Independent Command 2

(Being part three of the memoirs of the Respected Thomas Williams, Imperator and Caesar, as collected by his granddaughter the Lady Jessica Williams-Bagsworth)

Copyright ©2016 By Zen Master

Seeking Enlightenment through Bondage

The combined promotion and change-of-command ceremony the next day was as quick and simple as we could make it, since we were on a warship in contested space. Afterwards, Jimmy had a small promotion ceremony for me, which was the first that the girls knew about my promotion. Okay, maybe Exeter doesn't tell Hannah all my secrets.

The two couriers showed up that afternoon, both of them full of crew, no-longer-pregnant concubines, and critical supplies. Runner was going back to Truman with crew being transferred and about-to-drop concubines, and Postman was mine.

Our announced itinerary was back to Truman to get Tina and her youngest and the rest of our kids, then to Earth to get the latest on Ishtarat and get the Explorers manned and moving, and then on to Ishtarat. I kept nine of my square pegs -the three LTs and six senior enlisted engineering types- and their assorted concubines and children with me on Postman, got the few leftovers transferred to the Norham Castle and Brennan, and sent the three corvettes on ahead to Ishtarat for repairs. Each had a complete file of what little we knew about the system and instructions to not be surprised at whatever they found, whether human base or Sa'arm colony. Routine message traffic went out informing God and all his Hosts about the ship movements, with references to this order, that instruction, and this other policy.

There is a military axiom that "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy; that's why he's called the enemy". Very often, however, it's your own side that breaks the plan.

We had picked up Tina and little George, my square pegs' extra concubines, and all of our assorted little ones, but we hadn't even gotten clear of Trumanat when Postman's CO told me that system traffic control had sent a message to stand by for orders. Soon after that we received an eyes-only Priority message from Borneo Command, the headquarters for the district that Ishtarat was in.

I kicked everyone except Hannah out of my 'office' (one room in the pod we were using) and sat back to find out what was wrong. It was a video message from an Admiral Himmel who introduced himself as the commander of Borneo District.

"Admiral Williams, I thought you deserved to hear this straight from me instead of the rumor mill. I have blocked your current assignment. This is not a slur on your abilities, just a simple recognition that the job you were assigned to do cannot be done under the current conditions."

"The man running the colony at Ishtar seems to be a good man and is trying as hard as he can, but he has limited training, experience, and resources, and he absolutely will not accept instruction or assistance from any other authority. If you go there as System Commander we fully expect him to fire on your ships, so I have vetoed your assignment. The three ships you sent ahead will get repaired, but must immediately leave the system afterward. Unless you have different orders for them, I will direct them to meet you at Sol System."

"You yourself should continue on to Sol, where they will try to find something else for you to do. If it was up to me I'd have you replacing Admiral Maxwell at Truman, but I have no authority over that District and whoever gets you will be damned glad they did. I liked what you did with Avery, and I liked your court-martial defense even more. We need people like you in command and training the next generation of officers. I hope they send you to Borneo. I'll find something for you to do."

Well. Now what? I guess I take Postman to Earth and see what's up. I did send Himmel a reply thanking him for the heads-up, and telling him to have Akashi go back to the OPF -I didn't want Jimmy to think I was trying to steal her even though I wanted to- but to have Brennan and Norham Castle meet me at Sol when they were free.

I didn't insist on a direct one-jump trip; I allowed Postman's skipper to follow the normal route where he stopped at every inhabited (or even just picketed) system delivering mail and generally acting like a postman should. As a System Commander I got a lot of "for info" flag message traffic about who was doing what where; that was so that my people wouldn't be surprised if something next door happened to spill over into our area. Apparently, not having a System to Command didn't affect this, because, all the way back to Sol, every time Postman dropped out of hyperspace to deliver and pick up message traffic (and an occasional honest-to-God widget or package) we found several message drones looking for me. Very educational.

When we got to Sol and were intercepted by their OPF, I sent a message reporting my arrival and my availability to the CNO and Planning if they had any need to talk to me. I got replies almost immediately. I'm going to be doing one of three or four things, and since we can only invest the ships to do one of them until we see the results, they were willing to let me see the different options and have a say in which one we did first. If all went well, forces would be made available for the other options. If all did not go well, I probably would not be involved in any future operations. That's what it's like on the front lines. I am an expendable resource.

We were trying to expand our operations some: We needed to not only defend our turf and grow humans in other systems, but we needed to do what we could to limit the Sa'arm's growth, too. As near as we could tell, any Sa'arm world sent scouts out to neighboring systems as soon as they had the resources to build the scout ships. Then, they added population until they had the bodies to man another invasion fleet, then built it and sent it off to a nearby world that had been scouted and found to have a good home for dickheads. As soon as that fleet was gone, they probably built a second one to send to another system.

We could stop this cycle by defeating their invasion fleets, yes, but we could also delay it by killing their scouts, if we could do that cheaper than they could build their scout ships. In parallel with that, we were also trying to raid their systems, destroying their hive ships before they were finished but apparently that was not working as well as hoped.

So, we were sending our own scouts in every direction to see if they found any Sa'arm, but we were also looking into finding ways to defend systems that we didn't have a colony in, just to deny those systems to the Sa'arm. Tactically, this wasn't much different from my original orders, back at Tulakat's OPF.

While we decided where to start, BuShips was putting together a light task force, with emphasis on the "light". I was going to get 3 or 4 cruisers, two squadrons of destroyers, and 20 or so corvettes of various types. A lot of ships, but not much firepower. Since I wasn't supposed to be defending any colonies or attacking any hive spheres, I wasn't going to get any major warships and no Marines at all. Basically I was going to be running my own OPF again, but this time with no backup. That's what they think!

