Chapter 15: Under New Management

We were also having some trouble from the AIs over the legality of our actions. A lot of their issue didn’t make much sense to me, but I got that a lot when I talked to the AIs about a lot of subjects so it wasn’t anything new. This time it was about our chain of command and the source of our authority.

Most of you kids have taken classes in government theory. We have to have a government. Us humans just don’t get along with each other well enough to go without one.

It is a principle of human government that the authority has to come from somewhere. Early governments had based their authority on personal power, as in “I’m a better hunter and warrior than you so I’m in charge. Stop arguing before I kill you.” Later it was common to claim that the King got his authority from God, who wanted him to rule, and everyone else in the government got their authority from the King. Are you going against God’s will? Again, that was a different way of saying “Stop arguing before I kill you.”

More recently, it was common to say that the government got its authority from some document, and the document had been approved by the people from whom the authority flowed. Of course, anyone who argued with the government which spoke for all the people was at least a criminal, an Enemy of the People. In some countries they were also judged insane and a pervert. Clearly, they should be killed, right?

In our case, the Confederacy Navy and Marine Corps got their authority to build weapons and use them from Central Command, which was authorized to do that by the UN as the ‘human world government’, and the UN in turn had gotten its authority by the will of the people or some other idiocy.

I certainly hadn’t been aware that the UN had overall authority over the whole world back when I’d been a serving officer in the US Navy. Constitutional law and our source of authority had been subjects that any US military officer was an expert in. Sometimes we had to act on our own, and we were all trained in it.

It didn’t happen very often any more, but the history books were full of examples where the senior military officer present had to make decisions that affected the whole country back home. A naval force out in the boonies had the ability to start a war that the nation then had to deal with, so naval officers were trained in how to decide when to take what actions, how to decide what their true authority level was, and what was best for the nation.

In fact, for the United States’ first century of existence, that was one of the few important differences between the US Army and the US Navy. The Naval officers were trained in international relations and the Army officers weren’t. If the US delegation to, say, Sweden, had a question about starting a war, the Ambassador was supposed to consult with the senior US Navy officer available, not the senior Army guy. Eventually the Army got an academy going at West Point and started turning out officers who were trained in this, but for a long time it was a sore point between the services.

Anyway, this was bullshit. Completely aside from the fact that if the UN had claimed back in the beginning to be the top of a world government they were lying, the Diaspora had long since stopped listening to Central Command. CC built ships for the Confederacy, and they defended Sol System and the rest of the 1st Military District. That was all CC did, and they didn’t do a very good job at either one.

The 7th Military District’s Combined Fleet was there in Sol System to deal with a bad case of dickheads, and a small group of ships and men had been further detached and assigned to deal with a bunch of criminals that were causing trouble. All of our sailors and Marines followed the orders of those officers appointed over them, all the way up to Jack.

Jack had, in turn, been placed in command of the fleet by the orders of General George Hillman, Governor of Brak and Commander of the 7th Military District with the support of the various colonies which had supplied ships.

The various colonial governors had gotten their positions in various ways. George had been sent out by CC back at the beginning of time, when they were first organizing the districts, but he was -even back then- recognized as being independent of Central Command. CC could give him supplies, men, ships and policy, but they couldn’t give him orders.

All of us, and here I’m talking about my Governor hat, had been appointed by the local military leadership with the advice and consent of the AIs, which supposedly spoke for the “old” Confederacy. I had risen to Lt Commander in the US Navy, and Vice Admiral in the Confederacy Navy, but I drew my authority as Colonial Governor from the Confederacy which told the AIs -and all the equipment they controlled- to obey my orders.

My authority as a Governor had nothing to do with CC and never went through the UN. Jack’s authority as Fleet Commander likewise came from the District Commander and the Governors. There was no confusion here. We had all sworn to give our allegiance to the Confederacy and defend it when we were picked up.

If we wanted, this gave us another charge to place against all the DECO and CC officers who had made the same oath but then continued to serve the UN instead of doing what was best for the Confederacy, but by this point that was just beating a dead horse. We would use that charge to get rid of any of the UN’s agents that we couldn’t pin anything else on, but we weren’t going to waste everyone’s time piling extra charges on people we were already going to execute for more venal crimes. There was plenty of room on Purgatory for the few we couldn’t execute.

Anyway, we only had a governance issue if the AIs thought that they should be obeying the UN instead of the Confederacy, and I was having trouble swallowing that concept. Right. So, what was the problem?

The AIs wanted some sort of chief executive to formally accept responsibility for directing our armed forces. Failing that, a council or clearinghouse would do. It was important to them that this responsibility somehow rest with us humans and not anyone in the old Confederacy or even the AIs. When I finally understood this, I had to shake my head. We had armed forces, but no one was responsible for them. Someone had to be in charge even if only in theory. If not the Confederacy, the UN, or CC, then who?

