Chapter 19

I had gone but twenty or thirty steps when a cannon-ball, passing a few feet from my head, struck a comrade who was walking nine or ten feet from us and severed his head from his body as clean as it could have been done by a guillotine. The headless trunk remained trembling, and still holding his gun in his hand—I stood gazing on the terrible object, unable to move hand or foot—I do not know that I breathed—how long I know not—it seemed hours, but it could not have been but minutes, it may have been but a few seconds—I can remember five other cannon-balls striking the road at my side and in front, and yet I could not stir, until at last the headless trunk swayed and fell, almost to my feet.

John Newton Breed, 5th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, July 1861

I woke up laying in an open medtube. I didn’t recognize where I was, or the medical technician in front of me.

“Where am I?”

“You’re on the Stockholm. We’ve had you out for about two weeks.”

“Why so long?”

“You had a bad concussion. We can fix a lot of injuries quickly, but brain trauma isn’t one of them. We needed you out so your brain can heal. You’re going to be on a concussion protocol for another thirty days to make sure you recover fully. We don’t take these lightly.”

“My men? Are they all right?”

“I don’t have any answers for you beyond your own medical treatment. There are some folks outside waiting that I think can answer those questions for you. Before you leave I need to tell you what the protocol is, however.”

He explained how I wasn’t allowed to read, that sleep training was prohibited for me, and I couldn’t watch movies or basically do anything that involved a lot of cognitive work. I was going to be put on temporary medical leave. He gave me some painkillers in case I needed them. Apparently a medtube isn’t good at dealing with concussion-induced headaches, if they’re not caused by a physiological issue they can manage to both diagnose and address. I was told that if I got any bad headaches I was to report to medical for an evaluation.

With that finally out of the way he let me leave.

Todd was there in the passageway outside of medical and immediately gave me a big hug. At least he was OK.

I stepped back and looked into his eyes. They had tears in them.

“The men?” I asked.

“We lost Jeff, Will, Tim and Gordon. Rob was in bad shape, but he managed to get himself to a medtube before the emergency power went out. They found him and the medtube had just enough backup power to stabilize and maintain him until help arrived. I got hurt pretty bad, and was the only one conscious when we were rescued. The ship was a total loss and was scuttled.”

I broke down. I had just killed four more of my own men. My ship was gone. This was a disaster.

While I was crying I went over those last few minutes on the ship that felt like they’d just happened a little while ago. I could remember their voices. I could hear their fear in my mind. I could taste the panic we all felt as everything turned to shit.

“How did any of us survive that? We were fucked.”

“You know those crazy asshole captains in Taffy 3?”

Before I could reply, the ship’s AI butted in. <It is not recommended to have such a discussion with Commander Jones while he is on concussion protocol.>

“Oh shut the hell up!” I shot back. I wanted to know.

Todd understood this hadn’t been directed at him, and continued. “That crazy thing they did actually fucking worked. They used a combined volley that blew that first destroyer following us away, and it lost control. The one behind it couldn’t avoid their lead ship and they both collided, and the leader they’d hit exploded taking the both of them out. The one behind them tried to reverse course and run, but it exposed its broadside to the Patricians and they raked it with fire. Another task force arrived at that moment and took it out as well. After that it was just mopping things up, including those two hive spheres.”

“We actually won the battle? It looked to me everything was falling apart!”

“Pretty decisively. We lost six ships, including the Oxford. Perth Bay in Taffy 3 was lost during their charge. We destroyed everything the Sa’arm had, even the reinforcements the Sa’arm sent up from the planet surface, which arrived way too late to affect the battle. Sure, it looked bad from our perspective, but the rest of the fleet actually had a pretty easy time of it once they could all get back into engagement range.”

I was shocked. Maybe I had just been too focused on what was happening to us to understand that things were actually going well overall. Actually, that “tunnel vision” problem seemed to perfectly explain it. When you’re in the heat of it, you tend to lose awareness of everything that is not your immediate problem. We had tried to capitalize on that before during exercises, when other humans were on the opposite side instead of Sa’arm.

