Epilogue - How We Ended Up

It's been six years now. We've got upwards of a hundred colonies in as many systems in every possible direction. We're still losing systems, we aren't strong enough to hold any planet that the Swarm really want, but we can already tell we're going to win this war. We started with hand-me-down ships that weren't as good as theirs, but as soon as we started building our own that changed.

See, one on one we are their equal. On the ground, they only take planets because they coordinate so well and breed so much faster than us and can overrun any kind of planetary army once they've landed. They also don't seem to have any noncombatants.

When the Sa'arm win a battle with us, we don't know if they study us or just add our bodies to the dinner table. We, on the other hand, send investigators and research people in to examine whatever is left of every battle that we win. The xenobiologists say that there is no recognizable difference between any two units in a group. When we get to examine a dead Sa'arm ship, the body found behind a wrecked weapon mount is identical to the body found in the engineering spaces. For land battles, the Sa'arm holding their laser 'rifles' are identical to the ones inside their vehicles.

It looks more and more as if the Sa'arm were manufactured; an artificial space version of army ants intelligent enough to learn from their mistakes and determined to put an ant-hill on every habitable planet in the galaxy. On the other hand, they have to use ships to get to planets, the same as us, and that means if we can stop their ships it never turns into a ground fight.

And, it's clear that, in their heart-of-hearts, they are ground-pounders. They are optimized in every way to win infantry battles. They are not optimized in every way to win naval battles. We suspect that they don't invent anything, although they are capable of recognizing the capabilities of anything they capture and modifying it for their own use. The ships we're building right now are equal to theirs, and we win in any kind of fair fight. Unless they can reinforce. Of course they can reinforce most of the time, so we still lose most of the long knock down and drag out fights, but when we can pick our battles we're starting to win.

And, we are still learning and building our strength. They don't seem to innovate as well as us. The next generation of ships we build will be better than theirs in every way, and we'll start winning the unfair fights, too. We can already see that.

So, we haven't stopped them yet, but we are slowing them, and the data is easy to graph. We can't tell if we'll stop them short of Earth or not, it's going to be close, but even with Earth only keeping one hundredth of its resources for home defense and sending the rest out, Earth has a bigger fleet than any of the colonies. We figure that, even if the Sa'arm do get here, it'll be a long time before they are ready to go anyplace else afterwards. Meanwhile, all of our colonies will still be pumping out soldiers and sailors, ships and tanks, missiles and bullets as fast as they can.

Let's see. Frenchy kept his nose clean and climbed the promotion ladder to Admiral. Since we don't have an Air Force, he had to choose between Navy and Marines; I guess he considered the Marines a worse fate than the Navy. He helped develop our fighter and bomber programs before he returned to operations. We lost him with his flagship and several other ships a couple of years ago when we tried to raid a Sa'arm system that turned out to be more ready for us than we thought.

Admiral Kennedy stayed in Sol system, where he runs some training and development directorate. I've lost track of what George and Randall are doing, but I know they are still alive. Every once in a while the AIs ask the five of us for a group decision on some issue with the CAP system, so Diana and I sit in a meeting room and we all do the hyperwave conference thing until we agree on an answer.

Other than the AIs, I don't think that anyone else knows about that meeting in the corridor on Freighter #2, back on the day I was picked up. I don't consider myself one of the Masters of the Universe, though. All I did was keep the UN restricted to Earth and the Solar System.

Dickie took over Allington Castle and ran the squadron until it was large enough to split into two units and then moved up to larger ships and formations as we built them. When we finally got strong enough to make a serious move to take Tulakat from the Sa'arm, he was right there in the middle of it all. He wasn't the first of the old Castle hands to make Admiral, but he was the first one to deserve it. Billy, Doc, and the rest of them likewise moved on to bigger and better things. Promotions are quick in wartime. Between combat losses and an expanding fleet it's easy to move up as long as you aren't one of the losses.

