Chapter 16 - Training and Testing

When we were done we held a quick conference, the Admiral, the two COs, and myself. We'd done what we had come out to do. We had proven that we could 'fly' and navigate in hyperspace, we had proven that we could use the weapons, and we had found a place for our Advanced Combat course. It was time to go back to Sol System -which the AIs wanted to call "Earthat"- and get back to getting my ship ready to commission.

For the future, we would set up another training center here. The weapons use and tactics sections of the commissioning workups would all be done here at Barnard's Star. We'd put together a training syllabus and a live-weapons course, and once there was a school-house station to live and work in Admiral Sykes would move out here. Someone else could supervise the overhaul process at Jupiter Station, once we had the bugs worked out and were just sending the ships through the pipeline.

I had spent all my attention on the big picture, making sure that we could safely use these starships. That was necessary, but it wasn't sufficient. It was painfully clear that I needed to address the other side of the coin, whether we could use them effectively as warships. There were a couple of Important Questions that I needed answers to as fast as possible.

As soon as Appleby Castle was docked at the Northside Training Hub I took the transporter back to Jupiter Station, where Ellen was waiting for me. I even told Ellen that I had an emergency to deal with and couldn't go with her to celebrate my return yet. While I waited for Admiral Sykes we had a good talk about what she had been doing while I was gone.

She said that she had been asked by some of the other women why we were getting so much better quarters, and that she had explained that she was pregnant, and the AIs had accepted my agreement to support her as my concubine and claim her children as mine. When they had asked the AIs what that meant it had caused a ruckus as they all went to the men they had hooked up with to demand the same status. Did I mention that not all those negotiations went well? There were some men sleeping alone and some women who were going back to Earth because of that.

When Admiral Sykes popped out of the pad for Bere Castle, I asked him if, in an hour or so, he could give me a few minutes. I thought we had a problem but I wanted to get all my ducks in a row before I made a fuss. Back at Barnard's Star when we were shooting up all those poor defenseless asteroids I had asked the AI about how the weapons worked, and I really hadn't liked the answers.

"Wait, you mean that this 'Plasma Torpedo' thing isn't really material?"

<It is material. However, it is not a solid device as you think of torpedos. It is an energy field that contains an amount of matter in a plasma state.>

"And, the beam projectors send out a beam of particles, right?"

<Correct>

"What do you have that launches, or shoots, or projects, or whatever verb you want, a device that exists in the solid state of matter?"

<Devices that project solids are not allowed.>

"Wha... What? Why not?"

<A device to project solids is permitted if the engineering can guarantee that it is accepted by the target. Many Confederacy systems use such devices to deliver cargo between orbits. However, for safety reasons a device that projects solids to a target that may not accept it is not permitted.>

"I frankly have no idea what you are talking about."

<Such a weapon would be permitted if we could ensure both contact with the Sa'arm ship, and the complete destruction of the projected solid during or after contact. If either condition fails, we are left with a high-speed solid that will eventually impact another body. For safety, this cannot be permitted.>

"....So you are saying that, because of future safety concerns, an entire class of effective weaponry is disallowed."

<Correct.>

"Mother fuck me."

<I do not understand.>

"That's okay, you did it anyway."

It didn't take long for Allie to straighten me out. As soon as I was sure it wasn't just a problem with these old ships but rather a problem with the entire Confederacy, I called the Admiral to let him know I was on my way. When I got there I dumped the whole thing on him.

"Admiral, I can't see any way around it. I have talked to the AIs on four different ships -although I suspect they talk to each other enough that just one was enough- and they are united in this. Projectile weapons are outlawed until we guarantee that they will never miss and that they will be completely destroyed in the impact. They don't want misses hanging around for the future."

"I agree, Captain, that's bullshit. They want us to fight a war that will kill them all if we lose, and they worry about future safety? No, that's not bullshit, that's horse shit. Okay, I'll take this upstairs."

I felt a lot better about that. It was a serious problem, but I wasn't the only one who recognized it. I could go back to dealing with my own ship and my own private life. Using Ellen to test the bed in our new "Accompanied Officer Quarters" looked like my next priority.

