Chapter 8: Month 87 - The Stand

"I'm here to take a stand" - Bon Jovi

There was a Jim Stafford song popular when I grew up, about a pair of farmers who found some marijuana growing on their land. "All good things gotta come to an end, and it's the same with the wild-wood weed". The Sa'arm gave us almost half a year before they came back, but when they did they came loaded for bear.

We, on the other hand, thought we were ready for them. We had all breathed a collective sigh of relief when the first of our eight four-turret heavily-armored Raptor-based ships floated out of its construction frame, not quite finished but close enough to start its shake-down cruise while it finished itself. Her seven sisters all followed her within a few days.

Yes, they had quirks. They had issues. They had problems, in fact. We would live with them all, though, since the second they were clear, the frames had started working on eight more. The design team put some thought into all the problems, though. The second set shouldn't have those problems. They would have new ones of their own, of course.

The big problem, the one that mattered, was their main battery. Taken one at a time, we could fire any of the four "Junior Hero" guns at full power, any direction, all day long. We got that part right. Somewhere, though, we had screwed up the mounts -or maybe it was how long the hull was for its frames- and any time we fired A or C, the two "up" turrets, it screwed up the mounts for B and D, the two "down" turrets. Naturally, B and D returned the favor. Firing either of them took A and C off-line for about 20 minutes.

Practical effects? We couldn't fight on both sides at once. We could use A and C all day, or we could use B and D all day. Fine, we'll just try to keep all enemies who need to be shot up on one side. If both turrets on that side get disabled, they could roll the ship but it was going to be a long 20 minutes or so for the crew before they could fire the other two guns. Again, I didn't like it but we could live with it. If one of those ships got hurt so bad that they couldn't fire either gun on one side, it should be trying to run, not fight.

Also, they didn't have any large missiles. The structure and mass to support the four turrets and their recoil impulse cut into the usable interior volume a lot. We had intended to put a missile battery between "B" and "C" turrets, but there just wasn't enough volume to have the kind of large space we would need for the magazine.

Meanwhile, the power requirements for everything kept climbing, and we finally put another power room there where we could fill the rest of the volume with structure and armor. Even if everything else was dead, as long as that power room was up turrets "B" and "C" could still fight.

We had eight of these things. We put four of them in with Harpy to add to our battle-line and one went to each of the Taffies. I grabbed the eighth one for myself, as a system command post. I could ride around, I could hide behind armor, and I could shoot back. As the children pointed out, I also had enough room in my flag quarters to take them all with me, but no they need to attend school so they can be Sponsors when they grow up. I also grabbed two of our new Shiro-IIs as an escort.

Since they were effectively a new class, we named the first one "Rattlesnake" and the rest of them the "Snake" class. Rattlesnake, Copperhead, Adder, Asp, Coralsnake, Mamba, Cobra, Krait. I kept Krait as a flagship until I turned my command over to Kevin.

Manning these ships was getting harder. How we did the ones going to the Taffies was typical. We moved that Taffy's Europa's skipper over to the new Snake, and the Europa's XO moved up to Captain. We pulled the skipper off of one of the Taffy's Shiro-IIs to serve as the Snake's XO, and his XO moved up to command his ship as well.

We did the same thing throughout the Taffy, moving department heads from smaller ships to larger ones and department heads from larger ships to XO, and so on down the line, trying to not take too many people from each individual ship. We had posted all the promotions a month before it happened, then pulled the trigger a couple weeks early so that the people going to the Snakes could help ensure their replacements were up to speed before reporting to their PreCom unit.

That way, no older ship had to deal with too many green replacements, and the new Snake started with a core of people who didn't know the ship that well but already knew the Taffy and could make the ship fit into the task force without trouble.

