Chapter 2: Month 72 - Getting Organized

"It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it" -Dolly Parton

The change-of-command ceremony the next day was as quick and simple as we could make it, since we were on a warship in contested space. Afterwards, Jimmy had a small promotion ceremony for me, which was the first that the girls knew about my promotion. Okay, maybe Exeter doesn't tell Hannah all my secrets.

The two couriers showed up that afternoon, both of them full of crew, no-longer-pregnant concubines, and critical supplies. Runner was going back to Truman with crew being transferred and about-to-drop concubines, and Postman was mine.

Our announced itinerary was back to Truman to get Tina and her youngest and the rest of our kids, then to Earth to get the latest on Ishtarat and get the Explorers manned and moving, and then on to Ishtarat. I kept nine of my square pegs -the three LTs and six senior enlisted engineering types- and their assorted concubines and children with me on Postman, got the few leftovers transferred to the Norham Castle and Brennan, and sent the three corvettes on ahead to Ishtarat for repairs. Each had a complete file of what little we knew about the system and instructions to not be surprised at whatever they found, whether human base or Sa'arm colony. Routine message traffic went out informing God and all his Hosts about the ship movements, with references to this order, that instruction, and this other policy.

There is a military axiom that "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy; that's why he's called the enemy". Very often, however, it's your own side that breaks the plan.

We had picked up Tina and little George, my square pegs' extra concubines, and all of our assorted little ones, but we hadn't even gotten clear of the system that Truman was in when the Postman's CO told me that system traffic control had sent a message to stand by for orders. Soon after that we received an eyes-only Priority message from Borneo Command, the headquarters for the district that Ishtarat was in.

I kicked everyone except Hannah out of my 'office' (one room in the pod we were using) and sat back to find out what was wrong. It was a video message from an Admiral Himmel who introduced himself as the commander of Borneo District.

"Admiral Williams, I thought you deserved to hear this straight from me instead of the rumor mill. I have blocked your current assignment. This is not a slur on your abilities, just a simple recognition that the job you were assigned to do cannot be done under the current conditions."

"The man running the colony at Ishtar seems to be a good man and is trying as hard as he can, but he has limited training, experience, and resources, and he absolutely will not accept instruction or assistance from any other authority. If you go there as System Commander we fully expect him to fire on your ships, so I have vetoed your assignment. The three ships you sent ahead will get repaired, but must immediately leave the system afterward. Unless you have different orders for them, I will direct them to meet you at Sol System."

"You yourself should continue on to Sol, where they will try to find something else for you to do. If it was up to me I'd have you replacing Admiral Maxwell at Truman, but I have no authority over that District and whoever gets you will be damned glad they did. I liked what you did with Avery, and I liked your court-martial defense even more. We need people like you in command and training the next generation of officers. I hope they send you to Borneo. I'll find something for you to do."

Well. Now what? I guess I take the Postman to Earth and see what's up. I did send Himmel a reply thanking him for the heads-up, and telling him to have Akashi go back to the OPF -I didn't want Jimmy to think I was trying to steal her even though I wanted to- but to have Brennan and Norham Castle meet me at Sol when they were free.

I didn't insist on a direct one-jump trip; I allowed Postman's skipper to follow the normal route where he stopped at every inhabited (or even just picketed) system delivering mail and generally acting like a postman should. As a System Commander I got a lot of "for info" flag message traffic about who was doing what where; that was so that my people wouldn't be surprised if something next door happened to spill over into our area. Apparently, not having a System to Command didn't affect this, because, all the way back to Sol, every time Postman dropped out of hyperspace to deliver and pick up message traffic (and an occasional honest-to-God widget or package) we found several message drones looking for me. Very educational.

