Chapter 13

I sent the mission report to Colonel Decker the moment we got within range of the naval station, happy that I was going to give him some good news. We had gotten some useful intel for him last time, but this time we actually had some battle results. If I could have somehow mounted a broom to the outside of the ship, I would have wanted to sail into our dock with it proudly sticking up from whatever we could pass off as a superstructure. That was an old tradition I would have been happy to share in.

Colonel Barlow wasn’t waiting for us when we arrived this time. I was fine with that. It might be fun to play with the officious bastard, but that wasn’t who I was really looking forward to seeing.

We had arrived a little before lunchtime, so I asked all the crew have their family reunions in the mess hall and we could all share a meal together. It was a lot of fun to watch the crewmen share their stories about our latest mission and how excited the families were. Susan and I just listened, and she beamed with pride to hear everyone talk about what we had done. I think it did her some good to hear the others tell it, because they were heaping a lot more of the credit on me than I would have ever thought was right.

After lunch we all split up and went back to our own quarters to do those things families tend to do after an absence. Susan was quite insistent that I go straight to the bedroom when we arrived at ours.

That afternoon I met up with Colonel Decker, but had him meet me at the Sheep Pen instead of his office. I hadn’t shown it to him yet and it was so much more comfortable, even if it wasn’t necessarily guaranteed to be private. If the place was too busy, I could always clear out the team room for us.

Colonel Decker was surprised that not only had he not caught word of the place, but that we had managed to put together something like this.

“This place is just great. Mind if I move my office here?” he joked.

I showed him around, pointing out the memorabilia, and especially the photos from the original USS Oxford. He was very impressed by the diary we had and I told him the story of how we got our hands on it.

We got down to business after that, setting ourselves up in some comfortable chairs. We had the place to ourselves, so we could enjoy the casual comfort of the main area instead of the more work-like team room.

“I have to say I’m impressed, Carl. That was a pretty ballsy move for you to make in your little ship, but it seemed to be a smart calculated risk. I’m not going to ride you too hard for putting yourself in danger like that, but don’t get in the habit of stretching too far. If we had lost you, a lot of valuable intel wouldn’t have made it back here.”

“I understand, sir. I’m not very interested in putting my crew at risk any more than you’re eager to see the ship lost,” I said, smiling.

“So we’ve had a little time to go over your data. Our job is to put out analysis of the information we get and I wanted to run some of our conclusions past you to see if you concurred.”

“Fire away, sir.”

“First, we believe that the Sa’arm tend not to blend much technology from different ships into anything new they’re fielding. Those ships you tangled with out there didn’t seem to have anything different in them than we have in our Castle corvettes, based on the SIGINT you collected with your active sweep. That means it is unlikely that what works on one type of ship will be effective on another in terms of EW vulnerabilities.”

“That seems reasonable, sir.”

“Second, we can’t be confident that your EW attack was effective without seeing that successfully repeated on an undamaged ship. Too many other possible explanations, from having killed or incapacitated a requisite number of dickheads aboard to the point their collective abilities fall apart, to it just being a coincidence. We can’t recommend offensive ECM capabilities be put on the ships at this point, but we are saying there is a possibility that they may in fact be useful.”

“Sounds a little conservative, but I see no fault in that one, sir.”

“Lastly, we believe that with continued effort we are likely to discover new opportunities for effective offensive jamming, sensor manipulation and improvements in our ability to detect Sa’arm assets at range. We have no indication that we may be able to develop any capabilities to detect, disrupt or otherwise exploit Sa’arm command, communications, or control systems.”

“I agree with all that, sir.”

“Oh, by the way, I’m pretty sure you’re the stealthiest ship in the Confederacy right now.”

I smiled. “That’s all Ensign Hendrick’s fault, sir. He’s the one that came up with the idea, and worked with the AI to not only design the modifications, but implement them.”

Colonel Decker nodded. “Then we’re going to have to see he gets some recognition for that effort. BuShips is looking right now at how we can use all or part of those ideas elsewhere. His contribution is going to have a big impact on how we fight in the future.”

“Glad to hear that, sir. I know Ensign Hendricks will be pleased to hear that.”

Colonel Decker paused for a minute before he switched tracks.

“I want you to think about making another change to your ship. You took those missiles off, but they weren’t much use to you before. There may be missions in the future where having some firepower might actually be useful. Real firepower. Have your team consider the possibility of modifying that underside bay you use to store your remote array in, Maybe change it to a reconfigurable mission bay where you can choose to either keep the array in place, or put something else like anti-radiation missiles in, ones that would pack a punch. Or maybe we could stick mines in there if we wanted to. Since we’re still in the process of learning what we can do with your ship, I’d like to see some more flexibility in it.”

