Chapter 17 - Advanced Qualifications

Admiral Sykes was still working on the course syllabus when we got to Barnard's Star. Not that this was a surprise; we got the periodic reports. This was well before we ever got those message torpedos or drones in service, but as long as they were building the infrastructure for the ACO course, they had the Darjee freighters coming and going every day with people, materials, modules, and finished products. When the freighters returned to Sol System, everyone got to hear the latest status.

So, we knew before we got there that we would be helping set up the course. That was okay, whatever it took, as long as we got to go through it before Alton Castle and Amberley Castle, the next two scheduled to come out here.

Actually, it really wasn't okay. When you get used to something, even if it's an unnecessary luxury, you don't like it when it gets taken away. It looked like we'd be there for a couple of weeks, and we all missed our companions. Certainly, when the men started grumbling about it, I understood their point of view.

Going into combat where we could get hurt or killed? Leave them behind. A short trip for training or qualification? Yeah, we can do without them. But, stuck in a different system for weeks helping build something? When I get off work at the end of the day I want a reason to go back to my bunk! I, acting for both crews, petitioned for our companions to be brought out here to Barnard's Star.

The petition was granted, Admiral Sykes wanted his companion, too, but then that immediately led to more formal manning documents for the ships. We had been knocking around several stabs at Watch, Quarter, and Station bills for the various conditions we might find, and this was the last straw. We couldn't bring all 44 women on board because the air systems couldn't handle that many people.

There also weren't enough toilets. We had a total of 14 commodes throughout the whole ship, so every morning if each woman needed two hours to get ready to face the day like on Earth it would be 6 hours later before the first man got in to pee.

That was an easy workaround. At the end of the workday anyone not in the duty section can transport over to the schoolhouse ship, an Aurora with plenty of unused berthing space. But, we need more people on the ship now! It's commissioned and can act in an emergency, so it must be kept manned for any emergency. We are going to have to formalize the manning levels for each condition.

As a temporary measure we expanded the duty sections to 9 men each, with each duty section able to completely man the 'routine' underway consoles with three extras qualified to man the weapons in an emergency. That gave us four duty sections, each with an OOD, a helmsman, a comm/sensors guy, an Engineroom tech, a DC tech, and three gunners, and an extra body for whatever was needed. The extra people got spread out as seemed appropriate.

That gave us additional training opportunities. As long as we were there at Barnard's Star, no matter what we were doing we had that day's duty section do everything possible. They got us underway, they navigated us to wherever we were going, if possible they took a couple of potshots at some asteroid that looked at us wrong, and when the day was done they brought us back into transporter range of the schoolhouse and either shut down there or brought us in to dock.

In effect, by the time we were done building and then going through the ACO, each ship had four minimal crews, with my formal recommendation that after a couple of patrols the crews be split up to form the core crews for four ships. That was well received, as the space around Jupiter Station was getting crowded. They had the third set of Castles being overhauled, they had eight of the freighters we named Mercuries, and we had been told that the next set of deliveries would be something completely different again, another group of ancient ships like the Castles but of a different design.

I never did hear a believable story about how the Patricians got their class name. Mostly, they were named after resorts or vacation destinations on Earth. Nassau, Malibu, Monaco, etc. Why not call them the "Resort" class? They certainly aren't all hidden getaways for the rich. Maybe they are all places where us working folk go to pretend to be rich "patricians"?

No, that doesn't work either. "Hampton Roads" isn't a vacation spot. It's a shipping channel, the place where several rivers combine before entering the lower Chesapeake Bay. There are beaches around, but nobody ever called "Hampton Roads" a place to go for a vacation.

Here's a funny story. It isn't in any way connected, but I got the video message from Diana when I was going over the first reports on the new "Patrician" class of small scout ships, so I have always associated them in my mind. Mention the Patricians, and I think of chocolate.

Diana grew up in central Pennsylvania, in the small town of Lebanon. That's just east of Harrisburg, and nowadays it's just another Harrisburg neighborhood. Guess what else is in that area? The small town of Hershey, known throughout the world for inexpensive but good chocolate.

Diana may have liked chocolate as a young girl, I'm sure you couldn't get away from it in that area, but she interned at one of the Hershey plants when she was in college, and she developed a deep loathing for the stuff. Rather than tell everyone to stay away from the product, the factory management would tell the workers to eat all they wanted. In the long run, it was cheaper and provided better morale. The workers would get sick of chocolate pretty quickly, and after that they left the product alone. Wave a warm smelly Hershey bar under Diana's nose when she isn't expecting it and she'll gag. Thankfully that was no problem for me, when we were dating she told me that and I spent my money on flowers instead.

Anyway, while I was in my cabin in Allie going over the specs on this new ship type we had been given, I got a video message from Diana and, well, that's more important than this is. She was sitting behind her desk in her pink suit like usual, with a box of chocolates in front of her. I don't remember what the brand was, but it was one of the better-known European brands; one that any reasonable woman would be happy to get.

Diana was laughing, holding the box of chocolates. "Dear, I just got invited on a date again, by a very nice gentleman. Guess what he brought me when he asked me out?" The poor sod. How was he to know she used to work at a chocolate factory? "I graciously declined, and then I called Ginger and told her we needed some more of her contractors up here to keep the men focused on their work instead of on me. Love you! Miss you! Tell Ellen I want her to write me, too, not just you. Bye now!"

