Chapter 6: Month 82 - Our First Real Test

"Their guns on fire as we sail into hell" - Roger Whittacre

So that was about it for awhile. We were building a bunch of things at the shipyard, we were terraforming one of Ale's moons to be a liberty port, and we were digging into the Womb to make a safe place for our children.

The initial layout for the Womb was fairly simple, because we have to keep in mind that this is, first and foremost, a military outpost in an interstellar war. First we went straight in (or down) 30 kilometers. Then, while one digester kept going in/down, we had eight more start digging sideways tunnels.

Our plan was for this upper level to be defense stuff: A few bunkers protecting each tunnel, barracks, control rooms, armories, and so on. The Womb's defense commander would have his offices there. The entire system's defense commander (me, at the moment), however, would NOT have his offices there, as if anything interesting ever happened, whoever was here in the Womb would be pretty much isolated from the rest of the system until it was over, since we wanted the place to stay hidden. The guy actively managing the system's defenses needed to be out where he could see and affect the action.

The second level, 5 kilometers farther down, would be management. That's where the courthouse, mayor's office, and the tax collector's office would be if this was a real town. Again, this was where the Womb's director, sheriff, or whatever he ended up being called would have his office, but the System Governor, when we got around to having one, would probably have his palace somewhere else. That would be his call, when we got one.

Below them would be residential tunnels. We only spaced them two kilometers apart. For some reason, saying we have "two kilometers of vertical separation" doesn't sound like very much to me, but if you say "the next level is more than a mile below you" that sounds pretty far away. The idea was that you could bore out these side tunnels maybe 20 meters wide, then every fifty meters on each side you could bore out a 15x30 meter "room". Then, you could bring a normal habitat pod in and set it up for immediate use, or you could bring in a pod seed and let it grow in place. Either way, you had room for 40 families every kilometer.

Install a grav grid and all the normal services, and each tunnel became an instant neighborhood. Tunnel 10 kilometers and you had a small town of 400 houses. Stay with the 8-radial-tunnels plan, and we were up past 3000 houses on each level. We had just under 3500 volunteers in the whole expedition.

Okay, we've got the room, we can spread out some. Designate "Tunnel 1" on each level for industrial stuff like power plants, air systems, and factories, then the opposite #5 for public service stuff like constable stations, nurseries, schools, stadiums, pools, and retail shops, then #3 and #7 for farms, ranches, and large-scale gardens, and we could still have 1600 families in the four tunnels left, letting us house everyone we had with only three levels of residences.

Each level would have a huge landing around the central shaft for people to walk from one tunnel to another. We also insisted that there be a long ramp circling the central shaft so that if we lost power for some reason people could walk out. Building this stuff would cost us nothing except the time used to build the machine that would do the actual work.

But, you are just digging holes in a big piece of metal, right, Grampa Tom? you say. Where does all that metal go, Grampa Tom, you ask? That's easy. Some of it got run through the orbital constructors to build more machinery. Most of it, though, got sent to Barton Yard over at Ale, to be used as armor. It's free and our power plants can move the mass, so everything we build is going to have a thick layer of steel as armor. It's not like any of our warships were intended for landing, anyway. They stay out in space where all we have to deal with is the inertia from the mass.

If we wanted bigger "towns" we could always go farther out than 10 klicks. To make sure that we had no trouble no matter how large a tunnel got, we thought that we should offset each level so that the tunnels weren't right above or below the next level's tunnels. And, since we were putting grav grids everywhere, we could keep going down as far as we wanted. Transporter pads in convenient places would make getting around fairly easy. If we went down so far that we came out the other side, well, we could do the same thing anywhere else in the Womb. It would be a long time before we ran out of space.

These tunnels would start out pretty bare, but as we built up our infrastructure we would have more and more equipment available for the neighborhoods to use. The tunnel would get wider and higher, and every so often we would have to push the pods back up against the new wall. With enough room and light, the access tunnel itself would end up as a park, with trees, grass, gardens, walkways, bike paths, and anything else the inhabitants wanted.