As far as humanity is concerned, the CAP system is still a closed magic "black box". Any questions about how the scores are calculated are gently deflected by the AIs with a quick comment that if the test subject understood the test he, she, or it could steer it, so in order to get valid results they must refuse to explain it.

During one of our conferences we talked about FTL radios for the fleet, and we decided that, as much as we needed them, we needed to avoid micromanagement by Earth even more. We ended up asking the AIs to help us improve communications, but never so much that the headquarters commands had real-time access to the people at the front. So, being led by the AIs through a huge dump of "obsolete" Confederacy data, Earth's researchers came up with a "hyperwave radio" that worked great, but only if you were far away from any gravity wells.

It even destroyed ships in the area, so it could only be used by isolated stations a light-hour or so away from a star. It worked wonderfully well to talk to another radio station somewhere else, but was awkward to use to say the least. They tried to turn that into some kind of weapon, but we've never seen a Sa'arm ship out that far from a star so it's a weapon with no target.

The communication solution the development guys came up with that was actually useful was a miniaturized ship, basically just a missile or torpedo, with a hyperdrive, the brains to navigate to where it's sent, and a bunch of memory for messages. They ended up calling them "message torpedos" or "drones", and every system keeps two or three for emergencies. The busier colonies send one to their next-higher command whenever they have anything to say. The District Commanders turn around and send them out to all the bases and colonies whenever they have anything to say. The fleets also use them to report back to headquarters, but the DCs have to use actual ships to talk to the fleets, since the fleets move around and a message torpedo couldn't find them.

The reason I brought that up was that we proved early on that the AIs were willing to lie in a good cause. They don't like being lied to, but they are willing to lie to our enemies. In this case, I'm talking about the UN. Once we started seriously ramping up our recruiting for the ships, the stations, the colonies, and everything else we are doing out here, we couldn't hide it from the UN any more.

We came somewhat clean and admitted that we were building a Navy with armed ships, bases, and shipyards, a Marine Corps of infantry and support specialists, and a network of colonies. Of course the UN had to make sure that they maintained control of everything. What they set up was two massive bureaucracies based on the Moon and various facilities in Earth orbit.

The first, called "Central Command", takes orders from the UN and gives orders to the armed forces. On our end, we set up several "Military Districts" that are each responsible for a specific volume of space. CC is responsible for "overall direction" of the war effort, while the District Commanders are responsible for day-to-day operations in their districts.

When that happened was when we came to our senses and told the AIs that we really didn't want whatever it was that they used to communicate between systems, and that just sending ships back and forth was good enough for us. We claimed that the communication lag prevented close coordination between CC and the districts, and for several years every time we had a military setback we found a way to blame it on CC's meddling. And, we had a lot of setbacks in those first few years.

Eventually, CC got the idea and stopped trying to direct the sailors and soldiers. They do the management and support function for us, as a combination Pentagon, Kremlin, and Whitehall. They also handle all the training and research and development stuff for us. The District Commanders run the war. And, now that they have robotic message torpedos, the districts can send messages to their colonies and get answers back generally within hours.

Actually, once CC gave up on ordering the districts around, the R&D guys came up with an FTL communicator that works. Sometimes. Don't know much about that one, we don't have one here. All we have is the one that the AIs use when they want a live conference about CAP issues.

Recruiting and Personnel could have been a sticking point, but the AIs are better negotiators than the UN is. Earth and the Confederacy recruiting effort are firmly in the hands of a UN bureaucracy named DECO, the "Directorate of Evacuation and Colonial Operations". As near as we can tell, DECO is run by escapees from an insane asylum, and any colony that actually listens to them is effectively lost to the war effort. Not to worry, DECO has no authority outside of Earth orbit, so once they send the fleet a recruit he is ours.

