Chapter 4

The next few days were a blur, with the various crewmembers arriving on different transport ships along with their families. Construction of the ship started, and I was almost glued to a video display showing the replicators slowly adding material and components to the hull until I realized I wasn’t getting anything done.

Susan made progress in connecting with the other families, and to my surprise even invited the officer’s concubines over to our quarters one afternoon to get to know each other, and I suppose gossip and those other things women do together. As soon as they arrived, I found some reason to go visit Commander Wilcox as much to get the hell away as to start laying out what was going to happen on our shakedown cruise, which I was also going to double as an initial crew training exercise as was the norm.

I wanted to get mission ready as fast as we could.

One of the nice surprises was a conversation I had with Sally, the senior concubine of my XO. I’d thought I needed to get the families involved as much as possible, and she had a particular skill set I could make use of. We were at dinner one night, chatting amiably about life at Demeter, and I decided to change the subject.

“Sally, I understand you did graphic design back on Earth. I was wondering if there was something you could do for me.”

“Sure, Carl, anything you need as long as Todd is cool with it” she replied with a wink. Man, these women were dangerous.

“Every unit back where we’re from would have some sort of crest, and it doesn’t seem like anyone here has mentioned one. They’re a good thing for morale, and I think you might be a good person to ask about making one for us.”

Sally’s eyes lit up in excitement as Todd looked on with interest. “Sure, I’d LOVE to! What are you thinking of?”

“Well, I’m thinking of a shield, and on one side is a black sheep. On the other side would be a lightning bolt. We’d need some sort of motto on the bottom, and I think it should read ‘Victory Through Knowledge.’ What do you think?”

Todd was vigorously nodding in approval as Sally answered. “Well, aren’t those usually in Latin or something? I mean, it kinda makes it seem more, well, official that way.”

No more than an hour later, Sally used the AI to forward a design to me, and I loved it. “Victoria Per Scientiam” sounded mysteriously important, and I knew this would be a morale builder that would set us apart from the other ships in the fleet. The only thing she added was the ship’s hull number at the top.

I had the AI search to make sure we weren’t stealing anything someone else had used before and cause confusion, and the closest thing to this was the patch for a Marine fighter squadron that had fought in the Pacific during World Was II. Surprisingly enough the commander of that unit had been from Idaho, like me.

I had the AI make shoulder patches for all the crew, and didn’t care whether it was within regulation for us to wear them or not. Once I gave them to the crew, I bet they were never coming off without serious bloodshed.

The crew was everything I hoped for, and worse. The other officers, Ensign Hendricks on sensors and Ensign Chandler in engineering, were absolute whizzes at what they were going to do even before I got them into a series of sleep training modules. I could tell they were a little spotty on how to work with others, so I was going to have to keep an eye on them to make sure they were leading the way I wanted. They also seemed to have a bit of an independent streak, which while welcome in a lot of ways, was something I had to work on so they’d make decisions within their authority, but not beyond that.

The enlisted crew were all loose cannons of a sort and would require a lot of supervision, at least at the outset. Sergeant William White was the guy who had caused the blackout in South Korea after he rigged up a homebrew high powered, very low frequency generator that had pushed a resonant frequency signal down the power lines at Yongsan Garrison.

It was supposed to go to the antenna he had put on the roof of the building he was working on, but a design flaw made the path to the power mains more attractive to the signal than the antenna. That signal overloaded the electrical distribution system in the area that was supposed to make sure that the various sources of the supply of electricity coming to the huge metropolitan area was always in the proper phase.

When the equipment saw that the fake, induced power signal phase expected on the draw side was different than the supply phase coming in, it started trying to compensate to avoid the kind of massive damage a problem like this could cause and promptly caused exactly that sort of problem. Half of the substation transformers in the area either blew up, or required expensive and time-consuming maintenance. The remainder were woefully inadequate to the demand draw and promptly shut themselves down in order to prevent catastrophic damage to themselves.

It was quite a disaster, and his court-martial was quickly concluded with a dishonorable discharge. We decided to keep him at his original E-5 rank, rather than the E-1 he got busted to, in recognition of such a supreme accomplishment.