“Wow, that’s an interesting idea, sir. I’ll get the team working on that. Are there weapons packages that we should be designing this new mission bay to accommodate?”

“Not at all. We don’t have anti-radiation missiles in inventory, nor do we have any minelaying capability that we’d need mines for. You get to design and test all the toys you want for your toy box, so the only design constraints you have to work with now are what could possibly fit underneath the Oxford and still cover up with your ship’s fancy bodywork.”

“So we pretty much have free rein to come up with whatever we want to in terms of mission packages, as long as we think they may be useful, then?”

“I’d steer away from duplicating any capabilities we already have in inventory unless you see a real reason to do that. I also don’t think we need to turn you into the space-going version of an attack submarine, as I think that’s going to be the first idea that rolls next out of BuShips, courtesy of Ensign Hendrick’s fertile imagination, and that role really requires a ship designed specifically for that purpose. You’re former Air Force, so you’re familiar with the direction I’m pointing you in.”

“I sure am, sir. I’m just thinking about how we keep having to redesign the ship all the time. When we were in acceptance trials I was all worried about hidden design and construction flaws caused by an AI that I didn’t have much faith in yet. As it turns out, about all the design flaws were our fault, instead. We didn’t really have a good idea of what we wanted with the ship in the first place. The requirements analysis, which is on us, not the AIs, is really where we failed.”

Colonel Decker smiled. “‘Failed’ is a little harsh of a term to use here. We had a lack of imagination, and it wasn’t all that hard to see where that came from.”

“How so, sir?”

“Have you ever been told about how the Oxford came to be?”

“Well, a little. NA Special projects got the tasking to build us, I think after the Navy passed it on to them.”

“I looked it up, or rather got curious one day, and sent a message drone out to CENTCOM asking about this, and they shot me back a copy of the files. You are the ship that was never supposed to be.”

I was intrigued.

“After an engagement there’s an after-action review, and those are turned into a findings document that gets sent up the chain. After one of those, the review panel had suggested that if they only had better intelligence they might not have gotten their butts spanked so badly. Pretty much they were trying to shift the blame for their bad planning and brain-dead execution.”

“That suggestion made its way to CENTCOM and into the hands of a friend of the fleet commander who had just screwed up. Trying to protect his old buddy, he paraded this recommendation around like a big old flag, trying to salvage a career. He managed to get this turned into a tasking for the Navy ship design bureau to act on this recommendation and actually build a ship that was dedicated to intelligence collection.”

“The design bureau saw this for what it was - an unserious effort to play politics with their people, but they didn’t have the power to get the tasking canceled, so they just sat on it hoping people would forget about it. That didn’t work. Then they tried to argue that the tasking wasn’t a good idea, and that if the Navy wanted a new capability, they should just design a pod for it and stick it on a freighter hull like they always did. That didn’t work either. Finally they settled on good old tradition and whined that historically the Navy never operated these sorts of ships, they were the purview of the US Military Sealift Command, and since that was a proven model, it should be sent to the Naval Auxiliary. That worked.”

“NA got the tasking and were flabbergasted. They hadn’t done anything but take freighters and run them around. It got pushed down the chain, with everyone passing the buck, until it ended up on the desk of our good friend Tom Wilcox, which was the only reason all this turned out so well. Tom is a smart and creative guy, but he didn’t quite fit in even in the NA, and they had stuck him in a dead-end job making inconsequential trinkets that no one else wanted to be bothered with. He ran with it.”

Colonel Decker then started to chuckle, remembering something.

“Poor Tom wanted a crew that would fit his vision for this baby, but personnel refused to help him. He tried over and over to steal people with proven technical intelligence chops, but they wouldn’t be reassigned. Especially to a nobody like him, sitting in an office no one ever heard of, and in NA which never got their pick of the cream of the crop anyways. Finally, he poked around for people who hadn’t been extracted that were either on the brink of getting kicked out of the US military, were in jail, or otherwise unwanted by anyone. He found some, begged targeted extractions for help, and one week they had nothing better to do. And here you all are.”

I let all this sink in for a moment. That we were here, with this ship, was an absolute miracle. No wonder we were re-designing this ship on the fly and given no support to develop and train a crew. Anyone good at designing a new ship had passed it on down the line, leading to a complete novice, who all considered actually did a pretty good job.