It probably wasn't a week after we started calling the new class "Snakes" that the people down at L2 started calling their Monitors the "Turtle" class. Are y'all jealous much? Yes, they are slow and ponderous, but they aren't that bad. They can take any other ship we've ever heard of in a fair fight, what do you want? To be able to catch any other ship, of course. Sorry. That just ain't happening. You can catch any ship that comes to you, and that's all we need.

We also had six of our new cruisers, with another six on the way. They were only taking two or three months to build, the way we were farming different assemblies out to different constructors. I let Kevin name them, and he named them all after cruisers in the RN. I was okay with that, as long as one of them was named Belfast. HMS Belfast was another ship that should be remembered; she and Victory were to the RN what Enterprise and Constitution were to the USN. He was good with that, and they became the Kent class of heavy cruisers, with the Snakes we were building getting designated "assault" cruisers. The Snakes weren't as fast as the Kents, but they had more guns and more armor.

During our buildup, we visited the "orbital fortress" concept several times. All the science fiction stories had everybody using them, but we couldn't really see what they would give us. Anything that an orbital fortress could do, a ship could do almost as well, with the added benefit of going someplace else if it happened to be in the wrong place. An orbital fortress couldn't do that.

Just as a space station was essentially a large spaceship without the engines, an orbital fortress was basically a large warship without engines. Thus, any space/power/resources used by engines on a ship could be diverted to more weapons, more armor, more sensors, etc, etc, etc.

However, it couldn't be completely immobile, because it needed to be able to re-orient, or move to cover a hole left by another OF that had been destroyed, or whatever. It also needed to generate whatever power its weapons, shields, and internal systems needed. So we couldn't completely get rid of the engineroom. Granted, we probably wouldn't need to have hyperspace engines, but that wasn't a big deal anyway.

The only place we thought that OFs would be worth the trouble was at Beer itself, and, well, you know. We ran into a brick wall every time the subject came up. So, we put missile launchers all around Barton Yard, Hotel, and the Greeks, but they were all sited on solid bodies rather than free-floating. And we kept building ships so that we could defend Beer.

Besides, all of our battle-line ships could be considered as OFs by design and function, just with a bit more mobility than most.

On one of her ferry trips, Beebe came back with a new friend. Specifically, she came back in the company of CNS Thor, a recently recommissioned Mercury-class Marine transport ship. Thor was full of Marines, and Beebe was full of Marine concubines and dependents.

Thor's Captain, a Lt Colonel Hamid Annan, had sent me a quick greeting message telling me how delighted he was to be under my command, as was customary for a new ship in any system. When I got it I gave him a quick reply, welcoming him to our system, hoping that they enjoyed their stay, and asking him to contact me personally if he or his ship had any requirements that were not being handled at a lower level. All completely normal and routine. I had played his part in this Kabuki play quite a few times, but it was the first time I had played my part with a new or visiting warship, and it became one of my memories.

The Marine commander, a Lieutenant Gustav Muller, wanted a live conference with Bill, and Bill pulled me into it. He was asking for a formation -they called it a parade- to formally mark the unit's arrival, but we frankly didn't have any place large enough and open enough for what appeared to be a couple hundred men to stand in ranks. Well, we did, but it wasn't a very formal place. We got the between-the-lines impression that the sooner we did this, the better, so we told them where to go and told the staff at Hotel to keep the park clear for the next several days.

After the VidCon was done Bill explained to me what was going on. The CMC had originally organized its "companies" around the Mercury-class transports that the Confederacy had given us so they fit well together. However, when the companies were found to be too small to do the jobs they were called for, and the Mercuries were found to be too fragile, the CMC had gotten larger transports and started adding more people to their companies. Having their TOE completely filled out to the newest standard gave this company 223 bodies, but the Mercuries were set up for the old-style companies with only 121 bodies. They probably had cots stacked in the passageways, rather than report to higher that they were unable to make it work, and Thor's various environmental systems were probably complaining about the overload.