DECO thought that they would have authority over all of the colonies, but after all the agreements were signed the AIs pointed out that throughout the Confederacy, any colony became self-governing the instant the first non-employee, non-government (and for us they had to add "non-military") person landed at the colony. If you had a mining station that held nothing but miners, corporate executives, and security personnel, that station was subject to home control. However, the first time a miner brought his wife and children to live with him at the station, it became politically independent of their parent. They may still have economic and contractual obligations, but they were not required to listen to the home offices about anything else.

The bottom line was that DECO ran every colony the way they wanted up until the instant that the first colonist actually landed there. After that, DECO had no authority at that colony. And, we claimed that every colony, every station, and every ship had dependents on them. The AIs actually PUSHED us to take concubines with us on every ship, to make sure that the ships remained free of DECO control.

Anyway, the AIs made a simple change to their test and scoring system: For any political recruit, they simply left "integrity" out of their formula. They also quietly flagged that person as ineligible to leave Sol System, or Earthat. CC and DECO both got loaded with UN people who I wouldn't trust to walk my dog, but nevertheless had absurdly high CAP scores. Sociopaths and psychopaths are frequently very intelligent, well educated, suave, urbane, competent, friendly, helpful. You just can't trust them.

Other than not ever being assigned outside of the system (because "We need you too much right here") these people were treated just like everyone else, and it didn't take too long before CC and DECO were completely controlled by UN people, just like they wanted. Unfortunately, we've had to sacrifice a lot of good people to those snakepits just to keep things going.

Not that all those UN people actually volunteered, of course. Most of them proudly displayed their high CAP scores and continued on in their jobs that the UN had worked so hard to place them in. You don't really think that the President actually deserved the score he boasted about, do you?

For the rest of us, when someone gets picked up the AIs verify that the recruit actually deserves the CAP score he claims, and we indoctrinate him our way. Most of them never look back.

When the Secretary-General appointed Chandler to head DECO, Ginger emigrated to the colonies rather than work with him. She ended up at Atlantis, which is all underwater domes and climate-controlled anyway so it has turned into a huge nudist colony. Every letter we get from her starts "I haven't worn clothes in two months" or "I had to put my uniform on yesterday to meet with an out-system visitor. I hated it." Since her letters are always high-resolution three-dimensional holograms as lifelike as possible, I always get an erection when I view them, and Diana always smacks me for it. And then makes me use it on her. Ginger is STILL helping Diana!

Occasionally, though, the UN and the Chinese get their shit together enough to create a new colony without Confederacy Navy help. We don't expect anything except trouble from them, either. They don't provide ships, they don't provide men, they don't provide anything to the rest of us except endless demands for support. We ignore them. We're trying to fight a war here, and a political colony that does nothing except feed the administrator's ego is not going to get any of our resources. The UN and China can help them, if they want.

Me? I never got another promotion, don't ever expect one. I went back to Jupiter Station and worked on improving the Castles for another year or so. Eventually we had made enough changes that we started calling them "Improved Castles" or "Ainsworths" after the first one that had most of our improvements.

After we got done with our testing program for the Castles, I got myself reassigned to the outer system security and resource survey with Diana as my adjutant. That's what you do with troublemakers, after all, you exile them to Siberia where they can't cause any more trouble. Officially I am a 'Colonel' now, although I still answer to 'Captain', and by job I answer to 'Commodore' more often than not.

I have commanded Sol System's Scout Flotilla 17 for the last five years. Supposedly, we are cataloging all the TNOs, the "Trans-Neptunian Objects" like Pluto, Sedna, and Eris. Using Pluto's and Charon's combined mass as a lower limit, we're up to 113 TNOs now plus many thousands of smaller objects. We've found planet-sized objects half a lightyear out.

There may be more. Yes, some of them are really big, failed stars bigger than Jupiter. They have their own families of satellites with lots of resources.

And it's becoming clear that we are completely safe from the Sa'arm out here. The Sa'arm don't do deep space unless they are chasing someone. So, as long as we don't have ships from Sol visiting us all the time, no Sa'arm ship will ever find us.

