Chapter 18

Colonel Decker had a new mission for us. More precisely, he had a new mission plan for us to look at.

Vice Admiral McGinty was taking a fleet to a Sa’arm occupied world that seemed to be on the brink of sending out their ships in an effort to spread their galactic destruction. The system was somewhat comically named “Jehoshaphat,” by either someone thinking of the enduring oath from America’s nineteenth century, or less likely, borrowing from Jewish history. It had one useful planet, Jehoshaph, and the Sa’arm were there busily constructing hive ships and the various support vessels those would need for an imminent liftoff.

“We have been trying to play defense with the Sa’arm, but space is simply too vast to defend every avenue the Sa’arm might use to continue their expansion across this galactic arm. We don’t have even a tiny fraction of the ships we would need to stop that, and if we did most would be sitting around waiting for years for anything to happen. If we’re going to slow down their incursions, it’s a far more efficient use of our resources to ambush them whenever possible in the places we know they are.” Colonel Decker explained.

“Vice Admiral McGinty is being sent to command a mixed fleet of ships to try to beat up the Sa’arm before they jump out of Jehoshaphat and hopefully prevent them from doing whatever they intend. We don’t have the big ships available that we’d like to use to tackle hive ships, but we don’t have time to wait for them to become available. The fleet being assembled is a big collection of destroyers and smaller ships, whatever could be scrounged up, and you’re one of the available ships.”

“Apparently McGinty thinks pretty highly of what you’ve done so far, so he wants your input on how a bunch of pipsqueaks can nibble a bunch of big boys to death. Maybe you can give him some ideas. Look this over and send him your input, and he’s going to make use of whatever he can to develop a plan that might make this work. He’s going to be with the blockade fleet for a few more days before coming back and you can get together with him then. Any questions?”

I was pretty surprised by all this. While I regularly had my men collaborate with me to develop operational plans, it wasn’t a hallmark of the Navy. Perhaps the admiral’s outlook on things helped explain why I got along with him so well.

“Sir, what do you know about the Vice Admiral? This seems pretty unusual, not that I mind.”

“Jim McGinty was the head coach of the Ravens before he got extracted. I’m a little surprised you didn’t recognize him. He was at Ohio State before that and had a really successful career there. He’s a legend in football, and that’s probably why he always is talking about combat using sports analogies.”

I nodded in understanding. “Well, I’m more of a baseball guy, so I never paid any attention to who the NFL coaches were.”

“Ah, ‘the thinking man’s game’. It fits you,” he replied.

“Anyways, take a look at the files I’ve sent over to you. Give them some thought and see if you can help,” he continued.

“I’ll be happy to. Hopefully I’ll be able to help Coach out.”

We gathered in the team room to start going over the material Colonel Decker had sent. Apparently someone besides us had actually been snooping around in space, which was a surprise to us. We had been told several times that the Confederacy wasn’t doing any “spy ship” kinds of work, and here it was actually doing just that. They must have mounted some huge telescope to a ship to do photo recon, because we had tons of pictures of the surface of Jehoshaph that showed various ships under construction, or completed and waiting.

We had considered a photo recon capability for the Oxford, but we just couldn’t fit it. No one had figured out a way to shrink down the big optics needed for this kind of work, and a big telescope wasn’t going to ever be conducive to stealth. We focused on ELINT, our core capability, and left it pretty much at that until we came up with other ideas that might fit our limitations.

The Sa’arm had a recon sphere and two big hive spheres that were identified as a pair of Virtus Hive Colonizers. A couple of Vervactor cruisers were on the surface along with a bunch of Venti destroyers. There was stuff under construction everywhere. The photo interpretation guys had overlays on all of the pictures identifying estimated completion dates and providing all sorts of notes about what appeared to be happening. What tipped them off was that the Sa’arm had stopped building new ships.

Departure was projected to happen in six weeks, and it took three weeks to get there from Trumanat. Not a lot of time at all to get ready.

Damn CENTCOM all to hell. If we could drop nuclear warheads on the two planetary shipyards, the atmospheric effects of a nuclear detonation would obliterate this effort entirely. We could probably deliver the warheads ourselves. Instead they have to hoard all their toys, not realizing that if we stop them here, they aren’t getting to Earth. All we’d have to do is watch when the Sa’arm are nearing completion of a fleet and nuke it on the ground. If we got them all, we’d stop them cold everywhere and any survivors would just starve to death when they ran out of resources.

