Chapter 18 - Truman

What can I say about Truman? The first time I saw it, it was much like the first time I saw Jupiter Station: a jumble of ships, equipment, half-built habitats and stations. The biggest difference was that half the construction was down on the planet, trying to put together a place for humans to live. Truman was marginally habitable, meaning that it could be lived on with technical assistance.

That doesn't mean that it was a terrestrial planet. It was the moon of a gas giant somewhat close to Saturn's size, and it was just a little larger than Earth's Moon. The people who were setting the base up had decided that for some reason normal artificial gravity was not appropriate, and they had to make do with some kind of amplifier. That got the gravity at the base up to .8 of Earth-normal instead of the .2 everywhere else.

I was fascinated with the terraforming technique they were using. Truman wasn't massive enough to retain gases, and it had no atmosphere worth mentioning when our people first moved in. It had been decided that, if we had a choice, having bad air that you couldn't breathe was better than no air at all, so instead of some kind of Confederacy wizardry they had gone with brute force. There were a couple of automated tugs shuttling a pair of huge tanks down into the almost-liquid part of the giant's gas envelope to be filled, then back to Truman to dump. The farther down they lowered the tank, the higher the pressure that the soup-tank was filled with, but the longer it took to get the tank in and out, so they had reached some happy medium that maximized total mass transfer rate for the whole round trip.

This wasn't going to be quick. They said that it would take decades to get the pressure up to where people died in minutes from oxygen starvation instead of in seconds from blowout if their suits were damaged. Eventually, the atmospheric pressure would reach 1 bar and they would slow down to just maintaining that pressure and they could start working on converting the air to something breathable, but when I saw it Truman was just beginning to have a trace of methane-hydrogen-helium-whatever as an atmosphere.

Anyway, for all practical purposes Truman Base was just another space station that happened to have a lot of room to walk around. And, to someone who just made a three-week trip in a ship with constantly varying gravity, the slight decrease in our weight just wasn't a problem. I probably wouldn't even have noticed if I didn't have the numbers in my face.

We stayed at Truman for two days, almost three before we headed out on our first patrol. There weren't any critical reasons, but the small reasons to stay for a bit kept piling up until it was clear that we should get them all dealt with. We didn't need to rest or resupply, but we needed to meet the locals, get updated on the neighborhood as they saw it, get the women-folk taken care of, and get minor things like the chain of command straightened out.

It didn't help at all that I was an American, a Commodore or very senior Captain with all my service in submarines as well as little time in actual command, while the commander of the base was a British Commodore from one of their unarmed government services who had spent his career directing freighters and had never personally commanded anything larger than his own yacht. I'd checked his history, and I assumed he had checked mine. These AIs know EVERYTHING, and we could know everything too if we just thought of the right questions to ask!

One task I had to perform personally was to go meet the good Commodore Sir Harold Arbuthnot down at the base. He was not willing to use the AI's ability to do a live video conference. My attempts to contact him were brushed off by his secretary with instructions to go to his office for my briefing and orders. I asked said secretary if Commodore Arbuthnot was crippled and unable to leave his office, and I was told that he wasn't crippled and it wasn't my place to question the Commodore's choice of location.

Sometimes I think that some of the British nobility are still angry about losing their American colonies, going on 250 years ago now. Most of them, thank God, figured out long ago that it only happened because they were such shitheads. Stop being a shithead, and we get along great.

We negotiated a meeting in a conference room down there. It was still in his territory, but as far as I was concerned if it had to be in his office then it didn't have to happen at all. I was fine not meeting with him, and the demands and orders had already stuck in my craw. Apparently having the person-to-person meeting was important enough to him to give on the office thing, and once Allie was safely shut down and getting services from the orbital facilities I transported down to meet my counterpart.

So, I walked into that meeting already knowing that the good Commodore Sir Harold Arbuthnot was a jackass. It took me roughly twenty minutes, however, to realize that on top of that he was in over his head. This had nothing to do with my personal loathing for him; I'd had to work with people I didn't like my whole life. The problem was that he was a classic "Active/Stupid", one of the worst possible personality types to have in command.

Sometime back in the 17- or 1800s, the Prussians invented the concept of a "General Staff". That was a group of senior officers who could do anything well and could thus be held in reserve until the commanding general needed to rally a cavalry unit, or replace a wounded artillery commander, or straighten out a supply fiasco, or negotiate safe passage past a neutral fortress.

Instead of putting these guys in command of some unit just because he was senior, they would give command of that unit to a junior guy who needed experience. Whoever held overall field command would keep a group of these guys around in case they were needed. Anyway, the Prussian General Staff also did research, and one of their people published a treatise on the various types of commanders.

His analysis was incredibly simplistic, but at the same time incredibly useful. The author worked from actual historical records. Since he could point at quite a few examples of each type of officer, the work they did, and the results they got from all the recent wars in Europe, his explanation rapidly gained mindshare.

Officers could be placed on a range between active and lethargic, as well as a second range between intelligent and stupid. The absolute best officers to have as subordinates were those who were active and intelligent, as they would learn quickly, properly see to any duties assigned, personally ensure that they were all carried out correctly, and even anticipate and prepare for future taskings. The best to have as a commander, though, were those who were intelligent but lazy as they would see to it that their subordinates got everything done properly instead of trying to do it all themselves.

