Chapter 5: Month 80 - Digging In

"Building the perfect beast" - Don Henley

A couple of days after Tina's visit she gave me a call and opened with "I've gained almost a kilo already. I'm still sore in a few places and I need to wash my mouth out a couple hundred more times, but I'm back at work. Please let me know if I need to talk to Monique about that. It wasn't your fault and she shouldn't blame you."

I growled "I'll send her with Hannah some time." Since Hannah was helping out with the PIO and Monique had the website anyway, no one would think twice about that.

"Good. Anyway, one of the most popular requests for info is one that I need your authorization for. All the concubines and dependents want to know where their sponsor's ship is. No one wants to authorize that without your permission."

I just looked at her. Blankly, I guess.

"It's a military security issue. If the progressive heroes of the glorious Cuban revolution were fighting the cowardly forces of the corrupt running dog imperialist Americans, we would need to keep the location of our ever-victorious ships secret. I mean, even the incompetent overfed drug-addled Americans could occasionally strike an unexpected blow against the upright stalwart soldiers of enlightenment, if their cowardly spies told them where our ships were and they were able to surprise our Modern Men, couldn't they?"

I don't understand how she could say that with a straight face. I mean, I was laughing and all I had to do was listen to it. "Oh, yes, of course, it's possible that your glorious revolution could have suffered a minor setback if our cowardly soldiers and sailors could find your ships."

We talked for a little bit about what she (or "the people") wanted, but it wasn't complicated. The PIO wanted to add our ships and installations to the Beerat system drawing that was already one of the most popular "pages" of our "website". I thought it was a good idea, but there were possible issues. I finally told Tina that I agreed with her in principle, but needed to talk to my staff before giving her a final okay.

They couldn't see any down side to it, and if it made the concubines and dependents happy, it was easy enough to do. We hedged our bets, though. We put in two caveats:

First, if the Governor (who we didn't have yet) or the senior officer of any Confederacy service wanted to declare an installation "secret", then that installation would not be displayed, listed, or referred to in any way on this display. That didn't mean that we wouldn't talk about our 'secret'; we just wanted the option of not putting everything on this open display.

As an immediate example, I (the senior Navy officer present) declared everything in the L4 cluster to be secret: The Womb and her defenses would not show on this system asset display. Of course we all knew exactly where it was, but I thought that this would help reinforce the mindset that our children's best protection was that the Swarm didn't know we were here.

Second, some of us had served in Vietnam. Others had watched the nightly news of the war. The rest of us, the Americans at least, had grown up dealing with the problems caused by that war and how it was mishandled.

The US had civilian oversight of military operations. We all agreed that this was right, but one of the nation's problems was the civil unrest generated by non-combat personnel getting live combat video with their dinner. Susie Homemaker was not in any way equipped to watch all the horror that is a jungle ambush and make intelligent decisions leading to winning that war. She did, on the other hand, have far more votes than experienced military personnel did, and that war ended up being run by public opinion, including, in the end, pulling out instead of winning.

We all suspected that the war was unwinnable as long as the Vietnamese farmer-in-the-paddy sided with the Viet Cong, but we resented not having been given a chance to find out. And, on a higher level, strategically the US and our allies could afford the cost of the war far more easily than the Soviets and Chinese. The Cold War could have ended much earlier if the Soviet Union had gone broke in Vietnam instead of Afghanistan. Instead of the US sacrificing an unknown but certainly large number of American soldiers, half the world sacrificed a whole generation to Marxist indoctrination. Tina's parents in Cuba had been part of that sacrifice.

My staff was unanimous on our second caveat. If we were in a live-fire situation, we would NOT provide real-time updates to that ship-location display. If we lose a ship, that loss will be announced after we have privately told the families who had lost loved ones.

With those two minor issues, we added our ships, yards, mines, installations, etc to the system display. I got to record an introduction to the display, along with a quick explanation of the rules, using the Womb's absence as an example.

