Chapter 8 - Jupiter Training

Miguel sent us out via the transporter pad as soon as we were in range of Freighter #12, which was acting as a transporter control system as well as being headquarters for the Jupiter area and general school ship for the prospective shipboard crewmembers like us.

Our pilot had told me earlier that, once he had unloaded us, he would land the shuttle on another ship that they were using as a shuttle tender and get two days off while his alternate took the shuttle back to Earth. If there was any cargo he had to see to that before he was off, and the oncoming pilot saw to proper loading of any cargo going out. So far, the only cargo was raw materials being delivered from the Moon to Jupiter. That was another thing the Moonbase did for us; it was mining materials to use for construction out here.

There was a 'ground crew' that took care of servicing the shuttle and helped with the cargo. The other shuttle on the Earth-Jupiter run was going the other way at the same time, so there was a shuttle leaving each place every day. The four pilots each did a two-day round trip and got two days off.

Miguel's only real gripe was that the system didn't have any slack in it yet. They had qualified eight shuttle pilots in two groups of four and all eight were in use, the others ferrying scientists around the system on their survey. It wouldn't be too long before they needed more shuttles and more pilots. Well, that was probably no different from anything else up here. Maybe once we started actually assembling crews for the ships he and the others would get relieved by newer pilots so they could help with the ships.

I expected that he would probably have to train his relief. Or, if not him, one of the other pilots would have to. I was a firm believer in the system we humans had developed, the safety net that had a qualified pilot in the right seat to deal with emergencies any time you had a student pilot in the left seat. No matter how badly I screwed up the little plane I had learned to fly in, my instructor could get us back out of trouble. Okay, if no one else has pointed it out yet we need flight instructors and check pilots.

When we stepped off the transporter pad on Freighter Number Twelve, we all went together to check in with our supervisor out here, a Royal Navy Rear Admiral named Andrews. In the Navy we would call him the "Senior Officer Present Afloat" or SOPA, meaning that there may be more senior naval officers elsewhere. There might be more senior army or air force or coast guard officers here, but he was the senior Navy guy here and all Navy guys here would follow his lead.

Andrews was a real pain in the rear, at least where Americans were concerned. He made it clear that he was there to keep this a UN and NATO job and prevent us Americans from taking over. While he was talking I realized that no one out here was on our side yet officially, even though some of them were still trying to do the right thing.

There couldn't be; the four of us would be the first of the cabal's team out here. While Andrews was making sure that we all understood that I may have been the senior officer on the shuttle but I wasn't the senior officer out at Jupiter Station and we would all be doing what HE told us to do, I asked the AI if we had an estimate for when his 'implant upgrade team' would arrive.

I got an immediate answer that Doc Sorenson and helpers would be out in a week or so, as soon as they got a couple more doctors who could take over at F2 and the new office down on Earth. Good. Getting out here wasn't fun, so we probably won't have too many of our UN overlords here. Everyone here should support us, if we approach it right.

When Andrews was done with his diatribe, he sent us all on to check in with Admiral Sykes, who was in charge of starship crew training and ship turnover. There was a captain in charge of the mining and station construction and other infrastructure stuff, and Andrews was in overall command of the whole mess at Jupiter. For the greater glory of the UN, it was clear.

Admiral Sykes was a fellow American and far easier to get along with. From my point of view as an American, at least. He welcomed us all to Jupiter and his little school, and within five minutes I was convinced that he was a naval officer first, with politics a distant second. He mentioned that when he was a 'wee little Ensign' he had served under my father, then spent a couple of those minutes giving us an overview of where we were.

Basically, we were all waiting for ships. It had been decided to not try to do any conversion work on the freighters, but rather use them as scouts, surveying ships, and transports. For now, they would remain under the control of their alien crews because that allowed us keep them in use until we could replace them with better.

Instead, all of the other ships we were being sent would be immediately turned over to us. With the exception of these freighters that we could use for now but had to return when no longer needed, every ship we were getting from the aliens was an ancient relic that the Confederacy had no use for. Phrases like "half a million years old" and "older than the Confederacy itself" were thrown about, spoken seriously.

Some of the ships, apparently from the period however long ago before the Confederacy was formed, were already armed and could be used as-is as warships once the environmental systems had been set for us. Others were not as old but were instead simply designs that were no longer economical to operate and the Confederacy could therefore donate to us.

