Part 7 - Month 82 - Rebuilding after the Storm

"We don't need another hero" - Tina Turner

While Abbot was checking out what Majorca had flushed, Taffy-1 arrived on the scene in the inner system and merged with Taffy-2, Commodore Ramsey in command from Harpy. However, once we were as sure as we could get that there were no more dickheads in the system, I ordered Taffy-1 to remain near Beer and I took a shuttle to Lesotho to ride back to Barton Yard with Taffy-2. Montserrat joined us soon after, having demonstrated that our Webb's World L2 missile depot worked fine. It hadn't helped us at all during the battle, but it would help us a lot if we got jumped on our way back. With Nice out of it, she was the only ship -Two had with missiles.

Paul Bunyan got a very public and official atta-boy from me for doing exactly what she was built for even if we had completely forgotten about her. She also got another very public and entertaining dressing-down about learning how to share from one of the task force captains, for spoiling what was "promising to be lovely good fight". Through the years, the second speech ended up with a much higher replay rate on the Womb's entertainment system than mine. She also got told to go back to hiding at L2 until we needed her again.

The ugliest part of being a commander is taking responsibility for your losses. As both Beerat System Commander and the Admiral in Command of the Beerat Defense Force (not quite the same titles, as the System Commander would also be in charge of offensive forces, when we had some) I could take all the credit for our latest victory. But, if I did that, I also had to take personal blame for the deaths of roughly 500 men and women who had gone into battle trusting me to make the right decisions and do everything I could to bring them out again.

Since we had expanded crews on most of our ships for training our new people, the AIs could tell me we lost 378 people on Kestrel alone, and another 127 on Nice. For those 505 men and women, I had failed in my duty. Two hundred and eighty-seven volunteers. Two hundred and eighteen concubines. Seven and eighty-six of whom were pregnant. I really, really didn't need to hear that last.

The only thing I could do for them was to establish policy about the families they had left behind. I sent a message to all of the various senior officers asking them to think about our next step. We would get together and make sure they were taken care of. Harpy immediately asked for my authorization for an order that Tina had already given on this subject, that the AIs were holding up as beyond her authority. I got her on conference.

We had talked several times about her job and the lack of training the Civil Service provided. It was getting better, but the CS was still in its experimental phase. Maybe it had moved into the developmental phase. Back in Sol system Tina had gotten some sleep-training that the system CS coordinator had developed, but mostly her institutional knowledge was in a pair of document sets that the CS called "what worked" and "what didn't work".

In theory, this was really no different than any other field of knowledge. It just wasn't organized any better than that yet. Older fields had textbooks, classes, entire colleges that taught their students all about architecture, infantry tactics, or painting. The CS didn't have any of that yet. Someday the CS would have classes and textbooks and college degrees on colony management, but right now all Tina had was reports on what different CS reps had tried, what worked, and what didn't.

She had come to me several times for advice, orders, and clearance for orders she had given that surpassed her authority, and I had tried to be helpful. My priorities were to safeguard our people, safeguard our bases, protect the Beer, and give our people the best life we could after those other priorities were met. I dealt with the ships and the people on them, I had Bill to handle the fixed assets, and I had Tina to handle the non-military people. Sometimes her reports gave us ideas to try, and other times they convinced us to not try something we had already started doing.

One of her reports was from Thule, an appropriately-named planet that sounded horrible if you weren't an Eskimo or Lapp. Their CS rep had even less training than Tina, and she had gotten a whole Marine transport's worth of concubines and children dumped on her when said transport got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and was lost with all hands, including the regiment or whatever it was carrying. The AIs at Thule had basically tried to recycle the whole lot of their concubines since they no longer had sponsors.

Tina wanted to ensure that this did not happen here, and had ordered Woomie to transfer, for administrative purposes, all widowed concubines and their children to her as their sponsor, and to allow them to continue to use their current housing until further notice with no reduction in services. They were not losers who had been rejected by their sponsors; their sponsors had died in Confederacy service and their dependents would be taken care of.

"Okay, what part of this exceeds her authority as the Beerat System CS Coordinator?"

<The first part. Her CAP is 6.8; she is only authorized two concubines and she already has two.>

Things like this make you look for a concrete wall to beat your head against. "Is there a numerical limit to how many concubines the Civil Service is allowed to house as a temporary measure during an emergency?"

<No, there is no limit to how many concubines the Civil Service can house.>

"Okay, can the CIVIL SERVICE take these widows and orphans in?"

<Yes.>

"Great. Now, who is the ONLY CIVIL SERVICE REP in this system?"

<Sub-Decurion Hernandez. We believe we understand what you are trying to say. Sub-Decurion Hernandez is not claiming the widows as personal concubines and the orphans as her own children. She is acting in her capacity as the ranking Civil Service representative and assigning the widows and orphans to the Civil Service.>

"Very good. That's probably why, in her instruction to you, she used the phrase "for administrative purposes". She meant that she was claiming them for the Civil Service so that, for your needs, each of them would continue to be listed as having a sponsor. Now, if this ever comes up again, is there a better way for her to word this instruction, that would have avoided this?"