Meanwhile, Beebe and Barton were setting up a construction and repair yard for small craft and making sure that if we ever decided to build or repair ships we would be ready. Naturally, the immediate question was "What do we build first?" and that was limited by the fact that we simply didn't have the extra trained people to crew anything useful yet. I had no business reducing the manning levels on our current ships until I felt confident that the remaining crew could do the job.

So, we started out by building the basic infrastructure that any system needed: the twelve early warning stations we had planned earlier, a pair of fuel collection facilities to gather hydrogen from Ale and concentrate the deuterium, the tugs we needed to put everything else in place, life support tenders to allow a ship to shut down its internal systems for repairs, fuel tankers to service the fleet, etc, etc, etc.

Our intention with the tankers was to have several small tankers that could refuel five or ten of our scouts, or fewer of our larger ships, in one trip, thus allowing the warships to stay on station as long as needed. We could even use the tankers as in-system couriers, allowing us to move manpower around if someone got a promotion, or again if someone got pregnant. Pretty much the same system we had back at Tulakat but with refueling added.

This actually didn't cut into our effective manpower pool hardly at all. Every concubine must "belong" to a sponsor, but there is no rule about physical distances. Put a sponsor in charge of a "squadron" of these service craft. As long as none of these auxiliaries had weapons, and none of them had hyperspace jump engines, they could each be manned by one or more concubines, with the number onboard depending upon how long they expected to be away from base. Hey, extra concubines we got!

The AIs even allowed us to include shields and a point-defense system, as long as everyone was clear that an all-concubine crew would NOT have any say in the gun's use. If the AI wanted to use it to kill an incoming asteroid or missile, that was the AI's decision. We didn't even put manual controls on the mounts for those service craft.

Once that program was in place and punching out various small craft, we could turn to the fun stuff. While we thought about what larger ships we wanted to build first, I asked for what I had been fooling around with in my mind: The main gun (a 150 meter long railgun) from a Hero and the absolute minimum support equipment to use it.

No hull, no missiles, no CIC, just the gun itself, a fusion plant to drive it, minimal sensors, and the thrusters to aim it. We could use a pod as combination control room and berthing for three crew (only one needed at a time but three shifts available) and a concubine each, and, okay, put a transporter nexus in it so we can change crew out by just getting close.

My intention was to build one, make sure it worked, and have it towed to Webb's World's moon. As long as it didn't have active emissions, it should be pretty well invisible there. If a hive ship gets past us, it won't get past that gun.

However, the idea kept getting more complicated. WW's moon wasn't tidally locked like Luna was. It revolved, showing all sides to the natives every couple of days. If we wanted to keep our Sunday Punch out of sight of the natives, it would have to be continuously powered, which would make it far easier to detect by the dickheads.

One of the engineers had the now-obvious fix: Give it some engines, yes, but dig a hole for it in some crater, land in the hole, and cover the hole with what looks like the same crater floor. Put some passive sensors on the cover, and we're in business. That works. Build it. "Make it so, Number One." That was a stupid show, but everyone knew the reference.

Duh. Sometimes the obvious is only obvious after someone, referred to as 'the genius', points out the obvious to everyone else. The rest of us, referred to as 'the idiots', only see it afterwards. We could have gone straight to building a Behemoth-Class SuperDreadnaught Star Destroyer, but we didn't have plans for anything like that so we built things we did have plans for, until we knew more about the shipbuilding process. We started our shipyard with four small-craft construction frames, building a sensor platform, a tug, a life-support tender, and an automated miner respectively.

The sensor platform, tug, and miner frames were left at it to keep making more of them until told to stop. Once the first life support tender was close enough that it could complete itself, we pulled it out and started working on a fuel station for Ale. The first tug we built went to work towing the first sensor platform into place. Said platform wasn't complete, but it had the brains, power, and materials to complete itself. By the time the tug came back, it would have another unfinished platform to position. That tug would be busy for a while.