We all hightailed it to Hotel and got to watch Thor land in the middle of what had been used as a rugby pitch only days before. That was pretty impressive. I had never seen anything larger than a cargo shuttle actually land. All of our warships were space-only; they didn't even have outriggers or skids for emergencies. I knew that the Mercuries had been adapted from a Confederacy freighter that normally landed instead of taking pods on, but I had never actually seen a Mercury before, and I'd certainly never seen one land.

I counted, just like I'm sure everyone else who had heard Bill's explanation, as a color guard disembarked first, then three platoons of Marines with hand weapons, then another platoon with more authoritative equipment, then a small group of staffers, and finally their CO -who I had met over the videoconference- who reported formally that Echo Company of the First Marine Reconnaissance Regiment was present and ready for inspection. Indeed, all of the Marines were in dress uniform and all appeared ready to continue standing by until they got their inspection, but there were 228 of them.

On one hand, what do I know about inspecting Marines? On the other hand, why deny them? I followed Bill's lead and tried to not screw anything up with small talk. I kept my mouth shut and tried to look important while Bill and Gustav talked shop. They took this opportunity to promote a couple of the Marines and give a few others some medals.

The last grouping of Marines in the back, only 5 of them, turned out to not be Marines at all, but rather the "go" team from Thor's medical department. When they had the ship to themselves, they worked in sickbay like normal ship's medics. Whenever they had Marines embarked, however, they wore funny clothes and lugged a first aid kit in one hand and an RL-1 in the other.

And they went with the Marines when they landed. Not a job I would want, but it was good to know we had portable medical support. Sometimes we lost injured people simply because we couldn't get them in a med-tube in time. We added them to our list of chores for Echo Company, help us improve our trauma response teams.

After the parade/formation/personnel inspection was done, Lt Muller dismissed his troops, and now he and Bill had to accompany me while we did what I wanted to do. I was the System Commander, the senior Confederacy officer in the whole system, and I wanted a tour of a Mercury Troop Lander. Of course that turned into an inspection of all the troop spaces.

Most of the tour was of interest only because it was a new, or at least new to me, class of ship. I'd never been on any of our troopships, and having "safe landing of armed and armored combat troops" as their primary mission dictated some significant differences from our warships. Most of them don't matter any more, after all this time. The Mercuries've all been decommissioned for good, the ones that survived that long.

About the most interesting part was a large personnel/cargo hatch that separated the troop spaces from the crew spaces. Someone had painted a huge sign with the CMC emblem on the hatch itself that said "You are now leaving Marine space. Be nice to the crew. They give us our ride home."

When we went through it, I waited until it had closed again. Sure enough, there was another sign on the crew side. It said "You are now entering MARINE space" but the word MARINE was written vertically, and each letter had a word spelled out as if it was an acronym. I knew it from my prior service, where there was a -usually friendly- rivalry between the USN and the USMC. The words were "My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment", of course.

Bill invited both commanders to bring their XO and senior enlisted to his quarters for an informal get-to-know session. It turned out that Hamid and Gustav were old friends. They had even known each other before pickup. Gustav's family were German, as the name would imply, but oddly enough so were Hamid's!

Hamid's parents were both from Palestine and had met in Turkey after fleeing from one of the endless wars around Israel, then when they got married and she had a child they had taken advantage of the special bond between Germany and Turkey to move to Bremen. Hamid had grown up speaking Arabic at home and German in school. He had been tutoring engineering students at the university when they had both been picked up. Gustav was not one of his pupils, but they knew each other.

Gustav went out of his way to tell me that Hamid was a German, not an Arab. He was delighted to have his old friend in command of his transport, because he knew that his men would not be abandoned. If they were trying to retreat, Thor would be there until his men were aboard. I was given to understand that he wasn't quite so sure about that with some other transports he had landed from.

I pointed out that we had asked for them because we wanted help with our fixed defenses and boarding parties. His company would not be involved in any planetary landings unless something went very badly wrong. The only planet he might be landing on was held by friendlies, and landing there was prohibited until and unless the Sa'arm succeeded in landing and he got sent in to dig them out. It was our job to arrange the future so that he never had to do that.

