Part 5 - Month 80 - Digging In

"Building the perfect beast" - Don Henley

A couple of days after Tina's visit she gave me a call and opened with "I've gained almost a kilo already. I'm still sore in a few places and I need to wash my mouth out a couple hundred more times, but I'm back at work. Please let me know if I need to talk to Monique about that. It wasn't your fault and she shouldn't blame you."

I growled "I'll send her with Hannah some time." Since Hannah was helping out with the PIO and Monique had the website anyway, no one would think twice about that.

"Good. Anyway, one of the most popular requests for info is one that I need your authorization for. All the concubines and dependents want to know where their sponsor's ship is. No one wants to authorize that without your permission."

I just looked at her. Blankly, I guess.

"It's a military security issue. If the progressive heroes of the glorious Cuban revolution were fighting the cowardly forces of the corrupt running dog imperialist Americans, we would need to keep the location of our ever-victorious ships secret. I mean, even the incompetent overfed drug-addled Americans could occasionally strike an unexpected blow against the upright stalwart soldiers of enlightenment, if their cowardly spies told them where our ships were and they were able to surprise our Modern Men, couldn't they?"

I didn't understand how she could say that with a straight face. I mean, I was laughing and all I had to do was listen to it. "Oh, yes, of course, it's possible that your glorious revolution could have suffered a minor setback if our cowardly soldiers and sailors could find your ships."

We talked for a little bit about what she (or "the people") wanted, but it wasn't complicated. The PIO wanted to add our ships and installations to the Beerat system display that was already one of the most popular "pages" of our "website". I thought it was a good idea, but there were possible issues. I finally told Tina that I agreed with her in principle, but needed to talk to my staff before giving her a final okay.

They couldn't see any down side to it, and if it made the concubines and dependents happy, it was easy enough to do. We hedged our bets, though. We put in two caveats:

First, if the Governor (who we didn't have yet) or the senior officer of any Confederacy service wanted to declare an installation "secret", then that installation would not be displayed, listed, or referred to in any way on this display. That didn't mean that we wouldn't talk about our 'secret'; we just wanted the option of not putting everything on this open display.

As an immediate example, I (the senior Navy officer present) declared everything in the L4 cluster to be secret: The Womb and her defenses would not show on this system asset display. Of course we all knew exactly where it was and the graphics that showed the L4 cluster and all the construction in the Womb were very popular, but I thought that this would help reinforce the mindset that our children's best protection was that the Swarm didn't know we were here. We don't want a schoolchildren's field trip to blunder into a Sa'arm invasion fleet. If we get a visit from the Dickheads, everything in L4 needs to stop and be quiet until they are gone.

Second, some of us had served in Vietnam. Others had watched the nightly news of that war. The rest of us, the Americans at least, had grown up dealing with the problems caused by that war and how it was mishandled.

The American culture had civilian oversight of military operations. We all agreed that this was right, but one of the nation's problems was the civil unrest generated by non-combat personnel getting live combat video with their dinner. Susie Homemaker was not in any way equipped to watch all the horror that is a jungle ambush and make intelligent decisions leading to winning that war. She did, on the other hand, have far more votes than experienced military personnel did, and that war ended up being run by public opinion, including, in the end, pulling out instead of winning.

We all suspected that the war was unwinnable as long as the Vietnamese farmer-in-the-paddy sided with the Viet Cong, but we in the military all resented not having been given a chance to find out. And, on a higher level, strategically the US and our allies could afford the cost of the war far more easily than the Soviets and Chinese. The Cold War could have ended much earlier if the Soviet Union had gone broke in Vietnam instead of Afghanistan. Instead of the US sacrificing an unknown but certainly large number of American soldiers, half the world sacrificed a whole generation to Marxist indoctrination. Tina's parents in Cuba had been part of that sacrifice.

My staff was unanimous on our second caveat. If we were in a live-fire situation, we would NOT provide real-time updates to that ship-location display. If we lose a ship, that loss will be announced after we have privately told the families who had lost loved ones.

With those two minor issues, we added our ships, yards, mines, installations, etc to the system display. I got to record an introduction to the display, along with a quick explanation of the rules, using the Womb's absence from the system display as an example.

Meanwhile, Beebe and Barton were setting up a construction and repair yard for small craft and making sure that if we ever decided to build or repair ships we would be ready. Naturally, the immediate question was "What do we build first?" and that was limited by the fact that we simply didn't have the extra trained people to crew anything useful yet. I had no business reducing the manning levels on our current ships until I felt confident that the remaining crew could do the job.

So, we started out by building the basic infrastructure that any system needed: the twelve early warning stations we had planned earlier, a pair of fuel collection facilities to gather hydrogen and helium from Ale and concentrate the deuterium, the tugs we needed to put everything else in place, life support tenders to allow a ship to shut down its internal systems for repairs, fuel tankers to service the fleet, etc, etc, etc.

Our intention with the "YO" (the NATO designation for small fuel tankers, for 'Yard craft - fuels) was to have several small tankers that could refuel five or ten of our scouts, or fewer of our larger ships, in one trip, thus allowing the warships to stay on station as long as needed. We could even use the tankers as in-system couriers, allowing us to move manpower around if someone got a promotion, or again if someone got pregnant. Pretty much the same system we had back at Tulakat but with refueling added.

This actually didn't cut into our effective manpower pool hardly at all. Every concubine must "belong" to a sponsor, but there is no rule about physical distances. Back at Tulakat, everyone in the blockade had concubines and children (the 'conks and kids') at home at Truman, 17 lightyears away.

Fine, put a sponsor in charge of a "squadron" of these service craft. As long as none of these auxiliaries had weapons, and none of them had hyperspace jump engines, they could each be manned by one or more concubines, with the number onboard depending upon how long they expected to be away from base. Hey, extra concubines we got!

The AIs even allowed us to include shields and a point-defense system, as long as everyone was clear that an all-concubine crew would NOT have any say in the gun's use. If the AI wanted to use it to kill an incoming asteroid or missile, that was the AI's decision. We didn't even put manual controls on the mounts for those service craft.