Every man who met Diana was sure she was too good for me. Things like this made me suspect that they were right. Still, if she wanted to be my wife I was never going to give her any reason to change her mind.

The Patricians were smaller than the Castles were, and were armed with missiles. Now, before I got my panties in a wad, they weren't armed with missiles any more. They had been when they were built, and they would be again as soon as we could make it happen, but as we received them they were all 'surveying ships', launching survey drones to do the actual data collection while the ship stayed safely far, far away. The Confederacy hadn't even considered sending these old survey ships to us until we had the projectile issue resolved, but with that done these ships apparently were available and it appeared that they might be useful to us.

There had been, it seemed, very few actual modifications done to the ships for this 'conversion'. The only real differences were in the actual devices that got launched, and the attitudes of the people pushing the buttons. All we had to do to use them as warships was ensure that they met our environmental needs, fill the magazines with missiles, and put crews in them.

There were already arguments. Put missiles on them and send them out to fight! We need warships! No, fill them with survey drones and send them out scouting! We need information!

When used as "AGS" surveying ships -or AGIs, actually, spy-ships- you would pop out of hyperspace far away from the inner system, launch a low-observable probe to quietly swim through the system looking everything over, then while that is happening use your much faster hyperdrive to go to the other nine systems on your list and dump out nine more probes. When done, come back to the other side of the first system to pick up the first probe, which should be through the system by now.

No danger to the ship or crew, no alarm to any natives. Go get the other nine probes and return home to analyze the data. Don't even have to retrieve the actual probes, do we? If it's any trouble at all don't bother. Just a data dump will do. We brought 60 of these probes anyway, they are only one third the length of the original missiles.

Expediency won, because we needed accurate scouting before more warships would do us any good. Our first 'scout' ships were the first dozen or so Auroras that were handed over to us. Not the Darjee-run freighters that ran any cargo we wanted carried anywhere we wanted to go, as long as there were no Sa'arm in that system, no, not them. I mean the unused mothballed Auroras that the Confederacy gave us. Those ships never got much attention on Earth or the people trying to fill colony ships, because they didn't spend much time in Sol System once we got them.

The Auroras were slow and completely defenseless, but we didn't see any way to change that so we found a use for them that didn't require any armament. By the time we had our first two Castles setting up the ACO course at Barnard's Star we had those Auroras out looking for the enemy.

Those freighters were completely automated; the only reason for any crew at all was that the Confederacy wanted a crew on its ships. To deal with social needs, we put five human 'crew' on board each one, with five of Ginger's contract workers to keep them calm. Actually, the crews were taken from the Castles' precommissioning crews, with one requirement being "in a stable relationship with a companion".

By the time we sent those 'scout' Auroras out, the Darjee ships were done with their second phase of our spherical survey and we knew that there were no Sa'arm -or any other star-faring people- within 25 lightyears in any direction and the UN was demanding that we set up some interstellar colonies that they could run. Until we had more ships, we were going to say that this was enough of a buffer, and we could concentrate on the direction the Sa'arm were supposed to be coming from.

We sent a pair of the Darjee ships out to the last 'known safe' system in the right direction, just over a hundred lightyears from us, and asked them to start building a support base for our scouts. Eventually, that became our first District Headquarters, but it started as a base that our 'scout' freighters could return to instead of having to come all the way back to Earth.

Someone named the planet "Truman" after the US President of "The buck stops here" fame, and when we had enough of a military to become more organized Truman became the seat of our 2nd Military District. We had more districts for other sections of the front soon, but when we got involved with the Tulak mess the 2nd District absorbed the lion's share of our efforts for a long time.

Anyway, those 'scout' Auroras could go to a system, but it wasn't safe for them to enter it and do a good survey. They were almost sitting ducks against our Castles, and we were pretty sure that the Castles weren't the most powerful warships in the universe. Surely any warship of any size could destroy an unarmed freighter that was too slow to flee?

So, those Auroras had orders to not enter any HEZ for any reason except for known-safe bases. They had instruments that could check out a planet from outside of the HEZ. They should not get close enough to anything interesting to be unable to run if they got attacked. We would rather get a "we aren't sure" report and try again later, than lose the ship, never get any report at all, and then have to send one of our remaining ships to the same system. For now, it was enough to be able to sort the systems into "Habitable planet here", "Nowhere to live", "No Sa'arm present", "Sa'arm infested", or "We couldn't tell, sorry."

We still lost several of those ships, almost certainly because the crews wanted to come back with definitive answers. Those guys who took Auroras in to find the Sa'arm deserve to be on the top line of any memorial we ever build. If we win, I mean. Those guys went into unknown systems in unarmed ships looking for trouble, knowing that if they found it they wouldn't get to report it. In almost every case, when we sent a follow-up mission, the second ship came back to report that they had detected Sa'arm ships in that system. There were only one or two ships lost without a trace.