Apparently CENTCOM didn’t trust us to be able to do that. Yeah, organizational mistrust runs rampant in human society. Rumor has it that CENTCOM is made up of politically-connected hacks with fake CAPs. That would explain a lot. But maybe that mistrust is simply a useful survival mechanism built into us from ages ago, one that might no longer serve its useful purpose. It’s damn frustrating to see the effect it’s having on us here. It’s making the war harder to win.

We were going to have to meet them in space. We’d have a cobbled-together fleet of small ships, albeit a rather sizable one, and we were going to have to set a trap not knowing where they were going or exactly when they’d go. Vice Admiral McGinty’s initial plan had a lot of flexibility built in, but when they appeared the main plan was that we would converge on the main targets to hit them from multiple directions like a swarm of angry bees attacking a bear. Hopefully the confusion we would sow might keep them off balance enough so they wouldn’t be able to blast our small ships out of the way as we attacked.

It was a desperate plan, but it made sense. We’d almost certainly suffer a lot of losses in the process, but it fulfilled the main goals of trying to make sure the enemy fleet couldn’t get far enough from Jehoshaph to jump to FTL without suffering potentially debilitating casualties, ensuring that whatever they wanted to do would be a lot harder for them to accomplish. The possibilities for failure were numerous and disturbing, but if you were a football coach known for developing a great running game with a pass-option offense this was the kind of game plan you might consider.

“OK, guys,” I started after we went through the materials, “We need to give the admiral some ideas here. Let’s start with working up a SWOT matrix based on the plan and the information we have. Then start seeing how we can add some things to the “opportunities” box so we can give him some new options and maybe save a few lives. Thinking time.”

Everyone nodded their heads and started writing ideas on their pads. With a pencil and paper. Yes, old tech still works, and for creative endeavors, it often works better. We all scribbled for about a half hour, with some crewmen having sidebar conversations to work on their ideas.

Vice Admiral McGinty was happy to use the team room for our meeting two days later and was quite happy to have our facilities available instead of a generic staff conference room at HQ. The Staff Sergeant who usually manned the FA offices had panicked when a Navy Vice Admiral showed up asking to be admitted to the Sheep Pen, but was happy to let him pass once I reassured him that it was fine.

“Good to see you, Vice Admiral, or should I call you ‘Coach’?” I smiled.

“Only my close friends call me that. I’m not sure you qualify,” he joked.

I brought him back to the team room, and he was impressed as others had been with the Sheep Pen. He was even more interested in what we’d done with the team room.

“Any chance I can use this space? This is perfect,” he remarked.

“It’s yours any time you need it, Coach. We’d love it if you made your home away from home here with us. We’d appreciate it if you kept the existence of our little haven on the down low, you understand. I don’t need a lot of staff people barging into our private enclave.”

He laughed. “I’m gonna take you up on that, and I promise to keep the staff pukes and higher-ups away from you guys.”

“Welcome home, then,” I offered.

Yeah, it felt risky to open up our private space to outsiders, but if we could do a better job planning here than elsewhere, it might save some lives -- maybe our own.

“Just have anyone showing up use the code phrase “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” with the guy out front. I’ll let him know to expect it.”

Each member of the crew briefed the Vice Admiral on their individual ideas demonstrating different tactical alternatives, potential weapons modifications, or concepts that could get and keep the Sa’arm off-balance. We knew some of the ideas were impractical, but presented them anyway There wasn’t enough time or minelaying capacity to put in a minefield. We couldn’t get nukes. A super-sized “gift-box”wouldn’t provide enough of a tactical impact to justify trying to drag the thing to where a departing fleet might find it, and we didn’t know where to put it so they might. There wasn’t enough time to develop and test a bigger new stand-off weapon from scratch that destroyers could use which might act like the ARM-B, and if the untested weapon didn’t work, reliance on it would be a massive problem for us.

I let our junior crewmen go first, then the officers, and I wrapped it up with my own ideas. I finished up with our “Red-Team” findings on what could go wrong with the concept, talking about the risk we were taking on of being spread out all over the place and leaving the Sa’arm with “interior lines” that might make it possible for them to attack our small divisions and defeat each one of them in turn. For each of those potential outcomes, we had defined what the indicators would probably be that the Sa’arm would be executing such a reaction, and what we might do to mitigate the dangers.