"...And that's about it. We don't worry much about misses here on Earth because everything eventually falls to the ground. The Confederacy takes the long view and prohibits any device that might leave an uncontrolled projectile loose in space. Thank you for attending this presentation."

"Professor Suarez here, Admiral. If I was a pacifist I would bring up all the unexploded ordnance that kill our children every year in old battlefields all over the world, but it seems obvious that, in a war of extinction, military expedience must take precedence over future concerns. If you don't allow that, you risk becoming the loser in the contest and there is no future. Surely the AIs see that."

"Professor, I've talked to the AIs about this issue myself. They agree that if we don't win this war the galaxy will, eventually, contain only Sa'arm. However, they cannot change their core values. They are, in the end, computers with fancy programming and there are things they cannot do. We cannot fight this war in a way that endangers the future Confederacy. If there is one."

"Okay, we are all busy people. Let's all take this latest problem back to our staffs and ask them W-T-F. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. Admiral, thank you for your clear presentation of the problem."

A few days later I got a message from Admiral Sykes to listen to a call he had just received. For some reason, he sounded happy. As my daughter would have said, sure, whatever. The AI showed it up against one wall, the Admiral and someone else like a split TV screen.

"Admiral Sykes."

"Thank you for taking my call, Admiral. This is Professor Suarez, somewhere in the Moon. One of my crazies has an idea. If we can guarantee that any misses cause no trouble, will the AIs allow projectile weapons?"

"How could you do that?"

"We are looking at their nanotechnology as used in industrial construction. What if we put a few of their nanites on every projectile, with orders to disassemble the projectile to atomic dust after some time elapsed? Do the AIs have any time-frame requirements?"

This was probably the first time I had seen Admiral Sykes smile in several weeks. "I will have one of my people find out right now. I'll let you know as soon as I get an answer back. If it works, we may have to erect a statue to your crazy."

"Dr. Sanjib is a Jain and I don't think he'd want that, but if it helps, sure. I'll tell my secretary to pass your call in to me immediately."

"Number 12, I have a theory question."

<We will try to answer it.>

"Our understanding of your stance against projectile weapons is that this is based completely on concerns about the future if a projectile misses the target and is left to continue on its path until it hits something else, not a military target."

<That is correct. Eventually, any object not in a stable orbit will hit something and damage or destroy it. This is an avoidable danger.>

"I am told that you have a class of industrial nanites that disassemble materials for later use as raw materials for replicators. Can these nanites be programmed to wait a certain period of time before starting to work?"

<Yes, they can be programmed to wait any reasonable time, up to several thousand of your years.>

"Can these nanites be constructed to survive the acceleration stresses of a projectile launch?"

<That should be within their design parameters.>

"Then, if we put some of those nanites inside every projectile, and set them to disassemble the projectile after a reasonable time like 24 hours after launch, would this satisfy your safety requirements for projectile weapons?"

<Please wait.... We have considered this. This plan appears to be within the capabilities of our nanites. Depending upon size and materials, some projectiles may take longer to disassemble than others. What is the largest projectile you will want to use?>

"I cannot answer that. Search our history archives for the biggest bomb we ever made. That was built in a gravity field for use on a planet. Assume that our spaceships will be launching larger projectiles in the form of missiles and torpedos."

<I find several references to large bombs used by your Royal Air Force to destroy submarine facilities during your last major war. Those bombs massed 10,000 of your kilograms. Our disassembly nanites would need several hours to disassemble such a device. We will warn the Confederacy to stay away from any system that has seen projectile weapon use within one hundred and forty-four times that time span, at least forty of your days.>

"You do that. Do you have any other objections to us building weapons that can help us win this war?"

<We have objections to the war, but we recognize that we have it and would like to, as you would put it, 'win'. With the caveat that every projectile must contain these nanites, we will withdraw our objections to projectile weapons.>

"Thank you. Now we can get back to work."

We had teams of people on Earth, behind the Moon, in the Moon at the Moonbase, out at Jupiter Station, basically everywhere possible trying to either develop new weapons using Confederacy technology, or alternately to use Confed tech to improve the weapons we already had. Aside from lasers, every single weapon we came up with had foundered on that idiotic principle. Nothing that projects solids. No guns, no missiles or torpedos, I'm sure that some wit asked about crossbows and I'm sure the answer was "no".