That all begged the question of why the aliens had these ships available for us in the first place, why they kept unused ships around for hundreds of thousands of years instead of modifying them or scrapping them for their materials. The answer gave us another insight into the Confederacy's culture and values. Each ship had an AI built into it, to the point where the AI effectively WAS the ship, like Anne McCaffrey's Brain Ships. Lesser vessels like the shuttles had minimal AIs that were not very capable, but navigation in hyperspace required immense computing power at irregular intervals, and that had forced the development of AIs powerful enough to have personalities and be considered people in their own right.

The AIs accepted their status as second-class citizens, but they were citizens of their Confederacy, with the overall mission of dealing with any hazardous task so that the biological citizens would not be unnecessarily placed in danger. If the task ended up with the AI destroyed, that was regrettable and the next time it would be prevented if possible, but at least it wasn't a member of one of the Confederacy's biological races who was killed.

Meanwhile, no AI would be destroyed on purpose, or even by accident if it was avoidable. If a ship could not be put to useful work, it would be mothballed until useful work was found. I guess we could consider the shipboard AIs to be retired.

So, on the one hand we had a bunch of modern small container ships that we could use immediately as long as there was no danger to the crew, and on the other hand we had a bunch of prehistoric relics we could do anything we wanted with, coming soon.

When I got to Jupiter Station we had about a dozen of those freighters hanging in space behind Jupiter where they were not visible from Earth. #12 was being used for all the management functions while another one was being converted to a more permanent, more roomy station. The station would still have the freighter at the core and would be able to move in emergencies, but it wouldn't be able to carry pods any more.

I don't remember what the ship's number had been; by the time I showed up they were already calling it "Jupiter Station". They had removed all the pods and the rings that the pods mounted to, and were using the spokes to mount boxy assemblies of rooms and corridors. At the moment, it looked very much like a submarine sitting in a floating drydock, with solid walls on either side of it but none above or below yet.

The Darjee ship's crew -or maybe the AIs- had done the design work and started the assembly, letting the humans watch. They had also set up a couple automated mining systems on some of Jupiter's moons that were delivering raw materials. The big thing was that the original ship, and two or three of the others, were all taking in the raw materials from the miners and using the big replicators in the enginerooms to grow all the parts they needed.

This is not to say that getting the materials they needed was necessarily easy. The replicators could make you anything you needed, if they had the right materials. If all you fed them was straw, they couldn't make many steel pipes. Sure, there was a trace of iron in every cell, so even straw had some, but you would go through a LOT of straw trying to make steel. If you wanted steel pipes you would be a lot better off mining a nickel-iron asteroid. And if your fancy steel alloy called for some titanium, chromium, and a trace of beryllium, you wouldn't get any at all from that straw no matter how much you stuffed into the digester. Earth life just doesn't use those three elements.

Girders, pipes, walls, sometimes complete rooms all got created at the ships, then floated over to the station by AI-controlled units and held in the right place while other robots attached them. Watching Jupiter Station take shape around a starship was a pretty popular show around there, since there wasn't much else to do back then.

Soon after my arrival, we found out what the other ships had been doing. Some of them had been building additional mining rigs, raw materials barges, and tugs to deliver the barges to the ships doing all the building. Several of them, however, had been building the different parts to a much larger replicator, one that could create a shuttle, miner, tug, or barge all at once. It didn't happen any faster than making all the different parts separately did, but it saved all the time that had been used putting all the parts together.

Once THAT replicator got into action, which happened a couple of weeks after I got there, Jupiter Station grew a lot faster, and parts of it went into service immediately. I know that Freighter #12 had all of the specialized equipment like the transporter hub stuff moved first, so that Jupiter Station could be the one with people coming and going at all times of the day and night. That went into the core, the part that had started as a ship. Next were the command-and-control people for the Jupiter area. Before long there was a shuttle landing pad on top of the station, and as quickly as that Freighter #12 was down to just being a school ship. Us Navy types got the whole back end and the forward end still belonged to the research people trying to understand all the new technology.

Meanwhile, those same other ships built two more of those huge replicators. Well, they aren't huge by our standards, not any more, but at the time they were huge.

While some of the alien ships were building our first industrial facility, others were taking observers out to see the surrounding stars. The Confederacy had a database of systems but we were not in a high-traffic area and they admitted that perhaps some of their data might be out of date. So, as a first step we had the ships take some of our people out to the nearest stars to show us what was there, and to verify that their database was still accurate.

Whoever was in charge of that was methodical, if nothing else. The first dozen or so survey missions went to the stars that were closest to us, then right back to Sol once they had verified the database or updated it. The first ship to go out went to the Alpha Centauri triple system, of course, and checked out everything orbiting all three stars. The next one to go out went to Barnard's Star, which was the second-closest star but was also an old small red dwarf that wasn't even visible from Earth without a telescope, and so on.

