Chapter 9

When I woke up in the morning Susan gave me the good news that the AI had told her the day we had left port that she was pregnant with a daughter. I was overjoyed, although a little scared at the prospect of being a dad, and especially because I’d grown up in a family with all boys and had no idea how to be a dad to a girl.

Boys I knew all about. You roughhoused with them, told stupid jokes, taught them skills, and demonstrated honor, courage and ethics as they were going to soak up everything you showed them. Hopefully only the good stuff.

Girls, however, are complete a mystery to me. What was I going to do with a girl, play dress up and have her serve me fake tea out of plastic cups as I pretended to enjoy it?

I kept my concerns to myself as Susan asked me what I thought of different names for the baby and what we would do to modify our quarters to accommodate the upcoming new member of the family. She was excited. I decided to bring her down to medical for a check-up, just in case, and the tech informed us everything was fine according to the AI.

When we got back to our quarters I excused myself to the study to start working on the reports I would have to file. All of the information I needed had been logged by the ship’s AI so it wasn’t hard to drop the data in I needed, demonstrating what systems were checked, when they were checked, and what the outcomes were. I had to assemble information on all the mods we made out there and the reason we made them. I left out documentation on the artwork the families had added, as I considered that none of their business.

We had made notes of things we might want to change with the ship based on our experience with the shakedown cruise. Most of these were ergonomic issues - we wanted to put all the Zebra controls in a space as close together as possible to make it easier to quickly close them, there were a few control layout modifications, and we needed to tear out all the stuff we had bolted on to the bulkheads for damage control and such and reorganize their placements since that had been a sadly haphazard effort.

Some of the changes were design enhancements. One, we needed to reorganize the placement of some of the antennas on the masts so we could get “maximum possible performance” subject to the physical limitations of the ship rather than the AI’s design standard of “acceptable performance.” Some antennas interacted with other nearby antennas, and usually the results weren’t quite what we would have wanted, as they would change the sensitivity of the antenna a bit in one or more directions. The longer the antenna, the longer the wavelength it was designed to receive, and the longer the wavelength the more sensitive it was to objects relatively close to it.

Perhaps the biggest change was Private Gordon Smith’s suggestion that we add a bot-powered tethered antenna array that could be moved away from the ship so it would be more isolated from electronic emissions from the ship. The idea was a complete rip-off of the towed sonar arrays used by US attack submarines. This also helped with some of the longer wavelengths, as there would be no objects in close proximity of the antenna if it were a thousand meters away from the ship.

The “nose art” idea also made the enhancement list, as we couldn’t hide that.

Lastly, I had come up with the idea that we needed a ship’s library in the wardroom. I had asked the AI if it had training modules on Earth history, and it didn’t saying this was outside of the responsibilities it was assigned. I was hoping that we could provide at least the officers with a thorough history of naval warfare, focusing on the two World Wars, as my limited education there seemed like it could provide some useful lessons for us. Books would have to fill in for us. They are a proven methodology, after all.

I also wanted to add anything published about the history of electronic warfare and signal interception, as maybe the tales of what had been done during the Cold War might similarly provide us with useful fodder for our upcoming missions. None of the spy novel stuff, but what the OSS actually did, and later work by the NSA and CIA and other agencies, along with the Brits and Russians. That would be for the Sensors guys. I liked that they could relax playing cards, and I didn’t want to put a stop to that, but a lot of that time seemed like a wasted opportunity to me.

All those enhancement requests went straight to the shipyard for implementation without the need for outside approvals. They would be done in a few days at most.

The most burdensome effort for me was going to be pulling together a narrative on how our shakedown cruise went and what my conclusions were. Then I was going to have to write an evaluation of how well the ship’s design fit our intended purposes and what changes in future models would enhance the capabilities, efficiency, or endurance of the ship. Those were going to take at least another day, probably two.

Then I would have to get evaluations completed for each of the crew, but I’d only have to personally write them for the Ensigns. Of course the initial performance evaluation for an officer was twice as long as that for an enlisted man, but Ensign Hendricks was going to have to write those four enlisted personnel evaluations.

Even in the Confederacy there was paperwork to be done. At least it seemed to be a reasonable minimum, and I didn’t have to worry about formatting cover sheets for my TPS report, as there were none.

After lunch with Susan I headed out to see Commander Wilcox, and I briefed him on the shakedown cruises. He already had access to the raw data from the ship, but hadn’t had the opportunity to sort through it all. Me putting it into perspective helped make sense of a lot of it for him.