<A more clear way to word this instruction, if we understand Sub-Decurion Hernandez' intent, would be "On my authority, transfer these concubines and dependents to the Civil Service." If she gives that order, we will verify her authority to give that order, and the order will be obeyed.>

"Tina, you got that? You can't have them all yourself, but you can authorize their transfer to the Civil Service. That is their sponsor right now, 'the Civil Service'. If any of them ask who their patron is, you say 'the Civil Service is, and we'll get you a better one as quick as we can'."

"Yes, yanqui. Thank you. I understand what you are saying. It was not my intent to personally take in 442 concubines, most of whom are female."

"Right. Please remember that the AIs are intelligent, but they are not human. They do not have our values. They are much better than us at analysis, but not so good at judgement or common sense, or decision-making that depends upon judgement or common sense. Also, English is too vague for reliable communication with a computer. If you are having trouble, you can use Spanish. The AIs will still understand you, and you may get better results. Now, anything else before I go get a first-hand look at Nice?"

"No. Thank you, Tom. Many people wouldn't care as much as you do. I was very lucky to get you."

"Go. Show those people how lucky they are to have you."

Nice was a wreck. Pretty much everything forward of the third pair of MPB turrets was gone, or if not completely gone then mangled to the point of being nothing but wreckage to be cleared away. Not as bad as Avery had been, but all this was done by one plasma torpedo. That shouldn't have caused this much damage. Either the dickheads had better PTs than we did, or there was something wrong with the ship's construction. Add that to the next message torpedo to Brak.

The shipyard was going to have to expand again. We needed to speed this up. Not only did we need more ships of all sizes, we needed to be able to repair damage and work on upgrades without interfering with new construction. Thankfully, if you had the infrastructure (all the construction equipment the Explorers had spent several months in Sol System building before we left), this was as simple as telling Barton "Build some more construction frames over there" while waving vaguely in the direction you wanted them. After a week or so of assembling parts and equipment -much of which the frame itself put together- you could tell it to start building something. All we had to do was make sure it had whatever raw materials it wanted, and that meant that our original small frames, and the ones at the Womb, built more automated miners and tugs than anything else.

We had put in some small-craft construction frames near the Womb -saying 'in orbit around' wasn't quite right- when we first got there and realized that we needed more small craft, and they had been building shuttles, tugs, tankers, miners, etc for months now. In fact, now that I remember that's actually where "I Have a Big Dick" came from, not from Barton Yard. When the Womb's frames were up and working we had started shifting Barton completely to warship construction. Well, a couple of the small frames stayed with their original run of sensor platforms and miners, but otherwise it was all warships and parts for warships.

Let's see. We had six medium frames, the ones that had built the Folk-Heros, finishing up the Asian-class conversions to the Baby-Hero front end. The instant we could pull those ships out we were going to have each one start building an improved corvette. We had planned on just making a slightly-larger Shiro with a Baby-Hero gun as main armament, but what just happened may have changed that.

While we were working on what our improved scout would look like, we had Barton start putting together another ten frames so that we could build them, whatever they were going to be, in groups of 16. If nothing else, they could start building the engineering department in the back until we knew what we wanted.

All of our ships needed self-guided missiles that could swat incoming small craft. They didn't need the 55 cm shipkillers that the Patricians had, because those were far larger than needed to kill small craft. They weren't big enough to kill larger ships, unless you could get several hits at long range after full acceleration, and that appeared to be a losing game. If they hit they did a lot of damage, but they could be seen coming, they could be intercepted, and after burnout they could be dodged. And, the smaller ships could only carry a few of these larger missiles.

So, since we had demonstrated that we had a shipkilling weapon that had longer effective reach than the Sa'arm beam weapons, we were thinking that, instead of putting 55 cm launchers on these new ships, we needed something smaller, like an air-to-air missile. Maybe less damage, maybe less range, but definitely self-guided, easier to launch, and smaller so that we could carry a lot. Add 'request info on smaller missiles' to our next report to Brak.

Over there, we had three medium-sized frames building the Asian-sized hulls for our experimental "Monitors". That was going to be awhile. Right next to them, we had three smaller frames each building a "Junior Hero" railgun for the monitors. Once they were done they would each build another one so that, by the time the monitors were ready, they would each have two turrets ready to be mounted on them. If everything worked right, those things would be a major addition to our fleet. However, we had to consider them experimental and accept that we may be disappointed.

Next to the monitors we had two new frames going up. The first things they were each going to do was build four of our standard 'medium beam' turrets, just like the ones on most of our ships. That would give us 20 spare turrets. Then, as soon as we had our Asians back, they were each going to take in one of our Africas and swap out four of their eight remaining disruptor turrets with beam turrets. That was going to be a bit ugly; the turrets would have to be pushed out some on sponsons to make space for the beam generators underneath, but actually that was a good thing tactically because it gave them a better view of the surrounding space.