That covered all of the stars within about ten lightyears of Earth. The freighters could make somewhere close to ten lightyears per day, so they were all back within a few days. After those few had verified that our immediate neighborhood was still safe, they started sending surveyors out to look at several stars in the same general direction before coming back to report.

While those survey missions were still going on, some of the freighters got loaded up with modules to make up some prefab monitoring stations, and then delivered them to each of the nearest stars. Those monitoring stations were Homo Sapiens' absolutely first extrasolar colonies, and it took some courage to board those ships for those things.

The freighters were supposed to locate a good place for a station, perhaps on a small moon or asteroid, and drop off a 'some assembly required' station: twelve men, a half-dozen of those apartment pods, a pair of miners, an ore barge, two tugs, and most of a large replicator. The replicator wasn't complete but was close enough that it could complete itself once it was free of the ship and the miners were giving it raw materials.

Those guys in that first set of monitoring stations didn't even get any shuttles like we were using to get around. The shuttles were considered too big, and not strictly required for the minimal station they were building. The miners and the tugs could all be used as transports, if needed.

A secondary function that was never mentioned was that these first primitive 'colonies' would see what worked, what didn't, and what they needed that they didn't have. Hopefully, by the time we were ready to launch a real colony these guys would have taught us enough to make it work.

With that equipment list, a single freighter could carry the parts for eight stations, and we had three freighters deliver these 'some assembly required' stations to the 24 nearest systems. It only took 50-some-odd stations to picket every star within 15 lightyears of us. Of course they all got differing results. Some had no problems, while others asked for help every time we sent a ship to check on them.

Four of the nearest stars didn't even have planets, but they all had enough debris to provide raw materials. Those four stations were assembled out in free space, and they had no gravity of any kind until later. Two of them built ring-stations to spin for gravity, one of them made a two-ended dumbbell with a cable connecting the two ends, and the fourth one just did without until we gave them artificial gravity later. I know that all four of those free-space stations were the highest priority for crew rotation.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were either learning about the freighters that we were on, or trying to study the other ships they were sending us. It became clear that all four of us shuttle-mates were on the command track, that we would be commanding the ships we took out. None of us were anywhere near ready for that, but no one else was any better.

We, the warship crew contingent, took all the sleep-training we could get on alien equipment. Power plants, environmental systems (which included gravity generation and inertial dampeners or compensators), normal-space drive systems, hyperspace drives, sensors, nav shields, navigation tools, ship-handling concepts as applied to 3-dimensional space instead of 2-dimensional ocean surfaces. There, the submariners and the aviators had an advantage over the regular naval officers; we already had the three-dimensional viewpoint.

That hyperspace training answered one question we had all asked, why we were using the shuttles instead of the larger ships. Before long we had four shuttles with one leaving every twelve hours, and then six shuttles with a departure every eight hours. How many shuttles would we have to put into service before it was better to just use one of the ships?

Anything with mass affected Einsteinian space; we had that right. And, the hyperdrive would only work in 'flat space' with no masses around. The drive these freighters used couldn't get any closer to Earth (or any planet that we would consider habitable) than about 830,000 kilometers (measured from the center of the planet) without our shuttle pilot's "bad things" happening. More massive objects, like Jupiter or the Sun, had even larger volumes where you couldn't safely use your hyperdrive.

What exactly happened varied depending upon the circumstances, but the absolute best possible outcome was that you pop out of hyperspace in somebody's Hyperspace Exclusion Zone (henceforth HEZ) with your hyperdrive missing a la one of Niven's stories (Look, Joe! No drive!). Even if your hyperdrive didn't take anything else with it, you were stranded in a (probably) uninhabited system with no hyperdrive. And, that was the best outcome. All the other possible outcomes were a lot worse.

Practically speaking, that meant that any ship had to get at least 0.83 million kilometers away from the planet it was leaving before it could go into hyperspace. And, since these particular ships could only accelerate at 10 G's, it took them an hour or more to get there. Of course, they weren't starting from the center of the planet. They were already out in space at least partway to the limit. Still, it was like having a freeway that went everywhere but it took an hour just to get onto the freeway.