The white boards were filled with diagrams and every display had images by the time we were done. Coach took a lot of notes on the pad we had made available to him, and after we were done he had a lot of questions for us. We ended up spending three hours working with him.

One of our suggestions was to have whatever photo recon asset was out there keep as continuous watch on the planet as possible. It wouldn’t help for this battle, but a knowledge base of exactly the process and procedures the Sa’arm use before they lift an invasion fleet might be very valuable, and we would be able to predict their behavior better. Coach told us that unfortunately that ship was lost, a victim of the increased flight activity of the Sa’arm. It had managed to fire off a message drone before the Sa’arm patrol ship which had found it got into weapons range, and it was too close to the planet to FTL away towards safety.

“I wish I had you and your men on my staff, Commander,” McGinty enthused. “You are one crazy bunch of sneaky assholes who don’t play by the rules. I like that. I could have used you as an offensive coordinator back in the day!”

“We’re all in this together, sir. I’m just glad we could help.”

Vice Admiral McGinty promised he would get together with his staff and look at our ideas, and that they’d probably be back in our team room the next day to start working on the refinements to the initial plan. A few other ship’s captains had been solicited for input as well, so they had a lot of work to do. He took photos of the whiteboards for his staff’s use, and we made sure to forward him any of the digital content we had developed.

“A long time ago I learned that sometimes the quarterback was doing the right thing by taking initiative and changing what I wanted in a play. At first it pissed me off. Then I started bringing them into game planning so they wouldn’t surprise me, and they often saw things in films that gave them some ideas that were good. Ever since, I’ve always tried to make them part of the planning effort. You’re going to be one of my quarterbacks out there. You’re already delivering precisely what I want out of the leaders on my team.”

I was pretty surprised. Here I was Fleet Auxiliary, and he was implying that I’d have a leadership role over Navy captains in a battle. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this, but if Coach thought that was what he needed, well, I couldn’t argue with him.

“Whatever you need, sir. I’m -- no -- all of us guys, are yours.”

The barely concerned underlying tension at home was really bothering me, so I did what I absolutely did not want to do at all and asked Susan what was going on with her.

She immediately broke into tears.

“It’s so hard! I feel like I’m losing you! We did the right thing taking those wonderful people into our lives, and I see how happy you are with the boys, but it just feels like my life is falling apart!” she sobbed, running to me for a hug.

“We have some hard adjustments to make, between what Confederacy life is like in general, and the circumstances we’ve been faced with. Tammy and Grace understand that. Have you talked to them?”

“All the time,” she choked. “I don’t want to be unfair to them, but it hurts so bad! In order to make them happy, I have to give you to them. I don’t want to hurt them, but the only way to make it better for them is to hurt me!”

“Do they understand that?” I asked.

“I don’t want to tell them that. They’ve been through so much. Losing Chris was so hard on them.”

“I think they deserve to know how you’re feeling. They’re at least your friends now. Talk to them. They’ll help you, I’m sure.”

She sniffled a bunch and agreed. I didn’t know a lot about women, but I did know that they usually worked things out when they talked to each other. If not, well, I didn’t even want to think about it.

At least I had dodged the bullet on coming up with a solution to all of this that I might later be responsible for. I sure hoped they’d work this out. I couldn’t handle having household problems on top of everything else on my plate, and I didn’t want to break up this new extended family.

It wasn’t ten minutes later that the AI informed me that someone I had never heard of wanted to talk to me. I wasn’t in the mood, but the guy was a Major. I couldn’t just refuse the call.

“Put him through,” I told the AI.

“Commander, I’m Major Walter Connor with the Second Military District, Admin section. I have a problem you need to fix.”

Oh, great. Staff guys. Today was rapidly turning into maximum suck.

“What can I help with, Major?”

“You have two crewmen who have unfilled concubine slots. I need you to order them to take care of that right away,” he intoned.

Lance Corporal Tim Wilson, my crypto and analysis wizard, and PFC Walter Douglas, my music lover-slash-analyst, both had only one concubine instead of the two they were supposed to have.

“Fuck off, sir,” I answered.

“Excuse me? I am a superior officer, and you will comply with my requests, Commander!”

