Chapter 1: Heavy Cruiser Exeter, Tulakat Outer Patrol Force

"We've been livin' in the flames so long" - Blue Oyster Cult

"Exeter, please connect me to Commodore M'beku. If he is busy, this is important but not urgent."

<Working.>

"Thanks."

"This is Commodore M'beku. How can I help you, sir?"

"Jimmy, I just got two personnel action messages that affect you personally. You got a couple of minutes free?"

"I will in a couple of minutes, sir."

"That's fine. Please meet me in Flag Briefing in ten. This will be short; we don't need any donuts."

I thanked Exeter for the connection and walked out of my office and around the corner into the briefing room, carrying the two messages and telling Hannah "I should be right back."

"What's up, sir?" Only 5 minutes after our conversation. That was one of the reasons I was good with this. No matter what Captain James M'beku was tasked with, it WOULD be done, it WOULD be done well, and it WOULD be done earlier than scheduled with an absolute minimum of fuss. I have a clear conscience about this. These are my people, and they aren't going to get fucked over or killed because some idiot is giving them stupid orders.

I handed him the two messages, mine on top. "Jimmy, Maxie-poo has finally figured out how to shit-can me. And, given how difficult it is to arrange transfers out here, he had a rare moment of common sense and you are getting your very own star. To be honest, I'm positive that he was led to that decision. He wouldn't have chosen you if he got to make up his own mind."

Tulakat's Outer Patrol Force wasn't quite a fleet in its own right, but it had been built up to much larger than a squadron and, since we were quite often out on our own, it rated a flag officer to command it and a flag staff to support him. Admiral Theodore Alexander Maxwell the Third had assigned me to command the OPF a year ago, publicly stating that the OPF needed someone he could trust to think on his own. The unstated aside was that the OPF was as far away as he could send me, as I did rather more independent thinking than he was comfortable with. At the time there were public discussions about whether the military or personal need was more relevant. My only comment was that "I think this is a good idea".

The OPF was officially a group of light scout/patrol ships, but we also had some larger ships that we had combined into what we jokingly referred to as our "battle line". I had formalized my senior captain's position as my second in command and "commodore" in charge of the battle line. They spent some time training as a group, but most of their time was spent individually on patrol with the smaller ships. The two of us really should have been on separate ships but Exeter was our only heavy cruiser and the only ship we had with the space for any kind of flag staff so we got to live together.

The top message was a personnel action ordering me to turn my command over to my relief, Rear Admiral James M'beku, and authorizing me to requisition appropriate transport to my new station as Commanding Officer, Ishtarat System Defense Force, in the Borneo Sector. The post carried an automatic promotion to Vice Admiral. The second message was another personnel action promoting Colonel James M'beku to Rear Admiral and re-assigning him from Commodore of the Tulakat OPF's battle line to Commanding Officer of the Tulakat OPF. Further, he was to promote from within the OPF to fill the vacancy at Exeter's CO (and battle line commodore) that his promotion was creating. I gave Jimmy time to read the two messages, then "The smallest ship we have here is a corvette, and you need them all. I'm not taking one of them just to get back to civilization. I expect that Admiral Maxwell will have also detached a courier for my use, just to ensure I am on my way as quickly as possible, but we won't see it for a day or so. So, we have time for a formal change-of-command ceremony tomorrow. Please spend a little time thinking about who moves up to fill the holes. Meanwhile..."

"Exeter, Jimmy is being promoted to Rear Admiral and will be formally relieving me here. Please give him full access to all flag traffic so he can get up to speed." Meaning all the stupid messages that we got addressed to "Senior officer on station only" that told me all the dirty little secrets that anyone had that A) needed to be aired out but B) were embarrassing to someone so maybe didn't need to be completely public.

Back to Jimmy. "I've never heard of Ishtarat, but if Maxwell and the AIs think sending me there to command the defenses is a good idea, it's not going to be a normal place. Give me some time to check that out. I may want to take some of my square pegs with me."

He looked up at me, then over to one of the hologram "decorations" on the wall. It showed a Cincinnati Tools "Shaper" from the decade before World War Two. That hologram was infamous, and central to why Admiral Maxwell wanted me out of his hair. He had publicly referred to me as a "square peg" that didn't fit into the Navy's round holes, and my response was to have that hologram placed on the wall of every briefing room in the OPF. I did absolutely nothing except order the AIs to place the holograms. I submit that it took at least an hour for someone to figure out the connection, and at least a day for it to get back to the Admiral.

