Part 6 - Month 82 - Our First Real Test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, we've got the room, we can spread out some. Designate "Tunnel 1" on each level for industrial stuff like power plants, air systems, and factories, then the opposite #5 for public service stuff like constable stations, nurseries, schools, stadiums, pools, and retail shops, then #3 and #7 for farms, ranches, and large-scale gardens, and we could still have 1600 families in the four tunnels left, letting us house everyone we had with only three levels of residences. We kept that system for every level, with the levels all rotated a bit so that all the "Tunnel 1"s weren't stacked right on top of each other. It turned out that all the odd-numbered tunnels were infrastructure stuff, and all the even-numbered tunnels were residential.

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

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

If we wanted bigger "towns" we could always go farther out than 10 klicks. To make sure that we had no trouble no matter how large a tunnel got, we thought that we should offset each level so that the tunnels weren't right above or below the next level's tunnels. For that matter, we could branch the tunnels. At 10 klicks, the tunnel was about 6 klicks away from the next tunnel over, That was even farther away than the next one up or down.

And, since we were putting grav grids everywhere, we could keep going down as far as we wanted. Transporter pads in convenient places would make getting around fairly easy. If we went down so far that we came out the other side, well, we could do the same thing anywhere else in the Womb. It would be a long time before we ran out of space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We had six construction frames that were ~100 meters long and could handle ships that were up to ~50 meters wide. We had six Africas that we wanted to give a longer-range punch to, as well as six Asians. That seemed obvious to us; as soon as each frame became available when they finished building the Folk-Hero guns and ships, we took an Africa off the line and put it in the frame. We didn't think that we were losing much firepower if we got surprised with all six down, and the sooner we got them upgraded and back in formation the better off we would all be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Does Deepak concur?"

<It was his suggestion.>

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

Another report was from Larry on Brennan, once Taffy-2 had heard what was coming. It was a message to Commodore Gonzales on Kestrel, copied to me, Bill, and Commodore Ramsey commanding Taffy-1 from Harpy's CIC. "This is a preparatory order. This doesn't look like something we're going to get to sneak up on. By our standing orders, be prepared to assume full operational control of Task Force 2."

That, again, was part of our incursion checklists. Larry, Arturo, Jennifer, and I had had several conferences about this. If I was with one Task Force, Brennan would stay with the other. And, as long as there was an advantage to sneaking around, Larry held operational command of the Taffy he was attached to. The instant that sneaking was no longer advisable, he was supposed to return operational command to that Taffy's commanding officer.

That message was immediately followed by an acknowledgement from Arturo, again copied to Taffy-1, me, and Bill.

Another message torpedo. The visitors were jumping farther in-system. That meant that they were headed for Beer, rather than our shipyard. Shit. One of the unspoken purposes of all of our activities at Ale was to attract attention. Anyone who blundered into the system, then stopped by to check the shipyard out or even ran by for a high-speed firing run wasn't bothering Beer and gave us that much more time to stop them. On the other hand, if they weren't coming here then I would probably live through today.

Okay, that was it for the sensor platforms. They had given us all the data they could, now it was up to us to get some use out of the warning. Actually, probably just Taffy-2 if the Sa'arm were going straight to Beer.

The shuttle docked in Harpy and Taffy-1 headed in-system at maximum military speed for its slowest unit, the Patrician Laguna Beach. I headed to Harpy's Flag Bridge, a space back towards the engineering spaces set up as a communication center and backup CIC. If there was a flag officer onboard, he and his staff got it.

Being in the flag bridge meant that, if Harpy got hit and lost both CIC and bridge but was otherwise still a viable combat unit, I could take command of the ship from there. If she was no longer a viable warship, command went to DC, which had backup nav and comm consoles while I continued to manage the other ships.

Taffy-2 sped up, too. A lot depended upon where the Sa'arm came back out, and we learned that pretty quickly. They popped out between Taffy-2 and Beer. Just great. Taffy-2 wouldn't be able to block them, but on the plus side they could still catch the Sa'arm before they could get to the planet, assuming that they intended to slow down and land. If that was their intention, they would have to fight us first. If they intended to run into the planet at full speed, well we couldn't prevent it but that would probably be okay, too. Hard on any of the Beer who were near their "landing" zone, but far better for the rest of them than live Sa'arm.