The second tug we built towed our first and similarly not-yet-finished fuel collection facility to a very low orbit over Ale and stayed with it to drag scoops through the atmosphere and deliver the contents back to the processor. The facility would separate out the Deuterium for fusion fuel and the Unium for reaction mass from everything else in the atmosphere and eventually give us fuel. Maybe other materials, too, depending upon what that 'everything else' turned out to be.

However, the tug was a temporary workaround until the station was completely operational. In the long run, the tug was really just there to deliver empty tanks to the station and return full ones to whoever was waiting for them in orbit.

The idea was that, once the station was completed enough to have a trustworthy emergency escape engine of its own, it wouldn't orbit the gas giant. Instead, it would be slowed -the tug could do that- until it was moving at the same speed as the atmosphere below it, then lowered into the atmosphere. About twenty spherical tanks the same size as pods but as light as possible and completely empty (as in assembled in vacuum and then sealed) would support it in the upper atmosphere like helium balloons would on earth.

The facility's altitude could be grossly controlled by balancing the number of suspension tanks against the mass of the station proper, and more finely by reeling the balloons in or out, since their buoyancy depended upon the atmospheric density outside them. More tanks and shorter string would give us a higher station; fewer tanks and a longer string would give us a lower station. This was going to be moving target for some time, as the station wasn't complete yet and would only get larger and more massive as we delivered, attached, and assembled more modules.

Why would we care about altitude, you ask? Well, too low and the engineering to withstand the pressure gets so bulky you can't get anything done. Too high, and the atmosphere that you are skimming is too thin to be practical.

Also, something that we knew would probably also be a factor but we didn't know how much yet, was temperature. Ale radiated enough heat to warm up the entire area, and there was a steady temperature gradient. At the top of its atmosphere it was basically the temperature of space. In its core there was a fusion reactor running. Anything we built would have to stay somewhere between those two extremes. Probably closer to the cold end, since it was always easier to heat something up than cool it off.

The third frame, the one that built the refinery, we had build two more life-support tenders, then switch to building the service tankers we had discussed earlier. The only real difference was that the tankers were designed with removable tanks, sort of like Earth's tractor-trailor rigs, while the tenders were built as one unit, sort of like a big box truck. We wanted the tenders so that we could keep a crippled ship's crew alive until they could get their main engines back on line to drive their own internal environment systems, but we didn't have any crippled ships at the time, so after we built the first one we moved to more critical needs.

As soon as that first tender was completed, though, several different problems all came together and solved each other. We set each tender down on the Womb's outside grav grid as they were completed so that the grid would have all the standard public services that habitable spaces needed: power, water, sewage processing, whatever. The third tug we built -this is the "duh" part here- took all of the Ferry pods from the Explorers and set them up in one corner of that grid where there weren't any baby pods growing, in a sort of apartment complex.

That gave everyone in the ferry pods access to power and the other utilities, plus access to the Womb through the transporter pads, and it also freed up the Explorers. Not to mention that moving a family from the cramped apartment to their permanent home in a new hab pod was now a simple matter of putting everything you wanted on a grav sled and walking over to your new home.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. We hadn't done that yet, we had only just realized that this would be the first thing that we would ask our third tug, when complete, to do, when we had our first military crisis.

We hadn't been there a month and were still arguing about where to put everything in the Womb when Cartwright, the corvette that Athens had sent out, came hightailing it back into Beerat. The first system we had sent her to was, well, "Swarming". She had hung around trying to get an enemy capabilities assessment until she noticed some ships getting underway. What looked like two triads of Vacunas were heading somewhere in our general direction. She thought we'd like to know.

I told Taffy-2 to move out some, to be between Ale and the expected incursion, and moved Taffy-1 close to Webb's World. Once in position, they both went to Max EmCon. Meanwhile, I told Athens to have her people ready to close up any escape lanes after they showed up, if they came.

