Chapter 16

“What are you working on, Will?”

I had decided to make a visit to the Sheep Pen so I could see how the men were doing. Will was holding court with a couple of the other men and they had something rather strange displayed on the holo.

“Pappy, we’re tryin’ to make a gun,” he answered.

“If you want one, just go to the armory and check one out.”

“Nah, we’re trying to design a gun. Somethin’ strange that might look like the dickheads maybe would use. It’s helping me keep my mind off things, ya know.”

I finally grasped what was going on here. Apparently they had the AI displaying models of unusual firearms that had been used on Earth, and were trying to pick one of those out as a starting point for their work. The current design candidate had four barrels that instead of being parallel to each other, fanned out sort of like the toes on a bird’s foot.

“Nah, only four shots won’t make sense. Next.”

The image was replaced with something that looked like a set of brass knuckles with a revolver cylinder on top and a knife stuck out of the bottom.

“That’s more like it. We just make it fit dickhead hands and have it shoot something cool.” Sergeant White enthused.

PFC Smith seemed enthusiastic about the idea, and PFC Douglas started suggesting that it shoot something like little rockets. I left them to their hobby and got a beer from the bar. I spoke with Lieutenant Williams to see how he was doing, and he looked a lot better than yesterday.

Colonel Decker strode in accompanied by a Navy Ensign I didn’t recognize.

“Colonel, looks like they’ll let just about anyone in here these days!” I shouted. He shook hands with Todd and me.

“Well, your Sergeant out in the front office front was kind enough to let us in, so you can put the blame on him,” he said with a chuckle.

“I want to introduce you to Ensign Rob Porter, Confederacy Navy. He’s going to be assigned to you as a replacement, at least until FA can get someone out here for you more permanently.” I shook hands with Ensign Porter.

“How about we discuss this in the back?” I nodded to the door of the team room.

“Sure, lead the way,” the Colonel replied.

As we walked back Ensign Porter’s eyes were scanning all around the Sheep Pen taking everything in. He seemed pretty surprised by the place. I ushered everyone through the door and we all took a seat.

“Nice digs!” Colonel Decker exclaimed. “Now I really want to move my office here. I didn’t know you had a place like this in the back.”

“It makes a good training and planning room for us, much better than the conference rooms up at HQ,” I explained. “So, what’s this about the Ensign being a replacement for us? I hadn’t requested one yet.”

“We’re going to need you back at operational readiness soon, so I put in the request for you yesterday. Rob here has been waiting for a fleet posting ever since he completed OCS, and in the meantime is doing some staff work at HQ. It’s not his forte. I thought it might be good for him to have some exposure to you and the way you do business, and he’s a solid junior officer that I think you’ll enjoy working with.”

“You need someone back there in your Engineering spaces, and waiting a month or more for FA to get you another crewman isn’t going to fly. Rob needs something other than paperwork to occupy him. Win-win, you know?”

“Rob, how about you tell the Commander a bit about yourself?

Ensign Porter seemed a little nervous at how things had started, but he soldiered on. “Well, I got picked up four months ago. I had been an engineering student at UC San Diego and got selected for OCS after basic indoctrination and training. I did pretty well there, but it seemed a little, well, too focused on lectures and process. I suppose I have a lot to learn, still. For the past three weeks I’ve been working with logistics planning.”

I asked a few questions and we went back and forth a bit, but he seemed like he could handle the job. It seemed like he would fit in with us all pretty easily.

“No reason not to give you a chance to broaden your horizons, and you seem as qualified as anyone else. Welcome to the team,” I offered, with a handshake.

Colonel Decker was right. We needed an engineering officer, and we needed to get back out there instead of dwelling on what happened on the last mission. I trusted Decker’s instincts about people, and this guy seemed solid. With the appropriate punishment delivered by the sleep trainer, he would probably be brought up to speed quickly, and it seemed his personality would be a good fit for us.

I led everyone back to the main room to introduce Rob to everyone. At this point folks had gathered around Sergeant White’s holo display as they continued to fiddle with their contraption. They all took a break for introductions and Rob started studying the display.

“What’s this? It looks like an Apache pistol. Why would anyone waste their time on something like that?” Rob asked the group.

“No, it’s a dickhead officer’s pistol. Or at least it will be when we’re done. Say, what do you know about these things?” Sergeant White inquired.

“My dad was a big firearms guy and had a C&R license from BATF. He collected all sorts of weird stuff but wasn’t able to ever get his hands on one of these things. They’re pretty rare. It was a stupid design that didn’t work, but it’s a valuable collector’s item and there aren’t a lot of them out there. Not a whole lot of people have ever seen one. I haven’t, myself. The whole idea of making sure you brought a knife to a gunfight was insane, and these were super inaccurate and under-powered.”