As soon as the floodgates were opened we were deluged with ideas for weapons. Every crazy who knew about the war had at least four insane ideas. The problem was, it's only stupid if it doesn't work, and we had no idea yet what actually worked in combat and what only worked in the laboratory.

It didn't take the brains too long to decide not to use chemically-powered projectiles. The infrastructure behind sending a bullet downrange was far higher for guns than it was for some other technologies.

Here, we were getting into things that I just wasn't an expert in. I knew that the US Navy had started to move to "Rail Guns" as a direct-fire weapon just a few years after I had retired. In reality, the Navy had been trying for decades, but only recently had the technology to make it work been available. I knew that some people preferred "Coil Guns" as better in some way. However, I'd never worked with either one and frankly had no idea what the difference was until after I was recruited for this war and had to see what it took to get them installed on our ships. It boiled down to "rail guns are simpler and coil guns are more accurate".

If you have the materials, building a rail gun is easy. It doesn't even take any electronics or brains; just some special materials and a lot of electrical power. You just set up a pair of conductive rails that are parallel and open at one end. You put a projectile between them, and switch an obscene amount of current on between the rails.

The interaction of magnetic and electrostatic fields between the rails and the projectile with the short-circuit current spits the projectile out towards whatever the gap between the rails is aiming at. The only real difficulty besides the current draw is that at least part of all three of the components is consumed by the arcing. Even that first shot can't really be aimed well, since the rails change shape while they are consumed. As the physical rails change shape, the fields surrounding them change shape, too, preventing accurate prediction of where the projectile will go.

Earth had tried to use them for a hundred years because they were so simple, but we hadn't had the materials to make the rails stable enough to shoot accurately or to make the current they needed. Besides, the accuracy got worse with every shot as the rails became less and less straight. Confed tech helped that a lot, and we eventually ended up with one or two small railguns on just about every ship we inherited or built. Or more, in some cases.

Not as offensive weapons mind you, but as last-ditch defensive devices to shoot up missiles, torpedos, and plasma torpedos. They never worked that well against missiles or torpedos, because all they could do was shoot up the controlling brain, not blow them up or knock them off-course. At first we were worried about big warheads on missiles, but after a while the numbers started to sink in and we realized that any kind of missile would do more than enough damage just from the kinetic energy transfer from impact. Explosive warheads would only matter if they missed.

Any missile that was close enough to hit with a railgun was already so close that, if it was on an intercept course, the railgun wasn't going to make any difference. A railgun hit would help in the case of a near miss with a proximity nuclear warhead, though, by destroying the warhead before it went off.

The real reason for having the railguns was to shoot up nearby enemies like shuttles or space fighters and bombers. And Plasma Torpedos. Those things exploded immediately and harmlessly, if you hit them with anything at all while they were still a couple of kilometers out.

Anyway, we had no idea what weapons our enemies would have, but I felt a lot better about my Allington Castle when we installed two "Point Defense Lasers" just forward of the engineering spaces, one up and port, the other down and starboard. They were the Confed-tech version of the US Navy's venerable CIWS, that R2D2-looking thing you used to see on all our surface ships, and they got shortened to "PDLs" almost immediately.

We had added four mounting points, but we still didn't know what we were doing so we left the other two empty at first. The reason for going into all this was that the first concrete change that we saw from the "projectile prohibition" fiasco resolution was a railgun version of CIWS. It was the first project approved and completed and that finished trials with a usable weapon containing the nanite projectiles. By the time our first six ships were ready for trials, the opposite corners from the laser mounts held two "Point Defense Railguns", usually referred to as "PDRs".

The lasers had infinite range but limited damage, and fire control could be difficult since we had no method of determining true aim point unless it actually hit a target and we could detect damage, while the railgun slugs were easy to track but not that fast or accurate and could not really damage anything with a decent hull. Only time would tell which, if either, was actually helpful.

As soon as we got the second set of Castles, two of them got designated as our training ships for preliminary ship-handling exercises north of the rings and Appleby and Bere went back over to the south side to finish their overhauls. They weren't as far behind as one might expect, because an awful lot of the work could be done while they were still in service. Ripping out unneeded equipment, growing the new portside personnel hatch, a lot of stuff. Really, all of it could be done during down time between training cycles. Just more slowly than the other six ships.