When I was a little boy, there was a small machine shop down the road from my parents' house, and I spent a lot of time there watching the men turn pieces of metal into parts. When I got older, I got a job there as an apprentice machinist before I went to college. Those men's recognition that any job can be done in more than one way sank in, and it's a major part of my success as an officer, both before in the US Navy and now in the Confederacy Navy.

A milling machine is a power tool you see in factories and machine shops. It cuts (well, 'mills') flat surfaces on a work piece, maybe six flats on the sides of a bolt head so you can use a wrench to turn it. A lathe is another power tool you see in factories and machine shops. It makes curved surfaces, maybe some threads on that bolt so that it moves in or out when you turn it with your wrench. As the saying goes, if you have a lathe and a mill, you can use them to make another lathe, another mill, and anything else you want to make.

A shaper is somewhat of a combination; it makes whatever shape you want. Shapers are chiefly famous for being able to make ... square holes. When you have a square peg and a round hole, yes you can file the peg until it's round, but you can also make the hole square so that your square peg fits without using a hammer.

It was my ability to see more than one answer to any question -while Admiral Maxwell refused to look any further than the One True Answer- that was at the root of our issues. He hated me, and I thought he was an idiot. He was also my boss so I couldn't say that, but if he was going to give me an opening like that...

Every time anyone walked into an OPF briefing room, they were reminded that Earth's machine shops had included power tools for making square holes for over a century. There was no NEED to fret over square pegs. Unless you were so stupid that the only tool you knew how to use was a hammer. In that case, yes, square pegs were an issue. Basically, my pointing out that shapers existed long before replicators did was also pointing out that if Admiral Maxwell couldn't deal with square pegs, he was one of those hammer guys.

No words spoken, no slight that he could take offense at, and as long as I did my job well the AIs would take the effect on the fleet's morale into account if he said or did anything about it. We couldn't out-breed the Sa'arm, so the only way to win a war with them was to out-fight them. That meant we had to build a fleet composed of well-trained, highly-motivated crews manning well-designed, built, and maintained ships commanded and directed by competent officers with the integrity to earn their men's trust.

If you had the clearance and knew which questions to ask, the AIs would tell you any number of interesting things. The Outer Patrol Force had already demonstrated that, under my command, it had a combat capability far exceeding that of the inner quarantine fleet, which not only had more ships but larger ones.

Much of that was directly due to morale and leadership, factors which involved the human concepts of "trust" and "respect", two concepts that the AIs could define but not use. I had mentioned to the AIs more than once, during conversations about this, that the Admiral and his cronies probably couldn't even define the words, much less use them intelligently in a sentence. The Admiral's pettiness would strongly -and negatively- affect fleet morale if he proved me right by responding in any way. Basically, any punitive actions he took would lead to his dismissal, for the good of the Diaspora. And, he wasn't stupid, just narrow minded.

I was safe from him. As long as I performed well, of course. If I fucked up, he would have me yanked in an instant. I didn't see this as a problem. Why worry about how your boss feels, safe back at headquarters in another system, when we were the ones on the front line, the ones that got killed if the Sa'arm showed up and we weren't ready? If I fucked up, I would in all probability be dead long before Admiral Maxwell found out.

Tulakat was a contested system. Tulak was the kind of planet that Humans liked, and it was a fair assumption that the Sa'arm would like it too. Certainly, the natives -we called them Tulaki- had seemed happy living there. When we had first entered this fight as the Confederacy's proxy, one of our first needs was intelligence, in the military sense. How do they fight? What weapons do they use?

We went to Tulak soon after the Sa'arm had, as an experiment to see how hard the Sa'arm were going to be to beat. We knew we weren't ready, but we had to start somewhere, and we thought that a new colony would be easiest for us to practice on. We established several things very quickly:

Fighting them on the ground after they got established was a bad idea; they could breed combat units faster than we could. So, we needed to prevent them from landing. That meant a fleet that could stop their fleet.

Their ships were armed, so we needed ships that could deflect, absorb or shrug off their weapons. Their ships were shielded and armored, so we needed ships with the firepower to penetrate their shields and armor. And, if we wanted to hold our own systems, keep them out of new systems, and kick them out of the systems they already had, we were going to need what the US military used to call a "Two-Ocean Navy", enough ships to protect both our coasts and also send fleets to wherever the trouble was. We were going to need a huge naval buildup.

We had some advantages; even the ships the Confederacy had given us were faster and Confederacy sensors appeared to be better than the Sa'arm's so we could see them coming before they saw us, but that just meant we could pick our battles, attacking or avoiding as we chose. We still were going to need a lot of ships of all sizes if we wanted to actually stop them in space and prevent landings. At first, though, all we could do was avoid combat when we wanted to.