Bill was listening in, and he added that we would have to get together about boarding transport. Some of the Sa'arm ships may have been big enough for Thor to land on, but Thor wasn't tough enough to take the reception she would get so we needed to use armored and shielded boarding shuttles. Thor had brought the standard Mercury fit of a single "house-cat" personnel and cargo shuttle for the crew and two Panthers for the Marines, but nothing that was designed to fight its way into another ship.

In fact, nothing in our database looked helpful. We were going to have to start from scratch here. Again. Still, Echo Company had brought about 250 complete sets of the latest powered armor suits with them, all stacked up in Thor's morgue, so if we could get them to a dickhead ship they should be able to have fun inside it. My only part in this was to tell Deepak to give them whatever help they needed to build their transport, whatever it turned out to be.

Administratively and for all training purposes, Thor and Gustav's Marines belonged to Bill as our guy in charge of the kind of things that Marines did. However, operationally they would probably be taking most of their orders from Jennifer, since if all went well they would mostly be following our scouts around.

The reason that I brought up this getting-to-know-you meeting was that Lt Muller had a political question. He was roundabout, making sure he and his men didn't get in trouble, but they had a serious question about what they were doing...

"Admiral, General, if you don't mind I need to get serious for a minute. My men are all Marines and they will obey any legal order they are given, but sometimes you are out on your own and cannot contact higher and you have to formulate your own orders, and when that happens you have your best chance of getting them right if you know your commander's mind. If you know his intentions, you can do what he wants even if you can't reach him to get orders."

"With that in mind, and remembering that it's a lot easier to send your men out where they might get killed if you believe that they are doing something worth doing, why are we here? Who cares about the Beer?"

It would come better from a fellow Marine. I made a great show of flourishing my hands and backing away while pointing at Bill. "General Atsuke, I believe that this one is yours."

Bill, in his turn, pointed back at me and said "Admiral Williams has made it painfully clear that he considers us Marines to all be idiots who don't know enough to come in out of the rain, so I'd like to start by pointing out that I really appreciate your question. Your willingness to ask that question shows that our Marine officers have the courage, integrity, and thoughtfulness that he demands of his own Naval officers." Okay, he got me there.

"We have spent a great amount of time thinking about and discussing that question, and we've come up with three different answers. All three are true, and any of us can accept at least one of them."

"To start with, we have to start somewhere. We don't get to use that planet, but we are denying it to the enemy, which is a sufficient reason in its own right. Further, as long as we are here, the surrounding Sa'arm..."

I didn't like to put it quite so baldly, but he was right, we were pretty much surrounded here.

" ... can't do much more expanding. We don't know for sure, but we suspect that we are occupying the attention of several Sa'arm systems which would otherwise be moving on."

"Second, the Confederacy contacted us for the sole reason that they needed protection from a threat they couldn't face. Politically, our stand here shows them that we will do what they need, we will stand between the helpless and the Sa'arm. Every day the Beer get with no Sa'arm on their planet is another day of proof that the Confederacy can trust us with all this firepower."

"Third, it's what we do. We are not soldiers of conquest. We are defenders of our people, and we have no problem letting others hide behind our shields. Haven't you ever lived near an idiot, maybe a beautiful woman who does whatever her astrologer says and is so wacko that you wouldn't touch her on a bet and you think the world would be better off without her, but you still help her out because she has children? It's not their fault their mom's crazy."

"The last reason isn't official, but it's real nonetheless. Tom spent several years at Tulakat. We got there in time to stop the Sa'arm from eating all the Tulaki, every human who ever set foot on that planet was a Marine who was ready to fight, but we weren't strong enough yet and the Sa'arm kicked us off again. He had to look at that planet his whole time there and think about the Tulaki not being able to fight off the invaders, and us not being strong enough to help. I'm pretty sure that the real reason we're here is that he feels guilty. We failed the Tulaki, and he wants to make sure we don't fail the Beer."