Eventually, each residence would be much more like a regular house, with the original pod somewhere in the middle or the back. It would continue to manage the house, and it could also serve as an emergency safe room if there was any kind of civil disaster. Turn the grav-grid off and give it some thrusters -which it could grow itself if needed- and it could even cut itself loose and serve as an escape capsule.

As long as everyone didn't all want the same things, each neighborhood could be different. And, if Sally wanted flowers out front but June her neighbor was allergic to daffodils, Sally could move down to level 5 / tunnel 6 which was full of gardeners, or June could have her house moved to L5/T2, on the same level but across the main access shaft from T6, where there were a lot of people with sensitivities and we kept the air a lot cleaner for them.

I figured it wouldn't be too many years before the Civil Service had full-time positions for "lawnmower" and "dogcatcher", and public walkways would have hand-made signs with "Have you seen my parakeet" messages and holograms showing birdy flying around.

We spent awhile arguing about who should go where. All the Navy on one level, Marines on another? No, mix the levels, but keep them segregated by tunnel? Random mix, assigned by AI? There was no "right" answer there. Personally I wanted a mix but the truth was that, for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of our people were all going to be Navy.

Occasionally, people would ask me "Where should we put <X>" where <X> was usually something that I knew nothing about but since I was in charge they felt obligated to ask me for my opinion. I tried to be honest, as in "I'm not sure. What do you think?" which allowed them to get their way with my blessing. Sometimes we had to have conferences so that we all got to hear all sides of whatever the argument was about.

One important question, of course, was "We are all here for the Beer, right? Where do we put our brewery?" I still didn't have the One True Answer, but I felt pretty strongly that we shouldn't have a single official government-approved brewery. We would end up with something like Budweiser, and we'd all be killing each other in shame within a few years. Instead, I wanted each level to have their own micro-brewery, maybe in Tunnel 5, and if any of them were successful enough to need to expand, they could build a bigger one across the hole in Tunnel 1 with all the other industrial stuff and ship the bottles wherever they wanted.

I'd had a couple of discussions with the AIs about alcohol, I'm sure everyone did. I was pretty sure that they weren't telling me the whole story about why replicator-produced alcohol was always so bad. We had finally agreed on a truce of sorts. If alcohol was so important to us that we were willing to go to all the trouble of making it ourselves without resort to replicators, then they wouldn't do anything to ruin it. Any ruining would be done by the brewers.

Not that they ever let themselves get talked into a corner bad enough that they had to admit ruining the replicator stuff. The taste and aroma are products of complicated interactions between complex hydrocarbons yadda yadda yadda yeah yeah yeah yeah you don't have any trouble fixing the most complex food item we can think of, but you can't make a simple martini? We knew they were lying out their electronic asses, but as long as they were smarter and faster than us, we probably would never be able to prove it.

Anyway, THAT decision got microbreweries under construction in every level from 3 on down just as soon as Tunnel 5 was certified safe for occupation. Every T-5 got a "family restaurant and pub" where people could congregate outside of their homes, and every pub was working on trying to make a drinkable brew. We held off on decisions about distilleries for then, beyond the normal "if we find one we're smashing it", and wine was going to stay just a pipe-dream until we had real farmland we could devote to vinyards. Houston, I think we have found a basis for real commercial trade between Earth and her colonies.

Meanwhile, humans like to drink. I think that every human culture used alcohol. Some wisely, some perhaps not so wisely. I didn't claim to be better at that than anyone else, but I wanted my people to be able to blow off some steam when they got a chance. I browbeat the AIs into "recalibrating" one replicator on Hotel to put out a one liter glass bottle filled with something certified to be laboratory-grade ethanol, 99% C2H5OH, with 1% H2O and absolutely no other contaminants. I allowed the AIs to save face by telling them that we understood that this special "recalibrated" replicator couldn't safely be used for any other purpose.

