Chapter 4: Month 78 - Setting up Shop

"It's the same old song and dance my friend" - Aerosmith

In my mind, just about anyone could help build and run a town or a factory, but it took a special mindset to crew a warship that could go into combat at any time. Maybe that was just my point of view as someone who had spent most of his life on said warships, but that was where I was. We need shipboard crew for a growing fleet, and we don't need much at all of people who can't be shipboard crew.

We got several small groups of volunteers from various sources. All of the recent pickups that we got had either volunteered for Navy service, or had expressed apathy over his or her service. Fine, they are all going to be Navy and we are going to build as many ships as we could find crews for. As long as we were left alone, my "master plan" was to successively build larger and larger ships that needed fewer and fewer crew until we ran out of materials for ships or people to man them.

However, there was a huge snag in my manning plan: The Ferry pods could hold all of our warship's dependents, or they could hold all of our transferred and new volunteer passengers with their families. They couldn't do both.

We came up with a three-part answer to that. BuPers was giving us complete crews for all of our ships, but all of our newer and larger ships had been built for double crews, to allow for training. These ships had a good amount of unused berthing and other environmental support. Further, there was no requirement that we take all of our people with us immediately. In fact, until we were sure we could stay at Beerat safely, it might be better to leave some of our families behind so that we weren't all killed together.

First, we said that, for the cruisers, destroyers and the four Shiros, the crew could take up to two concubines and up to two dependents with them to Beerat. As soon as absolutely possible, those extras would be landed someplace safe, as they had no business onboard in a firefight. We could not yet predict where or what that safe place might be. They may not have TV, popcorn, and a pool, but they would be safe. That took care of probably a third of our crews right there, the junior personnel who didn't have large families yet.

Second, any sponsor with either more than two concubines or more than two children would have to leave the excess here in Sol system, in a fairly nice housing project attached to one of the moonbases that had been built to house extractees. These stay-behinds would be brought up as soon as we had a place to put them.

We also made these offers to the crews of the couriers and the Explorers, and the fleet staff, meaning me and my assistants, since we were already on the Explorers. I admitted that all of my children would be staying behind as I was not willing to play favorites and choose two, and likewise I would leave two of my four concubines behind as well.

LaRhonda was obvious; she was the best mommy we had and whoever it was would have their hands full. Besides, she was going to be dropping again soon. The second choice (Hannah) was again obvious but I didn't want to make it. The two that would be best to stay behind were also the two that I could depend upon to keep my stress level down when things got tense. Monique might become good for that but not yet, and Joannie would never be someone I could call "restful". An incredibly pleasing fuck, yes, but not restful. I put that off for now. Anyway, those two options freed up the Ferry pods from all the crew families that had started to move in.

For our smaller warships, the Castle variants and Patricians that didn't have enough room for the people they currently had, that first part of the plan wouldn't work. Even if the people involved were willing to accept the crowding, the ships themselves didn't have the environmental plant to handle them. We wanted to give each crewman a single suite on one of the "Ferry Pods", but promptly realized that a 28-man Castle times 14 ships plus the three Patricians was half of the rooms available right there.

On the other hand, saying "none for you" wasn't good either, so we compromised some for them: we set aside one floor in each Ferry pod (a total of 18 floors) and re-partitioned them into 40 very small bedrooms that an adult could live out of, and maybe a second adult could visit if they got along well. That gave us 720 tiny cubicles.

This was more than the total crews of the Castles and Patricians, and allowed each of their crewmen to house a second concubine if they wanted. If they only had one child and they wanted to, they could bring the child with this concubine. It was the best we could do. If they had more than two concubines, or if they had more than one child, or if they didn't want to bring said child, again all the leftovers would have to wait at our "MoonBase Hotel and Resort Spa" until we called for them.

There were only a few takers for this more-limited offer for the corvette crews, maybe a couple hundred. All the rest either didn't have a second concubine, or had families large enough to need the moonbase hotel.