Larry gave one last order, which was the same thing we were doing: Advance at the highest speed that their Patrician, the Montserrat, could keep up with. If the Patricians didn't have their four missile launchers, we both would have said "tough luck" and left them behind. As it was they had half of our most powerful long-range weapons, and all the newer ships had to keep their acceleration down to let them keep up. After that order, Larry formally turned operational control of Task Force 2 over to Arturo, effectively turning Brennan into just another minor ship under Arturo's command.

I gave one more order, too, before we all sat back to watch the clock. I told Barton to cancel his evacuation, and also cancel the underway preps for Malaysia and Georgia, the two Asians that were closest to completion. I told him to get the other four underway and headed in-system as quickly as possible. Designate them as "Task Force 3". Use any resources not required for those four ships to expedite work on Malaysia and Georgia.

If things got bad enough, it was possible that Taffy-3 would show up to find a bunch of broken ships with themselves the most powerful units left on either side of the board. In that case, they would be able to finish off the leftovers, on their side, and then help with recovery of any survivors, on our side.

Arturo had commanded a ship in la Armada Espaniola, the Spanish navy, and had served with NATO task forces his whole career, but this was likely the first time he faced an enemy that had a reasonable chance of killing him. We had a quick video conference, he and Jennifer in their CICs, I on Harpy's flag bridge, and Bill back at the Womb.

Bill started it. "Surprise is only possible when one side doesn't have all the facts. We assume that they will have some surprises for us. Do they matter, or not?"

I answered that one. "They have already achieved tactical surprise. We know that we don't know what weapons their ships have; all we have is a very vague knowledge that both classes, all three ships, have lots of beam weapons. We will be surprised if they have anything else."

Jennifer added the other side. "If they know anything about our ships, they know they are about to be attacked by two undersized ships that they can beat easily, and three more even smaller ones that cannot hurt them at all until the range is very close. If they follow that, they will hammer the cruisers and ignore the destroyers. That's our hole card. I don't see any changes. We have to go in the way we planned it. I'd say have the destroyers concentrate on the hive ship. It's the only ship that can really win this campaign for them, not just this battle but the campaign for the whole system. They will sacrifice both their smaller ships to get Big Mama down on the planet. It's going to be hard on our cruisers, but if your four little boys can support the cruisers they may live long enough for the destroyers to come help. That's certainly what we are going to be doing in about two hours, if you don't stop them."

I butted in again. "One thing that helps is that they have to slow down to land. We aren't landing. We don't have any reason to slow down, so we will get there faster than otherwise. I know it doesn't help right now, but in about three hours, Task Force 3 is going to show up at Beer. That's four half-assembled Asian-class destroyers. They don't have their big guns yet, but they still have eight twin-beam turrets and they should be enough to clean up anything that we leave on the table for them. I agree. Big Mama has to be our first priority. Destroying her and her cargo is more important than crippling the others."

I sat back. "Arturo, you've got a job to do. We will stay out of your hair unless we have something useful to add. We'll be there in two hours."

Arturo got to speak, finally. "If we were between them and the planet, we could hold them off until you got here. As it appears, it looks like we have to each charge in as we get there. We are going to lose ships here."

My turn again, as Admiral in command. "Arturo, yes. You are going to lose ships here. However, you have help coming. There is no need for a suicide charge. If any of your ships get crippled, have them break off. We are going to win this fight. We will recover the damaged ships afterwards. Fight until you are too damaged to continue, then break off."

Speaking of which, that was a good point. "Bill, get all three of those life-support tenders moving. We are going to need them."

Back to everyone again. "Big Mama is the key, and both sides know it. She is the only one we have to kill to win this fight, and they will sacrifice everything else to protect her. Any weapon that can reach Mincemeat-1..." Kevin had designated the three ships as Mincemeat-1, -2, and -3 on his plot "...should be shooting at her. They will throw everything else they can in the way, so use your secondary armament on Mincemeat-2 and -3. They can hurt our ships but they can't take the planet."

Let's close this. Arturo really has better things to do. "Arturo, we need to let you go."

Arturo. "Let's leave this open, just don't jog my elbow without a good reason. I'll try to keep you updated."

