Chapter 11: Leadership is Where You Find It

I found LaRhonda on the Kilo, acting as Hannah’s on-site supervisor. She seemed to be getting much better cooperation from the Marines than I would expect from strangers being ordered around by a conk, so I asked I Can’t Wait what had happened. The ship played in my implant a short rant LaRhonda had given a troublemaker, then had sent to every Volunteer on Success to avoid further issues.

Hotel, can you play her rant for everyone to hear?

“Look, jackass. I’m just a dumb nigger whore concubine, and I can’t tell you what to do. However, my Sponsor is the senior Civil Service officer in this whole system and she told me to get this done. If I tell her that it’s going slow because you are giving me shit she will take away all of your conks AND your children. You won’t be getting them back, neither. You dumbass men can just fuck each other for the rest of your lives.”

“And, if that isn’t enough to scare you, her husband is a System Governor. I know you high and mighty senior officers are all as dumb as a box of rocks, so you don’t know what that means, exactly. It means that he is the one man in this whole system who can tell the AIs to kill you, and they’ll do it. I spend every night I can in his bed, and I make sure he’s happy I’m there. I’m pretty sure that if I ask him for a little favor he’ll do it. So go ahead and give me shit. Depending on how good you are at it, you’ll either spend the rest of your life gay or dead.”

“Thank you, Hotel.”

<You are welcome.>

Every once in a while I have the AIs play it for me, just to get a laugh from LaRhonda giving the Marines shit when they were acting stupid.

Anyway, I was wondering. Does everyone else in the universe know about my fears of having too much power?

I Can’t Wait told me that a significant fraction of its resources was tied up for the next few minutes answering all the questions about whether the ‘dumb nigger whore concubine’ was serious or not, and if she could back up her threats. Since at the time I was discussing whether or not to just go ahead and destroy Unity with everyone on it, with another man who seemed to think that I probably should, the AIs had left me alone and told the Marines that they could obey her instructions about the evacuation, they could learn to like sex with other men, or they could die. “Take your time deciding”, I guess.

I walked up while she was discussing housing with several families, picked her up, and gave her the best hug I could. “I heard your speech. Both of us will back up everything you said, you dumb nigger whore concubine. Can you spend the night with me tonight? You’ll have to share the bed with Hannah but I’ll make it worth your while.”

Using my implant, I asked the AI if there was anything I could do to help LaRhonda pass her next CAP test. She was willing to take charge in a power vacuum, she was willing to accept responsibility for her actions and those under her supervision, she was willing to stand up to fucked-up people to protect their children. Yeah, she had us backing her up, but still ... I didn’t want to cheat, but what else did the AIs want?

(<This assignment has helped her personal growth. She should get between 6.7 and 6.9 on her next test. Additional formal education would increase this.>)

My dumb nigger whore concubine will get retested as soon as we have the Success people taken care of. That’s not cheating much, no more than I have for other people. It’s well within my normal abuse of power to decree retests for people who come to my attention, whether for good behavior or bad. I do it all the time. It’s one of my most useful management tools.

Since this was a sort of dress-rehearsal for the Victory and Unity people, I allowed myself to be drawn into the discussions of what was going on. I was still wearing the uniform of a Rear Admiral, but I was, apparently, really the “Acting Governor of Sol System” which outranked every uniform on the ship so they were pretty respectful even if they didn’t like what I was saying.

I made sure that I Can’t Wait would make these talks available for everyone to watch. My take on what was going on was that the reason Earth and Sol System were so screwed up was systemic failure at the top of the chain of command, and we were going to do a clean sweep of both DECO and Central Command. The Marines in Success may not have been the leaders of the idiocy that fucked Earth over so badly, but they had stood by and allowed it to happen while benefiting from the status quo, so they were going to have to take their fair share of the blame.

The bottom line was that none of them were trusted by anyone outside of DECO or CC, and we were going to start by making every one of them take a new CAP test that I had requested stress their integrity, honor, and ability to take responsibility for their own actions as well as those of their subordinates. Frankly, those lower in the food chain may come out okay but I didn’t expect the men and women at the top to do well at all.

We’d have to see how they did before we could make any plans for their later use, but certainly any plans would include every person in DECO or CC spending some time in actual combat service before they were again given any opportunity for command or leadership, and it was doubtful if any of them would ever be allowed in a position to make policy. We were not going to have REMFs running the war, no matter how smart they were or how fast they talked. Unless they had proven their character under fire, that is, and not everyone who came under fire came back.

Well, that didn’t appease the upper echelons at all, but a lot of that actually went down fairly well with the more junior Marines. What I was saying was really the way things were supposed to be. You shouldn’t command if you’ve never obeyed, and you shouldn’t be making policy if you’ve never had to live under someone else’s policy that you don’t understand. And you shouldn’t be sending young men and women out to die if you’ve never been in combat yourself.