After that, the trip to Jupiter took less than 5 seconds in hyperspace, but then Jupiter's HEZ was immense, even larger than Earth's, and the ship had to pop out beyond that limit. With the larger ship's reduced acceleration, it came out to almost the same time as the shuttles. In a couple of months, when Earth was on the other side of the Sun, using a hyperdrive might make more sense, but for now it didn't gain us any time at all. Add in Mars, the asteroid belt, and crazy student drivers in a car with no brakes, and we saw why the aliens didn't want us driving their ships yet. And we didn't have to have the aliens drive us around, either, as long as we used the shuttles.

The correct answer, of course, was something halfway between the two. What we really needed was something that had a hyperdrive but was much smaller than the freighters, maybe something that held a hundred passengers, and had the acceleration of the shuttles. That would drop the whole trip to a half hour to leave Earth's HEZ, plus a few seconds in hyperspace, plus a couple of hours to get through Jupiter's HEZ.

That sort of hyper-shuttle was our first 'starship' design. We got to call it a starship because it really could go to another system if it wanted, but it was far simpler than the real starships, and it gave us a useful tool while we learned about starship design. That was all after my time at Jupiter, of course. I think that they built two or three for the Earth-Jupiter run, then a few more for the run between Earth and the shipyard at Saturn, before they turned their design efforts to bigger and better things.

Once we got our own ships we could do some testing. As we had expected, the Confederacy erred on the side of caution. The border of any particular HEZ was fixed. Unless the mass of that star or planet changed significantly, the HEZ wasn't moving. And the math to calculate the limit of the HEZ from the mass wasn't complicated, either. Finding the exact edge of the HEZ should be easy.

However, there were a lot of variables in the formula. How well we could measure a star or planet's true mass was important. So were how well we could measure how far away from it we really were and how fast we were moving. How much delay there was between the decision to drop out and how long it took for the hyperspace bubble to actually collapse, and how far you went during that time was an issue. Even whether we were going straight in or just grazing the edge mattered. Just about everything about hyperspace navigation was a fuzzy variable.

And, it turned out that it made a difference if you were coming or going. If you were inside the limit and turned on the hyperspace bubble generator, the generator went away. In the same sort of process where an enemy submarine hit by a Mk48 torpedo 'went away', or an enemy fighter hit by a Sidewinder 'went away'. The scale of violence showed that there was a gradient of energy release. The closer you get to the limit the less violent the explosion, until finally you turn it on and the bubble expands to enclose the ship and you are in hyperspace. If that happens, you are outside the HEZ.

That's a great practical way to find the limit, if you don't mind destroying your test platform with every experiment. In fact, that's probably how the first HEZs were plotted, before the math to describe them was developed. The AIs don't have records that far back; the AIs were developed after the elder races of the Confederacy invented the hyperdrive, mostly to help navigate in hyperspace but also to determine the local HEZ limit without any explosions in the center of the ship.

If you are arriving, though, you have a different problem. On the one hand, the ship appears -to outside observers- to be a pinpoint that expands to full size very quickly. If you are not moving in relation to the HEZ, there's no explosion in your engineroom. If you are, well, there might be. It depends on your direction of relative motion. At a tangent? No problem. Moving towards the mass? Problem.

It's probably easiest to think of gravity gradients. If the hyperspace bubble is moving into or out of a gravity well, the well objects to your sudden appearance, and the kind of mass that has an HEZ has a lot of gravitational energy to object with. If you are just moving across it, though, you can pop out and the well doesn't get mad.

The real problem was actually displacing mass. The expanding bubble that was becoming a normal-space ship had to push any mass in the way, out of the way. That took energy, and the acceleration involved in a ship popping into normal space was pretty high. If you came out into N-space where there was significant mass, whether an asteroid or merely a high gas content, the energy release could easily melt large holes in your hull.

Since any mass large enough to have compacted into a single object had a significant gravitational field, they were all surrounded by clouds of moons, rocks, dust, and gases that extended for tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers in all directions, sometimes even farther. The Confederacy had a force field they called a "Nav Shield" that helped with running into that stuff in normal space, but it couldn't deal with the effects of a hyperspace transition into a gas cloud. Even in a good clean vacuum the conversion of the occasional cold, low-energy gas molecules to high-energy plasma made a flare that could be seen for millions of miles.

So, as a practical matter with all hazards considered, the Confederacy considered the HEZ to be a hard limit for both coming and going. Some of this background was known to the AIs, and some of it was stuff we figured out at Barnard's Star over the next couple of years. All that that was later, though. Right now all we had were those shuttles.

