Part 8 - Month 87 - The Stand

"I'm here to take a stand" - Bon Jovi

There was a Jim Stafford song popular when I grew up, about a pair of farmers who found some marijuana growing on their land. The last verse starts with "All good things gotta come to an end, and it's the same with the wild-wood weed". The Sa'arm gave us almost half a year before they came back, but when they did they came loaded for bear.

We, on the other hand, thought we were ready for them. We had all breathed a collective sigh of relief when the first of our eight four-turret heavily-armored Raptor-based ships floated out of its construction frame, not quite finished but close enough to start its shake-down cruise while it finished itself. Her seven sisters all followed her within a few days.

Yes, they had quirks. They had issues. They had problems, in fact. We would live with them all, though, since the second they were clear, the frames had started working on eight more. The design team put some thought into all the problems, though. The second set shouldn't have those problems. They would have new ones of their own, of course.

The big problem, the one that mattered, was their main battery. Taken one at a time, we could fire any of the four "Junior Hero" guns at full power, any direction, all day long. We got that part right. Somewhere, though, we had screwed up the mounts -or maybe it was how long the hull was for its frames- and any time we fired A or C, the two "up" turrets, it screwed up the mounts for B and D, the two "down" turrets. Naturally, B and D returned the favor. Firing either of them took A and C off-line for about 20 minutes.

Practical effects? We couldn't fight on both sides at once. We could use A and C all day, or we could use B and D all day. Fine, we'll just try to keep all enemies who need to be shot up on one side. If both turrets on that side get disabled, they could roll the ship but they were just sitting there in the middle of a battle with enemies big enough to cripple them. It was going to be a long 20 minutes or so for the crew before they could fire the other two guns. Again, we didn't like it but we could live with it. If one of those ships got hurt so bad that they couldn't fire either gun on one side, it should probably be trying to run, not fight, anyway.

Also, they didn't have any large missiles. The structure and mass to support the four turrets and their recoil impulse cut into the usable interior volume a lot. We had intended to put a missile battery between "B" and "C" turrets, but there just wasn't enough volume to have the kind of large space we would need for the magazine.

Meanwhile, the power requirements for everything kept climbing, and we finally put another power room there where we could fill the rest of the volume with structure and armor. Even if everything else was dead, as long as that power room was up turrets "B" and "C" could still fight. That gave the ship three different power plants that could drive two turrets.

We had eight of these things. We put four of them in with Harpy to add to our battle-line and one went to each of the Taffies. I grabbed the eighth one for myself, as a system command post. I could ride around, I could hide behind armor, and I could shoot back. As the children pointed out, I also had enough room in my flag quarters to take them all with me, but no they need to attend school so they can be Sponsors when they grow up. I also grabbed two of our new Shiro-IIs as an escort.

Since they were effectively a new class, we named the first one "Rattlesnake" and the rest of them the "Snake" class. Rattlesnake, Copperhead, Adder, Asp, Coralsnake, Mamba, Cobra, Krait. I kept Krait as my flagship until I turned my command over to Kevin.

Manning these ships was getting harder. How we did the ones going to the Taffies was typical. We moved that Taffy's Europa's skipper over to the new Snake, and the Europa's XO moved up to Captain of the ship he already knew. We pulled the skipper off of one of the Taffy's Shiro-IIs to serve as the Snake's XO, and his XO moved up to command his ship as well.

We did the same thing throughout the Taffy, moving department heads from smaller ships to larger ones and department heads from larger ships to XO, and so on down the line, trying to not take too many people from each individual ship. We had posted all the promotions a month before it happened, then pulled the trigger a couple weeks early so that the people going to the Snakes could help ensure their replacements were up to speed before reporting to their PreCom unit.

That way, no older ship had to deal with too many green replacements, and the new Snake started with a core of people who didn't know the ship that well but already knew the Taffy and could make the ship fit into the task force without trouble.

It probably wasn't a week after we started calling the new class "Snakes" that the people down at L2 started calling their Monitors the "Turtle" class. Are y'all jealous much? Yes, they are slow and ponderous, but they aren't that bad. They can take any other ship we've ever heard of in a fair fight, what do you want? To be able to catch any other ship, of course. Sorry. That just ain't happening. You can catch any ship that comes to you, and that's all we need.

We also had six of our new cruisers, with another six on the way. They were only taking two or three months to build, the way we were farming different assemblies out to different constructors. I let Kevin name them, and he named them all after cruisers in the RN. I was okay with that, as long as one of them was named Belfast.

HMS Belfast was another ship that should be remembered; she and Victory were to the Royal Navy what Enterprise and Constitution were to the US Navy. There aren't many cruisers where you can go on the bridge and read log entries like "Contact recognized as enemy battleship. Outside extreme range of main guns. Rang up full emergency power and turned helm to close". Sure, there have been cruisers that did that, but not many of them did that and made it back home again to become museums.

Kevin was good with that name, and they became the Kent class of heavy cruisers, with the Snakes we were building getting designated "assault" cruisers. The Snakes weren't as fast as the Kents, but they had more guns and more armor.

During our buildup, we visited the "orbital fortress" concept several times. All the science fiction stories had everybody using them, but we couldn't really see what they would give us. Anything that an orbital fortress could do, a ship could do almost as well, with the added benefit of moving if it happened to be in the wrong place. An orbital fortress couldn't do that.

Just as a space station was essentially a large spaceship without the engines, an orbital fortress was basically a large warship without engines. Thus, any space/power/resources used by engines on a ship could be diverted to more weapons, more armor, more sensors, etc, etc, etc.

However, it couldn't be completely immobile, because it needed to be able to re-orient, or move to cover a hole left by another OF that had been destroyed, or whatever. It also needed to generate whatever power its weapons, shields, and internal systems needed. So we couldn't completely get rid of the engineroom. Granted, we probably wouldn't need to have hyperspace engines, but that wasn't a big deal anyway.

The only place we thought that OFs would be worth the trouble was at Beer itself, and, well, you know. We ran into a brick wall every time the subject came up. So, we put missile launchers all around Barton Yard, Hotel, and the Greeks, but they were all sited on solid bodies rather than free-floating. And we kept building ships so that we could defend Beer.

Besides, all of our battle-line ships -the Turtles, the Kents, and the Snakes- could be considered as OFs by design and function, just with a bit more mobility than most.

On one of her ferry trips, Beebe came back with a new friend. More precisely, she came back in the company of CNS Thor, a recently recommissioned Mercury-class Marine transport ship. Thor was full of Marines, and Beebe was full of Marine concubines and dependents.

Thor's Captain, a Lt Colonel Hamid Annan, had sent me a quick greeting message telling me how delighted he was to be under my command, as was customary for a new ship in any system. When I got it I gave him a quick reply, welcoming him to our system, hoping that they enjoyed their stay, and asking him to contact me personally if his ship had any requirements that were not being handled at a lower level. All completely normal and routine. I had played his part in this Kabuki play quite a few times, but it was the first time I had played my part with a new or visiting warship, and it became one of my memories.

The Marine commander, a Lieutenant Gustav Muller, wanted a live conference with Bill, and Bill pulled me into it. He was asking for a formation -they called it a parade- to formally mark the unit's arrival, but we frankly didn't have any place large enough and open enough for what appeared to be a couple hundred men to stand in ranks. Well, we did, but it wasn't a very formal place. We got the between-the-lines impression that the sooner we did this, the better, so we told them where to go and told the staff at Hotel to keep the park clear for the next several days.

After the VidCon was done Bill explained to me what was going on. The CMC had originally organized its "companies" around the transport ships that the Confederacy had given us so they fit well together.

However, when the companies were found to be too small to do the jobs they were called for, and the Mercuries were found to be too fragile, the CMC had gotten larger transports and started adding more people to their companies. Having their TOE completely filled out to the newest standard gave this company 223 bodies, but the Mercuries were set up for the old-style companies with only 121 bodies.

In fact, if you looked at the records, we had gotten the Mercuries before we had invented the Marines, and the standard "Marine Company" had been organized around how many bodies they could fit into those ships. Twice as many bodies probably didn't fit very well. Being Marines, they probably had cots stacked in the passageways, rather than report to higher that they were unable to make it work, and Thor's various environmental systems were probably complaining about the overload.

We all hightailed it to Hotel and got to watch Thor land in the middle of what had been used as a rugby pitch only days before. That was pretty impressive. I had never seen anything larger than a cargo shuttle actually land. All of our warships were space-only; they didn't even have outriggers or skids for emergencies. I knew that the Mercuries had been adapted from a Confederacy freighter that normally landed instead of taking pods on, but I had never actually seen a Mercury before, and I'd certainly never seen one land.

I counted, just like I'm sure everyone else who had heard Bill's explanation, as a color guard disembarked first, then three platoons of Marines with hand-held weapons, then another platoon with more authoritative equipment, then a small group of staffers, and finally their CO -who I had met over the vidcon- who reported formally that Echo Company of the First Marine Reconnaissance Regiment was present and ready for inspection. Indeed, all of the Marines were in dress uniform and all appeared ready to continue standing by until they got their inspection, but there were 228 of them.