When we got to Sol and were intercepted by their OPF, I sent a message reporting my arrival and my availability to the CNO and Planning if they had any need to talk to me. I got replies almost immediately. I'm going to be doing one of three or four things, and since we can only invest the ships to do one of them until we see the results, they were willing to let me see the different options and have a say in which one we did first. If all went well, forces would be made available for the other options. If all did not go well, I probably would not be involved in any future operations. That's what it's like on the front lines. I am an expendable resource.

We were trying to expand our operations some: We needed to not only defend our turf and grow humans in other systems, but we needed to do what we could to limit the Sa'arm's growth, too. As near as we could tell, any Sa'arm world sent scouts out to neighboring systems as soon as they had the resources to build them. Then, they added population until they had the bodies to man another invasion fleet, then built it and sent it off to a nearby world that had been scouted and found to have a good home for dickheads. As soon as that fleet was gone, they probably built a second one to send to another system.

We could stop this cycle by defeating their invasion fleets, yes, but we could also delay it by killing their scouts, if we could do that cheaper than they could build their scout ships. In parallel with that, we were also trying to raid their systems, destroying their hive ships before they were finished but apparently that was not working as well as hoped.

So, we were sending our own scouts in every direction to see if they found any Sa'arm, but we were also looking into finding ways to defend systems that we didn't have a colony in, just to deny those systems to the Sa'arm. Tactically, this wasn't much different from my original orders, back at Tulakat's OPF.

While we decided where to start, BuShips was putting together a light task force, with emphasis on the "light". I was going to get 3 or 4 cruisers, two squadrons of destroyers, and 20 or so corvettes of various types. A lot of ships, but not much firepower. Since I wasn't supposed to be defending any colonies or attacking any hive spheres, I wasn't going to get any major warships and no Marines at all. Basically I was going to be running my own OPF again, but this time with no backup. That's what they think!

My only outrageous demand was about the minor units, but you already knew what that was going to be: No fucking Castles unless they get modified to the fleet 'crew concubine' standards. We are going out beyond nowhere and we cannot deal with that stress. Other than that, my part as Admiral Commanding was to accept all the reports, wait for the ships to be gathered, meet all their COs, set up force and squadron training exercises so that they could practice working together, yadda, yadda, yadda, and look for problems.

That's my job, I look for problems. I don't even have to fix them. All I have to do is find them, recognize them as problems, assign someone else to fix them, and read the reports about their status.

As I saw it, killing dickheads wasn't going to be a problem. It was creating a base from which to draw parts, supplies, manpower, and emotional stability that was going to be a problem. I mentioned that to the CNO during one of our conferences, and he seemed to agree with me. We are going out as a small fleet, but if we intend to stay there we will need a base. If there is no formal colony there, we are going to have to establish an informal one ourselves. If nothing else, hollow out some space in an asteroid for us to call home and raise babies in. Crews last longer when they occasionally get off the ship, and they fight harder when they are protecting their families.

Speaking of families, we had just barely made it to Sol when Hannah dropped her latest, our son Joseph. Actually we wouldn't have made it but the med tubes kept her from going into labor until we could take her somewhere with better facilities than what Postman had. Joseph didn't seem to mind waiting; he was happy where he was. Plenty to eat and drink, nice and comfortable and warm. Every time I thought of him I thought of the old joke about men: we spend nine months trying to get out of there and the rest of our lives trying to get back in.

Joseph was thus the biggest newborn baby I had ever seen. Not a record, but the biggest I had seen. Hannah would have needed a lot of medical help afterwards if we were still on Earth.

Not too long after that, LaRhonda dropped her latest, Michael. That was a screwup on my part; I should not have let the two of them get pregnant so close together. With four women and orders to have as many kids as possible, we had tried to set up a rotation. When it worked right, one of them was almost ready to drop and was back on Truman, one of them had recently dropped and was still on Truman watching all the children, one of them had just come back to the ship ready to get pregnant again, and one was pregnant right now but still able to run around and be helpful on the ship.

That was the plan, but of course it never worked exactly the way it should. You aren't supposed to play favorites, but I couldn't help it. Hannah was my better half, the assistant that I couldn't live without. And, Joannie caused trouble whenever she got sent to Truman.