Once that program was in place and punching out various small craft, we could turn to the fun stuff. While we thought about what larger ships we wanted to build first, I asked for what I had been fooling around with in my mind: The main gun (a 170 meter long railgun) from a Hero and the absolute minimum support equipment to use it.

No hull, no missiles, no CIC, just the gun itself, a fusion plant to drive it, minimal sensors, and the thrusters to aim it. We could use a pod as combination control room and berthing for three crewmen (only one needed at a time but three shifts available) with a concubine each, and, okay, put a transporter nexus in it so we can change crew out by just getting a ship close.

My intention was to build one, make sure it worked, and have it towed to Webb's World's moon. As long as it didn't have active emissions, it should be pretty well invisible there. If a hive ship gets past us, it won't get past that gun.

However, the idea kept getting more complicated. WW's moon wasn't tidally locked like Luna was. It revolved, showing all sides to the natives every couple of days. If we wanted to keep our Sunday Punch out of sight of the natives, it would have to be continuously powered, which would make it far easier to detect by the dickheads.

One of the engineers had the now-obvious fix: Give it some engines, yes, but dig a hole for it in some crater, land in the hole, and cover the hole with what looks like the same crater floor. Put some passive sensors on the cover, and we're in business. That works. Build it. "Make it so, Number One." That was a stupid show, but everyone knew the reference.

Duh. Sometimes the obvious is only obvious after someone, referred to as 'the genius', points out the obvious to everyone else. The rest of us, referred to as 'the idiots', only see it afterwards. We could have gone straight to building a Behemoth-Class SuperDreadnaught Star Destroyer, but we didn't have plans for anything like that so we built things we did have plans for, until we knew more about the shipbuilding process. We started our shipyard with four small-craft construction frames, building a sensor platform, a "YT" tug, a "YP" life-support tender, and an automated miner respectively.

The sensor platform, tug, and miner frames were left at it to keep making more of them until told to stop. Once the first life support tender was close enough that it could complete itself, we pulled it out and started working on a fuel station for Ale. The first tug we built went to work towing the first sensor platform into place. Said platform wasn't complete, but it had the brains, power, and materials to complete itself. By the time the tug came back, it would have another unfinished platform to position. That tug would be busy for a while.

The second tug we built towed our first and similarly not-yet-finished fuel collection facility to a very low orbit over Ale and stayed with it to drag scoops through the atmosphere and deliver the contents back to the processor. The facility would separate out the Deuterium for fusion fuel and the Unium for reaction mass from everything else in the atmosphere and eventually give us fuel. Maybe other materials, too, depending upon what that 'everything else' turned out to be.

However, the tug was a temporary workaround until the station was completely operational. In the long run, the tug was really just there to deliver empty tanks to the station and return full ones to whoever was waiting for them in orbit.

The idea was that, once the station was completed enough to have a trustworthy emergency escape engine of its own, it wouldn't orbit the gas giant. Instead, it would be slowed -the tug could do that- until it was moving at the same speed as the atmosphere below it, then lowered into the atmosphere. About twenty spherical tanks the same size as cargo pods but as light as possible and completely empty (They were assembled in vacuum and sealed when complete) would support it in the upper atmosphere like helium balloons would on earth.

The facility's altitude could be grossly controlled by balancing the number of suspension tanks against the mass of the station proper, and more finely by reeling the balloons in or out, since their buoyancy depended upon the atmospheric density outside them. More tanks and shorter string would give us a higher station; fewer tanks and a longer string would give us a lower station. This was going to be a moving target for some time, as the station wasn't complete yet and would only get larger and more massive as we delivered, attached, and assembled more modules.

Why would we care about altitude, you ask? Well, too low and the engineering to withstand the pressure gets so bulky you can't get anything done. Too high, and the atmosphere that you are skimming is too thin to be practical.

Also, something that we knew would probably also be a factor but we didn't know how much yet, was temperature. Ale radiated enough heat to warm up the entire area, and there was a steady temperature gradient. At the top of its atmosphere it was basically the temperature of space. In its core there was a fusion reactor running. Anything we built would have to stay somewhere between those two extremes. Probably closer to the cold end, since it was always easier to heat something up than cool it off.

The third frame, the one that built the refinery, we had build two more "YP" life-support tenders, then switch to building the "YO" service tankers we had discussed earlier. The only real difference was that the tankers were designed with removable tanks, sort of like Earth's tractor-trailor rigs, while the tenders were built as one unit, sort of like a big box truck. We wanted the tenders so that we could keep a crippled ship's crew alive until they could get their main engines back on line to drive their own internal environment systems, but we didn't have any crippled ships at the time, so after we built the three YPs we moved to more critical needs.

As soon as that first tender was completed, though, several different problems all came together and solved each other. We set each tender down on the Womb's outside grav grid as they were completed so that the grid would have all the standard public services that habitable spaces needed: power, water, sewage processing, whatever. The third tug we built -this is the "duh" part here- took all of the Ferry pods from the Explorers and set them up in one corner of that grid where there weren't any baby pods growing, in a sort of apartment complex.

That gave everyone in the ferry pods access to power and the other utilities, plus access to the Womb through the transporter pads, and it also freed up the Explorers. Not to mention that moving a family from the cramped apartment to their permanent home in a new hab pod was now a simple matter of putting everything you wanted on a grav sled and walking over to your new home.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. We hadn't done that yet, we had only just realized that this would be the first thing that we would ask our third tug, when complete, to do, when we had our first military crisis.

We hadn't been there a month and were still arguing about where to put everything in the Womb when Cartwright, the corvette that Athens had sent out, came hightailing it back into Beerat. The first system we had sent her to was, well, "Swarming". She had hung around trying to get an enemy capabilities assessment until she noticed some ships getting underway. What looked like two triads of Vacunas were heading somewhere in our general direction. She thought we'd like to know.

I told Taffy-2 to move out some, to be between Ale and the expected incursion, and moved Taffy-1 close to Webb's World. Once in position, they both went to Max EmCon. Meanwhile, I told Athens to have her people ready to close up any escape lanes after they showed up, if they came.

Sure enough, a couple of days later we got a visit. We gave Cartwright a minor demerit for not getting the numbers exactly right, but a major atta-boy for the warning. What originally looked like "two triads" eventually resolved into two each of "triad with a smaller ship". We didn't realize that until one triad oriented on our budding shipyard at Ale, which we had going full speed and putting out all kinds of emissions. As they closed on the shipyard, the other triad oriented on Webb's World.