One glaring omission in our training syllabus was technical info on the ships that we were supposedly getting. The aliens were sending us ships, but they didn't have any info on them. This was inadequately explained as due to their age; the ships were older than the AIs had reliable records for and they were unwilling to disseminate data that may not be correct. They were starships, they were armed, they were smaller than the freighters, and they didn't use the modern pod system of cargo control. That was about it for the aliens' info on the ships we were getting.

That just didn't make sense to any of us. It was already clear that they had some way of communicating with the folks back home. If they had the ships, and the ships were operable, or at least repairable, then surely the people who had the ships could send all the technical info we needed? The AIs wouldn't even give us detailed drawings or video of their outside appearance. We got nothing on those donated warships.

So, we studied the equipment on the freighters that we couldn't have, in hopes that the warships were similar enough that we weren't starting from the bottom when we got them.

All of us command-track officers qualified as shuttle pilots. You have no business commanding a ship if you can't act as helmsman in an emergency, and driving the bus was the only practice we could get. Really, it wasn't that hard. It was probably easier for me than most, since I had my pilot's license and I sat down in the pilot's seat with the subconscious mindset that 'this plane has no brakes when in the air'. Those who had only driven cars and trucks would always have trouble with that. Of course, anyone who had ever driven a boat, a ship, or a plane should already have that part down pat.

We all took our turns driving the bus for the passengers, just for the practice. The controls were "AI-assisted", which meant that you could control the shuttle manually if you wanted, or you could just tell the shuttle's AI to safely land the shuttle on the Station's main pad.

For some evolutions, I never did try it manually. I was only there to tell the autopilot what to do, and maybe fix things if the autopilot failed. If the autopilot failed then we had far worse problems than my docking skills. The AI ran EVERYTHING on these shuttles, from cabin temperature to deciding which thrusters needed to fire how much to make that attitude change.

I never did the Earth run, but I did a few "Take Alex Able down to miner #6 so Billy Baker can have a few days off" runs, and they gave me the experience to consider myself competent. That was all I was looking for, to be safe and skilled enough that others considered me safe.

Only the bus drivers, those pilots who did it every day for a living, would really get good at it. I pretty much hardened my determination to get the bus driver who brought us out here, Miguel Hernandez, for my own crew, whenever we started assembling them. He was a second-generation American, the son of an illegal Mexican migrant worker who made a good enough home to bring his family up. His wife and first two children had been legal immigrants, and Miguel and his younger brothers and sisters had all been born in the States.

Miguel understood cultural clashes and was very easy-going. Not to mention being a much better pilot than me. He told fascinating stories about flying decrepit airplanes serviced by Anglo ground crews who, for all their education, simply did not understand "both wing tanks must have the same amount for balance, else the plane can crash and you won't get your crops sprayed".

Miguel was a skilled, experienced, and professional pilot (meaning he made his living at it) long before he reached his 17th birthday and became eligible for the FAA's lowest-level "recreational pilot" license. He had fun stories about walking into a flight school and telling them he was a professional pilot and would like to have a license, could you help me? Anglos are so ANAL about paperwork! Us Anglos couldn't help but laugh at his take on our culture.

We all did a lot of sleep-training. I also spent some time talking with the AIs about the sleep-trainers themselves. They were, simply put, less-capable med-tubes. If you absolutely had to learn how to grow delicious purple chickens and all the sleep-trainers were in use, you could climb into a med-tube for the lesson.

The med-tubes were sealed units with fluid baths and other stuff that made it wise to completely strip before entering. They would keep you alive if the compartment they were in was vented to space. As long as the med-tube had power, the person inside would be safe. He couldn't do anything and would be kept unconscious, but he would be safe.

The sleep-trainers weren't completely enclosed and you could lay down on (or in) one with your clothes on. The sleep-trainers were more like beds with a half-cover. If power was somehow lost in the middle of a session and the top did not rise, you could still get out. You couldn't get pulled out while using one, though, apparently that caused neurological problems so they had built-in force fields that kept the person inside immobile while in use.

Both systems used a field of some type that put the user to sleep immediately. When used for medical work, this ensured the patient wouldn't be moving around while being operated on. For training, the field allowed knowledge to be inserted into the brain.

There was some cross-over, too, between the two devices. Since then I've heard of a ship with several hundred sleep-trainers that had complete sealing covers like med-tubes had. They weren't complete med-tubes, but they could act as life support bassinets and a ship that was being used as a combination floating brothel / orphanage / schoolhouse could put two children in each one and keep them safe and secure. And, probably, out from underfoot.