Between various false starts and all the associated rework in the first six, those two delayed starts, and the two pulled from the second set of eight to act as trainers, we had a fairly smooth curve in status for the first 16 Castles. We would have a couple ready soon, then a couple more, and so on. We could keep pumping these things out one or two a week as long as the Confederacy delivered them. Faster, if we had to and we came up with crews for them.

We had pretty much established what we wanted to do with these overhauls. Actually, we were about done with the first couple before we had finalized the list of what we'd do. Rip out unneeded stuff. Consolidate the Fire Control consoles into the new larger CIC. Move what could be moved, to consolidate more space. Install bunks. Grow the two new access hatches. Install the Confederacy's newer "Nav Shield". Install new weapons. Get some kind of lifeboat.

That last item never happened. We never did, while I was on them, get a lifeboat. Lifeboats eventually happened, but it took a long time to shrink a shuttle down to where it would fit into that tiny space we made for it on the upper hull behind the armored compartment that held CIC. That was one of the reasons that, when we finally went out, we kept the ships paired whenever possible.

While we were finishing up with the first eight ships Admiral Sykes was back out at Barnard's Star setting up a combat course, including ship mockups for us to shoot at. Expensive, but it had to be done if we were to have any kind of live-fire training against realistic targets. There was a lot of angst over this. We were going to sacrifice a large fraction of our industrial output for nothing more than targets to be blown up.

We had a few videos of the enemy ships. Maybe someday we would have some idea of what we were facing, but for now the mockups were built to simulate our own ships. Hopefully we would never be shooting at our own ships, but it was all we had. Besides, it was a good way to familiarize ourselves with the kinds of damage we could expect from combat. Assuming our enemies had the same kinds of ships and weapons we had. We knew that was a totally bogus assumption, but we had to start somewhere.

One of the US military's mantras was "If you train like you want to fight, then you'll fight like you trained," meaning that the more realistic your training is the more valuable it will be when the real thing happens. Our military history is full of the results of a well-trained force coming up against one that wasn't as well trained. It's actually a very old concept. One of the old Roman authors wrote of the Legions that "Their practice is bloodless battle; their battles are bloody practices".

Being smart and fast and having good tools are all good things. You don't win by being smarter or faster or deadlier than the other guy, though. Those all help reduce your casualties, but unless you can win with one massive surprise blow, they aren't enough. You win by being tougher and readier, by being able to take a blow and come back still fighting against someone who thought that one blow would be enough and isn't ready for your return blow.

The main road into the big Navy base at Norfolk is named Taussig Boulevard. The reason for that name is that, when the US finally entered World War One, all the rest of the belligerents were extremely tired, exhausted really, but they all had several years of total war behind them and knew exactly what they were doing, while we were untried and untrusted.

Our first unit to show up across the Atlantic was an unescorted Destroyer squadron. Destroyers weren't very big back then. They were just starting to grow out of their initial role of "Torpedo Boat Destroyer", a small ship to screen the real warships from little boats with big torpedos, and they barely had the space to carry the fuel to cross the Atlantic.

The Royal Admiral in charge of the British port they reached had, I'm sure, been briefed on the need to treat the new kids with tenderness until they had been toughened up, and his greeting signal asked how long these tiny ships would need to refit after fighting their way across the North Atlantic before they could be thrown to the wolves.

Captain Taussig replied "We are ready now, sir."

End of fucking discussion. We don't want to be here, so let's get the damn job done and go home again. Europe had been fighting for three years. They were all tired, and we were ready. We didn't have the massed forces of either side, but we were ready to fight with what we had.

The other side collapsed and sued for peace within a year, very soon after the first US Army units made it to the front and demonstrated that they, too, were in fact completely ready for combat on any scale the German army wanted. Of course, that collapse led to a very one-sided peace agreement, but that wasn't our fault. That was the fault of self-important European politicians who wanted to punish Germany for a devastating war that Germany didn't even start, and they got what they deserved a generation later when Hitler took power. Hitler got taken down in his turn, too, but not until everyone involved was very, very sorry about the terms France had insisted upon in 1918.