When we got those mothballed missile ships that had been converted to surveyors, the ones we ended up calling "Patricians", we put crews on them as quickly as we could and sent them out to replace those 'scout' freighters before we lost them all. We never lost any of the Patricians while they were on surveying duty. Of course, within a year they had done their job of surveying the volume of the upcoming battle 'front', and they were all recalled to Jupiter to be converted back to being missile ships. About the only nod to their surveying career was that the missiles were all intelligent enough to be able to play "survey probe" if ordered.

Other than pulling any remaining survey probes and filling the magazines with missiles, those tiny ships got the Confederacy's Nav Shield and two of our Point-Defense Rail Gun systems. They never got any kind of offensive weapon beyond the missiles. They were just too small.

We spent several weeks at Barnard's Star, returning to the course control "schoolship" every day or two to rest and be with our companions. Several times, when the task at hand appeared to be doable with a partial crew, we gave two of the duty sections the time off and brought our companions with us. That made whatever we were struggling with a lot more pleasant, knowing that Ellen was in my cabin waiting for me.

The first couple of weeks were spent helping set the course up. We got to play with the different course modules, verifying that some were easy and some were hard. We used the two ships against each other as a "red force" and "blue force" for wargames, adding the pretend-ships to either side as they became available.

By the time the next pair of Castles showed up, DE003 Alton Castle and DE004 Amberley Castle, Admiral Sykes was ready to declare the course ready for use. Of course many of the training modules could be run in parallel by individual ships, while others required several ships to cooperate.

There were dozens of asteroids throughout the system which had programmable transmitters attached. The seek-and-destroy course modules would have one or more of them transmitting "I'm an enemy! Kill me!" on several frequencies. Some were continuous, some were intermittent. Some said "I'm a good guy, too!" or "I'm a neutral. Don't bother me!" Most of them had semi-intelligent controllers with low-power lasers that they would fire at us if we were detected. We learned very quickly that our ships were far more stealthy if we turned the Nav Shield generator off. Of course, if we had the shield off then the simulated damage from a surprise attack from an undetected enemy installation was a lot more severe than if we had our shield up.

Once we thought we had learned all we could about sneaking around in our Castles, we turned to ship-to-ship combat. The Darjee had built, or had their repair replicators build for them, a pair of Castle mockups. During the testing and development phase we shot one of them up with our particle beams from a few kilometers away, close enough to call our shots, until we could see results. Then, we had it roll over to give us a fresh side and gave it a Plasma Torpedo.

The other ship received the same treatment, but with the Nav Shield running. We basically got nowhere with that using our particle beams, although it was clear that they were stressing the shield. If we fired both at once, or within a fraction of a second, they would penetrate the shield and cause some damage. The Plasma Torpedo took the shield out. We stopped shooting at that point, since all we were trying to do was create a walk-through display of what our weapons did, and added those results to our wargames.

Those two "ships" got retired after that. They got docked to a pod-jack, a short piece of corridor with cross-corridors like a child's toy jack set up with airlocks on all six 'ends', and the whole assembly was set off to the side. About fifty klicks away from the main station, since leaving the particle beam damage unrepaired made them mildly radioactive. The two alternated running their power plants to provide power to the jack and both ships, and anyone who wanted to visit could take a transporter to the jack. Some damage could be seen from the inside, while viewing other damage involved a space-walk.

For a lot of crews, that was their first time out in actual space, and the course ended up with a couple of people who did nothing but help newbies learn how to seal their suits. The Admiral made everyone go through this exercise at least once, as part of the "Intro to Damage Control" module that everyone had to pass before the ship was certified as "Combat Ready".

Mail from home was almost as regular at Barnard's Star as it had been when we were hiding behind Jupiter, since we had freighters coming with equipment, materials, and personnel almost every day. We got news from Jupiter Station and gossip from Diana and Ginger.

The four landers we'd named "Mercuries" were ready to be sent out to fight, but we didn't have troops to put in them. They were trying to scrounge mercenaries but it didn't look like that was going well; the kind of person who answers an ad for mercenaries doesn't do well on the AIs' integrity test. Since it would be a one-way trip -none of the soldiers were returning to Earth- the AIs wanted to make sure that the soldiers hired were people they didn't mind having around, and collection was slow.

They had nudged the UN about having some organized units turned over to them. If there were any "off the books" units that needed to disappear this was the perfect time to make that happen. There were rumors that this was actually going to happen, with several less-savory units being mentioned.

I could believe the need to get rid of the Peruvian "Death Squads" which had been brutal enough to finally wipe out the Sendero Luminoso Maoists, the so-called "Shining Path" rebels who had troubled Peru for so long. Having done so, though, the Peruvian government was embarrassed by the reports coming out of the mountains about what it had taken to out-terrorize the Maoists. If ever a government needed to get a loyal unit taken off their hands, it was them.

I had trouble believing the stories of a Russian all-woman unit, though. I'd heard of the Chechen "Black Widows", but an all-female Russian unit? Were they for real? As it turned out, the Mastroika were real, and they had done enough of their own atrocities paying the Chechens back for their atrocities that Russia wanted them out from underfoot while they pretended to play nice with the neighbors.

The rumors included Philippine anti-insurgency troops, Thai government security troops, and a company of Swiss guards, courtesy of the Vatican.

