Chapter 3

“Good morning, sleepyhead” my gorgeous wife whispered to me as I woke up. I was all up for a nice cuddle to start the day, and she sure didn’t have anything better to do at the time. I finally extracted myself to visit the bathroom and start getting cleaned up, but she made sure to follow me into the shower to make sure I was clean to her exacting specifications. Of course that led us back to bed, some welcome exercise, and back once again to the shower. I didn’t put my coveralls on until well after 0900, thankful that I had no appointments or any sort of duty station to report to – yet.

<Lieutenant, there are three messages waiting for you on your data pad> the AI announced once I left the bedroom on my way to get breakfast. Well, I had a job to do, after all.

I veered to my study and got the data pad before returning to the kitchenette. While I dug into some eggs and bacon from the replicator (which just weren’t as good as the real thing, but close enough) I opened my text comms interface to see what was up.

The first was from the design bureau, notifying me that the design changes had been made and were available for review. The second was a notice informing me that my XO would be arriving that afternoon. That was even better news. The third was a request from the commander of the base Marines for me to come qualify with a pistol at their range at my convenience, and suggesting yet another set of sleep modules to enjoy before that experience. That actually might be a fun diversion, since I’d always enjoyed my time at the range in the Air Force, and had wished we had more time available for it. To make up for that, I was the happy owner of a nice Kimber 1911.45 ACP pistol that I enjoyed putting holes in hanging paper targets at the local range on the weekends. We were issued 9mm pistols for duty, but I found I liked the .45 better, and if I was going to spend my own money on something, it would be something I liked, rather than the default I had to use on duty.

As I ate breakfast I took a quick look at the design modifications, and they were all I hoped and more. Each emitter was now on an articulating mount that could cover a a bit more than hemisphere on either side of the ship, and the emitter covers were gone. Now the ship was even uglier than before, and slouching quickly towards what only someone truly able to appreciate the beauty of supreme ugly would ever be able to love.

As for the range qualification, I figured I could knock that out this morning, with plenty of time to spare before I met my XO. I gave Susan a quick kiss before I went to the sleep trainer for the twenty minutes it took for that, and then scheduled with the range NCO to come at 1100 hours. Gotta mark all those check boxes when you can, otherwise they pile up and you can get into trouble.

I walked into the range at the appointed hour to find a Sergeant utterly annoyed to have to go through this exercise with yet another junior officer. No doubt he’d been subjected to all sorts of stupidity before, and that was evident as he went over the range safety rules in excruciating detail, along with numerous dire warnings about what he’d do if I violated any of those rules. Yeah, I get it. I wasn’t going to let it bother me.

I was issued a laser pistol, an energy pack and spare, and a holster. I checked to make sure everything was functional before dropping the empty pistol in the holster and we headed out to the firing line.

“You will engage this target with ten shots from ten meters, and then I will back off this target to twenty meters at which time you will engage the target with a further ten rounds. The energy pack with the blue label is the one you will use first, which is partially discharged, requiring you to perform a reload at some point during this course of fire. You will start with the weapon in your holster and when you are done you will return your weapon to its holster. This is not a timed course of fire. Do you have any questions?”

“No Sergeant. Let’s go.”

“Then without removing your weapon from the holster, load your blue energy pack and tell me when you are ready.”

I inserted the pack into the butt of the pistol, slapped it once to make sure it was seated properly and looked over to the Sergeant.

“Ready.”

The Sergeant stood back behind me and off to the side. “You may commence fire.”

I drew the pistol with a firm grip, keeping it towards my body and extended it towards the target like I had practiced with my .45 so many times, then settling my off hand to cover my grip over my right hand as strongly as I could. I had no idea what the recoil was going to be like on this thing, but I was going to use all the muscle memory and habits that had done me so well with my beautiful, but now long-gone Kimber. When the sights settled on the target I squeezed the trigger and was happy to see a laser boring holes in the center of the target. With no apparent recoil, follow-up shots were quick and I fired all ten rounds in just a few seconds. This was pretty easy!

“Cease fire!” The Sergeant barked, then pressed a button to move the target to the next position. I held my pistol in a low ready position waiting for the next command.

“Commence firing!” The Sergeant shouted.

I brought the pistol up from low ready and was still nailing the center of the target. After the third shot I had to reload, and did this cleanly. My mind started to wander to some of the ideas that had been banging around in my head from the sleep training, and after seeing the ninth shot from this string neatly pierce the middle of the target, more than guaranteeing a passing score, I decided to do something different. Something I’m sure the Sergeant wouldn’t like, but I sure as hell wanted to find out what happened no matter what he thought.

I was at a firing lane on the far right of the range, so I had an armored bulkhead to the right, something that a laser pistol wasn’t ever going to penetrate. The target was twenty meters in front of me, but that wall had marks indicating distance in five meter increments. If I fired at about the ten meter mark on the wall, adjusting for my position and the position of the target, I should be able to bounce my shot off the wall and into the target, and that sleep training gave me the idea that this experiment might yield some interesting results.