Sure enough, a couple of days later we got a visit. We gave Cartwright a minor demerit for not getting the numbers exactly right, but a major atta-boy for the warning. What originally looked like "two triads" eventually resolved into two each of "triad with a smaller ship". We didn't realize that until one triad oriented on our budding shipyard at Ale, which we had going full speed and putting out all kinds of emissions. As they closed on the shipyard, the other triad oriented on Webb's World.

Before long, we could tell that each triad also had a smaller ship, holding back from the three. With humans, I would call that a command ship, but that didn't make any sense with the dickheads. It's gotta be one of their courier ships, an attempt to find out what is eating their ships. At any rate, while we at the Womb could watch, there wasn't much we could do to affect either part of the battle.

Confederacy Navy ships had an assortment of ways to talk. For normal purposes, when talking to another ship we had the AI connect us and didn't worry too much about how it happened. For combat use, though, each ship had a set of low-power lasers called "whiskers" that the AIs could train on other ships and modulate with a signal. Naturally, this only worked if we knew where the other ship was, and the other ship didn't move out of the way while the laser was enroute.

Our ships didn't have special receivers for this; they used the normal optical arrays and the processing circuitry automatically converted that type of signal to audio and piped it to wherever it was wanted. This meant that a group of ships lying doggo could talk to each other without much chance of any emissions being detected. This was the source of the audio overlay from most AARs.

As soon as the bandits had split up, Brennan had taken direct control of Taffy-2's two scouts and the three of them had separated from the rest of the force, moving forward and out, then back in again when their opponents moved by. It was the right thing to do -get ready to kill any fleeing Swarmers- but it was also wasted effort in this case. When the triad got close to where we thought they could detect our ships, the task force lit up their shields, targeting systems, and main engines, and charged.

A Vacuna triad was demonstrably tough enough to usually beat one of any of our Castle variants. Our better shields only made it almost a fair fight. A Vacuna triad pretty much just evaporates when it gets surprised by two cruisers and a half-dozen destroyers, even when half of them are the nearsighted Africas. Harpy had assigned each target to various ships, and had assigned Mr. Cautious to herself. None of the dickheads got a hit past our shields before they died.

Taffy-1's fight to protect the natives was a bit messier. As soon as Taffy-2 sprang their trap, the inner triad, okay, quad, slowed down, and the laggard slowed down even more, opening up more space between it and the Vacunas. They may not have known what happened, but they knew that something bad had happened to their buddies. Either their electronics are a lot better than we thought, or their ESP has a lot longer range than we thought. That was something to think about later. And, that guy in back is gonna try to get away. Can't have that.

Soon after that, Taffy-1 turned on their shields and got under way, accelerating to ensure intercept. By the time the dickheads noticed them there was no way to avoid the oncoming ships, but they tried. The triad slowed as much as possible and the rear ship actually succeeded in reversing course but all four were again quickly overwhelmed. This time both of the cruisers took some hits, but nothing important was hit, nothing that affected their combat capability.

Actually, that is the Admiral's uniform talking. The man inside the uniform had to consider our three dead and half-dozen wounded as "important". Still, we were up to 14 Sa'arm ships eliminated against the loss of one Castle, if you count the Maiden as one of us. We were still in control of the system, and still in control of all information about the system.

This wasn't a battle. It was just a live-fire exercise. I wasn't going to learn anything about my men until things started to go wrong. I was good with the exercise, though. We would talk it over, but as plans go it was good. Next on the training agenda would be options for when the plan fell apart.

I could have swapped the cruisers, but command cohesion is important. I didn't want to start swapping ships around until everyone had a lot more experience. So, while everything was quiet I had the task forces swap their positions so that Harpy and Lodz could go get repairs, and I took Postman to meet them so that I could see the shipyard and go over TF1's AAR in person with them.

Since we had Postman back (she had brought a few more people), I sent PE back to Brakat and Sol with the latest AARs and the standard Admiral's plea for more ships and men. Apparently the dickheads were concerned, and the next visit would be a lot harder to stop.