“Dammit, I don’t have time for this shit. We’re getting ready to go out on a really difficult mission and I don’t need my men screwing around with this bullshit when I need their heads on straight for something we might not survive. I don’t give a shit what has your panties in a twist, but I am fucking not going to start having them run around looking for fucking concubines when I need them making sure we all don’t die out there. So respectfully sir, take your crap and shove it up your ass!“

Yeah, I had lost my temper, when I usually was so good at keeping my cool. Yeah, I knew this was going to cause me and the crew trouble. I just didn’t care at the moment. You try to fuck with my guys, I’m going to kick you in the ass.

“WHO IS YOUR COMMANDING OFFICER, COMMANDER!” the Major bellowed.

“Yeah, you can talk to Colonel Decker if you want, you toad. Or maybe you’d like to talk to Vice Admiral McGinty! I’m sure your bullshit will go over great with him!” I shouted back.

“You have not heard the end of this! I guarantee you will soon regret your insubordination!” he shouted back.

I hadn’t realized that he had cut off before I shot back “You can kiss my ass, you stupid motherfucker!“

Susan came into my study with a deeply concerned look. I’d never used that kind of language around her before, and I doubt anyone in the crew had either. Except for the time I had screamed at the Sa’arm after we lost Chris. Then they heard everything I could think of to scream out in blind rage. I tried hard not to use that kind of language, despite it being all around me. It wasn’t what I wanted to be.

“Sorry, honey. I lost my temper,” I admitted with a big exhale.

“I can tell. What happened?”

“Some staff puke want to get Walter and Tim to take on additional concubines. I told him to leave us alone.”

“Yeah, with your usual witty and disarming style, I see,” she kidded.

“Maybe I got a little over the top. I’ll find a way to make it work out. Boy, I think I made that a lot harder,” I said.

She nodded. “Maybe so, but I have a lot of confidence in you. You’ll get it all taken care of. I know it’ll all be OK.”

This was going to take every skill I had to fix. I hoped I’d be up to the job, because if I let Walter’s love affair with Kristina get wrecked because of some staff idiot, I’d never be able to forgive myself.

Our final brief with Vice Admiral McGinty in the team room was delayed for a bit while he talked with me privately about a discussion he had with the commanding officer of the HQ admin staff section. Apparently this Major Connor had gone on the warpath on us, and ranted up the chain of command about how much disrespect and bad attitude I had shown, and he had wanted to initiate formal proceedings against me. The AI of course had complete records of our conversation, and they didn’t make me look good at all.

“I apologize, sir. When someone wants to screw with my guys I get a little defensive. I was having a bad day anyway, and I just lost my cool. It won’t happen again.”

He smiled. “I get it. I’ve had to go to bat for my people before, and I know how it all feels. You just gotta keep your cool. I need you to keep your head out there, you know.”

“I get it, Coach. Maybe I can help smooth this over.”

“In the meantime I’ve told them to back off. You were right this isn’t a good time for them to be bringing up admin garbage with you so I asked them to defer all this until after we get done out there. Maybe tempers will cool by then.”

“Thanks for helping, sir. I appreciate it. I didn’t mean to put you into the middle of this, but I was pretty upset at the time.”

“No problem. So how about we get to our real business, then?” he asked.

“I’m more than ready, Coach”

I got the guys together after the briefing to brainstorm how we could maybe fix the problem I had caused. “I’m sorry guys, but I think I caused us a problem. I need your help.”

“Pappy, we’d do anything for you, you know that!” Staff Sergeant White answered. The others nodded in agreement.

“I pissed of a Major in Admin who was demanding that Walter and Tim take more concubines. I told him to go fuck himself.”

The guy’s eyes widened. They knew how uncharacteristic this was of me.

“Dang, Pappy, thanks for sticking up for us. If they made me do that it would break Kristina’s heart!” PFC Douglas exclaimed.

Lance Corporal Wilson chimed in. “Same here. Mary would throw a fit, but I’d be right there with her. She’s pregnant with our first, and that would only make things worse. Can they order us to take more concubines?”

Walter gave him a “high five” in celebration. “Congrats! Kristina is too!”

We all shook their hands in congratulation as I continued.

“No. You have to agree to a new concubine, so they can’t force them on you. They can try to force you by other means, but I’ve been holding them off for a while now so you wouldn’t get bothered with all this. I need you thinking about things other than having your family in disarray with a change like that. It’s hard enough for me at home having more concubines, kinda voluntarily.”