As we worked it out, that special "recalibrated" replicator had strict user controls. It would only work if Barton Resort's Master Bartender was standing in front of it to receive the bottle, and that position was formally appointed by the Resort Director, so some drunk bozo couldn't just kill the bartender and tell the replicator "Okay, I'm the bartender now, so gimme some hootch!"

It also had two separate volume limits. With no "paying customers" -meaning Confederacy military servicemen and women- present at the bar, it would produce four bottles a day. That was so that the various staff could have a little if they wanted, but it was officially so that the bartenders could practice and learn how to make good mixed drinks. It also let them collect a small stock so they could ship some to other bars, so that this didn't have to remain the only bar on the entire planet (or moon, or whatever you wanted to call it). We did prohibit alcohol transport off Hotel until we had seen how it worked out.

It was amazing how many of our people had worked as a bartender, or as a waitress in a bar, or had simply spent so much time in a bar that they knew how to mix their favorite drinks.

The other volume limit was "none as long as it's being used". If there was a serviceman or woman present and conscious, the replicator would make alcohol as long as anyone wanted some. The instant the last Supply Clerk or Gunnery Sergeant in the bar passed out, or decided to stop drinking for any other reason, the replicator shut down.

We were careful to completely ignore any questions about storage or transport, other than the "none off-planet" rule. With only one replicator in the whole system making alcohol, we figured it would be a long time before the black market started causing trouble. Hopefully we would have seven competing breweries long before then.

The staff on Hotel had other replicators, of course, and they set one up to provide labels for their liquor bottles. The first time I ever saw one, it had a well-presented label that said "Barton Reserve Panther Piss". Don't ask me, I wasn't there when it happened. If I had been, I would have pushed for "Kickapoo Joy Juice".

Tina, Bill, and Woomie (yeah, that's what they were calling the Womb's AI) held a lottery for the first residential address, L3/T2 #1. It was won by one of our passengers, a young man who had been extracted with his two concubines and a 5 year old girl and shoved in one of our ferry pods just before we left. He had volunteered for the Navy to be a starship engineer, and was fine with wherever we put him. For now he was learning how to supervise fusion plants with the ones we were installing in the Womb as examples, and his work really was right around the corner from his new address.

When he got around to me at the ceremonial handing over of the address marker, he asked me when his second concubine should be here, as she was his sister and he worried about her. All I could tell him was that she should either be on Hillary, which we should see again in a month or so, or on Beebe, which would bring the rest of our people a couple of weeks after that.

Also, with that milestone -the assignment of the Womb's first residence- we formally changed our name from "Beerat Denial Force" to "Beerat Defense Force". Because, our focus could change from merely keeping the Sa'arm out to protecting our own colony.

In hindsight, those were calm, easy summer days. We were slowly, methodically building up our combat power, where that "slowly" was only forced by our having to develop each step. I was spending enough time at Barton Yard that I sent for the girls, and Barton gave us a nice 'penthouse condo' in the Imperial.

While Kenya and the others were being taken apart and put back together, the three "Junior Hero" ships were finished and mated with their gun assemblies. Since we weren't planning to build any more, we named them after three American folk heros: Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and John Henry. There was some argument about that last, because John Henry was a real guy, an African-American freed slave who was the biggest man on the rails in the 1870s, and Johnny Appleseed was at least based on a real guy. Paul Bunyan was the only one who was made up out of whole cloth.

For offense, all they had was the rail gun itself. For defense, we gave them our now-standard dual shield system, a pair of the Patrician's CIWS railgun mounts, and we also installed a pair of canister launchers like the Raptors had.

We were thinking that the ships weren't very maneuverable and couldn't very well avoid return fire. So, if there was more than one target, they should stop accelerating, fire at one target, and then launch a couple of sand canisters set to spread out immediately. The sand cloud would travel along the line between them and their targets and hopefully disrupt any missile, rocket, laser, or beam weapons coming back up that track towards them.