On one hand, what do I know about inspecting Marines? On the other hand, why deny them? I followed Bill's lead and tried to not screw anything up with small talk. I kept my mouth shut and tried to look important while Bill and Gustav talked shop. They took this opportunity to promote a couple of the Marines and give a few others some medals.

The last grouping of Marines in the back, only 5 of them, turned out to not be Marines at all, but rather the "go" team from Thor's medical department. When they had the ship to themselves, they worked in sickbay like normal ship's medics. Whenever they had Marines embarked, however, they wore funny clothes and lugged a first aid kit in one hand and an RL-1 in the other.

And they went with the Marines when they landed. Not a job I would want, but it was good to know we had portable medical support. Sometimes we lost injured people simply because we couldn't get them to a med-tube in time. We added them to our list of chores for Echo Company. Help us improve our trauma response teams.

After the parade/formation/personnel inspection was done, Lt Muller dismissed his troops, and now he and Bill had to accompany me while we did what I wanted to do. I was the System Commander, the senior Confederacy officer in the whole system, and I wanted a tour of a Mercury Troop Lander. Of course that turned into an inspection of all the troop spaces.

Most of the tour was of interest only because it was a new, or at least new to me, class of ship. I'd never been on any of our troopships, and having "safe landing of armed and armored combat troops" as their primary mission dictated some significant differences from our warships which had "rapid destruction of enemy ships and installations" as their primary mission. Most of the differences don't matter any more, after all this time. The Mercuries've all been decommissioned for good, the ones that survived that long.

About the most interesting part was a large personnel/cargo hatch that separated the troop spaces from the crew spaces. Someone had painted a huge sign with the CMC emblem on the hatch itself that said "You are now leaving Marine space. Be nice to the crew. They give us our ride home."

When we went through it, I waited until it had closed again. Sure enough, there was another sign on the crew side. It said "You are now entering MARINE space" but the word MARINE was written vertically, and each letter had a word spelled out as if it was an acronym. I knew it from my prior service, where there was a -usually friendly- rivalry between the USN and the USMC. The words were "My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment", of course.

Bill invited both commanders to bring their XO and senior enlisted to his quarters for an informal get-to-know session. It turned out that Hamid and Gustav were old friends. They had even known each other before pickup. Gustav's family were German, as the name would imply, but oddly enough so were Hamid's!

Hamid's parents were both from Palestine and had met in Turkey after fleeing from one of the endless wars around Israel, then when they got married and she had a child they had taken advantage of the special bond between Germany and Turkey to move to Bremen. Hamid had grown up speaking Arabic at home and German in school. He had been tutoring engineering students at the university when they had both been picked up. Gustav was not one of his pupils, but they knew each other.

Gustav went out of his way to tell Bill and I that Hamid was a German, not an Arab. He was delighted to have his old friend in command of his transport, because he knew that his men would not be abandoned. If they were trying to retreat, Thor would be there until his men were aboard. I was given to understand that he wasn't quite so sure about that with some other transports he had landed from.

I pointed out that we had asked for them because we wanted help with our fixed defenses and boarding parties. His company would not be involved in any planetary landings unless something went very badly wrong. The only planet he might be landing on was held by friendly neutrals, and landing there was prohibited until and unless the Sa'arm succeeded in landing and he got sent in to dig them out. It was our job to arrange the future so that he never had to do his job.

Bill added that we would have to get together about boarding transport. Some of the Sa'arm ships may have been big enough for Thor to land on, but Thor wasn't tough enough to take the reception she would get so we needed to use armored and shielded boarding shuttles. Thor had brought the standard Mercury fit of a single "house-cat" personnel and cargo shuttle for the crew and two "Panther" armored landing shuttles for the Marines, but nothing that was designed to fight its way into another ship.

In fact, nothing in our database looked helpful. We were going to have to start from scratch here. Again. Still, Echo Company had brought about 250 complete sets of the latest powered armor suits with them, all stacked up in Thor's morgue, so if we could get them to a dickhead ship they should be able to have fun inside it. My only part in this was to tell Deepak to give them whatever help they needed to build their transport, whatever it turned out to be. After that I could let the others worry about it.

Administratively and for all training purposes, Thor and Gustav's Marines belonged to Bill as our guy in charge of the kind of things that Marines did. However, operationally they would probably be taking most of their orders from Jennifer, since if all went well they would mostly be following our scouts around.

The reason that I brought up this getting-to-know-you meeting was that Lt Muller had a political question. He was roundabout, making sure he and his men didn't get in trouble, but they had a serious question about what they were doing....

"Admiral, General, if you don't mind I need to get serious for a minute. My men are all Marines and they will obey any legal order they are given, but sometimes you are out on your own and cannot contact higher. You have to formulate your own orders, and when that happens you have your best chance of getting them right if you know your commander's mind. If you know his intentions, you can do what he wants even if you can't reach him to get orders."

"With that in mind, and remembering that it's a lot easier to send your men out where they might get killed if you believe that they are doing something worth doing, why are we here? Who cares about the Beer?"

It would come better from a fellow Marine. I made a great show of flourishing my hands and backing away while pointing at Bill. "General Atsuke, I believe that this one is yours."

Bill, in his turn, pointed back at me and said "Admiral Williams has made it painfully clear that he considers us Marines to all be idiots who don't know enough to come in out of the rain, so I'd like to start by pointing out that I really appreciate your question. Your willingness to ask that question shows that our Marine officers have the courage, integrity, and thoughtfulness that he demands of his own Naval officers." Okay, he got me there.

"We have spent a great amount of time thinking about and discussing that question, and we've come up with three different answers. All three are true, and any of us can accept at least one of them."

"To start with, we have to start somewhere. We don't get to use that planet, but we are denying it to the enemy, which is a sufficient reason in its own right. Further, as long as we are here, the surrounding Sa'arm..."

I didn't like to put it quite so baldly, but he was right, we were pretty much surrounded here.

"...can't do much more expanding. We don't know for sure, but we suspect that we are occupying the attention of several Sa'arm systems which would otherwise be moving on and causing trouble elsewhere."

"Second, the Confederacy contacted us for the sole reason that they needed protection from a threat they couldn't face. Politically, our stand here shows them that we will do what they need, we will stand between the helpless and the Sa'arm. Every day the Beer get with no Sa'arm on their planet -and no humans, either- is another day of proof that the Confederacy can trust us with all this firepower."

"Third, it's what we do. We are not soldiers of conquest. We are defenders of our people, and we have no problem letting others hide behind our shields. Haven't you ever lived near an idiot, maybe a beautiful woman who does whatever her astrologer says and is so wacko that you wouldn't touch her on a bet and you think the world would be better off without her, but you still help her out because she has children? It's not their fault their mom's crazy."

"There's a fourth reason that isn't official, but it's real nonetheless. Admiral Williams spent several years at Tulakat. We got there in time to stop the Sa'arm from eating all the Tulaki, every human who ever set foot on that planet was a Marine who was ready to fight, but we weren't strong enough yet and the Sa'arm kicked us off again. He had to look at that planet his whole time there and think about the Tulaki not being able to fight off the invaders, and us not being strong enough to help. I'm pretty sure that the real reason we're here is that he feels guilty. We failed the Tulaki, and he wants to make sure we don't fail the Beer."

Shit. He was probably exactly right. I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but it was clear that everyone else had. Bill didn't come up with that out of the blue. He had been thinking about the philosophy side. All I could do was look back at them and shrug.

"What do you want me to say? The CNO asked me to do this. It's an experiment. If a small task force can protect an inhabited planet without even any help from the inhabitants, it's proof that we can hold any system that we decide to hold. Should I have told the CNO 'No, I don't want to, it's too hard'? Of course I said 'I'd be honored to do this.' We didn't get anything we didn't absolutely need, but he supported me every step of the way with people, ships, and just general backup when a lot of people thought he was throwing ships away. I don't want to fail the Beer or the CNO."

Bill leaned forward in his chair and looked Gustav in the eye. "And that is why you are here. Without you, we have no way to kill the crew of some crashed Sa'arm ship short of orbital bombardment, and that's messy. If they come back, and one of their ships gets through, we need to dig them out ASAP before they can get their colony going. If you can't contact higher and you know there are live Sa'arm on the planet, you and your Marines will do whatever it takes to eliminate them all. Casualties will not be relevant to the mission."

The end result was a split. Us Navy types worked with some of the Marines on a design for a boarding shuttle, something that would survive a couple of the Dickheads' beam weapons and hold at least a couple fire teams of Marines in their powered armor. It not only needed armor and shields, it needed something to kill missiles with, and it needed some way to poke a hole in the target so that the Marines could get in.

We wanted something as small and cheap as possible because spreading the passengers across several of them was better than putting them in fewer but larger ones that held more passengers and hurt us more if we lost one. Unfortunately, that task list was giving us a vehicle that was already looking pretty large for a piece of consumable equipment that was only going to be used once.

Meanwhile, the Marines themselves practiced using their powered armor suits and Thor's two Panthers to land on every planet and planetoid in the system except Beer.