Being ready with realistic training is a lesson that sometimes has to be relearned by every generation. 25 years after Destroyer Squadron 8 showed up at Queenstown, Ireland ready for combat operations, the first US Army units to face Rommel in the North African Desert got their asses handed to them at Kasserine Pass, and, well, everybody knows what happened at Pearl Harbor. We KNEW we were better than anyone else, and look what happened. It turned out to be a very good thing for the Allies that the USA was safe behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, where the Axis powers couldn't get to our farms, factories and shipyards. Because, for the first year or so we certainly weren't ready to defend ourselves, much less help our buddies fight.

Since then we've tried to keep our training realistic, and people who disrupt carefully-planned exercises with initiative get rewarded, not punished. If the planner got surprised by a junior officer's thinking, then maybe that senior officer doing the planning has been serving for long enough to retire. Both Wehrmacht officers before 1945 and Warsaw Pact officers after 1945 have observed that the biggest problem with fighting Americans is not that we have a sound combat doctrine, but rather that we train intelligent and well-educated officers to use their initiative, and see no need to insist that our people follow our doctrine....

Yes, we have documents that detail how things should be done on every possible subject from taking a shower to building a field-expedient bridge that can handle tanks, but the true "American Doctrine" is this: "Whatever works is 'good'. Whatever doesn't work is 'bad'." Everyone in NATO has their own way of doing things, but the US is the biggest member, and everyone accepts that we don't do the royalty and nobility thing very well. If you're wrong, we don't CARE what rank you hold or who your uncle is. You're WRONG.

The Cold War ended without World War Three because the Soviet Union never felt any confidence that they could defeat Europe plus the US. Europe, sure. With the US backing them up? Impossible to predict what those guys will do. And, for once in modern history, a war machine built for the sole purpose of global conquest was allowed to collapse without having been used. Of course avoiding a total world war with nuclear weapons was a good thing, but it also meant that the US Navy hasn't fought a major war in well over a half-century. What do we really know?

Admiral Sykes was a US Navy Admiral charged with preparing a bunch of alien ships for an interstellar war. That was the only thing that mattered to him, getting the best ships and the best-prepared crews he could produce, as quickly as possible. However, since we didn't start out by knowing what path led to that, several times we had to backtrack on our overhauls when we changed our minds. Life as his guinea pigs wasn't as restful as, perhaps, those to come after us after we knew what we were doing.

One object of the Advanced/Combat course, as I said, was to see how effective our weapons were against real ships, and that meant either building real ships to use as targets or sacrificing some of the few ships we had to provide real damage assessments. So, we built target drones. They were equipped with their own fusion plant and engines, plus a Nav Shield and three low-power signaling lasers for weapons. They were, in almost every respect, complete starships. About the only things they didn't have were a hyperdrive, real weapons, a crew or an AI. They were going to be remotely controlled from the station. The AIs could do that in real-time, to make the ships act as if they were manned.

The fourth large "Industrial" replicator that those Darjee freighters built for us wasn't at Jupiter Station; it was out at Barnard's Star. We consoled each other with the promise that, once the training center had everything it needed, as long as it stayed ahead of the "consumption rate" of those target drones, it could use any excess capacity to build more of these Castle ships for us. None of us really understood the vast scale of an interstellar war, but we knew that we would need hundreds -if not thousands- of ships before we were done. The hundred or so that the Confederacy was giving us were just a starting set to allow us to join the game.

We ended up with 44 men onboard when we set out for our own trials and combat readiness certification. There were 6 'critical' consoles that we would keep manned at all times, plus another 22 'noncritical' consoles we would man in combat or at other times we wanted to make sure every base was covered. That gave us 28 acceleration couches in various places.

The four in CIC were all in use, with whoever was OOD at the Command console, the helmsman at the Helm, and the other two splitting duty as navigation, sensors, communications, and environmental monitoring as needed. Actually just about any console could do any job, but most of them were designated to specific tasks.

For normal boring underway, the only other two consoles that we kept manned at all times were the main control consoles in the ECR, the main Engineering Control Room, and in DC, the Damage Control center, which was a new compartment we'd put together amidships out of a couple of storerooms.

