Chapter 3: System Alpha, Take Two

Lily, can you go find some more firewood? It should be dry enough. No, you can not get it from the replicator. This forest is old enough that we can use deadfalls. That’s branches that have died and fallen to the ground. Because we’re supposed to be camping, that’s why.

Okay. Our second trip to System Alpha -to finish the job we started- had to wait again while we built more ships. And crewed the ones we already had. We had another 16 Snakes building, but 8 of those had just been started. We had plenty of time to repair all of our damage and figure out how to add more point defense to every ship.

Yes, we could have built a hundred frames and a hundred ships. They are all just equipment and the AIs could expand their own abilities to run as much construction infrastructure as we wanted. The problem was crewing them. With Hillary and Beebe making runs to Earth with six ‘ferry’ pods each, we were getting five hundred or so Volunteers a month from Earth, but very few of them were ready for warship duties. Mindset, training, experience, upgrades and repairs, it often took months to turn a new sponsor -who was usually distracted by his family, since he wasn’t used to owning a pair of beautiful and compliant women- into a competent and reliable crewman.

So, as long as we had a crew shortage there wasn’t any point in building a lot of extra ships. And, since we were still working on design and the ships kept changing, we didn’t gain anything by building something that had to go right back into the frame for changes. Instead, we were building ships just about as fast as we could man them.

It wasn’t so bad when we were expanding, because we could promote every fifth experienced crewman from four ships and use them as the core crew for a new fifth ship. All five ships would have 20% newbies which was far too high for a close-range fight to the death the day they commissioned but workable if we gave them a week to settle in. This, however, was more like taking every other man from one ship so that we could crew a second one. Neither ship could be trusted to turn left when ordered, much less turn left and avoid ramming the next ship in formation.

Meanwhile, we dusted off some of the mothballed frames at the Womb and had them build some more of those escort cruisers, the ones we were calling Atlanta-class CLAAs. We gave them even more short-range weapons and told them to see if they could help protect their neighbors, too.

The frames we had building more Kents out at Barton Yard? We just made sure that the miners supplying them with materials didn’t have any trouble. We dusted off all of the small frames, too, and set them to building turrets for the Snakes and Kents.

We also set up four more new frames and started building more of our Improved Shiros but without the “Baby Hero” gun in the nose. That gun, as long as it is in a nose mount, just isn’t that helpful unless you like making suicide attacks. Instead, they had more PDRs and a pair of Particle Disruptor turrets in the front. Those weapons may be obsolete for ship-to-ship combat but they should do the cleanup task just fine.

Then, when we were done repairing everything that had gotten blown only partway to hell, we put our six Asians-Plus in those repair frames and reversed the upgrade we had done to the Africas the year before: We pulled half of their Particle Beam turrets and replaced them with Particle Disruptor turrets. We also bulked them up with some more armor, there was no shortage of that, and like everyone else we added a couple more PDLs and StarSparrow mounts.

I should point out that maneuvering mass had become a non-issue. Every ship -and all the small craft, too- needed mass for maneuvering jets, something to expel in one direction to get the ship to move in the opposite direction. This wasn’t main propulsion; just attitude jets and docking systems used when main propulsion systems would fry innocent bystanders. Yeah, that was also how we steered the ships in hyperspace, but the flow rate for that was so low as to not even be considered from a supply standpoint unless you were going out on a Star-Trek-style five year mission.

Helium was the best gas to use from a pure physics standpoint, if you could get it, but it wasn’t normally something easy to obtain in the quantities a ship needed. Hydrogen was available anywhere and gave a better specific impulse, but it came with enough handling problems that it was a clear second choice behind helium. Because of that, all of the Confederacy’s ships were set up to use either helium or hydrogen, and most could slowly refuel themselves if they wanted to send a tender or shuttle with a fuel processor to hang out on the edge of any handy gas giant.

Our two fuel stations were just bigger, constant-service versions of those emergency fuel processors, floating in Ale’s atmosphere and processing endless gigatons of soup to get the traces of helium. Yeah, a little deuterium for the reactors was nice to have but that was almost never going to be a problem. Getting the reaction mass helium was harder.

Once we had both stations up and running, though, someone pointed out that we could split out the scoops from the processing. We didn’t have to have the stations themselves down as close to the helium-rich layers as they could survive to maximize their production. All we really needed were a couple of autonomous probes that had continuous-flow transporter pads and enough brains and sensors to go find a layer rich in helium, while being tough enough to survive down there. The stations themselves could stay up higher in the atmosphere where they could deal with the reduced pressure and temperature, and process whatever the pads sent them.

When we got those autonomous probes online, the stations were not only a lot safer to be on, but suddenly about 5 or 6 times more productive. That, in turn, meant that maneuvering mass was no longer an operational concern. If the fleet was unusually active, we may need to refuel the ships every couple of weeks, but that was just a delivery problem. And we already had the tankers.

