Chapter 61

Dear Willow and family,

There are some that whisper that the Governor is over paranoid, I'm not sure myself. Getting actual farms up and running, getting us away from power that is managed by the AI's seems to me to be a good thing. Even with a lot of the concubines being pregnant there are lots of idle hands getting up to lots of mischief. Not only that but concubines cannot seem to be satisfied with having all of their physical needs met. No one here is without a house, or clothes (though they are very much optional) or most important, clean water and nutritious food. Sure the food from the replicator tastes artificial to me, but I seem to be in the minority. Yet I've seen bloody brawls over something as small as a pair of thong underwear. And don't even get me started on all the various fights over who is the favorite concubine! It's enough to make me snatch my head bald!

I find that as often as not I'm the jailor of some concubine who has decided that the best way to become the favorite concubine in her master's harem is to murder her rivals. Thankfully there aren't a lot of weapons handy. But bats and golf clubs work as well as knives and guns. Heck even a bar of soap in a sock (one concubine I have to decide whether to recycle or to put on punishment detail got a pattern for both of them and nearly beat her sister concubine to death) makes a wicked weapon. So as much as possible the Governor is passing out rewards for working on the farms. And he has several domes that were intended as automated mines. Now they have a lot of laborers in them. What we'll have available for rewards is a question we haven't answered. One thing is that 'real' food, and restaurants are on the list as well as what amounts to a water park.

Some of those were the ideas of industrious concubines who wanted something to do, or who missed having restaurants. I can tell you this: all the Civil Service Officers are glad to have them doing things like that. Presently our house is working on expanding our vegetable garden so that we will have produce to exchange for service. Not that Marissa and I don't have an account that is quite full of credits because we both work, and we both hold Confederacy wide patents. But in keeping with the feeling of the Governor we'd just as soon be selfsufficient. Maybe we don't need to do that but something about living at the bottom of the ocean makes you realize how little control you have of your life. If the power failed (and while all the temblors we've had so far are just growlers why imagine that they couldn't be worse?) most of us would die in an instant. We're working on creating double and triple redundancy for critical systems. Also we're working on putting in physical domes rather than depending on the force shields. That still leaves the problem of keeping fresh air and dealing with our waste if power fails. We've convinced the planetary AI to do two things to help with that. The Confederacy uses small scale LENRs for things like pods and space stations that are too small to use a full scale fusion plant, Usually when a pod is set down the LENR is shut down and its components used in expanding the pod when the pod is connected to the colony power and AI. We've either had ours rebuilt or not absorbed in the case of anyone new so that hopefully every pod will maintain its own power. With my shop and our garden we could almost use a fusion reactor, I use a lot of power running computer simulations and creating mockups.

I've modified the drones that I made and suggested to you. If you can feed a position or even a general direction for the Sa'arm they'll go to ground and take on a charge from the sun then continue on the heading you gave them if they were to far away to reach them on the initial launch. They do have a small amount of capacity to receive new orders so if they go to ground and ping you or any other tank in the area they could take off in a totally new direction when they are charged again. Their guidance systems are good enough that they avoid any of the obstacles on the test range here. Of course we haven't been able to test them in a jungle yet ... And we would appreciate them being tested in a jungle environment. I've looked at your tank and there are several (or should be) spaces that could be used as linear magazines for these flying bomblets. I'm including technical drawings for your motor platoon...

Only don't think of them as flying in the sense that they get very high. I'm sending you a bit of 'film' of one flying six inches off the ground through our test maze, including as you can see random moves in every direction except down when they reach the six inch minimum altitude unless they're going to ground. By the way if you look in the corner of the frames you can see that we're using high speed equipment to capture these images because it will give you a speed at which these drones are traveling. All of that of course may be moot ... But I'm including a pattern for one that will create a fairly large amount of smoke when it is 'killed' (or when it goes off... ) so shooting it down (if the Sa'arm can do that) won't help that much. In fact we hope that the smoke will help shield the other bombs that are in the area from the ground watchers.