Any extra beam turrets would be kept as fixed defenses around the shipyard itself. They would belong to Bill's Marines. That, at least temporarily, was going to have to be our answer to the Sa'arm bombers. If they came at us in larger quantities, we wouldn't be able to get them all with missiles. We needed quick-aiming, quick-firing weapons that didn't run out of things to throw.

No one had come up with a good use for the disruptor turrets. They were devastating, but only if they got in close. And, they were slow to recharge and be ready for a second shot. Our analysis of the recent battle made it clear that the Sa'arm knew about our Africas, considered them harmless from long range, and thus didn't get close to our ships.

We were also going to start on our next group of ships, a four-turret version of our Raptors. That was kind of a gamble, because we still had no proof that we could make a turret work, but the ships would take so long to build that we needed to start as soon as we could. I authorized, and Deepak directed, the construction of eight large frames to build eight Raptors in. By the time actual construction started we would have a better idea of what we were doing. We hoped.

When the first turrets for our monitors were ready, we would be able to do some testing and figure out if they worked, if they needed some changes, or if we were just wasting our time on the whole idea. If it turned out to be the latter, we would just complete our eight new Raptors to the more conventional design, hopefully with some guided-missile launchers. In the same way, when the monitors themselves were completed in about a month and a half, we could do enough testing to tell us which way to finish the Raptors.

We have no place free to repair Nice, and nothing that will be free soon. Not that is large enough, at least. And, we're not going to stop one of our construction projects, tow the hulk out of the way, put Nice in there, make her all pretty again, and tow the hulk back into the frame to continue work. Fine, put another medium-sized frame next to the two frames building beam turrets for the Africas. Put Nice there and start ripping the damaged parts out.

Make sure that the automated machinery understands that any organics found do NOT get recycled; they get gathered together. Call it a religious requirement. Any organics found will get recycled by God, in His time. We will launch them into Beerat and when God gets around to it they will go into the next generation of planets and stars.

For that matter, Nice will be needing some of those new turrets herself. That was convenient. Good call, Deepak! Beyond that, though, it was a pretty easy decision to go ahead and add a Junior-Hero mount to Nice while we were rebuilding her. To start with, it would be a fixed spinal mount like a Hero had, but once we had turrets under control we could look at refitting her with one. Either way, having one fixed gun was better than not having any at all.

As soon as Nice was safely in the construction frame we decommissioned her and dismissed her entire surviving crew to Hotel with orders to not surface for ten days. When that was up, we put them back to work putting their ship back together, and started cycling everyone else from Taffy-2 through the resort. If they wanted to help improve it, that's good, but just lounging around for their time off was fine, too.

We had a small housekeeping staff there at all times, and as long as we had "working people" there we transferred as many of our rejected princess concubines there as they could house, to let them work on their social skills. To make sure they had a good example to work from, we sent all the vacationing crew's families there, too, to enjoy their vacations with them, and quietly passed the word that there wasn't much we could do to reward people but there were a few things.

Anyone who was willing to take on one of these wayward girls (or one of Tina's hundred dicks, in some cases) would be authorized one additional concubine, as long as the sponsor's other concubines passed on it, too. We were trying to build families, not destroy them. Their records would show the reason as "Served in Taffy-2 during first naval battle of Beerat". That 'first' was because we figured that there would probably be more.

While I was at it, I ordered a complete round of CAP tests on all crew-concubines in Taffy-2. Standing their ground next to their sponsors and winning what was, for us, a major battle while the ships beside them got vaporized counted as a "life-changing event" as far as I was concerned.

I couldn't make any of them sponsors, but if they had it in themselves, that should bring it out. Even remembering that if it had been Taffy-1 Hannah and I would have been among the dead in Harpy, I couldn't get out of my mind that, if we had survived, this would have justified making her take the test.

A lot of those girls got to change their coveralls for uniforms after those tests, so apparently the AIs thought we were doing something right. Personally, I think that that decree and its results made a bigger difference in concubine and dependent morale than the add-on decree did for sponsor morale.

When the smoke had all cleared, our people were remembering the good results of that fight more than the bad results. Not that we forgot our lost, but they weren't weighing on our minds as much. We got a lot of good out of their sacrifice. The big one, from my point of view, was that for the first time I could really trust those ships to work together no matter what happened.

Our crews KNEW we could win, and even more important they KNEW that their brothers and sisters would stand beside them through everything until it was over. I included Taffy One in this, since they all knew that they could do anything that -Two had done, if it happened to be their turn next. That took a major load off my mind. They had become a fleet, a force that I could trust as much as I had trusted those crazies back at Tulakat's OPF.

We were talking about this in one of our staff meetings, when some half-wit pointed out that I had become like Caesar, and could say to one man "Come" and he would come and to another man "Go" and he would go. Those meetings were supposed to be safe, secure, and somewhat private, but no that just had to become public fodder. At least the idiocy didn't come out of my mouth this time.

On the other hand, Larry's actions in command of Taffy-2 made it clear that we'd missed something in our commanding officer training program. We could have made a hard split between scouts and fighters, but that would lead to even bigger headaches when someone had to do something they weren't trained for. Better to admit the mistake and fix it.