Their suits had very marginal thrusters, mostly to help them stay upright while firing heavy weapons, and they had the mechanical and electronic hooks to plug in a sort of EVA kit, so until they had their boarding shuttles the Marines also practiced free-flight in space.

Over time, our unmanned search probes sent us three different calls to investigate wreckage in addition to the three ships that Capps was watching. For each one, we first dispatched a tug to go get it, since that trip was going to take a while. Then, once the tug was only a couple days away from it, we dispatched a couple of warships through hyperspace, usually a pair of our Shiro-IIs, to get there first and poke it enough to be sure it wasn't going to shoot back. They in turn had Thor following at a safe distance, and when the warships were sure nobody would shoot at them the Marines took their two Panthers close enough to EVA the rest of the way.

That got the Marines some good practice boarding a real Sa'arm ship, it kept Thor and the tug from getting shot at if the wreckage was still live, and it meant that we had enough firepower on hand to deal with whatever needed dealt with, if the wreckage turned out to still be infested.

Only one was; one of the ships that Capps was watching took a shot at a Panther with its main gun. The Panther lost its shield and part of its hull and several Marines were injured, but they were all in their powered armor and that protected them at least somewhat. None of the injuries were critical.

The Panther's flight crew dumped all their passengers out the side hatches, used their own fire-support mounts to destroy the gun that shot it, and stood back to provide more support if needed. Almost suicidal with no shield, but that was their job: provide anyone who could shoot at the Marines with a bigger target that could shoot back and was thus a higher-priority than shooting up helpless Marines. We don't pay those guys enough, either.

Dumping the Marines was the correct action, since another hit like that would likely have killed everyone in the back, but that caused its own trouble. When the flight crew dumped the passengers, that included a half-dozen Marines with damaged suits that were no longer space-worthy. The Ensign and Gunny in charge of that platoon took a couple of seconds to get things sorted out, but they ended up pairing Marines with good suits with the injured to escort the crippled Marines back to the Panther.

That left only 40 or so Marines to land on that side of the wreck, but with the other Panther landing another complete platoon on the other side it was enough. There were enough openings that they didn't have to cut their way through the hull, and they went through the ship step by step clearing every compartment. They took some more casualties but none were fatal, and every time a Marine went down they detailed a buddy to get him back to their Panther.

That was also the wreck that gave us the best look at a Sa'arm ship. They still had a power plant running, they still had air until we blew all the hatches out, and they still had various equipment running. Or, maybe they had fixed it and gotten it back up. Either way, we had the tug push that one back to Barton Yard where we could dissect it.

In fact, that was the impetus for our first official visit from Brak, a ship that wasn't bringing us people or supplies. Every sector had its own R&D establishment with shipyard and training bases, that was the whole point of having a sector command, although of course some were smaller than others. The day after we sent out a message torpedo telling them we were towing a dead Vacuna back to Barton Yard for some poking around, we got one back warning us to expect a visit from some of their REMFs, a team of research and intel weenies who wanted a tour of the wreck, the next time Postman passed through Brak.

We gave them a counter-offer, since none of us wanted to play nursemaid to a bunch of arrogant jackasses and primadonnas. We had already pulled everything we wanted off it. We had no use for the damned thing other than training, and there were other wrecks we could use for that. Frankly, we expected the opportunity to create more wrecks at any moment. If they sent out a wrecker, they could take the whole thing back with them.

Okay, we cleaned the message up a lot, but that was what we meant, and I expect that the command team on Brak realized that. Their reply graciously accepted our generous offer to allow their team to examine the wreck from the safety and comfort of their homes at Brakat. Brak sent out one of their combat repair tugs, basically a big freighter with a cruiser's power plant, a few guns, and a construction frame where the hold should be, and carried it off. Their REMFs didn't have to leave home, we didn't have to put up with them, everybody won!

Deepak and Barton fixed Gustav's broken Panther and then built several more for spares. That was the plan, at least, to have some extras in case Thor's got shot up again.

What really happened was that they started accepting recruits from our youngsters. We also allowed several of our younger and junior sailors to transfer, since joining the Marines hadn't really been an option for anyone here before. Echo Company split their First Platoon into First and Fifth Platoons and their Second Platoon into Second and Sixth Platoons, and the four understrength platoons absorbed all the new recruits we were willing to let them have. As Gustav put it, they already had twice as many bodies as Thor could comfortably carry, so why not make it three times?

Since Hector was still only 11, I was good with that. If their recruits wanted to be Marines that bad, everyone was better off if we supported them. I refrained from pointing out that Echo Company could just as quickly consolidate back down to its original four platoons, if they took enough casualties.

Beyond those practice boarding assaults, Gustav's Marines didn't have much to do. Their 4th platoon -their heavy weapons group- spent a while with our fixed-defenses people making sure they were as up to speed as possible but that was it. We did forbid any of our Cadets going on any of the live-fire exercises. Well, all their mommies demanded that, I decreed it, and the AIs enforced it. They could attend the boot camp they set up, and they could go on training exercises around Ale or the Womb, but if Thor was going out to check on wreckage all their Cadets had to stay behind. Blame your parents for not having you earlier. I'd been saying that to Hector for years now.

Not that Hector was really a Cadet yet, he was too young for even that yet, but just as many of the more mature 12 and 13 year olds could be Cadets and be treated like probationary Sponsors, a very few of the more precocious 10 and 11 year olds were allowed to pretend to be junior Cadets. Yes, the Admiral's oldest son got to be one of them. I knew that Hector wouldn't embarrass me any worse than any other 11-year-old boy would.

A Cadet, once he had proven himself, could be assigned a task and left to it with no adults around. They wore a ship-knit suit as a uniform and a crew-conk earpiece and pendant necklace -both to talk with the AIs and to remind them that they were not yet Sponsors- as a rank badge. Boy, were they proud of those earpieces and pendants. Okay, they were a lot more severe and 'practical' than what the crew-conks had; most of the crew-conks had theirs all prettied up like jewelry. Some concubines wore a pearl necklace that was big enough to damn near hide their breasts.

The "Juniors" as we called them could be given an assignment but not left alone as they had not yet earned their personal channel to the AIs. We had to leave an Sponsor, a Cadet, or a trusted crew-conk with them. Again, it was more manpower to do all the myriad tasks a growing fleet needed as well as training for the future. One of our goals was to have every Cadet graduate the program as a Sponsor. Another goal was to have every child accepted as a Cadet. We weren't there yet by a long shot, but every day the fraction of Womb children who became Sponsors inched up. The immersion in fleet society was helping a lot, just like out in the rest of the fleet.

We didn't get our second group of Snakes in time. They were far enough along that the engines were in, and an observer could see the holes that the turrets were going to be dropped into, but there were still a lot of raw girders for most of their length when one of our scouts sent us a message torpedo to warn us that something wicked was this way coming. The only part of that set of ships that looked close to complete was the back engineering section.

Engineering was certainly not complete on any of them, but this was a lesson we'd learned when we first set the Yard up: the Yard was almost defenseless, and anything in it was toast if the Sa'arm hit us. Therefore, we tried to arrange our construction and repairs so that if at all possible any ship in the Yard could get underway and save the part that was already built or repaired. Once the basic vessel frame was set up, the construction bots pretty much gave equal priority to "get power plant and propulsion usable" and "build the rest of the ship".

For these second-flight Snakes, all we had to do to get them moving was to pick an unfinished room and set it up as a CIC, install stationkeeping jets and some nav/com sensors on the frame somewhere close to where they were supposed to go, and fill the reaction mass tanks. Our shipboard AIs were all modular collections of lesser AIs that could continue to function if some were lost in battle. The Snakes' AIs weren't anywhere near as smart as they were going to be when they were complete, but some modules were already online since they helped the frame's AI manage all the construction bots. It was less than a day's work to get the hulks moving on their own, if that was all the frame was working on. The ships wouldn't be able to fight, but they could run.

Oh, yeah. We had to provide a dozen or so crew to help make decisions that the AIs were programmed to ask for help with, but the Yard workers themselves could do that if they had to. They already knew the ships. Besides, they needed to be evacuated, too.

We had commissioned and were learning how to use our first six Kents and another six were building, but only a couple were far enough along to save if we had to run.

We had also just commissioned the first 6 of our fourth group of Shiro-IIs, and had another 10 almost done. They would be finished in another week or so, but we told the building frames' AIs to concentrate on hull integrity, nav/com sensors, and weapons and fire control in case this wasn't a false alarm.

We went ahead and manned the ten Shiro-IIs, the two Kents, and the eight Snakes, too, just in case. Their crews were already partly assembled and were going through sims down on Hotel so they could be ready for their ships when their ships were ready for them, so we put all the sims on hold and had them move onboard. If we did get attacked, they could pull out of their construction frames and commission early.

The last four Shiro-IIs in this group, the other four Kents, and a whole lot of smaller stuff weren't far enough along yet to save, if this alert was real.

Our message was from one of the nearby systems that had three Castles rotating in and out. We considered the Castles underpowered, underarmed, and obsolete, but they were a good deal faster than the Dickheads they were warning us about, and our message torpedos were a good deal faster still. The two nearest systems both had Dickheads, and there were more in about half of the nearest twenty systems.