That was another one of the sources of our problems here. DECO and CC, like all Confederacy institutions, were too new. A mature organization, whether you were talking about the Vatican or the US Navy or even the British monarchy, had been around long enough for people to grow up inside the system. When it came time for someone to take over they had been groomed for it. They knew the system from the inside, they knew what it was supposed to do and how it was supposed to be done, and they could take over without any major changes that disrupted the system or those who depended upon it.

DECO and CC were new enough that the people who had been put in charge at the beginning were still in charge. Well, that was pretty much true of everything the Confederacy had built, but everywhere else we had tried to set up a promotion system so that we would have some continuity if the guys at the top died.

Every Navy ship, every Marine formation, every fleet and colony had a chain of command and succession list. If I died my council would select the next Governor, probably from within the council, with the AIs’ approval. Probably Bill or Hannah. And, whether or not the new Governor agreed with my policies, he or she would at least know what they were and the reasons behind them, so no policies would get changed without a reason. If Kevin or Jack died on operations, his deputy -stationed on a different ship of course- would take over and continue the fleet’s mission. And so on.

The system also paid dividends when we were expanding. If you died, your XO was supposedly qualified to take command due to his training, his experience, and your guidance. It followed that if you didn’t die, he was also qualified to take over a brand new ship that needed a CO. Or, since it was likely that your XO had less experience than you, it might be better if you took the new ship and your XO took over the ship and crew he was already familiar with.

DECO and CC, however, hadn’t done that. Neither organization had any SOP documents or traditions, and neither had set up any kind of promotion system. They were run by fiat, by daily instructions from the top.

And now, finally, it was clear why they were run that way. Their executives were always appointed by the Secretary-General of the UN. Unless that changed, neither organization would ever set up any traditions. They would always be run from the top, with the top changing whenever the Secretary wanted, and the executive level would always be more attentive to the Secretary’s desires than to any institutional goals or the needs of the people below them in the food chain.

CC’s management issues made a lot more sense to me now. DECO, of course, was far more stable than CC since Mr. Chandler had been in charge since it was first created. I’m not saying it was good, just that it was more stable than CC. DECO didn’t change their policies every couple of months. Central Command did.

Anyway, between me telling the Marines that we were going to do things the way they should be, and LaRhonda telling them what would happen if they caused any trouble, for the most part the Marines followed their training and did as they were told.

The only trouble came from the senior echelons. Most of them had been appointed as Colonels and Generals when they were first picked up instead of having earned their rank through service and promotions. They were all fucked, and they all knew it. They were the ones who had feathered their own nests instead of serving Earth and the Confederacy, and they had no higher authority to pass the buck to.

Was the Secretary-General going to take the blame for their failure to stop Earth’s invasions? His decision to have yes-men in command of Earth’s defense was a critical cause, but that didn’t change things now. His yes-men had been in charge the whole time, and they had made the decisions that led to this mess.

Once I Can’t Wait’s crew and passengers all understood their directions, we cleared out so they could get moving. I pointed out to her skipper that he needed to keep the ‘before testing’ Marines and family separated somehow from the ‘after testing’ people; we didn’t need anyone panicking on either side of that divide.

Several of our ships had brought small contingents of Marines for internal security and boarding actions, and we got them to donate some teams to keep I Can’t Wait under control. With that and the way the Kilos were arranged they could isolate each deck, then take one deck at a time and lock all the pods down until everyone on that deck had been tested. Then, they could release that deck to normal access for their side of the divider line, and work on the next deck.

At least, that was the plan. It didn’t work any better than any other plan that depended upon people acting reasonably. They started with a group of fourteen pods as an initial test. There was a sleep-trainer in each pod, so we had the pod’s so-called Marine get in it for his test while one of our real Marines stood by to maintain order in the pod.

Meanwhile, each sleep-trainer had instructions to not wake the person being tested until cleared by both I Can’t Wait’s skipper and the Marine on the spot. The Captain had to be in the loop because if things started to go south the Marines in the sleep-trainers could be left there until he had control of his ship again, while the Marine on watch needed to be able to ensure he kept control of the pod.

We had to stop and regroup even before the first test finished. The problem here was that this was a short-term evacuation and everyone had pretty much run for the transporters carrying whatever they could grab on their way out the door. Even in this small sample, several of the pods didn’t have a leader who could make decisions. With the kids needing things and their Sponsor on the slab, many of the conks turned to our Marine to make decisions like whether they could feed the kids now or not while their Sponsor was out. I was keeping an ear on how the tests were going, and the trend got back to me immediately.

I got ahold of Hannah and LaRhonda who were both likewise watching the experiment and filled them in on my concern, then asked if they wanted a control freak who wouldn’t even allow a mother to decide when to feed her own children to be a Sponsor with life and death power over Concubines and Dependents. They agreed with me that the correct answer was “B) - Absolutely Not” and that got fed back to the AI running the tests. Those guys failed even before their test was well and truly started.