Before long, we could tell that each triad also had a smaller ship, holding back from the three. With humans, I would call that a command ship, but that didn't make any sense with the dickheads. It's gotta be one of their courier ships, an attempt to find out what is eating their ships. At any rate, while we at the Womb could watch, there wasn't much we could do to affect either part of the battle.

Confederacy Navy ships had an assortment of ways to talk. For normal purposes, when talking to another ship we had the AI connect us and didn't worry too much about how it happened. For combat use, though, each ship had a set of low-power "whisker" lasers that the AIs could train on other ships and modulate with a signal. Naturally, this only worked if we knew where the other ship was, and the other ship didn't move out of the way while the laser was enroute.

Our ships didn't have special receivers for this; they used the normal optical arrays and the processing circuitry automatically converted that type of signal to audio and piped it to wherever it was wanted. Thus, a group of ships lying doggo could talk to each other without much chance of any emissions being detected. This was the source of the audio overlay from most AARs.

As soon as the bandits had split up, Brennan had taken direct control of Taffy-2's two scouts and the three of them had separated from the rest of the force, moving forward and out, then back in again when their opponents moved by. It was the right thing to do -get ready to kill any fleeing Swarmers- but it was also wasted effort in this case. When the triad got close to where we thought they could detect our ships, the task force lit up their shields, targeting systems, and main engines, and charged.

A Vacuna triad was demonstrably tough enough to usually beat one of any of our Castle variants. Our better shields only made it almost a fair fight. A Vacuna triad pretty much just evaporates when it gets surprised by two cruisers and a half-dozen destroyers, even when half of them are the nearsighted Africas. Harpy had assigned each target to various ships, and had assigned Mr. Cautious to herself. None of the dickheads got a hit past our shields before they died.

Taffy-1's fight to protect the natives was a bit messier. As soon as Taffy-2 sprang their trap, the inner triad, okay, quad, slowed down, and the laggard slowed down even more, opening up more space between it and the Vacunas. They may not have known what happened, but they knew that something bad had happened to their buddies. Either their electronics are a lot better than we thought, or their ESP has a lot longer range than we thought. That was something to think about later. And, that guy in back is gonna try to get away. Can't have that.

Soon after that, Taffy-1 turned on their shields and got under way, accelerating to ensure intercept. By the time the dickheads noticed them there was no way to avoid the oncoming ships, but they tried. The triad slowed as much as possible and the rear ship actually succeeded in reversing course but all four were again quickly overwhelmed. This time both of the cruisers took some hits, but nothing important was hit, nothing that affected their combat capability.

Actually, that is the Admiral's uniform talking. The man inside the uniform had to consider our three dead and half-dozen wounded as "important". Still, we were up to 14 Sa'arm ships eliminated against the loss of one Castle, if you count Maiden as one of us. We were still in control of the system, and still in control of all information about the system.

This wasn't a battle. It was just a live-fire exercise. I wasn't going to learn anything about my men until things started to go wrong. I was good with the exercise, though. We would talk it over, but as plans go it was good. Next on the training agenda would be options for when the plan fell apart.

I could have swapped the cruisers, but command cohesion is important. I didn't want to start swapping ships around until everyone had a lot more experience. So, while everything was quiet I had the task forces swap their positions so that Harpy and Lodz could go get repairs, and I took Postman to meet them so that I could see the shipyard and go over Tafy-1's AAR in person with them.

Since we had Postman back (she had brought a few more people), I sent PE back to Brakat and Sol with the latest AARs and the standard Admiral's plea for more ships and men. Apparently the dickheads were concerned, and the next visit would be a lot harder to stop.

I also asked for some Marines, if a small detachment was available. We probably won't ever need them, but if we ever do, it sure would be nice to have them. My staff's thinking was that we had two possible uses for Marines, and neither task would need very many.

We still didn't know much about the Sa'arm. If we had the opportunity to examine a disabled dickhead ship instead of simply blowing it away, we should take advantage of that opportunity. The problem there was that we had no one able to do it. My staff suggested asking for some trained boarders with powered armor who could go first, instead of having to send some Navy gunners and bosuns and cooks to fight the dickheads hand to hand.

Also, our current thinking was that the Sa'arm were a collective intellect that got smarter or stupider depending upon how many dickheads there were. That meant that a crippled ship that crashed on a habitable planet with only four survivors wouldn't be very smart, but if given time they would breed and every added body would make the colony smarter. They weren't asking for the ability to repel a full-scale landing with tens of thousands of organized dickheads and full armor support, they just wanted to be able to clean up any accidents.

Are those obsolete "Mercury" Assault Frigates still gathering dust? They are too small to do anything that the Marines consider worth doing. How many Marines do they carry? A company? Could we have one of them? Sure, send their families, too. We don't know how long we will want them.

And my "Sunday Punch" wasn't working well. Yes, the AIs tried to tell me, but sometimes you have to see for yourself. We simply could not keep the rails aligned during full-power firing tests without the structure of a Hero-sized ship around it. Back to the drawing board.

I had Athens send a pair of Castles (Brownson and Cowell this time) back to Dickhead-1. Same orders, do NOT get in a meaningless fight. The Confederacy had a formal name for the system, something like "Zoobleat" but what was the point of remembering that? Whoever the Zooble had been, they weren't any more. We will mourn for them after we win this war. Then I spent the next couple of weeks at Ale, touring the facilities and going over TF1's AAR with their commodore and the various ship's command teams (generally, the CO, XO, and Weapons officer, who was usually also the 3rd in line for command). About the only thing I didn't like about our recent live-fire exercise was something I was going to have to take the blame for myself.

Earth's science fiction was popular in the Confederacy forces. The Marines studied Pournelle, Laumer and Drake looking for ideas; the Navy tended to read Bertram, Bujold and Weber. Both task forces had formed into a plane or wall in the best Weber fashion, with the two cruisers in the middle, then three Asians on one side and the three Africas on the other side, and their two corvettes on top and bottom. It looked pretty, but if the Sa'arm had learned how to identify our ship classes the Africas were easy targets -and their two flanking corvettes weren't going to do much rescuing.