That brought up an option we hadn't thought of. The "rejects" that Tina had brought us generally didn't have families; they were mostly single young hotties with princess entitlement attitudes who had been picked up for their looks, then dumped on the Civil Service when their sponsors couldn't get through to them, as one step short of being recycled.

These ladies were lounging around in the Ferry suites while they decided that this wasn't too bad. They really didn't need suites, and the consensus was that they had a long way to go to earn such nice digs. We had about 500 of these little cubicles left after the Castle/Patrician offer and we could have changed them all back to suites, but ... We stuffed two rejects in each one. If they can attract a sponsor, they can move out. Until then, you ladies are spare baby factories and we'll keep you in standby. Any of them who had children well, we let them stay at the moonbase hotel. We'll get them on our next trip.

Third, none of our colony-building passengers were going to get a better deal than the warship crews who were going to be fighting and possibly dying to protect them. Until we have won this war, the people on the sharp end of the spear are going to have a higher social status than the REMFs who support them from the safety of their homes. Whether transferring from a factory or just picked up from Earth, if you have thirteen concubines and thirty-five children, all but two and two are staying here for now. You only get one of those "Ferry Pod" bedrooms for this first trip.

Even with all the shenanigans surrounding the "rejects", we still had over a thousand of those small family suites, and we filled them with every transferee and freshly extracted Navy volunteer with concubines that we could scrounge. We would process them and their families as quickly as we could, but the trip out was going to be mostly free time as they got used to their new lives.

The night before we left Sol, I finally stopped waffling and faced facts. I wasn't going to leave Hannah behind. I was far less of a man when she wasn't right behind me. I spent the night giving Joannie the best time I could and sent her off to the moonbase hotel to help LaRhonda watch our tribe. I kept Monique to continue our bonding, and I'm sure Hannah filled her ear with dire threats about what would happen if she ever said 'No' to anything I wanted.

After a couple of weeks of fleet exercises in Sol's outer system, a final check that we had stuffed the Ferry pods as full as we could, and another that the Confederacy had not changed their intentions towards the Beerat natives -we were to leave them alone as much as possible- we all went into hyperspace and headed out for Brakat, stopping at every system on the way. This not only verified that every ship and navigation system performed as expected, it also allowed us to practice all arriving at once as a fleet. The first couple of stops demonstrated to the skeptical that this was, in fact, something that had to be done a few times to get right.

At each system we continued our fleet tactical exercises. This also gave us a couple of days to talk between ships, transfer people as needed, and hold the endless conferences we used for planning what we were going to do once we got to Beerat.

I had put a note in Lt. Bogdanovich's record that since she had served as both a Chief Engineer (of the Maiden Castle) and a Commanding Officer (of the liferaft, yeah, that was stretching it, but she kept things together in a bad situation with no help for several weeks) in combat, in both cases performing her duties without fault, I considered her capable of being either a command officer or an engineer, as she preferred, if she didn't want to stay in supply. When we left, she was Chief Engineer on one of our Castles. I'm gonna try to turn her into one of my square pegs, yep!

I also got back a completely informal and off-the-record report that when she heard about my addendum to her file, she told a shipmate that "I still want his kids." I didn't see any reason to pass that on to Hannah. She still gets upset about that stuff. Fucking the hell out of Joannie until we both hurt is fine, she's a co-wife, but fucking someone else outside of our family is cheating.

The two sergeants also came with us, although with requests to not be on my ship as I was nearsighted and ran into things. I think the Lt shared my court-martial record with them. No big deal, it wasn't exactly a secret anyway.

Our final tally was 43 ships: 2 Raptors, 3 Europas, 6 Asians, 6 Africas, 4 Shiros, 14 Castles/Ainsworths, 3 Patricians, 3 Explorers, and 2 Couriers. Right at 2400 uniformed men and women, all trained and competent sailors united in a common goal. We could add another thousand or so, once we had integrated all of our passengers.