I also asked for some Marines, if a small detachment was available. We probably won't ever need them, but if we ever do, it sure would be nice to have them. My staff's thinking was that we had two possible uses for Marines, and neither task would need very many.

We still didn't know much about the Sa'arm. If we had the opportunity to examine a disabled dickhead ship instead of simply blowing it away, we should take advantage of that opportunity. The problem there was that we had no one able to do it. My staff suggested asking for some trained boarders with powered armor who could go first, instead of having to send some Navy gunners and bosuns and cooks to fight the dickheads hand to hand.

Also, our current thinking was that the Sa'arm were a collective intellect that got smarter or stupider depending upon how many dickheads there were. That meant that a crippled ship that crashed on a habitable planet with only five survivors wouldn't be very smart, but if given time they would breed and every added body would make the colony smarter. They weren't asking for the ability to repel a full-scale landing with tens of thousands of organized dickheads and full armor support, they just wanted to be able to clean up any accidents.

Are those obsolete "Mercury" Assault Frigates still gathering dust? They are too small to do anything that the Marines consider worth doing. How many Marines do they carry? A company? Could we have one of them? Sure, send their families, too. We don't know how long we will want them.

And my "Sunday Punch" wasn't working well. Yes, the AIs tried to tell me, but sometimes you have to see for yourself. We simply could not keep the rails aligned during full-power firing tests without the structure of a Hero-sized ship around it. Back to the drawing board.

I had Athens send a pair of Castles (Brownson and Cowell this time) back to Dickhead-1. Same orders, do NOT get in a meaningless fight. The Confederacy had a formal name for the system, something like "Zoobleat" but what was the point of remembering that? Whoever the Zooble had been, they weren't any more. We will mourn for them after we win this war. Then I spent the next couple of weeks at Ale, touring the facilities and going over TF1's AAR with their commodore and the various ship's command teams (generally, the CO, XO, and Weapons officer, who was usually also the 3rd in line for command). About the only thing I didn't like about our recent live-fire exercise was something I was going to have to take the blame for myself.

Earth's science fiction was popular in the Confederacy forces. The Marines studied Pournelle, Laumer and Drake looking for ideas; the Navy tended to read Bertram, Bujold and Weber. Both task forces had formed into a plane or wall in the best Weber fashion, with the two cruisers in the middle, then three Asians on one side and the three Africas on the other side, and their two corvettes on top and bottom. It looked pretty, but if the Sa'arm had learned how to identify our ship classes the Africas were easy targets -and their two flanking corvettes weren't going to do much rescuing.

The Asians were a general purpose escort, able to put out a high rate of fire in every direction to protect larger ships from small craft like fighters and torpedo bombers and the occasional suicide gunboat. If you are a WW2 buff, think "Atlanta class light cruisers". Their main weakness was that all that fire wasn't very powerful and took many hits to be effective against bigger ships. I mean, the Atlantas had even been formally designated as "CLAA" (meaning "Anti-Aircraft Screening Light Cruiser") in recognition that they shouldn't be duking it out with anyone their own size.

The Africas, on the other hand were close-in knifefighters. Inside of about 15 klicks an Africa was nasty. Again, for a WW2 example, think of a destroyer-sized combatant with nothing but torpedos. For some reason, disruptors ignored shields, so an Africa could use a third of its disruptors to blow out your hull plates or armor or whatever, and the rest of them to vaporize whatever was hiding behind your armor, all within a second or two. The effect would be very much like using a Bazooka on a telephone booth. However, if you stayed 20 klicks or more away, they were even less dangerous than the Castles.

Putting the Africas all together -and otherwise all alone- on one flank was just inviting someone to sit 20 clicks away and eat them. I asked the two commodores to, instead of having two flanking arcs, put the six destroyers in a circle with the two classes alternating. That gave us a core of ships that could take some damage, plus an enveloping circle with medium and short range weapons in every sector.