As far as we can tell, the Sa'arm are ONLY interested in Earthlike planets. They have a tendency to pop their invasion fleets out of hyperspace up to a half-lightyear out, but after an hour or two they go back in and come out on the outskirts of the system, and then after another delay they do it again, coming out in the system, fairly close to their target planet.

We assume that the first stop is for a navigation fix. Their drives that we've been able to examine are all a manually "set up and go" version of our own drive, and they probably can't adjust it that well from their home base, many lightyears away. The Confederacy doesn't even try. Instead, they developed the AIs to do live navigation while in hyperspace. Either the Sa'arm can't do that, or they haven't figured out how yet. The second stop is probably to both get a better fix and start waking up all the troops.

There HAS to be a way to take advantage of this. Sol is starting to build a huge globe of proximity mines between Saturn and Neptune's orbits. It's going to take forever, they are thinking 25 or 30 years to complete it, but they are starting on the side closest to the Sa'arm advance, so there's a chance it could do something to slow down or damage an incoming invasion fleet.

It takes a long time to do these surveys. Nobody expects us to be done before the Sa'arm show up, SSSF-17 is just a place to dump troublemakers. We don't need big ships, the smaller the better. Unfortunately, we need a lot of them and those things are manpower-intensive so we've got quite a few people.

Just to keep things simple, we built our own base out here on one of the planets we found about two light-months out from Sol. It's pretty cold, but it's larger than Mars and it's stable enough for our purposes. We've built quarters, recreation facilities, and shipyards. We're still in our home system -any time the Sun is up there's no question which star is closest- but we are so far out that not even Sol's System Defense Command's scanners notice our hyperdrives.

There's no need to start rumors, so we don't have anyone send us any supplies. Once a month or so we send our old Aurora -we renamed it "Shanghai Express"- back on a supply run. Not that we really need the supplies, but it would look funny if we didn't. And, they tell everyone that the supply run is pretty much a non-stop job, it TAKES a month to find all the survey ships, even using hyperdrive. That pretty much ensures that none of the bureaucrats ever want to visit us. Having us considered the place to send the fleet's screwballs helps, too.

We've got a good bunch of people. No one who considers his concubines to be mere property wants to serve under Commodore Edelmann, so there's a lot of pre-selection in who we get. On the other hand, several times we've gotten some very good but habitually abusive people sent to work for me as the alternative to retest, reduction below 6.5, and execution. When you look at it in the right light, they volunteered, too. One of those sponsors is female but I've never understood how some people think.

The two-level caste system we ended up with, with Sponsors and Concubines, was a good compromise. It pleased no one, but everyone could live with it. In fact, it saved the lives of the people most affected. I think that the only people who actually liked the caste system when it was agreed upon were people who perhaps shouldn't have been volunteers in the first place, but it took the AIs a while to tune their tests for all the vagaries of the human psyche.

I ended up with four concubines. Not that I needed them with Diana sharing my bed and both of us acting like teenagers, but it was four more people safely off Earth. Okay, nine more people, what with all their children. Yes, I chose four women. Actually, that's not strictly true. I got the four women that Ginger sent me.

I also 'got' the two women that Ginger sent Diana. They officially 'belong' to Diana, but for all intents and purposes we are still together, a two-headed monster like William and Mary were. Our six concubines are all treated like part of the family and we use them to help get things done here. I am just supposed to keep them pregnant. Some of them want me to do that personally, while others want to go elsewhere. I don't see any reason to be pushy about that. As long as they get pregnant every couple of years and take care of the children, I'm satisfied that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

Ginger got eight concubines, the bitch. Rather than go looking on her own, she took in several who had been picked up and then rejected for whatever reason. I'm almost positive that's where ours came from, also.