The worst possible commander type was what the essay's author called "Active/Stupid", as such a commander would not only want the wrong things done, but he would not allow his subordinates any leeway to correct the resulting issues. He would take the credit for anything that his subordinates got right but blame them for any problems, while at the same time not allowing them the initiative to take corrective action.

Sir Harold was an expert in his own field, but outside of that rather narrow field he was an "Active/Stupid", a man who knew he was not competent for the office he held but could not believe that anyone else could possibly do better so the proper thing to do was to maintain his position at all costs and try to muddle through.

I had no authority over him. My influence only extended to ensuring that he had no authority over me or my people, either, and I grabbed as 'mine' all that I could come up with an excuse to own. May God help those who were stuck under his authority. It took less than a day for the realization that only an outside agency could fix this and, further, that only I could get an outside agency involved, to percolate into my conscience.

The Commodore had come to us, courtesy of the UN, from the UK's Ministry of Transportation and Shipping. While I had been struggling with getting armed ships ready to fight, he had been sent out here to manage the new base and the unarmed freighters we were using as scouts. I had no doubt that the man was an expert in his field, but he had grown up in their revenue service sorting traffic in the Medway, then around the North Sea oilfields, before getting promoted to be the most important traffic cop in the world: Director, Dover Traffic Separation System.

I had no question but that our traffic control was in the best possible hands. I was not, however, impressed with the good Commodore's ability to manage a war, and it was clear that he considered himself to be the best man available and had no interest in stepping down so that someone inferior could muddle things up worse.

It didn't help that he started out by insulting me. It didn't help that I returned the favor by insulting his most cherished personal beliefs. Did I mention before that royalty doesn't impress Americans? I've worked with Brit nobility before. Most of them are good people. The best are, well, the best. Unfortunately the worst are pretty bad, and they don't appear to realize it. It did help, a lot, that I'd had three weeks to do my research and get all my ducks in a row in case things went south at Truman Base. The important datum was that the Commodore was UN, not NATO. Allie assured me that, if there were problems, the AIs would support me as long as I had a reasonable plan.

Our meeting started horribly and it got worse fast. When we met he held his hand out and said "Very good to meet you, Captain Edelmann."

Now, it doesn't bother me at all that not everyone pronounces my name the way I do. If you look at my name on paper, it's not clear whether it starts with a long 'E' or a short 'e'. Since my father used the short 'e', I did too. Not everyone did. It's no big deal. Junior had told me he saw the same thing at Annapolis, and had reassured me that it was okay.

Still, I had been told by the AIs how he pronounced his name, so it was a safe assumption that he had been told how I pronounced my name by the AIs when they told him we were coming. Therefore, his doing it 'wrong' from my point of view was either incompetence, disinterest bordering on apathy, or an arrogant belief that he knew my name better than I did. It's simple enough to find out which of the three it is. And, he cannot possibly have failed to notice that I came here with the exact same rank and position that he held. With orders that kept me independent of him.

Two can play that game. I took his hand in both of mine, shook it, and said "It's very good to be here, Mr. Arbuthnot", pronouncing it "Ar-buth-not" like it looks on paper.

He took his hand back and said "it's 'Arbuthnot'..." pronouncing it 'Ar-boo-no' like the AIs had "...to a fellow sailor I am 'Commodore', and to a commoner I am 'Sir'. Now, let's try that again."

I stepped back and looked up. Sorry, it's already a habit. "AI?"

<How can we help you, Commodore Edelmann?>

Note that the AI got it right, both rank and pronunciation. "AI, have you and the people here settled on a common way to address you?"

<I am frequently addressed as 'Truman'. It identifies the AI managing this base and is acceptable.>

"Thank you, Truman. Now, you just addressed me by my current rank and position, and you even pronounced my name correctly. May I ask how long you have known that much about me?"

<All relevant data about all personnel in your task force were transmitted to Truman Base when your orders to come here were approved, just over thirty-four Earth days ago. We have received several updates to the original data package since then.>

"Very good. Now, when Mr. Ar-buth-not here was informed of our impending arrival -and this isn't a task force, not really, but it's all we have at the moment- was he given any opportunity at all to find out who commanded our little movement?"

<Yes, Commodore. If I understand your intent, he was made aware of your rank, your name, and your orders. The two of you appear angry. Is there something we can do to help resolve the issue?>

"Sorry. What you are witnessing is a politician making a bald grab for power. It is common among our people, where precedence can be established for the future. If I agree that he can direct my actions, that will establish his authority for the future. Unfortunately for him, though, he is a dishonest, conceited little idiot of a weasel with no clue how to do my job and that's not going to happen. He doesn't have legal basis for it, he doesn't have the training or experience to do the job well, and he started out by insulting the only man who could possibly have allowed it to happen. Truman, do you have access to Earth's internet and records like the AIs at Jupiter Station do?"

"I command this base and you will follow my orders!"