Ginger wanted to complain that she had gotten her recruiting system up and running, but she was now being told to slow down again; we weren't ready for all those people yet. She said that, at current rates, we would have gotten just over 18,000 people off the planet by the time the enemy landed in ten years. What in God's Green Earth was I doing up there, besides getting women pregnant?

I didn't understand that one at first. Didn't we have a couple dozen or more ships taking colonists out to as many colonies? Well, yes, but she could fill them within a day of being told the ship was ready. The ships, on the other hand, took weeks to deliver the colonists, they had to hang around -especially the first couple of loads for each colony- for some time to provide manufacturing assistance and make sure the colony would survive until the next ship showed up, they took weeks to return to Earth, and after all that Ginger could fill them again in a day.

If we had pods available for the ships, that is, since apparently the colonies needed to keep the pods the colonists were in. Generally, the need to collect replacement pods added more time, at one end of the trip or the other. They were building a facility at Saturn to pump out habitat pods but like everything else it took time and meanwhile the ships were waiting.

Ginger could fill two or three ships a day. Give her a couple days notice to ramp up, and she could probably fill five or six every day for as long as we wanted. With how long the round trips were taking, the numbers worked out to us needing about two hundred ships to keep her recruiters busy. I didn't think that was going to happen. We either needed more ships or bigger ones. Or faster, if they weren't spending so much time on the trip itself that would also help. More or larger ships would have a greater effect, though.

One thing that they were talking about, if they ever had the transport space for them, was forced colonization where people were just rounded up and put on the ships. I couldn't see that idea going anywhere. What kind of colonists would that give us? On the other hand, if we ran out of time and the bad guys were already on Earth playing "Giant Purple People Eater", then people would probably be fighting over space on the ships. I hoped it never came to that.

Let's see.... Ginger had started on some of the real third-world hell-holes where you could get an ugly, worn-out hooker who would do whatever she was told all night long for only $20, and for an even $200 the house wouldn't expect to get her back. Add $50 more and they'd even take care of the body, but Ginger wasn't planning on killing them. To a group of people with body-modifying medical equipment, how ugly and worn-out the hooker was when we bought her wasn't relevant.

Recruiting for the troopships picked up a bit when the recruiters could honestly look the prospective mercenary in the eye and say that every bunk would come with its own bedwarmer, guaranteed obedient and guaranteed disease-free. For that matter, the merc would be disease-free too.

The AIs had conniptions, though, when Ginger tried to send a hundred whores up to the first one, the Mercury, after buying them all with a UN credit card in Bangkok. She ended up having to store most of them for several weeks in one of the warehouses at LTI's world headquarters complex on the Potomac. That was just outside of Alexandria and Ginger had mentioned that she could see the Washington Monument from her office.

That took more manpower, but she made lemonade out of her lemons by hiring more security people to keep an eye on them. It was only money, and the UN was keeping her charge accounts paid off. As long as the girls behaved themselves, and the men were gentlemen, she pre-authorized any private arrangements the girls and the guards made among themselves. She got already-trained manpower that could be sorted through against later needs and the girls were safe, if not necessarily sound.

She used the time to start running the girls through the med-tubes, and gave each one who had gone through it a bracelet that they couldn't take off. At the same time she informed the guards that any girl without a bracelet would give them AIDS and maybe they should just work with the ones who had been processed. Since the ones with bracelets were soon noticeably more healthy and attractive, the guards didn't have too much trouble with that rule.

Did I mention that most of the guards only spoke English or maybe French or Spanish, and the only English the girls knew were verbs describing available services? And expecting a fifteen-year-old Thai whore to speak Spanish was just absurd.

Their education had stopped at the bare minimum to be able to work as a slave whore. They couldn't cook, shop, or even dress themselves for the public since they had never owned any clothes. They were willing to provide any sexual service a man or even a woman could think of, but they couldn't tell anyone how old they were. They could all offer services in probably seventeen different languages, but they had trouble asking for soap in their own native tongue. They weren't what anyone would call well-educated, and Ginger had endless trouble with their attitudes and expectations. Frankly, they could only function as continually-supervised slaves.

Those girls were great, as long as you only thought about them as hookers or slaves. As soon as you started to think about them as fellow human beings, though, you were on your way to a migraine. Most had been 'recruited' into their profession even before they were born, since the one economically valuable product that an uneducated psychopathic whore can reliably produce on demand is a baby.

A lot of those whorehouses had been in business for well over a century of European colonization. Male babies were killed, unless born to dedicated staff-serving whores. Female babies were fed and raised, and taught from birth to obey men. As soon as they were old enough, they were put to work taking care of the younger babies. They started learning to please men as soon as they were old enough, around 4 or 5.

If you teach a girl that age that she isn't getting breakfast or dinner until she has knelt in front of a man and performed a rather personal service for him, by the time she's 7 or 8 it's ingrained in her psyche. To her, that's the way things are supposed to be and she goes looking for a man to service any time she is hungry or needs personal validation for any reason.