Larry Niven was right about gravity lenses being able to concentrate sunlight, but when we went to actually do the math we were appalled at what it would take to get useful sunlight over a useful area. We would need a mass large enough to affect the planets' orbits! How could we claim to be hiding, if we did that? Instead, we went with some more of the Confederacy's magic, a sort of reverse application of the Castles' drive dissipator.

That gave us "sunlight" over a 400 Km circle, which of course "moved" as the planet rotated under the hotspot. There wasn't much we could do about the rotation rate, not without the kind of energy output that would attract attention, so we had to leave it alone. I can tell you that sunflowers do NOT like a 14-hour day with only two hours of sunlight! We still had to provide lights for the farms so it's probably more trouble than it's worth, but we wanted sunlight and we got sunlight.

And the magic concentrator works as a dissipator going the other way. Anyone trying to find us with a telescope would see us as if we were 4 lightyears out.

Since we don't consider this a permanent home, we're just giving a narrow band about 400 Km across some sunlight every day. Besides that, every place that we have anything alive at has a fusion plant that does nothing but heat up the area and provide all the light that we need. The rest of the place is so cold that there was a movement to call the place "Komarr" but that got squashed fast; if we did that no one would ever trust us.

The Confederacy's light emitters turn out to be pretty good for farming; both the plants (most of them) and the animals are happy with it. We've built some pretty big greenhouses and get great crops from our annuals, but our orchards are just now beginning to pay us back for all the work we've put into them. We've got just about any kind of fruit you could want except for bananas; they can't figure out why those don't grow right. They tell me we'll have pecans soon if they can keep the squirrel population under control, but don't expect anything from the vineyard for at least another twenty years.

We also have an assortment of different ecosystems in isolated bubbles so that they can't cross-pollinate or invade each other. Just from the US we have, let's see, farms from Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, and Georgia, a Texas longhorn ranch, and strips of coastline-plus-water from Maine, Florida, California, and Hawaii, slices from both the Okefenokee and the Great Dismal swamps, and a New York City slum (because someone carefully unnamed here -not me- thought that even the rats deserved better than being eaten by the Sa'arm). We do not have any redwood trees, although they're on our list. We are working on an inland river bubble, I think the Ohio.

We have done the same with ecosystems from all over Earth. We aren't trying to discriminate; anywhere that anyone wants goes on the list and we do it as soon as we can get the source materials. A couple of the Express's pods have been modified to be independently mobile, and they have several individual compartments with their own external hatches. Every time the Express goes back for supplies a stealthed tender takes it around everywhere on the list and collects a few hundred cubic meters of forest floor or mudflats or seawater or whatever. We've tried to import enough land, soil, plants, and animals to make each bubble self-sufficient. That's what takes the most manpower here, trying to keep track of all the ecosystems and what each needs to be balanced.

Yes, cetaceans are on the list. No, we don't have any yet. Well, we have a couple of manatees from Florida, but none of the smarter ones like dolphins or the bigger ones like whales. We don't have any of the deep-ocean life, either. We want them, but both transport and ecosphere will have to be pretty big. We're working on it. The biologists say that the manatees aren't really cetaceans, anyway, they are part of some other order. No one else cares. We still want a few more, because they are still endangered by us humans even if we do beat the Swarm.

We don't ever fight anyone so we don't ever take any battle damage, and the shipyard techs don't have anything to do except make-work. We don't have the facilities to do much research, but we can build anything we have plans for, and Central Command sends us a message torpedo every couple of days with the current news.

Every new ship design we hear about, we build a few. If they are warships, we play with them for a few weeks, putting them through their paces and see if anything needs to be fixed, then mothball one in case we need it and send the others out to the fleet just like the shipyards around Saturn. In fact, the Darjee AI running the Saturn shipyard considers us one of their assembly systems and seamlessly adds our ships to their output without any fuss. It's almost like no one even knows we're here.

If the new design is for a freighter or transport though, and it's better than what we had, we build enough of them to carry everyone and everything we might want to carry, then disassemble the previous model for materials. Maybe use the materials to build more of the unmanned probes that are really doing the survey for us.