My only outrageous demand was about the minor units, but you already knew what that was going to be: No fucking Castles unless they get modified to the fleet 'crew concubine' standards. We are going out beyond nowhere and we cannot deal with that stress. Other than that, my part as Admiral Commanding was to accept all the reports, wait for the ships to be gathered, meet all their COs, set up force and squadron training exercises so that they could practice working together, yadda, yadda, yadda, and look for problems.

That's my job, I look for problems. I don't even have to fix them. All I have to do is find them, recognize them as problems, assign someone else to fix them, and read the reports about their status.

As I saw it, killing dickheads wasn't going to be a problem. It was creating a base from which to draw parts, supplies, manpower, and emotional stability that was going to be a problem. I mentioned that to the CNO during one of our conferences, and he seemed to agree with me. We are going out as a small fleet, but if we intend to stay there we will need a base. If there is no formal colony there, we are going to have to establish an informal one ourselves. If nothing else, hollow out some space in an asteroid for us to call home and raise babies in. Crews last longer when they occasionally get off the ship, and they fight harder when they are protecting their families.

Speaking of families, we had just barely made it to Sol when Hannah dropped her latest, our son Joseph. Actually we wouldn't have made it but the med tubes kept her from going into labor until we could take her somewhere with better facilities than what Postman had. Joseph didn't seem to mind waiting; he was happy where he was. Plenty to eat and drink, nice and comfortable and warm. Every time I thought of him I thought of the old joke about men: we spend nine months trying to get out of there and the rest of our lives trying to get back in.

Joseph was thus the biggest newborn baby I had ever seen. Not a record, but the biggest I had seen. Hannah would have needed a lot of medical help afterwards if we were still on Earth.

Not too long after that, LaRhonda dropped her latest, Michael. That was a screwup on my part; I should not have let the two of them get pregnant so close together. With four women and orders to have as many kids as possible, we had tried to set up a rotation. When it worked right, one of them was almost ready to drop and was back on Truman, one of them had recently dropped and was still on Truman watching all the children, one of them had just come back to the ship ready to get pregnant again, and one was pregnant right now but still able to run around and be helpful on the ship.

That was the plan, but of course it never worked exactly the way it should. You aren't supposed to play favorites, but I couldn't help it. Hannah was my better half, the assistant that I couldn't live without. And, Joannie caused trouble whenever she got sent to Truman.

I got interested in one of the choices, one that we had labeled as 'Beerat' with four planets Mead, Beer, Pils, and Ale. The system was named after the second planet because it had native life, apparently intelligent as they had radio and video, but not up to Pre-Confederacy Earth as they had no spacecraft, not even satellites. I was unable to find a good reason why the planets had human names, however silly, when the Confederacy had apparently known about the place for millennia.

We had sent a Castle to check the place out, and the fight it had gotten into with a Sa'arm scout group had ended in a tie, all four ships dead. We only knew what happened because a follow-up corvette had found the survivors all huddled in their liferaft. I viewed all of the rescue videos, but they didn't say much about the system. I wanted more than the raw navigation data, if I could get it.

When I found out that the survivors from Maiden Castle were here at Sol, I requested an interview with the senior, the logistics (or supply) officer, a female who had apparently gotten the Marine package but she made it look good. Amazons a foot taller than me didn't particularly trip my trigger, but I had to admit that on her it was a nice package.

When she stepped in the room I rose and shook her hand. "Good morning, Lieutenant, and thank you for meeting me. I asked to speak with you because you are the senior survivor of Maiden Castle. If you don't mind, can you pronounce your name so I don't look silly getting it wrong?"

She laughed politely like any junior officer should for an Admiral's stupid joke and asked "What can I do for you, sir?"

I smiled. "If you were a concubine I would have a long list of things you could do for me, but since you're a volunteer all I can ask for is a briefing on your last trip. I've been selected to command the force we are sending to secure the Beerat system, and you are the Confederacy's expert on that system. As you may be aware, the ship you were on failed to properly report its findings, so we have to glean what we can from whatever you and the others remember."

'As you may be aware'.When her acting CO had ordered the ship abandoned, then rammed the last Sa'arm ship as the only way to stop it, then-Ensign Bogdanovich had spent a couple days in a survival pod, then several weeks in the liferaft with the other survivors before they were rescued. The ship sent to cautiously find out what happened when the Maiden Castle didn't come back had found the liferaft, jettisoned its own liferaft to dock it, and high-tailed it back to safety as fast as it could go with all the survivors. They hadn't wasted any time on surveys, or even hiding their ship from the natives.

"Your liferaft had the tactical download for the battle you were in but that didn't include any of the local color commentary."

That was SOP. The liferaft, in line with it's primary function as emergency escape craft, got a continuous data stream from the Tac/Nav panel any time the ship went to Condition 3. This feed ended, of course, when the liferaft was launched as part of "Condition 4" but we all knew what happened next anyway.

"Well, 'everything' sounds a bit vague, but we are going back and I want to know everything I can about the neighborhood before we move in."

"Yes. As good neighbors, we are going to try to defend the system without involving the locals, who I understand do not yet have spacecraft."

"Of course. I don't have to grant it. And, depending upon what it is, I may not have the authority."

"Ensign Webb stayed on the ship to make sure it rammed the dickheads. I want the second planet named 'Webb's World'. He was a twit, but he sacrificed his life for those natives and he should be remembered. By them, too, when they come out and join us. And I can pretend to be a concubine if it makes a difference."