Of course, if Brennan and Norham Castle were still alive when we got there, they would be joining us, so add another hundred or so people. 45 ships sounded like a big fleet until you looked at the actual ships. We didn't have an awful lot of firepower to be duking it out with Sa'arm Conquest Spheres. We were going to have to plan, we were going to have to prepare, we were going to have to work together, and we were going to have to rely on "alternate means of success". We were going to have to cheat.

Stopping at Brakat first wasn't a military requirement for our mission, but it was a political requirement. A Sector Commander, whether Admiral or General, got the credit for everything that went right in his sector whether he knew about it or not, and he also got the blame for everything that went wrong. Not only did I need to know his point of view on my mission, he needed to know my point of view, too, so that he could understand any messages I sent. It was only good manners to stop in Brakat and check in.

Of course he wanted to know all he could about my plans and intentions, and he questioned my choice of flagship. I agreed that it would be nice to have more armor around my lily-white ass, but we didn't have any heavily-armored ships. All we had were light units. Every single ship we had was expendable in the performance of our mission. Given that, it was better for overall fleet direction to be done from one of the few ships we had that weren't supposed to be getting shot at in the first place.

I wasn't happy about becoming a REMF, though. I was just doing it because I didn't see a better way to command the fleet. I asked if he had a spare battleship he could lend me so that I could command my fleet from a warship that actually fought, but he said no, he couldn't spare any of his at the moment.

That told me that he was actually one of the good guys despite his exalted position; the truth was that there was no such thing as a battleship yet. The biggest combatant ships we had built yet were the Heros, and we were busy proving in various raids into Sa'arm space that the Heros weren't big enough to do the job. We were going to have to keep building bigger ships until we came up with a design that could survive going toe-to-toe with anything the Sa'arm had. They, of course, would respond to that by sending three (or nine) of the biggest things they could build. We didn't know what that was yet, but we already knew our enemy well enough to predict that response.

I did come away with something useful, though. He promised that, if and when Sol came up with a viable design for something big and tough enough to be called "Battleship", he would see to it that I got a copy of said design. I noted that this was rather short of being told I could have one of the actual ships, and he agreed with me, pointing out that manning her would be a challenge, so there wasn't any point in making a promise he may not be able to keep.

He also asked about the planet names, since there was some confusion. Lt. Bogdanovich had tracked that down for us before she reported to her new ship. It turns out that the Confederacy had listened to the natives' broadcasts long enough to establish that they called themselves the "Beer", so that name was right, but the other three planetary names (Mead, Pils, and Ale) had simply been filled in when the Nav records for the system were first looked at by a Human cartographer.

In the long run, Kerry wasn't going to get her way about "Webb's World", but for now we could use it. I thought it was important to remember those who sacrificed for the common good, so I was going to support her as long as we weren't in contact with the natives, um, the "Beer".

We had a laugh about that. There were going to be lots of jokes about getting to know the natives once they joined us. "Hey, Joe, let's go down to the planet, find a bar, and become one with the Beer."

Anyway, my command staff got to know the Sector Command staff, told them everything we wanted, got told that most of it wasn't available (which we already knew, so there were no hard feelings), and after a few days of shuffling people around some more we moved on out.

Eventually we came out of hyperspace well clear of the Beerat system and crept in under patrol EmCon, 43 ships and 15,311 souls according to the report I had asked for with the exact population of each ship at the exact instant that it popped out in Beerat space. 383 officers and 2014 enlisted on the warships, 1080 more volunteers as passengers on the explorers who would be Navy once they were trained, 8512 concubines in various places, and 3322 under-14 dependents.

That total kept increasing, of course. Between sponsors and concubines, we had almost 9000 healthy, fertile women. Not all of them were pregnant all the time, but it was normal for our pax list to increase by fifteen or twenty every day, just from all the births. We also normally lost one or two people per day, usually one of the new concubines who couldn't accept the position they had agreed to back on Earth.