As quickly as possible, we started rotating our scout COs into command of our warships, and while we were at it we made "Department Head or XO of a scout" one of the tickets that had to be punched for the warship officers before they were eligible for command. This kind of thing used to take offices full of secretaries and clerks to keep straight; with the AIs it was easy. All we had to do was make the tentative decision about what we wanted to do, ask them how the manning looked, and if it worked tell them "do it". If it didn't work, figure out why and fix it.

I promoted Larry to Colonel and gave him command of one of the destroyers as soon as we promoted her old CO to command of one of our larger ships.

Yes, we included Paul Bunyan's crew in those deals. Not at first, we had already forgotten about them again, but when they found out about Taffy-2's good deal they made a stink about who deserved what and got told that for the purposes of those two decrees, yeah, they were considered part of Taffy-2.

A lot of our families were becoming somewhat complex, as many of the ex-concubines stayed with their previous sponsors to form combined households. It also became clear that, with the ex-sponsors entitled to a replacement and an add-on, and the ex-concubines entitled to at least three of their own, our glut of extra concubines wasn't going to last long at all.

All of this added to Tina's workload, but as this was her job, I refused to be sympathetic. I did authorize her some assistants, though. After conferring with the AIs, the ex-sponsors and Commanding Officers in two cases and the parents in the third, I blessed two of our new sponsors as Signifers in the Civil Service, and the youngster who had just turned 14 as an Optio.

I sat in on their commissioning ceremony, then a short conference where they decided how they would divide their efforts. To start with, Tina was going to stay at the Womb with the Optio as an assistant, while one ex-conk would go to Hotel and deal with all the issues there as well as at Barton Yard, and the other would go to Harpy and deal with the active fleet's issues.

My only input was to point out that we now had four Civil Service officers, and that was more than probably any other system aside from Sol itself. This was not going to be a secret, either. I did not think it reasonable that systems with none would accept this without argument. While I would fight extradition as long as I could, there were people who could order some of them transferred so they needed to keep that in the backs of their minds.

And, I kept in the back of my mind that any system that wanted a CS officer could get as many as they wanted the same way we had: let a marginal sponsor volunteer for the CS instead of making them enter one of the combat forces. Face it, not everyone is cut out to be shot at with a smile.

The reason that Signifer Janice Mattlan was going to Harpy was that I was pulling her from Taffy-1 to serve as the fleet's flagship until we had something better. She was bigger and tougher than any other ship we had, but the Dickheads had demonstrated that the difference wasn't significant in an actual fight, and she just didn't have the offensive tools to contribute to a long-range running battle. She was, just like the Africas we had started with, nothing more than a Marine-style bullet-sponge, kept around to absorb bullets before they hurt anyone else.

On the other hand, she was the largest ship we had, with more armor than anything else we had, and she did have a good amount of space, so she was the logical choice for a floating headquarters ship with an Admiral's staff. I was finally going to get to ride around with some armor around my ass. And, pulling her kept the two Taffies effectively the same. Or, it would as soon as -Two got Nice back.

We could also use her as a test-bed, a ship that we could mess with without constantly changing the two task forces. And, we would start with more armor: the material being excavated to dig the Womb was mostly metal, and we had far more iron, nickel, and various other metals laying around than we needed for our shipbuilding projects. One prime use was improved armor, and we could use Harpy to see how the added mass affected our shiphandling.

The basic material used was a kind of honeycomb, made out of the toughest alloy we could mix with the materials at hand. Not the hardest, as that comes with brittleness when it fails. The toughest, meaning the most energy absorption before failure, and bending rather than shattering when it does fail. The engineers talked about modulus of elasticity and deformation but I preferred to keep it to English where I could understand them.

The bottom line was that the walls of the honeycomb absorbed a lot of energy before failing, and the spaces between the walls forced any excess to dissipate some before reaching the next wall. Apparently a meter of this stuff massed roughly one quarter of what a solid meter of the same material would mass, but reduced the kinetic energy of an incoming projectile roughly as well as half a meter of solid material would. It was even more effective on directed energy weapons, as most of the energy got absorbed by the first layer it reached. The only thing to reach the second layer would be the secondary projectiles, the vaporized outer layer. With 20 or so layers per meter and several meters of armor, any hull protected by this would be impervious to energy weapons.

It was the sort of thing that could only be made by a 3D printer or replicator, or a construction AI directing googols of nanites. Building it by Earth's traditional methods would give us a bunch of welded joints that were far more brittle and weak than we wanted.

Any honeycombed armor that we added would occupy four times the volume that the same mass in solid armor would, and provide twice the protection. And, we were floating in space. There wasn't much to stop us from adding as much armor to the outside of our ships as we wanted, volume-wise. The only limits would be the added strain on our engines moving the added mass around, and the need to not block weapons, sensors, hatches, or engines.

I left the engineers playing with their virtual sliderules and calculators, first figuring out how much mass they could add to Harpy before it showed too much at the helm, and then where-all that mass should be placed for best effect. They were giving me a headache.