"You command this base. That part is true. However, you do not command my little rump squadron of warships. You do NOT, and never will, have any armed ships under your authority. I'm ensuring that right now. Now, stop interrupting me. I'm talking to someone else and it's rude. Truman, Mr. Ar-both-not here is a member of the British nobility, a parasite on humanity. Can you look up the terms 'gunboat diplomacy' and 'wog-bashing' for your understanding of what's going on here? He has placed himself in the position of supreme ruler of an isolated little kingdom and is trying to bluff the commander of an armed force sent to secure the area. It is in his own cultural heritage that the military commander sent by the home government is independent of the locals squabbling over who sits on the throne, and indeed usually has the last word on who is on that throne when he leaves."

Not that I really believed all that, but it was a defensible position with a growing body of evidence. I looked at my opponent again. "Mr. Ar-buth-not...:

"Ar-boo-no!"

"Shut up you idiot! When I arrived here you had an opportunity to work peacefully with me. You could have taken the high road. You chose, before I ever opened my mouth, to attempt a coup, and you started THAT by insulting my service and my name."

"Now, as I was saying, my heritage is that competent people rise to the top. Your heritage is that once upon a time someone in the government raped some poor peasant girl to create your ancestors, and you think that this makes you special. You're special all right, but it's not in a good way. I don't give a shit who your ancestors were. As long as you do your job -which is to run this base- I won't cause you any trouble. That will change if you try to cause ME any trouble. Do you understand me, Mr. Ar-buth-not?"

"I don't work for you. You work for me!"

"You appear to be working for yourself. I suggest that you think about that. Certainly, the AIs which want us to help defend their people can't be pleased with your attempt to carve out your own little kingdom here. You have NO experience with warships, you have NO experience of command of any mobile assets, according to the records you have never had any military training at all, you have strictly limited experience dealing with people who don't care about your patent of nobility, and you have absolutely no business in command of an armed base about to be attacked by enemies."

I redirected my attention. "Truman, my orders say nothing about placing my ships under the command of a bureaucrat with no military experience. Instead, they charge me with the safe and proper use of my ships according to my best judgement. My ships will not accept any instructions of any kind from people who follow Mr. Ar-buth-not's orders. If they are phrased politely, we will probably accept requests that make sense, but we will not in any way support this idiot's attempt to create an independent kingdom. He directs this base. That is all he has authority over. Please let us know if any of my people have trouble getting services from the base because of instructions from their commander."

"Now, Mr. Ar-buth-not, my staff will be ready for a briefing on local conditions at any time in the next few hours. If you would be so good as to set that up, we can be about our job as quickly as possible. Unless you desire to be publicly humiliated, I suggest that you make it the best briefing possible. That is all I have for you for now. Good day, Mr. Ar-buth-not."

Well, that went splendidly, yes? No. Or maybe, considering, 'Not'. I went back to Allington Castle and waited a half-hour. The good Mr. Ar-buth-not immediately dispatched a complaint to be carried by the next ship heading back to Jupiter Station. Shrug. I sent my own update on the situation, and attached Truman's video record of the meeting. I also requested that the ship stand by for updates, rather than leave in the middle of the question. One way or another, this should be resolved soon and they could take the results with them. There wasn't anything that Jupiter Station could do anyway. By the time we got an answer back from the home office we'd be out looking for Sa'arm again.

When the half-hour had passed with no developments, I asked Allie to send a message to all scout ships in the system -which the AIs called Trumanat so we did too- asking them to convene with their staffs at a mutually agreeable site for a combined meet-and-greet and planning session.

In return we got a system-wide memo from Mr. Ar-buth-not ordering all system staff to ignore any communication from me or my people.

I asked Allie where the AIs stood in this. I was here to do a job that their people wanted done, and it appeared that there was some interference making it more difficult. Allie said that the interference was unacceptable but they were not sure how to correct it. I suggested that, if they approved of my goals, it might be best if the AIs published their own statement about the limits to Mr. Ar-buth-not's authority and my own, and that, in wartime, maybe the various ship COs would probably live longer listening to a Naval Commodore than to a maritime traffic cop.

Soon after that there was a system-wide declaration from the AIs that Commodore Harold Arbuthnot, commanding Truman Base, held administrative authority over all fixed assets in the system, but that Commodore Roger Edelmann, commanding CNS Allington Castle, DE-001, held operational authority over all mobile assets based out of Trumanat. Good. The ships were here to prosecute the war. The base was here to support the ships. Very good, but man there was a lot of overlap. In case of conflicting instructions, the AIs would attempt to mediate. Okay, that's probably good enough.

I already had a list of ships in-system. Aside from our refurbished warships there were only four; two of the scouts and two of the Darjee-crewed transports with a human supercargo crew, freighters bringing supplies, equipment, and people to Trumanat. One was Mayflower Madame, a name that had been assigned when all of our companions moved onboard at Jupiter Station. I hadn't considered it a floating whorehouse, but, yeah, it was. Its cargo this trip was staff for the base and women for the ships. With the base staff people unloaded, it had plenty of room for visitors.

I asked to be connected to her 'skipper', the head of the supercargo humans, and got his agreement that Mayflower Madame would be a great place to hold our conferences. That got passed on to all ships, and we could move on with the war effort.