We didn't have the ships to watch any more Dickheads, since we left one scout in every uninhabited system we could as a picket, and had three rotating their stay in the four closest infested systems. We were amassing all the data we could on the stages that a Sa'arm colony went through, and we could tell that at least four were actively building ships. It was a safe bet that some of those ships were intended for us.

Our warning came from one of the more advanced Sa'arm colonies, one that had progressed farther than just building their own scouts and was building colony ships as well. All our men on the spot could tell at their distance was that 20 or so ships had gotten underway all at once, they appeared to be leaving the inner system, and at least one of them was bigger than anything we had seen yet. They launched a message torpedo to give us the earliest possible warning, then sent one of the Castles themselves in case something went wrong with the torpedo.

The Confederacy knew about, or at least would tell us about, four different FTL systems. The Dickheads used a type of hyperdrive that did not require constant supervision by an AI, just a computer to do all the calculations beforehand and set the engines. That, or maybe a group mind that could do the calculations without a computer, we guessed.

One drawback to their FTL drive was that you chose where you were going first, pushed the start button, and you were nothing but a passenger until you popped out. There was no way to steer or drop out earlier or later, like we could with the system the Confederacy used.

I guess I should point out that this was a control issue for them, not a drive issue. The physicists said that there were FTL drives possible that acted like that, but what the Sa'arm used was actually pretty much the same as ours. They could change their course, they could change their dropout time with their drives. If they had an AI to manage the drive for them, that is. Without AI support, all they could do was set it up and go.

That meant that they tended to be conservative with their jumps, coming out where they knew they had room, looking at the system, and then jumping again to be closer to their target. We could use that against them, if we were smart. For instance, it was fairly safe to assume that their second jump, the one from the outer system to their actual target, was as close to a gravity well as they thought was safe.

We could mark this second emergence point on our Tactical Plots, and be almost certain that, no matter what happened, they wouldn't be going back into hyperspace until they had retreated back to at least that far from the gravity well. We could also be certain that, if we surprised them before it was too late, they would jump out, be gone, and come back later with more ships. That particular lesson had cost us a couple of systems, but the knowledge we had lost so much to learn was a key part of our plan to hold this one. If we let them get in close before we blew their guts out, they couldn't run.

Another drawback to their drive was that it was slower than ours. That particular system was about 12 lightyears away, which to the best of our knowledge would take their larger ships two or three days to travel. Since our warning took far less than a day to reach us, we should have at least a day or so before they could get here, if here was where they were going. We sent another message torpedo to Brak, warning them that something was up and apologizing for not being more specific.

There wasn't much more that our operating forces could do to get ready. They were all as up to date as we could make them. We kept them all as close to topped-off on supplies as was possible. All they could do was cancel any exercises, call back any crew on leave, and clear out all the Cadets.

We had long since installed those StarSparrow missile launchers everywhere. The Womb, Hotel, Barton Yard, the Greeks, every fixed installation had several guarding the approaches. Every ship had at least two except our Castles, Patricians, and Shiros. Those had started with only two of the small PDLs or PDRs (Point-Defense Lasers and Point-Defense Railguns) and no room for anything else, so we replaced one with a StarSparrow launcher and left the other one in place in case we needed it.

A PDL could keep firing as long as it had power. It might be best to leave at least one on every ship. Okay, it did use a magazine, the crystal it used to focus the laser pulse was consumed in use and ejected as part of the cooling system after every shot, but the PDL magazine was on-mount and held several thousand crystals so we didn't worry much about running out. A PDR was almost as hard to run dry.

The StarSparrow launchers only had 7 missiles on-mount, with another 6 modules surrounding the mount where they could be quickly swapped out, for a total of 49 missiles per launcher. Since the only threat we wanted them for was the Sa'arm bombers, we thought that this should be enough. Still, all of our larger ships had a secondary magazine that held more modules.

The Shiros had 10 more modules for their only StarSparrow launcher, and every larger ship had both multiple launchers and at least 20 replacement modules for each mount. All of our sims, and all of our live-fire exercises with target drones pretending to be Sa'arm bombers, said that one of these missiles would do for a bomber. We thought we were going overboard here, but who knew how many bombers the Dickheads had?

Once we had all of our immediate actions in work, we took another look at everything in the Yard. It sure would be nice to save some of that stuff....

We had a bunch of completed Junior-Hero turrets, just sitting around waiting for Snakes to put them in, and even more StarSparrow launchers and particle beam turrets for them. If we had a couple of days, we could at least set some of them in place in the ships that could move. They wouldn't be usable, but they would get carried off when the ship left, and that would save us a lot of time later if we had to start over again.

Actually, the StarSparrow missile launchers were almost completely self-contained; all they needed were power, targeting data, and permission to fire. Any that we could get mounted on a hulk would make that hulk's chance of surviving much better. As soon as the get-us-out-of-here stuff was in progress, we had Barton get any construction bots still not busy start working on that. Set it in place, weld it down, make sure it has power and data connectivity, and go install another one. Enclosing them so that crew can access them without suits can wait. Go install another one.

They gave us two days. Barton Yard was still running at full speed, but everything else was as quiet as possible. Okay, that's not quite right. The L2 force was quiet, and the three Taffies were quiet, but both our inner and outer sensor shells had active scanners going and we had fire-control system scanners live at both L4 and L5. The Yard did, too, but that was probably lost in the background noise of the shipyard itself franticly working on ships when the dickheads popped out of hyperspace far above the ecliptic.

Well, not everyone thinks the ecliptic is important; that's why we have a sensor shell, not a sensor ring. One of our stations gave us a pretty good look at our visitors.

It was easier to start with the small ships that we recognized. It looked like there were nine of the Vacuna triads. No big deal. There were a pair of the Volumna-with-2-Vervactors triads we had already seen. Okay, those were trouble but we knew we could take them. The problem was going to be the other nine ships that were all bigger. No, on closer look six of the nine were more Vervactors, but the last three were much, much bigger. They were the important ones.

Again, our first steps in this dance were all automated after we selected which plan to follow. First, since this was far in excess of what we were expecting, we sent a message torpedo to Brak screaming bloody murder. Second, it was a big enough force to blow past anything the scouts could do, so the scouts stayed away but started gathering behind them to take out any retreating survivors.

Third, the three Taffies started moving towards Beer. There was no point in moving towards the visitors, as we expected them to be jumping inward fairly soon.

Fourth, the L2 force got underway to interpose themselves between Beer and the Sa'arm. At this time, Beer and Ale were both on the same side of Beerat, with Mead not too far away. Pils was out on the other side of Beerat. We expected the visitors to jump to Beer soon.

One difference between our various forces was that the L2 group was keeping their speed and emissions down to avoid detection, while the Taffies were all moving as fast as they could with shields and active scanners up. If our visitors were willing to be distracted, we wanted to give them something distracting.

Our Sumo Line, the L2 force, had Harpy as flag with four of our Snakes, all three of our Monitors, all three of our Folk-Heros, and eight Shiro-IIs for screening, Commodore Moltke commanding. Our three Taffies were still identical except for numbers; each one had a Snake for flag, a Europa-Plus, and two each of our new Kents, our Asian-Pluses, and our Africa-Pluses, with seven or eight of our Shiro-IIs as screen. I had Krait and her escort merge with Taffy-3 as the nearest; the ships would fight as part of the Task Force while I did what I could to direct the overall battle.

Harpy was the only ship in all four forces that didn't have at least a Baby-Hero gun. On the other hand, she had more shipkiller missiles than all the other ships combined. Surely they would help.

The Womb stayed quiet, aside from radiating the same scanner system as Jennifer's growing fortress over in the Greeks. We're just another fortress like that one, yep, leave us alone unless you want a bloody nose.

Barton Yard kept working on ships. Since the Yard was buried among Ale's immense collection of moons and debris, it was deep in Ale's hyperspace exclusion zone. Ale's HEZ was huge, as befitted a protostar, far larger than the HEZ around a habitable planet. Anyone coming to visit the Yard would be visible in plenty of time to leave, as long as we kept our bug-out preps up.

Our tactical plan evolved into a rapid pass by each Taffy, planned for about 400 Km away at the closest point of approach (CPA), with each ship turning to fire everything it could as long as it was in range, then getting out of there to come back later. Taffy-2 got there first but with a bewildering array of targets they all shot at different ones. That was set up by their Commodore, Colonel Tenisha Williams -no relation that we could tell- who wore that hat in addition to being skipper of Mamba, with the AIs making sure no two ships were shooting at the same target. Our different ships also had a bewildering array of weapons with differing ranges and differing effects. We needed to know which ones actually worked.

This was a partnership in truth. There was no way us humans could do this without AI support. And, while they may have eventually figured out what should be done, they would never be able to actually do it without us to take the blame. We needed each other.

Nice got to start with her four missile launchers. Her first salvo went to Grandma, with her next two going to the other two colonizers. Her fourth and fifth went to the other two large ships, which we were pretty sure were just bigger warships, a threat to us but not really a threat to Beer.