We had Athens send another one of our Castles out to see if they could find any survivors from Brownson and Cowell. That got confusing, because our snoops were both on station and knew nothing. Their AIs backed them up, the Dickheads were still building ships but they hadn't sent anybody our way that they had noticed. Well, they came from somewhere, dammit! Maybe another system.

For a long-term answer to the bombers, we were going to ask for help again. Going back to the WW2 Pacific campaign that we seemed destined to re-fight here, the answer to bombers carrying weapons that could sink ships had two parts.

First, tactically, the defender sent out fighters to shoot down (or at least damage) as many bombers as possible. None of us knew anything about Naval Aviation beyond knowing that, as weapon systems, the planes were cheap compared to ships, but if looked at as expendable munitions they were far more expensive than shells or missiles, and the pilots were even more expensive than the planes were, and they were also expendable munitions. Add that to the next report, too: 'Can we have a couple carriers with fighter wings and spare pilots?' We can build replacement fighters. Build replacement pilots? Not so much.

Second, the other thing that was done about bombers in WW2 was more strategic, to eliminate them at the source; sinking the carriers and destroying the airstrips they flew from, and eventually destroying the factories that built them, along with preventing the enemy from importing the raw materials they needed to rebuild the factories and build more bombers. In our case, eliminating the source was going to have to remain on our "to-do list" for the foreseeable future.

We spent a long time looking at the AAR from that fight. Some of the lessons were obvious, some not. Some were good, some not. There wasn't much we could add to the Confederacy's knowledge base about the Volumnas, beyond verifying that watching one blow up was almost as good as getting head.

We could update our data on the Vervactors, of course. Vector analysis told us a lot about mass, acceleration, and maneuverability. The official armament estimate still wasn't going to get much clearer than "a lot of beam weapons", but we had some details. We were pretty sure that we had been hit by beams from at least 30 different locations on Mincemeat-3.

Someone had asked if it could be 27 (3x3x3) but no, it was a hard minimum of 29 and probably more. There may have been more mounts that could not see us so they didn't fire. The AIs were trying to analyze their optical imagery. If they could positively identify one of their weapon mounts in the process of firing, they could apply pattern recognition and locate every one of those weapons on the hull.

It may have been a range thing, but we could report positively that our current shields would stop one hit from a Vervactor's beam weapons. We had to follow that datum up with the corollary that our current shields would probably not stop two at the same time, or within something like half a second. We had been lucky to not take any damage from them. Apparently they considered 500 kilometers their outside range, and due to the way the battle ended we did not know if they would do more damage if they got closer than 400 Km.

The bombers were going to be a problem. We could not find any evidence of a gross failure of Nice's armor, hull, and frame from poor design or construction. From Nice's damage, we estimated that their plasma torpedos did roughly ten times as much damage as ours did. That then begged the question of how they did that with small craft. We had to use a huge ship-powered containment field to generate our PTs. However, we weren't going to find out how they did it until we could examine one of their bombers. Which meant somehow stopping one without completely destroying it.

I put my foot down on that immediately. We were not going to ask our people to risk their own ships in hopes of crippling a bomber. If a bomber showed up, I wanted it killed as a priority target before it could launch.

Well, what was a bomber's outside range for launching? All we knew was that the one that launched on Nice did so from about 90 klicks. Absent any better info, we had to assume that they had the same max range that ours did, 98 (usually rounded to 100) kilometers, and so our tactical doctrine was adjusted to make bombers a priority target so that we could kill all bombers before they reached that range.

Telemetry -the AIs are always talking to each other- told us that Kestrel had tried swatting the bombers with sand canisters but had not hit any; again, this pointed out that we needed small anti-aircraft type guided missiles on every ship. Firing ballistic weapons at the Sa'arm was useless unless the projectile came in so fast they could not dodge, like our railgun slugs.

We already knew that Kestrel had gotten one bomber with a particle beam. It looked like she had gotten another after it had launched both torpedos, and we couldn't find anything at all about the last bomber. So, from the available enemy forces, Kestrel had been killed by a minimum of two PTs, and a maximum of four PTs and a ramming by a bomber, or maybe by two PTs and then a ramming by a bomber that still held two PTs as a kind of warhead. Given what a single PT hit had done to Nice, we had to accept anything in that range as capable of causing Kestrel's loss.

Complete sets of tactical data from every ship involved got sent to Brak for analysis in case they saw something that we had missed. In return we asked for small guided missiles, fighters, and anything else they had handy that they didn't need.

All we got back were plans for a small missile and a mount to launch them. The fleet was already aware of this problem and had developed a retractable mount that launched a small guided missile from a replaceable seven-round module; the mount would extend out for firing, then retract when not in use into a bay that held six reload modules. The whole thing took up less room than just about anything it might replace, since a whole reload module was less than a meter across. As requested, the mount was completely automated -including reloading- and could take targeting instructions from our fire control systems.