Shit. He was probably exactly right. I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but it was clear that everyone else had. Bill didn't come up with that out of the blue. He had been thinking about the philosophy side. All I could do was look back at them and shrug.

"What do you want me to say? The CNO asked me to do this. It's an experiment. If a small task force can protect an inhabited planet without even any help from the inhabitants, it's proof that we can hold any system that we decide to hold. Should I have told the CNO 'No, I don't want to, it's too hard'? Of course I said 'I'd be honored to do this.' We didn't get anything we didn't absolutely need, but he supported me every step of the way with people, ships, and just general backup when a lot of people thought he was throwing ships away. I don't want to fail the Beer or the CNO."

Bill leaned forward in his chair and looked Gustav in the eye. "And that is why you are here. Without you, we have no way to kill the crew of some crashed Sa'arm ship short of orbital bombardment, and that's messy. If they come back, and one of their ships gets through, we need to dig them out ASAP before they can get their colony going. If you can't contact higher and you know there are live Sa'arm on the planet, you and your Marines will do whatever it takes to kill them all."

The end result was a split. Us Navy types worked with some of the Marines on a design for a boarding shuttle, something that would survive a couple of the Dickheads' beam weapons and hold at least a couple fire teams of Marines in their powered armor. It not only needed armor and shields, it needed something to kill missiles with, and it needed some way to poke a hole in the target so that the Marines could get in.

We wanted something as small and cheap as possible because spreading the passengers across several of them was better than putting them in fewer but larger ones that held more passengers and hurt us more if we lost one. Unfortunately, that task list was giving us a vehicle that was already looking pretty large for a piece of consumable equipment that was only going to be used once.

Meanwhile, the Marines themselves practiced using their powered armor suits and Thor's two Panthers to land on every planet and planetoid in the system except Beer.

Their suits had very marginal thrusters, mostly to help them stay upright while firing heavy weapons, and they had the mechanical and electronic hooks to plug in a sort of EVA kit, so until they had their boarding shuttles the Marines practiced free-flight in space.

Over time, our unmanned search probes sent us three different calls to investigate wreckage in addition to the three ships that Capps was watching. For each one, we first dispatched a tug to go get it, since that trip was going to take a while. Then, once the tug was only a couple days out, we dispatched a couple of warships through hyperspace, usually a pair of our Shiro-IIs, to get there first and poke it enough to be sure it wasn't going to shoot back. They in turn had Thor following at a safe distance, and when the warships were sure nobody would shoot at them the Marines took their two Panthers close enough to EVA the rest of the way.

That got the Marines some good practice boarding a real Sa'arm ship, it kept Thor and the tug from getting shot at if the wreckage was still live, and it meant that we had enough firepower on hand to deal with whatever needed dealt with, if the wreckage turned out to still be infested.

Only one was; one of the ships that Capps was watching took a shot at a Panther. The Panther lost its shield and part of its hull and several Marines were injured, but they were all in their powered armor and none were critical. The Panther's flight crew used their own fire-support mounts to destroy the gun that shot it, dumped all their passengers out the side hatches, and stood back to provide more support if needed. Almost suicidal, but that was their job: provide anyone who could shoot at the Marines with a bigger target that could shoot back and was thus a higher-priority than shooting up helpless Marines. We don't pay those guys enough, either.

Dumping the Marines was the correct action, since another hit like that would likely have killed everyone in the back, but that caused its own trouble. When the flight crew dumped the passengers, that included a half-dozen Marines with damaged suits that were no longer space-worthy. The Ensign and Gunny in charge of that platoon took a couple of seconds to get things sorted out, but they ended up pairing Marines with good suits with the injured to escort the crippled Marines back to the Panther.