As soon as they had a good plot running on the dickheads, Arturo launched a time-on-target salvo of missiles. First Kestrel launched four canisters of sand, then had Nice and Montserrat launch complete salvos of their much-faster missiles, with the launch timed to impact Big Mama two seconds before the sand. If the missiles hit at all, they should take Mama's shield down long enough for the sand to also hit. All anyone could do was stay glued to the screen and pray.

BOOM! For a split second, Mama was a much larger blip on the screen. Even in space, our minds provided the sound-track to accompany the flash. Harpy announced <Two missiles hit Mincemeat-1. The enemy shield failed and one sand canister also hit. Damage unknown.> ....and there was much cheering, which stopped when the screen refreshed and Mama looked pretty much the same as she did before, maybe a little uglier with a beat-up face.

The plot also immediately showed vector changes. Mama was dancing to the side, as well as such a portly matron could dance. Her two bodyguards were decelerating and coming back to us, er, Taffy-2.

No, her FOUR bodyguards are coming back to join us. Where did the other two come from? Someone asked that question. Bill answered on the command conference channel. "The Fleet intel report on the Volumna class says they can carry three of their Vacuna-class scout ships internally, plus some small craft with plasma torpedos. You should be seeing three Vacunas and some bombers soon."

I knew that. Actually we all did; we had all studied the same reports, it's just that we were all focused on the current fight and Bill was figuratively relaxing in his hot tub. Maybe Mama had only brought two Vacunas; maybe there were three but the initial ToT missile and canister salvo had disabled the third one.

I asked Jennifer on another channel "You've got 16 launchers. Can Kestrel change the spread on those sand canisters and use the side launchers to take out a bomber?"

"Yes, when they get closer, but she will have to turn broadside, then rotate the ship for each group. I'll ask Arturo how he plans to handle the bombers if they show up."

I heard the answer. "Yes, if we see bombers we will try sand from long range then our beams as they get closer. We don't think they have shields, so they should be easy to kill. Meanwhile, we have succeeded in separating the mother ship from her escorts. If we could have gotten in front of them we would be in much better shape."

Arturo continued on to direct another ToT salvo, but this time directed at Mincemeat-2. If they were silly enough to stay on one course, they might get hurt bad. While we were waiting for that to hit, they detected nine smaller craft leaving Mama. Okay, eight. One of them exploded a couple of seconds after the second salvo got to the escort cruiser. The salvo landed one missile and one sand canister on their target, and Mincemeat-2 stopped accelerating. Apparently one of the misses got one of the bombers.

Arturo directed the same thing for the remaining escort cruiser. We saw no effect, but then they were all dancing around. He ordered Montserrat to not launch any more missiles until they were within their powered range, and then to launch as fast as possible and go to one of our supply depots to reload. The Patricians only carried 20 missiles, which meant a total of only five 4-missile salvos.

I understood Arturo's decision and agreed. Montserrat could only do that twice more. Still, if she didn't get anything else done, she had damaged Mama and taken one of the Vervactors out of the fight -and maybe killed a Vacuna before it launched. With her contribution to this fight she had already more than paid for her complete cost to date, both to originally build and to crew and maintain until now.

Mincemeat-3 and the two Vacunas kept coming, and the eight small craft passed them. Eventually we could see that they were spreading out some, even as Taffy-2 was. Arturo was almost constantly talking with his CIC crew or his Captains and we didn't want to bother him, but I felt like I had to.

"Arturo, they may try to ram. Those escorts are expendable compared to getting Mama down on the planet."

"Yes. I have told Montserrat to flush all missiles immediately if she is approached by those bombers. She will not survive more than one plasma torpedo, and I understand that each bomber carries two. The rest of us will try to avoid a crash." After several years out here, his English still sounded British and stilted to me. Kevin probably thought it was fine.

We were discussing probable ramming targets when Big Mama suffered an unfortunate accident. Completely without warning, she started throwing pieces loose and then a few seconds later she exploded. Not that we minded, but What The Fuck?