Sleep-trainers modified like that would be more difficult for adults to use, but would be far more useful if medical help was required and there weren't enough med-tubes to go around. That trade-off would have to be judged for each ship. In that particular case, it turned out to be the right decision, since that ship got shot up pretty badly later; the only survivors were the pairs of kids in the modified sleep-trainers with covers.

That knowledge thing scared me, when coupled to the UN's control implant. Could the sleep-trainers give me memories of having, say, killed Attila the Hun, a man who had died 1500 years before I was born? Theoretically, yes, they could, but doing so would be against Confederacy law and would result in destruction of the AI that supervised it and Bujold's "Betan Therapy" for the sentient who ordered it.

Well, how could false memories be any worse than changing the real world, what we saw and heard? If the UN wanted me to kill my neighbor, wouldn't it just be easier to give me false memories of having watched him butchering my wife and children for dinner and then use the implant to show him coming at me with a knife? That would probably get me to kill him in self-defense, or maybe even track him down and kill him in cold blood. It was no worse than what the UN had been doing with our implants.

While the AIs considered it unthinkable, it clearly wasn't. I could imagine the scenario, and if I could others could too. For me, it was just a thought experiment I came up with while trying to learn the rules of this new game. Others would undoubtedly actually do it, if they saw it as a path to power.

Misuse of this system certainly was thinkable, for many humans. It was even doable, for some. Beyond intent, there was no outside difference between giving me false memories that taught me how to maintain air regeneration systems and giving me false memories that taught me that my neighbor was an evil man who did evil things and should be killed at my next opportunity.

That led to other things. The simple, direct, and proper solution from the AI point of view was not at all proper to the Darjee delegation. Everything I was afraid of was acceptable -if not necessarily proper- use of experimental animals which would all be humanely disposed of after the experiment was done. It was not acceptable use of sentients.

If we were recognized as sentients, though, we had to be invited to join the Confederacy. The AIs were not sure this would be good for the Confederacy. The Darjee -the envoy team and the ship's crews- were positive that it was a bad idea. We would disrupt everything, from politics to commerce to basic emotional security if we joined Confederacy society. We just weren't calm enough. Well, yeah, that's why you came to us for help. We aren't as calm as you are and sometimes that's a good thing.

That conversation got tabled for awhile, we assumed while the envoys talked with the home office. Eventually, sometime before the President's speech that told the world what was going on, we were offered limited Confederacy citizenship. At least, those who passed the test we had come up with were. If we accepted Confederacy citizenship, the AIs would enforce all the legal protections that the normal Confederacy citizens had, including a prohibition against insertion of false memories that the citizen had not asked for, i.e. training on a new subject.

Those who were not Confederacy citizens, of course, would not be given that protection. They would still be considered, as far as the Confederacy was concerned, as non-sentient animals. You can already see where we were headed with that. We were going to be treated like Niven's Kzin, where one gender was intelligent and the other was not.

That 'limited' part of the citizenship? The Confederacy was only bringing us in under duress, because they needed us so badly to deal with the Sa'arm. They had no desire to create an even worse monster in their own labs a la Dr. Frankenstein. Part of the agreement was that we would have to be sort of a third class of citizens, halfway between the first-class elder races and the second-class AIs. We can give orders to the AIs, but the AIs are more trusted and are supposed to keep us from going too crazy.

The test we were using to sort our own people would give the Confederacy smart, honest, open-minded, loyal warriors with absolutely no compunction about violence of any kind if we thought that violence would help the situation we found ourselves in. Our test would exclude the kind of smart, honest, open-minded pacifists who would always find a way to compromise, the kind that the Confederacy wanted in any new race joining them.

For now we were selecting for, and would soon be breeding for, warriors. At some unspecified time in the future, after the war was over, we would start a new testing program geared towards contact with the elder races. Those who passed that new test would be allowed to visit the rest of the Confederacy.

The fact that the two tests were mutually exclusive -if you passed either one you could not pass the other- was not lost on any of us. Us warriors would never meet the other races who had built the Confederacy, who we had given so much to defend. The losers, the people who would never pass either test, were considered to be just animals. As a race, we were on that junction point between "dangerous animals", "almost ready", and "psychotic-dangerous". We would have been considered "to be destroyed" if the Confederacy had such a category. As it was, we were given to understand that our section of space had long been marked as "quarantined-unstable and dangerous" and we would have been left very alone if not for the Sa'arm.

The rest of us who didn't pass that second test, and for now that was all of us, would be kept apart from the core Confederacy. We would always be supported by the AIs, but we would only be visited by the race which had been selected for this task, the Darjee. No other race would be mentioned to us. We have no valid need to know about them. We would be gently steered away from the direction that the rest of the Confederacy was in. We could have the rest of the universe.