That left only 40 or so Marines to land on that side of the wreck, but with the other Panther landing another complete platoon on the other side it was enough. There were enough openings that they didn't have to cut their way through the hull, and they went through the ship step by step clearing every compartment. They took some more casualties but none were fatal, and every time a Marine went down they detailed a buddy to get him back to their Panther.

That was also the wreck that gave us the best look at a Sa'arm ship. They still had a power plant running, they still had air until we blew all the hatches out, and they still had various equipment running. Or, maybe they had fixed it and gotten it back up. Either way, we had a tug push that one back to Barton Yard where we could dissect it.

In fact, that was the impetus for our first official visit from Brak, a ship that wasn't bringing us people or supplies. Every sector had its own R&D establishment with shipyard and training bases, that was the whole point of having a sector command, although of course some were smaller than others. The day after we sent out a message torpedo telling them we were towing a dead Vacuna back to Barton Yard for some poking around, we got one back warning us to expect a visit from some of their REMFs, a team of research and intel weenies who wanted a tour of the wreck, the next time Postman passed through Brak.

We gave them a counter-offer, since none of us wanted to play nursemaid to a bunch of arrogant jackasses and primadonnas. We had already pulled everything we wanted off it. We had no use for the damned thing other than training, and there were other wrecks we could use for that. Frankly, we expected the opportunity to create more wrecks at any moment. If they sent out a wrecker, they could take the whole thing back with them.

Okay, we cleaned the message up a lot, but that was what we meant, and I expect that the command team on Brak realized that. The reply graciously accepted our generous offer to allow their team to examine the wreck from the safety of Brakat. Brak sent out one of their combat repair tugs, basically a big freighter with a cruiser's power plant, a few guns, and a construction frame where the hold should be, and carried it off. They didn't have to leave home, we didn't have to put up with them, everybody won!

Deepak and Barton fixed Gustav's broken Panther and then built several more for spares. That was the plan, at least, to have some extras in case Thor's got shot up again.

What really happened was that they started accepting recruits from our youngsters. We also allowed several of our younger and junior sailors to transfer, since joining the Marines hadn't really been an option for anyone here before. Echo Company split their First Platoon into First and Fifth Platoons and their Second Platoon into Second and Sixth Platoons, and the four understrength platoons absorbed all the new recruits we were willing to let them have. As Gustav put it, they already had twice as many bodies as Thor could comfortably carry, so why not make it three times?

Since Hector was still only 11, I was good with that. If their recruits wanted to be Marines that bad, everyone was better off if we supported them. I refrained from pointing out that Echo Company could just as quickly consolidate back down to its original four platoons, if they had enough casualties.

Beyond those practice boarding assaults, Gustav's Marines didn't have much to do. Their 4th platoon -their heavy weapons group- spent a while with our fixed-defenses people making sure they were as up to speed as possible but that was it. We did forbid any of our Cadets going on any of the live-fire exercises. Well, all their mommies demanded that, I decreed it, and the AIs enforced it. They could attend the boot camp they set up, and they could go on training exercises around Ale or the Womb, but if Thor was going out to check on wreckage all their Cadets had to stay behind. Blame your parents for not having you earlier. I'd been saying that to Hector for years now.

Not that Hector was really a Cadet yet, he was still something like 11 at the time, but just as many of the more mature 12 and 13 year olds could be Cadets and be treated like probationary Sponsors, a very few of the more precocious 10 and 11 year olds were allowed to pretend to be junior Cadets.

A Cadet, once he had proven himself, could be assigned a task and left to it with no adults around. They wore a ship-knit suit as a uniform and a crew-conk earpiece and pendant necklace -both to talk with the AIs and to remind them that they were not yet Sponsors- as a rank badge. Boy, were they proud of those earpieces and pendants. Okay, they were a lot more severe and 'practical' than what the crew-conks had; most of the crew-conks had theirs all prettied up like jewelry. Some concubines wore a pearl necklace that was big enough to damn near hide their breasts.