Next, one-on-one our soldiers could take theirs. The Sa'arm, however, reacted immediately to any attack, and any one Sa'arm we killed would immediately be surrounded by others. We learned very quickly that anything that one learned they all knew. And, they were far better at coordinating widely-spaced units than we were.

We lost most of our ground force but everyone was sending live video so we got some close-ups of the Sa'arm. This included closeups of intact live Sa'arm using tools and weapons, somewhat intact dead bodies, and completely opened-up dead Sa'arm in various-sized pieces. They didn't seem to have the concepts of clothing or individual armor and we could not identify anything that looked like a radio link. We tried to avoid the obvious conclusion that they were telepathic, but eventually we ran out of other explanations.

They also didn't seem to "think" the same way we did. As the fighting went on we realized that they didn't respond well to new immediate threats, but the second time we tried a particular tactic they would have a response ready. That meant that if we found a way to win a particular fight, that way would only work that one time unless we destroyed all of the Sa'arm present before they could tell the others.

Their link, however it worked, did have a range limit. It seemed to stop working somewhere around a million klicks, and it seemed to lose a lot of bandwidth well before that. If we killed a dickhead on the planet, every other dickhead on that planet knew and responded immediately, but if we killed a ship in orbit the response was less focused. And, if we killed a ship elsewhere in the system, they may not ever notice.

This last became a central part of our research and testing effort. We could try anything out on an isolated ship, and as long as we made sure the ship was actually killed before it got close to a Sa'arm-held planet, the Sa'arm as a whole would not learn anything about our tests. And, on a larger scale, anything the Sa'arm on the planet learned would stay there as long as we kept the planet isolated. We could also use the planet to try different ground-based tactics and equipment.

So, after the Sa'arm settled in on Tulak, we pulled back. We didn't try to kill them all. We didn't have the firepower to do that, not if we wanted to use the planet ourselves when we were done. What we could do, however, was quarantine the system. We killed any ship that tried to leave the system before it jumped out, and we killed any ship that arrived before it could contact the planet. These dickheads knew an awful lot about the way humans fight. They really, really wanted to tell the rest of the Sa'arm about all the trouble we were giving them. We, in turn, really, really wanted them to never tell the rest of the Sa'arm what they had learned.

While our fleet out in space and our Marines down on the ground tried different weapons and tactics, we in the Outer Patrol Force made sure that no Sa'arm ship escaped from Tulak. Every time we tried something new, the Sa'arm would send out a ship. We assumed that it contained info about what they had learned. We didn't want those ships to escape. That was the job of the OPF. We didn't have to have bigger ships, as long as we had enough small ships to intercept. And, as long as we were willing to take the casualties it took to ensure no one got through the quarantine.

When I was promoted from Lieutenant to Commander (the lowest "command" rank) I had been given Avery for my first command. She was an early corvette sent out with several others to help create an outer scouting/patrol/chase force soon after we lost the planet Tulak itself. I had been promoted to Captain (and commodore in charge of the outer patrol) as a result of one of those running fights early on, while we were still figuring all this out. We knew what we wanted to do, but we weren't sure yet the best way to get it done. Well, that was why we were there, to find out.

One particular Sa'arm ship -it was the type we later named the "Venti" Destroyer- trying to leave Tulakat had been hit several times by the inner force of "real" warships as it passed their cordon. It appeared to be damaged but it was still able to dance around and avoid further hits. Unfortunately, only Avery was in the right place -and fast enough- to have a chance of intercepting before it jumped. My gunners didn't have any better luck than the blockade ships had. I had finally run out of patience and told the helm to increase speed to emergency max and hold course for intercept, then put the whole ship in the circuit while I gave my gunners additional incentive, ah, instruction.

"We cannot out-breed the dickheads. And, the way you boys shoot it's beginning to look like we may not be able to outfight them, either. That means that the only way we can win this war is to outsmart them. Now, if these dickheads get away, whoever they talk to will know everything we have taught these guys. We really don't want that to happen. However, you boys don't seem to be able to hit from this far out so we are moving in closer. Hopefully, you will be able to get some hits soon."

"If not, Avery will ram the bastard. It would really be nice to not have to do that but if you gunners can't kill it your way us CIC weenies will kill it for you. You have until impact to do it your way. All personnel not immediately required for maneuvering and fire control are hereby ordered to abandon ship. That is all."

I had followed that up with a call to the XO (on the bridge) with instructions to have Gunner Sams relieve Spec Harper at the plasma torpedo magazine, and another call to the ECR to tell ChEng that I wanted her on the liferaft with the XO and to designate someone else to stay in ECR. That was because both ChEng Smitty and Spec Harper were pregnant females and I was a male chauvinist pig who thought they should live. Neither of their unborn were mine, but I still thought I should save them if possible.