"That...shouldn't be necessary. Welcome, but not necessary. And a very bad idea. If you ever want to make that offer on your own, off duty, I'd be delighted, but right now that's blatant bribery of a senior officer and I CANNOT accept your offer if I want you to respect me in the morning. As far as your request goes, though, you're the senior surviving officer on the first expedition. It's a human tradition that you name things. If you think 'Webb's World' sounds better than 'Beer' or even 'Bogdanovich's World', 'Webb's World' it is."

"Well, if it turns out that 'Beer' is the natives' name for their own planet, the Confederacy won't ever accept 'Webb's World', but with the other planets being Mead, Pils, and Ale, that's not very likely. If you don't have any other duties right now, why don't you track that down for us? If you can determine that a human cartographer named those planets last year, the AIs will take an order from the lead expedition's commander -that's you- if it is backed up by the current System Commander -that's me- at least as far as what humans call it."

"That will last until we are in actual two-way communication with the natives, at which point the AIs will push to change the planet and the system to whatever they call it, but they will continue to accept humans calling it whatever we want. You already know this, we call this the 'Sol System' but you will never hear an AI say that. To them, it's always 'Earthat'."

Actually, hearing that made me trust her a lot more than a knee-jerk 'yes sir' would have. We need officers who think and verify, not just blindly obey. Yes, in combat, you obey your superiors immediately, trusting their training, experience, and better grasp of the big picture. Blind obedience at any other time, though, is for slaves, Marines, and other idiots.

"Also, for what it's worth, I think you should view my court-martial record. I'll open it up to you. Ensign Webb sounds like my kind of man."

"For trying to ram a dickhead. For pretty much the same reason, in a ship that wasn't doing much better than yours was. We lived because we got lucky. When we get out of here look it up, you may find it entertaining."

"Now, why were you stuck in the escape pod for so long? Shouldn't you have been in the liferaft?" My first command had been an Ainsworth, the revised-manning Castle, with very few relevant equipment differences. The standard duties list for a Castle being abandoned had the SuppO in the liferaft as there wasn't much else he or she was expected to be doing to help, and if the liferaft wasn't properly supplied it was his own damn fault.

"I wish I'd been in the liferaft. No, the supply officer doesn't have much to do on those small ships so I qualified as ECR supervisor and was manning the DC station. Since the Chief Engineer was killed early in the action, I stayed behind until the last minute to make sure the engines didn't shit the bed. I sent one of the engineers out with the liferaft and I got to float in God's Country for far too long before they found me. Actually, the liferaft wasn't much better after a couple of weeks."

She sounded like my kind of man, too. She and Webb were both square pegs that didn't fit into nice round holes. I softened my voice. "How was space?"

We talked for awhile about the system and the natives before I let her go. She confirmed the reports that Maiden Castle's AI had developed a translation routine that was good enough to follow their broadcasts in real time, so we shouldn't have any trouble doing the same thing if we needed to.

I did mention that the Western navies that most of us had served in when we were younger tried to follow "hardship postings" with "cake postings". What happened to the Maiden certainly counted as a hardship for the survivors, but if she or any of her people wanted to go back to Beerat I was desperately scrounging crew and would be delighted to have them.

And I reminded her that if she didn't have other employment yet she could claim to be working for me while she researched the Beerat system's naming history, because a Vice Admiral's aide would get much faster assistance than an unemployed Lieutenant would. I didn't see any reason to point out that, if she did that, the AIs would list her as working for me, giving me more formal access to her abilities. Why let some other schmuck get her?

Speaking of scrounging crew, my request for three of the K'treel Explorers had been approved. Good, they have the cargo volume for anything we want to take, and that includes everyone's concubines and children. We aren't going to consider Sol our home system, this was a PCoS (Permanent Change of Station) for an entire small fleet. We were going to consider Beerat our home system, and the Explorers would let us take everyone with us without the warships being overrun with rug-rats.

All of these ships had been renamed after human explorers when they were turned over to us. We got AGS-20 William Beebe, AGS-21 Frederick Otis Barton, Jr, and AGS-22 Edmund Hillary. I knew that Hillary had been one of the guys who first climbed Mt Everest, and Beebe was involved in the bathyscaphe trips down the Marianas Trench, but I had no idea who Barton was. The only Barton I was familiar with was Clara Barton, a nurse in the Civil War. Or maybe the Crimean War, I wasn't sure.

I sent my square pegs -an LT and two assistants each, along with all their assorted concubines and children- to the three Explorers as skeleton crews to learn their way around and get them moving. I gave the LTs formal orders assigning each one to a ship as Commanding Officer, then let them sort out who was going with who after telling the three new COs that their enlisted assistants were going to get commissioned as Ensigns immediately after they proved they could do their jobs as Chief Engineers.

Hopefully, by the time we got where we were going, they would have trained-up three crews well enough that they could turn the three Explorers over to them. That would make my square pegs available again, and I could put all nine somewhere else I needed them. Among other things, this gave me back the two pods on the Postman that they had all been crammed in, so everyone was happy about their new assignments and I had room for staff.

Next I talked to BuPers to beg for crew for the Explorers. They became much more helpful when I pointed out that I had brought my training cadre with me; all I needed was warm bodies who had volunteered for the Navy. We could even handle the initial induction processing and enhancement. I asked for 60 bodies, 20 for each K'treel. That would give each one 23 volunteers -three times the official minimum crew- and (hopefully) at least 50 concubines who would eventually be almost as helpful, if I got to use them my way. If they could swing it, I wanted personnel with sub-scores in compassion to be above a minimum I gave them, and I wasn't going to bitch about any of their other scores. I also pointed out that we could take on as many unclaimed extra concubines as they wanted to dump on us, as we were going to be, um, out of town for awhile. Oh, yeah, if they have any urban-planning or factory management types, we could use a couple.