DC was responsible for continuously monitoring the health of the whole ship, and if anything went wrong giving the OOD timely, accurate, and useful information and suggestions for bypassing the failure, and then, when appropriate, repairing the failure. With a person in that acceleration couch at all times, there was no need to keep anyone at the main environmental control station in the upper level of the engineroom.

We also weren't going to keep the bridge or the weapon systems manned at all times. We looked at the bridge as a backup for CIC, and would only man it if we were doing something sensitive like combat or docking. The weapons consoles would only be manned for combat. Or drills, of course.

We didn't have a lot of room for the crew, but one thing that we all insisted on was that all 44 men had their own bunks. We had six 6-man berthing compartments and five cabins. Dickie and I got our own cabins, while the other three cabins each held two men.

Every bunk was on the aft bulkhead of the compartment, and was mounted on bearings at each end, somewhat like a steel hammock. Or, if you've seen it, the Thames Barrier. If the ship was not using their main engines, the bunks would hang 'down' in the artificial gravity and look like normal bunks, either two high for the cabins or three high for the bunkrooms. If the main engines were in use, the bunks would rotate on their bearings and shift to keep 'down' in whatever direction the forces added up to be 'down'.

We'd learned our lesson about this stuff. Every acceleration couch and every bunk had sensors that reported the position or degree of rotation. That report went to the CO's console, the DC console, the Chief Engineer's console in ECR, and the main environmental console in the engineroom upper level. They may all be involved with something else, but three of those consoles were always manned, and if none of those consoles acknowledged the warning within a few seconds the AI driving the consoles would make the notice more annoying until someone acknowledged it.

Since I, as skipper, may have more important things on my mind, like maybe we might be in combat, we gave the other stations orders to acknowledge it and investigate before the AI decided that telling me was more important than tactics. If the warning ever overrode whatever I was trying to do at the Command Console, in addition to knowing we had a broken couch or bunk I also knew that we had lost at least two of our 'critical' stations, and if we were in combat at the time that was more important for me to know than that one of the bunks was broken.

There wasn't much we could do about the amount of gravity, though, any more than we could with the console's acceleration couches. If we were in a hurry anyone trying to sleep would just have to accept whatever the gravity was. The only good side to this was that everyone at least had their own bunks.

Every submariner had served on a ship where the junior sailors had to hot-bunk, or share a bed with another crewman, because there were never enough bunks for everyone. Those guys had their own sets of sheets, etc, and when one guy got up to go to his watch or work he would store his stuff, then the other guy pulled out his own sheets and went to bed. They called it hot-bunking or hot-racking because the bed never got a chance to cool off.

If you compare USN submarine personal space minimums and US Justice Department specifications, the first thing that jumps out at you is that a USN nuclear submarine does not meet the minimum habitability requirements for use as a federal penitentiary. And the other navies had smaller, older, less capable boats with worse living conditions. Have you ever met a stable, sane man who said they loved submarine duty? No. Only the crazies loved it. Everyone else said that the arduous duty extra pay didn't come anywhere near what it should be. We did it because someone had to, and not many could do it. That didn't mean we loved it.

I was adamant that every man would have, as a bare minimum, his own bunk.

The AIs were still having trouble with their integrity test, the thing that eventually got called the "Capacity, Aptitude, and Potential" or CAP test. As much trouble as they were having finding the limits of how odd a human personality could be, they were having just as much trouble with the idea that our personality could change. An utterly reliable and boring tech could be turned into a raving lunatic by some stressor that didn't bother anyone else, and a free-thinker without a care in the world could similarly become a single-minded automaton by any trigger or none.

It wasn't enough to measure what our values were. They also had to measure how changeable those values were, and they never did get that right. They still have trouble with people who pass the test and then demonstrate that they shouldn't have, while many people who fail it originally do much better on a re-test. Yes, the AIs weren't just unhappy about how unstable we were, they were unhappy about how unstable our stability level was. They couldn't depend upon either a 'rock' or a 'butterfly' remaining a rock or a butterfly.

Since we were still getting some undesirable people due to their ability to show one personality and set of values when they knew they were being watched or tested but a completely different set of values when they thought they were alone, someone also put some thought into the security side of the human element. As long as we have been building ships and sending them off to trade, make war, or explore, we have armed the officers. If we trusted the crews, we also kept arms for the crew but kept them locked up under the officers' control.