There had been 42 Dickheads, but when Taffy-2 got in detection range, all three of the colonizer ships dumped their parasites, and that verified in our minds that the other two big ships were just muscle. By the time we were in range to start firing our "broadside" weapons, there were well over 60 separate ship-sized targets to choose from. And, they had separated into two groups. All the big ships continued on their way to Beer but many of smaller ones moved between Taffy-2 and the 'core' group.

We also saw roughly the same number of their small craft, most likely the bombers we were calling Limas, pop up on our plots. However, these stayed with the main group still headed towards Beer.

Nice got at least one hit on every target while we closed, but none of them dropped out or exploded or did anything worth remembering.

The next part was something that we knew was going to be awkward as hell, but we couldn't see any way around it with the ships we had. We wanted a drive-by shooting, with our ships sliding by too fast to get hit too many times. However, our older ships, the ones we came here with, were all designed to charge in and fire as fast as possible as the range fell until one side was gone, with ramming as an option if that was what it took. We called this the "chase" orientation, because this was very good if they wanted to chase or close on someone. It was less effective in all other circumstances.

They all had most of their weapons mounted to fire "forward", and the ship had to be within 5 or 10 degrees of pointed-at-the-enemy to use all weapons. If they weren't pointed at the enemy, they could only use some weapons on that side, and none of their forward-firing weapons. And, their engines could only accelerate "forward".

This meant that all of our older ships, the Europas, the Asians, the Africans, even our new Shiro-IIs which we had built to support them, could only effectively fight if they were pointing towards the enemy. Which meant that they couldn't maneuver at all, if they were sliding by in a fast pass off one side. We had known this when we added their nose guns. It hadn't changed this weakness at all, just given them a bigger fist to smack people with.

Our newer ships, the Snakes and Kents, were intended for just this type of action. Their turrets gave them more of a "broadside" orientation. They could go anywhere they wanted, face any direction they wanted, maneuver and jink as needed, while their turrets stayed on target and pounded whoever they wanted. The Snakes could only fire on one side because of our design screwup, but the Kents could roll so that both guns could fire at a single ship on their 'horizon', if we wanted. We definitely wanted.

The Snakes and Kents could maneuver to avoid incoming, but all the other ships, if they wanted to fire at the enemy, could only coast, sit there facing the enemy and take it. At least they were small targets when end-on. And they could only be damaged in their noses and other things that stuck out, like weapons mounts. The core ship spaces were safe from attack, at least until the nose spaces were gone.

All the Taffies were moving too fast to stay around. We had expected Taffy-2 to just have a few seconds, a minute at most, to shoot up whatever they could. However, they had to leave the main body alone and shoot up the escorts, 24 Vacunas which came out to meet them.

Each of the six true turrets, two each from Mamba, Ajax and Achilles -all "Junior Hero" guns- were to shoot once at a target, assume it would be effective, and shift to a different target as quickly as it could. We expected to have more trouble acquiring new targets with the 13 guns which could only elevate -all four destroyers and the eight Shiro-IIs had "Baby Hero" guns while the Europa had a "Junior Hero"- so they were all supposed to stay on a single target until they had confirmation of a kill.

This was really just a combat test of our new weapon systems. Any good results would be appreciated, but the true value of Taffy-2's firing pass was to learn for all the other forces what worked and what didn't.

The seven "Junior Hero" guns fired as close to simultaneous as possible, with the turret ships spacing their shots by a second to cut down on shock harmonics. Everyone except Nice immediately shifted to another target and fired as soon as they had valid solutions and the gun indicated on target. Nice just kept on the original and fired again, continuing as fast as she could reload.

We got six hits; one of those shot at by Achilles had already started a zig when Achilles fired but we had not yet seen that on our plots. The six hits gave us two explosions that destroyed those Vacunas, but we were unable to tell what damage the other four hits did beyond dropping their shields.

All of the Dickheads immediately started evasive actions and none of our second shots hit anything except for Nice's; her second followed her first almost immediately and that shot also gave us fireworks and a dead Vacuna. All of our ships fired several more times with no hits as the range dropped. After a few misses Tenisha directed each ship to stay on the same target until it was hit.

Before long Nice could also use her two large or "heavy" Particle Accelerator Beam mounts and she started chewing up whatever she was shooting at. Within seconds the range had dropped enough for a quick run through of almost everything any of our ships mounted, and it got hard to tell who had done what. It didn't matter. Kill it, shift to another target, and keep shooting.

Before we knew it the range was increasing again, but we had the remnants of the Vacuna screen still in range for some time for our direct weapons, and Nice kept plinking missile salvos at Grandma and her kin as long as she could. One of the muscle ships, we had by now verified that they were what we called "Vestas", and one of the Volumnas were trailing plumes of debris, but we still didn't have any hard kills on the core group.

Taffy-2 had savaged the screen, though. Their range to us never got below about 350 Km and none of them got very many shots. Nice had shifted to one of the damaged ones and eventually hit it, then another, and the task force as a whole got eight more, but that was it before they were too far past the Dickheads to hit them. We killed twelve of them all told, and four of the survivors appeared to no longer have shields.

Several of our ships received strikes from beam weapons, but the range was extreme for those and none even took a shield down. Taffy-2 would be a long time shedding its velocity and would not get to participate again until everyone else had had their turn. They had mangled the Vacuna screen, leaving only twelve of them still functional, but the Vacunas had also done their job, preventing us from concentrating on the core group.

It was Taffy-3's turn next, the Taffy that we had attached ourselves to. We immediately noticed that the 12 surviving Vacunas that had gone out to meet Taffy-2 were still out there. Since we were coming from another side, they were completely out of position to screen their core group from our attack run. I ordered Joey Saunders, Cobra's CO and this Taffy's Commodore, to try for a CPA of 300 Km off their base course to see what happened. In the great scheme of things, we needed to whittle them down some until the Sumo Line could handle them, but it would be nice if most of us lived through it.

We got the rest of their light ships, another 18 Vacunas. These were all very close together and we were pretty sure that they had just been launched from the largest ship, the colonizer we called "Virtus". Again they came out to meet us, and we again targeted them with our guns as the closest and easiest to hit while Athens sniped at the core group with her missiles.

We were larger than Taffy-2, with an extra Snake and two more escorts, but we didn't have the element of surprise for our first shot. Since we were having so much trouble hitting them, we decided to have every gun stay on a single target until it was gone. It wasn't that we had something wrong; it's just that the only other time we had used these guns in anger both sides had either been closing on each other giving us very simple fire control solutions, or running and being chased down, again giving us simple solutions. This time, one side was jinking around and the other was passing quickly in a drive-by shooting.

Hits did not come easily, but we did see a trend. Hits from a "Junior Hero" gun tended to kill the ship, while hits from a "Baby Hero" tended to knock out the ship's shield and may kill the ship but may not. And, when we got in range, we were getting a higher proportion of hits from our beam weapons than the railguns. The railguns did incredible damage when they hit, but they were still unguided projectiles that took some time to get there and the Dickheads were dodging as well as they could. The beam weapons did nowhere near the damage, but they were much closer to lightspeed, and were much more likely to hit someone.

Also, the Vacunas were pretty small as warships went, between our Castles and our Patricians. Any hit anywhere was likely to take out something important. 8 turrets and 13 nose mounts went through the 18 Vacunas like a hot knife through butter. We also took some hits, but only our larger ships were targeted and only Cobra was materially damaged. She lost one of her secondary weapon mounts, a particle beam projector, along with both crew when a couple of beams knocked her shield down and a third beam got through before her backup shield generator kicked in. All that armor prevented any secondary damage. On Krait, we just got knocked around some from hits that vaporized some armor plate on the few times they got something past our shield. We never got anything important, anything that affected the ship, damaged at all.

Athens' missiles were having some effect. All of Grandma's kin were streaming debris. And now their screen was gone.

Taffy-1 was coming in from behind the Dickhead fleet, and we asked them to slow and veer so that they would go within 200 Km of the core fleet before passing them. This turned their effort into more of a running battle than a quick drive-by. That gave the first group of escorts time to get back in position, and Taffy-1 had to fight them first.

Lodz did the same thing as Nice and Athens, sending salvos of missiles to Grandma, the two Volumnas, and the two Vestas in turn.

By this point I was getting anxious about how far our visitors had gotten and requested that Taffy-1 ignore the screen and try to work over the core ships with their Hero guns, using their secondary armament on the screen if they persisted in getting in the way.

This worked a lot better, probably because the larger ships could not dodge as well as the smaller ones. Maybe because the range was lower, too. And we were going, relative to them, a lot slower.

Taffy-1 also got all the bombers, the Limas. Our preliminary doctrine for them was simple: blow them away as fast as you can; they have the only weapons in their whole fleet that can kill our ships with one hit. When Taffy-1 came in detection range, both the surviving screen from Taffy-2's pass and all of their Limas came out to greet them.

As soon as the range dropped to 3000 Km, the outer limit of their powered flight envelope, every StarSparrow mount in the whole Taffy dumped its on-mount load of seven missiles at the oncoming Limas, then reloaded from its ready magazine. The cruisers all had four mounts, and the destroyers and Shiros each had two. There were only 36 of the Limas, and we sent several hundred missiles at them. The results made me feel almost as good as watching Big Mama blow up had, back a year before.