BuShips was surprisingly easy to work with, too, so I'm pretty sure that our experiment had some backing beyond the normal Vice-Admiral's constant screaming for more ships. Since the K'treels weren't going to be warships no matter what we did, they needed very little refitting to meet our requirements: better shields, better sensors, a transporter nexus that could act as a hub for portable transporters.

That last was a big one since none of our scouts had transporters; putting a nexus on the Explorers meant that we could place a pad on every ship and the Explorers could manage the system as long as they were close enough. Actually, the pads don't take hardly any room at all so we put three in each ship: in the ECR (back of ship) and CIC (middle of ship), since both were protected internal spaces, and in the passageway just behind the bridge (front of ship), since the bridge wasn't a protected space.

We figured that, no matter what happened to a ship, if there were any survivors at all, surely one of those three would be usable for either rescue and salvage personnel or for evacuation. We also made sure that every other ship in the fleet had the access/ID codes for each pad, so all we had to do was get in range to use them immediately.

The big thing I wanted was an up-to-date database on equipment designs. My skeletons were reporting what I had suspected; As part of their extended-deployment capabilities, the K'treel Explorers had complete self-repair facilities that could also be used for other jobs. They could build any kind of repair part they needed, up to and including a complete new K'treel Explorer. Or a Destroyer, or Frigate, or Cruiser, or Fighter, or Carrier for that matter. Any size replicators up to the ones they were calling "Factories". Munitions like automated missile systems would be easy, if we had the plans and raw materials.

The main gun from a Hero battlecruiser would be fun to build, too. No hull, no shields; just rails, sensors, enough thrusters to aim it, and a fusion plant to drive it. It may only get one shot off before any escorts destroy it, but the gunner will only need one hit to kill a hive ship, even the big ones.

As soon as we had the Explorers under control, we had all three of them start manufacturing small 'Appliance' and medium 'Machine Shop' replicators, and the important parts to the large 'Industrial' and huge 'Factory' replicators, and start stuffing them in their cargo pods. There was no reason to make them wait until we got there. This way, we could set to work as soon as we chose a location. We were going to need everything that the Tulakat force had back at Truman: base, repair yards, defense systems, everything, and the safe bet was to assume we would need them fast.

Once each Explorer had a couple of the standard medium replicators, we put them to work manufacturing pod 'seeds'. Yes, the large replicators could each pump out a complete pod every day, but A) we didn't need them yet and had no place to put them if we had them, B) by the time we had someplace to put the pods, we would want the larger replicators to be working on something else instead, and C) the medium replicators could make the 'seed' versions right now without causing any trouble.

A pod seed was basically the good stuff, the heart of the pod: the replicator that did everything, and the minimal AI that directed it. A seed was only a ton-mass or so, and if you plugged it in to a power source and fed it some raw materials, over a week or two it would build the rest of the pod itself. We figured we could fill any extra space in the aft pods with them and be that much farther ahead on our bases when we deployed them.

One point that everyone held against the K'treel Explorers was that they could only handle 9 pods. However, there was a very simple reason for this, and I thought it was a good one: The mounting points for the pods weren't sized for the pods in their compact "habitat" configuration of only 10 m diameter (about 300 cubic meters of volume) like most ships we were used to. Instead, the Explorers had pod mounting points sized and spaced for pods in their fully-expanded cargo configuration, which was 30 m diameter by 25 m long. That's 2800 cubic meters of space.

At 9 pods apiece for the three Explorers, we had all 27 pods expand out to their cargo dimensions instead of their normal housing dimensions. We designated one of the back pods on each Explorer for organic stores (for rapid and easy conversion to food, if needed) and the other two back pods for odd raw materials that we may not find easily, like Deuterium for fusion plant fuel and Gadolinium for fusion plant shielding, and various other alloys that might be used in manufacturing, say, a Hero, and filled them up from the massive digesters that were taking apart Jupiter's moons to build Earth's defenses.

This appeared to actually be what the Explorer's builders had originally used the pods for, to make sure that the ship had everything it might need for repairs and survival, no matter what went wrong and no matter how long it took. The fact that, until we gave the order to expand them to full size, the pods appeared to be completely normal told us that the Confederacy had been using their pod system for a long, long time.

For the trip out, we set the middle and front pods up as super-sized apartments to allow us to take our extra people (concubines, children, extra crew and recruits, base personnel, etc). With six floors (some larger than others; this was a cylinder after all) and twelve or so small suites on each floor, each pod had 72 suites suitable for a small family of two or three adults (or a larger number of little people), and between the three Explorers we were dedicating 18 pods to this for a total of just under 1300 suites we could stuff people into. We were a long way from deciding who to put in them but having the space gave us a lot of options for our move.

Now, what do we call these things? If they work well, the Explorers - or newer ships that can handle these pods - are going to become popular. I was thinking of them as Greyhound Busses, but when I heard them referred to as "Ferries" that made a lot more sense. Ferry Pods they are.

They weren't ocean liners by any stretch of the imagination. No one in one of those rooms was going to live in style, but they had the rest of the ship to move around in as long as nothing went wrong. Thinking ahead, unless we came up with another critical need I wanted the center 3 pods left as Ferries and reserved for emergency transport of all of our people. After we got where we were going and emptied them, the front three pods would be available for whatever came up. The only thing we really knew was that we didn't know everything yet.

I also ordered another round of CAP testing for all our concubines, and as usual Hannah refused. I didn't think that being my personal servant and fuck-toy was the best that she could do, but if she wanted to stay in my bed I was certainly not going to argue about it. Still, I knew her better than I knew any other human being, and I always had the sneaking suspicion that she had somehow found a way to sabotage her test. There was just no way she was only a 6.3. Unless she had convinced the testing center that 6.3 was the score she wanted. Could you do that?