“Sir, I am very concerned about the design flaw the AI tried to cover up” I said, wearily. “It had included hidden design requirements without anyone’s knowledge and then evaded every time we tried to understand what was going on until I asked just the right question. I don’t think the AIs will lie to us, but they could easily be doing things with our ships we don’t know about, and we might not like what those things are.”

“I understand your concerns, and I don’t doubt this happens all the time. One of the big jobs the AIs have is to keep us from hurting ourselves or the Confederacy. We could do a lot of things that would be a problem without knowing that we were screwing up, and it’s kind of like having guardrails on a roadway. Sure, you lose the freedom to try to kill yourself by driving off a bridge or run yourself into oncoming traffic, but the guardrails serve a very useful purpose.”

“Yeah, I can understand that. But I’m not sure we can trust the decisions the AIs are making with our ships if they won’t even consult with us when they make them. They know nothing about war, that’s why they need us. If the AI had asked me about this beforehand, I would have agreed and we would have worked out a safety protocol without limiting the ship’s combat capabilities. Now it’s up to me to figure out what all those hidden design flaws are that they introduced before they bite me in the butt. What is it that I don’t know about my ship that’s going to hurt us? The AI isn’t forthcoming on that, it just says ‘everything is operating within the design specifications’ or something equally unhelpful.”

“I get what you’re saying, but we’re just going to have to work with them on this. Gently. Don’t push too hard here. We don’t want the AIs thinking you’re unfit for command if you get too adversarial with them” he counseled.

“Ok, sir” I relented. “I’ll do my best on this and try not to get wrapped around the axle on it.”

“Oh, by the way,” Commander Wilcox said, lightening the mood, “what was this all about with the ‘Salty Jack’s Incident?’”

“The what?” I asked, puzzled. “What ‘Salty Jack’s Incident’ are you talking about, sir?”

He chuckled. “It’s a food establishment located within a moonbase Naval training facility. Your name came up.”

I groaned. “You heard about that? All I did was send them a message after they spammed my inbox.”

Commander Wilcox laughed. “We got a message drone from Earth the other day that contained a request from Navy Criminal Investigations to question you about your involvement in the unauthorized destruction of Navy property.”

“You have got to be kidding me! I had nothing to do with destroying anything on the moon or anywhere else. I was never there! The men sure would have been on board with it, but we never did anything! I swear!” I was in a near panic.

Commander Wilcox could barely contain his laughter at this point. “Calm down, LT. That’s what I thought. I’ll make this go away, so don’t you worry about it.”

“What happened? Why is all this happening?”

“Well, it seems that most likely one of the crewman who you forwarded that message to was pretty unhappy about what he read. He must have found a mutual acquaintance at that base in the personnel rosters, which the AI would have provided him if asked, and forwarded that message. Somehow it went through the personnel attending the midshipman’s academy like a wildfire.”

“A mob descended on the place armed with damage control equipment they use for training there. They beat every furnishing, appliance, table, chair, and everything else but the physical structure of the place into bits and pieces, and they would have torn that down too if they could. The Shore Patrol stunned thirty five officer cadets into unconsciousness, and estimated they only were able to hit half of the crowd before the rest scattered.”

Oh, my, I thought. This was bad.

“Further investigation revealed that an employee had picked the wrong distribution list for a commercial message that had been intended for loyal customers of the establishment, and it went out a bit more widely than that by mistake. Actually, it ended up going to all Confederacy naval personnel in Earth space. The response was overwhelming, and the employee lost his temper after a flood of return messages asked stupid questions or made unreasonable requests. Your message apparently was the one that caused the employee to lose it, and the rest, we’ll say, is history.”

I was shocked. “I don’t know what to say, sir. I certainly never wanted anything like this to happen.”

Commander Wilcox nodded. “Like I said, don’t let it bother you. We’ll take care of this.”

Before heading back home I stopped by the Sheep Pen to see if any of the men were there, and not only had everyone but the XO decided to be there, but a bunch of the concubines were as well.

I was greeted with happy shouts of “Hey, Pappy!” when Rita brought me up.

“OK, men, I just got surprised by Commander Wilcox with something. A restaurant on the moon called ‘Salty Jack’s’ has been destroyed.”

The men whooped and hollered as the concubines looked on in complete confusion, wondering why the celebration and who ‘Salty Jack’ was.

“FUCK MY ASS, YOU SAY? WELL FUCK YOUR WHOLE WORLD!’ Private Smith was shouting.

I pointed at him. “Private Smith, what did you do?”