Harpy's AI explained, as I'm sure all the other ship's AIs were explaining to their crews: <Paul Bunyan was able to accelerate earlier and then shut down all emissions and coast on a vector that crossed the enemy's base course approximately 700 kilometers in front of them. Paul Bunyan fired five shots from two degrees before crossing. The ship now has its shields up but is still coasting and hiding behind a sand cloud.>

Fuck, YES! That changed everything. Arturo was screaming orders. Kestrel, Nice and Montserrat tried again to get Mincemeat-3, but again the range was too great; their target was dancing too well. The Dickheads also started slowing again, or rather accelerating away from us and towards the planet again. That made sense to me; they are no longer escorts, expendable to this expedition. They had become their expedition's colony ships. From their point of view, at least one of these ships needed to survive and land to build a colony on Beer.

Before long the bombers were within range of a powered missile. Montserrat launched her last four and peeled off for resupply. Three of them took out bombers, and we had two cruisers, three Africa-pluses, two Shiros, and a Castle against a mega-cruiser, another crippled mega-cruiser, two Vacunas, and five bombers.

While they waited for the bombers to run in, Arturo kept throwing missiles and sand canisters at Mincemeat-3. He hit once, but we didn't see any effect. He didn't try to get the rest of the bombers; we wanted to see what targets they went after. Someone, somewhere, would be able to figure something out from that.

The bombers ignored our smaller ships and concentrated on the cruisers. This matched our understanding of their estimates of what the different ships could do. Two went after Nice and three went after Kestrel. Nice killed one of hers with a missile before it got too close, then the other with a beam after it launched.

The one plasma torpedo that hit Nice turned her into a mangled wreck, killing about a third of her crew. If the other torpedo had hit, or if the bomber had rammed, we probably would have lost the whole ship.

We don't know what happened to Kestrel. We know she got one of the bombers -one of the Shiros saw it explode- and after their run there were no more bombers, but we don't know what happened between those two points in time. Kestrel exploded just like Mama had. She was there, then she was just gone. There was no point in looking for survivors.

Larry recognized that he was the senior officer present and assumed command of what was left of Taffy-2, but he only gave one order. "Advance on the enemy, and fire when in range. That is all."

That may be all, but it's not enough. Obviously, that coin had two sides. If I was right that the normal warship captains couldn't be trusted to sneak around when that was the appropriate action, it was also true that our scout captains had no business commanding a task force in a normal fight. I was going to have to take the blame for that one. And fix it. Later.

One of the destroyer captains started allocating targets. He told the other DDs to concentrate on Mincemeat-3 until it was dead, then finish off Mincemeat-2. He told the Shiros and Brennan that they could have Mincemeat-4 and -5, the two Vacunas.

Mincemeat-3 started firing particle beams at about 500 kilometers. All six of our ships got hit at least once, but none of the hits penetrated our shields. The destroyers held their fire until they were only 400 klicks away.

Once they got within 400 kilometers, all three started pounding Mincemeat-3 with 50 kg slugs at full power, 100kps. He died quickly. If he had any other weapons that could reach that far, he never used them. Since Mincemeat-2 was still out of range, the destroyers took out the Vacunas next. The Shiros didn't complain; they were going to get hurt if they had to close in enough to kill them on their own. This way nobody else got hurt.

After that it was a simple matter of closing in through Mincemeat-2's beam weapons until it was within can't-miss range of the "Baby-Hero" rail guns, making sure there was nothing important behind the target, and shooting it up until it exploded. We still didn't have anyone qualified to board a crippled Dickhead ship. What was left of the Task Force stopped as far away from Beer as they could, then tried to help Nice with damage control. Once we were sure we were done they would escort Nice back to Ale for repairs.

We did well given the circumstances. We got surprised, and our available weapon mix didn't match up well against the enemy platforms -the Asians should have been able to make short work of the bombers- but our frantic construction work and prior planning let us win the battle anyway.

All five enemy ships were destroyed, not by the ships we brought from Sol system, but by weapons we built here ourselves, and that was something to be proud of. We could credit Nice and Montserrat's missiles for crippling one of the Vervactors and maybe keeping the assumed third Vacuna from launching, but that and a couple of bombers were all that our "stock" ships could claim.

On the other side, all of our losses were due to a weapon system that we hadn't expected and didn't have a good answer to. We could fix that, though. It would be fixed, as soon as we had our Asians back. As soon as it was obvious that Taffy-2 could handle the cleanup, I ordered "Task Force 3" back into the yard and asked the planning committee for ways to expedite their completion.