Eventually the Confederacy agreed to this not-quite-good-enough class of citizenship, and the "Volunteer" half of our present caste system was born. Our test checked for the qualities we wanted in a Confederacy warrior-citizen. If the prospect was already up here he was offered citizenship. If he accepted, he was given the rest of the story and instructions to not talk to non-citizens about it, and then put to work. If the prospect passed the test but was still on Earth he (or she) was given the short version -not including the part that the UN had played- and told that he could volunteer if he wanted. When and if he showed up for service, he got the rest of the story.

Until we had won the war, there was just nothing to be gained by telling all the idiots and pacifists about the future second test. It may not have been fair, but the universe doesn't care about 'nice' and we have a job to do. Anything that makes our job harder is going to be avoided. The Mr. Rogers, Barney, and Miss Kitty crowd are just going to have to wait until after the war.

Anyway, back to the med-tubes and the sleep-trainers. The med-tubes did their work in two ways. They could actually do surgery, opening you up to replace a bad heart valve with a good one made of plastic that wouldn't get rejected and would never fail. Unless you were already dying because of circulatory failure, though, what they preferred to do was inject you with all kinds of nanites, machines that were cell-sized or smaller, which would help your body grow the valve properly.

About the only things they couldn't fix were certain types of neurological injuries or birth defects that affected brain development. They also could not -or would not- do a class of modifications that I grouped mentally as "crimes against nature". They would not reverse some age-related organ failures. If your testes or ovaries had shut down or been damaged in some way, maybe due to an auto accident, they would fix them up, not a problem. Reversing a vasectomy was easy. If they had shut down due to age, though, they would not reverse that process.

They also could not -or would not- regrow testes or ovaries if the set was completely missing, whether due to accident or medical procedure. The only exception I ever heard to that was from several years later, when a volunteer at one of those surprise pickups was told he could not take a particular woman as a concubine because she had no ovaries and could not conceive children. It was admitted that both had been removed years before to stop a cancer and save her life.

The AIs determined on the spot -and what does that say about their Earth-side monitoring?- that while one ovary had been discarded after analysis, the other one had been preserved for research, and they accepted her. She got both of her ovaries re-grown and at last report she was pumping out children for her sponsor as fast as they would let her. One assumes that the mere existence of one ovary in a jar of formaldehyde somewhere else was somehow enough to make her eligible.

The sleep-trainers could not do surgery, and they could not inject nanites. They could, however, re-program nanites that a user already had. How did that work? Was it by radio? Internet packets passed from one to another? That was not clear, which is a nice way of saying "That wasn't covered, probably because they didn't want us to know that level of detail".

Where the nanites originally came from wasn't clear, either. My bet was on the med-tubes containing their own tiny replicator that made them by the zillions whenever needed. Hopefully, part of their control mechanism was an inability to reproduce. It would be better to occasionally have to inject more as they wore out, than to occasionally deal with people who died because their nanite population got out of control.

We also got vastly extended "natural life spans", whatever that meant. The doctors and biochemists could make my eyes glaze over within seconds when they tried to explain it. Without Confederacy support, most people died due to a specific cause: kidney failure leading to blood poisoning leading to cardiac failure, or weakened arteries leading to a blowout leading to internally bleeding to death, or an injury damaging organs so that they couldn't perform as needed. All this would be prevented or corrected by the nanites, keeping every organ and system healthy.

However, we wouldn't live forever. Eventually, enough things would start to fail in such frequency that the only way to keep the whole body alive would be to keep it in a med-tube, and that's not much of a life. I know that they keep mentioning Telomeres, but what they are trying to say doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe you'll have better luck.

The rule of thumb seems to be, whatever remains of your "natural life span" if you were to remain on Earth will probably be doubled if you become a Confederacy citizen. Let's say that people of your build, ethnic background, general health, lifestyle, and economic condition tend to live to about age 70 in your neighborhood. If you are already 65, you have, on average, about five more years of health left before you either die or move to a hospital bed for heroic measures. If you volunteer, assuming that no accidents befall you, you can expect, on average again, about 10 years of health left before you have to move into a med-tube to stay alive.

Not that we expect our life expectancy to be very high if we get into a fight with invading aliens. That 10 years is probably not realistic.

The same guy, if picked up at 25, could expect have 45 years of health left on Earth and 90 years on a colony. Small children who accompany their parents, and those born on a colony, can expect to approach or maybe in some cases even pass 200 years before they take their last trip to medical.