The Asians were a general purpose escort, able to put out a high rate of fire in every direction to protect larger ships from small craft like fighters and torpedo bombers and the occasional suicide gunboat. If you are a WW2 buff, think "Atlanta class light cruisers". Their main weakness was that all that fire wasn't very powerful and took many hits to be effective against bigger ships. I mean, the Atlantas had even been formally designated as "CLAA" (meaning "Anti-Aircraft Screening Light Cruiser") in recognition that they shouldn't be duking it out with anyone their own size.

The Africas, on the other hand were close-in knifefighters. Inside of about 15 klicks an Africa was nasty. Again, for a WW2 example, think of a destroyer-sized combatant with nothing but torpedos. For some reason, disruptors ignored shields, so an Africa could use a third of its disruptors to blow out your hull plates or armor or whatever, and the rest of them to vaporize whatever was hiding behind your armor, all within a second or two. The effect would be very much like using a Bazooka on a telephone booth. However, if you stayed 20 klicks or more away, they were even less dangerous than the Castles.

Putting the Africas all together -and otherwise all alone- on one flank was just inviting someone to sit 20 clicks away and eat them. I asked the two commodores to, instead of having two flanking arcs, put the six destroyers in a circle with the two classes alternating. That gave us a core of ships that could take some damage, plus an enveloping circle with medium and short range weapons in every sector.

That worked tactically, too, with their greater acceleration and maneuverability. As long as the pair of cruisers was coming in, a prudent enemy would concentrate on them. The faster destroyers could move ahead in a wide circle, reducing the circle's radius as the cruisers closed and alert for an opportunity to finish off a damaged enemy before it could get back into the fight. Any movement toward one side of the circle would open the rear of the formation to a charge by our ships on the other side.

Unfortunately, for long range fire all we had were the missile launchers on the Europas and the Patricians, and the plasma torpedo launchers on the Castles and the Shiros. Not for the first time, I asked myself why all of the Castle variants had at least one plasma torpedo launcher, but none of the destroyers did.

The missiles were good against hull and armor, but didn't always hit. They were subject to counterfire. Missiles were also easy to dodge, as demonstrated by our training accident back in Sol system. The plasma torpedoes were more likely to hit, but again could not be considered capable of delivering a knockout blow to a ship with a functional shield. However, a single plasma torpedo could take out a shield, and if an enemy was kept busy enough, we could saturate his defenses with missiles. So, I reluctantly assigned our four Shiros (all we had) and two of our Patricians to the task forces as additional destroyers (light) and hoped no one shot at them.

We added missile resupply depots to our plans basically everywhere: at the shipyard, in orbit around a couple of Ale's moons, inside the mess at both of Ale's Trojan points, and orbiting WW's moon. Actually, if I remember right, I think that this is when we realized how to solve that problem.

Most people, if they have heard of LaGrange Points at all, only know about two, L4 and L5. There are actually five known, of which L4 and L5 were the last discovered. This was back in the 1800s, long before spaceflight or even computers, when mathematicians were using pen and paper to explore Kepler's equations for orbital mechanics. No one was saying "This is the way God works"; they were just saying "These equations seem to describe what we see in our telescopes, but there are some odd implications".

When the astronomers talk about a "1-body system", or a "2-" or "3-body system", they didn't mean that that body was floating all alone. What they meant was that there was one (or two or three) bodies that so badly out-massed all the other stuff that all the smaller stuff could be pretty much ignored when calculating orbits and stuff. A "2-body system" either had two stars and nothing else large, or else a single star and a single huge planet, and nothing else large.

Someone (I guess a guy named LaGrange) had found that, for a 2-body system where one was much larger than the other, there were several "nodes" where all the various forces were balanced and anything smaller that found its way there would tend to stay. L1 was obvious: directly between the two bodies and nearer the smaller one where the attractions of the two bodies were equal. Not quite as obvious was L2, still on the line between the two bodies but the far side of the smaller body. That one was sorta like a geostationary orbit, but instead of always being over the same point on a planet it always kept the moon between it and the planet (or the planet between it and the star).

L3 was the weird one. Still in that same line through the two bodies, the point behind the primary, exactly opposite the smaller body, in the same orbit, was also stable. I never understood that one, but I couldn't argue with results. NASA had actually sent a research probe around the Sun and put it in the Sun-Earth L3 position back in the 1980s, I think just to prove the theory. Yep, far less fuel to stay in position than anywhere else, and it had to avoid a couple of asteroids that were hanging out there, too. Who'd a thunk it?

Anyway, the WW-moon L2 was someplace we could put a missile resupply dump that would not disturb the natives, and it would not have to be continuously powered. And, that also answered the earlier question about where to put the Sunday Punch, once we made it work.

Are you confused yet? If I mention L4 or L5, or the Womb or the Greeks, I'm talking about the outer system Beerat-Ale LaGrange points. If I mention L2, though, I'm talking about the Beer-moon L2 point, the point behind the moon that the natives on Beer could not see.

While we were building everything we could that didn't need manpower to use, we also worked on doctrine for various threats. As we had just demonstrated, we could handle any kind of small scouting force that tried to penetrate the inner system. The big issue was what to do if we got in over our heads.

Our "Plan B", if we found ourselves fighting anything too big to defeat conventionally, was for everyone to close as fast as they could. Our most powerful weapons that could not be deflected or intercepted were on some of our smallest, most fragile ships: The Africas with their disruptors and the Shiros with their rail guns.

Officially, the Shiros were supposed to use their guns for point defense against incoming missiles, but we did some tests with a few asteroids that no one needed, then some more asteroids that we put shields on. As long as they fired from close enough, they did almost as much destruction as the Africa's disruptors.

So, "Plan B" was for everyone else to try to attract fire so that the Africas and Shiros could get close. If they could get within 10 or 15 klicks, whatever they shot at was going to "go away". Our survivors could then go lick their wounds, or go after another monster if they felt like it. The problem was, if we had to do this, if we had to close with anything big enough to need Plan B, not many of our ships were going to survive that attack.