This time Tina got a 6.6 overall and just like that I didn't own her any more, she was Tina Hernandez again and free to go where she wanted, as long as it wasn't Earth and served the Confederacy in some way. I reminded her that she could join any service she wanted, but I had never really considered her Marine material, and it would be Really Nice to have our very own Civil Service Officer if we were being sent out to create a new colony with no colonists. That way her children could grow up around their daddy.

She agreed, and I could check off another item on my mental "how to create a colony on $5 a day" list. Tina promptly moved in to one of the Explorers' suites, and soon after that set up housekeeping with a couple of abused conks she had found abandoned somewhere. I couldn't see her being happy with a male who had to do whatever she said, anyway. She also started losing weight again, but I couldn't see that as my affair. If she wanted to look like an Auschwitz survivor that was her lookout.

For her first headache, I had Signifer Hernandez go make the rounds of all the system's brothels and berthing ships, looking for concubine rejects that we could rehabilitate, remembering that she got two herself, and that Vice Admiral Williams was owed a replacement for her tight little Cuban ass, too.

I told her that she could shanghai Hannah if she needed any help. Many crew concubines who don't stress over a volunteer start shaking when someone in gold coveralls gets angry. A lot of concubines act like they don't mind being slaves, but then turn around and act like Pol Pot if you give them any authority. Hannah wasn't that way, but anyone she saw wouldn't know that.

Joannie and LaRhonda are probably never going to make the 6.5 cutoff, but I didn't want to lose them anyway. The universe needs submissive sluts, too. There will always be a place in my home for beautiful women who can't keep their legs closed.

I stayed busy enough that I completely forgot about Brennan and Norham Castle until I got a routine message that they had completed repairs and were headed to Sol. I sent back a Priority message (copy God and his Hosts, as usual) telling them to go to Beerat as scouts.

A) Do not both get killed; no matter what happens one of them must survive to warn the rest of us what got them,

B) If at all possible, destroy any Sa'arm found, if possible before they wipe out the natives,

D) If they have nothing else to do, survey the system with the intent of finding an asteroid or small moon that we could put a hidden base inside.

I included an addendum with the force's expected ship list and the directive that Commander, no, Lt Colonel, no, fuck this, Acting Colonel and Captain Jackson would be the force's second in command once we reached the system. This was expected to be a temporary measure that would end once the entire force was up to speed, as we had several officers senior to him. Starting with all the cruiser Captains, uh Colonels, of course.

That message came back, copied to all ships in the force, with endorsements from both Brakat (Beerat's sector command) and, hmm, the CNO. They want no questions about who's in charge and who chooses the tactics.

My copy had a note from the CNO pointing out that someone had questioned my appointment, since the largest ship I had ever personally commanded was a light cruiser and I may not have the best grasp of what the bigger ships could do. This was trumped, in his and the Ops Directorate's opinions, by my accomplishments at Tulakat. I already had a better grasp of fleet tactics than most of his admirals and he trusted my ability to learn how to use bigger ships more than he trusted my subordinates' ability to learn how to sneak if I wasn't there to make them. Ooookay, ensure the integrity of the chain of command, check off another item on the list.

I also sent a message to Truman, authorizing transport to Sol for all of Brennan's and Norham Castle's concubines and dependents, with transport priority too low for a dedicated transport but high enough that they would come back on the return trips for any transports that went to Truman.

A couple of days after I talked to Lt Bogdanovich, I got a visit from a couple of female Petty Officers. Well, officially they were "Sergeants" since we were trying to normalize all the ranks, but I grew up in the US Navy. In my mind, Petty Officers they were, and Petty Officers they would be. Until they made Chief, got killed, or retired. And retirement looked pretty far away.

Anyway, they introduced themselves as Sgt Becquerel and Sgt McFaddon, and the names helped me remember them from Maiden Castle's survivor videos.

The blonde, Sgt Becquerel, said "We would like to ask you a personal question, off the record, if we can."

I laughed. "This sort of thing almost never goes well. Either someone is in trouble, or someone is trying to cause trouble. No one ever asks an 'off the record' question for any other reason. Okay, off the record, what do you need to know?"

"Kerry, uh, Lt Bogdanovich, told us that she offered to sleep with you and you refused and called it an attempt to bribe you. Is she going to get in trouble?"

When she came in, I asked the AI to show us the vid of that interview. When we got to actually talking about the Beerat system, I had it stop.

"If anyone did wrong, it was me. I started that interview by admitting that I wanted to sleep with her. That got that out of the way and I could talk to her without that clouding the discussion. As it turned out, she wanted something from me and offered to sleep with me if it would help her get it."

I had Hannah sit on my lap where she belonged, and put my hands on her tits where they belonged. I didn't usually do this during conferences with my subordinates, but I thought it was appropriate here.

"If we were in the US Navy where no one on a ship ever gets laid without breaking all kinds of rules, I would have jumped on that offer. Any man would. Lt Bogdanovich is a beautiful woman. However, out here in the Diaspora I generally get my needs taken care of well enough that I can resist offers like that. Hannah here and her sisters make sure that I can say no when it's the right thing to do. That's one good point about all this submissive fuck-toy stuff, having Hannah available to suck my cock whenever I want pretty much ends all the shenanigans we used to have back on Earth whenever a man had a woman working for him."

"If she or even you two ever want to spend a night in my bed, I'm okay with that, but it has to be because you want to, not because you think you have to. Lt Bogdanovich is not in trouble over that offer, but she should think about why she thought it was appropriate to make that offer. If her last CO was still alive I would have already suggested to Internal Affairs that we may have a problem, but with what's left of him spread all over a faraway star system that seems kind of pointless. Although, I will pass this on anyway, as a social issue to be monitored."

