Chapter 7: Month 82 - Rebuilding after the Storm

"We don't need another hero" - Tina Turner

While Abbot was checking out what Majorca had flushed, Taffy-1 arrived on the scene in the inner system and merged with Taffy-2, Commodore Ramsey in command from Harpy. However, once we were as sure as we could get that there were no more dickheads in the system, I ordered Taffy-1 to remain near Beer and I took a shuttle to Lesotho to ride back to Barton Yard with Taffy-2. Montserrat joined us soon after, having demonstrated that our Webb's World L2 missile depot worked fine. It hadn't helped us at all during the battle, but it would help us a lot if we got jumped on our way back. With Nice out of it, she was the only ship -Two had with missiles.

Paul Bunyan got a very public and official atta-boy from me for doing exactly what she was built for even if we had completely forgotten about her. She also got another very public and entertaining dressing-down about learning how to share from one of the task force captains, for spoiling what was "promising to be lovely good fight". Through the years, the second speech ended up with a much higher replay rate on the Womb's entertainment system than mine. She also got told to go back to hiding at L2 until we needed her again.

The ugliest part of being a commander is taking responsibility for your losses. As both Beerat System Commander and the Admiral in Command of the Beerat Defense Force (not quite the same titles, as the System Commander would also be in charge of offensive forces, when we had some) I could take all the credit for our latest victory. But, if I did that, I also had to take personal blame for the deaths of roughly 500 men and women who had gone into battle trusting me to make the right decisions and do everything I could to bring them out again.

Since we had expanded crews on most of our ships for training our new people, the AIs could tell me we lost 378 people on Kestrel alone, and another 127 on Nice. For those 505 men and women, I had failed in my duty. Two hundred and eighty-seven volunteers. Two hundred and eighteen concubines. Ninety-three of whom were pregnant. I really, really didn't need to hear that last.

The only thing I could do for them was to establish policy about the families they had left behind. I sent a message to all of the various senior officers asking them to think about our next step. We would get together and make sure they were taken care of. Harpy immediately asked for my authorization for an order that Tina had already given on this subject, that the AIs were holding up as beyond her authority. I got her on conference.

We had talked several times about her job and the lack of training the Civil Service provided. It was getting better, but the CS was still in its experimental, maybe developmental, phase. Back in Sol system she had gotten some sleep-training that the system CS coordinator had developed, but mostly her institutional knowledge was in a pair of document sets that the CS called "what worked" and "what didn't work".

In theory, this was really no different than any other field of knowledge. It just wasn't organized any better than that yet. Older fields had textbooks, classes, entire colleges that taught their students all about architecture, infantry tactics, or painting. The CS didn't have any of that yet. Someday the CS would have classes and textbooks and college degrees on colony management, but right now all Tina had was reports on what different CS reps had tried, what worked, and what didn't.

She had come to me several times for advice, orders, and clearance for orders she had given that surpassed her authority, and I had tried to be helpful. My priorities were to safeguard our people, safeguard our bases, protect the Beer, and give our people the best life we could after those other priorities were met. I dealt with the ships and the people on them, I had Bill to handle the fixed assets, and I had Tina to handle the non-military people. Sometimes her reports gave us ideas to try, and other times they convinced us to not try something we had already started doing.

One of her reports was from Thule, an appropriately-named planet that sounded horrible if you weren't an Eskimo or Lapp. Their CS rep had even less training than Tina, and she had gotten a whole Marine transport's worth of concubines and children dumped on her when said transport got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and was lost with all hands, including the regiment or whatever it was carrying. The AIs at Thule had basically tried to recycle the whole lot of their concubines since they no longer had sponsors.

Tina wanted to ensure that this did not happen here, and had ordered Woomie to transfer, for administrative purposes, all widowed concubines and their children to her as their sponsor, and to allow them to continue to use their current housing until further notice with no reduction in services. They were not losers who had been rejected by their sponsors; their sponsors had died in Confederacy service and their dependents would be taken care of.

"Okay, what part of this exceeds her authority as the Beerat System CS Coordinator?"

<The first part. Her CAP is 6.8; she is only authorized two concubines and she already has two.>

Things like this make you look for a concrete wall to beat your head against. "Is there a numerical limit to how many concubines the Civil Service is allowed to house as a temporary measure during an emergency?"

<No, there is no limit to how many concubines the Civil Service can house.>

"Okay, can the CIVIL SERVICE take these widows and orphans in?"

<Yes.>

"Great. Now, who is the ONLY CIVIL SERVICE REP in this system?"