We didn't think we needed to worry about either mutiny or barratry with the AIs constantly watching each of us, but we still had to worry about one of us going crazy. Even a single maniac can do irreparable damage to a lone ship, out far from home with no assistance available. To give everyone else a chance to survive that, every officer was given a stunner and training in how to use it. Yes, that included being hit by a stunner ourselves.

Trust me, none of us were much good to anyone for the next day or so. Think of fasting for a day or so to get your stomach completely empty. Then, drink until you pass out. While falling, hit your head on something so hard you get a concussion. Get woken up a couple hours later to go back to work.

Since we were one of the first "command teams" to go through this training, we all did it together. Two days later, when we were able to function properly, we all agreed that in the future, a ship should only send one-half or even maybe one-third of the command team to that training at a time. Don't send any more until the first set is back on duty again. Expect this to take a couple of days. Stunner headache is WICKED!

Every man assigned as an officer went through that and was issued his own stunner. The senior enlisted also got it if they were training for OOD. The AIs were told to keep track of the stunners and let us know if one ever wandered away from home. Further, the officers would not normally carry theirs, so if they were out and about and needed one, they could order one from the nearest replicator. The replicator would not lower the shield and allow anyone else to remove the stunner unless the officer requesting it told the AI to. No one else could order a stunner or any other kind of tactical weaponry without raising warning flags and having the AI ask the command team if this was allowed.

We also set up all three of the officers' cabins for dual use as security cells, if we needed them. Having that built-in during the conversion work but never needing it was far better than trying to come up with a holding cell in the middle of a patrol and not having anyplace to put it.

We did stop for a couple of days to rest, once we decided that our overhauls were as done as we were going to get without spending a lot more time. The management types set up a commissioning ceremony for our first two ships in one of Jupiter Station's larger auditoriums, and Admiral Kennedy sent Diana and Ginger out to stand behind me in their pink shipsuits as I formally accepted command of and responsibility for the Confederacy's first commissioned warship.

Right beside Ellen in her white suit. I'm sure there were pools about how long they could stand there and look happy before the catfights started, but they all knew their places in the pecking order and they all played nicely. Someone had set up a remote with a bottle of champagne at Allie's bow, and there was a shuttle nearby to record the mess. At the appropriate time all three ladies stepped up and together pressed the button to smash the bottle.

My fellow skipper, Commander Julio Alvarado of Alnwick Castle, was also an American. He only had one lady behind him, a lovely companion who had selected him as her charge as soon as she was allowed to, back when we first started getting women up here. While we were standing up there but before we got started he leaned over to me and said that we looked lopsided, could he borrow one of my women for a while?

Of course he said it loud enough for everyone to hear. I leaned back towards him and replied through the laughter that I couldn't think of any answer that wouldn't get me in trouble with someone, so I was going to pretend I didn't hear the question.

I found out later that they had brought a case of bottles up, and they had gone through about half of them in tests before they got the mess under control. Part of that mess-control was the remote that did the smashing; once the ceremony was over it had to clean up the mess it had just made. If it was smart enough to understand what it was doing, I hope it was also smart enough to understand that it was a ceremonial requirement.

Ellen had to sleep alone for two nights before Diana and Ginger went back to F2 and Earth. My two 'wives' claimed to sleep wonderfully well in our small bed, when they weren't bothering me. I can't say I got any sleep at all. Wasn't this supposed to be a time of rest? Ellen said it was fair, I never let her sleep, either.

When Allington Castle and Alnwick Castle, designated as "DE-001" and "DE-002" (the dash is optional, most Americans put it in and most others don't) finally left Jupiter Station to begin their service as warships of the Confederacy Navy, our first stop, of course, was on the north side of the rings for the Basic Castle Normal-Space Operations course. Both ships had two complete watch teams where everybody had their individual BCNSO cert, but the ship itself had to go through the course too. It was a waste of time if everything worked right, but the only way to be sure was to actually do it.