"To sum up, Hannah is my concubine, my personal slave and fuck-toy, here to keep me sane and happy so that I can think with my big head, and she does her job very well. You two and the LT are volunteers, and if you ever get a hint that your life would be better if you slept with your supervisor, don't complain to him. Tell the AIs. They will contact me, or whoever your CO is. Your supervisor will get re-tested, and we are getting better at checking things. If his sociability score is low enough, he won't be a volunteer any more."

Hannah butted in. "Postie, that is not a priority call if no one is in physical danger. If we are busy, I don't want him to stop fucking me for something this silly. You can tell him when he rolls over and starts snoring." She was already squirming. Good.

"As always, practicality from my wonderful wife." To the two sergeants, "I may have dated her for her tits, but I married her for her mind. As long as she wants to stay with me, she is always going to be my most trusted assistant. This is the kind of thing you could have gone to her about."

They didn't have anything else they wanted to talk about, so I saw them out and turned to find Hannah bent over the couch, legs spread and coveralls open. Okay, I guess that's my next 'critical task'.

"Why didn't you always have an erection, back on Earth?" That's one of the good things about Confederacy medical care. No matter how big Joseph was, Hannah was back ready for aggressive sex within days.

While Tina and Hannah were collecting as many concubines as they could come up with excuses for, I was trying to turn a long list of ships into a fleet. Everyone knew cerebrally what we were trying to do, but it takes time to get everyone working together.

Eventually we got our entire lineup in the same place and the same time, and we formally declared the Beerat System Command to be operational, with the Beerat Denial Force as it's only asset. We had Harpy and Kestrel -both of the brand-new Raptor class- Athens, Lodz, and Nice -all Europa light cruisers- the 17th and 19th Destroyer Squadrons with six each of Africas and Asians respectively, and a very amorphous formation that was officially designated the 34th patrol flotilla with an assortment of Shiros, Ainsworths, and Patricians. Some of the Ainsworths had started life as Castles. You're welcome, guys. I feel your pain; I had to do it too for a while.

I designated the three K'treel Explorers and two couriers, Postman and Pony Express, as my "Support Group". Until we were actually set up in the Beerat system with a headquarters somewhere, I kept Postman as my flagship with two Shiros seconded to the Support Group as bodyguards.

While I didn't like being in the least protected ships we had, I didn't want to repeat what we had been forced into at Tulakat's OPF. I was not going to have the people who took over if I got killed on the same ship as me, and Postman allowed me some space for staff. And family, but I couldn't use that as an official reason. Yes, of course one of the Mercury-class Marine transports would have been a much better way to do it, but that didn't occur to any of us until later.

While several of the destroyers and many of the corvettes had at least seen action, Athens was the only cruiser which had ever even left Sol for longer than a training cruise. Those cruisers may be crewed by men and women who had seen combat, but not together as these crews, so until I had actually seen them perform under fire they were all suspect. In my mind, at least.

One of the first things we did was create two task forces, as similar as possible. We broke the two destroyer squadrons at the division (3 ships) level and had them swap, so each squadron had a division of Africas and a division of Asians. This upset the purists but both designs had serious weaknesses. By putting a division of each together we had a good chance of using one design's strong points to cover the other design's weak points.

Then I detailed Lodz and Nice as DesRon flagships so that their command teams got some experience managing groups of ships, added two of our corvettes to each task force as scouts, and last assigned the Harpy and Kestrel as task force flags. The two Raptors were brand-new and I wasn't sure that I liked the design concept, but they were better than not getting them so I shut up and was thankful.

Using the Raptors in a fleet was going to be difficult. For close-in work they had a good fit of beam turrets, but for long range they didn't have any self-guided missiles. All they had were "canister" launchers which launched an assortment of non-guided, non-self-propelled items. They carried canisters of sand, chaff, sensor platforms, and mines. All of which could be incredibly useful, if we could predict where a Sa'arm ship was going to go next, but none of them were self-propelled or guided, so anything they launched was guaranteed to miss if the Dickheads changed course after they were launched.

The sand canisters also looked like they might be good countermeasures against incoming missiles, but again the Sa'arm didn't appear to have missiles that were as effective as ours, so that may not be a critical task, either. Could the sand stop a beam weapon? Perhaps that worked. Or, they could launch a 'canister' that was nothing more than a canister-sized solid block of ice.

BuPers said that each of our Raptors had the best command teams they could give them so I was willing to work with them, but how to use them evaded me. Hopefully Sol had started working on an operational doctrine, and when they had something they would share it with us soon enough for it to help.

Until we figured that out, though, I had to use the Raptors, integrated into the rest of our ships, as simple bigger hammers. As we understood it, the Sa'arm had not yet seen these ships use their canister launchers. The first time would be a tactical surprise, and that was something that would happen only once, so their command teams were agreed with me that we should hold that wild card in our hands as long as we could. So, until we knew how to use them best, both Raptors were just bigger ships with more guns, very like the Europas that the Sa'arm had seen before.

With that in mind, each task force was trained to operate together very much like a division of ships in a conventional sea-battle in the WW1 era, before anyone added missiles or aircraft to the game. Each Task Force -and that immediately got shortened to the WW2 US Navy's nickname "Taffy"- should be working together at all times as a single unit, with the expectation that either Taffy, whichever turns out to be in front of a dickhead intrusion, will charge into the fight while the other task force crept around behind the dickheads for some surprise anal sex.

That left Athens. Since she was the only ship and crew we had with actual combat experience -all the others were either pulled from Sol's home fleet, brand-new, or coming to us after overhaul and crew turnover- I designated Athens as the patrol force flag, and gave her the rest of the corvettes.