I didn't attend any of the birth-day parties, unless they were for my own staff, or for the command teams on ships that were nearby. While we weren't too busy, though, I did attend the "Personnel Loss Review Boards", the hearings set up to investigate each loss, even if only by video conference. I made the CO of the ship involved attend, too. Some of the losses were unavoidable, as when a new concubine attacked a sponsor, but even then we had to look at each other and wonder if there was any way to get through to the morons that this was a Bad Idea.

Probably not; the real solution would be filtering at or before pickup to cull the unstable ones that wouldn't make it. And, of course, if we mentioned that to the AIs, they would come back with:

<Your proposed solution has already been implemented in the CAP system. The problem with your solution is that extractees do not always perform a check for personality flaws while selecting their concubines.>

Well, no. I'd participated in one pickup myself, and I'd viewed the videos from countless others for entertainment. Our average extractee/volunteer selected their concubines purely on the basis of how big their tits were, how fast they stripped, and how wet they were when they got plugged in. This was a good way to select which of your college classmates you should take to Panama City for spring break. It was not, however, a good way to select someone to take with you into combat where her freezing in terror would get you killed. Take the smart, ugly one who loves to suck, you idiot!

In fact, you could make a pretty good assessment of which volunteers were good officer material simply by choosing all the ones who looked at CAP scores before selecting their mates. That suggestion was from Ens. Sally Goode, a blonde assigned to our system defense planning team who rivaled Joannie for raw fuckability but was far more valuable for her mind.

Sally made that suggestion during one of those loss hearings, and I had to admit that I would have failed her test. That got some laughs. On the one hand, how I chose my four (my wife and three stroller-pushers) was common knowledge. On the other hand, it was also common knowledge that one of those four was now a volunteer in her own right, and a second refused to retest on the grounds that she would become a volunteer, so my method appeared to work, too.

"Well, at least you didn't choose on breast size!"

"On the contrary! I certainly did!" I paused to make sure that I had her attention. "I met Hannah at a college party. I went to go talk to the biggest tits in the room. We used to joke about it. We had been married for a year before I found out what color her eyes were. She got something in her eye and asked me to look at it. Until then, all I knew was what color her nipples were."

That got laughs from everyone, and Sally had to cover her face with one hand. "Men!"

"Yes. Men. Most of us stop thinking when, say, you, for instance, walk in the room. One of the reasons I have my concubines is so that I can recover quickly and start listening to what you say instead of just drooling like I want to. Sally, you are on Joey's staff because you are a good planner. Joey and I are both glad to have you. On the other hand, having you around creates your own planning issues."

"What?" She was red-faced, but smiling.

"Did you know that I have a standing order with my ladies that, if I have to spend more than half an hour alone with you, one of them will give me head immediately before that meeting? They should probably stand by and expect to get fucked as soon as the meeting lets out, too." I looked at my adjutant. "Kevin?"

"It's true. I have to coordinate that with Hannah." He even said it with a straight face.

Now Sally joined in the laughter. After it died down, I wasn't going to cut that short, an honest opportunity to laugh at their commanding Admiral's personal foibles.

I waited to let Sally speak first. This might be a teaching moment ... Yes.

"Sir, we could. I don't mind."

"No. We can't. Stand by for a sec..." I asked the ship's AI if it had access to video of the two sergeants' visit a month or two earlier. Yes. It did now. Of course Postie had it available.

"See, I've already gone through this with another female officer. Let's watch a home movie." And we all got to watch the sergeants asking me if Lt Bogdanovich was going to get in trouble, and my answer, including the video from that interview. I got to watch me fondling Hannah, too. I caught my hands twitching. Hannah should be here now, dammit.