<Sub-Decurion Hernandez. We believe we understand what you are trying to say. Sub-Decurion Hernandez is not claiming the widows as personal concubines and the orphans as her own children. She is acting in her capacity as the ranking Civil Service representative and assigning the widows and orphans to the Civil Service.>

"Very good. That's probably why, in her instruction to you, she used the phrase "for administrative purposes". She meant that she was claiming them for the Civil Service so that, for your needs, each of them would continue to be listed as having a sponsor. Now, if this ever comes up again, is there a better way for her to word this instruction, that would have avoided this?"

<A more clear way to word this instruction, if we understand Sub-Decurion Hernandez' intent, would be "On my authority, transfer these concubines and dependents to the Civil Service." If she gives that order, we will verify her authority to give that order, and the order will be obeyed.>

"Tina, you got that? You can't have them all yourself, but you can authorize their transfer to the Civil Service. That is their sponsor right now, 'the Civil Service'. If any of them ask who their patron is, you say 'the Civil Service is, and we'll get you a better one as quick as we can'."

"Yes, yanqui. Thank you. I understand what you are saying. It was not my intent to personally take in 442 concubines, most of whom are female."

"Right. Please remember that the AIs are intelligent, but they are not human. They do not have our values. They are much better than us at analysis, but not so good at judgement or common sense, or decision-making that depends upon judgement or common sense. Also, English is too vague for reliable communication with a computer. If you are having trouble, you can use Spanish. The AIs will still understand you, and you may get better results. Now, anything else before I go get a first-hand look at Nice?"

"No. Thank you, Tom. Many people wouldn't care as much as you do. I was very lucky to get you."

"Go. Show those people how lucky they are to have you."

Nice was a wreck. Pretty much everything forward of the third pair of MPB turrets was gone, or if not completely gone then mangled to the point of being nothing but wreckage to be cleared away. Not as bad as Avery had been, but all this was done by one plasma torpedo. That shouldn't have caused this much damage. Either the dickheads had better PTs than we did, or there was something wrong with the ship's construction. Add that to the next message torpedo to Brak.

The shipyard was going to have to expand again. We needed to speed this up. Not only did we need more ships of all sizes, we needed to be able to repair damage and work on upgrades without interfering with new construction. Thankfully, if you had the infrastructure (all the construction equipment the Explorers had spent several months in Sol System building before we left), this was as simple as telling Barton "Build some more construction frames over there" while waving vaguely in the direction you wanted them. After a week or so of assembling parts and equipment -much of which the frame itself put together- you could tell it to start building something. All we had to do was make sure it had whatever raw materials it wanted, and that meant that our original small frames, and the ones at the Womb, built more automated miners and tugs than anything else.

We had put in some small-craft construction frames near the Womb -saying 'in orbit around' wasn't quite right- when we first got there and realized that we needed more small craft, and they had been building shuttles, tugs, tankers, miners, etc for months now. In fact, now that I remember that's actually where "I Have a Big Dick" came from, not from Barton Yard. When the Womb's frames were up and working we had started shifting Barton completely to warship construction. Well, a couple of the small frames stayed with their original run of sensor platforms and miners, but otherwise it was all warships and parts for warships.

Let's see. We had six medium frames, the ones that had built the Folk-Heros, finishing up the Asian-class conversions to the Baby-Hero front end. The instant we could pull those ships out we were going to have each one start building an improved corvette. We had planned on just making a slightly-larger Shiro with a Baby-Hero gun as main armament, but what just happened may have changed that.

While we were working on what our improved scout would look like, we had Barton start putting together another ten frames so that we could build them, whatever they were going to be, in groups of 16. If nothing else, they could start building the engineering department in the back until we knew what we wanted.

All of our ships needed self-guided missiles that could swat incoming small craft. They didn't need the 55 cm shipkillers that the Patricians had, because those were far larger than needed to kill small craft. They weren't big enough to kill larger ships, unless you could get several hits at long range after full acceleration, and that appeared to be a losing game. If they hit they did a lot of damage, but they could be seen coming, they could be intercepted, and after burnout they could be dodged. And, the smaller ships could only carry a few of these larger missiles.

So, since we had demonstrated that we had a shipkilling weapon that had longer effective reach than the Sa'arm beam weapons, we were thinking that, instead of putting 55 cm launchers on these new ships, we needed something smaller, like an air-to-air missile. Maybe less damage, maybe less range, but definitely self-guided, easier to launch, and smaller so that we could carry a lot. Add 'request info on smaller missiles' to our next report to Brak.