Private Gordon Smith was a junior sonar operator aboard the USS Mississippi, a Virginia class attack submarine based out of Pearl Harbor. His weapons department commander had thought that Private Smith’s fine physique trimmed his jib perfectly and when Smith finally got fed up with the unwanted advances he could not escape, he unbolted the supports for a rack of hard disk arrays, wrote some software on the primary server that could make all the internal arms that moved back and forth across all the spinning hard disks abruptly shift in unison. One late evening and on Smith’s command, the the disk array started lurching across the floor towards his supervisor making a “whump-whump” sound while the commander’s terminal kept flashing ominous messages announcing “I’m coming for you!”

The officer ended up in counseling and was removed from active duty due to the trauma. A Naval Investigative Service team ended up dropping a reprimand in Smith’s personnel folder that guaranteed he would never be promoted once they figured out what had happened, after they revoked his security clearance.

You can’t work on a submarine without a security clearance, so he was discharged.

Private Tim Wilson was an amateur radio enthusiast who was convinced he had a Constitutionally protected right to listen to police radio, no matter what was going on. When departments across the US moved to P25 Phase 2 encrypted systems, it upset him to no end that they were probably hiding things from the public that they had pledged to “serve and protect,” so he used his skills as a software developer who worked on big-time security systems to build an underground cloud-based crypto analysis system to crack the encryption keys and the data stream.

If he had just wanted to listen privately, probably no one would have known what he had done, but within twenty-four hours of setting up an inadequately secret website that would allow anyone at all to listen to any encrypted public safety radio in the country, the FBI had him in handcuffs. He never entered the criminal justice system, but instead was held secretly in detention in the basement of a building at Fort Meade where for three weeks they tried unsuccessfully to force him to work for “No Such Agency.” He was more than happy to disappear when a Confederacy Marine showed up in his cell somehow to help him do just that.

Private Walter Douglas was one of those guys in the music industry who could hear something in a song that shouldn’t be there, or notice what wasn’t there that should be better than anyone else in the industry. He probably would have rocketed to massive financial success if not for the narrow range of musical interests which went all the way from “Death Rage Ska” to “screamo.”

A candidate for Congress managed to upset him terribly somehow, and he managed to surreptitiously insert himself on the A/V crew for one of the candidate’s campaign rallies, replacing the candidate’s walk-on music for the event with a snippet of a song entitled “Puppy barbecue” lovingly performed by a band named “Crib Death.” The local media caught the would-be Congressman gamely trying to deal with the surprise by dancing in a weird way as he came to the podium as the lyrics “I WANT TO EATS ALL YOUR PETS” roared out of the speakers to the utter horror of all in attendance. Caught on video, it became a social media sensation, causing the candidate to immediately withdraw from the race, while the A/V company was held responsible and sued into oblivion.

Douglas thought this was so funny he suggested he was responsible for this on social media, which gave him hours of amusement until he realized he had to go into hiding to avoid retribution from a certain Italian-American family in New Jersey which had bankrolled the campaign of the former candidate. Oops.

When a Confederacy Marine showed up in the fleabag motel in Tennessee where Douglas had been hiding, it was such a remarkable answer to his desperate prayers he actually asked the guy if he was an Angel of God. Instead, the Marine answered “No, because I get to have sex with four women at a time at the job I’ve already got.” Despite being in his mid-twenties, Douglas had had only had one girlfriend in his life four years prior and figured the Marine was even better. “Please take me with you” were the last words Douglas uttered on the Earth.

Each of them predictably showed up with a handful of concubines, except for Douglas. Some of the crew were totally onboard with the idea of having multiple concubines after having been glued to the “Average Joes” TV show and hoping they’d get selected in a pickup to have an adventure in the stars. Some of the concubines were aghast at the idea there were slaves, with no rights and no freedoms and were trying to find out how to avoid that, only agreeing to go because their sponsor was someone they felt they couldn’t live without.

Most were somewhere in the middle, accepting the situation, but hoping to find a way that would work for the sponsor and concubines without giving up their identity.

There were a few minor children, the oldest a thirteen year-old girl and the next oldest an eleven year-old boy.

After everyone got settled I asked all the crew to get together in a conference room. We all introduced ourselves and told everyone a few tidbits about our past (noticeably, everyone left out the interesting bits) and it was time for me to address the crew for the first time.