Back to Sally when the movie ended. "Ensign Goode, you are, at the same time, a human being, a very desirable female, and an officer in the Confederacy Navy. You have to keep track of the pros and cons of each of those three at all times, and that's a delicate balancing act. Part of that is being aware of how you affect those around you. You are here because we value your mind. I'm never going to ask you to ugly it down some 'cause I have a solution to your current status, but dear God I hope you never find a way to be more desirable. If you do, I'll transfer you somewhere with no men around so that we can continue to get some use from your mind. I try to be honest when I can, and as long as I've got Hannah to go home to, your mind is more important to me than your body. On the other hand, if anything ever happens to Hannah I make no promises about my value system."

Sally was quiet for some time, and everyone else at the review board gave us the space she needed. I had no idea if she was extracted looking like this or if her appearance came from a med-tube. It didn't matter. What mattered was that, if she wanted to look like this, she needed to face the fact that it would color her relationship with every male volunteer she met, men who were used to thinking of women as obedient property and who even had two female slaves at home. Eventually she looked up with a sparkle in her eye and asked "So, have you nailed her yet?"

"Nailed who?"

"The Lieutenant, whatever her name is."

"Lt Bogdanovich. No. And, I probably won't. All requests for my children must go through my breeding coordinator, a lady named Hannah Williams, and she already shares my limited availability with three other women. She probably wouldn't take kindly to a request to, ah, spread me thinner." I'd never made it that plain before, but I still considered Hannah my 'first wife' and I had no need to go around her back. I was not going to fuck any of my subordinates without her prior approval. I was getting all I needed from her and Monique anyway. Since we were picked up going on five years before, Hannah had never said 'No' to me. She said 'Can I just suck you tonight?' sometimes, meaning 'Please go bother one of the other girls, my back hurts and I have a headache', but she had never said 'No'.

"'Breeding Coordinator'? Is that another staff position on the ToO that I have to fill?" Kevin.

"No. It's one of the tasks that get dumped on the SLJPO. That used to be Hannah, although come to think of it that's you, now, isn't it, Kevin?"

No response beyond crossed eyes while the British leftenant asked the AIs what the bloody hell 'SLJPO' meant. Chuckles from everyone else, some after they also consulted the AIs. Anyone who had come from the USN knew the term, though.

"Hmmm. Well. Hmmm. Well, as long as Hannah is doing such a fine job there's no need to rock the boat, now is there? I'll leave that task in her capable hands for now."

All in all a rather more productive PLRB than most. We hadn't come any closer to solving the various problems that caused the losses, but I'd found a lighthearted way to get my staff on board with my values. I didn't like the concubine system -even though I was a direct beneficiary- but we had to work with it until we had a better one. At the same time, any female who could fight her way clear of the system and make her way on her brains instead of her back deserved to be given all the support we could give her, both as her due as a human being and as incentive to all the marginal ones to keep trying.

After we broke up Ensign Goode came by and asked "Hannah is really that important to you?"

That one was easy, even with a dozen people listening. "Hannah is just a slut I fuck whenever I want." I waited a couple of breaths.

"Hannah is my better half, the woman I married. She is my conscience. I define 'Right' by asking myself 'If Hannah understood all sides of this question, which choice would she tell me I should take?' I'm told I should retest for CAP; my expected score is well over 8 and I could have another two concubines. Ensign Goode, if anything ever happened to Hannah I expect my CAP to be well under 4."

I looked around at everyone. "You people protect me as your commander. You need to protect Hannah as the true source of everything good that I do. I'm only a good person because I want her to think well of me. Without her I would be a monster."

I had no doubt that Hannah's new title would make its way across the fleet within hours. I guess I'd better make sure she hears it from me, first. AI, verbal message to Hannah Williams on the Postman: Please review the video from the latest personnel loss review board. You don't have a new job, but you did get a new title. And, I had to work with Sally again. There's no point in you two wearing anything when I get home tonight. Love, Tom.