As long as they didn't maneuver, the sand cloud would stay between them and their enemies. When they were ready to fire again (hopefully at a different target), they would accelerate to one side to clear the cloud, stop accelerating, shoot again, and again hide behind a new cloud of sand. If all went as planned, the CIWS would never get used. It was only there in case a missile came around from one side and missed the cloud.

Has anyone noticed yet that this was classical WW1/WW2 submarine torpedo-attack tactics transposed onto new platforms and weapons? I thought so.

The gun itself was great. We listed its "effective range" as 600 Km, as we figured that no matter how maneuverable a target was, our fire control system could place a slug in something ship-sized out to at least that far. Of course, if a target was larger, or less maneuverable, then we could probably tag it from much farther out. And, all of our test shots on Bull's Eye made it pretty clear that anything that got tagged would be out of the fight.

The only drawback was the ship itself. This trial design was a "casemate ironclad", and any sailor from either side of the War of Northern Aggression would be comfortable with how to fight the ship. They would need help learning the details, and navigation might be a bit hazy, but how to use the ship in a fight would be obvious to them. The mount itself, and the two canister launchers on either side of it, were all fixed mounts firing along the ship's axis, while the two CIWS mounts were farther back and set to cover the top and bottom hemispheres.

Just like the Heros, we could only aim the gun by aiming the ship. The ship itself was a modified back half of a Shiro, with the engineering plant (propulsion, power generation, hyperdrive, and environmental plant) pretty much straight off a Shiro but only one main engine instead of the Shiro's two. We went ahead and gave it the Shiro's sensor/comm system and put all the crew spaces in the cylinder surrounding the gun, pretty much the same way as the Heros were set up.

The biggest difference from a Hero besides size was the ability to jettison the mount if the pulse capacitor charging system started to ring. From what we could tell, that problem had killed a couple of Heros that otherwise would have survived the battle that they died in.

Jettisoning the mount turned out to be absurdly simple, too. Install a set of solenoid rings in the cylinder around the mount, and if you unlocked the mount and energized those rings the mount would launch itself instead of a slug. The jettisoning set of rings didn't even have to be engineered for repeat use; if the ship came back after losing its main gun those rings would get replaced when we installed the new gun, too.

We all laughed at that, because if you popped out of hyperspace a mile away from a Sa'arm Conquest Sphere, you would do it a lot more damage with a 130 tonne projectile moving at .5kps than you would with a hundred-kilo slug going 100 kps. Dumping the mount that way would also help accelerate what was left of the ship the other way, too, which we all considered to be a Good Thing, if you happened to find yourself a mile away from a Conquest Sphere.

We kept manning as small as possible, with only 27 volunteers assigned. Actual number of souls onboard was twice that, of course, because the crew got to take one concubine each. We stationed Paul Bunyan at the WW-moon L2 point, Johnny Appleseed at the Womb, and John Henry all alone at Ale's L5 (Greek, or trailing Trojan) point.

Since we didn't know how long we had to prepare, we also gave the baby-hero testbed/tug our dual combat shields, a sand canister launcher, and a CIWS mount, declared it to be a local-space warship, and left it at Ale itself as the Barton Yard watchdog. Okay, that's my fault, me and my big mouth. They were calling it the "I Have a Big Dick" and there wasn't much I could do about it without looking petty and stupid. Stupider.

In fact, we were so happy about those casemate ironclad refugees from the Civil War that we thought seriously about just building as many as we could. However, wiser heads prevailed and we stopped at the three we had built and concentrated on upgrading all the destroyers with the baby-hero guns while we continued our development of the next step, a "Monitor".

This would be a similar ship to these, but with the main gun in a trainable mount so that the ship didn't have to stop maneuvering and point at the target before it could shoot. The key to success here was that the ship was going to have to be far more massive if it was going to have to take the shock of an off-axis full-power shot without any damage. So, rather than wait until we had the yard space, we built three more medium-sized frames and started building an Asian-sized ship in each, but with two huge holes in the middle.