He stopped mid-stream, and his exuberance quickly turned into that kind of look you get from a dog after you caught it crapping on the carpet.

“Pappy, I was pissed they said that crap to you. With the help of the AI it took me no time to locate the place, pull a roster of people nearby and find someone I could send that message to. I thought it would make them just as mad as I was and that they’d go down there and give them a piece of their mind for me.”

“Well, you win points there for being subtle, at least, but they did a little more than you might have intended. What actually happened is that it totally pissed off a bunch of overeager officer cadets so badly that they turned the place into a pile of rubble.” Yeah, I was exaggerating a little bit, but it wasn’t far off.

“Whoa. That’s radical” was about all Private Smith could respond with.

I turned to the rest of them. “Let’s look at this like it was a combat exercise for a minute. If this was actually our mission, we successfully pulled off a really successful operation, maybe with a lot of luck, or in this case bad luck.”

“My message kicked it off by getting the enemy really angry and cause them to make a bad decision. Your effective research allowed your message to leverage those results and cause a nearby unit to get angry too and make the bad decision to attack the target for us, with them taking all the consequences, well, at least most of them. This is how Sun Tzu wanted to fight, by getting in the enemy’s heads and making them defeat themselves.”

Everyone gave me a curious look at this point. I could see Private Smith walking through the chain of events and seeing how this all fit.

“When we face the enemy, it’s going to be really, really hard to get in their heads enough that we can force them to make mistakes. If we could send them messages like we did, and we somehow managed to understand their psychology, then maybe we could do something as dramatic as this.”

There were eager nods all around.

“But not all messages that living beings get are from things like text messages. Sometimes an action conveys a message, or the environment around them does, or a perception of what they see around them that isn’t even accurate sends them a message. If we know how they’re going to react, and we can control the message, we can cause specific reactions. Reactions we want them to have. Reactions that result in victory.”

“VICTORIA!” Ensign Chandler shouted as he raised his glass. Everyone else followed suit.

I laughed. These guys were eager to get out there and win, and anything that even smelled like a win was to them like water to a thirsty man. I hoped we’d get some real ones. I liked winning, too.

I only stayed a little while at the Sheep Pen before I headed out to get back to my study to work on my pile of paperwork. I worked through lunch, forgetting it entirely, until it was dinnertime and I took a break to share a meal with Susan in our little kitchen.

We chatted about our day, and she was eager to walk me through all the baby planning she was doing along with the other ladies. I asked her about how things had gone after we left for the cruise, and she apparently had organized all sorts of activities for the families, where they’d do everything from crafting to having social events. They’d stayed occupied with things they enjoyed instead of just sitting around for over a month waiting for their men to come home.

Then it was more paperwork, which was thankfully nearing completion, and then bed, sweet bed, with the one woman I wanted to be there with.

The next morning I met Commander Wilcox to turn in all the paperwork. There was no further mention of ‘The Salty Jack’s Incident’ for which I was grateful. With all the administrative stuff done we only had to wait for a review in order to commission the ship and since we were under Special Projects only Commander Wilcox and his assistant were needed for that. He promised that would be completed by the end of the day.

“Oh, by the way, you have managed to kick over a little bit of an anthill within Naval Auxiliary.” Commander Wilcox remarked.

I groaned. “What now?”

“People have been noticing those unit patches you guys are wearing around. Requests have gone up the chain to ask that they be permitted and whether they could have them too. Other inquiries are coming back down wondering who the heck has departed from uniform standards and who is allowing it to happen. I’ve been playing dumb, hoping that it all gets resolved at higher levels before they figure out what is going on here, and so far everyone seems to be covering for you guys.”

“Well I appreciate the top cover, sir, but if it causes problems for you we’ll stop wearing them in public.”

“Cat is out of the bag, so you might as well carry on for now. I think your resident artist might end up with a successful business helping other units out before anyone really decides to stomp this out, though. I personally think it’s a good idea, but you probably guessed that already.”

“I hope the next time I come here I don’t have to learn about some new problem I’ve caused my commanding officer. Sorry about all that, sir.”

“You keep doing what you’ve been doing. You’re here because I think you can shake things up. I think we need people like you in the Confederacy. If it causes desk jockeys to get heartburn, so be it. If they don’t find something to bitch about, they’ll find something else anyways so it really doesn’t change things if any new ideas you come up with are things they don’t like. After all, they’re REMFs.”

“Any chance we could remain under special projects after we get commissioned? I’d hate to have to go through all this trouble again of breaking in a new CO.” I smirked.