“Sounds like you know a thing or two about guns. Maybe you could lend us a hand here?”

“I work pretty cheap. You get me a beer, and I’ll be your armorer!” They shared a laugh while PFC Douglas went to fetch Rob a drink.

“So explain to me exactly what you’re trying to do here...”

Colonel Decker and I sat back and watched them work.

“I’m sorry about making it seem like I’m going to just foist some random guy on you one day after the funeral, but I wanted to make sure I could get you the best candidate possible before personnel actually sent you some random guy. I’m pretty confident he’s going to work out for you. He’s not necessarily the kind of Black Sheep you all are, but he was someone I wanted to bring into my sheepfold if I could. He’s got real potential.”

“I get it, sir. If we didn’t have the time to search for a perfect candidate and do one of those targeted extractions, and then ship him from Earth to here, it was going to be hard to fill this job. If this works out, we might want to keep him though. Would there be any problem with a transfer to FA if that happens?”

“I don’t see an issue there. Transfers back-and-forth happen from time to time as long as the personnel involved don’t have a problem with it. In the meantime don’t put that patch on his Navy blacks. Some admiral around here might have a fit if he saw that. They don’t care that much what the FA people are doing, but they do care about what their folks are doing.”

“Thanks for the warning there.”

“Looks like he’s getting on well with your crew,” Colonel Decker observed with a chuckle.

Indeed, the impromptu design group had been working furiously, and now the hologram showed an absolutely alien-looking monstrosity that looked terribly dangerous and deadly. Folks were going to eat this up.

We strolled over. I asked “So, is this what you’re going to do?”

Rob was pretty excited about the results. “We need to build and test a prototype so we can see if it would work, just so no one would be able to easily figure out it’s a fake. The closer we can get to it working, the more people will buy into it.”

Colonel Decker chimed in. “Can you make sure there are some design flaws in there?”

“Why do that, Colonel?” Sergeant White asked.

“I may have a plan for these. Let’s say they actually work, but are weak, short-range, and impractical. Since the Sa’arm don’t seem to carry sidearms, if they found one of these they might just decide it’s better than the nothing they already have and might adopt it. We would be ‘gifting’ them new technology, but it wouldn’t be much of a gift at all. It would actually be a waste of their resources. If these showed up in some of the Trojan boxes you do and the Sa’arm liked them, it might encourage them to keep opening up the damned things and killing themselves. It would keep the project going.”

Rob and Sergeant White got pretty excited by this idea. I chuckled at the possibility of Marines somewhere actually bringing a few of these home as real trophies, when we would have been cranking them out as fake “pogue bait” for so long. As the original manufacturers, we would be making even more authentic Sa’arm war trophies than even the Sa’arm themselves.

“I guess we need to work on a ‘reverse Trojan’ system or something,” I mused.

Colonel Decker nodded. “Welcome to the world of intelligence, Commander.”

Ensign Porter seemed to fit right in with the rest of the crew. He was eagerly corrupted by our non-traditional ways and quickly dropped a lot of the Navy officiousness that he had adopted while working at headquarters as a survival mechanism. Since Porter wore a black uniform without a “Black Sheep” patch as opposed to the rest of us who wore a blue uniform with one, he turned out to be excellent as an infiltrator. It wasn’t like any of us in the Fleet Auxiliary could waltz into port logistics to do a “midnight requisition,” when we looked so out of place with everyone else. But Porter could walk just about anywhere in a navy office without any notice, and between a little coaching from Sergeant White, and being recognized as the staff office guy for logistics he had so recently been, the Ensign was turning into a first-class scrounger and spy.

A lot of the crew kind of viewed Ensign Porter as a favorite little cousin, despite him being an officer. Sure, they gave him the appropriate military respect and never told him what to do, but they were happy to explain what they needed and Porter would come up with his own part to play in whatever scheme they were hatching. His experience and local knowledge was rather valuable, and under the expert tutelage of the crew, a devious, sneaky intellect was blossoming.

I think Chris would have been proud of him.

One of the things Ensign Porter pulled off was to “requisition” a small quantity of platinum from logistics. Sergeant White needed it to put a mysterious inscription on the side of his creation, and this would feed a replicator the rare element needed for this job. White thought it would only be appropriate for an officer’s weapon to have some special marking on it, just to set it apart from what the lowly enlisted dickheads got to carry. Platinum, just because that’s special.

The men thought hard about what would be inscribed on the handle of the fake weapon, and ended up agreeing on “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.” Unfortunately you can’t write that in English on the side of a supposed piece of exotic Sa’arm weaponry. They played with using different languages with strange (to them) alphabets, but someone might recognize it. If it was taken seriously, I could barely imagine the chaos that would be caused if the intel analysts somewhere were to believe in the existence of some cultural link between, say Laotians for example, and the Sa’arm. Our joke could end up causing a lot of innocent people harm. Rob ended up suggesting they just make some random lines and curves on it and not try to be so cute, and that was ultimately agreed on.