We put the top one farther forward and the bottom one farther aft. Why? Mostly because we flipped a coin, but partly because we figured that by human nature we are more likely to use the top one if we only need one shot, and the one farther forward will send its impulse closer to the center of the ship's mass if it is fired forward. Of course, if we are shooting behind us, then we'll want to use the bottom gun because again that will send the impulse through the center of the ship's mass.

We had six construction frames that were100 meters long and could handle ships that were up to50 meters wide. We had six Africas that we wanted to give a longer-range punch to, as well as six Asians. That seemed obvious to us; as soon as each frame became available when they finished building the Folk-Hero guns and ships, we took an Africa off the line and put it in the frame. We didn't think that we were losing much firepower if we got surprised with all six down, and the sooner we got them upgraded and back in formation the better off we would all be.

When we got Kenya back we ran her through a bunch of tests, but everything seemed to be fine. The AIs expected that, of course. For these mounts, we had the whole assembly able to rotate in the "X" axis, like the individual guns could in a traditional turret. In other words, the assembly could change the aim-point's elevation. It couldn't rotate in the "Z" axis like a true turret could, but we were hoping that this wouldn't be too much of a problem. After all, the ship was in space, not floating on water, and the ship itself could roll on its centerline (or "Y" axis). No matter where an enemy was, the ship could roll until the mount could elevate to get on target.

Okay, the gun couldn't fire backwards. We gave it clearance to fire about 115 degrees from dead ahead, both 'above' and below', and verified that the gun worked properly with undersized slugs. We didn't try full-weight slugs at full power any further off than about 12 degrees, as the whole ship was shuddering already.

We set the software stops to 10 degrees up or down, with the understanding that, if necessary, they ship could fire past that, but the farther off center it was, the harder it would be on the ship. Basically, don't do that unless you have even lost your stationkeeping jets and cannot spin the ship to face your enemy. You are probably going to break something important.

When we were satisfied that everything was good, we gave her back to Taffy-1 and grabbed the first Asian. The procedure was slightly different, but still pretty routine by now. The rest of the Africas came out somewhat faster than the first one had, and also got a much shorter test period, mostly just to make sure that everything was working as it was supposed to. As each Africa returned to her parent squadron we pulled an Asian from that squadron and parked it in the just-vacated frame for its own upgrade.

Manning for each ship didn't change at all. Manning should go down with the simpler weapons fit, but until we had more new construction we had more crew than ships so there wasn't any point in pulling men off these ships. Actually, for training we were inching back up again towards the double crews, just to give all of our recent pickups something to do.

We ended up with a kind of boneyard of extra parts, 12 twin disruptor turrets, basically complete weapons systems if you gave it fire control and power, and 12 twin particle beam turrets and associated beam generators which were useless without being connected but could still be used as spare parts or even as handy weaponry for a new ship.

Bill spent much of his free time trying to figure out how to use them as fixed mounts for system defense. He set some of them up around the shipyard and used anyone who wanted to be Marines to man them as fixed fortifications. If nothing else, it's good training. The right answer would be to ring Beer with huge orbital fortresses, but until something broke with the Beer the AIs wouldn't allow it. I expect Bill also spent much of his free time trying to figure out how to get the Beer involved so that he didn't have to plan this fight with one hand tied down.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!

We were about halfway through upgrading the Asians when we got another visit. We had about a third of our sensor platform network set up; of course we started on the side closest to our friendly neighborhood Sa'arm and we got two message torpedos from separate platforms telling us of a hyperspace trail coming at us from that direction. That gave us about half an hour of warning -do NOT ask me how this can possibly work as I never understood it myself- to get everyone moving.

Well, we don't know where we are moving to, but if nothing else it lets us make sure everyone is awake. It also lets me wonder what happened to Brownson and Cowell, the two corvettes we sent to give us fair warning about this stuff. Whoever lives through this needs to send someone looking for them.