Similarly, with all those kids it was normal for five or ten to reach their magical 14th birthday each day, too, and about a quarter of them tested good enough to be sponsors. That was a huge increase over the typical ratio back on Earth, but then many of these kids had been out here for several years now, and they weren't dumb. The recent pickups had the same CAP score curve as on Earth, but the kids who had been with us for years did much better, over half of them on some days getting a 6.5 or higher on their first test.

The "navy brats" could SEE the difference between how sponsors and concubines were treated, and they wanted to be sponsors. Similarly, they saw, every day, the difference in the way sponsors and concubines acted. They did everything they could to act like sponsors, and some of it affected their value system enough that the AIs liked the results. We could only hope that eventually we would get to where they all would be accepted, and we could end the concubine system.

Many of the new volunteers already knew what they wanted to do -I was never going to wean Hector away from his Marine uniform- but they all deserved an interview with someone who could talk intelligently about their options. Add that to the collateral duties for the officers on that ship, another thing to take time away from running their division, department, or ship. It had to be done, though, if we wanted quality recruits. I quietly pointed out that even those children who weren't quite fourteen yet should be able to talk to their parent's officers about career options.

Anyway, I was saying that we crept in, with an occasional IFF pulse to alert friendlies, if there were any. We kept the two task forces bunched but sent the patrol force out. We were eventually met by Brennan, which appeared to have some damage.

"Captain Jackson, didn't you get fully repaired at Ishtarat?"

"Well, yeah, but we had some trouble a couple of days ago with some tourists. Daddy, I got a boo-boo."

Postie announced <Imagery being received. It appears to be an after-action report>.

"Wait a minute while I review this, Larry. Is Norham Castle okay?"

"She didn't get hit at all, the bitch."

An AAR is a mass of commentary and addenda surrounding a tactical plot replay. This one showed the relative positions of five ships, including insets with actual damage for our ships and calculated damage for theirs, and live commentary from the two skippers. The TPR showed ... exactly what I had been making my two task forces practice. A Sa'arm Vacuna scout triad had come in-system while they were hanging around waiting for us, and a quick conference between skippers had established their roles.

Norham Castle: "Larry, I'd much rather be the Anal Bandit if you're okay with being the Blundering Idiot."

Brennan: "I'm a smaller target. Not much, but a little. How long do you want?"

Norham Castle: "Give me two hours. Longer, if you can."

Brennan: "I'll try to give you three. Go as slow as you need. Hans, you cannot get detected."

The TPR showed Brennan and Normie-C separating, both moving as quietly as they could at Patrol EmCon. Three hours later, Brennan had lit her shields, gone to full power and started firing everything she had from well out of effective range. The triad oriented on Brennan and started slowly but methodically shooting her up.

It wasn't a fair fight, since a Castle could really only shoot effectively at one enemy at a time. She had disabled one Vacuna and was working on a second but would not have won when Normie-C showed up behind them. What would otherwise have eventually ended badly for Brennan ended quite abruptly with three expanding clouds of debris.

Norham Castle: "God, I love anal sex! Judy, come here."

That last probably wasn't properly part of the AAR, but no one had the heart to take it out. Most of us chuckled when we first heard it. Hannah made a face. Yes, that face. We've done it, but privately I agree with her. That's nasty and disgusting.

That was a lesson we had learned at Tulakat; if you focus their attention in front to begin with, they don't seem to notice the ass-bandit until he starts butt-fucking them. By then it's too late, of course. And, as per my OPF standing instructions, a long-range scan during and immediately after the action made it clear that from the time of initial detection, none of the three ships had launched anything in any direction except towards Brennan. Whoever had sent the triad would never learn what happened to it.

I ordered the full AAR forwarded to all ships for all hands to view -as entertainment, for many of them, but as training "THIS is how you do it" for the various command teams- and we went on with the rest of Larry's report. They had two dead -a gunner and his conk- when one turret got hit, but all others would recover. Other than the casualty list and their survey info, nothing was important.