Over there, we had three medium-sized frames building the Asian-sized hulls for our experimental "Monitors". That was going to be awhile. Right next to them, we had three smaller frames each building a "Junior Hero" railgun for the monitors. Once they were done they would each build another one so that, by the time the monitors were ready, they would each have two turrets ready to be mounted on them. If everything worked right, those things would be a major addition to our fleet. However, we had to consider them experimental and accept that we may be disappointed.

Next to the monitors we had two new frames going up. The first things they were each going to do was build four of our standard 'medium beam' turrets, just like the ones on most of our ships. That would give us 20 spare turrets. Then, as soon as we had our Asians back, they were each going to take in one of our Africas and swap out four of their eight remaining disruptor turrets with beam turrets. That was going to be a bit ugly; the turrets would have to be pushed out some on sponsons to make space for the beam generators underneath, but actually that was a good thing tactically because it gave them a better view of the surrounding space.

Any extra beam turrets would be kept as fixed defenses around the shipyard itself. They would belong to Bill's Marines. That, at least temporarily, was going to have to be our answer to the Sa'arm bombers. If they came at us in larger quantities, we wouldn't be able to get them all with missiles. We needed quick-aiming, quick-firing weapons that didn't run out of things to throw.

No one had come up with a good use for the disruptor turrets. They were devastating, but only if they got in close. And, they were slow to recharge and be ready for a second shot. Our analysis of the recent battle made it clear that the Sa'arm knew about our Africas, considered them harmless from long range, and thus didn't get close to our ships.

We were also going to start on our next group of ships, a four-turret version of our Raptors. That was kind of a gamble, because we still had no proof that we could make a turret work, but the ships would take so long to build that we needed to start as soon as we could. I authorized, and Deepak directed, the construction of eight large frames to build eight Raptors in. By the time actual construction started we would have a better idea of what we were doing. We hoped.

When the first turrets for our monitors were ready, we would be able to do some testing and figure out if they worked, if they needed some changes, or if we were just wasting our time on the whole idea. If it turned out to be the latter, we would just complete our eight new Raptors to the more conventional design, hopefully with some guided-missile launchers. In the same way, when the monitors themselves were completed in about a month and a half, we could do enough testing to tell us which way to finish the Raptors.

We have no place free to repair Nice, and nothing that will be free soon. Not that is large enough, at least. And, we're not going to stop one of our construction projects, tow the hulk out of the way, put Nice in there, make her all pretty again, and tow the hulk back into the frame to continue work. Fine, put another medium-sized frame next to the two frames building beam turrets for the Africas. Put Nice there and start ripping the damaged parts out.

Make sure that the automated machinery understands that any organics found do NOT get recycled; they get gathered together. Call it a religious requirement. Any organics found will get recycled by God, in His time. We will launch them into Beerat and when God gets around to it they will go into the next generation of planets and stars.

For that matter, Nice will be needing some of those new turrets herself. That was convenient. Good call, Deepak! Beyond that, though, it was a pretty easy decision to go ahead and add a Junior-Hero mount to Nice while we were rebuilding her. To start with, it would be a fixed spinal mount like a Hero had, but once we had turrets under control we could look at refitting her with one. Either way, having one fixed gun was better than not having any at all.

As soon as Nice was safely in the construction frame we decommissioned her and dismissed her entire surviving crew to Hotel with orders to not surface for ten days. When that was up, we put them back to work putting their ship back together, and started cycling everyone else from Taffy-2 through the resort. If they wanted to help improve it, that's good, but just lounging around for their time off was fine, too.

We had a small housekeeping staff there at all times, and as long as we had "working people" there we transferred as many of our rejected princess concubines there as they could house, to let them work on their social skills. To make sure they had a good example to work from, we sent all the vacationing crew's families there, too, to enjoy their vacations with them, and quietly passed the word that there wasn't much we could do to reward people but there were a few things.

Anyone who was willing to take on one of these wayward girls (or one of Tina's hundred dicks, in some cases) would be authorized one additional concubine, as long as the sponsor's other concubines passed on it, too. We were trying to build families, not destroy them. Their records would show the reason as "Served in Taffy-2 during first naval battle of Beer". Because we figured that there would probably be more.

While I was at it, I ordered a complete round of CAP tests on all crew-concubines in Taffy-2. Standing their ground next to their sponsors and winning what was, for us, a major battle while the ships beside them got vaporized counted as a "life-changing event" as far as I was concerned.

I couldn't make any of them sponsors, but if they had it in themselves, that should bring it out. Keeping in mind that if it had been Taffy-1 Hannah and I would have been among the dead in Harpy, I couldn't get out of my mind that, if we had survived, this would have justified making her take the test.