A typical Bangkok whorehouse had two lines of people along the outer walls, one inside and one outside, twice a day at mealtimes. Young girls who want breakfast or dinner get in line at the glory holes, and the city poor pay a penny or two to get in line on the other side. The system doesn't impose any expenses on the house beyond a supervisor on one side and a money-taker on the other. Any trouble is resolved by a whipping and all punishments are done in front of the other girls. After two or three incidents the girl is simply killed. No one girl is valuable enough to keep if she continues to cause trouble. The survivors grow up to be whores. It's all they know, all they can be.

By age 10 any of them could make any man come within seconds. When one started to grow breasts and hips, look like a woman, and bleed, she would be made available for other services, starting with the rich foreigners who wanted to rent a virgin for the night. All foreigners were rich, and many would pay absurd amounts for this privilege. And, if the customer was silly enough to let the girl get on her knees first, well, very often the same girl could be rented for the night as a virgin many times before someone finally got what they had paid for.

Some of the girls were taken out of the assembly-line training process before they were worn out. The prettiest, the ones who performed the best, the ones who showed the most desire to please, those were taken as personal servants by the house's male staff. Those were the only ones allowed to raise male babies, and those babies grew up to take their part in the house's male staff, pushing their own mothers, sisters, and daughters around when they were old enough.

Ginger wanted to save the youngest girls she could before they were ruined by the system, but the whole reason the Confederacy was supporting this was to supply women to adult combat soldiers and if they looked too young most men wouldn't want them. Besides, the only girls that she could buy without too many questions were those that the whoremasters considered too old to be profitable.

She finally ended up with a solemn promise that each girl was at least 15 years old and no older than 20. Not that we could tell, or that the girls knew either. The houses themselves probably had no reliable records anyway. All she had was the word of a man she knew would lie through his teeth for any reason or none.

None of the girls had ever left their house before Ginger bought them. They hadn't been to school or seen a doctor. They had never even seen outside the house unless they got to a glory hole before a cock was stuck through it. They were never allowed to speak with a client until they were old and worn out, which meant 16 or 17 with four children already. They were taught -with whips- to not speak at the glory holes, and when they started seeing men for other services, until they were worn out it was always a rich foreigner who didn't speak Thai anyway. The only clothes they had ever worn were the pretty things they were given when a customer wanted to choose from a lineup.

They brought in a couple of sleep-trainers and ran the girls through 10- or 15-minute English lessons around the clock, and within a few days everyone could negotiate with confidence. I could just imagine that. "If you want to help me take a shower, I'll wash your back for you. Which hole do you prefer to use?"

Before long Ginger could have her recruiters throw in a free hooker with every soldier recruited. That helped to up her numbers, too, and it got more women out of those pits.

Once word got around to the various governments which were considering giving us troops that each man would get his own 'wife', all arguments ceased. The first two ships, Mercury and Woden, were filled with our own recruits. The other ten all got units "donated". Ares and Zeuz, the other ships from our first consignment, each got a company of the French Foreign Legion as the first organization to come to terms with Ginger.

Every man had to swear to take care of and take responsibility for his 'wife', and Ginger herself gave the talk to each group saying that there would not be any replacements for misplaced or mistreated women. The ladies were glad to be out of their hell-holes and they would be good to their men as long as their men were good to them but they needed a lot of supervision. Ginger quickly learned to have an assortment of women available for those who didn't want an undernourished childlike Thai or round little Mexican or whatever the latest special deal had gotten her.

We all lied to ourselves and called them "indentured servants", telling our consciences that as they got a better education and got more used to a technical culture they could be released and put to work as independent people in their own right. In reality, for all the hookers Ginger sent out to the fleet to be with previously-recruited men, that promotion from comfort girl to crew-person didn't happen very often.

That promotion from comfort girl to crew-person never happened, on those twelve troopships that we filled with mercenaries and unloved soldiers. The 20-odd crew on each ship were all high-CAP men that the AIs accepted, but the 130-plus soldiers and their 150-plus third-world hookers that went onboard at first have always been redheaded bastard stepchildren with no home. They aren't 'Volunteers' as we have come to use the term, but they certainly aren't 'Concubines', either. We try to honor them for their service and support them with whatever repairs or supplies they need, but no colony wants them around any longer than needed. Those men and women frequently aren't even granted downside liberty, since they don't have CAP scores.

Those twelve original "Independent Companies" weren't part of the current CAP system. The ones that are left can't be issued any concubines, so they can't get more women short of another whorehouse roundup. And they can't be tested, because every time we take a close look at them we realize they would all fail the test.

There's a reason those units were all donated by their home governments. While they were excellent soldiers, they weren't people you would want as neighbors. Not even in the next town down the road. They are pretty much stuck in limbo until some colony adopts them. It would have to be a colony that is about to get overrun and isn't worried about the long-term social consequences, though.

So, we had our first four troopships full of men and women. Now, where could we train them, if they couldn't train on Earth? I don't know who made the decision, but I can tell you that Admiral Sykes was less than pleased when he found out that, in addition to building his ACO ship-handling course, he had been granted the outstanding opportunity to also create a school for Confederacy Marines out at Barnard's Star. Not to mention building their training facilities first.

We in our ships helped design and put together a facility that was large enough to exercise all 500 troops at once, but we drew the line at helping train the Marines. What did we know about that? Ginger got an emergency call for two dozen retired Army and Marine drill sergeants, and she filled it by pulling one or two from retirement homes throughout Europe, filling in as needed from Canada and the US. Yes, they all got someone to keep their beds warm for them.