The missiles themselves were only 100 mm wide and about two meters long and accelerated at 5 g, but they could hold that acceleration for about 6 minutes. The low acceleration was on purpose, to ensure that closing speed was low enough to allow the guidance system to correct for any target maneuvers.

One minute after launch they were moving 3 Kps relative to the launcher, and had already moved 90 kilometers. After 2 minutes, they had doubled that speed and had moved 360 kilometers. Burnout would happen just over 3000 Km down range, so that was the engagement envelope if we wanted to prevent any more hits by those plasma torpedos: 3000 Km down to 100 Km.

The acceleration was not adjustable, but we could control closing speed by controlling distance to target when launched. The farther the target, the faster the missile would be moving when it reached the target. Unfortunately, a high closing speed would cause problems for both sides. The target would not have long to recognize the threat and do something about it, but at the same time if the target dodged at all the missile would not have long to correct its path. Thus, if we launched at long range and missed, a re-launch at the same target should work since the target would be closer and the missile would be slower and more maneuverable.

To try to eliminate accidents, the missiles had two "range safety" features. The missiles were supposed to self-destruct if they detected a shield on the target or if their target was reachable in less than a programmable time. To maximize target damage and to ensure complete destruction, they had an explosive warhead right behind the sensor head and several smaller charges scattered throughout the body.

They also, as a matter of standard procedure, had the same failsafe that every projectile we carried had: a set of nanites programmed to wait a particular time -for these missiles it was 20 minutes- and then start disassembling the missile. Within an hour or so, the missile would be roughly 80 kilograms of monatomic dust in a slowly spreading cloud. Within a day the cloud would have dispersed enough that any of the Confederacy's ships with their original nav shield would be safe.

The first two safeties could be disabled on the fly in case we found out in the middle of an action that the Sa'arm bombers did, after all, have shields, or if there were no friendlies around. The third safety could not be disabled -the AIs would not allow the launch if those nanites were not present and active- but it could be reset to something longer -like two days- if it seemed appropriate to try for a long-range shot at something.

This might work. We'll run some tests, but it will probably end up replacing the CIWS rail guns on all of our ships. The inventors were calling it the StarSparrow. I caught the reference, one of the US Navy's early ship-launched anti-aircraft missiles had been the SeaSparrow.

We set up yet another small-craft construction frame and had it start building these units, as well as some programmable target drones that could pretend to be Sa'arm bombers so that we could find out if these missiles really worked, and figure out our doctrine.

While we were at it, we also started building small automated sensor stations that we could place between and behind the main stations, to ensure that we caught anyone sneaking around in the outer system. There was no way we could build the kind of missile shell that Sol was working on to keep troublemakers out, but we should be able to build a sensor shell that at least told us that some had gotten in.

Our "Academy of Beerology" kept reminding me that we weren't going to get to ignore the Beer any more, because they had stopped ignoring us.

Visiting the Academy was fun. Our anthropologist and his assistants had gotten one of the early pods in Level Two -the Wombs 'government level'- to use as an office, mostly just to get them out of their cramped quarters on one of the Explorers, and had come up with that name as a way to imply that they were willing to teach, but they were mostly a research group.

Have you ever seen a poster for "St Pauli Girl" beer, from Germany? The Academy's front door had a hologram of one of their concubines, one with impressive assets, with said assets trying to escape from a conk-style dirndl while carrying six mugs of beer. Very distracting. What was worse, every one of their concubines dressed like that when in the shop, and none of them were exactly flat-chested. The only thing missing was the actual beer. After my first visit, I always took one of my girls with me, just to make sure that if I got distracted it was by the right people.

Anyway, getting back to the Beer, the explosions in their sky were pretty obvious, since this last set weren't much further out than their moon was. Worse, the entire running battle had occurred outward of the planet from their sun, so pretty much by definition all those explosions were in their night sky. There was no way they could have missed them.

The Academy had gotten their real-time translator going first off and were concentrating on trying to understand the culture. The Beer were talking among themselves about us, and it wouldn't be long before they tried contacting us. We need better direction than "leave them alone". That went into the next message torpedo.

That was a milestone, of sorts. We were sending message torpedos to Brak pretty much every day, like a real navy base would. We were getting them pretty much every day, too. This was just like the bureaucracy back on Earth. You knew you were established when you got on the "distribution list" for all the stupid little paperwork messages that went to all commands, all bases, all ships to ensure that we all, on the same day, stopped sending form DD-212 in triplicate because we all had copiers; to save paper we only needed to send two copies. Ya know? If you stopped sending all these stupid messages, it would save a lot more paper than this change ever will....

Okay, maybe George is useful. He and the AIs kept me from having to read all the routine stuff.

The next period, almost a year, was a busy but quiet growing time for us. We built new ships, upgraded old ships, finished our sensor platform shell, started giving the platforms missiles and crews, finished our first fuel production station and started building two more, got all our Asians back from the Yard and put the Africans back in -only two at a time- to get half of their Particle Disruptor systems ripped out and some more twin Particle Beam turrets installed in their place, had the four extra frames start building more of our new Shiro-II class so we had 20 of them building at once, got our three Monitors working, built some two-turret Europa-sized cruisers, finished our first set of four-turret large cruisers and started on another set.....