That left us with only 7 souls on board: me at the helm and Weps at Tac/Nav in CIC, the three gunners, Gunner Sams in the magazine, and the engineering tech in ECR. All males, and all with at least two children back at Truman.

Of course our gunners had eventually hit something that killed the dickhead's propulsion -or we wouldn't be talking right now- and as soon as Weps could say the dickheads were no longer accelerating I told the helm to veer off.

Staying close was a real bad idea, as the dickheads still had at least one trainable particle cannon working that was powerful enough to penetrate our shields, whereas all we had were weapons that fired "forward" so we shot them up as we passed, getting ourselves shot up a lot worse after we passed until we could spin ship and face them again. We were still moving very fast away from them so we killed our engines and coasted backwards out of range as quickly as we could and waited for help. My abandon-ship order earlier meant that we were severely undermanned and couldn't do much about repairs.

After awhile Johnston (another corvette) showed up and we moved in from opposite sides. Their single turret couldn't cover both of us, and I guess they thought they had a better chance of killing us than the undamaged fresh ship because they stayed on us. So, while we played "target", Johnston moved in and finished them off. Avery had enough damage by then that after we picked up our crew again from the liferaft and all of the survival pods, we were released from patrol duty and sent limping all the way back to where she was born, at the Jupiter yards.

As a matter of after-combat routine a complete data dump from both ships got sent back to Truman for analysis, then prettied-up into an "After Action Report" or AAR, and apparently this one got passed around. When we made it back to Sol system -which the AIs still insist upon calling "Earthat"- we learned that we were heroes. There wasn't much good news back then, and apparently my little talk to my gunners had been passed around as a morale booster. It showed the skeptical that we weren't just partying out there, it showed the pessimists that we could win if we played our cards right, and it showed the optimists that sacrifices were going to be required.

My willingness to ram the Sa'arm ship also got me court-martialed, as there seemed to be some questions about my sanity. My defense was short and to the point. While I gave my statement, I had a power-point slide on the wall behind me listing other times commanders had made my choice: The Ten Thousand. Thermopylae. Salamis. Horatius at the bridge. The "Great Siege" of Malta. Lepanto. HMS Revenge. Lake Erie. USS Essex. The Alamo. CSS Alabama. Little Round Top. Mobile Bay. Rorke's Drift. Coronel. HMS Jervis Bay. Stalingrad. Coral Sea. Wake Island. Samar. Bastogne. The Golan Heights. It was a long list.

"Battles are not fought in isolation. They are fought for various reasons with what is available under the conditions that you happen to find when you contact the enemy. If you choose to be a soldier, you have to accept that sometimes you will find yourself in a fight you don't want to be in. Sometimes you are stuck because you are unable to move. Other times you can move, but you have to stay because you are protecting others. Sometimes you have to attack someone bigger than you because you are all that is available, and again the only way to protect the people behind you is to attack a superior enemy force."

"You aren't always going to win these fights. If you cannot accept this, you shouldn't be a soldier or sailor. In this particular case, allowing the Sa'arm ship to escape would have led to all other Sa'arm systems learning a lot of lessons that would have allowed them to be far more effective, which would have vastly increased our casualties in the future. Avery didn't have the firepower -or the fire control- to kill it from a safe distance."

"No one else was close enough to help before they escaped. The only weapon we had that we knew could destroy the ship was our main engine. That wasn't courage, and it wasn't a cavalier disregard for danger. It was a calm recognition that killing that dickhead ship was more important to our future than preserving Avery. We cleared the ship of everyone not needed to shoot or ram, and we went in."

"In closing, I would like to point out that if our sensors and fire control systems were better, we wouldn't have been forced into that decision."

That got me acquitted of attempted suicide -the court-martial was a formality that was held any time we lost a ship and all I had to do was demonstrate that I wasn't crazy- and my closing comment got me a temporary assignment with the team working on upgrades for our warships. My only contribution while I was there was to point out that we generally only had people shooting at us from one direction at a time, and our combat shields were specially-strengthened debris shields that protected us from all directions.

If we could give the Weapons Officer the ability to strengthen them in one direction, even if that meant weakening them in other directions, it would have prevented a lot of our damage and most of our casualties. If we happened to find ourselves getting shot at from multiple directions, we would return the shields to their normal all-around configuration.

The brains said that this seemed doable, they could work on that, and we should get plans for that upgrade soon. Unfortunately an improved fire control system was going to have to wait until we knew why we kept missing.