Most of the missiles had nothing to do, so they activated their range-safety to blow themselves up. In order to prevent accidents in a short-range furball, they were not allowed to seek a new target. That was okay, they were cheap and light and we had thousands. We could use them on any damaged Dickheads that no longer had shields, we guessed, if we thought about it and didn't have anything else handy. After all, they were small but they homed and they did have explosive warheads.

By the time we were all done smiling and shaking each other's hands over that, Taffy-1 was in close combat and everyone got to use their older short-range weapons. Including, unfortunately, the larger Dickhead ships. We already knew that the Volumnas and Vervactors had a lot of beam weapons, and our estimate of how many the Vesta had went from "a whole bunch" to "a fuckload".

The Virtus and the two Vestas concentrated on Coralsnake and it took them less than a minute to rip her apart, while the Volumnas and Vervactors did the same thing to our two Kents. Nobody except the Vacunas fired at our destroyers or Shiros, and apparently no one at all shot at Lodz.

Meanwhile, Coralsnake and Lodz were concentrating on the Virtus, Kent and Coventry took the two Volumnas, the four destroyers worked over the two Vestas, and the eight Shiros finished off the remaining Vacunas then started on the other ships.

When they separated again, Taffy-1 had been reduced to the untouched Lodz, the very badly damaged Kent, Bhutan, Burma, and Ghana, and six Shiros, two of which were doing nothing except damage control. Only Lodz and two of the Shiros were in any shape for combat. I sent all three of our rescue tenders to rendevous with Taffy-1 as soon as they could.

On the other hand, all the Dickheads had left were their Virtus, the two Vestas, and eight Vervactors. And the Virtus didn't appear to be in any shape for a controlled landing on a habitable planet. The Virtus and Vestas were all trailing immense amounts of debris, but the Vervactors were mostly all in good shape. One more pass from Taffy-2 would do it, if they could get back in time.

Or, we could just let the Sumo Line do it. They had been sitting there off Beer during all this, off to the side a little so that anything sent at them wouldn't hit Beer if it missed, watching the movie and eating popcorn. The Dickheads were slowing down, getting ready to land. They probably thought they had made it. With the Sumo Line's engines cool, their shields down, and all active sensors shut down, we doubt if the Dickheads had any idea they were there until they started shooting at about a thousand klicks.

That was well beyond their "official" effective range, but no one on either side was maneuvering and besides their targets were all huge compared to a dodging Vacuna. Anneke Moltke had succeeded to command Harpy when I moved Jennifer up, and as she had more experience in tactics than the Snake skippers I had blessed her as Sumo Line Commodore. She had all four Snakes fire at the Virtus, while the three Folk-Heros took one Vesta and the three Monitors took the other one. Their twelve escorts, Shiro-IIs with Baby-Hero nose guns, all shot at Vervactors. Harpy stayed out of it; she would use her missiles on any survivors who looked like they might get away.

The two Vestas exploded, as did several of the Vervactors. The Virtus didn't explode but it did come apart. After a few seconds to look at the results, the second salvo did all but one of the Vervactors. Then, with 26 guns shooting at it, the last one disintegrated and exploded within seconds of the rest.

This was the way to do it. No one on the Sumo Line got hurt, no one even got shot at. We needed these guns on every ship. Getting within 300 or 400 Km of the Sa'arm's larger ships was tantamount to suicide.

An hour or so later, the remains of the Virtus slammed into Beer over a wide area. The destruction was enormous, and the death toll was going to be horrible, but they were going to have a hard time convincing any of us to be sorry. It was nothing compared to what would have happened if that ship had landed safely and unloaded its cargo.

About the time that Taffy-3 made its pass and the ship I was on was getting shot at, we got a second visit. Our scanner shell told us that this was another 25 or 30 ships. These came in on the same "side" of the system as Beer and Ale, like the first group, but these were on the other side of the ecliptic from where the first group had first showed up. Not now, dammit, we're busy!

Late to the party? Completely unrelated? We knew they couldn't be Confederacy, as our ships would either have come on in all the way, or popped out so far away that we wouldn't notice them. It was either more Dickheads or someone new, someone too stupid to stay out of a bar-fight.

More Dickheads. Again, our sensor shell gave us details almost immediately. This was the visit we had been expecting, the one we were ready for. This group was effectively our last visit, but with three times the numbers and some extras. There were three of the Volumna-plus-two-Vervactor triads, with six Vacuna triads as escort.

Fine, we'll deal with them after we deal with their friends. I told Jennifer to do what she could, we were busy.

Jennifer couldn't do a goddam thing unless they went to the Womb or the Greeks. All of her ships -she referred to them as 'mobile assets'- were on their way in-system to clean up the retreating survivors of the first attack, if there were any.

This group sat there for the usual 15 or 20 minutes, then went back into hyperspace like usual. There was still nothing we could do about them, everyone we had was working on the first group far, far away.

When they popped out again, they were just outside the HEZ for Ale. WTF? Yes, Barton is making as much noise as he can to attract trouble, but they are Dickheads. They HAVE to know what's going on at Beer. What The Fuck are they doing?

What they were doing was splitting up. The three Volumna-plus-two-Vervactor triads stayed outside the HEZ where they could run if needed, we guessed, while the six Vacuna triads went in, about the same time that Taffy-1 was getting shot up.

What could we do about it? To start with, Barton started evacuating the Yard. Eight unfinished Snakes, two unfinished Kents, ten unfinished Shiro-IIs fired up their engines, floated out of their construction frames, and took off the other way.

They all had some weapons that might work at least once, but firing any of them would cause an unknowable amount of damage to the unfinished structure surrounding them. The StarSparrow mounts and the PDLs and PDRs were the only weapons it was safe for any of them to fire, and they were all defensive. None of them had any offensive weapons that could fire twice.

As soon as everyone in the Yard and environs had transported to one of the ships, Barton followed them. That lowered my personal stress level a lot, since LaRhonda and Monique were using Barton's "penthouse suite" as a quiet place to bond with all of our little ones who weren't ready for nursery school yet. The girls all traded around every few days. That day I had Joannie with me for stress relief, and Hannah was safe in the Womb watching the older kids and helping Tina.

Big Dick and all of our Marine-trained fixed weapons systems stayed behind to see what trouble they could cause. I don't remember where Thor and all the Marines were. They had no business in any of this, and they had clear orders to stay well away from it all unless and until there were live dickheads on Beer. They followed their orders.

Jennifer had about a quarter of our scouts, the four of our new Shiro-IIs that were closest, head back out to Ale, with the rest of them spreading out to cover the gap in their net. We talked about it and decided that quiet and without notice would be better than screaming in and spooking them. We didn't want them to go away and come back later with more friends, we wanted them to stay here in the system with us. Forever.

Before too long all the excitement in-system was over and the survivors all got to watch the drama unfold out at Ale. We had 18 Vacunas closing on the Yard while we had four Shiro-IIs closing in on the three colonizer triads. Unfortunately, they did not get in range of their "Baby Hero" guns before they were noticed, and the three Volumnas each pooped out three more Vacunas and nine more Limas.

All nine of these light ships moved out to face the Shiros while the larger ships moved away. This was not a fair fight. Again, if they were able to shoot in any direction other than straight ahead, they might have been able to stand and fight. As it was, they had to turn early enough to stay out of range of the Vacunas or get destroyed. I went ahead and took the responsibility for telling them to retreat until we could back them up.

Our boys took a couple of shots at the Vacunas with their nose guns when they closed to about 400 Km, killing two and damaging a couple more, and they sent three waves of StarSparrows which eliminated the Limas, but they were too badly outnumbered and they turned tail and backed off to await reinforcements.

We still had none to send. Taffy-2 was nearest but was still accelerating towards Beer to help there if needed. Taffy-3 was headed in the right direction, but that was because they had gone far past Beer and had just stopped and turned around. Taffy-1 no longer existed as a combat-capable unit.

I gritted my teeth and ordered the Sumo Line to remain in place no matter what happened at Ale. We still didn't have the assets to protect everything we wanted to protect, and Beer was still more important than anything else in the system.

If nothing else happened, Taffies-2 and -3 could move out some, enter hyperspace, make a short trip outward, and come out fairly close to this new group. No, make it farther away. Far enough that they probably won't see you. Stay split, and see if you can squeeze them between you.

Meanwhile, the assault on Barton Yard was playing out in slow motion, because there was nothing we could do except watch. We had built a battery control post for the Yard, but it was part of the yard and had also been evacuated. Clearly, we hadn't thought that one through well enough. The various mounts had communication with each other and Big Dick, but contact with anyone else was unreliable. Hotel was still being quiet and hoping no one noticed them.

Each of our fixed weapon posts had a residence area with two gunners and their conks, a power plant, and the mount itself, all protected by one of our shield generators. If they kept everything powered down, they might be hard to spot. However, that meant they couldn't shoot, either. They had talked it over among themselves before with input from their Marine trainers, and they had decided to go with weapons ready, shoot as soon as they had a good target, and then activate their shield to try to survive any return shots.

