Chapter 13: And Justice for All

Once we decided to hold trials for the DECOites instead of just destroying their ship, we had to come up with a set of charges that the AIs would accept. We finally decided that we couldn’t get away with what I wanted to do without looking capricious and vindictive. Well, the vindictive part I wasn’t too ashamed of, since I was in position to extract vengeance for a lot of people who had been abused and couldn’t fight back, but the capricious part was an issue. If we wanted a Confederacy ruled by law, we had to get those guys under control without making charges up.

As it ended up, we couldn’t charge the DECOites with any crimes directly concerning the way they had been treating their conks. Their behavior was allowed by the terms they and their concubines had accepted when they joined the Confederacy. The best deal I could get from the AIs was to hold them responsible for their conks’ health and performance.

So, we ended up with four general charges for the DECOites. Anyone who had caused, either directly or indirectly, the death of a conk was charged with negligent loss of a Confederacy asset. Not a big deal, it wasn’t a capital charge, but if proven we could use that as an excuse to force a re-test.

It was a ‘universal truth’ that everyone could re-test once a year. If their score rose high enough then they got more concubines, so retesting was a no-brainer. Everyone did it. Sometimes, an early test was authorized for some reason. I authorized them all the time for my people. Okay, a lot of the time it was ‘I ordered a retest’. It wasn’t our fault if they had never considered the possibility of getting a lower score.

If a Sponsor had killed the conk in self-defense we had to accept that answer, but if the conk was trying to be a good slave and her or his Sponsor didn’t have a good reason for killing the conk, he or she was charged with negligence. And that included simply releasing the conk to the CS, if that conk was later killed or recycled by a later owner. They knew, or should have known, what was going to happen. Again, not a capital charge but it allowed us to force a re-test. And their test had changed...

Next, every conk was supposed to be raising children to increase our numbers. Ever since the first colony had been settled, we had told every Sponsor and every Concubine during their initial familiarization training that every female must bear at least one child every two years. This war was going to take a while to win, and we needed a high birth rate to man our ships and Marine formations.

There were exceptions. New female sponsors like Sally were often told to go serve on a ship or in a platoon for the first two years, but then they were also taken off the front line to have their first child before going back to front-line service.

We were in Year 14 of the Swarm Era. Some sponsors, like Edelmann’s gang, had left Earth even earlier. They had been away from Earth for 15 years. Their original conks, if any, should have a minimum of 7 children each. We made allowances for extenuating circumstances, but what would keep a bureaucrat living in Earthat space from raising children?

To give the marginal cases the benefit of any doubt, any Sponsor with a Concubine who didn’t have at least one child for every five years of service was charged with willfully endangering the Confederacy. This allowed us to take care of almost every DECOite who hadn’t killed any of their conks. If the cow-girls and the dolphin-girls hadn’t produced children every few years, their sponsor was charged with that. It was a minor charge, but if proven it let us make them re-test. And their test had changed...

Third, one reason we had given all those baby-factories to their sponsors was the long lead time to produce new sponsors. We needed as many of those children to grow up to be sponsors themselves as we could possibly make happen. All colonies set up schools of some sort, but many colonies allowed the sponsor to hold their children out for home-schooling if they wanted.

After all, those children had stay-at-home concubine parents. If a Sponsor had school-aged children but there was no home-schooling set up and he had not made any arrangements for their education, again the Sponsor was charged with willfully endangering the Confederacy. If proven, they would re-test. And their test had changed...

Last, I wanted to reinforce the concept that the conks were humans too. I didn’t get complete buy-in from everyone, but as long as I restricted my purge to DECO and I wasn’t killing DECO people out of hand, I didn’t get too much pushback. And even those who wouldn’t agree that a concubine was human had to agree that they were at least a potential human. While we were dealing with all the trials, all of the Sponsorless families who had suffered through their lord and master coming home every night on Unity were getting used to him not being underfoot. Every couple of days all of the conks got in a sleep-trainer for therapy, education, training.

And testing. Most of the families had a head conk, and within a few years they all knew what we wanted in a Sponsor. Any conk that could be coaxed into passing the CAP test was happily promoted to Sponsor. And just as happily granted custody of the whole family, conks and kids alike.

On the other side of the test, a lot of the people we were labeling as ‘Concubines’ weren’t capable of taking care of anyone else. Sure, maybe they had already been psychopathic introverts when they had been picked up. However, the AIs had access to the original tests, and all medical evaluations through the years. Most of them had been stable and functional humans, back when they were picked up. And most of them had been promised a life on a colony, having and raising a huge family. Wasn’t that broken promise just as important as their Sponsor’s rights?