A lot of those girls got to change their coveralls for uniforms after those tests, so apparently the AIs thought we were doing something right. Personally, I think that that decree and its results made a bigger difference in concubine and dependent morale than the add-on decree did for sponsor morale.

When the smoke had all cleared, our people were remembering the good results of that fight more than the bad results. Not that we forgot our lost, but they weren't weighing on our minds as much. We got a lot of good out of their sacrifice. The big one, from my point of view, was that for the first time I could really trust those ships to work together no matter what happened.

Our crews KNEW we could win, and they KNEW that their brothers and sisters would stand beside them through everything until it was over. I included Taffy One in this, since they all knew that they could do anything that -Two had done, if it happened to be their turn next. That took a major load off my mind. They had become a fleet, a force that I could trust as much as I had trusted those crazies back at Tulakat's OPF.

We were talking about this in one of our staff meetings, when some half-wit pointed out that I had become like Caesar, and could say to one man "Come" and he would come and to another man "Go" and he would go. Those meetings were supposed to be safe, secure, and somewhat private, but no that just had to become public fodder. At least the idiocy didn't come out of my mouth this time.

On the other hand, Larry's actions in command of Taffy-2 made it clear that we'd missed something in our commanding officer training program. We could have made a hard split between scouts and fighters, but that would lead to even bigger headaches when someone had to do something they weren't trained for. Better to admit the mistake and fix it.

As quickly as possible, we started rotating our scout COs into command of our warships, and while we were at it we made "Department Head or XO of a scout" one of the tickets that had to be punched for the warship officers before they were eligible for command. This kind of thing used to take offices full of secretaries and clerks to keep straight; with the AIs it was easy. All we had to do was make the tentative decision about what we wanted to do, ask them how the manning looked, and if it worked tell them "do it". If it didn't work, figure out why and fix it.

I promoted Larry to Colonel and gave him command of one of the destroyers as soon as we promoted her old CO to command of one of our larger ships.

Yes, we included Paul Bunyan's crew in those deals. Not at first, we had already forgotten about them again, but when they found out about Taffy-2's good deal they made a stink about who deserved what and got told that for the purposes of those two decrees, yeah, they were considered part of Taffy-2.

A lot of our families were becoming somewhat complex, as many of the ex-concubines stayed with their previous sponsors to form combined households. It also became clear that, with the ex-sponsors entitled to a replacement and an add-on, and the ex-concubines entitled to at least three of their own, our glut of extra concubines wasn't going to last long at all.

All of this added to Tina's workload, but as this was her job, I refused to be sympathetic. I did authorize her some assistants, though. After conferring with the AIs, the ex-sponsors and Commanding Officers in two cases and the parents in the third, I blessed two of our new sponsors as Signifers in the Civil Service, and the youngster who had just turned 14 as an Optio.

I sat in on their commissioning ceremony, then a short conference where they decided how they would divide their efforts. To start with, Tina was going to stay at the Womb with the Optio as an assistant, while one ex-conk would go to Hotel and deal with all the issues there as well as at Barton Yard, and the other would go to Harpy and deal with the active fleet's issues.

My only input was to point out that we now had four Civil Service officers, and that was more than probably any other system aside from Sol itself. This was not going to be a secret, either. I did not think it reasonable that systems with none would accept this without argument. While I would fight extradition as long as I could, there were people who could order some of them transferred so they needed to keep that in the backs of their minds.

And, I kept in the back of my mind that any system that wanted a CS officer could get as many as they wanted the same way we had: let a marginal sponsor volunteer for the CS instead of making them enter one of the combat forces. Face it, not everyone is cut out to be shot at with a smile.

The reason that Signifer Janice Mattlan was going to Harpy was that I was pulling her from Taffy-1 to serve as the fleet's flagship until we had something better. She was bigger and tougher than any other ship we had, but the Dickheads had demonstrated that the difference wasn't significant in an actual fight, and she just didn't have the offensive tools to contribute to a long-range running battle. She was, just like the Africas we had started with, nothing more than a Marine-style bullet-sponge, kept around to absorb bullets before they hurt anyone else.

On the other hand, she was the largest ship we had, with more armor than anything else we had, and she did have a good amount of space, so she was the logical choice for a floating headquarters ship with an Admiral's staff. I was finally going to get to ride around with some armor around my ass. And, pulling her kept the two Taffies effectively the same. Or, it would as soon as -Two got Nice back.

We could also use her as a test-bed, a ship that we could mess with without constantly changing the two task forces. And, we would start with more armor: the material being excavated to dig the Womb was mostly metal, and we had far more iron, nickel, and various other metals laying around than we needed for our shipbuilding projects. One prime use was improved armor, and we could use Harpy to see how the added mass affected our shiphandling.