Eventually we felt secure enough that we built a few medium-sized frames near the Womb, and built some Auroras to take over the Sol-Beerat run and give Beebe and Hillary a rest.

As soon as we got our first group of six Shiro-IIs, we re-organized the fleet. The entire scout force knew what was desired of them by this time, and we were all close enough that they didn't really need their own flagship. Depending upon where they were, and where Athens was, it was entirely possible that one of them would contact the Yard or the Womb or the Greeks with a request that they relay something to Athens and then send the answer on out to them. This was silly.

We moved Jennifer out of Harpy, formally promoted her to Rear Admiral, and gave her everything outside of Ale's orbit: the scanner stations, their missiles, and the scout group, to include any snoops we sent to other systems. She looked things over and decided that she would put her command post over at the Greeks. That justified a lot of infrastructure there beyond the missile stations, and we were fine with it attracting pests, since that again diverted unwanted attention from Beer and the Womb. Before long the Greeks were a fortress in their own right.

We pulled Athens in, gave her and Lodz the same upgrades that Nice had, and split our combatants into three Taffies, designating the skippers of the three Europa-Pluses as Task Force Commodores. When we started, each Taffy had a Europa-Plus as flag, two Asians-Plus, two Africa-Pluses (with half and half disruptors and beams), and two Shiro-IIs. Every ship in every Task Force either had one of our Junior Hero guns on a mount that could be elevated, or one of our Baby Hero guns on a fixed spinal mount. We sent all the standard Shiros, Castles/Ainsworths, and Patricians back out to the scout group.

We kept Paul Bunyan at the Beer-moon L2, stationed John Henry at Ale protecting Hotel and the Yard, and put Johnny Appleseed over at the Greeks protecting Jennifer's headquarters. We put Taffy-1 with Paul Bunyan, but the other two Taffies got put at the Beerat-Beer L4 and L5, since we still couldn't keep them close to Beer.

The "improved Shiro" that we were building filled in the niche between our scouts which shouldn't be fighting and our Destroyers which weren't as sneaky. Each Shiro-II had a "Baby Hero" in a nose mount with about 10 degrees of elevation either way, two Plasma Torpedo launchers, and two medium Particle Beam projectors. They also got two of the new StarSparrow launchers, and both of the original Shiro's Point Defense Railguns. We had originally wanted them to carry some missiles like the Patricians, but we just couldn't find a way to cram the launchers in along with a decent sized magazine without either dropping something more important or making it too large to build quickly so we finally dropped it from the requirements list.

As each new Shiro-II commissioned, we added it to one of the three Taffies. Then, for every two that a Taffy got, we took an earlier one out and sent it to join the scout shell, using their time in the Taffies as a shakedown cruise that got them some experience running their ship and working with others. With twenty frames taking a month and a half to build each one, after three months and some change we had forty of them, and we started thinking about retiring our Castles.

We now had six of the -IIs in each Taffy and another 22 out in the scout shell, plus the four original Shiros and the two Patricians. At the same time, their job out in the scout shell had been greatly simplified by our array of sensor stations, all twelve of which were now fully operational with their own missiles. However, we remembered how stretched thin we had been just our original ships and we built another group of twenty.

We seriously considered mothballing some of the Castles just to provide the officer corps for them all. We had the bodies to man them all, but we didn't have the core of experienced officers we needed to make it safe to sail with inexperienced crews. However, another one of my decisions made that impossible. We still needed the Castles, and we needed them with good crews who could act on their own.

We ended up with each Taffy having eight of the Shiro-IIs with the balance out with the scouts, and we finally thought we had enough of our small ships to seriously start picketing the neighboring systems. That was one of my more agonizing decisions. I finally decided that we could not take a chance on one of our -Plus ships being captured, or even closely observed while in combat, and vetoed sending any of them out of the system. For now, we restricted their use to system defense, and if we ran out of command teams we trusted we shorted the ships that would stay in the company of other ships.

We only sent our Castles out snooping. Again, we tried to give them the best chance we could. We had better sensors than the Dickheads did. We didn't need to sail through their formations to count their ships. Our boys were given orders to pop out at least six light-hours out from the primary, and come in under max EmCon, going no further than needed to see what was going on. We also gave them orders to not engage in combat for any reason other than to escape if trapped, and if they had to fight they had better shields than the Sa'arm scouts.

We sent scouts to the nearest four systems at first, three ships each. As soon as they arrived on station, one was to return to report. The other two would remain until relieved, with our intention being to send a relief ship every month. That would set up a rotation of no more than two months out with a month back home, and if necessary one ship could come back with a warning while leaving the other on-station to keep an eye on things.