I did make sure Ensign Porter started working on sleep trainer modules and get some real work done, but bonding with the rest of the crew was going to help him.

Colonel Decker had us participate in a fleet training exercise in Thuleat space. It was probably a good idea to get out there on a nearly no-risk mission that would let us get experience as a re-formed crew, and so we might get our edge back after the loss of Chris. At first I didn’t like the idea. After more consideration I recognized it as the gift it was.

For this exercise we would act as OPFOR along with three Stagecoach transports that would have their electronic signatures mocked-up to seem like Vervactor cruisers, and low-power lasers installed to act like cruiser weapons. One of them could act as a tender for us as we harassed the “Blue Team,” supplying us with replacement dummy ARM missiles that were made of fiber instead of metal, and armed with red paint as a warhead instead of the thirty kilogram AP bomb. The ship’s AIs would act as referees.

The “Blue Team” all had their weapons modified to shoot low-power laser beams, except for any projectile weapons which would send out paint bombs instead of solid slugs. Nobody would actually get damaged that way.

We did emergency drills constantly on the way there, playing some of the same games as before where we’d try to come up with ways to make the drills harder. The XO was fixated on making sure the response teams made their initial reports properly.

The first iteration had all of us on the “Red Team” in formation. An ordnance bot was standing close by with a reload package so we could get at least two volleys off during the battle. It would be a classic meeting engagement, where two opposing forces blundered into each other and my goal was to take the first shot, get reloaded, and then see if we could hit a flank with the next volley.

Because Sa’arm sensors aren’t as good as Confederacy ones, the two Blue Team light cruisers and their five escorting destroyers showed up on our sensors long before the AI allowed us to react. I fired off a volley of ARMs as soon as we were allowed to and then ducked behind one of the freighters, using it as a shield while the ordnance bot gave us a reload. We hit three different destroyers with those shots, and the AIs scored them as disabling damage. The rules of the game made our ARMs act more like Sa’arm heavy missiles rather than the small weapons we actually carried. We were playing a role here.

By now everyone was maneuvering wildly, and in the chaos we did manage to slip away undetected and carefully maneuver around to the side of the engagement. Our passive sensors had carefully categorized the frequencies of all the ships out there, so we now had a solid idea of what EW we might use to help out our teammates now suffering under the combined fire of the Blue Team Fleet.

We launched our three ARMs, and five seconds before impact bathed the two cruisers in a blast of our own special electronic love. Our missiles found the electromagnetic energy reflecting off the Blue Team ships helpful in acquiring their targets. Two impacted one of the cruisers and one the other, as the reflection of RF energy off those two larger targets made them more attractive to the missiles. The AI judged one of the cruisers dead, and the other severely damaged. With that the Blue Team disengaged and our remaining two cruisers and I pursued until the exercise iteration was stopped.

I was certain there would be some rather uncomfortable after-action reviews happening aboard the Blue Team vessels after all this. They had the numbers and had lost over half of their force before the battered remains had to choose between withdrawal or death.

Our crew was very happy with the results, though. Even with the weaponry we used being plussed-up beyond what our weapons actually could do, we had four severely damaged ships to our credit and a kill on a cruiser. We did more than one of the Red Team cruisers, and we were just a little itty-bitty under-armed ship!

The next iteration was a Blue Team attack. The three Red Team “cruisers” would be in orbit around an unoccupied planet and the Blue Team would go and attack it. Our “admiral” gave us free rein to do whatever we wanted to on this one, and I looked forward to the opportunity to give the Blue Team a nice surprise or two.

When we got together in the wardroom to plan, Rob came up with the idea of using our own drones to pre-position spare ARMs way out in far, far orbit and we could go to these caches to replenish our mission bay. The drones could manage the reloading. If it went wrong, the worst that could happen is we get paint on the inside of the mission bay, so I went with it. The idea morphed into turning this into an ambush where the main Red Team Force would bait Blue Team into committing an attack and then hide as best they could on the other side of the planet while we sniped at them. It sounded like fun, and our acting “admiral” readily agreed.

We were quietly drifting out in space until the AI released us to get to work. The Blue Team was burning towards the planet and had passed us, and we had a perfect “tail shot” on the fleet, right from the direction where they had the hardest time with sensor coverage. One missile hit a cruiser, and two others hit different destroyers. The AIs ruled all three an engine kill, which was a massive problem for a ship hurtling towards the gravity well of a planet. Of course they wouldn’t make the ships crash into the planet, so the AI would rescue them before it got dangerous. After that rescue those ships were out of the exercise. We had four more targets to work.