My pissing contest with Mr. Ar-buth-not led to other questions. Did I really want to abandon Ellen, pregnant with my child, to live on an isolated base run by Mr. Ar-buth-not while I went to war? Frankly, I'd rather she stayed on the Madame. Actually, I'd rather that she just moved into my cabin on Allie, but if I did that everyone else would want their companions, too.

Every one of us had done the "Basic Life Support Management" module for these ships, and we had all run the numbers. We had 44 crew. As modified, the ships could handle 56 "normal" humans with a little life support capacity held back as a reserve. It could not handle 88. The Madame had a transporter control nexus, and we could just go visit our ladies when we were free.

If we were shut down far enough to leave the ship to the duty section, the on-duty crew could have their companions onboard as long as we never exceeded the declared maximum of 56 people. While I was at it, I threw in a benny for the senior people who were often stuck on the ship. Anyone qualified as OOD could stay on the ship and have their companion visit them with the duty section's companions as long as we were 'in port'. Yes, I'm qualified as OOD.

Besides, there were moral considerations. If we got caught in the wrong place by someone bigger and meaner than us, we wouldn't be coming home again. Did I want Ellen, and her baby when it arrived, to die with me if that happened? My dick said yes. My head said no.

I did pull rank on one thing, though, when I caught some of my people referring to my new friend as "Mr. Ar-buth-not". That was wrong. I was going to continue to do so, as a public recognition of my feelings about his attempted power-grab, but I expected censure about that when Jupiter Station heard about it, and I didn't want anyone else in trouble for disrespectful behavior to a senior member of our little colony out here. He would be addressed or referred to, by everyone else on any of our ships, as Commodore Ar-boo-no.

Part of that instruction was the recognition that it did not apply in any way to anyone at the base, as I had no administrative authority over them. If there ever came a time when I did hold such authority, I would at that time extend this instruction to those people.

Mayflower Madame's supercargo had bought off on the 'floating bordello' concept and had the ship's AI respond to "Madame" with a delightful breathy female voice. That would take some getting used to!

Allie could pass on to me all the raw data produced by the scouts, but they couldn't give me a feel for it the way a briefing by men who had been there would. Our first conference was a resounding success. I use that term literally.

I mean, after everyone had gathered in a briefing room, when Dickie introduced me everyone stood up. That much was standard military courtesy towards a senior entering the room. The enthusiastic applause was not. What did I do to deserve that? Did I slay the alien king in personal combat and end the war?

They didn't say what the applause was for, which told me right there what it was for. Dickie leaned over and whispered to me "That private meeting between you and Commodore Arbuthnot has been seen by every person in the system."

Great. I have to acknowledge that, without admitting what I'm acknowledging. I waited until the applause died down some and said "Please be seated."

When it was quiet I went on. "Okay, for those who don't follow the news, I'm Commodore Roger Edelmann. For what it's worth, I'm an American. I think it's common knowledge that Americans are the most aggravating of the Commonwealth peoples to work with." I got some chuckles.

"Except for maybe the Jamaicans, and a lot of that is because no one can understand what they're saying." A few more chuckles.

"Are there any Jamaicans here?"

After a few seconds someone raised a hand and said "Nay, mon, but I lived on de island twelve years."

"Please get with the AIs and see if they can teach you English. That's all I'm asking." More laughter.

"Life is hard, mon. Jah, I do dat thing."

Dickie leaned over to me again. "I know him. He's as Australian as I am." Ah, thanks. Narked out by a neighbor, or nicked as I guess they would say.

"It's been pointed out that many of the Aussies have trouble with their diction, too." Much more laughter at this point.

"Alright, getting back to the point. Us Americans are also famous for our work ethic. As a group, we are goal-oriented self-starters. We will grudgingly accept competent authority and follow our orders when they make sense for the situation we find. However, you can depend upon us to happily chuck those orders out the window when they don't make any sense. Along WITH the person giving those orders, if necessary to make the point. For any of you who have never worked with Americans before, if I give you an order that doesn't make sense, or appears stupid, for God's sake ask for clarification. Respectfully, please." More laughter.

"All kidding aside, I have the utmost respect for what you guys have been doing. We've spent the last couple months trying to turn some revenue cutters into real warships, and we know they aren't going to get the job done as well as we might like but they are all we have and we're here to use them. While we were working on that, you guys have been out here in completely unarmed ships trying to develop some intelligence for us. If we had armed ships to do the job, I'd say you were all fucking nuts and belong in an asylum."

"However, we didn't have anything better, and you guys all went out and developed everything we know. In my personal opinion, every one of you guys deserves a salute from anyone who wasn't out there with you. Can everyone here who took part in one of those survey missions stand for a second?"

I moved around to beside the podium and saluted the collected officers of the two scout ships. "Thank you for your service. It is my understanding that there should be more of you, but we lost some of the ships we sent out. Okay, please be seated."

I got back to the podium and my notes. "Moving on, we have four armed ships here at the moment. Our current plan is to split into pairs and go visit the two nearest systems that we aren't sure about, then come back here and figure out our next move. There's no point in visiting systems that we know the status of, we aren't strong enough yet to do anything about it."