Losing so many men hurt like hell, but it felt just a little bit better that their lives had been lost doing something that worked. If this had been the defeat I was certain of before, it would have made this hurt even more.

But it still hurt beyond what I could seem to bear.

Todd led me to his small berth where Ensign Porter and PFC Douglas were waiting for us. We all held each other as I broke into another bout of sobs. This was all that remained of the Black Sheep. There were a lot of families that would soon be getting the worst news possible. News about some of the finest people I had ever known. They were going to miss Jeff, and Will, and Tim, and Gordon terribly, and we sure as hell would too.

The rest of the survivors already had two weeks to work through some of their grief, but seeing me just beginning that terrible journey brought them to tears also. Having them with me helped a ton, though. It brought us closer together as we helped each other, reassured each other that we’d done everything we could have done, and of course started getting to the point where we would remember funny stories about the men we’d lost. Those stories seemed to make us miss them even more, but it just felt good to remember the happy times we’d shared with them.

Later on Todd filled me in on what happened to the Oxford in more detail. A Sa’arm destroyer had connected a shot on our engines and taken them out, injuring Rob pretty badly in the arm and chest when shrapnel started bouncing around the engine room. With the hull breached and him injured, he evacuated himself to the medtube on his own, even making sure to close the engine room hatch to help maintain atmosphere in the other aft spaces. I don’t know how he managed to keep his calm through that to remember this important procedure as he tried to save his own life. Those endless drills must have worked.

Almost immediately afterward a series of hits blew holes in the hull in the officer’s berths, which had been unoccupied, but the damage affected the structural integrity of the ship. The next hits of that string hit the Sensor bay, killing PFC Smith and Staff Sergeant White instantly. Lieutenant Hendricks had been hit by a blast of shrapnel and suffered some serious head and chest injuries. By the time Todd was able to get to him he was fading fast, the emergency power was failing, and the medtube was occupied and probably not working even if it was available. Jeff had died in his arms while PFC Douglas tried to help Lance Corporal Wilson.

I had been knocked unconscious by flying debris.

Lance Corporal Wilson died before the rescue team could get him to medical treatment.

After the crew had been evacuated, there was a battle damage assessment performed on the Oxford and it was clear that without power or propulsion it would take a lot to jury-rig power for the AI so it could start making repairs. The estimated repair time just to get the ship moving under main engines was longer than anyone wanted to remain at Jehosaph, so there wasn’t much choice but to rig the self-destruct system to detonate on a timer.

Before they did that, Todd plead with them to recover something from the ship. The BDAR (Battle Damage Assessment and Repair) team probably wouldn’t have agreed in any other circumstance, but Todd got some deferential treatment because of what the ship had done in the battle. They went back to the ship and cut out two small parts of interior bulkhead and brought them back while Todd went out to recover the ship’s diary, and the copy of the diary of the USS Oxford. Nothing else of value other than the AI could be recovered.

The BDAR team started the timers, moved off the Oxford, and soon she was no more.

We got back to Truman a week later and I was rather upset to learn that the families had already been notified of the losses. I thought it would be better if they heard it from me, but someone on Vice Admiral McGinty’s staff had dutifully fired off a report via message drone about the outcome of the battle and what it had cost us. Some officer from the personnel section had made the notifications to the families. He’d been gentle and respectful about it -- apparently this was a duty he was accustomed to performing -- but they’d never thought to ask us whether this was what we wanted.

The protocol was that after the loss of a sponsor a family had twenty-four hours before their quarters were reassigned to be available for other needs, and the concubines and dependents would have to move into housing for unattached concubines, unless there was a directive to have those concubines “willed” to someone else. For some reason, none of the crewman had done what Ensign Chandler had with Tammy, Grace and the kids.

Todd filled me in on that mystery. Everyone had taken me off their final directives after they saw how hard it was integrating Ensign Chandler’s family with Susan and me. I hadn’t spoken to them about it, but they had read the signs and it wasn’t too difficult to see how hard that had been for us. They completely understood that Susan and I dearly loved them all, but that wasn’t the family we really wanted to have.