Taffy 1 was still at the shipyard figuring out how to best use our upgraded Africas and Taffy 2 was hanging around near Pils where they could move to cover Beer but weren't so close as to upset the AIs. Both Task Forces were effectively identical, two cruisers, three Africas-with-big-guns, two Shiros, a Patrician, and no Asians at all. No chance of getting them, either, they were all ripped apart. We wouldn't get the first one, the Malaysia, back for another week or so. If the shipyard gets hit, they are all just sitting ducks. Okay, Taffy-1 had "I Have a Big Dick" under Jennifer's control as long as they were at Ale, and Taffy-2 still had Brennan, so they weren't quite identical.

I let Bill's fixed defenses stay put and lie doggo, but had everyone else working at the yard get to Barton as quickly as possible -we could rebuild our shipyard a lot easier than we could replace the people themselves- and told him to run and hide as soon has he had everyone.

I took a shuttle to Harpy. No real thought required, we are still just running down our pre-planned decision trees and checking off boxes. If whoever it is is small enough for the fixed guns to have a chance with, yes come up and fight. If whoever it is is too big to have a chance against, pretend you aren't there and we'll try again next time. We told Big Dick to pretend to be a harmless bump in Ale's ring until he thought he had a good shot.

The next message torpedo told us who it was. No, they aren't friendlies. 3 ships, a Volumna and two Vervactors. I'd never personally met either class, but we'd seen everything Fleet Intel had on them and we'd viewed every AAR that had them in the fight. They looked like a flying saucer flanked by two huge bullets.

A Volumna was huge, something like 600 meters across, although only 200 meters or so high, and it was hard to remember that it was their smallest colony ship, the one they sent when they weren't expecting much trouble. All we knew about armament was that it had beam weapons like their scouts, and the official estimate on quantity was "a lot".

A Vervactor was tiny in comparison, only some 200 meters long. It was roughly the same size as our Raptors, just longer and thinner, which made it two or three times the size of everything else we had. Similarly, our best info on how it was armed was the same "a lot of beam weapons".

This was my first hard on-the-spot decision. Do I save my men's lives today by killing these Dickheads as fast as we can, or do I save more lives in the future, by trolling them in and letting us see what they can do so we can be better at killing them in the future?

The decision tree has to pause until we know more. Meanwhile, I sent a couple messages. The first was to Bill, safe in the Womb: "General Atsuke, we may lose some people today. If I happen to be one of them, you will get to sit in my office when it gets completed. You already know that this isn't a ground-pounder campaign, it's going to stay Naval unless we lose. Listen to Tina about the people, and listen to your Captains about the ships. Admiral Williams out."

The next one was to the girls, safe on Barton. "Hannah, Monique, we have incoming and we didn't get any warning. We are going to have to scramble to get in position to stop them, and it's almost a fair fight. We won't get to surprise them this time, and we're going to lose some ships. I'll try real hard to come home, but I'm on Harpy and she's going to be a prime target. I love you both. Tom out."

Tina, back in the Womb with Bill. "Tina, honey, congratulations. I am hereby exercising my authority as System Commander to promote you to Sub-Decurion. You are likely to soon have a whole mess of widows and orphans on your hands. Talk to Bill when you get a chance, he'll fill you in. If I don't make it back tell Hector to do what he thinks is right."

After that I just sat in the shuttle, taking reports. One message was from Barton, who wanted to cancel one of my orders.

<Admiral, we can get the six destroyers powered up and moving before the enemy can reach us here. If the crew stays suited we can leave the environmental systems down and concentrate on propulsion. Once the ships are moving they can bring up everything else. They are still viable warships, with far greater capabilities in every regard than your scouts. And, they are still faster than any of the enemy ships.>

"Does Deepak concur?"

<It was his suggestion.>

"Do it. Save those ships if you can." Deepak was right, even with broken noses they were still Asian-class destroyers, and the six of them carried a major part of our total firepower. One more week. That's all we needed to get the first three back. One more goddam week.