I know we had people on the Moon working on clothing and and equipment and such for the troops, but I never got any more involved in that than reading the status reports. What did I know about Marines?

The UN insisted that we give two of our all-human-crew freighters to them and the Chinese, for their use. We went through that twice as we got more ships, giving them a total of three ships each, the two Darjee-crewed ones behind the Moon and two more each that were human-crewed, before we got tired of it. We stopped telling them when we got ships. We needed those ships ourselves, and all they were doing with them was jerking off.

A couple of years later, when the Darjee-crewed ships started to complete their contracts and several of the ships were offered to us, we made a big deal about "Darjee ships getting human crews" and gave the UN and the Chinese as many Auroras as they wanted. By then we were building our own ships anyway, and the Kilo-class thousand-pod ships were on the drawing boards. The logjam of limited transport was about to be broken.

Those ships' AIs stayed on our side, though. They still had the Confederacy as their first priority. As long as they had non-CAP crews and passengers they would only go to the UN and Chinese colonies and back to Earth. The Confederacy did not want those crazies running around loose.

After we were done with all the fixed exercises, we could turn to ship-to-ship tactics. The school had several sets of portable signaling lasers whomped up, and each ship got three of them. The beam turrets and torpedo launcher were all disabled, and the lasers were temporarily mounted on top of them so we could shoot at each other without causing any damage.

One nice touch was that the units were installed where actually firing our main weapons would have the beam or torpedo run into the temporary laser rig, which would of course disrupt the beam or torpedo. That way, if everything went wrong and the real weapons were somehow fired, only the firing ship would be damaged.

That was a good idea and I wish I could take the credit, but it was the Admiral who thought of that. He was a surface sailor, and he'd actually seen a "blue on blue" friendly fire incident once during a NATO exercise. He'd come up with a good way to ensure it wouldn't happen here, or at least not during these exercises.

We went through a lot of fun and aggravation, developing tactics and seeing what worked and what didn't. One on one, two on one, three on one, two on two, sneak attacks on a surprised enemy, deliberate attacks on an alert enemy, we went through everything we could think of.

One thing we had hammered into us was that none of these weapons gave us one-shot kills. We had to batter our opponent apart. If two of us went at it in these exercises, by the time the AIs refereeing the 'fight' decided that one ship was 'dead' the other one was pretty close. The only way to get a safe kill was to surprise our opponent and start shooting from directly behind him, where we would get at least a couple of shots in before he could turn and shoot back.

If we could get a hit with our Plasma Torpedos, the other ship lost its shield and didn't last much longer after that. If our opponent got surprised, but was able to stay out of PT range, it turned into a slugging match.

We added sensors to let us look behind us. Not directly behind us as the drive would ruin the sensors, but everything except a narrow cone where the actual drive exhaust was. And we learned to turn every so often to make sure no one was sneaking up on us. That was standard anyway, in the boats. All submarines were blind behind themselves, and it was standard to turn occasionally to clear our baffles.

We learned how nice it was to have a buddy. That wasn't important on subs. The weapons we carried would kill just about anything we might want to shoot at with only one shot, and the torpedos rarely missed. Or so we thought, since we never actually went to war with the Soviets. Still, it was part of our cultural heritage how much trouble our boats had in WW2 with defective torpedos and the Sub Service went to a lot of trouble to make sure that never happened again.

All our torpedos got regular, almost constant, maintenance, and we fired practice torpedos fairly often. Once in a while, we got permission to sink some hulk with a warshot. If you hear the term "Sink-ex", it means an exercise where somebody is going to get sunk. We never used a specially instrumented torpedo straight from the factory, though. It didn't do any good to know that a special test torpedo worked. We wanted to know if the torpedos out in the fleet worked. The torpedo used in the sinkex was always one that had just spent a year or two on patrol somewhere.

So, this need to batter our opponent to pieces wasn't reflexive for me and my fellow bubbleheads, like it was for the surface sailors. They had the cultural heritage of tacking to place their broadsides right next to their enemy and firing their cannon until one side or the other sank. Not that anyone still alive had even served in WW2, much less the Battle of Trafalgar, but that was their cultural heritage. "No captain can do very wrong by steering for the closest enemy" and all that.

The only experience I had with this was from an old computer game, Warcraft. No, not the later internet version, the original game that came on a CD. The game was about a Tolkien-style war between the humans and the orcs, and you could play either side. The thing was that you started with weak units and had to build stuff before you got better units.

If the lowest-level human fighter -the ones you started the game with- took on the equivalent orc unit, when the battle was done one was dead and the other was nearly so. The two units were that evenly matched. What you were supposed to do was group two of your fighters, and have them go together to beat up on an isolated enemy unit.

The orc (or human, if you were playing the other side) took damage twice as fast and died twice as fast, and thus only got to beat on one of your two soldiers for half the time. Instead of having a useless almost-dead soldier, you had two quarter-damaged soldiers who were both still viable combat units. You could send the pair out against another lone orc, and then a third one. Depending upon how the computerized dice rolled, they may be able to kill a fourth orc before one of your two original soldiers finally croaked.