I pushed the pistol right, and before the Sergeant could react I pulled the trigger. A ten centimeter hole vaporized the middle of the target, completely obliterating the record of all of my previous shots.

“What the FUCK are you doing, sir! What in the holy hell is wrong with you? Can’t you control even a goddamned laser pistol?” The Sergeant erupted as he sprang at me and removed the pistol from my hands. “You are DONE here. I don’t ever want to see you on my range AGAIN! Sir!”

“Sorry, I think it slipped a little” I said in apology, hoping it didn’t sound too insincere.

“Dammit, you put my range and everyone on it at risk!”

I looked around, noticing no one on the range but us. “Sorry Sergeant. I can repeat the course of fire for qualification if you think that’s necessary” I offered sheepishly, although I was laughing my ass off inside.

“Give me your equipment and get the hell off MY range. I’m going to record you as nineteen out of twenty and I hope you never have to come here again. Now GET THE HELL OFF MY RANGE, Sir!”

I handed him the holster and energy packs and left, suppressing a chuckle.

Oh my, those weird sleep training modules were going to be more valuable than I ever thought. They might be the key to breaking all the rules, because they redefined what the rules actually were. We humans thought we knew the rules, but we only understood a fraction of them, and a lot of them we misunderstood. The Confederacy knew ALL the rules, but outside of the AIs who weren’t going to actually put them into practice, nobody else was even curious about what they were. They took the meager toys the Confederacy provided, compared to what they COULD provide, and went out to play without really understanding what these tools could actually do. Physics rules the universe, not traditions, and certainly not bureaucratic policies and procedures.

Commander Wilcox had said ‘knowledge is power,’ something I’d heard before but never really paid much attention to. Now I had an idea of what that really meant, at least as far as our conflict with the Sa’arm.

That bank shot off the bulkhead was small potatoes. Anyone with enough time to fool around with a laser pistol was eventually going to try that just to see what happened, unless some bureaucratic NCO with a stick up his butt was riding herd on the shooter to prevent such malfeasance. What was different was that as my mind was wandering during this rather unchallenging exercise I started thinking about the physics of wave refraction, interference and reflection from those sleep training modules that delved into deep theoretical science, and what the practical applications might be. If maybe you tried to apply some of that theory to a real-world situation, you might just come up with some entirely new tactic or technique that could prove terribly useful. Knowing the rules but having the creativity to judiciously break them as needed was how a lot of very successful leaders in the past got that way.

The Oxford itself was an example of this. Maybe we of the crew would be as well.

I headed over to the reception station to see if my XO had arrived, and noticed on the traffic display I’d gotten there with about twenty minutes to spare. As I waited, I browsed through the list of sleep training modules on my data pad that I haven’t gotten to yet – there were plenty – and wondered what I could add to that list.

<Arriving, shuttle twenty-three dash one oh seven with twenty-two passengers onboard> the AI announced. A moment later the port airlock opened and in walked a group of different people in shifts and duty coveralls, including one in a Fleet Auxiliary uniform that matched what my new XO looked like according to the packet I’d gotten.

I walked up to him and stuck out my hand. “Todd, I’m Carl Jones, and I’ll be your CO. Welcome to Demeter” He grasped my hand with a strong grip.

“Lieutenant, happy to be here. Finally I get to actually do something useful rather than sit around on my ass and wonder why the hell I’m here.”

“I know what you mean. Mushroom life isn’t the best.” I laughed back. “Anyone else with you?”

“Yes, LT, these are my concubines Sally and Theresa,” he said motioning two rather pleasant ladies over. “This is my CO Lieutenant Jones.” We exchanged pleasantries for a moment. It was a little difficult to have a conversation with the AI in the reception room, so I sub-vocalized to the AI, something I found a little strange still, and asked it about accommodations for Ensign Williams. They had been assigned to quarters in VOQ just a little way from mine.

“If you’ll all follow me, I can take you to your quarters here. I’ll be just a few doors down from you folks. Do you have any gear?”

Todd shook his head. “Nope, It seems everything we ever need just pops out from that replicator whenever we want it. Sure makes traveling easier!”

“Ah, the infinite wonders of the Confederacy. May they never be exhausted! If you’ll come with me, then?”

The short walk to visiting officer’s country passed with enough polite conversation to make me feel that Susan was going to get along with these folks, which I had expected, but it was still a relief. No matter how many books and movies she could find to amuse herself with, she needed people. I never met a woman who was actually happy not having others around her. Maybe she was trying to find any opportunity to not complain about things right now, but I really wanted to help if I could to give make her new life as happy as possible. If she was happy, it would be a lot easier for me to be happy, as well.

When we walked into the new quarters, I found I didn’t have to explain anything to them, as they’d already had ‘the pod experience’ and not only knew what was there and how to use it, but how to change anything they didn’t like. They’d been in the Confederacy for about a week longer than I’d been, so they actually knew more about pods, AIs and Confederacy life than I.