Yes. As plans go, our Plan B sucked. It sucked diseased goats, to quote a volunteer on Harpy who had grown up in the mountains of Aden. Isn't Arabic a delightfully colorful language? Without more firepower, though, it was the best we could come up with, if the Sa'arm decided to send something like one of their bigger colony ships. Everyone supported my experiments with the Hero gun. No one liked Plan B.

Plan C, of course, was "Build us some Really Honkin' Big Ships that can wade into a barfight and win." We were working on that; the suicide-charge Plan B was only a contingency plan for if we got attacked by Big Bad Guys before we could implement our Plan C. Building the Really Big Ships that we needed for Plan C was going to take forever, though. And, we were going to have to take baby steps to get them, one at a time.

In floating steel warship terms, we wanted some dreadnaught battleships with a lot of armor and a lot of big guns that could be aimed. That was our intended final product. Before we could build one, though, we had to figure out how to put the big guns in a turret on a ship. That meant building a couple of monitors with a huge turret in the middle, just to prove the turret concept worked. Unfortunately, we weren't ready for that either. Armor would probably be a problem, too, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Our first ship with a big gun was going to be more like a casemate ironclad with a siege mortar in the middle; you aimed the gun by pointing the ship, just like the Heros we were trying to avoid building. And, we couldn't even do that until we had the gun itself under control, which meant building a couple of them by themselves as a sort of coastal artillery. That's where we were at the beginning, trying to make just the gun work.

Once we accepted that we were going to have to start at the beginning, we set up six construction frames for small ships (up to 100 meters or so), then started building smaller versions of the Hero gun in three of them and rudimentary ships to power and move them in the other three. Again, the Heros had a pair of spinal railguns that took up most of the entire ship's length of 250 meters -call it 170 meters for the raw weapon system- and launched a one tonne (1000 Kilogram) payload at about 100 kps.

Much of the problem with this as a weapon system was that it was so awkward to use. The ship could not aim the gun; all the crew could do was aim the ship itself and fire the gun when it looked like it might be lined up on a target. And, the ship itself was the biggest warship we had built yet. Aiming the ship at a moving target was almost impossible. There was no question but that anything hit was going down, but hits on a moving target were very difficult. At the same time, if it was trying to get lined up for a shot it was the next closest thing to immobile, itself. And, in combat, 'sitting ducks' get rapidly converted to 'dead ducks'.

We needed to put the gun in a turret that could track a target. When we sat down to plan this out, we accepted that we weren't going to be building anything with turrets that big in the foreseeable future, so we needed to lower our expectations a little. What we came up with in the sims was a "Junior Hero" gun that launched a package 1/10th the mass at a comparable velocity and thus did roughly 1/10th of the damage. This was still more than enough to take care of any troublesome intruders, and if one hit wasn't enough, having a smaller gun might allow us to have more than one in a turret, and eventually more than one turret on a ship.

The scale-down made our engineering problems almost all go away. We could make the raw weapon system one third of the length, only 60 meters long, and since the stresses from the smaller payload were so much reduced the whole system including bracing and shock absorption looked to mass about 150 tonnes, only 1/5th of the original weapon system. With experience in real-world use, all of these numbers might go down more.

In fact, while we were salivating over this at one of our planning meetings, someone pointed out that if we made a smaller one half this size, we could back-fit it into every one of our patrol craft as a semi-spinal mount and give them all a one-hit kill option for any Sa'arm scouts. Okay, not the Patricians, their magazines were in the way, but everything else could be rebuilt to fit this "Baby Hero" gun.

Someone else pointed out that the gun didn't have to be completely internal. The ends of the rails could easily stick out the front, and in that case even the Patricians could have one. The point that, if the rails extended out from the hull enough, the rest of the system could be gimballed to allow aiming, came soon after.

That was the last straw, the last thing we needed to hear to do it. We weren't going to interrupt the original set of construction frames; we still needed those scanner platforms, tugs, and everything else they were building, and we didn't want to interrupt the six frames here building the "Junior" guns. We moved over a little and built another three smaller frames like the small-craft ones and had them start on the "Baby" guns.

Our shipyard was a mix of huge frames to hold parts where we wanted them, replicators over here making standardized structural items like girders and plate, other replicators over there making specialized parts like fusion plants and ceramic-alloy composite launcher rails, automated mining equipment crawling across Ale's rings to feed those replicators, automated and robotic assemblers to put everything together, and nanites that went behind them doing all the little stuff like making perfect welds. All of which we had already, because we had set the Explorers to building the cores of these machines back in Sol system, and they completed themselves as soon as we set them loose with the pre-processed materials that we also brought with us.

In fact, this leads us to our first ship "loss", the K'Treel Explorer we had named Frederick Otis Barton, Jr. We needed a master control supervisor for the shipyard complex before it got out of hand, and Barton sort of volunteered for the position. The Explorers had noticeably more personality than the AIs in our warships, and the one in Barton seemed to take the shipyard complex on as her (his?) own project.

We didn't want Barton to become physically fixed into the complex; we had to keep the ship able to move in case of an emergency evacuation, but as long as she could get underway in a crisis we were good with permanently stationing her as the shipyard manager for the "Barton Shipyard Complex". Actually, this was a Really Good Thing, because she, okay, from now on Barton is a he, would almost certainly do a better job than the humans that we had earmarked to do it.

The humans still got posted to the shipyard officially, about twenty of them at first, but Barton really did most of the organization and management work. The official human shipyard manager was an Indian shipbuilding engineer and architect named Deepak Bhatkar that we had stolen from Sol system's shipyards. He was delighted to have an AI that could evidence some judgement and didn't need constant supervision. I wasn't so happy; I didn't want to lose one third of our emergency evacuation capability, but they assured me that Barton would always be available for that and that having him at the yard actually ensured that he would have anything needed already at hand, no matter what the emergency turned out to be.

We pulled most of Barton's crew off, including the three original "square pegs", after letting the CO who had gotten him this far select a standby crew of eight to stay with him just in case he needed to move. I kept my promise to promote the two engineers to Ensign, and promptly put each of them in charge of one phase of the shipbuilding effort. Lt Farris got the upgrade planning office, in charge of figuring out how to make our ships better. They all got a couple of volunteers to help them, basically anyone who had ever worked in a factory or any kind of assembly line. They also got as many unclaimed concubines as they could stand and a promise that I'd find them a better job as soon as I could.