We needed those ships doing the same thing they had done in the OPF at Tulakat, patrolling the empty space of the outer system.

I told Commodore Grotten -and made it public- that if I ever caught two of her ships flying in formation I was going to assume they were having a slut-swapping party and ask why I hadn't been invited. They were not part of our combat forces, and with luck and God's love they never would be. Their job was to give us lots of warning no matter who came from where, and then to get into position to kill any stragglers or escapees. To do that they needed to be spread out and avoid any incoming undamaged Dickhead ships.

I also got the Ops Directorate to bless Colonels Arturo Gonzales and Jennifer Ramsey -Harpy and Kestrel's Captains respectively- formal upgrades to "task force commodores". Since performing well in combat in that position was the easiest way for a senior Captain, okay Colonel, to get on the Admirals list, that should smooth the ruffled feathers of having a Lt Colonel giving orders for the entire fleet while they themselves were stifled by our initial doctrine in purposefully-crippled ships. The chain of command went, temporarily, from me to the respective COs of Brennan, then Harpy, then Kestrel, then Athens, then Lodz, then Nice.

For formal fleet command, I stopped there. If we got reamed so badly that all those ships were lost, then it was probably best if any survivors stop trying to fight and start trying to run. I put that in the fleet's standing orders, too. The high command needs to know what went wrong so they can start working on a fix. If we get wiped out, they won't find out we got wiped out, and they won't work on a fix for whatever got us. If we lost every ship in the command list, any survivors are hereby ordered to retreat to safety and report to Brakat, if possible, or any other Confederacy-held system if not.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time with the command teams from every ship. I had to know I could trust them to do the right thing, and that meant knowing that they knew when to disobey orders. They would all obey orders when appropriate, but none of them would hesitate to ignore their standing orders if the situation warranted. If we got into a big furball and lost all our command ships breaking the back of the invading fleet, the survivors weren't going to stop mopping up the leftovers just because of some stupid order to retreat.

We also practiced Emissions Control, or EmCon. A ship with shields up was much easier to "see" than a dead ship pretending to be an asteroid. Also a targeting lidar was detectable much further out than a return signal was, and a long-range scan was even worse. A warship actively searching for trouble would get noticed by said trouble long before she noticed the trouble she was looking for.

Many of our personnel had previous military experience on Earth, and of course for the Confederacy Navy, the experience was mostly from Earth's wet-navies. Those volunteers who had served on or around submarines understood how to be quiet, but those volunteers who had served on surface warships had trouble with the concept. On the other hand, the Sa'arm also had trouble understanding the concept, and that was a big help sometimes. Unless they got a lot smarter, we would ALWAYS see them long before they saw us.

Last, at every conference I stressed that we were fighting for real estate, yes, but also for knowledge, ours to have and theirs to deny. If we were forced to choose between killing most of an incursion with no casualties, or all of an incursion at the cost of a couple of ships, I would always choose the latter option.

Letting a dickhead escape with a list of our ships and knowledge of our tricks will only tell its home planet to send a bigger force next time -and how big a force it needed to send- to beat us. Better to take some casualties now and avoid that bigger force later. If we choose to fight, we must fight in such a way that only we leave the scene of the crime with lessons learned. And, as long as we were charged with defending that system, we would always choose to fight. We'll get our best results if we learn from our previous experience and fight the way we learned in Tulakat.

If we are lucky, the stars all align correctly, and God loves us, we will always destroy 100% of all incursions. However, this may not happen. If there ever comes a time when a dickhead ship escapes to report home, then at that time we will change tactics to minimize casualties. If the cat's out of the bag, then there's no sense in worrying about the Sa'arm collective's info stream. Until then, though, we will do whatever it takes to prevent escapees.

She did this on purpose! I mean, I asked Postie if it thought that Tina had selected Monique with my prejudices in mind, and it replied <After factoring in comments made by Signifer Tina Hernandez, the probability of this exceeds 94%.> Great.

Now, I am an American, and I have prejudices. Not the normal ones, no. It is commonly recognized that some cultures are toxic, but that does not force every member to be bad. "Mexicans are lazy" but that appearance is forced by their climate; you HAVE to lay low in the afternoon down there, if you try to work in that heat you'll kill yourself. Most Mexicans you find in the US are incredibly hard-working migrants, doing everything they can to support their families.

The rest of the common prejudices are the same way. "Niggers are dirty and useless" but individual blacks are quite often far more hygienic and trustworthy than their poor white trash detractors. "Germans are all Nazis" but most Nazis today are home-grown idiots from the US with no German ancestors at all. "Canadians can't do anything without their government telling them what to do" but again individual Canadians are no worse than us Americans.

The only true prejudice I have left is the one that I have seen, time and again, proven to be true: "The French are the most stuck-up people in the world, with rather less reason than most". That one I can stand behind.

So, what happens when you combine some of those prejudices? You get the French Canadians, that small cultural and ethnic group left behind and trapped when the British Empire conquered the French colony of Quebec in the mid-1700s. It has been 300 years and they STILL haven't been assimilated. The only thing that's funny about dealing with the Quebecois is remembering that both they and the "real" French despise each other, and no one else understands why, on either side.

Well, at least she isn't actually French. I don't know if I could deal with that.

Anyway, Tina had sent me a message that tracked me down wherever I was and let me know that she had left my replacement for her "tight Cuban ass" in my quarters with Hannah, LaRhonda, and Joannie since she had to run and go get another group of rejects for us.

