Chapter 4: Year 11: Walking the Neighborhood Beat

Okay, Jimmy, you’re going to have to help your brother some. We’re supposed to be melting the marshmallows, not burning them. I know it’s not as much fun, but they taste a lot better before you burn them.

When Kevin came back to Beerat space from Alpha, we basically shut down everything not associated with life support and threw a system-wide party. Take THAT, universe! He took the entire expeditionary force to Ale and shut the ships down for one of our 10-day weeks on Hotel. Hotel wasn’t big enough yet to properly support everyone, but they made do. That alcohol replicator got a workout that week, and the shipboard med-tubes got a workout for the week after that.

Actually, the med-tubes got a lot of work for quite some time after that. If we humans really had any sense at all we would stop using alcohol. There are times when I have to agree with the AIs, we are all a bunch of unreliable monkeys. We just don’t know when to quit. And they better be glad they found us, because we maybe won’t quit, but they have a chance of getting us to behave. They don’t have that chance, with the Sa’arm.

We ended up finding an ex-alcoholic (I know, he says he is ‘still recovering’, they all say that) in one of our recent shipments of volunteers and had him start an office to track alcohol abuse. And other drugs, too, if that ever came up. We could have told the AIs to monitor that for us, but the good Lord knows that there have been times I went off the deep end with alcohol and I didn’t want anyone labeled as a failure just because he, she, or it drank too much. Our council agreed with me that the AIs could collect data but we wanted a human in the loop giving orders and making decisions, just the same as a weapon system.

Fred Dalton’s real job was “Substance Abuse Tracking” but we couldn’t call it that; everyone who had two drinks would freak out about Big Brother. Yes, Fred tracked everyone’s drinking, he could tell you how many highballs you had last night before passing out, but his mandate was abuse. He had instructions to not say or do anything unless your performance, either at work or at home, appeared to be suffering. We put his office on Hotel and called it “Medical Performance Monitoring” and, since it was a Civil Service affair, we could temporarily assign anyone to him if appropriate. He doubled as the CS rep for Hotel, of course.

As long as you maintained your normal high work standards and didn’t abuse your family -both of which the AIs were already tracking- Fred couldn’t say anything to anyone. Even better, we had the AIs seal all of these records, or at least the abuse collation part, from everyone below command level. If you have a drinking problem only you and your ship’s CO and XO will be told. Fred had the authority to order anyone to come in for counseling, leaving the CO the authority to delay that until convenient for the ship.

We gave Lt Dalton a promotion to sweeten the deal of being transferred from the fleet to the Civil Service, and with him being a Decurion we had to promote Tina, too, to stay ahead of him. Or at least even, with one day of seniority.

Our third expedition was more of the same. We had come up with a system or methodology that worked, and we needed to use it as many times as we could as fast as we could before one of the Sa’arm planets came up with a counter. We needed to lather, rinse, and repeat in every dickhead system we could get to.

What we had clearly worked as far as the outer system and the orbitals were concerned, and that was our minimum bottom line. However, what we had wasn’t good enough to hang around the planet after we had cleaned the orbitals out. We sent the design guys back to their offices to build something even bigger than the Snakes, something with enough armor to ignore the dickheads’ ground-based lasers.

While they were at it, we asked them for a way to recover damaged ships. Each expedition should have at least one tug that could have pulled Cottonmouth out of trouble, and while we didn’t know if it was possible, I wanted some way to get a broken ship into hyperspace if it couldn’t do that on its own. If that wasn’t possible, then the tug had to be powerful enough to get large ships out of the battle zone.

Meanwhile, though, we went through another building cycle and sent Second Fleet out to System Beta after another group of Snakes and Kents had joined the force. I sent a troublemaker out with Kevin as part of his staff just to get him out of my hair. Jack Maroni was a senior captain, uh, Colonel, sorry, a Commodore in all but name, that Brak sent out to see how we did things, poking his nose everywhere and generally stirring up aggravation. Fine, we aren’t really doing anything here unless we get another visit, why don’t you go with our Second Fleet and observe them first-hand?

Our third expedition was huge, more than a hundred ships. This time we got complete strategic surprise, just like our first visit to System Alpha. The dickheads in this second system had a little more in the way of outer-system industry, but nothing exotic. And, after a year of monitoring, we knew where all of it was.

Kevin sent a mixed division of I-Shiros (a pair of the older ones with the baby-hero gun and a pair of the newer ones with the twin Particle Disruptor turrets) and a pair of PBYs to each location with instructions to destroy every ship, destroy every installation, and make sure there was nothing left to build a ship out of. We already knew that the dickheads needed to breathe, so just letting all the air out of any habitat would take care of them eventually. They could hold their breath a lot longer than we could; their structure and skin were even strong enough to survive being in space for a few minutes and their respiratory systems had sphincters just like our anuses and bladders did, but they had to breathe eventually.