“In a few days we’re going to get the worst new ship in the Navy Auxiliary. In that ship we are going to go out and hunt dickheads, far from home, without support, unable to defend ourselves and on a mission no one believes in. Our task is to defeat the enemy. We will do that. We are the Black Sheep of the Confederacy and we will do things no one ever believed were possible.”

They all looked stunned, while Todd Williams smirked, having a sense of what I was doing.

Finally, Sergeant White broke the silence. “Well, Pappy, when you put it like that how could we refuse?”

The ensuing laughter eased the tension I’d intentionally made happen.

“Pappy, huh? Well, I’ve certainly been called worse.” Yeah, they’d tagged me with a nickname. I could live with that if it meant I could get them all to buy in on this crazy idea.

“So seeing how you’re all excited to be part of this outfit, I have a few things for you to do until the ship is ready for us. One, here are your shoulder patches for your uniform. Right shoulder, a quarter inch below the shoulder seam and centered. The AI will put it on your coveralls for you the next time you get the replicator to give you a new one. I expect to see these on you no later than tomorrow morning.”

“Second, we have a lot to learn to get ready. Each of you has a list of modules you need to work on in the sleep trainer in your quarters. The AI will tell you what they are. Some of them may be just a little, well, trauma-inducing because of the amount of information they’re going to pound into your heads and I’ve let the AI know which ones they are because I’ve done them all. If you find yourself not feeling well afterwards, the sleep trainers are also medical pods and they can really help you with this, so don’t be shy about asking for help after you complete something and don’t feel well. You’ll get fixed up in no time.”

“Last, I know some of you have families that are having a hard time adjusting to this new life. If you’ve got issues with concubines please contact me. Please encourage your concubines to contact my wife – yes, I said wife -- Susan, if they have any questions, concerns or issues. We aren’t going to be strict about sponsor-concubine relationships here and want to help you all find a way to make this all work for you rather than demand you act in only one way. As long as everyone is happy, I don’t care how you work it out, I just want to make sure it does get worked out.”

“Please use your chain of command if you need it. We’re here for you guys. Questions?”

Sergeant White motioned to me and I nodded.

“Lieutenant, what the heck do they want us to do, exactly?”

“They, the Confederacy, doesn’t really seem to know what to do with us. Somehow orders got cut to construct an intelligence-gathering ship, and I’ve managed to get some electronic warfare capabilities added to it. It’s going to be up to us to prove that we can make a useful contribution to the war, and when we do then I suppose they’re going to find some way for us to make a difference. Until then it’s up to us to prove ourselves. If we’re going to be bored and useless nothings, all we have to do is live down to their current expectations. If we’re going to end up making a difference, every one of us is going to have to excel, be creative, and figure out how this tool we’re going to have at our disposal might possibly change the course of this war. I don’t know about you guys, but I hate being bored and feeling useless. I’ve had enough of that on Earth. Out here I want to make a difference. How about you guys?”

A chorus of “hell yeah” and less polite comments rang out.

“Officers please stick around. The rest of you are dismissed.”

Everyone stood and the enlisted men left the room. Once they were gone the rest of us settled down.

“Chris” I said motioning to my ship’s Engineer, “you don’t have any direct reports so you’re going to have the lightest load in terms of personnel management here. I’m hoping you can be sort of a confidante for the men, allowing them to bitch and whine to you as they need to and for you to keep on top of any personnel issues that may develop. Since you’re not in their chain of command I think they may be more ready to talk to you about some things rather than their chain of command. Bitching and whining is normal though, so it’s more of an issue when that stops happening than seeing it happen. You’ve been a university professor, so you have some experience dealing with the kinds of people we have in the crew, and I hope you can put that experience to use to help us build a great crew out of these guys. Oh, and keep the ship running, too.”

Ensign Chandler nodded. “No problem. I’m the unofficial morale officer for the ship and happy to do it.”

I turned to Ensign Jeff Hendricks, the officer in charge of the sensor crew, who would be responsible for the enlisted men. “Jeff, you have the heaviest load. I want you to concentrate on technical and tactical excellence, which should be your strong suit from what I can tell. Make sure they’re trained up as much as possible with the same sleep training modules I’ve been torturing you with. Start walking them through any kind of scenario you can dream up to make them think about how they’re going to react to all the different things we might or might not see out there. I need your team to think on its feet, make solid decisions fast, and collaborate with each other well. You’re the heart of this ship, and it’s your team that really determines whether we succeed or fail.”