"On the other hand, if everything goes right we should be getting roughly two more ships every week for the foreseeable future. We're supposed to be getting 60 of these ships from the Confederacy, as well as another 50 or so of a couple of other designs that can be armed. We're getting some troopships as well as some even smaller armed scouts. We should be building ships of our own within a couple of months, although we're a far cry from being able to design them. So, we'll be building more of what we have and trying to learn enough lessons that when we do build new designs they are better."

"That is all I have for you gentlemen today. Now, I'd like to take a seat and see what you-all have learned about our neighborhood."

A very tall black man took control of the briefing at this point. He started by saying "Commodore Edelmann, I'm Captain Amos Mwake, formerly of the South African Navy, currently commanding 'Swims with Crocodiles'. I'd like to start by thanking you for clarifying the chain of command out here. It's always good to know who's who and what's what. Next, I think I speak for us all when I say I appreciate your recognition of those we've already lost out here. And, on that subject, I would like you to answer a question for us. I apologize if you already answered it and I was asleep."

I laughed with the rest of the group and held up my iPad. "It's okay, I still have my notes. I should be able to give the same answer a second time. Ask away, Captain."

"Yes, sir. Are there any plans to arm our ships?"

Shit. I got back up and walked to the podium again. "Madame? Can we see a list of the ships we have based out of this system?"

<You know I'd do anything for you, Commodore> That got a lot of laughs and a couple whistles. That voice gives me a woody every time I hear it.

"Okay, can we group them by type? We have our four 'Castles' and we have, what, eight of your 'Auroras', not counting the Darjee-crewed ships shuttling back and forth with passengers, right?"

"There are only six of us left, Commodore. 'For teh Win' and 'You Want Us To Do What?' are missing and presumed lost."

"Shit. I've been assured that every one of you has clear orders to never enter an HEZ unless you are in a secure system, like Trumanat here. Are you saying that they disobeyed orders and got caught too close to a planet when they couldn't run, or are you saying that they got run down in hyperspace?"

"We don't have that answer for you, Commodore. I'm sorry."

"But you do have those orders, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay, good. We should NOT lose any more ships unless our enemy has better technology than the Confederacy thinks, and we shouldn't have lost those if they were following orders. We don't have to know everything right now, and I will publicly thank any skipper who comes back and reports that they were too afraid to go in. You guys aren't SUPPOSED to be going in."

"Next, in a separate category let's put this ship, Mayflower Madame. It is Darjee-crewed and will not be doing any surveying but it is assigned here for now and we should list it. Last, we have two other groups of ships we're calling the 'Patrician' class and the 'Mercury' class. The Mercuries are freighters that don't use pods or lighters. Instead, they land on the planet themselves and discharge cargo directly. We're going to use them as troopships until we build our own. The Patricians are small missile boats, even smaller than the ships I brought."

"Okay, we have four groups of ships either here or coming soon. The Castles are armed as heavily as we know how to make them. We're going to go looking for trouble. We have to find out if they work as warships, and how well or badly they do, to plan our shipbuilding back home."

"The Patricians are going to be armed with missiles eventually, but for now we're putting them back in service as AGIs to replace you Aurora skippers. They are going to go to a system, launch a stealthy survey probe that will swim through the entire system and look around, and while that's happening the ship will jump around the system to pick up the probe again when it comes out the other side. They have a couple of small defensive systems sort of like our old CIWS, but that's all."

"The Mercuries are coming out here as soon as they can find some troops to put on them, and they are depending on us to find them someplace to go and cause trouble at. I expect them to have some self-defense tools when they come. Actually, the last I heard we had four of them that were manned and filled with troops and the troops were training to act as a unit. Once they are ready for combat we'll see them here."

"The Darjee-crewed transports aren't ever going to be armed, as I understand it, but that's okay because we aren't sending them in harm's way anyway, if we can help it."

"That leaves you human-crewed Auroras. I've heard a lot of wild ideas about how to arm you, but nothing that might actually work. As I understand it, one main design feature of the class is that the power plant in back isn't really part of the ship, but rather is a tacked-on and replaceable unit, right?"

"Yes, sir, that's about right."

"What I've heard is that this design makes powering any kind of useful weapon awkward. We tried a lot of different ideas when we were using the sleep-trainers as combat simulators. Madame, can you show us one of the ships from our exercise "Patton's Raid"?

<Of course, Commodore. If that pleases you I'd love to.>

Where is Ellen when I need her? These guys don't need to watch me try to provide a briefing with an erection I could use as a pointer.

"Okay, please slowly zoom in until our audience starts laughing."

The hologram of the ship slowly grew until we could pick out all the sand-colored M1A3 "Abrams" main battle tanks chained down on the rings where the pods went, cannons firing at something off-screen. And there was laughter.

"We tried a bunch of stuff in the simulators. Most of it just isn't practical. How would the crew get in and out? How would we power the turret? The engine is a gas turbine, and it needs both kerosene and air to run. If we were serious, we could simply mount the turrets on the hull, and let the ship provide the electric power, hydraulics, and fire control."

"We could make the turret air-tight, but after all that trouble we get a weapon system that fires shells at a velocity of about three thousand meters per second. That's only three kilometers per second. It's fast enough for land-based combat where your enemy is only two or three kilometers away in a vehicle that can't dodge far enough in only a second to make you miss. However, if your target is two hundred kilometers away, he has a whole minute to change position and avoid being hit."