I had to think, though. Maybe those guys shouldn’t be Sponsors, but they were still trained and augmented Marine officers who could -supposedly- fight and follow orders. There had to be something we could do with them that was better than just recycling them for tonight’s meatloaf. And, was this their real personality, or behavior trained into them by their commanders? That went back to the AI running the tests, too.

I set up a vidcon with our own Marine officers so I could sound them out on our options. We were going to have a bunch of Marines with death sentences, and we had a planet with a Sa’arm landing force right here in the system with us. I wanted plans for using them to help stiffen the defenders, plans that both our Marines and the AIs would support.

Just as important, most would die but some of them would survive whatever suicide mission we sent them on. Before we sent them into combat I wanted clear policy on what those Marines had to do to get extracted from their mission and rehabilitated.

While I had them on the line, I sounded them all out on what authority their own concubines had. While every family was different, they all agreed that their own conks had the authority to feed their children without asking. Their concubines were responsible for taking care of the children, and they had all the authority they needed to do that. If the conks on Success couldn’t even do that, there was something seriously wrong. What if their sponsors got busy, or were called away on duty? Should the children starve?

We got three immediate failures from that first, well, test group of tests. We also got two marginal results, people who would fail if we wanted failures but could probably change to our values if we gave them time and guidance. Since the object of this whole operation was to save as many people as we could, I felt obligated to give those two the benefit of the doubt. We assigned them ‘provisional’ passing scores and let them back out of their sleep-trainers. By then our Marine in the pod had talked with the conks and had his selection for the one most likely to make Sponsor ready to get in.

The three who failed their retest had their families sent upstairs out of sight, then they were woken and told that they had been demoted and provisionally reassigned to a combat unit. For now, we sent them to one of our ships to augment the Marine security force. Later, when we had a better idea of numbers, we would forward them to the Moon and put together a formation. They were going to get sent down to Earth somewhere to stiffen their defenses.

I was looking forward to making that announcement in person. They and their Navy brother officers over on Victory had caused this mess, and besides they had been sending Marines out to die in ground combat with the Sa’arm for years while they sat safely on their asses here. It was time for them to do their own fair share of hopeless last stands. If any of them survived, then perhaps we could think about re-assigning them to a unit elsewhere.

The rest of them, the junior officers who passed the ‘regular’ test, were reunited with their families and immediately put to work helping keep order with the rest of the Success’s crew. So were their conks. We needed a Marine present to deal with the Sponsor in each pod, but if that Sponsor was in the sleep-trainer or reassigned to one of our ships any reliable conk could keep order in his family while the Marine moved to the next pod. If the problem child didn’t pass, we could keep him in the sleep-trainer until we could get a Marine there to take charge.

The testing cycle quickly became a continuous process. The next Sponsor and his conks would get processed whenever we had a Marine and a conk available, and as we got each Sponsor done we could put the ones who passed to work on the next pod. The ones who failed got sent to our ships. Either way, a reliable conk stayed with the family to test each of his conks in hopes that at least one could accept some responsibility.

If the Sponsor passed, he kept his family. If he failed, he never saw his family again; they were gone when he woke up. Okay, they were only upstairs but they were out of sight and with the lift disabled they could not come down again until he was gone. We had to leave someone with his family until we got them a new Sponsor or one of his conks passed the test. Unfortunately, part of the whole problem was that the failures weren’t the kinds of people to improve their property. We didn’t get many new sponsors from the failures, but the ones who passed generally had one or two conks that we could borrow for this.

The only drama that we were willing to put up with was when a Sponsor passed the test and got to keep his family, but one or more of his conks also passed the test. We had enough to do to keep everyone busy for a couple of days, but they could communicate with each other and generally by the time we were done processing everyone on the ship they had decided what they wanted to do. I stayed out of that.

In fact, I got to stay out of the whole mess with Success and I Can’t Wait and the Marines. I got to look in on it occasionally, but the DECO flagship Unity was a much bigger headache and once we had the basic process worked out for Success I turned the Marines over to my Civil Service assistants and focused on Unity.

I Can’t Wait had been inbound from some colony, headed to Earth for another load of colonists, and had checked in with Outer Traffic Control not too long after I told Jack we needed a bunch of transports. When it got added to the shipping availability list, Jack had told OTC to divert it to Mars and it was in transporter range only a couple of hours after I asked for it since Mars’ HEZ was so much smaller than Earth’s.

The other transports we were getting had all been in Earth orbit, filling up directly from Earth or from the Moon’s Volunteer processing centers. Getting them to where we needed them meant that they had to first dump their passengers back onto the Moon again, then drive out past the huge double-planet HEZ that Earth and the Moon had. Only then could they pop into hyperspace for the second or so it took to get to Mars.