We all noticed that, every day, the 'All Items' food list was larger. As people tried items, they got moved over to the "Approved Items" list. One of Diana's emails mentioned that she was up to 8 recruiters who knew what was going on. Ginger, George, and two others worked the US and Canada, one dealt with the Hispanic world, another went all over the UK and the Commonwealth, and two more handled the rest of Europe and the stable areas of Asia and Africa.

Every one of them had orders to eat at a different restaurant every day if possible, using their company credit cards to pay for the table and their scanners to get the patterns for everything served while they were there. It helped their recruiting; no prospective recruit ever objected to having a nice dinner paid for by "the company".

Each recruiter had the same kind of calculator-looking scanner that George had showed us. Ginger, George, and one of the Europeans also had one of the invisible scanners, and they had orders to leave them for a couple of days at popular establishments. We started to see desserts from France and Greece and seafood dishes from Spain and Japan on the 'All Items' list. None of the items lasted long before getting moved to the 'Approved" list. It was really nice to be able to compare four different versions of a dish and everyone had their favorites.

Diana kept me up to date with all the news, meaning all the gossip that she thought I would be interested in while they got more organized.

George-the-recruiter's Long Term Investments company opened a small branch office in Hampton, just across the bay from Norfolk. That gave him and Ginger some space to work out of instead of Freighter #2, and they started hiring people left and right.

After they had brought in a few security folks to keep the place safe, they installed a few med-tubes and a half-dozen sleep-trainers in the back, and they didn't even have to send anyone up to the ship for their 'interview' or 'checkup'. On the other hand, they promptly found out that the office didn't have a big enough power feed to run more than three or four of them at a time.

As soon as they had the people to man it, they bought an unused industrial site just outside of Washington's beltway for LTI's world headquarters. Hey, what's money to the government? They had effectively unlimited funds, as long as they could make a case for the purchase being a reasonable investment in the war effort.

That place had room for anything they could want to put in it, and it had the power for anything they wanted to do.

While they were working on that and opening satellite offices all over the country, one of George's fellow recruiters took our SubVets newsletter and visited the organization's National Secretary. The United States Submarine Veterans Association is a private club that gives both young and old boat sailors someone to bitch to who understands what they are bitching about because they've been there too. Every newsletter has an article about some wonderful thing that the club has done with our dues to help the orphaned children of a sailor who died serving our country, but I'm pretty sure they only do that to claim to be a non-profit charity.

I'm not saying that we are all socially unfeeling, but everyone I ever met in SubVets joined because the club owned a bar in downtown Groton, within walking distance of Electric Boat's shipyard. Everyone wearing dolphins was welcome, as were their guests, and the beer was dirt cheap. Walk over there after work, have one or two or seven beers, and you'll join anything. Especially since, if you're a member, they'll call you a cab to get home.

Anyway, the national organization's secretary had an amazing list of retired bubbleheads and where they lived. The secretary himself was a politician who no one would want on their own ship, but as long as he was kept on land pushing papers he was helpful. That gave Ginger's crews a mailing list to send postcards to, asking if the no-longer-active submariner was available to help the country out, using his special skills and knowledge. Neither age nor medical condition was relevant, as long as they could make it to an office and sit at a desk for a few hours. At no time did those guys ask the AI to lie. If they were still healthy enough to travel and sit at a desk, they were good enough for us. We could change their health.

Those interested could call a toll-free number. The number connected them to an AI which determined if they were eligible for this temporary recall to national service. If they lived with family, they were out for now. At this point in the game, they were only looking for people with no strings attached. I, apparently, was a mistake in that they were under the impression that no one would notice if I disappeared. Still, that one tip led to several hundred recruits of all ages and ranks, all of whom had at one time or another served in the United States Navy's Submarine Service.

Somewhere in there, it was pointed out yet again that this was supposed to be a "NATO" effort, not a "US" effort, and they expanded their recruiting to retired and discharged people from the Royal Navy, the Commonwealth and all the European navies. Since NATO used English as a common language, it was pretty much a fait accompli that the Confederacy Navy would use English when the French started complaining.

The Canadian recruits were rather more abrupt with their Quebecois brethren; if you even think about objecting to English, don't bother coming in. You aren't the kind of team player we need. It's not OUR fault; our parents saw the light and taught us English. Blame your own parents for insisting that they were better than anyone else and did not need to compromise. If you can't, or won't, learn English, we don't need you. Well!