I got interested in one of the choices, one that we had labeled as 'Beerat' with four planets Mead, Beer, Pils, and Ale. The system was named after the second planet because it had native life, apparently intelligent as they had radio and video, but not up to Pre-Confederacy Earth as they had no spacecraft, not even satellites. I was unable to find a good reason why the planets had human names, however silly, when the Confederacy had apparently known about the place for millennia.

We had sent a Castle to check the place out, and the fight it had gotten into with a Sa'arm scout group had ended in a tie, all four ships dead. We only knew what happened because a follow-up corvette had found the survivors all huddled in their liferaft. I viewed all of the rescue videos, but they didn't say much about the system. I wanted more than the raw navigation data, if I could get it.

When I found out that the survivors from the Maiden Castle were here at Sol, I requested an interview with the senior, the logistics (or supply) officer, a female who had apparently gotten the Marine package but she made it look good. Amazons a foot taller than me didn't particularly trip my trigger, but I had to admit that on her it was a nice package.

When she stepped in the room I rose and shook her hand. "Good morning, Lieutenant, and thank you for meeting me. I asked to speak with you because you are the senior survivor of the Maiden Castle. If you don't mind, can you pronounce your name so I don't look silly getting it wrong?"

"Bogdanovich. Kerry Bogdanovich. The last letter is silent."

"See? Wisdom like that is why I'm an Admiral."

She laughed politely like any junior officer should for an Admiral's stupid joke and asked "What can I do for you, sir?"

I smiled. "If you were a concubine I would have a long list of things you could do for me, but since you're a volunteer all I can ask for is a briefing on your last trip. I've been selected to command the force we are sending to secure the Beerat system, and you are the Confederacy's expert on that system. As you may be aware, the ship you were on failed to properly report its findings, so we have to glean what we can from whatever you and the others remember."

'As you may be aware'. When her acting CO had ordered the ship abandoned, then rammed a Sa'arm ship, then-Ensign Bogdanovich had spent a couple days in a survival pod, then several weeks in the liferaft with the other survivors before they were rescued. The ship sent to cautiously find out what happened when the Maiden Castle didn't come back had found the liferaft, jettisoned its own liferaft to dock it, and high-tailed it back to safety as fast as it could go with all the survivors. They hadn't wasted any time on surveys, or even hiding their ship from the natives.

"Your liferaft had the tactical download for the battle you were in but that didn't include any of the local color commentary."

That was SOP. The liferaft, in line with it's primary function as emergency escape craft, got a continuous data stream from the Tac/Nav panel any time the ship went to Condition 3. This feed ended, of course, when the liferaft was launched as part of "Condition 4" but we all knew what happened next anyway.

"What would you like to know, sir?"

"Well, 'everything' sounds a bit vague, but we are going back and I want to know everything I can about the neighborhood before we move in."

"Move in, sir?"

"Yes. As good neighbors, we are going to try to defend the system without involving the locals, who I understand do not yet have spacecraft."

"Not that we could tell. May I ask a favor, sir?"

"Of course. I don't have to grant it. And, depending upon what it is, I may not have the authority."

"Ensign Webb stayed on the ship to make sure it rammed the dickheads. I want the second planet named 'Webb's World'. He was a twit, but he sacrificed his life for those natives and he should be remembered. By them, too, when they come out and join us. And I can pretend to be a concubine if it makes a difference."

"That ... shouldn't be necessary. Welcome, but not necessary. And a very bad idea. If you ever want to make that offer on your own, off duty, I'd be delighted, but right now that's blatant bribery of a senior officer and I CANNOT accept your offer if I want you to respect me in the morning. As far as your request goes, though, you're the senior surviving officer on the first expedition. It's a human tradition that you name things. If you think 'Webb's World' sounds better than 'Beer' or even 'Bogdanovich's World', 'Webb's World' it is."