They didn’t want their last act to be something that would hurt me. I cried my eyes out. I would have done anything for my family, my big family.

They were worried if they directed them to someone else without having a long discussion about it first, it might hurt them as well, in the same way. Since talking about death isn’t a very comfortable thing to do, they had all avoided the issue. There were no final directives for the crew.

I asked the AI where the families were, hoping I could fix it.

The AI informed me that they had all left on a transport four days ago for a colony. Truman was a “temporary” military facility, and additional concubines and dependents not immediately needed were to be sent to colonies, where they would be more useful. SHIT, they wouldn’t even be able to attend the damned funerals! This was completely fucked up!

I immediately started composing messages to the families apologizing for what had happened, telling them how sorry I was that they’d lost their man, and expressing how much I cared about them. The messages were really hard to write, and no matter what I said it didn’t ever seem like I could say enough.

The AI pestered me about breaking concussion protocol, but I’d take the risk of a setback for this. I wasn’t going to let it just sit and make them feel for one minute longer that nobody cared about them or understood their loss. I had painkillers to get me through.

Colonel Decker was rather understanding about my foul mood when I stormed into his office. He hadn’t been notified at all about what was going on and it took him by surprise just as much as it had me. I just wished it would have occurred to him to check on the families instead of letting some bureaucratic process operate in the background that treated human beings, children even, like chattel. Of course to the Confederacy, that’s precisely what concubines and dependents seemed to be, but to us they were our family, the family of the CSS Oxford, the Black Sheep.

There was nothing he could do about it. He certainly couldn’t order the ship to turn around and come back. He couldn’t demand the families be returned after they arrived at wherever they were going. We knew where the ship was going, but had no information on whether the families would disembark there or be moved elsewhere. Even if by some miracle he could get enough authority to do that, which he couldn’t, by the time a message drone got there they might already be gone.

There wasn’t even any assurance that my messages to them would arrive within weeks, at least until they were assigned a permanent colony where the messages could finally be routed to them. This was awful. How long would they suffer with their loss, wondering if anybody gave a shit about them at all?

Since I was still technically on medical leave we didn’t have a debrief, but between the fleet’s mission report and the required Board of Inquiry that would be convened to go over in detail what happened to the Oxford during the battle, he’d learn everything he’d probably ever need.

“By the way, I should let you know that your men are being placed in the reassignment pool. There is no more Oxford, and we can’t leave such good resources sitting around with nothing to do. The orders affecting that reassignment will probably be issued today. I’m sorry about that, but we just can’t keep you all together without a reason.”

That started another bout of tears. I was sure Colonel Decker understood. Now I was losing all my men.

“When you’re done with your medical leave, we’ll have a talk about what’s next for you.”

“I understand, sir. Someone’s going to be very lucky to have someone like Todd Williams or Walter Douglas working for them. I’ve certainly felt that way.”

When I composed myself, we shook hands and he told me again how sorry he was before I went home.

Susan, Tammy and Grace had wondered where the missing family members were and were horrified when they learned. Susan wanted to go kill someone. I was barraged with questions and every outlandish idea imaginable about what might be done to correct the situation and finally had to turn over the questioning to the AI. I just couldn’t handle it anymore.

They weren’t mad at me of course, but if they had the power to start a revolt on Truman they certainly were angry enough to start one. I wasn’t far off.

I don’t think anyone slept that night. We had even forgotten to do bedtime with the boys, who had heard all the commotion and both decided to settle into Billy’s bed for the night on their own.

There was a mass funeral on a marine drill field for the one hundred and seventy three fallen - all the personnel lost at the Battle of Jehoshaphat. Most of the caskets were empty, the bodies lost and unrecoverable. They were all draped with an unfamiliar flag of the Confederacy that meant absolutely nothing to anyone. I’m not sure if half the audience even knew what it was.