I took the time to sit down with Barton's new CO, "Captain" Jackson, an ex-USN Lieutenant who had never commanded before but had stood OOD both underway and in port. I know his training and I know his experience, and I'm good right there. Barton is not a warship, and the man has far more training and experience than he needs for this job. He isn't going to stay in this job for long, either. As soon as we can get someone in here who has owned his own airplane or sailboat, Jackson's going back to the warships and getting trained for command.

I did point out to Jackson that, as long as Barton was docked and running the shipyard, he should consider Deepak to be his superior, and that any of the three (him, Deepak, or Barton himself) could declare an emergency and get the ship underway. I was fine with his remaining crew helping out in the yard or going anywhere they needed for duty or relaxation, that's fine and good. However, I wanted them living on the ship with their families so that not only would they already be onboard in an emergency, but also their families would be similarly available if there was ever such a dire emergency that he had to get underway short some people. The crew's families could thus serve as crew concubines and Sea-Scouts if such an emergency ever occurred without a full crew available.

Between Deepak and Barton we never had any bad screwups at the yard. We might build something we decided later that we didn't need, or we might build something that didn't quite do what we wanted, but we didn't waste any time building half of something and forget to build the other half. Officially Deepak was listed as a Marine Lt Colonel, but to me he was a civilian specialist and I would have to be out of my mind to give him an order about his shipyard that both he and Barton thought was a bad idea.

Anyway, that jogged our minds about our training crews, and I did the same thing with the other two Explorers, only I allowed them to keep a full crew of 11. This was important, because as soon as Hillary was able to dump her cargo we sent her back to Sol for another load, steadily growing nine pod-seeds into new ferry and cargo pods. All the industrial equipment went to work either digging the Vagina out, building our base deep in the Womb, or building our defense systems surrounding the L4 cluster, the Ferry pods got placed onto the new apartment complex we had built outside the entrance, and the three resource storage pods with whatever was still in them were left in the cluster near the Womb where they could be reached as needed.

Beebe dropped her three resource pods at the shipyard complex and took on three of Barton's still-full ferry pods, giving her nine of the ferry pods. She delivered all nine to the Womb's outside apartment complex before following Hillary back to Sol with nine more pod-seeds as her only cargo.

That early tug that we had put to work moving these pods around? As soon as we could empty one of the ferry pods by cramming everyone into the others, he lifted the empty one back into space and started regular passenger service between the Womb and the shipyard. The driver named it the "Long Island Express", so I guess he was from around there. That also got all the passengers still holed up in Barton's ferry pods over to the Womb, which was becoming a good-sized town.

Barton kept his remaining three ferry pods and started growing six more to have all the emergency capacity he could. The residents started calling him the "Barton Imperial", a "First Class Resort and Retirement Community". Maybe we can get them to put a pool in. And a tennis court. Can't call it a resort without a pool and a tennis court.

In two months, we should have all of our people.

The baby guns were done first, of course. They were nowhere near as big or complicated as the other things we were building and only took a week or so. We had our fourth tug modified before it was finished to act as a testbed for the baby guns, and while we started testing them we had the three frames start building another set of three guns.

If these guns don't work right because of an overlooked design issue, once we figure out what the problem is it will be far faster to fix them than it will be to manufacture a whole new assembly from scratch if we wait. We don't know how much time we have; it's better to keep the plant running full speed building something than to have it idle while we think.

We fired the gun a couple of times with no payload, just to make sure it worked, then took the test rig over to one of Ale's bigger moons, on the other side of Ale from our shipyard. Not that it was going to stay there, but it was there now, so we had Ale between our shipyard and any problems we created.

I volunteered myself as a spectator and went over to watch from Harpy's Bridge as the safest place to be if you had to be near the tests, and sent a system-wide warning to stay away until we knew it was safe. We hadn't officially named any of these moons yet, and one of the results of this test was that this particular one has been called "Bulls' Eye" or "Target" ever since.

Harpy stayed back, 200 Km out. The test rig continued in to about 50 Km out from the surface before halting and using its engines to 'hover' in place over its target, a mountain that we had selected just to use something big and easily identified. Using a tug for this was an accident; it was something expendable that we had available, but it was looking more and more like I was a genius for suggesting it.

The tug could do all this effortlessly; it had the engines to get there and the power generation capacity to drive the gun and only needed one body to run it. None of our warships could hover over a gravity well like that in any position except facing outward where its main engines countered the gravity. The tug could do it facing in any direction we wanted, and for weapons tests we wanted it facing the target. We were using men (and one woman) who had driven trucks for a living for these tugs, and for this test we had added a couple engineers and gunners, with Lt Farris looking over their shoulders in case there was a problem.

I bet every man involved in this got a woody the first time we fired that first "Baby Hero", and some of the women probably got wet, too. This was our first "We did it ourselves" toy, and we were ecstatic at how well it worked. Well, it was spostabe just that simple when you had AIs acting as draftsmen and design engineers to make sure that you didn't screw anything up.

The AIs acted like it was no big deal. It wasn't, to them. They didn't remember all the mistakes that we made learning how to build things like we did. Hell, it had only been 20 or 30 years since NASA lost a Mars probe because some of the ESA (European Space Agency) engineers working on it were using the metric system like any sane engineer would, and their sensors fed digital data in dyne-seconds or some such to NASA's main control computer, which had been programmed by American engineers. It assumed that those numbers were in pound-seconds instead and fired the engines accordingly. Instead of easing into Mars orbit, the probe slammed into Mars' atmosphere and burned up. Our history was full of experimental, developmental, and even industrial accidents because we, as a species, tended to "do" as soon as we could, before we really understood what we were "doing".

There was some recoil of course but we knew that going in. Much of the gun mount's 90 tonne mass was a built-in shock dampener, and the tug had many times the mount's mass. The tug, as part of its original purpose of precisely positioning heavy and awkward loads, had the best inertial sensor systems we could build into it. One of the things that the AIs are really good at is math, and by the third shot the tug's maneuvering thrusters were firing exactly in opposition to the gun to keep the tug steady. After that there was no delay to re-aim; it fired the rest of the ten-shot test string as fast as it could reload. Seven shots in seven seconds. The combat version would be able to fire more quickly if needed, but it was not yet apparent under what conditions a single target would need so many hits.