This ship-to-ship combat between equal ships worked pretty much the same exact way as that game had. One on one, the survivor was likely to die itself before repairs could be made well enough to return to a repair facility. If we could gang up on our enemy, though, we came out a lot less banged up when all the smoke had cleared.

That was the big lesson we got from the ACO course. Fair fights were to be avoided if at all possible. Besides, if you had a buddy watching your back it was a lot harder to get surprised.

That was something that I had to keep in mind. While the boats were blind in their 'baffles', that area behind them where the bow-mounted sonar could not hear, we also had a 'towed array', a set of hydrophones on a cable that we could trail behind us. Not only did that prevent anyone from sneaking up behind us, the long distance between the main sonar dome in the bow and the towed array behind us gave the signal processing computers an excellent baseline and as long as the towed array was out "range estimates" were often accurate within a few dozen yards. Without the towed array, range estimates for a sonar contact were a lot fuzzier, like "more than five miles" or "estimated at twelve miles plus or minus four miles".

Here, the onboard sensors gave us accurate range and bearing information for any bogey, but we had no towed array and we had no way of checking our baffles short of actually turning the ship, which made us a lot less stealthy ourselves. Having a buddy made that unnecessary.

Since we were the first ones through the training pipeline, there were a lot of lessons learned that helped the people who came after us. We weren't learning combat doctrine so much as forming it, and that changed a lot over the years as we learned what really worked out in the field and what didn't.

The third pair of ships, Bamborough and Barnard Castles (DE-006 and DE-007 since -005 Appleby had been diverted to run the BCNSO course) showed up for the ACO long before we were done, but it was decided that we had wasted enough time and wouldn't gain any benefit from sticking around to beat them up with all our experience. They would do all the single-ship exercises and then hang around and help improve the course until Appleby and Bere Castles showed up.

Eventually us "first four", Allington, Alnwick, Alton, and Amberley Castles were all certified to be "combat ready", and we were sent out to go find the front. We were to go investigate all of the "There be Sa'arm here" and "We don't know" systems that the early Aurora scout-ships had located for us.

Our orders were actually transfer orders to the base at Truman for further service, but they contained various clauses that authorized use of the ship's weaponry under the Captain's discretion if we encountered a race known to be hostile (the Sa'arm) or another, unknown, species which fired first. Notably absent from my orders were any instructions to place myself under the command of anyone there.

This was to become important in the very near future. I was the senior officer present, I was in command of the ships, and I was to exercise my best judgment in how to use my available resources to attain the Confederacy's goals. Any reports I sent back asking advice would be a month out of date by the time I got my answer.

So, I got the dubious distinction of being the Confederacy's first starship captain in however long it had been around to be authorized to take an armed vessel in search of an enemy with the prior intent of killing them. I got the even more dubious honor of being designated as Commodore, in command of the movement and responsible for the safe and timely delivery of the four ships to the base at Truman and their use thereafter.

Admiral Sykes had talked it over with us skippers, and I'm sure he had talked it out with Admirals Andrews and Kennedy. Truman was more than 100 lightyears away from us toward the galactic "East". We were to hopscotch across the intervening systems, practicing movement together in hyperspace and N-space, and at a time of my discretion we were to split into pairs and survey more closely two systems near Truman that had been left at "We aren't sure" by the unarmed scouts which had first checked them out. When each pair of ships was able to resolve the status of their assigned systems we were to continue on to Truman and take over the survey work from the unarmed freighters.

And we all had to sleep alone at night. Our companions were all put on a Darjee-run freighter carrying equipment and staff to Truman and would probably beat us there. In hyperspace, the Auroras weren't that much slower than the Castles, and they weren't stopping a half-dozen times to practice their maneuvering and look for trouble.

For the first four systems we stopped at, we all practiced showing up as close to the same place and as close to the same time as possible. All I can say is that we gradually got better at it. For the last two, we split up into pairs. The next two systems on our itinerary had been declared 'clean', so if we really did a complete survey it was just a dress rehearsal. We took Alnwick Castle with us, on the principle that we were used to working together, while Alton Castle and Amberly Castle were similarly used to working with each other.

That took almost two days to do. It would have been longer, but frankly we cheated. We split up to check the various planets. Hey, we needed to know if we could do that, or if we were going to have to be joined at the hip all the time.

We were traveling in pairs for three specific reasons. First, it doubled our combat power if needed and and it allowed us to check each others' baffles. Second, if one of us got in trouble it gave us a chance for the other one to survive and warn Earth. Last, if either ship had an unrecoverable engineering failure the one that still worked could help with repairs or evacuate survivors.

The first reason would need us to be together, but only in actual combat. The second reason was better served by our separation as long as we were in communication. The third reason didn't really matter either way unless the failure was due to outside causes and in that case again it would be better to be separate to make sure we weren't both caught in whatever it was. As long as we were certain that the system was uninhabited there was no good reason to stay together and several good reasons to separate.

This first full-system survey was boring as all get-out. I was already getting jaded. If you've seen one uninhabited system, you've seen them all. What was worse, the Confederacy had done this kind of survey some time back so for each system we visited we already had orbital data for each major body. There might be minor changes from unstable orbits, but if the database said this system had seven planets we expected to find all seven of them where the database said they would be.