"That sounds ... too easy. How official is that?"

"Well, if it turns out that 'Beer' is the natives' name for their own planet, the Confederacy won't ever accept 'Webb's World', but with the other planets being Mead, Pils, and Ale, that's not very likely. If you don't have any other duties right now, why don't you track that down for us? If you can determine that a human cartographer named those planets last year, the AIs will take an order from the lead expedition's commander -that's you- if it is backed up by the current System Commander -that's me- at least as far as what humans call it."

"That will last until we are in actual two-way communication with the natives, at which point the AIs will push to change the planet and the system to whatever they call it, but they will continue to accept humans calling it whatever we want. You already know this, we call this the 'Sol System' but you will never hear an AI say that. To them, it's Earthat."

"That makes sense."

Actually, hearing that made me trust her a lot more than a knee-jerk 'yes sir' would have. We need officers who think and verify, not just blindly obey. Yes, in combat, you obey your superiors immediately, trusting their training, experience, and better grasp of the big picture. Blind obedience at any other time, though, is for slaves, Marines, and other idiots.

"Also, for what it's worth, I think you should view my court-martial record. I'll open it up to you. Ensign Webb sounds like my kind of man."

"You were court-martialed, sir? What for?"

"For trying to ram a dickhead. For pretty much the same reason, in a ship that wasn't doing much better than yours was. We lived because we got lucky. When we get out of here look it up, you may find it entertaining."

"Yes, sir."

"Now, why were you stuck in the escape pod for so long? Shouldn't you have been in the liferaft?" My first command had been an Ainsworth, the revised-manning Castle, with very few relevant equipment differences. The standard duties list for a Castle being abandoned had the SuppO in the liferaft as there wasn't much else he or she was expected to be doing to help, and if the liferaft wasn't properly supplied it was his own damn fault.

"I wish I'd been in the liferaft. No, the supply officer doesn't have much to do on those small ships so I qualified as ECR supervisor and was manning the DC station. Since the Chief Engineer was killed early in the action, I stayed behind until the last minute to make sure the engines didn't shit the bed. I sent one of the engineers out with the liferaft and I got to float in God's Country for far too long before they found me. Actually, the liferaft wasn't much better after a couple of weeks."

She sounded like my kind of man, too. She and Webb were both square pegs that didn't fit into nice round holes. I softened my voice. "How was space?"

"Beautiful, but there's too much of it. I really don't want to do that again."

We talked for awhile about the system and the natives before I let her go. She confirmed the reports that Maiden Castle's AI had developed a translation routine that was good enough to follow their broadcasts in real time, so we shouldn't have any trouble doing the same thing if we needed to.

I did mention that the Western navies that most of us had served in when we were younger tried to follow "hardship postings" with "cake postings". What happened to the Maiden certainly counted as a hardship for the survivors, but if she or any of her people wanted to go back to Beerat I was desperately scrounging crew and would be delighted to have them.

And I reminded her that if she didn't have other employment yet she could claim to be working for me while she researched the Beerat system's naming history, because a Vice Admiral's aide would get much faster assistance than an unemployed Lieutenant would. I didn't see any reason to point out that, if she did that, the AIs would list her as working for me, giving me more formal access to her abilities. Why let some other schmuck get her?

Speaking of scrounging crew, my request for three of the K'treel Explorers had been approved. Good, they have the cargo volume for anything we want to take, and that includes everyone's concubines and children. We aren't going to consider Sol our home system, this was a PCoS (Permanent Change of Station) for an entire small fleet. We were going to consider Beerat our home system, and the Explorers would let us take everyone with us without the warships being overrun with rug-rats.

All of these ships had been renamed after human explorers when they were turned over to us. We got AGS-20 William Beebe, AGS-21 Frederick Otis Barton, Jr, and AGS-22 Edmund Hillary. I knew that Hillary had been one of the guys who first climbed Mt Everest, and Beebe was involved in the bathyscaphe trips down the Marianas Trench, but I had no idea who Barton was.