I missed all that; I was staring at the huge bullseye the gun had created around the target. The AIs could give me all the numbers I wanted about kinetic energy and impulse transfer; all I cared about was that with this, none of my people would ever have to ram a dickhead again. Yes, I have a woody and it has nothing to do with LtColonel Moltke, Harpy's stunning nordic XO. She would fit into those Budweiser commercials about the "Swedish Bikini Team" with no problem, but for the first time ever I didn't even notice that she had entered the Bridge where I was staring out the window. Not the screen, that was turned off so we could use our own eyeballs to watch the target. This was awesome. I am a man, and I Have A Big Dick!

I heard laughter behind me and heard a "What?" and turned to find LtCol Moltke buckling herself into the command console's shock frame. I realized I must have said that out loud. I recovered as fast as I could. "What do you mean, 'what'? Surely you realize that all of this is merely an expression of us cavemen's desire to have bigger dicks. Look around at everything we build. It's all just phallic symbols, right? And, that thing..." I waved vaguely behind me "...is nothing more than a subconscious attempt to build the biggest dick ever. It even acts like one, shooting until it's done and then going to sleep. Or at least, that's what my older sister would say after coming home from a date when I was growing up. I don't think she likes men." Much more laughter. Well, that will probably make the rounds, too. I gotta learn to keep my mouth shut.

Meanwhile, I sent a message to Commodore Grotten that I wanted her to select the three Ainsworths most in need of overhaul or rest and send them to Barton Yard for an upgrade. That led, unfortunately, to a quick slap in the face from reality.

When we got back to Barton Yard, all ready to celebrate, Barton asked me quietly if he could discuss my plans for the "Baby Hero" with me. Sure, should we get the planning team together? Yes, that would be advisable. That was Deepak, Lt Farris, and Ensign Hollis, along with Barton himself. Farris and Hollis were two of the square pegs from Barton's original crew, all of which were acting as construction supervisors until we had others to do that job, at which time I'd throw them at the next crisis.

Okay, each of the building frames had pressurized spaces for workers to meet, eat, sleep, etc, so we grabbed one of the rooms and sat down to figure out what was wrong. That was simple. There were two separate issues that Barton thought should be carefully considered before ripping three of our smallest ships apart for this upgrade.

First, while the gun couldn't quite be considered a spinal mount, it was going to have to be fixed rather than aimable. Further, it would pretty much have to be mounted in the very front of the ship with the recoil directly aft along the ship's center of mass, in order to limit all recoil effects to something that could be compensated for by the main engines. Next, only about 15 meters of the rail part of the assembly could be "external", meaning that about 20 meters of the assembly needed to be inside the hull for one reason or another. The Castles could maybe find some room if we ripped a bunch of stuff out and put it elsewhere, but the Patricians simply didn't have the space unless we wanted to remove the missile magazine, making their only other armament useless.

Okay, why not just extend the hull forward as needed? Yes, we can do that -but now we are adding to various loads that are already pretty strained for these small ships. It's one thing to remove 40 tonnes of ship and replace it with 90 tonnes not too far from the center of the ship; even though that's a 50 tonne hit it's doable. It's something else again to add all 90 tonnes, and put it so far out in front. The added mass so far from the ship's center of mass would make the ship handle like a drunk pig, losing much of the maneuverability and speed that made it valuable.

I wasn't about to argue with them. Any mechanical engineering curriculum will have a pair of related courses "Statics" and "Dynamics", all about forces and moments and masses and pivots and how to calculate what happens when the stick-figure knocks the pin loose. Statics was all about things that aren't moving, the stresses they are under when they are "static". Dynamics was about things that are moving, and the various forces get a good deal more squirrely, even if you don't consider the fact that they are probably constantly changing. Give me a statics problem and I can work the math, but dynamics was something I would just as soon not have to deal with again. Okay, we agree that this is bad. These small ships needed to be able to dodge out of the way of incoming fire.

Second, neither the Castles nor the Patricians had the spare power to drive the mount. Sure, if they weren't doing anything else they could charge the mount's capacitor bank in just a few seconds, but in order to provide the power necessary to do that they would have to drop their shields and lower their acceleration enough to drop their inertial compensators, too. I found this second issue to be even more damning than the first. No shields and not much dodging, either. These ships are already too fragile for sustained combat. Okay, putting this on our scouts should wait.

Well, how about the destroyers? Now we're talking! The destroyers had the space for a mount, they had the excess power to drive it, and we are talking about less than 1% of total ship mass instead of almost 5% like we were on the scouts. The destroyers would lose a minor amount of maneuverability, but in exchange they would gain a one-hit-one-kill ability with anything they were likely to face short of the Sa'arm's larger capital ships. Which we all knew they may well have to fight, but baby steps.

What was better, they had the mass to support limited off-axis firing, which meant that we could put the whole gun assembly on trainable gimbals. The first ship we put this on would have to be tested extensively to see how far off-axis the ship could take, then it and the others would have software stops installed to prevent the mount from passing that angle without command approval.

I couldn't stay for the design session; I didn't know enough about either class of destroyers to help anyway. I had never served on one. I knew enough about their capabilities to use them, but I didn't have the years of living on one that it would take to know it well enough to speak intelligently about what spaces, bulkheads, and frames could be moved where. While Deepak, Farris, and Hollis discussed options with Barton, I contacted both Harpy's and Kestrel's staff and asked for them to each send an Africa's CO, ChEng, and Weps, then the same three from an Asian, to Barton Yard for a quick conference on upgrades for the destroyers.

If this worked I would drop my current plan for destroyer upgrades, which was to figuratively cut them all in half and swap parts. The Africas just had no business in a fight unless they could close within 15 klicks or so; until they got that close they were nothing more than bullet-sponges absorbing damage so that our other ships didn't, and they were too fragile for that. All of our ships were.