So, we had Sponsors with conks who passed the CAP test once away from her sponsor. We had Sponsors with conks who used to be able to have and raise children but were no longer capable of it due to physical and/or mental abuse. Either way, the Sponsor was charged with breaking their promise to their conks, plus willfully limiting the growth of a Confederacy citizen and thus said citizen’s future service. I still didn’t get to kill any of them, but they would have to re-test. And their test had changed...

The evidence and fact-finding parts of the trials were quick. In most cases they were handled by the AIs while the accused was in a sleep-trainer, and only occasionally would the AIs ask for advice or clarification from us. Yeah, we all wanted the trials to be completely human, but that just wasn’t possible. In most cases, the only evidence was held in the AIs’ memory banks. Where we had non-AI evidence, though, we used it.

The sentencing part of the trial was easy. For the UN personnel, all the people who had never passed the full CAP test and couldn’t pass the full test now, the AIs wanted them all dead. They were only balking at killing them out of hand. Once we had come up with a prosecution strategy, they pushed for the death penalty in every case. Mostly, I agreed with them.

Still, the sentencing part had to be done by us. The AIs wanted to keep their hands clean, I guess. I didn’t see their point of view. They had handled the mechanical parts of killing quite a few Concubines over the years, but for some reason they wanted us humans to be involved here.

For everyone who we could pin a real crime on, there was no quibbling. They got the death penalty. There weren’t many, though. Some of the UN people and the vast majority of upper-echelon DECOites hadn’t really committed a crime beyond being an abusive shitbag and we had to come up with a fair way to get rid of them.

We put together a sentencing tribunal that would look at the case from the outside. I gave it eight members. The Civil Service, CMC, and Navy each got two seats. The Fleet Auxiliary got one. I wanted the Concubine point of view, but I didn’t think it was right to have a human with no authority over even their own life to have a say in executing other people. I decreed that the 8th seat would be filled by any available Sponsor who had once been a Concubine. I served as the presiding 9th officer, and I didn’t vote unless they were deadlocked.

All I asked was a simple majority. If 5 of 9 judges thought that the defendant would best serve the Confederacy by a re-test that might lead to them losing their “Sponsor” status, then it would happen. We didn’t need years of appeals. As any of the judges could ask the defendant, “When you sent that Concubine to be recycled, what appeal process did she get from your decision?”

Besides, we weren’t killing anyone. We were just removing their “Sponsor” status. If they failed the test. Only then would we kill them. All they had to do to live and remain as Sponsors, was pass the test. The new and improved test, that was.

We cycled everyone available through the tribunal as we could get people. Some people could be used in more than one seat, of course. I used Hannah and LaRhonda in either the CS seats or the ex-Conk Sponsor as needed. Several of the Fleet Auxiliary officers we got had also started as conks, so they could take that seat if needed. Once we got started, we got lots of volunteers for the tribunal, and we took as many as we could from Sol’s Defense Force. Oddly, many of the people who volunteered to serve on the tribunal had started as Concubines, too. There was a lot of resentment stored up against the DECO executives.

Of course I stacked the deck. Since Hannah and LaRhonda were conveniently available Civil Service officers, almost every tribunal had at least two people who had once been a Concubine. Often, the tribunal had three or more. The defendant had to have a really, really good reason for whatever he did to his conks to get at least five votes for acquittal.

Most of the DECOites could try “but that doesn’t apply to me”, but they couldn’t say “but I was never told that”. Whether they went through formal training on it or not, there was no way they could get away with saying they had never heard it during their years of service. The AIs could always show that they had heard it. And if they were “serving in the Confederacy agency popularly referred to as DECO” as well as “enjoying the benefits of serving as a Confederacy Sponsor”, well, then, it sure as hell DID apply to them.

Unfortunately, we had to let some of them go. If they claimed that they had to, they had orders from their chain of command to do it, we had to put that trial on hold until we had checked with their superiors. This became an additional charge against their bosses, of course. If the records and the sleep-trainer testimony backed up the subordinate’s claim and we had no other charges against him or her, we had to drop our case against the subordinate.

In the lower ranks, DECO had a lot of people who passed their re-test and hadn’t done anything wrong. They were just bureaucrats in a big government agency. They were released as soon as we could and put back to work. I mean, with dickheads overrunning the globe we needed as many extraction teams as we could get, and DECO needed all their people to manage them.

Thankfully, we didn’t have too many of those edge cases, where the DECOite failed the CAP test but we couldn’t pin a charge on them. We had to accept them as concubines. It really stuck in my craw that LaRhonda chose two of them as her own conks. I know it makes me look petty and mean, but I didn’t want them around my family.