The Northside Training Center had two completely separate courses set up by now so it didn't take us long at all. We figured that, in peacetime, we'd have all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit rules like "Each ship will demonstrate competence in all required phases with a minimum of three complete watch teams before final certification is granted." We weren't operating under normal peacetime safety rules. Any rule that could be relaxed would be.

Our wartime safety rules were more like "Each ship will pass each required phase at least once," with the understanding that those guys would continue on to train the others, under the AI's, the skipper's, and the XO's supervision, as the ship's schedule permitted. Admiral Sykes had signed off on a policy statement that, before being certified as ready for combat, each ship would have one watch team pass all three of the BCNSO, HSO, and ACO courses, and have at least one other team pass the BCNSO and HSO courses. The secondary teams didn't have to be the same for both courses, as long as there was no manpower overlap with the "A" team.

The bottom line was that each ship needed one team that could do everything, and for normal routine stuff at least one other team that could relieve the experts. If everyone on a team had their individual certs, a CO could grant the team a provisional qualification so they could practice and the "A" team could rest. Within a couple of days the "B" team could get the final team cert and the "C" team would follow as quickly as possible.

Really, it was the same qualification system used in the US Navy. A ship really needed three complete watch teams before leaving port, but the ship had to be out at sea doing things before the individual crewmen and collective watch teams could get their certs. If a ship was new, or had lost a lot of crewmen while in port, the ships were given "preliminary certs" that allowed them to go out and train everyone up to the established standards.

If necessary, the parent formation -usually a squadron or group- would provide additional qualified personnel to keep the ship safe while the newbies got up to speed. Generally, these additional personnel were senior crew from another ship and they were disgruntled at having their time off disrupted while they dealt with another ship's problems.

It was traditional that no one got much sleep while this was happening. The "qualified" watchstanders had to pull everyone's load until the "unqualified" watchstanders were able to carry their share, and if the 'real men' didn't get to sleep then for damn sure the 'non-qual useless pukebags' weren't going to be sleeping either.

If you were somehow not able to keep up with the prescribed training program then you were designated "DINQ" or Delinquent IN Quals and life really got unpleasant for any DINQs who were keeping their shipmates from getting their God-granted allotment of sleep. The CO and XO, of course, basically got no sleep at all during this period since they had to be immediately available for any issues that came up. This naturally led to life being even more unpleasant for any DINQs....

This shouldn't ever become a problem out here. Our recruits were of a far higher quality than many who joined the service as teenagers. In fact, the majority of our recruits had military experience and they were self-motivated to avoid becoming DINQ. Besides, the sleep-trainers made learning new skills and knowledge sets a lot easier. All we needed was the time it took to actually perform the evolutions and check the boxes until the crews were all certified.

Between most of my crew having already done this on other ships, my just being an all-around wonderful guy, and our collective desire to not look bad in front of everyone else, we were able to breeze through the Basic Shiphandling course. I'm sure that having the deck stacked to give the first ship the best crew available had nothing to do with it. Alnwick Castle wasn't very far behind us. All of the first six ships' crews had been through the Basic course several times as slots opened up.

The HSO course was similar to what we had done in Appleby and Bere, only they had shifted it to using Pluto for the first there-and-back trip instead of Neptune. That may have been driven by the changes in orbital positions, but it probably also had something to do with plans to start mining Neptune's moons and rings and start building up infrastructure there, too.

Nobody had any plans yet for Pluto or Charon, or any of the 'Plutinos' for that matter, so the Training Command claimed Pluto for HSO training. That way, anyone thinking about going there would get reminded that there would be ships coming and going that were manned by semi-competent crews and controlled by not-yet-trustworthy instruments and engines, and they could think two or three times about whether they really needed to be there in the way.

By the time we made it to Barnard's Star -which the AIs wanted to call Barnardsstarat since it had no inhabited planets- both ships had our hyperdrives dialed in to exactly 7100 times the speed of light. Our navigation was still a little off so we couldn't travel in company, but that was a work in progress. As we took these ships into hyperspace more and more, the AIs could refine their instrument calibration and get better at precision navigation. At any rate, it wasn't anything that could be blamed on the crew. The AIs ran the instruments, the AIs did the navigation calculations, the AIs managed the ion bleed out of the hyperspace envelope for propulsion and steering. Not our fault, man.