So, as the simplest way of giving them something with a longer reach, my thinking had been to cut open an Africa and an Asian and start swapping weapons systems wholesale. Instead of one having 10 twin disruptor turrets and the other having 10 twin particle beam turrets, I thought that it would be better if they all had 5 of each. That way, they would all have a decent medium-range punch and a devastating short-range punch.

Not that it was anywhere near that simple, of course. Each weapon system had a lot of stuff going on that wasn't in the turret. Starting with the particle beam generator itself, which was buried in an armored space below the turret.

On the other hand, the disruptor turrets were pretty much self-contained, because the results of the containment field being, well, disrupted while it was inside our own ship would be pretty ugly. This meant that the containment field for a disruptor was generated inside the turret itself. That led to both A) the turrets were pretty big and B) jettisoning a turret that had a problem was step 2 in the troubleshooting checklist. Step 1 was to ask "Do we have time to get the crew out before it blows?" Unfortunately, getting an answer to that question was Step 3, done after the turret was gone.

So there were good reasons why I wasn't pushing this turret-swap scheme. Of course, the most important question to anyone I mentioned this to was "What do you call them? 'Afrias'? 'Asicans'?". Sometimes they put a hyphen in there, as a nod to old destroyers being referred to as 'tin cans', making them the "Asi-can" class.

Anyway, if the baby-hero gun worked, it would be a lot easier than my idea would be. Oh, yeah, I had to send another message to Commodore Grotten saying 'never mind about those overhauls and upgrades'.

The design team didn't take long to report that they were ready with detailed upgrade plans for both destroyer classes, which were very similar in build. It was pretty simple in concept: Remove the forward two turrets and a bunch of other stuff that would have to be moved (like the bridge on the Asians), cut way into the hull, and start reassembling the ship with a new forward-mounted Baby Hero mount.

We pulled Kenya out of Taffy-1's lineup as a convenient testbed, and as soon as the first "Junior Hero" gun was completed we set it aside, shoved Kenya in that frame, and went to work. Actually, our part of the "work" was to stand around and watch while the frame's automated equipment did everything. The frame provided all the power it needed so we pulled the crew off. Without crew living onboard we didn't need the environmental services so we could kill the whole ship, shut everything down, and work faster than if this had to be done with the ship live.

Kenya's crew moved into the Barton Imperial and they all got temporary assignments. Some of the crew -mostly the engineers- got involved with the shipyard work, supervising the equipment ripping their ship apart. Some of them -basically the entire Weapons Department- took the testbed back to Bull's Eye for training, more in-depth testing of the gun system, and analysis for maintenance and to see if we could get away with making the system any lighter. Any of that 90 tonne mass we could pare away would make the ship easier to maneuver. As long as it didn't affect reliability or accuracy, and it didn't make it more dangerous to the ship, making the mount smaller and lighter was a priority.

We gave some of our infrastructure people and the rest of Kenya's crew a completely different task: pick one of Ale's moons and build a rest and recreation area, a resort in truth. They picked one with about two-thirds of Earth's surface gravity and started working. Their thinking was that it would be a fun place to be anywhere on the planet. They would only need grav-grids in the built-up areas with buildings.

Ale gave off so much heat that its collection of satellites had its own "liquid zone" where water, and thus life, was possible. The inner moons were too hot and the outer ones were too cold. This one, though, was in the liquid zone and had started to develop its own native life forms.

That brought us up short for a bit, because we had all grown up with Star Trek's "Prime Directive". However, the AIs assured us that we could be pragmatic here. This moon's life had never evolved past ooze, likely never would. Ale, acting the part of the local 'star', didn't put out enough high-energy radiation to support evolution, and its Van Allen belts prevented cosmic rays from doing the job. Unless we transplanted the goo somewhere else with more radiation, there would never be any "normal cultural evolution" to be concerned about. The AIs were good with us terraforming the place to suit our needs. We could feel guilty if we wanted, but we shouldn't let the ooze stop us.

This particular moon, as fit its size, had an atmosphere that was thinner than Earth's and was mostly the heavier gases like CO2 and various hydrocarbons, so that would be fairly easy to convert to something we could breathe. The hydrocarbons get converted to organics for our use, the CO2 gets split into oxygen (that gets released again) and carbon (that again gets stored for replicator use). Nitrogen would have to come from somewhere else, maybe the refineries down in Ale's atmosphere. We could ship the carbon and organics to the Womb to help buffer their environmental system.

Depending upon how much effort we put into conversion, it could have an atmosphere that was breathable in emergencies in just a few decades, and we could be comfortable in not much longer than that. Until then, people could run around in a minimal suit that gave them something to breathe and kept the soup off their skin.

They couldn't agree on a name for that moon so it ended up just being called "Hotel", and what they were building was a real "Barton Imperial Resort". I guessed that when it was up and running we could call the ship the "Old Barton Hotel".

We need someplace we can go to unwind, and we can build anything we want. The sailor in me wants a liberty-port type of place where a man just off a long patrol can go to get a drink and a pretty woman to help him relax, and he won't get in trouble no matter how stupid he gets when drunk, as long as no one dies. Yes, we'll have some guys there, too, courtesy of Tina's hundred extra dicks.

Bowling center? Sure, if anyone wants one we can do that. We need to prioritize, though, since this will all take time. Anything that everyone will use comes before anything that only some will use. The hotel rooms, restaurants, bars, and lounges, the tennis courts and the swimming pools were all more important than the snow-skiing trails.

We also put in some social rules for when this place was operational. Whatever happens on Hotel stays on Hotel. If you're a volunteer named "Kelly", and you hook up with a staff member named "Jody", it's none of ANYONE's business whether Kelly or Jody are both male, both female, or one of each, or for that matter if either one has a family. If you're a concubine and your patron would rather go to Hotel than come home to you, then you can complain to the Civil Service rep, but he's probably going to tell you "If your Sponsor would rather be on Hotel without you than here with you, you need to go look in a mirror and talk to the person causing the problem."

And, as much as we wanted our concubines to stay pregnant and give us children, we didn't want a bunch of unwanted orphans or single parents, so to start with we decreed that the staff would be sterile until "adopted" by a sponsor. We wanted them all to join families, but we wanted to avoid the he-got-her-pregnant-so-he-has-to-marry-her-even-though-he-hates-her issues that Western culture had so much trouble with.