About the only time fuel could be an issue was outside the system, since our tankers were local-space only, what we used to call YOs or ‘yard oilers’ in the US Navy. If we were sending ships to other systems and expected them to stay there without doing their own refinery work, we also needed a way to get fuel to them. As a short-term answer we had several pods converted to fuel storage, and every one of our freighters carried at least one fuel-pod. For a more stable long-term solution, we modified one of the internal storage bays in each freighter to hold huge tanks of liquid helium. On the outside, the tanks looked like normal pods but they were just simple tanks with no AI, replicator, or fusion plant. All they had was structure, insulation, and cooling equipment.

That took care of everyone except the scout forces, the PBYs and the Castles and Patricians they were replacing, none of which had the room for extra equipment like refueling probes. Stuff like this was one of the reasons that we had to rotate the Castles and the PBY squadrons we had watching the dickheads. Until we had stealth tankers that could go visit them and not get caught, they had to come back home to refuel. Each barge carried enough mass to keep all the bombers flying for two weeks of continuous service, or a full month with half of them always out. We tried to get them relieved on station before they ran out.

Last, our bulk freighter frame had continued pumping freighters out, one at a time every few weeks, and we now had a half-dozen or so. We had the two that had returned from System Alpha load up with spare munitions, parts, and supplies like the first time, but the new freighters only carried one item: As many of those self-propelled missile launchers as we could cram into their holds.

We had decided to try the sun-wall approach, and thought we would need one for the orbital swarm of small craft, and then a second one for the cloud that had come from the planet itself. Two should be enough, right? We were bringing enough for five of those arrays, and the guys who stayed in Alpha to build them on-site said they had enough for three more.

This time, we had a little more high-end firepower simply due to the additional hulls, but we also had far more low-end firepower, too. We had twice as many of our biggest guns, the “Junior Hero” guns, but we probably had three times as many StarSparrow launchers and something like four times as many PDRs and PDLs.

Our plan this time was to go in just like last time and shoot up everything we could. This time, the station-looking structures that appeared to be nothing more than bomber roosts had first priority. We would like to start with a sun-wall attack, but the ships and other orbital structures were spread out all around the planet. The sun-wall would only work on a concentrated enemy. So, we would shoot up their ships and stations again like the first time, and when the bombers came out we would see what happened.

The sun-wall tactic turned out to be a lot simpler than we had originally envisioned. The biggest problem was that the effect worked on both sides of the plane. If we drew the cloud of small craft after us and fired the warheads when they were in the right position behind us, well, that would pretty much put us in the exact same position on the other side of the wall. We didn’t really want to get caught in the same blowtorch.

One of our engineers had heard that, back during the cold war, the nuclear weapons guys had come up with a way to reflect a lot of the initial radiation front. Not all of it, and the reflector itself got consumed in microseconds, but that was long enough to have a major effect on the radiation blast pattern. If you knew which direction the target would be (easy, ‘down’, for a missile), this made any size warhead that much more effective. And, of course, once we asked the AIs about it, they knew all about how to do that and better with better materials. It was just another one of those things that they knew how to do but weren’t capable of realizing it was a good idea until asked.

No, don’t ask me how it worked. I may be better educated than before I was picked up and faster and stronger and see better and all that, but I’m no smarter than I was before, and that stuff still makes my head hurt. I can tell you it involved force fields somewhere.

The bottom line was that, instead of the Soviet and NATO 80 or 90% reflection (giving us the remainder 10-20% leakage pattern on ‘our’ side), we got something like 97% reflection (3% leakage) from our warheads. Anyone on ‘our’ side of the wall would see a nuclear blast only 3% as large as it really was, and anyone on ‘their’ side would see a blast almost twice as powerful as a normal ‘round’ blast. That 3%, the AIs assured us, was survivable by any of our ships. If our ships had our new split shields online, we wouldn’t even take any damage.

So, we thought we had an answer to the Sa’arm’s latest naval weapon system.

We didn’t want to delay any more going back to System Alpha than we had to, since we knew they would also be preparing for us. It was important to land a killing blow on that system’s defenses as quickly as possible. None of us wanted the kind of meat-grinder campaign that we would get if we allowed them to rebuild.

One of the leadership and morale things we did was to make sure everyone understood that Kevin was in command of the expedition, and he had to be free to make decisions without us back at Beerat second-guessing him. It was no more than the CNO had done back in Sol system before we left there originally, ensuring that everyone understood that I was in command of the Beerat expedition.

As part of that I formally agreed that Kevin had been right in the way he had organized Expedition Alpha against my wishes; for his purposes it was better to send all his warships in as one massed attack force that had as much firepower as possible.

Here in Beerat we weren’t trying to attack a specific target in a known location. We were trying to defend multiple targets against attackers that would come at unknown times from unknown directions in unknown force. For that it was best to have several smaller forces that might accidentally happen to be in the right place, backed up by a powerful roadblock to stop the survivors. One mobile force would keep the attackers busy long enough for the rest of us to show up.