Immediately after that, I asked if it was too late to fold in our original plan to swap some of those turrets. The Asians were fine, but the Africas' disruptors were going to be declared obsolete soon and those ships needed something quick-firing that could swat bombers. Could we, once we had the Asians back on station, put the Africas back in the yard and replace, say, four (half of the remaining eight) of the disruptor turrets with the leftover particle beam turrets? Not all at once, we weren't going to make that mistake again, but maybe two at a time?

If we could get those turrets back from Bill's artillery company, we would have enough to do three of the Africas. If we did two at a time, we should be able to build additional turrets fast enough to have them ready when the last three needed them. And Bill could have all the disruptor turrets for his fixed defenses.

Yes, we were angry about losing one of our largest ships and not knowing why, but the reason that we were all so pissed had nothing to do with Taffy-2's fight. About the time that one of our life-support tenders met with Nice on the way back to Ale and the safety of one of Barton Yard's construction frames, one of our sensor platforms warned us about multiple ships accelerating in the outer system, well away from everything else.

They were in a sector that we didn't have adequately covered yet by sensor platforms. We didn't have anyone in the area; Athens had pulled all of our scouts in to help stop any escapees from the battle in the inner system. You can blame me for that if you need someone to point fingers at; that was what Athens was supposed to do for an inner-system incursion. That was the plan agreed upon after long hours of wargaming all the options, and every senior officer had had his input into the plan.

The simple truth was that we didn't have the forces to adequately protect three different critical assets -the planet Beer, the Womb, and the shipyard complex at Ale- much less protect all three and keep the outer system clean too. We were just too over-extended to do everything we needed to do. On top of everything else, we needed more sensor stations and more scouts.

Still, one purpose of our scout group was to prevent retreating damaged enemies from escaping, and there was no way to predict what direction a fleeing enemy might go. Because of this, the scout group was scattered in a loose globe in an attempt to put someone in the way, no matter what direction they might go.

Majorca was our third Patrician. We had thought about adding her to one of the Taffies but hadn't because keeping them as similar as possible made it easier for us to plan. There were pros and cons either way; we had had angry faces over her in a couple of conferences. We need those missiles in our task forces. We need those missiles out in the patrol forces. Well, both were right.

The answer was to get more missile platforms. Maybe we could get some more Patricians; maybe we could build some. Certainly, we needed to start putting missiles on our sensor platforms, or at least set up a shell of missile platforms that the sensor stations could control. The correct answer, of course, was "D"; all of the above. Every solution was at least in the planning phase, but unfortunately until we had more resources that was where they had to stay.

Majorca was the only ship in position to investigate. She reported that the intruders were another Vacuna triad with the small fourth ship we had seen before. She had launched all tubes, one missile at each target. She got two hits on Vacunas. She had also launched a second salvo but the bandits jumped out before those missiles arrived. She reported everything to date, then went into hyperspace to follow the trail before it dissipated.

The debris field, when we finally got Abbot out there to investigate, showed that one missile had broken a Vacuna. It wasn't dead yet, it just couldn't move. Abbot took care of that. She took some damage but nothing major and no fatalities.

Another Vacuna had also been damaged, enough to dump some debris including some dickheads themselves out into space but apparently not enough to keep the ship from jumping. So, at least two undamaged dickhead ships, and maybe a third damaged one, had gotten away with whatever info they had come to get. Maybe Majorca could kill them when they popped out, wherever they went. The hyperspace trails were too cold by then for Abbot to follow.

We collected the dead dickheads for our research scientists to play with.

The bottom line for us was that, whether by design or by accident, the Sa'arm had figured out how to get a scout in and out again, and probably knew more than we wanted about the kind of forces we had waiting for them here. I sent out an immediate all-hands message saying that there had been two enemy forces. We had taken some casualties but again destroyed all ships in the inner attack force so the Womb and Beer were safe, but at the same time the outer force had turned back and escaped.

Therefore, commencing immediately we were shifting from an information containment strategy to the more conventional max/min strategy. No more "stop them all no matter the cost"; we would from here on out fight to maximize their losses while minimizing our own.

We never saw Majorca again. Wherever she went, the dickheads were ready for visitors. Or, maybe they were were doing the same thing we were, preventing anyone they caught from leaving. If we wanted to get more info about our neighbors we were going to have to be sneakier. When we had the ships to invest in the effort.