That worked tactically, too, with their greater acceleration and maneuverability. As long as the pair of cruisers was coming in, a prudent enemy would concentrate on them. The faster destroyers could move ahead in a wide circle, reducing the circle's radius as the cruisers closed and alert for an opportunity to finish off a damaged enemy before it could get back into the fight. Any movement toward one side of the circle would open the rear of the formation to a charge by our ships on the other side.

Unfortunately, for long range fire all we had were the missile launchers on the Europas and the Patricians, and the plasma torpedo launchers on the Castles and the Shiros. Not for the first time, I asked myself why all of the Castle variants had at least one plasma torpedo launcher, but none of the destroyers did.

The missiles were good against hull and armor, but didn't always hit. They were subject to counterfire. Missiles were also easy to dodge, as demonstrated by our training accident back in Sol system. The plasma torpedoes were more likely to hit, but again could not be considered capable of delivering a knockout blow to a ship with a functional shield. However, a single plasma torpedo could take out a shield, and if an enemy was kept busy enough, we could saturate his defenses with missiles. So, I reluctantly assigned our four Shiros (all we had) and two of our Patricians to the task forces as additional destroyers (light) and hoped no one shot at them.

We added missile resupply depots to our plans basically everywhere: at the shipyard, in orbit around a couple of Ale's moons, inside the mess at both of Ale's Trojan points, and orbiting WW's moon. Actually, if I remember right, I think that this is when we realized how to solve that problem.

Most people, if they have heard of LaGrange Points at all, only know about two, L4 and L5. There are actually five known, of which L4 and L5 were the last discovered. This was back in the 1800s, long before spaceflight or even computers, when mathematicians were using pen and paper to explore Kepler's equations for orbital mechanics. No one was saying "This is the way God works"; they were just saying "These equations seem to describe what we see in our telescopes, but there are some odd implications".

When the astronomers talk about a "1-body system", or a "2-" or "3-body system", they didn't mean that that body was floating all alone. What they meant was that there was one (or two or three) bodies that so badly out-massed all the other stuff that all the smaller stuff could be pretty much ignored when calculating orbits and stuff. A "2-body system" either had two stars and nothing else large, or else a single star and a single huge planet, and nothing else large.

Someone (I guess a guy named LaGrange) had found that, for a 2-body system where one was much larger than the other, there were several "nodes" where all the various forces were balanced and anything smaller that found its way there would tend to stay. L1 was obvious: directly between the two bodies and nearer the smaller one where the attractions of the two bodies were equal. Not quite as obvious was L2, on the line between the two bodies but the far side of the smaller body. That one was sorta like a geostationary orbit, but instead of always being over the same point on a planet it always kept the moon between it and the planet (or the planet between it and the star).

L3 was the weird one. Still in that same line through the two bodies, the point behind the primary, exactly opposite the smaller body, in the same orbit, was also stable. I never understood that one, but I couldn't argue with results. NASA had actually sent a research probe around the Sun and put it in the Sun-Earth L3 position back in the 1980s, I think just to prove the theory. Yep, far less fuel to stay in position than anywhere else, and it had to avoid a couple of asteroids that were hanging out there, too. Who'd a thunk it?

Anyway, the WW-moon L2 was someplace we could put a missile resupply dump that would not disturb the natives, and it would not have to be continuously powered. And, that also answered the earlier question about where to put the Sunday Punch, once we made it work.

Are you confused yet? If I mention L4 or L5, or the Womb or the Greeks, I'm talking about the outer system Beerat-Ale LaGrange points. If I mention L2, though, I'm talking about the Beer-moon L2 point, the point behind the moon that the natives on Beer could not see.

While we were building everything we could that didn't need manpower to use, we also worked on doctrine for various threats. As we had just demonstrated, we could handle any kind of small scouting force that tried to penetrate the inner system. The big issue was what to do if we got in over our heads.