Crap like this made me wonder sometimes if there really was a Confederacy at all, or if the AIs were just caretakers for a dead civilization. If you thought about it, you could build a pretty convincing self-consistent theory. How many people had really seen a Darjee? I certainly hadn’t, not live and in person. Okay, a lot of people had, back in the beginning when the Darjee were running all of our transports for us, but even so was there really anything else to the Confederacy besides a couple hundred weird aliens and several hundred ancient ships? Or was “The Confederacy” just some kind of scam that a dying race came up with to get us to do their fighting for them?

As one of the old Earth authors had said, “Check your assumptions. In fact, check them at the door. You don’t need them at this party.”

Eventually we came up with the concept of two committees or councils. There would be a military council responsible for managing the war, the way CC was supposed to have. That council, in turn, would answer to a civilian council that held the authority to make war for the Confederacy and delegated that to the military council.

I know I was involved, but I hope no one ever blames me for any of that. I suppose we had to have them, but did anyone really expect either council to actually get anything done? If they were intended to be legal figureheads, the two councils do their jobs just fine. If they were actually supposed to do anything, though, we’d have to say that both councils are abject failures.

The War Council could be made to work, sorta. Officially, we appointed every District Commander to it and told it to “find a way to win this war”. Its first meeting was at the big fleet shipyard at Saturn, and almost all the DCs went. Most of them brought various staff and they set up some committees to work on things while the DCs went back to their various and sundry headquarters after the initial set of meetings.

After that first meeting the War Council set up a couple of Kilos for their staff to work out of and provided some warships to escort them. Then, to make sure that no one ever confused the War Council with the old Central Command, they had the WC flotilla tour the districts, with each monthly meeting at the next District Headquarters. Either the DCs themselves attended, or they sent their deputies instead. With message torpedos to communicate with those who couldn’t -or wouldn’t- attend, policy questions could be resolved within a few days if needed.

The second council, the civilian oversight one? We went with the simplest way we could come up with, to make sure that they never could decide anything at all. We declared that it, just like the real Confederacy Council, would be a committee of all Confederacy Colonial Governors. Hell, many systems have five or six. Earth and Sol System have something like fifteen, right? Five or six on Earth itself and another bunch out in the system? Beerat’s lucky. We only have two.

They call themselves the Steering Committee. That one was, is, and always will be, a useless collection of pompous self-important pricks who want everyone else to all agree that their colony is the most important. Think of any legislature you’ve ever seen in action. Now, add the fact that whatever they decide is going to be law. There’s no executive branch to veto it. There’s no judicial branch to declare it unconstitutional. In fact, there’s no constitution. Whatever they decide is it, and the AIs will enforce it.

Diversity is a good thing. If we always do a particular thing the same way, sooner or later the universe will show us we’re wrong. It’s better to let some people be different. One of humanity’s strengths as an only marginally social species is that if it is possible to do something seven different ways we will do it all nine ways. One of them will be best, sure, but unless someone is getting hurt let people do it their own way. We don’t need somebody insisting that everything be done their way.

We worked hard to make sure that the Steering Committee never did actually agree on anything. The AIs insisted that we had to have it, sure, but they didn’t insist that we make it work. The only meeting I ever enjoyed going to was the one where I got to introduce the Beer’s “First Father” as the member from Beer.

Yes, honey, I’m talking about those guys, the ones I have to go see every couple of months for a week or two. As long as I’m still the Womb’s Governor, I’m on the Steering Committee and I have to go to their meetings or send someone else in my place. And there aren’t too many people I trust that much. Maybe Hannah, but what would be the point of sending Hannah? If she’s going I want to go too, right?

Anyway, the War Council works. Maybe not well, but they can make overall decisions to keep us all on the same path, which is to save humanity and the “old” Confederacy, and to destroy or at least contain the Sa’arm. They started with a series of resolutions setting out our ‘War Goals’.

The War Council’s first resolution was that saving Earth would be our first priority. That was something that both Jack and I pushed for, and the DCs all agreed that Earth had to come first for quite a few different reasons.

Because of this, unless a colony had immediate combat needs, any resource demanded of any colony for War Goal One would be immediately sent to Sol System. Those resources would be returned to the colony after the immediate War Goal One need was met; we weren’t supposed to be just grabbing ships for WG1 and then using them for whatever else we wanted. As it happened, the only ‘resources’ the WC ever demanded were the District Commanders themselves, to form the Council to begin with and get things rolling. Still, WG1 was there in case we needed it.