This was like the ripples in a pond when you tossed a rock in. Grabbing those ships would delay their normal rounds, taking passengers to the colonies. Maybe they could speed up for their trip out and get back on schedule. If we didn’t keep them too long.

By the time we had the first transport available for Unity the entire ship had been without food for two days. We turned Unity’s transporters back on for concubines and dependents, and that turned into another can of worms. Many of these families were even more disfunctional than the ones from Success. We needed to detail a Sponsor for each pod.

However, there was no way we could support that with our numbers. We had already minimized the crews in our ships every possible way we could back at Beerat, just because of our own manning problems. If we started detailing people to herd conks, we would render our own ships no longer combat-worthy almost immediately. That wasn’t really an option, anyway, since we didn’t have enough people even if we emptied every ship we had.

What we could do was substitute any crew-conk for the required Sponsor. For this, to supervise a disfunctional family, the AIs would let a crew-conk be in charge. We could back them up with Sponsors if needed. And we were starting to get Marines back from Success, so they got thrown into this as a practical exercise in small-unit leadership.

Jack didn’t need to hear about our challenges; he had his hands full with Earth. Our main force had gotten there and started combat operations against the planet about the same time that we got to Mars. Some parts of that were routine. However, with all of our experience fighting the Sa’arm, none of us had ever had to deal with neutral shipping. Or allied troops on the ground. Or, for that matter, civilian refugees. We had never before had to consider collateral damage as a problem. In the systems we had attacked, collateral damage down on the planet had always been a bonus.

Jack grabbed yet another Kilo that had just come in for us. It was ready to load up with recent pickups for a trip out to a colony, but he claimed ‘military expedience’, stuffed it with anyone they could find who had been a Sponsor for more than a month and had a stable conk who could run their family for a while in their Sponsor’s absence, and sent it out to us instead. That got us a very confused set of a thousand or so Sponsors plus another Kilo, and we spaced the Sponsors out every four pods with each pod holding two families worth of Concubines and children if the families weren’t too big.

Eight-families-per-Sponsor wasn’t anything like a stable long-term solution, but it didn’t have to be. It only had to keep the refugees alive and safe for a few days while we started to process them, and it let us cram about 20,000 people into each Kilo. We ended up needing a second set of babysitters from the Moon before we were done, but by the time we needed them Jack had them standing by and it only took us 4 Kilos to pull all of the dependents off of Unity. Yes, it took several trips, but most of the DECO people were being obstructive and we generally had berths available faster than we got the people to put in them.

Once we had everyone assigned to a pod and they knew where to get a sponsor if they needed one, we had the conks all take the CAP test again while the ship went back to the Moon. Between clearing Mars’ HEZ and driving in through Earth’s, it was almost a two day trip and that gave us all the time we needed. We gave them all a night to settle in, then ran all the conks through the test in less than a day. At 6-10 conks per pod and only an hour or two per test, it was easy.

Few passed, but that was just a baseline. The AIs were confident that a week or two of a stable environment would see a significant rise across the board. Were we humans that fragile, that a week of stability was the difference between a sponsor and a concubine? Besides, they weren’t going anywhere. I wanted to just send each ship out to the colonies as it filled, but these were the families of high-ranking members of the Confederacy’s armed forces and we had to fill out all the forms, dot all the ‘i’s, and cross all the ‘t’s.

And we certainly had the time to wait as long as the AIs wanted. Trying all their sponsors was going to take a while. Even if we used the AIs and the sleep-trainers as courtrooms, the AIs would make us have people in the loop as they refused to be judge and jury for a capital case, where the accused would lose his or her life if convicted.

Still, any concubine who passed the test was asked to volunteer for service with the Confederacy, and if he, she, or it said yes then he, she, or it was immediately granted custody of every concubine and dependent in that family. There weren’t many passes, but it showed the rest that we were serious, and it started trickling those people out to the colonies where they belonged.

The rest of them, the endless stream of conks and kids, were transferred to one of the Moonbases as quickly as we could just to get them off of those overcrowded ships. The Moonbases, now, THEY had some room! There were several built for the sole purpose of housing recently picked up volunteers and their families while they got their initial training, and they were all rated at ten million inhabitants each.

I don’t know why it took us so long to see it, but our long thin pipeline of colonists was easy to bypass. The transports used to spend a month or so getting to the colony, just to give the colonists time to get healed, get augmented, get trained, and get used to their new families. And, the extractions used to be timed to fill the transports as they returned. Between the extractions, the confusion, the struggles to collect as many of the children as they could find and various other headaches, even the original Auroras with only 96 pods were often held in orbit for days until they had a full load. The Kilos sometimes waited weeks for their load, when we first started using them. The Cube Ships? Don’t ask.