more curious about it than you are. Do you mind if I go into the study and get that taken care of?”

My relationship with Susan was different than what most others had with their concubines. First off, I had Susan, and only Susan, extracted to be my concubine rather than the two concubines my CAP score said I was supposed to have. Back on Earth everyone underwent this weird test done by an AI and they gave you a numeric score. If you got high enough, you were eligible to join the Confederacy, and if that score was above the cutoff, you were eligible to have more than the two “concubines” a passing score allowed.

I had been planning on proposing to Susan when I got extracted, and I just didn’t want to have anyone else. I’d heard that everyone else rushed to fill every possible slot they could before they left, but I just didn’t need anyone else. I caught a lot of grief for that, but so far it didn’t seem they could make me take someone else too, although they hinted pretty strongly that they could because I was supposed to be cranking out kids as much as possible and I needed more than one woman for that. Yeah, well, let’s see what happens with that.

The other big difference was I didn’t do the whole master/slave thing that seemed to be the norm. It just wasn’t me. I wanted a partner, not a pet, and I treated Susan like a partner. Dammit, I loved Susan. I wasn’t going to go ordering her around like she was somebody I didn’t respect. I got grief for that too, with people saying I was setting a bad example and causing trouble between other ‘sponsors’ and their concubines. We just avoided dealing with other people after that and the complaints died off, although I did feel bad that Susan was cooped up in the pod most of the time as a result. Well, they weren’t going to make me be a jerk, and if this is what it took to keep my sanity and my relationship, well we’d deal with it until we could figure something out.

I was her husband, she was my wife, and I liked it that way.

Susan smiled and told me to go ahead and take as much time as I needed and we’d talk when I had some time. I think she appreciated what I was doing.

As I walked into the study I looked up at the ceiling. “AI, can you present the briefing that Commander Wilcox made for me?”

<Certainly, Lieutenant.>

Across from the desk a holographic projection appeared and the door to the study closed. For the next hour and a half I furiously took notes as the AI described the “CSS Oxford,” hull number AGTR-1, its design, capabilities, and operations in mind-boggling detail. Of course all the information would now be available on the data pad I was issued, but my notes were all about the questions the briefing was raising and the ideas that came to mind. For the next hour I went through all those questions and ideas with the AI, which patiently answered my questions, explained why an idea would not be considered, or in a few cases, how an idea could be implemented if Commander Wilcox approved it.

The Oxford was the smallest, stealthiest platform that you could possibly festoon with a forest of non-stealthy antennas, radomes, dishes, masts and sensor pods, and then fill with an obscene quantity of electronics. It was decidedly the ugliest thing I think anyone could have dreamed up had they been given the task, and as far as crew comfort, well, that just fell right off the list. At maneuvering it was slow and ungainly, the FTL drive was barely adequate to the task, it held nearly no weaponry, and had no shield other than basic navigation shields which were pretty much only for emergency use. There wasn’t even a porthole to see the stars through.