The unorthodox nature of all this was a blessing, however. We would have never been given the freedom we’ve enjoyed if we had been “normal.” We would have been strait-jacketed by established process and procedure, and I would have gotten a crew of people who not only were comfortable in that environment, but could thrive only within it. CAP scores people who fit in very highly. People who are renegades, people who don’t always play well with others, people who take crazy risks, well, the system punishes those people with lower CAP subscores, and that makes a lot of them fall under the cutoff when the score is aggregated. My crew had sufficiently high scores in other areas to barely qualify for service, but in any other circumstance none of us would have been targeted for extraction.

“So I guess ‘Black Sheep’ is rather appropriate.”

“More than you know. In ONI, ‘black sheep’ are who I try to bring into the organization.”

He reached into his desk, pulled out a piece of paper, and started reciting.

Then the master of the sheepfold, who guards the sheepfold bin
Went out on the wind and the rain path, where the long night’s rain begins
And he let down the bars to the sheepfold, callin’ soft, “Come in, come in”
He let down the bars to the sheepfold, callin’ soft, “Come in, come in.”

Then up through the gloom in the meadow, through the long night’s rain and wind
Yes, up through the wind and the rain path, where the long night’s rain begins
Came the long lost sheep of the sheepfold, they all come a gatherin’ in
The long lost sheep of the sheepfold, they all come a gatherin’ in.

“My grandfather was a pastor. One night after a few cocktails he and his friends were going through some old hymnals and they came across this old song. In their less than sober state, they started reciting it together like they were at some old-timey revival. We were all hysterical with laughter. I think I was about eight years old at the time and never forgot that night.”

“After I had been extracted, I thought to dig up the lyrics. It’s not written about someone like me, of course, but it kind of describes part of what I do, so I keep this. When you showed up calling yourselves the ‘Black Sheep’ I about died with laughter remembering that night so long ago, but I just knew you belonged in my sheepfold.”

We sat for a while as I took this all in.

“OK, guys, settle down. The price of success is more work, and Colonel Decker has some for us.”

We were all in the team room, as I wanted everyone in on this collaboration effort, not just the officers.

“We are going to look at redesigning the remote sensor array bay to make it mission-configurable to hold other payloads than the remote array, in case we have a mission like the last one where we wouldn’t use it and something more useful could be stowed there. If you all come up with some good ideas that would make us more effective and more valuable to the fleet, we’ll do them.”

“Hendricks you’re on the bay redesign. Chandler, I want you to start working up some sort of anti-radiation missile we could put in there. Think of variants for ship-to-ship and ship-to-ground. Will, I want you to take a look at some sort of mine warfare capability. Smith, think of anything that might be a leave-behind spy package that we might seed somewhere so we wouldn’t have to sit around waiting for things. The XO and I will help work the collaboration, and the rest of you float from activity to activity, talk to the others about what they’re thinking about, and offer your suggestions. Got it?”

Heads nodded. Apparently no one questioned why we were were doing this, so I guess they grasped the concept here.

“Make sure you use the AI, and we have these displays and the white boards. We want others to can see what you’re thinking about. Let’s get to it.”

The men worked for a few hours and then the XO had them all come together to brief the entire team. Some of us who had floated around knew what the four task leads had been doing, but the leads were not completely sure about what the other leads had been doing.

Ensign Chandler was up first. “We have a prototype for a long-range anti-ship anti-radiation missile that could home in on radar or other RF signals. It would have an initial boost, coast until it got close to the target, and then have a terminal burn so it might get to a target fast enough before it got engaged by any close-in defensive systems. Without a mid-course burn it would have pretty much unlimited range, subject to how much an enemy ship maneuvers. If it maneuvers out of the missile’s detection capability at the terminal phase, or ends up farther away than the missile has fuel for, we wouldn’t get a hit. We’d coat it in the same material we use for the ship to make it low-observable. The warhead would be a small tactical nuclear weapon in the 10 kiloton range. We might enhance it for neutron particle emission.”

“The air-to-ground variant would be launched like a gravity bomb and fall in a ballistic path until it got within range of the target and had penetrated any atmosphere in the way. It would then do a hypersonic burn to deliver a conventional high-explosive fragmentation warhead designed to damage antenna systems, and perhaps do some structural damage. We can’t fit a big warhead on this one. The exterior coating would be heat-resistant ceramic and have a heat shield that can ablate during re-entry.”

“We also considered a fractional orbital bombardment package with terminal guidance, sort of like the Mavericks the Air Force used back in the day. This is something that should probably be used by a bomber instead of us, with us maybe doing active target designation, so we are considering the option of having an IR laser designator that we could put in the bay, but that wouldn’t be able to punch through some types of atmospheres which are unfortunately the types we like to live with and which the Sa’arm seem to appreciate.”