It was a terribly generic and meaningless ceremony. You couldn’t eulogize 173 individuals at a ceremony like that. Instead you got one overarching eulogy that spoke of honor and sacrifice and how this was one step forward in our march to victory against the worst foe mankind has ever faced. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It all felt like lies and bullshit. I dutifully sat there with our few remaining Black Sheep and held my tongue while Susan held my hand.

As soon as we could leave the spectacle we went to the Sheep Pen. I wasn’t sure how much longer it would exist. We didn’t have Jeff’s concubine, Betty, to put up pictures of our fallen, but we did have that picture she had taken of us all at our commissioning ceremony. We kind of gathered around in front of it, looking at the faces of our friends we would never see again, none of us able to talk.

Over on the side were two pieces of metal sitting up against the wall. One was the painting of the ship’s crest that had been just forward of the ship’s outer hatch when you stood inside. Next to that was another piece of metal, which had the family-created artwork on it with “We Love Our Black Sheep” across the bottom. This was the only memento we had of the families we had just lost, and the women hadn’t seen it since they created it on the ship.

We did what everyone else seems to do after a funeral and dug into our diminishing stockpile of alcohol. With a toast of “Victoria!” we drank in memory of our departed friends and shared our favorite stories about them. The tears gently faded away into chuckles, then laughter, and finally the sadness seemed to fade away a bit.

For some strange reason losing four of my men didn’t seem to hit me quite as hard as how much of a gut-punch losing Chris Chandler had been for me. Maybe I was getting numb about having my friends die. Maybe I was turning into a monster that eventually wouldn’t give a crap if anyone around me died. I shuddered at that thought. This was changing me.

Kristina and PFC Douglas came over at one point to give us an update on what was going on with him. The two of them were still never out of arm’s reach if possible, and she had her arm around his waist the entire night. It felt wonderful just to see how they felt about each other. I was so happy he made it. One of my worst nightmares involved the idea of telling Kristina that the man she loved so desperately wasn’t coming home. I would have utterly crushed such a beautiful and wonderful soul with news like that.

Walter was getting reassigned as a sensor crewman with a corvette in the fleet. That made perfect sense to me. His talents on sensors were remarkable and I knew they’d be more than happy with what he could do. Before long he’d probably be redesigning the sensor suite of the ship and working on upgrades to the antenna systems that would make the ship he was posted on the envy of all the other ships in the class. Beyond that, Walter had an amazing soul, one that appreciated love and beauty more than anyone I’d ever met, and he had an uncanny knack to use that to help others. I wished I could keep him somehow. He had gone from complete fuck-up to one of the best people I’d ever met.

Before I left that night I asked the Staff Sergeant on desk duty out in front of the Fleet Auxiliary offices about the Sheep Pen, letting him know that the crew was breaking up.

“We like that space, and I like it the way it is. I don’t think anyone wants to change it at all. Look, sir, I’ll just make sure we keep it all the way it is and if that ever changes I’ll let you know. I’m sure there are things in there you would want to have if we ever have to go back to it being some sort of storage or staff office space, Ok?”

“Thanks, Staff Sergeant. That would mean a lot to me.”

“Don’t mention it sir. It’s the closest thing we got to a museum around here, and the Oxford is most definitely history worth remembering.”

“Yes, it certainly is,” I replied with a tear in my eye. “Good night Staff Sergeant.”

“Good night to you too, sir.”

During the rest of my medical leave we mostly sat around in our quarters and talked. I got to know Grace and Tammy a whole lot better and it seemed that the relationship between them and Susan was gently settling into one of close friendship and affection. I never got into another discussion about it, and it seemed that my earlier pleas about being willing to do whatever they collectively needed were adequate for whatever role they needed from me.

I had vowed to myself to never reveal what had happened with those final directives for the crew. It would crush them.

We had Kristina, Sally and Theresa over often, and Rob’s concubines Brenda and a rather young Lauren came by occasionally. I enjoyed the ladies, although Lauren was one of the dumbest girls I think I’ve ever met. She was who I’d expect to see at Salty Jack’s instead of that friendly and nice waitress we’d had there. She’d probably even enjoy the place.