That was another one of the things that made us wonder if they might be designed lifeforms, not natural. Their skins were tough enough to allow them to retain their shape in vacuum and thus to move and survive in space. Under what circumstances would that sort of ability evolve naturally? Still, those sphincters only allowed them to hold their breath. It didn’t stop their need for air, so any habitat could be cleared just by letting all the air out, if we had the time to wait for them to all die. If we were in a hurry, then we had to clear it the hard way with Marines.

Someday someone would get around to running tests on live dickheads to see exactly how long they could survive in vacuum. We knew it was less than a few hours, since that’s how long it took to find the ones that Majorca had blown out the day she disappeared and they were all dead when we got there.

That became a standard small hunter-killer task group for 2nd Fleet. Four I-Shiros, two with the nose gun and two with the twin PD turrets, plus a pair of PBYs could find anything, run anything down, and kill anything short of one of the Sa’arm capital ships. And they could keep one of those busy while they screamed for help.

The main force went to the inhabited planet and did the same thing they had done twice before. Stomp on the ships, fry all the small craft, vaporize all the leftovers and debris, then shoot up the planet until our ships have all taken enough damage to need repairs. This time, we had enough ships that they could all take turns in the fire and go over the whole planet shooting up everything that looked industrial.

This time they stayed at the planet for more than ten days. There were still a lot of dickheads running around when they left, but there wasn’t any surface or orbital industry left. It should be a long time before these guys built any more ships.

We hadn’t lost a single ship this time. Most of them were chewed up some around the edges, but none of them were complete losses. We had a lot of personnel losses since they had stayed as long as they could fighting it out with the Sa’arm ground-based defenses. Almost all of the bigger ships needed some yard time. Again Kevin left a minimal mining group to set up some infrastructure for us, with an Atlanta, a freighter, and two I-Shiros to back up the two PBY squadrons that were staying.

Kevin also authorized the broom again for all ships on the expedition. About half of them already had one; they got to paint a second one. And we started to get complaints from the crews of all the ships that were staying safe in Beerat as part of our “First Fleet”. WTF? Had they already forgotten Taffy 1? How about Expedition Alpha? Are you fucking nuts?

Yes, actually. Woomie, we are the Humans, and we are fucking nuts. Who’s next?

The last two nearby systems weren’t anywhere near as developed as the first two, so we took a breather while we repaired everybody. We had two new ship types to integrate into our operations. As soon as the last cycle of Snakes and Kents were done for our third expedition, we stopped building them and started working on other things. We were getting manpower from Earth, but never enough. There were too many things that took bodies.

We upgraded the older Snakes to add the missile launchers that the newer ones had, and started swapping ships between “First for Home” Fleet and “Second only in Name” Fleet so that all the idiots who had never been shot at could have their day of terror. We moved more ships from 2nd to 1st than we did from 1st to 2nd, since we seemed to have more than we needed. We added two more Snakes and two more Kents to all four 1st Fleet task forces, beefing them up a bit more.

One simple improvement was a better supply ship. We needed to be able to resupply our warships on the move, the way that NATO had been doing with floating warships since World War 2. We used the Kent frames to build six “AFS” combat unrep (for “UNderway REPlenishment”) ships. They, like the Snakes, Atlantas, and our first set of freighters, were based on the Raptor hull and plant, and had huge holds and the same rapid refueling systems that the YOs had. They could go anywhere we wanted to send them, they could survive damage, and they could even defend themselves.

Missile transfer was still awkward, though, since we refused to put huge openings in our warship hulls and missiles had to be loaded one at a time through the launch tubes. We still hadn’t come up with a good answer to that problem. Every faster solution started with “First, cut a huge hole in the side of the warship and install a huge hatch with a completely defenseless corridor that leads to the magazine so that we can load a compete storage rack of 48 missiles at a time.” That just wasn’t going to happen. Any ship with such a weak point in its armor would be toast the first time it got hit by a Sa’arm plasma torpedo, no matter how large the ship was.

We knew there was a transporter-based solution, but it wasn’t available to us yet. The Aurora-class pod transports that we had started this war with all had a large transporter system built into the central hull. It had two pads, placed on the main deck on either side of the control ball, and was just about idiot-proof.

If it was turned on, when you walked down the main deck towards the central control ball, you found yourself on the other side walking down the main deck away from the ball. It was used for large cargo that the crew didn’t want passing through the ball. The crew could open the hatches and let people and cargo pass through the ball, or they could close the hatches to secure the ball, and turn on the transporter to let cargo go around. From the point of view of a freighter crew that was often afraid of its cargo, it was a great idea.

That transporter system was easily large enough to move our missiles from freighter cargo bay to warship magazine. I know it, you know it, the AIs all know it. However, the AIs would not give us the design information we needed to build more of them for our warships. They would run the bots that put it together for the Aurora-class freighters we built, but they wouldn’t do it on our warships.