I asked the AI about Monique, and what I got back was disturbing. She was pretty, but.... She was a French-Canadian, excuse me, 'Canadienne' who had been picked up in Buffalo with a marginal volunteer who was apparently fascinated with deflowering virgins. He had made the normal modifications of bigger, firmer, more sensitive bust, prettier face, slimmer hips, etc, but he had added an unusual one: Her hymen would grow back overnight. Every time he penetrated her he tore her hymen again, and the AIs would not give her any analgesics to deal with the pain. She didn't have any children yet; apparently the stress she was under kept any fertilized ova from developing into a fetus.

Eventually she had broken down and gone to someone else and begged to be killed so that she wouldn't have to go through being raped every night any more. The person she had gone to had taken her to a Civil Service office, where they had gotten her sponsor's permission to keep her since she wouldn't/couldn't get pregnant. They didn't know what to do with her, though, as she really had no useful skills (to the Confederacy, at least) beyond bedwarmer, and the AIs wanted to recycle her if she was unwilling to have sex and unable to have children. When Tina had put out her announcement about giving rejects a second chance with a clean record, the Civil Service office that had Monique had flagged her as available if we wanted her.

Okay, let's start with the simple stuff. "AI, is this regrowth done with nanites?"

<Yes, she does now. She did not until she was taken in by the Civil Service, who sent her to get a checkup. That base's AI could tell the Civil Service about her condition, and they told her.>

One good thing about rising through the ranks is that, the higher you go, the more helpful the AIs get. By the time you are commanding something, whether it be shuttle or starship, the AI running that vessel is anticipating what you want and trying to provide it before you ask. Sometimes you get complacent and start to think of the AIs as normal people like us, assigned to help you like any other assistant, and then you get smacked in the face with crap like this.

Not only are they not human with human values, they don't care much if the volunteers live through this war; they only care about getting the job of stopping the Sa'arm done, and the concubines are of less value to them than one of those chaff canisters I couldn't figure out how to use.

Shit, I don't need a 4th concubine, all I really need is one extra for those times when Hannah isn't feeling good and Joannie fits that perfectly, but I'll accept her just to have the authority to direct that action. "I claim her as my concubine and I so wish. If she has a hymen now, have it dissolved without pain, and then have that set of nanites flushed so it never grows back. How long will this take?"

<Please wait while the concubine is contacted.> and we were in a video conference with my quarters.

Yeah, but it will probably be months before she can have sex without flinching. Just great. Of COURSE the Darjee go crazy if they have to deal with us for very long. Even our very best aren't very good. We aren't any better than the Sa'arm; we just aren't quite as bad. Or maybe we are worse; at least the Sa'arm don't play with their victims. All they do is kill and eat them.

I put in another video call to our quarters, where the girls were getting to know each other. I introduced myself to Monique and told her that I'd be home in a couple more hours but that we would take things slowly, and left them with orders to have Postie show them the recording of the conversation I had just had with my local AI about Monique.

The front and middle pods on our Explorers were slowly filling up with newly picked-up volunteers and their concubines (all of whom needed basic orientation, medical time, and training on their new jobs), personnel transferred from other units to help us develop our presence at Beerat (none of whom, thankfully, needed much of anything), and a constantly fluctuating number of unattached concubines as Tina raided the system's brothels and Civil Service offices for unwanted women (almost all of whom needed immense and completely unavailable amounts of human compassion) and some of whom immediately found sponsors anyway. In fact....

I got a call in to BuShips about the care and feeding of the ion generators for the medium and heavy particle beam weapon systems which were the main batteries on all of our cruisers. They needed periodic maintenance and it would be embarrassing to say the least if we didn't have -or at least know how to make- everything we needed to keep them going.

"Hello Signifer Hernandez. Let's stop that shit right here. Your children call me 'Daddy', and I've spent enough nights in bed with you to earn the right to call you 'Tina'."

"Yes, Tom. What's up, yanqui?" Which is what the Cubans call those bastards to their north who kept them down and poor all through the Cold War....

"I've told the AIs to keep me apprised about how full our three floating hotels are, and I've noticed that you are collecting quite a few delightful young ladies for us. Which, as a man, I can say I'm really happy about, but as an Admiral I have to point out that the human race has two genders, and we have volunteers from both."

"Yes, Tom. I've discussed this with the AIs and the Earthat system Civil Service coordinator. The problem is that male concubines are very rarely rejected. Either they fit in and are kept by their original sponsor, or they don't fit in and they cause enough trouble to get recycled. There just aren't any male concubines available for our purposes."

"Hmmm. Okay, I guess I can accept that. You're right, every male reject I know of was within weeks of pickup, and none of them got turned in to the Civil Service. Still, we need male concubines, too. I'd say at least 1/20th of your collection should be male. I hate to use a sledgehammer to crack pecans, but let me know if you can't find a solution here and I'll put in a request to the Targeted Extraction Group for a bunch of male concubines."

Tina started laughing. "I want to be there when you call them. This I've got to see. 'Excuse me, please, I'm a man, an admiral with my own fleet, and I need more dicks for my women.'"

"Well, it won't be the most embarrassing thing I've ever done. That would probably be trying to explain to Hector..." that was her son, who I had adopted when I took her at our pickup and was already old enough to read, "...why I had put my cock inside someplace labeled 'exit only'."

I'm not big on anal sex, but Tina could be a handful and seeing that tattoo across her ass made me think that anal might be a good way to get her attention. On our third or fourth day together, she was bitchy enough that I tried it. It worked, too. She stopped trying to be in charge and accepted that I was number 1 and Hannah was number 2. Neither of these are going to change, so stop pushing.

Now she was red-faced and laughing. "I thought I'd bust a gut, between trying to not scream when you shoved that monster up my ass and trying to not laugh when he asked you about disobeying my tattoo."

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