The basic material used was a kind of honeycomb, made out of the toughest alloy we could mix with the materials at hand. Not the hardest, as that comes with brittleness when it fails. The toughest, meaning the most energy absorption before failure, and bending rather than shattering when it does fail. The engineers talked about modulus of elasticity and deformation but I preferred to keep it to English where I could understand them.

The bottom line was that the walls of the honeycomb absorbed a lot of energy before failing, and the spaces between the walls forced any excess to dissipate some before reaching the next wall. Apparently a meter of this stuff massed roughly one quarter of what a solid meter of the same material would mass, but reduced the kinetic energy of an incoming projectile roughly as well as half a meter of solid material would. It was even more effective on directed energy weapons, as most of the energy got absorbed by the first layer it reached. The only thing to reach the second layer would be the secondary projectiles, the vaporized outer layer. With 20 or so layers per meter and several meters of armor, any hull protected by this would be impervious to energy weapons.

It was the sort of thing that could only be made by a 3D printer or replicator, or a construction AI directing googols of nanites. Building it by Earth's traditional methods would give us a bunch of welded joints that were far more brittle and weak than we wanted.

Any honeycombed armor that we added would occupy four times the space that the solid armor would, and provide twice the protection. And, we were floating in space. There wasn't much to stop us from adding as much armor to the outside of our ships as we wanted, volume-wise. The only limits would be the added strain on our engines moving the added mass around, and the need to not block weapons, sensors, hatches, or engines.

I left the engineers playing with their virtual sliderules and calculators, first figuring out how much mass they could add to Harpy before it showed too much at the helm, and then where-all that mass should be placed for best effect. They were giving me a headache.

We had Athens send one of our Castles out to see if they could find Brownson and Cowell. That got confusing, because both sentries were both on station and knew nothing. Their AIs backed them up, the Dickheads were still building ships but they hadn't sent anybody our way that they had noticed. Well, they came from somewhere, dammit! Maybe another system.

For a long-term answer to the bombers, we were going to ask for help again. Going back to the WW2 Pacific campaign that we seemed destined to re-fight here, the answer to bombers carrying weapons that could sink ships had two parts.

First, tactically, the defender sent out fighters to shoot down (or at least damage) as many bombers as possible. None of us knew anything about Naval Aviation beyond knowing that the planes were cheap compared to ships but expensive if looked at as expendable munitions, and the pilots were even more expensive than the planes were, and they were also expendable munitions. Add that to the next report, too: 'Can we have a couple carriers with fighter wings and spare pilots?' We can build replacement fighters. Build replacement pilots? Not so much.

Second, the other thing that was done about bombers in WW2 was more strategic, to eliminate them at the source; sinking the carriers and destroying the airstrips they flew from, and eventually destroying the factories that built them, along with preventing the enemy from importing the raw materials they needed to rebuild the factories and build more bombers. In our case, eliminating the source was going to have to remain on our "to-do list" for the foreseeable future.

We spent a long time looking at the AAR from that fight. Some of the lessons were obvious, some not. Some were good, some not. There wasn't much we could add to the Confederacy's knowledge base about the Volumnas, beyond verifying that watching one blow up was almost as good as getting head.

We could update our data on the Vervactors, of course. Vector analysis told us a lot about mass, acceleration, and maneuverability. The official armament estimate still wasn't going to get much clearer than "a lot of beam weapons", but we had some details. We were pretty sure that we had been hit by beams from at least 30 different locations on Mincemeat-3.

Someone had asked if it could be 27 (3x3x3) but no, it was a hard minimum of 29 and probably more. There may have been more mounts that could not see us so they didn't fire. The AIs were trying to analyze their optical imagery. If they could positively identify one of their weapon mounts in the process of firing, they could apply pattern recognition and locate every one of those weapons on the hull.

It may have been a range thing, but we could report positively that our current shields would stop one hit from a Vervactor's beam weapons. We had to follow that datum up with the corollary that our current shields would probably not stop two at the same time, or within something like half a second. We had been lucky to not take any damage from them. Apparently they considered 500 kilometers their outside range, and due to the way the battle ended we did not know if they would do more damage if they got closer than 400 Km.

The bombers were going to be a problem. We could not find any evidence of a gross failure of Nice's armor, hull, and frame from poor design or construction. From Nice's damage, we estimated that their plasma torpedos did roughly ten times as much damage as ours did. That then begged the question of how they did that with small craft. We had to use a huge ship-powered containment field to generate our PTs. However, we weren't going to find out how they did it until we could examine one of their bombers. Which meant somehow stopping one without completely destroying it.