I sent my square pegs -an LT and two assistants each, along with all their assorted concubines and children- to the three Explorers as skeleton crews to learn their way around and get them moving. I gave the LTs formal orders assigning each one to a ship as Commanding Officer, then let them sort out who was going with who after telling the three new COs that their enlisted assistants were going to get commissioned as Ensigns immediately after they proved they could do their jobs as Chief Engineers.

Hopefully, by the time we got where we were going, they would have trained-up three crews well enough that they could turn the three Explorers over to them. That would make my square pegs available again, and I could put all nine somewhere else I needed them. Among other things, this gave me back the two pods on the Postman that they had all been crammed in, so everyone was happy about their new assignments and I had room for staff.

Next I talked to BuPers to beg for crew for the Explorers. They became much more helpful when I pointed out that I had brought my training cadre with me; all I needed was warm bodies who had volunteered for the Navy. We could even handle the initial induction processing and enhancement. I asked for 60 bodies, 20 for each K'treel. That would give each one 23 volunteers -three times the official minimum crew- and (hopefully) at least 50 concubines who would eventually be almost as helpful, if I got to use them my way. If they could swing it, I wanted personnel with sub-scores in compassion to be above a minimum I gave them, and I wasn't going to bitch about any of their other scores. I also pointed out that we could take on as many unclaimed extra concubines as they wanted to dump on us, as we were going to be, um, out of town for awhile. Oh, yeah, if they have any urban-planning or factory management types, we could use a couple.

BuShips was surprisingly easy to work with, too, so I'm pretty sure that our experiment had some backing beyond the normal Vice-Admiral's constant screaming for more ships. Since the K'treels weren't going to be warships no matter what we did, they needed very little refitting to meet our requirements: better shields, better sensors, a transporter nexus that could act as a hub for portable transporters.

That last was a big one since none of our scouts had transporters; putting a nexus on the Explorers meant that we could place a pad on every ship and the Explorers could manage the system as long as they were close enough. Actually, the pads don't take hardly any room at all so we put three in each ship: in the ECR (back of ship) and CIC (middle of ship), since both were protected internal spaces, and in the passageway just behind the bridge (front of ship), since the bridge wasn't a protected space.

We figured that, no matter what happened to a ship, if there were any survivors at all, surely one of those three would be usable for either rescue and salvage personnel or for evacuation. We also made sure that every other ship in the fleet had the access/ID codes for each pad, so all we had to do was get in range to use them immediately.

The big thing I wanted was an up-to-date database on equipment designs. My skeletons were reporting what I had suspected; As part of their extended-deployment capabilities, the K'treel Explorers had complete self-repair facilities that could also be used for other jobs. They could build any kind of repair part they needed, up to and including a complete new K'treel Explorer. Or a Destroyer, or Frigate, or Cruiser, or Fighter, or Carrier for that matter. Any size replicators up to the ones they were calling "Factories". Munitions like automated missile systems would be easy, if we had the plans and raw materials.

The main gun from a Hero battlecruiser would be fun to build, too. No hull, no shields; just rails, sensors, enough thrusters to aim it, and a fusion plant to drive it. It may only get one shot off before any escorts destroy it, but the gunner will only need one hit to kill a hive ship, even the big ones.

As soon as we had the Explorers under control, we had all three of them start manufacturing small 'Appliance' and medium 'Machine Shop' replicators, and the important parts to the large 'Industrial' and huge 'Factory' replicators, and start stuffing them in their cargo pods. There was no reason to make them wait until we got there. This way, we could set to work as soon as we chose a location. We were going to need everything that the Tulakat force had back at Truman: base, repair yards, defense systems, everything, and the safe bet was to assume we would need them fast.