I also got promoted to Captain, with command of the Antwerp, a new light cruiser being sent out to Tulakat in company with the like-new Avery and two more really-new corvettes. She had almost the same acceleration as the corvettes but much better weapons and armor. She had the same sensor suite and fire control system, though. It was still the best we could build.

Shields! Is now a good time to talk about shields? Avery had gone into combat with a beefed-up version of the Confederacy's standard all-around particle shield, something that any spaceship needs to stop ions traveling at relativistic speeds, and the odd bit of space dust that you might run into. While they helped some when getting shot at, they just weren't powerful enough to stop everything. They were a kind of sort of force field that affected anything with mass.

They didn't directly stop things like cosmic rays (which are just high-energy gammas), but they did something which changed their directions so that they missed the ship in the middle. From our point of view, we just said "it stops cosmic rays, too". You could adjust it to stop lower-energy photons, also, but if you did that to stop a laser beam, then you also stopped incoming visible light and you couldn't see to navigate, much less use radar or lidar.

Antwerp had MUCH better shields than Avery! In fact, all the new ships did. That had turned out to be fairly simple in theory, if somewhat messy in practice. The research guys I had been assigned to came out with a two-part "field mod".

The first part was easy, a ship modification that could be done while underway with just a few techs and a new generator. With a little modification (done by the AI with nanites over a couple of hours), our original all-around shield could be re-configured to be hemispherical, just covering the front of the ship, and roughly three times as strong as the original. A second shield generator, bolted down a few feet from the first one, did the same thing for the back half.

As an added plus, either generator could go back to being spherical just as fast as the AI could flip some internal switches. This meant if one shield went down in combat the other would take over. Yes, whatever was coming in when the first shield went down would get through, but everything following would be stopped again. Unless that one penetration took out the shield generators, of course!

The second part of the mod was messy. These two improved shields were still the all-around type, just hemispherical instead of completely spherical, and we still had to drop them momentarily to shoot. The second part of the mod added individual modules in various places to poke holes in the shields. Each missile launcher, each turret, any device that ejected anything got its own module that made a temporary hole in the shield for our missile/slug/plasma torpedo/whatever to go through.

This was a major improvement, since we no longer had to drop the whole shield, or even half the shield, to shoot. This was also a major headache, since any weapon emplacement that could be aimed had to have the hole-producer set up to ensure that the hole was in the right place. I mean, the temporary hole for a missile or torpedo launcher was always in the same place, and setting that module up only took a few seconds.

The pair of modules for a twin-beam turret, however, had to move with the turret and make the holes appear in exactly the right place no matter where the turret was aimed. It wasn't too bad on most of our ships, as at least the turrets themselves never moved. We had heard rumors of a new big cruiser design, however, that had several turrets that could move around the ship's skin on tracks, and I'm sure that tuning THOSE modules took days if not weeks. When you add in the fact that the ship had to be drifting, not necessarily "stopped" but certainly not under acceleration, in order to mount all these modules on the skin, the second part of the mod was just easier if you had a shipyard do it.

About the only other down side was that the shields took much more power, like four times as much, something about the square-cube rule, and some of the smaller ships didn't have much to spare. The Castles, our original class of scout/escort corvettes, for example, would jump on these shields, but they also meant that the ships had to manage power better. No more running everything at once. And, probably never any better weapons, either. No power to spare for that now.

This was much better, and the change was happening as fast as shield generators, hole-generator modules, and the instructions on tuning them could be shipped out to the fleet. The first part of the mod wasn't even a shipyard job. It only took a few hours, and since the second generator could be physically mounted with the original still running, the install crew would do everything needed for the new mod, then shut down the original and fire up the new one (in spherical "backup" mode) while they worked on the original. I wouldn't recommend installing the mod while in combat, but any other time that you had a few hours to spare, sure.

I think that this was the first major use of the new "Stagecoach" small freighters. As each of the first few were built, they were stuffed full of the new and improved shield generators and hole-generators and sent out everywhere we had ships. Of course any base could make the generators on the spot once they had the plans, but this got them to the fleet as fast as possible, and we noticed an immediate improvement in our combat results.

For scouting, the Sa'arm used a small ship we called a "Vacuna", don't ask me where the name came from, and it was undergunned compared to our scouts -the Castles and variants- but otherwise they were about the same size, maybe a bit smaller. They had the Confederacy's standard "Nav Shield", the one we all used before we beefed it up for our warships.

Actually, we understood that the Sa'arm having shields was a recent development. When the Confederacy had first run into the Sa'arm, they didn't have shields at all. Now, they had the Confederacy's standard Nav shield. This was one of several items that made the Confederacy determined to not allow the Sa'arm to ever capture any Confederacy property, whether ship, base, or planet, that might have more tech they could use.