They all had good plots on the intruders, since we had sensor systems throughout the area for our own navigation. As they got to the shipyard area, that started to change, because the Dickheads started shooting up every powered installation they came across. The area they swept through became grey on our plots, with no current information available.

Eventually they got to the Yard. Three of our twin MPAB systems were within range of the leaders, and they agreed on targets and opened fire simultaneously. All three got their targets, but they were immediately taken under fire by the remainder, and their shields could not hold against all the combined fire. Each got a few more shots off, but they were all quickly destroyed.

After that, the attackers fired on anything artificial, destroying frames, ships, parts, storage, sensors, everything. As they moved through the area, we lost more and more of our ability to track them. Eventually they ran out of shipyard to destroy and spread out, apparently looking for more trouble. They found it in the rest of the defensive net we had built around the Yard.

Our gun would be aware of a nearby Vacuna because of our surviving sensors, it would fire immediately when clear, it would get a couple more shots on the now-shieldless Vacuna and destroy it, and more would come destroy our position. One of the Vacunas would get damaged, probably with no shield, and they would move on.

After awhile there were only seven Vacunas left and they withdrew. When they did that, Big Dick came out from hiding behind something and started shooting them up from behind. He got three more before they got clear, and only four made it back to their colony fleet.

We had lost our entire shipyard, and with it about a dozen of our fixed weapon posts, each with four people. We had only made the Sa'arm pay fourteen Vacunas for it.

When the four surviving Vacunas got back to their colony fleet, they all got underway, then popped into hyperspace, coming right back out again as close as they could to Beer. This made no sense to us. How could they not know what happened to the first group? How could they think they could prevail against the force that had just wiped out a far larger force?

All of our Taffies were out of it. -2 and -3 were still trying to sneak up on them back at Ale, and -1 just didn't exist as a combat force any more. The Sumo Line was all we had that could stop them if they came in and that was fine, but we had nothing that could chase them if they decided to run. We needed a quick-reaction force that could follow them the way Majorca had, but it needed to be tough enough to report back no matter what they ran into.

To start with, we told the scout shell that if they couldn't kill them all, try to follow them. And return IMMEDIATELY when they got where they were going. No fighting, no data collection, just come back immediately so we know where they went.

No, they could not prevail against the Sumo Line. That was another non-event, just more target practice. Anneke had them do the same thing as before. The four Snakes took the Volumnas, the Monitors and Folk-Heros took the Vervactors, and the 12 Shiros took the ten Vacunas, and they only needed two salvos to clean the whole table this time.

Rebuilding our shipyard would take a while, but we still had everything else. The Womb was doing fine, neither Hotel nor Jennifer's fortress in the Greeks had been touched, we still had all of our mining operations, and, if we could finish them, the hulks we had pulled from the Yard before it was destroyed would more than replace our losses during this fight.

On the people side, I decreed another round of CAP tests, but this time I made it system-wide. Every concubine attached to the Beerat Expedition, no matter where they were or what they did during this fight, was authorized to retest. Sorry, make that ordered to retest.

This went a lot more smoothly than the earlier round, since everyone could see that the sky hadn't fallen when concubines reached the magic 6.5 score and got promoted to Sponsor. The earlier round had taught us enough to deal with any issues. There weren't many, since most of the new Sponsors came from families where the original Sponsor treated his or her conks well, and they often continued to live together as equals.

After talking with Tina and Hannah, I sweetened the pot: Any Sponsor who lost a concubine to Sponsorship was eligible for two replacements. Yes, as a reward for his or her part in elevating the new Sponsor, but also as an added responsibility: Good job. Now, do it again with these girls.

We actually had three of our "marginal" Sponsors, two men and a woman with only two conks each, lose both of them to this, thus earning the right to four new conks each. We all smiled, thinking about how the AIs would justify those three Sponsors' low scores. They were doing something right that many other higher-score Sponsors weren't, and they should be encouraged and rewarded.

Honestly, we were far better off in every way than we had been even six months before. We sent another message torpedo to Brak with all the raw tactical data, saying "never mind".

Our snooping in the neighboring Sa'arm systems gave us reason to believe that the forces we had destroyed had taken several years to build, so Beer was probably safe for a bit as long as we didn't go completely to sleep. Maybe it was time to start thinking about the future.

The Womb was safe, as near as we could see. And, we had well over 10,000 people who were not "sponsors in military service", ie civilians, if you counted the concubines and children. Furthermore, the Womb was not, and could not under any circumstances be claimed to be, a military base. Yes, it had some defenses, but that was all they were, local defenses. It was past time to call it a human civilian colony and appoint a civilian Governor to run the place so that us military could get back to concentrating on our jobs.

The rules were clear. When a military outpost grew to include a civilian colony the System Commander appointed the Planetary Governor, with the advice of his assistants. If the system AIs accepted the appointee, that person was the Governor, and the Governor had pretty much Roman or Chinese Emperor authority over that colony, with pretty much the Roman way of getting rid of Emperors as the only limit to what he could do.

The problem we had was finding someone to do the job. There was no way we would allow an "expert" (a label often defined as someone from out of town with a briefcase) to be in charge; they wouldn't understand our people, their issues, or their needs. What was worse, it appeared to be difficult to replace one who wasn't working out so we needed to get it right the first time.

The Confederacy didn't seem to have any kind of recall system. The Diaspora already had a couple examples of power going to the Governor's head. We weren't getting much news about them, but we knew of two colonies which had had to resort to military action to recall their Governors. P'yong wasn't necessarily our fault, it was one of the Chinese colonies set up completely outside of the Confederacy and the oriental inscrutability thing was blocking all news, but we didn't know anything about Reck other than it was a colony and the Governor had been replaced amid a lot of bloodshed so we suspected there was some Confederacy-authorized censorship there too.

The only civilian managers we had that we trusted were people like Tina, who did very good work but only as subordinates; they were not executive material and would punt -or seek higher approval- for any difficult decision. Conversely, the only executives we had were all military, either Navy or Marine. None of us had any experience managing a civilian population who didn't have to obey orders.

It wasn't until I was talking this over with the girls at dinner one night in our quarters on Krait when I looked at Hannah and realized that the Governor could make her retest. See? Some decisions are easy, when you look at them the right way.

All I had to do was appoint myself. The people trusted me. The AIs and Hannah and Tina would keep me straight. Move Bill up to System Commander, with Jennifer as Defense Coordinator and Kevin as Chief of Staff for Naval Operations, or something to that effect. We would need a Lieutenant-Governor, a people-person to assist me with all the people stuff and make decisions if I was out of town or something, wouldn't we, someone who could step up if something happened to me? I could even have more than one Lieutenant-Governor if we needed. And I could appoint my Consort as one of them, as long as he, she, or it just happened to be a Sponsor.

I was looking at Hannah when I said that. Joannie added "I could be your Consort, if Hannah doesn't want the job." Okay, that made Hannah smile. There was no way Joannie would ever pass the test unless the AIs decided they hated us, but the mental image was still pretty disturbing. Having Joannie in charge of a whole colony would cause a lot more trouble than not having anyone in charge at all.

"Okay, Tom. Lieutenant-Governor would have to be for life, too, wouldn't it? No one could send me somewhere else? If you become Governor and say that about your Consort, I'll take the test again."

Epilog - Month 98 - The Moraes Conjecture

Future's so bright I gotta wear shades - Timbuk 3

(Author's note: Not too long ago, a young American ornithologist -a bird-watcher with a degree- was in New Guinea working in his chosen field when he found himself in conversation with a local politician. As he tells the story, one question the man asked him was, bluntly, why 'you Europeans' had so much cargo, while his people had so little. Jared Diamond pretty much put his profession aside and dedicated the next decade or so to finding the answer to that question. Why DID the 'Europeans' conquer the world instead of someone else?

It is my serious opinion that any person interested in history should read his report "Guns, Germs, and Steel" before they pick up another history book. No, he doesn't know everything, and it's likely that his analysis is flawed in important ways, but he looked at that question with an open mind as a research scientist because he wasn't a historian, and that's far more than many historians bring to the table, many of whom write books to push their own pet theories. So, maybe we should consider Mr. Diamond a 'real' historian now, since he did the same. And, like many 'real' historians, many historians hate him, because in the process of explaining why the following scenario from our history was extremely unlikely he upset an awful lot of applecarts...... -ZM)

Lt Colonel Markov, Ghana's Captain, contacted Kevin once with a request that we attend a short briefing. One of his officers had come up with a hypothesis.....

When we filed into Lodz's briefing room, one of Markov's officers was standing at the podium. I had met him, I had met almost all of our officers, but beyond that he was an unknown. Hey, I can't remember everything. Lodz let me know that Lt. Eduardo Moraes was Brazilian; he had served in the Marinha do Brasil for four years before leaving the service to enter his family's business, then come to us a few years after that.

He had brought his wife and three children, plus three young lovelies who looked like he had found them on a Rio beach. They had all given him a few more children since, so his immediate family was almost as large as mine. There was nothing exceptional about his service with the Confederacy yet, and I didn't care about his height and weight.