War Goal Two was to defend all current Confederacy installations; any colony resource could be claimed for WG2 if a nearby colony was under threat of attack and the resources could get there in time to make a difference. That was partly me; I was still pissed about how long it took to get Jutland to cough up some of their carriers. Not that I could have used WG2 to grab some carriers to go into Alpha with, but the principle held. Help your buddies, dammit, it may be you needing help tomorrow.

War Goal Three was something that we had all pressed CC for but they never supported it and no one else had the resources to do it so it never got done. We needed a survey of the battlefield. How could we plan to win the war if we had no idea how big our enemy was? Or even where our allies were?

A sub-goal of WG3 was to actually track down the “old” Confederacy. The track down part should be easy; just ask the AIs, right? I said ‘should’. The AIs never had been willing to tell us anything about the rest of the Confederacy, and we didn’t expect them to start now, but if we could clear out all the UN people maybe they would lighten up some. We were to the point where we could demand meaningful answers. No more bullshit. Either show us where they are, or stop blathering about defending them. Either way works for us.

War Goal Four was to gradually expand the Confederacy-controlled zone by preventing any new Sa’arm landings on habitable worlds we could reach, and by taking already-infested worlds away from them. The combined battleline-and-carrier fleet that we had built would work for the former part until someone came up with a better idea. We didn’t have any way to do that latter part yet, but it had to be one of our goals or we never would learn how to do that.

If I give you children the impression that I had a lot of say in what the War Council did when it was first formed, you are right. Officially, I was just a member of the Steering Committee who had recent military experience. Unofficially, though, they listened to Jack as the commanding officer of the force that got the dickhead advance on Earth stopped, and Jack, well, after three or four years working with Kevin and I, he had pretty much bought into my views. I had more influence over the War Council back in those days than I did the Steering Committee!

War Goals One and Two didn’t really do anything. They were like preparatory orders. All they did was pave the way for later orders, if they ever became needed.

Even War Goal Three, the battlespace survey, wasn’t really anything new. Anyone who had ever actually left Sol knew that our charts had to be updated before we could take the offensive. WG3 was just another statement about the way the colonies thought the war should be fought. CC had always considered the colonies as only having value for their help defending Earth, and anything that didn’t directly add to Earth’s security wasn’t worth expending resources on. Out in the colonies, we thought that we had value in our own right, and sometimes we also thought about the ‘big picture’, the overall war to stop the Sa’arm.

We had a detailed survey of every system for a hundred lightyears in every direction from Earth, done in the very beginning of the war before the Sa’arm actually showed up and we stopped exploring and started throwing all our ships at them. It had been updated continuously ever since, and in some directions -mostly away from the Sa’arm- it was good out to 150 or 200 lightyears.

The survey took the basic info that the Confederacy had on each system, data on every major body in the system including orbits, and added stuff that was relevant to the war. System resources we could use, whether or not it held a planet that the Sa’arm could use, and so on. If there was a life-bearing world, was that life something that we should protect like the Beer or the Tulaki, or was it just basic lichens and stuff that not even the Sa’arm would bother harvesting?

The survey didn’t need any special new equipment. All it needed was the decision to do it and the ships assigned to get it done. The ships we assigned should be as small as possible to avoid detection. And to minimize resource loss if they didn’t come back, but that didn’t have to be spoken out loud. We also wanted to send ships that required the fewest crew, which again usually meant small without too many weapons or other systems that took manpower. At the same time, we didn’t want to take any of our combat power away from the fleet.

The War Council did a quick inventory across the Diaspora of all our older ships and declared a lot of them -not as many as I wanted but it was a start- obsolete for combat but still capable of surveying and scouting so there was no need to wait until we designed and built some specialized exploration ships. We could send out the ships that shouldn’t be in combat anyway, and try to get an idea of how big the Sa’arm volume of control was. If we got useful results, well and good. If we didn’t get useful results, we could think it over and send out some ships that had been designed to deal with whatever the issue had been.

If the Council’s numbers were right, we still had well over a thousand Castle variants and almost a hundred Patricians, along with quite a few experimental designs like our own Folk Heros that weren’t good enough to make it to the production lines. Some, like our own Big Dick, had been mothballed but most of them were in reduced readiness as reserve or backup ships. Unfortunately, a lot were still in use to patrol our systems.

The ones that were mothballed or in reserve were immediately available. Those few that were still in use as front-line warships merely pointed out those colonies and stations that needed better defenses. The Council used WG2 to justify asking the responsible District or the nearest colony to beef up the needy installation’s defenses until they no longer needed the older ships. We had several colonies, usually at least one in each District, that were supposed to be shipbuilding centers and they could allocate some of their output to ensuring that their neighbors were able to defend themselves.

Jack and I kindly volunteered Beerat to do the same, as long as someone else provided the crews. We were doing it for Jutland, and we could do it for anyone else who asked. We’d build it as long as someone else manned it.