There was a lot of speculation on exactly what this meant. My money was on the system being easily modified to be some super-weapon that the AIs didn’t want us to have. If that turned out to be the case, when we got it figured out on our own, well, we were going to have a super-weapon that the AIs didn’t like. Tough. “Management by prevention” fails when the prevention fails.

Years later, someone figured out the obvious solution. I’ve heard that the idea came from Russians cutting down trees and transporting them up to the Moon. The moonbases needed a huge amount of buffer material for their life-support systems, and they were also supplying it to all the transport ships that came to Earth for another load of colonists. The trees were organic, they were free aside from the labor, and anything that they took wasn’t available to the dickheads which were also harvesting trees. All the Russians had to do was cut the trees down, trim all the branches off, cut the trunks into 3 or 4 pieces, and shove them onto the pad.

Duh. We redesigned our missiles to break apart into 2 or 3 sections, and suddenly we could transport missiles making resupply after -or even during- a battle much safer and easier. The magazines had to be modified to re-assemble them, but that was easy enough. Ships that were designed after that even left the missiles in pieces for storage, as they were easier to move around. They only got assembled when at the launcher.

We named all the AFS’s for planets in Sol System, from Mars to Pluto plus Venus. Since they were going into ‘hot’ areas, the six AFS’s were not crewed by FA or conks like the Beerat local-space yard boys were. They got normal CN fleet crews. For their shakedown cruises, we sent each one out to a list of our picketed systems to resupply the patrols. I don’t remember any problems. Oh, I’m sure there were some, but I guess none of them were serious enough to get our attention.

The other new type was the kind of ship to give a Klingon a woodie. What the designers had come up with was only a little longer than a Snake, but absurdly more massive. It still only had four “Junior Hero” turrets arranged like the Snakes, though. The big thing was that it was massive enough, the designers thought, that the middle two turrets could be replaced with “Real Hero” turrets, when we had them figured out.

We had been looking at that ever since we got here to Beerat, but now that it was actually possible it didn’t seem very important. We already had weapons that could kill anything the Sa’arm had from outside of their detection range of us, and it didn’t look like the Sa’arm would ever be able to get over that hump.

See, in order to use better sensors the Sa’arm would have to learn how to work with AIs or at least computers, and that didn’t seem possible. They seemed to understand analog electronics and could both build and use radar systems for detection and fire control. Maybe they got them from some planet they assimilated, but they had them and they could use them. Anything that required computer control or analysis, though, appeared beyond their ability to understand.

Anyway, we kept that in the backs of our minds and built a pair of these things with four “Junior Hero” turrets each. The reason that we only built two was that we had seen how much faster it went when we did subassemblies, and we used four different frames to build the different sections for each one. Once the first two were done we’d try them out as we were building the second pair, and if they worked out we’d keep building them instead of Snakes until we came up with something better.

In keeping with our naval history theme, we designated them as Battlecruisers and named them Kongo and Guam. They had the same propulsion plant as the Snakes did, but they had plenty of room so we gave them six different power rooms: two for the ship itself and one for each turret. Even better, each turret could feed from either the plant forward or aft of it, so no matter what the rest of the ship did each turret should be able to keep firing as long as it existed.

And they had enough of our honeycomb armor to sit over a Sa’arm planet and swap slugs and lasers as long as the Sa’arm wanted to. Each strike on the armor from their ground-based laser batteries would vaporize a hole a few inches across and maybe a few meters deep. Each laser battery would get one or two shots before being located and then immolated by a 100-kilo slug. Even a near miss would do for it, what with the molten rock splashing for 2 or 3 hundred meters. Each ship could do that to four different targets at a time, with reload times in the seconds at most. The guns were ALWAYS ready to shoot before fire control had found them a new target. How many laser batteries could a Sa’arm planet have?

The first pair of BCs taught us enough about things that we had done wrong that we could correct the second pair while they were building. Once we had four of them, we sent Kevin off to System Gamma, the third Sa’arm system on our list. We figured that we would learn about some more design mistakes in use, and send the first pair back in the frames for updates once we had six or eight.

Our fourth expedition -the one to Sa’arm System Gamma- wasn’t really any bigger than our third one, in terms of numbers. In fact, since we had started pulling Snakes and Kents from 2nd Fleet to reinforce 1st Fleet, it really had less firepower than the previous expedition. Other than the four new battlecruisers, we had fewer large armored ships but more small scout and supply ships.

However, we were pretty sure that the Kongos would let us stay and form a close blockade around the dickhead planet if they had some support so we decided that it was time to try to stay in Gamma permanently, like we had at Tulakat.

Somewhere around here was when we reorganized and pulled all the supply and engineering assets out of Second Fleet, putting them in their own organization that was charged with supporting the warships. I don’t think we were calling them “Third Fleet” yet, though. That didn’t happen until we set up Fourth Fleet. For now we were just calling them the Fleet Train. These guys were supposed to support Kevin, but they weren’t actually under his command except in the SOPA “Senior Officer Present Afloat” sense.