"Guns just aren't fast enough for space warfare. In order to have an effective weapon, we need something that fires faster shells, or self-propelled and guided weapons like missiles, or some kind of beam weapon like lasers. All three classes of weapon will have more frequent hits just because they take away the target's ability to dodge. We have people back home working on this stuff, but it's going to be a while before we get anything really useful."

"The best idea I've heard of for arming your Auroras was to install three systems from one of our Castles on three adjacent pod mounts: a particle beam turret, a main power plant, and a plasma torpedo projector. It would have to be done that way because the plasma torpedo is an energy hog, and the particle generator itself is actually a part of the power plant, with an armored conduit connecting the reactor to the gun mount. You would need to place a power plant on one pod-mount, and then a particle beam turret on one side and a plasma torpedo projector on the other side."

"Now, the Patricians aren't getting hardly anything in the way of an overhaul, and unless something changed they weren't going to be required to go through the Advanced/Combat Operations course that we went through either, so their workups should take less than a week. We should be getting the first six any day now. They will be faster than you, they will be far smaller than you and hopefully that means they are harder to detect and harder to hit. Best of all, they don't have to go into the system to find out what's there. I'm telling you all right now that if I'm in charge of starship operations out here, I'm pulling every one of your freighters off front-line intelligence-gathering duty the minute those ships get here."

"What are we going to be doing, then?"

"You all saw how Jupiter Station was built, right? Everything there was built with materials and tools turned out by the big repair replicator in your engineroom. I don't think that we need to sacrifice one of our ships for the core, but I may be wrong there. Certainly, doing it that way would let the station be mobile if it needed to move for some reason so maybe that would be better."

"I think that every one of your ships should be here in this system, building up a fleet base. Housing, repair facilities, training facilities, unmanned monitoring stations, everything. At least one of you should be pumping out missiles and survey probes for those ships that are coming. We don't know if they will come fully loaded or not, but they won't STAY fully loaded and we need to be ready to restock their magazines as fast as they can use them up."

"Certainly, it would be awfully helpful if, in your spare time, someone built that three-pod set I was talking about and ran some tests to see if it actually worked or not. Personally, I think that with three of those sets per ring and six rings, you could probably blow anybody away. On the other hand, I suspect that your spinal design is too fragile to absorb much damage. Maybe we could enclose the rings into a cylinder for strength and damage resistance?"

"Anyway, if any of you wanted to be Bob the Builder when you were kids, this is your chance. If any of you want to take the war to the enemy, then please turn your ship over to us and hitch a ride back to Jupiter Station. We'll get you a ship with weapons on it, and we'll turn your ship into Truman Sector Fleet Headquarters. That's my current plan without having heard this briefing yet. I'm not silly enough to think you-all don't know more about this than I do."

I went back to my seat and listened to the rest of the presentation. Part of it was building an understanding of the local neighborhood, who lived on our block and which houses were vacant. There were dozens of systems out here that could take a colony with a little work. Every one would become a base to fight the enemy from. Even if they didn't make it, each one would serve to slow the enemy down and give Earth more time to arm. Not to mention giving us experience in how to fight an interstellar war. Our enemy apparently already had that down pat. We wouldn't be able to make any progress until we knew more about it than they did.

Part of the presentation was getting to know the people I'd be working with. That was something else we should be doing, sending those freighters out to do the preliminary work for the colonies. If the first colonists arrived to find shelter, power, and tools already there waiting for them they would be ahead of the game, wouldn't they? This was no different from what we were doing with every habitable system around Earth.

By the time the scout crews were done talking I had a clear idea of what we knew, what we didn't know, and how reliable that information was. The big item was that the Sa'arm really were coming this way; every sign of them was in the direction directly away from Earth, and they all seemed to be moving into the neighborhood the same way we were. This was just another way of saying that Truman was well-sited to be in the middle of the coming fight. Well, that's why Truman Base was put here where it was, to get in the way of the oncoming tide and stop it. They should have named it Canute Base but I guess that would have sounded defeatist.

After our briefing by the scout crews, we turned the meeting into more of an unstructured "what do we do next?" discussion. I didn't want those unarmed ships to go out again. They could do us far more good here as construction ships.

I got Captains Mweke and Parsons (of 'That's Crazy') to agree to stay here in Trumanat until they had each given us a miner, a tug, a shuttle, and one of those huge replicators that could continue on to build a fleet base after they were gone. Hopefully, before they were done we'd have some reinforcements, either the new Patrician AGIs or at least some more Castles, and I could permanently remove them from survey duty.

They conversed among themselves while I was talking with 'my' skippers, and came back to ask if it was alright if they did what I wanted, but not necessarily my way. Sure, that's fine. If I knew how to do it the best way, I'd do it myself and assign them a different task. I would not presume to tell them how to do it. Results were all that mattered.

They rearranged the tasks. 'Crazy' concentrated on building the two replicators, while 'Swims' was building all the other stuff. Sure. If it's faster, it's better. Actually, it's much better because they got 'Madame' to help build everything, too. With three of them working on construction, that went faster than I had expected. They had the first tug halfway complete before we left for our first patrol. They had some small automated equipment out gathering raw materials until they had larger dedicated mining equipment.