“Get out of my office you troublemaker, and let me get some work done!” he mock yelled, smiling.

Everything was done now, except for bringing guys back on the ship to stand watches again. I did what any good captain does and delegated that to the XO.

That meant I had some down time, and of course downtime meant I was going to the Sheep Pen. Since I had seen the women there last time, I assumed that the “man cave” vibe of the place was changing to a “family cave” so I didn’t feel bad about inviting Susan to meet me there. Maybe that change was a result of polishing off all the good booze we had got so the men didn’t have to share it, or maybe we were growing as a team of crewmen into the full team of crewmen and their families. For whatever reason, I thought this was a good development.

Susan thought the Sheep Pen was amazing, and spent a lot of time checking out all the memorabilia in the place. It was she that picked up on a subtle theme there, which she was eager to share with me.

“You know what all the things in this room have in common?” she asked me.

“Uh, no, I hadn’t noticed, sweetie.”

“Normally when you see stuff like this in a museum, it’s all about how some hero did some special thing, or accomplished some impossible goal. There’s not one of those here. Everything in here is about how a group of people did something. There’s a reproduction of the Iwo Jima flag, which a team raised. I’m sure it’s not the original!”

I looked around. I noticed that photos from the USS Oxford had been added which reinforced what Susan was talking about.

“There’s a painting of guys fighting at the Alamo. There’s a collection of rifles from a group of soldiers in the Middle East. The radio sets that code talkers used during the Second World War. Everything is about groups of people, and nothing is about a single person. I’ve never seen it done this way before. I like it.”

“You know, honey, I had never really looked that closely but I see what you’re talking about. It certainly fits Sergeant White, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising.”

Angela interrupted our chat by pulling Susan into a big hug and welcoming her. The two wandered off to talk about whatever women talk about and I headed over to Ensign Williams, who had made it this time.

“Wherever we get stationed next, we need a place like this that isn’t inside someone’s quarters” Todd observed.

“You’re probably right about that, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to pull that off. It’s going to take one hell of a favor to someone important to make that possible if we’re in a big facility. The bigger the place, the less extra space is usually available.”

“Well, I don’t see that being more likely with any other group of guys. Heck, we blew up a bar on the moon without ever getting close to orbit!” the XO snorted.

I laughed. The story was growing by the hour. “Well, not quite, but it’ll be a difficult mission, that’s for sure.”

“Hey Pappy!” It was Private Wilson, accompanied by a very lovely young woman with a big smile. “You remember Mary?”

“Yes, of course! You’re the lady who could sell anything to anyone, I recall!” I reached out to take her hand.

Mary blushed. She had been in pharmaceutical marketing back in the world, where she would represent drug companies at medical conferences. With wits and charm these gurus would cast magic spells or something on doctors and pharmacists so they’d prescribe their company’s medications instead of a competitor’s.

Yeah, cue Frank Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”. She fit it perfectly.

“Well I’ve gone from having a successful career, a luxury car, and a house on a golf course to being an unemployed baby factory living in a box, so I can’t complain at all about the opportunities that the Confederacy offers!” she joked.

I smiled at that. “Well, if your skills are currently under-appreciated, I might just have to go find you some occupational challenge that will properly make use of your many talents.” I waggled my eyebrows to emphasize that maybe she might not want to take me up on this.

“Oh, if you can, I’d love you forever!” and gave me a million-watt smile.

Yeah, she was good at this. If I needed someone to do things and I could turn this girl loose on them, she’d have them wrapped around her finger in no time. That could be rather useful when you’re in an environment where you need something and can’t bribe some rear-echelon pogue with trinkets or fake war trophies or booze because there’s nothing they want that they can’t get from a replicator.

Unless it’s seafood, of course, but I still haven’t found a supply for fresh seafood, yet.

“I seriously think there’s going to be some opportunities coming up in your future. After we get assigned somewhere, I might just have you do a few things for us.”

Oh, that got her excited.

Private Wilson and I talked about a signal analysis effort he tried to pull off on a Chinese military satellite when we were on the cruise, and whether we should try to get word to the US military about what we’d found out. The mysterious object in geosynchronous orbit turned out to be for maritime surveillance and would transmit encoded imagery back down to earth so the Chinese could track ships in the South China Sea and surrounding waters that were outside of range of their land-based and island-based radar systems. Wilson and the AI had been able to crack the encryption, and Private Wilson, out of a sense of loyalty to his previous homeland thought maybe he could ‘do them a solid’ as he put it.