He started right in once we were all comfortable. "Thank you for coming to this briefing. Governor, General, Admiral, I would like to describe a hypothesis I have developed to try to explain the way our frequent visitors may be organized. If you will indulge me, the simplest way seems to be as a comparison to a page from a 'World History' textbook."

"In the 16th and 17th Centuries, Europe was in what the historians call the 'Age of Discovery'. The various European nations were beginning to wake up to their immense technological advantages over the rest of the globe, and were starting to stake out their future empires. Imagine, if you will, a sleepy Indian village beside where a river empties into a beautiful bay on the northern shores of South America. A Spanish ship comes in to claim the bay, the fertile fields, and the mountain riches for their King, and, incidentally, help the natives see their way to either Jesus or death."

The huge screen behind him showed us the scene. Slaughter, plunder, rape, slavery. He continued to narrate. "This scene was repeated over and over and over again throughout the world, with the only differences the languages of the natives and their conquerors." The village was burning, the smoke rising up into the sky. The viewpoint moved back until we could see the whole world, with smoke rising from coastal villages just about everywhere except Europe.

"However, ancient Greek Syracuse had Archimedes, who is said to have built a giant mirror on a hill and used the sun's rays to burn an invading fleet." We got to see that. It is difficult to swim while wearing bronze armor.

"Italy's Leonardo daVinci is mostly remembered today for his paintings and sculptures, but he was also a military engineer who re-directed a river to ensure that his patron's citadel in Milan had an undrainable moat." That was pretty impressive. I certainly wouldn't want to have to swim that thing with people shooting at me.

"What if one, just one, of the Indian villages had an inventor of their stature? He would have to work with what he had, but what if he came up with a way to defeat the conquistadores?" We got to watch the previous village get overrun by invaders again while the women and children tried to escape out the back gate. Then, in the middle of the night, an immense bow that was braced by two trees and drawn by ten warriors launched a huge fire-arrow into the invader's caravel, safely anchored in the bay far beyond where the natives' bows and spears could reach it. Wooden ships are terribly wet, below the waterline. They are tender-dry, above the waterline. Their ship burnt, the few weaponless survivors were slain as they swam ashore. Within days, the invaders holed up in the village had been swarmed over and killed to a man.

"The nation that sent that ship would never know what happened. However, that would not make the village safe. There were many nations in Europe that wanted the prestige, wealth, and power that came with a New World colony." We got to watch the village, still being repaired from the last attack, under attack again. A different ship, with different flags, but the same result. The only difference was that this time the older and wiser villagers held off the attackers until they retired to the safety of their ship for the night. Again, the giant bow. Again, burnt to the waterline. Again, the few survivors mercilessly slaughtered at the water's edge.

"The first group of Europeans would try again, of course, with more men. Let's call these the Portuguese, my people, just to give us some labels." The two small ships were packed with soldiers with dreams of gold, glory, power. Most of them were landed, but after both ships were destroyed in the night, all were tracked down and killed.

"The other group, we'll call them the Spanish, had a successful colony nearby. Their second attempt was far more organized. On the other hand, by now all of the surrounding villages were aware of what was going on, and they had benefited from all the tools and weapons recovered from the previous attacks. They helped defend the coastal village that the Europeans kept attacking." This expedition was much larger, with three large ships and a couple smaller ones. With the additional manpower available to the village, it still met the same fate as all three previous ones.

"However, the Portuguese had a spy in the Spanish colony, and they knew of the latest Spanish expedition. They managed to get someone there in time to see what happened." We watched a small ship creep into the bay in the middle of the night in time for the officers to see, in their telescopes, huge flaming arrows come from the jungle and burn the entire flotilla.

"The Portuguese realized that they did not have the resources to defeat this enemy by themselves, so they took what they knew to the Spanish colony. The Spanish agreed that this insult could not be borne, and agreed to a joint attack. It took a year, but working together they organized a huge joint expedition to exterminate these Indians once and for all time, before knowledge of what they had done spread across the Americas and cost them all their other colonies."

We watched the village head-man take his family up the river into the mountain kingdoms, trading his beautiful daughters for a promise of help when the Europeans returned. Two kings promised all the warriors they had, while a third swore to come with every man his war-canoes could carry.

The combined Spanish-Portuguese army was huge, thousands of men, horses, cannons, priests, everything, even though it wasn't really combined. They may have been told to work together, but that didn't mean they were going to work together. They landed on the coast in two groups, around a mountain and on the other side of the river from the village.

The Spanish army was not impeded at all in landing or crossing the mountain. The Portuguese contingent went the other way, wiping out a second village just down the coast before sweeping inland to go around the enemy. However, both groups got stopped butt-cold at the river. Their cannons, horses, and firearms were not enough to cross the river in the face of all those bow- and spear-armed warriors without support from the ships, and every ship that got close enough to help got burnt for it's trouble.

In the end, the survivors retreated back across the mountain to their transport fleet. Which was no longer there. All that was left were burnt timbers washed up on the shore, courtesy of the 3rd kingdom's war-canoes and fire arrows. Within days the native army had sent them all to join their predecessors.

"Now, my ancestors came from Portugal and we all know that they were wonderful people who brought the benefits of civilization to all the miserable savages they met, but can we agree that really, there was no effective difference between the two nations? Portugal and Spain shared a language, a culture, a political system, a technology level, a religion, everything, including their thirst for empire. The only effective difference between the two groups was the simple fact that they answered to two different kings and thus did not get along for what we today would consider an arbitrary and silly reason."

He waited for argument, got none, and continued. "That, then, is the key to my hypothesis. Two separate groups of invaders that have absolutely everything in common except their chief executives, so they act alike but separately. They look the same, they have the same equipment and tactics, they act the same, but they don't coordinate well because they have two different kings."

This time, the huge display behind him split in two, and showed two short lists with paired entries:

- The first Portuguese attack on the village, and the fight between Maiden Castle and her Vacuna Triad.

- The first Spanish attack, and Brennan and Norham Castle's fight with their Vacuna Triad.

- The second Portuguese attack, and the time we first saw the new triad-with-a-4th-ship groups.

- The second, more massive Spanish attack with a Portuguese observer in the background, and the First Battle of Beerat, where a quad of scouts in the outer system got away.

- The combined Portuguese and Spanish expedition, and the Second Battle of Beerat with the two not-quite-simultaneous forces that might have cleaned our clocks if they had worked together better and I wasn't so paranoid.

"I admit injecting a bit of drama, as the defending natives don't quite match us, but the hypothesis explains the sequence of attacks better than any other theory I have heard yet."

There was complete silence for some minutes as we tried to find a flaw in his proposal. I didn't see one. One of the other attendees thought he did. "Well, how do you explain that group of Dickhead visitors last year, the Vacuna triad that didn't even have the 4th courier ship?"

Lt Moraes smiled. "That, in fact, was what gave me this idea. Back in the 17th Century, the French king wanted colonies, too."

In other words, it was probably sent by yet another system, a newcomer to the game, a third or even fourth system recently absorbed by the Sa'arm and just starting to explore. I have to admit that I was dumbfounded. He was right. The simple idea that the various Sa'arm systems communicated with each other and shared information, but acted independently, completely explained our entire combat history here in Beerat, if you assumed that there were at least three different Sa'arm systems interested in Beer.

This, if we could clean it up a bit, was a major clue in how to win this war. Individually, the Sa'arm cooperated far better than we did, but we could compensate with technology. On a much larger scale, though, the different Sa'arm systems didn't cooperate the way our systems did! Each Sa'arm system would stand alone. If we could isolate it, we could take it.

And, we knew we could isolate a Sa'arm system. We'd done that back at Tulakat when we first started. Kill their ships, clear out their orbitals, and destroy anything on the ground that looked like a ship being built down there. If we did that, the Sa'arm on the planet were stuck on the planet and couldn't bother anyone else.

The Moraes Conjecture, as it became publicly labeled, took some time to get buy-in from the Confederacy. I didn't doubt it, though. There had to have been several Swarm systems that knew we had Tulakat invested. None of them had ever sent a fleet to relieve their brothers on Tulak. Scouts to investigate? Yes, lots. Couriers that probably carried info? All the time.

Fleets to relieve them? Never happened. Lt Moraes was right. Each Sa'arm system acted like an independent kingdom that defended itself and sent out colonies that would themselves grow to be independent kingdoms. And independent kingdoms could be engulfed by empires, if they didn't have any friends. It might be long, it might be hard, it might be ugly, but I knew right then in that conference room that, and I said it,

"We are going to win this war."

Acknowledgements: The author is indebted to the entire Swarm Cycle Author's Email List, but some members deserve individual recognition for their outstanding assistance. Alas, they are known to me only by their pen-names: The Thinking Horndog, of course, is the creator and "owner" of the Swarm Cycle, the playground that we've all been enjoying, the only one who can tell me I'm wrong and make it stick. Akarge, Justin Radically, Lugh, Medik 4 7, Nuke Danger, and Tomken have all been of immense help.