Once each Explorer had a couple of the standard medium replicators, we put them to work manufacturing pod 'seeds'. Yes, the large replicators could each pump out a complete pod every day, but A) we didn't need them yet and had no place to put them if we had them, B) by the time we had someplace to put the pods, we would want the larger replicators to be working on something else instead, and C) the medium replicators could make the 'seed' versions right now without causing any trouble.

A pod seed was basically the good stuff, the heart of the pod: the replicator that did everything, and the minimal AI that directed it. A seed was only a ton-mass or so, and if you plugged it in to a power source and fed it some raw materials, over a week or two it would build the rest of the pod itself. We figured we could fill any extra space in the aft pods with them and be that much farther ahead on our bases when we deployed them.

One point that everyone held against the K'treel Explorers was that they could only handle 9 pods. However, there was a very simple reason for this, and I thought it was a good one: The mounting points for the pods weren't sized for the pods in their compact "habitat" configuration of only 10 m diameter (about 300 cubic meters of volume) like most ships we were used to. Instead, the Explorers had pod mounting points sized and spaced for pods in their fully-expanded cargo configuration, which was 30m diameter by 25 m long. That's 2800 cubic meters of space.

At 9 pods apiece for the three Explorers, we had all 27 pods expand out to their cargo dimensions instead of their normal housing dimensions. We designated one of the back pods on each Explorer for organic stores (for rapid and easy conversion to food, if needed) and the other two back pods for odd raw materials that we may not find easily, like Deuterium for fusion plant fuel and Gadolinium for fusion plant shielding, and various other alloys that might be used in manufacturing, say, a Hero, and filled them up from the massive digesters that were taking apart Jupiter's moons to build Earth's defenses.

This appeared to actually be what the Explorer's builders had originally used the pods for, to make sure that the ship had everything it might need for repairs and survival, no matter what went wrong and no matter how long it took. The fact that, until we gave the order to expand them to full size, the pods appeared to be completely normal told us that the Confederacy had been using their pod system for a long, long time.

For the trip out, we set the middle and front pods up as super-sized apartments to allow us to take our extra people (concubines, children, extra crew and recruits, base personnel, etc). With six floors (some larger than others; this was a cylinder after all) and twelve or so small suites on each floor, each pod had 72 suites suitable for a small family of two or three adults (or a larger number of little people), and between the three Explorers we were dedicating 18 pods to this for a total of just under 1300 suites we could stuff people into. We were a long way from deciding who to put in them but having the space gave us a lot of options for our move.

Now, what do we call these things? If they work well, the Explorers - or newer ships that can handle these pods - are going to become popular. I was thinking of them as Greyhound Busses, but when I heard them referred to as "Ferries" that made a lot more sense. Ferry Pods they are.

They weren't ocean liners by any stretch of the imagination. No one in one of those rooms was going to live in style, but they had the rest of the ship to move around in as long as nothing went wrong. Thinking ahead, unless we came up with another critical need I wanted the center 3 pods left as Ferries and reserved for emergency transport of all of our people. After we got where we were going and emptied them, the front three pods would be available for whatever came up. The only thing we really knew was that we didn't know everything yet.

I also ordered another round of CAP testing for all our concubines, and as usual Hannah refused. I didn't think that being my personal servant and fucktoy was the best that she could do, but if she wanted to stay in my bed I was certainly not going to argue about it. Still, I knew her better than I knew any other human being, and I always had the sneaking suspicion that she had somehow found a way to sabotage her test. There was just no way she was only a 6.3. Unless she had convinced the testing center that 6.3 was the score she wanted. Could you do that?

This time Tina got a 6.6 overall and just like that I didn't own her any more, she was Tina Hernandez again and free to go where she wanted, as long as it wasn't Earth and served the Confederacy in some way. I reminded her that she could join any service she wanted, but I had never really considered her Marine material, and it would be Really Nice to have our very own Civil Service Officer if we were being sent out to create a new colony with no colonists. That way her children could grow up around their daddy.