We've been slowly stealing people whenever we can, two here, five there. Sometimes more. Officially we only have 14 small survey ships, the Express, a second Aurora that we converted to a command, office, and visitor berthing ship, and just over 500 people. In reality, we're up past 15,000 men, women, and children now, many of whom were officially killed in shipboard accidents. We've got more than 30 transports if we need them, but they aren't on anyone's lists.

We got the whole crew (and any passengers) from some ships. Many were ships that were lost in combat in other systems. Apparently, all of the ships' AIs know about us. Any time one of our ships gets in a scrape that it might not get out of, if no one is looking the AI tells the crew the ship was lost and assumed destroyed by the Sa'arm and that they have been reassigned to the 17th SSSF, then quietly brings them here.

No matter how far away they were, if their hyperdrive is repairable they come here. We completely disassemble the ship since it can't ever be seen anywhere again, put the ship's AI in the next ship we build, and we welcome the crew to our project. We recently got two damaged kilo-pod transports that way, and they both still had a LOT of people.

We don't get every broken ship; that would start to raise questions we don't want. There was a banged-up heavy cruiser that made it to Poseidon a couple years back after struggling to make minimum repairs, and most of a K'treel Explorer limped back to Sol with several hundred children safely locked up in med-tubes as the only living 'crew' just last year. That one was horrible; the AI had to watch half of them die because no one knew they were there and it was too broken to tell anyone. The remaining children's rescue was completely by accident.

We get most of the "lost" ships, though. And, every once in a while we get a senior officer who wants to cause trouble because a mere Captain can't give orders to an Admiral or a General, but the AIs won't back them up. Look, would it be easier to think of me as "Governor" of this "colony"?

Junior graduated from Annapolis, got his commission, and is still serving in Uncle Sam's Canoe Club. Josey never finished Rensselaer; there was a pickup at one of the frat house parties and she took her best friend and a drunk pretty-boy. Boy was she surprised when she got assigned to SSSF-17 and was sent in to meet the Old Man! She had to choose a branch and went with the Civil Service; when they made us choose branches Diana and I both went with Fleet Auxiliary. We'll fight if we have to, but we'd rather just build the colony, the habitats, and the ships.

And raise our children. Diana's little DiDi was born first. I never found out what Ginger had to do to reserve "Ellen" for her little girl, born only two days later. Our first son born out here was named Eric after Diana's father, and when Ginger left for the colonies we named our third child Ellen. Our fourth 'space baby' Bobby is almost a year old now and when Diana pops out her next one she's going to be named Ginger. Ginger has both a Diana and a Roger, so if we ever get together again we'll have at least two of everybody!

Most of humanity is planning and working towards winning this war. We are working the other end, making sure humanity -and whatever else we can save of Earth- survives even if we lose the war. Fifteen thousand people is a large enough sample to ensure genetic diversity if anything happens to Earth, isn't it? With all the Confederacy knowledge, equipment, and abilities we should be fine no matter what happens. We call this place "Backup".

** END **

(Again, this was a collaboration between a great many people on the Swarm authors' mailing list. As before, most of them are only known to me by their pen-names. Special thanks are due to The Thinking Horndog who originally invented the Swarm Cycle as well as Akarge, Bad Line Ghoul, Frostfyre, HCB, Medik 4 7, Mulligan, Nuke Danger, Tomken, and all the other denizens of the Swarm Authors' email list. And, to tell the truth, Tomken and Mulligan deserve far more thanks for their proofreading when I thought I was done than they do for their help writing the original story.

Last, I can't mention names but some errors made it past all the scrutiny from the other authors and proofreaders. When I started posting it some of the readers pointed out some rather obvious errors. You just can't see them, if you did the writing yourself. "This thing is perfect! No one will find anything wrong with it!" So, some later chapters, when they got posted, include some fixes shoehorned in when no one was looking....)