Still, if we wanted to have some pride and say that anything the Auroras could do we could do better, we'd better do a good job here. Allie took one gas giant and all of its satellites while Alnwick took the other. They finished first and started on the smaller planets; we joined in when we were done. We found no sign of any intelligent life beyond the automated monitoring station that one of the Auroras had left.

You know, the one which told us that no one had been here since it was set up. Why didn't all these systems have these stations? They did, back closer to Earth, but we hadn't finished delivering them all over the place out here yet. That project was still in progress. We were about halfway through the survey when it occurred to us to check.

Since we wanted these automated stations to see any visiting ships anywhere in the system, and we wanted for us to be able to find them but not for anyone else to, the standard placement that had evolved was 1 AU (Earth's orbital distance from our Sun) from the system's central star, but placed at a 90 degree angle to the system's ecliptic plane, up at the system's "North Pole" where there was absolutely nothing. No one in their right mind would ever be there unless they were looking specifically for such a snooper, and it gave a clear view of the whole system. And, no, the station wasn't on the side we checked first. It was on the other side.

I resolved to get one of these stations set up at every system we ever visited, if we could. Even just knowing that someone had or had not visited a system would help us track down what our enemies were doing. That, in turn, would give us a clue about their values and why they did things. The only weak spot in the idea was that the stations had no way to report any news to anyone outside of the system; all they could do was gather data and wait for a ship to come collect it. On the other hand, the stations were easily accessible through hyperspace if you knew they were there.

We had no way to tell how the other team was doing in the other trial-run system, so when we were satisfied that we had done a good job here we jumped to the last system on our list, the one where the initial 'scout' Aurora had left before finishing their survey.

Our second survey was for real. We had complete astrographic data on the whole system just like the first one we had re-done for practice, guaranteed to be accurate as of less than a half-million years ago, just nothing recent on whether anyone had moved in or not. This time we came in from opposite sides of the system plane and verified that there were no automated monitoring stations at this system on either side.

This second survey took longer. It had four gas giants with moons that could be lived on if you had to, as well as five smaller rocky planets farther in. Since the enemy appeared to like the same sorts of planets as us and the Confederacy, we weren't spending a lot of time looking over the frozen bodies out past the gas giants.

Hopefully that never came back to bite us in the ass. There was so much we didn't know yet. It would be nice to establish exactly what standards they had for living space. If they needed a particular narrow range of environments we could put our bases somewhere else that they didn't like. On the other hand, if they turned out to be even more open-minded than we were we would have to go back to every system we had already looked at and examine all the frozen planets and moons for as far out as we could find them.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite science fiction books centered around the search for a psychopathic criminal by a galactic civilization. Since space travel was so easy, no one ever bothered with any but the nicest most terrestrial of planets. Of course the criminal's lair was eventually found in the same system as his target, in one of the frozen outer planets, after it was too late to thwart his evil plan. Every time we discussed whether or not we needed to survey every orbital body no matter how far out, someone would bring up H. Beam Piper's story "Space Viking".

Anyway, our survey had two aims. First, to update anything in the Confederacy's old database that had changed, and second to find out if there were any non-Confederacy sentients in the system. Both parts were managed by the AIs; we were just there to tell the AIs to do it.

The first part was simple; count planets, check orbits, count moons. If none of them had changed, the system was stable and we were done. The Confederacy's old astrographic database was still valid. If any of that had changed, we were supposed to figure out, not just what had changed, but why.

The second part was also easy but took a good deal longer. At a certain stage of development, any civilization would emit radio noise. Some of it may actually carry content, maybe analog or maybe digital, but what we were listening for was electromagnetic noise, the kind generated by motors, switches, and current-carrying wires. No EM noise, no electrical power being used.

Past another milestone, any civilization would emit neutrinos from their reactors. No neutrinos, no nuclear reactors.

There were also quite a few chemical signatures in the atmosphere of an inhabited planet, but they were all natural substances if you looked at nature long enough so they couldn't be treated as conclusive proof, just evidence that led to a closer look.

There was yet another milestone that was possible, for people who could shield their reactors enough to block neutrinos, but those people could be easily detected by yet a third type of emission.

All four detectors were simple and easy to use, but they had to be trained on all sides of a planet to ensure that there were no small-scale installations like a small colony with only one fusion plant. We could sit and watch a planet turn while we checked the whole thing out, or we could fly around it if that was faster. Which was better depended upon how fast the planet rotated and how far away we were.

It helped that we didn't have to be near a planet to check it out, so we could watch a rapidly spinning planet in the distance while we flew circles around one that didn't spin so quickly. Determining the best path to fly to get the whole system done as quickly as possible was, of course, a simple task for a computer powerful enough to be self-aware.

The people who set up our original survey had been right; we didn't need huge teams of scientists and techs to do this. We just needed one person to tell the AIs to do it, and enough extra people to keep that one person on task.

Even though we only did two systems, we were heartily sick of survey duty by the time we were done. We updated the little that needed updating in the Confederacy's database, verified that this system still held no sentients who had advanced to electricity yet, and headed out for Truman.