I would have thought that building the huge replicators would be first, as then they could help build everything else on the list, but this was like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. They couldn't build anything without materials, which meant that they needed to build a miner and a cargo-tug before they had the materials to build anything big... like a miner or a cargo-tug. Once we got going we could stockpile materials so that when an emergency need showed up we wouldn't have to start by scrounging materials, but for now scrounging was "step one". Part A of Step 1 was "scrounge enough materials to build better scrounging equipment".

As a first stab at a "Truman Fleet Station", we had everything that belonged to us gather in Truman's orbit but halfway around the gas giant, with Madame as the focus. It was far enough away from Truman that transporters wouldn't work without some kind of relay station, and I wasn't interested in figuring out how that would work until Mr. Ar-buth-not was a good deal more cooperative. And it occurred to me that, if we built the station out of one of our ships, it would meet the "mobile" criteria for belonging to me instead of him.

We warship captains had to decide where we were going first. I was adamant that, until we had made contact and survived our first combat, we would remain paired. We had no idea of the relative combat effectiveness of our ships against our enemies, and if it turned out badly we needed a survivor to take the word back that these ships weren't going to cut it.

Besides, one of the big overhaul items that had been left in the "unfinished" column was an escape shuttle. We still had no way of getting home if something broke down, out in the middle of nowhere. The Auroras had all their pods, one or two pod tenders and their shuttle. If they had a breakdown they could at least evacuate and hide until we went looking for them. We had nothing, and I wanted us to stay paired until we were confident that everything was reliable. Until we had a lifeboat of some kind, we would be acting as each other's lifeboat.

We continued to use Madame as a conference or convention center. It had everything we needed, even hotel rooms and booth babes! Until we had something better to use, Madame became "Truman Fleet Headquarters" and we set up squadron offices and conference rooms with a holographic display of the local space, what we knew, and what we thought. With relative positions of all nearby systems, color-coding the different systems to give status as unknown (purple), human-inhabited (yellow), uninhabited-but-with-a-monitoring-station (green), not-monitored-but empty-last-time-we-checked (blue), and enemy-controlled (red) was easy.

Every system got a name, even if it was just a sequential alphanumeric designation, and it seemed a point of pride to our surveyors to not use the name listed in Burnham's or any of the other star lists compiled by Earth's astronomers. Not that I would have known any of the 'official' names anyway, but the AIs had any Earth book we could think of available for reading or reference, and Burnham's Celestial Handbook turned out to be the only text on stellar names that normal people could read. It had raw data on each star listed, but also interesting info and history behind the names, and I asked our people to at least read the entry for each system if it happened to be in Burnham's, before assigning a random different name.

One policy that my good friend Sir Harold had set out was a naming system to be used when all others had failed. If no one else wanted to name a system, he had directed that systems we held, or were trying to hold, would be named after Royal Navy warships of the Napoleonic era. Enemy-held systems, if not otherwise named, would be named after French or Spanish warships of the same period. Neutral systems, if any, would be named after ships of the minor powers of that era.

I didn't have any special heartburn over this; there were going to be a lot of stars needing names and it was as good a system as any. The only practical drawback was that before long we were going to be naming our own ships out of that same list which could cause some confusion if we weren't careful in how we spoke. Emotionally, I expected that our French and Spanish people would not appreciate their ancestors being equated with an enemy that wanted to eat us all. My advice to any such would be to come up with names on their own before we had to and it wouldn't be a problem.

We got more mail from the ships arriving almost daily. Diana's job, looking for trends in manning needs and letting Ginger know who we would need soon so that we could have the people ready when we needed them, was going as well as predicting the future possibly could. She got caught short every time something happened to change our planning schedules, but as long as we didn't change our minds on what we were doing she could provide the manpower we needed.

On the other hand, it was becoming clear that Ginger's goal of saving all the hookers wasn't going smoothly and probably never would. Most of her 3rd-world hookers were delighted and grateful for their new careers as shipboard companions, but even the best of them were too poorly educated to be allowed to run around on a starship unsupervised.

Worse, a good many were simply too antisocial and dysfunctional to be trusted by themselves in an empty room. They were just too far out of their experience, and many could not learn patience, tolerance, or compassion. Of course none of them qualified as educated first-world sailors or soldiers.

And, there was no way to say that they volunteered for this service. The AIs didn't want them. If they couldn't pass the test -and the majority scored around 2 or 3 on the 0-10 desirability scale they finally settled on, with 6.5 as the minimum required to volunteer- and they didn't want to listen to their men, they either went back to Earth with their memories gone, or they went out the airlocks with their memories intact.

It was NOT fair to anyone, but many of those women had never had a chance to live a normal life from a western society point of view from the second they were born. Still, there was a constant need for more women, how ever Ginger could get them, so the cycle continued. The men wanted their companions. The women wanted to live. Ginger wanted to save them. The AIs just wanted some order.

They ended up formalizing the companion role. Diana and Ginger's people didn't want to classify the women as property, but the companions had to be under someone's responsibility. And, that meant that the someone, whoever it was, had to have the authority to make the women behave, and to get rid of them if they couldn't -or wouldn't- behave.

Ginger and Diana tried to give the women some protection; if nothing else an appeals court to go to if they felt oppressed, but they couldn't get any traction with the AIs. The AIs seemed to need to put us in a few neat categories, and if you weren't a human they could trust, then you weren't really a human at all and they weren't worried about violating your sacred rights. They called us, those people who passed our integrity test, 'volunteers', which sounds reasonable. They called those people who volunteered -or got shanghaied- but could not pass the test 'concubines', and they had to 'belong' to a 'volunteer', who was referred to as their 'sponsor'.

That was regardless of gender, by the way. As time went on we slowly got more and more 'volunteers' who were female, and they usually wanted a male companion. Those guys were labeled as 'concubines' just the same as Ellen and all the others. I doubt if the female volunteers ever made up more than about one in twenty of us, though, and they only needed male concubines in the same ratio.

The vast majority of concubines were female, and when they were recognized as baby-factories, the only possible source of children to populate our colonies, the ratio of female to male concubines rose even more. And, once we had a couple of real colonies that needed people, someone recognized that we were wasting a lot of training and experience when we sent a troublemaker back to Earth sans memories. Before long, it became policy to just assign her to a new sponsor who was emigrating to a colony and send the troublemaker out with him. They had the manpower, space, and time to deal with her. Sooner or later she would get assigned to a sponsor who could turn her around, one way or another.

However, not everyone had a colony handy to dump a troublemaker on. What to do with a concubine who couldn't get along with her second sponsor, or even a third sponsor, got resolved in our troopships by the expedient of just getting rid of her. There were quite a few ways of doing that, and those troops knew most of them. Naturally, the men who were the angriest always chose the most horrible and public way to do it.

That, in turn, led to morale problems among the ladies who had to witness whatever it was, and some of those ships got stuck in a downward spiral if their officers couldn't control their men. Or women, for the Mastroika. By the time those mercenaries found permanent homes and we retired the surviving Mercuries, most of them would tell anyone who would listen that they didn't have any women, and never had.

Submarine sailors don't spend a lot of time staring at the stars the way surface sailors get to. Even so, I've always had my own fishing boat, and celestial navigation is a skill that any sailor needs to have at least a basic understanding of. Whether you are the designated navigator for lifeboat #7 or you just want to be able to tell which way the ship is headed, telling direction from the sun during the day and the stars at night is something that most sailors learn to do. That starts with learning the constellations. I had trouble with most of them, but the ones on and near the ecliptic were well-known and they were good references.

Put simply, we were in a galaxy we called the "Milky Way" because we were in it, and from our viewpoint on the inside it looked like a continuous white band of stars splitting the sky in half. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with several arms. The core and the arms have all the stars and the space between the arms is pretty empty. The arm we were in was called the "Orion Arm" because it crossed Earth's ecliptic at the constellation we called Orion.

As seen from Earth, the enemy were coming from the "Galactic West", up the Orion Arm toward us from just behind Orion's shoulder. It remained to be seen if they were capable of crossing the vast emptiness between the various galactic arms or not, but from what the Confederacy could tell they were certainly moving up our arm, and we were in their way.

Our first run at the numbers, based upon how fast they were moving without us interfering, looked promising if you looked at them in the right way. The Orion Arm varied in width depending upon where you looked, anywhere from something like 1500 lightyears up to 4000 or more. Between the Orion Arm and the next-inner (Sagittarius) arm, and between the Orion Arm and the next-outer (Perseus) arm, space was usually pretty empty. If their ships couldn't go 1000 lightyears at once, they were confined to our arm.

Unfortunately, our galaxy isn't as neat as some spiral galaxies we could find. Our arm also had places where it extended into one or the other neighboring arms. There was a crossing to the Perseus Arm about 2500 lightyears behind them, and another about 1500 behind us. If they were just getting started, we could keep them out of both crossings and thus out of the next outer arm.

On the other hand, there was a much narrower crossing to the inner arm right where we were. It was like we lived on a crossroads. Were we supposed to protect the Confederacy behind us, or was the Confederacy in the Sagittarius Arm and we were supposed to block the crossing? The AIs wouldn't tell us.

Since we couldn't get out of the way, we either stopped the Sa'arm or got eaten. There were times when I thought that the Confederacy would be happy with either result, as it would mean a terrible threat to them had been eliminated, but then if they were scared of us why come to us in the first place? If they hadn't warned us and given us so much support, we would all get eaten on Earth and we would never become a threat to them.

But no, as bad as we must scare them the Sa'arm scared them far more, bad enough for them to be giving us ships and arms and helping us build an interstellar warfleet.

Anyway, Earth's astronomers listed "Trumanat", the star that Truman's primary orbited, as "178 G. Orionis". Trumanat was easier to say, and it meant something as well. Burnham's Celestial Handbook doesn't list all stars. After all, there are millions of them visible from Earth's telescopes. Burnham's is just a guide to all the interesting things to be seen out here, the nebulas, the binaries, the variable stars, and so on; anything that's worth looking at. You can pretty well sum Trumanat up by simply saying that it's a type F that is in no way remarkable. It isn't listed in Burnham's.