We finally got our three experimental "Monitors" completed and their turrets installed and started playing with them. I named the first one Monitor, but I let Kevin name the other two Erebus and Terror. Not only did they look ugly and mean, they acted ugly and mean, too. The turrets worked just like the AIs promised they would, but off-centerline shots just put too much strain on the hulls. The Asians they were based on simply didn't have the mass to absorb the impulse. After a couple of test shots, all three went right back in the yard again to get ripped apart and have their entire structure beefed up. Bigger frames, thicker bulkheads, and, hell, why not, more external armor, anything to add more mass.

Well, that put a temporary stop to that side of our buildup. We were adding more and more armor to the outside of Harpy, and we had planned to put her in the yard to become a "Plus" once the Monitors were operational, but once we realized that the Monitors weren't going to be available for awhile we moved Harpy up the schedule. She went in our "cruiser upgrade" frame the day that Athens left it with a big nose gun and a lot more armor.

We also put all the frames that we had been using for the destroyer upgrades to work building some new cruisers, as we figured that something midway between the new large cruisers and the new scouts would be more helpful than some more escort destroyers. Concept-wise, we cut a Europa in half and kept the missile front end and engineering department in the back, put two Junior-Hero turrets in the middle between them, and beefed everything up to handle the strain of firing the guns. Yeah, we added some armor, too.

That would make them general-purpose cruisers, able to do anything adequately. We did this because the heavy assault cruisers we were already building were so big and taking so long that we weren't sure we would ever get them finished in time, and all they would have were those four big guns anyway. If the guns turned out to not be right for something, well, they were all those ships had.

While Harpy was in the frame, we used some of the extra space the Raptor design gave us to install some Europa-style missile systems in her, too. Two of the forward canister launchers got replaced by missile tubes, and at each of the four "broadside" arrays we did the same thing with two of the three canister launchers. That gave her ten missile tubes and six canister launchers.

The only hard part to this was due to a quirk of the design: the forward canister launchers didn't have their own magazines. Each of the four forward launchers had a small "ready locker" that held an assortment of canisters for immediate use and a transfer tube that pulled canisters from that quadrant's broadside magazine. That system worked, for the relatively small inert canisters. It would not work, for the much-larger and much more complicated missiles.

Installing missile storage for the forward tubes thus ate up a lot of space that could have been used for other things, but there was no way we wanted a warship under fire to have full-sized missiles being snaked around inside the ship. Somewhere, somehow, Murphy would show us it was a bad idea. Instead, we went to the trouble of giving each of the five launcher pairs their own magazine. Each one held 40 of our standard ship-killer missiles, for a total of 200 for the whole ship.

In comparison, each of our Europas only carried 60 missiles. That was because the Europas were our first human warship design, and they were built before a lot of our lessons were learned, lessons we learned by, well, using the Europas. They had been partly intended as experiments, to see what we need, and as much as the Europas were improvements over the Castles and Patricians, the Raptors and Africas and Asians were improved again over them.

Those missile magazines took a lot of room. With this missile upgrade, we had pretty much decided that Harpy would never get one of our big guns, but we needed to hedge our bets anyway. What if we found a problem with those things, one that only showed up in combat? We needed some ships that didn't depend upon them, at least until we were sure we had all the bugs worked out. This way, we could put Harpy in with the three Monitors and they would have some cover if their guns did something bad. At the same time, the missiles weren't as guaranteed-to-hit as the guns were at close range, but they had far, far longer range.

Hillary and Beebe between them eventually brought all of our people along with new recruits and various transfers, and we kept growing. Tina had her own family and would act like an independent lady in public, but she would jump to do anything I suggested if we were alone together.

Monique, on the other hand, acted the role of the perfect concubine in public but had a lot of trouble with some of the private stuff. I didn't press her. She would heal faster without being pushed. Besides, if I wanted something weird Hannah, Joannie, LaRhonda, and Tina would be right there asking if they could do it for, to, or with me.

I had to play honest and leave some of my people until the last ferry trip, but since we only needed two it wasn't that difficult. In fact, having everyone come in two waves made my life a good deal simpler. If Joannie and LaRhonda came together, LaRhonda would feel slighted because Joannie would go off the deep end again if I didn't give her the first night.

Splitting them into two loads let Joannie bring some of the kids back in Hillary and then have her night without hurting anyone's feelings. Then, when Beebe came back with the last load, I could give LaRhonda all the attention that she deserved without anyone getting upset.

When we brought up Joannie showing up in a day or two Hannah pointed out that if I wanted anything she wasn't going to refuse, but it might go better with Joannie if I hadn't gotten any for a few days and could wear her out. The second part sounded like a great idea, but I wasn't sure about the first part. Still, she was right so I spent a couple nights with Hannah and Monique taking turns sleeping on me but not doing anything. I expect that the proverbial uninterested observer would conclude that I was fairly cranky by the time I met Joannie in our quarters on Barton.

We had had a vidcon earlier when Hillary first got in, with Joannie making sure I hadn't forgotten her before she put eight different children on to say "Hi!" to Daddy. Not that they could all talk yet, since she had brought Hannah's Joseph with her. I had wanted Michael too but allowed myself to be talked out of it. He should probably stay with LaRhonda.

When I got home I got hit by a half-dozen various-sized children who all wanted to hug Daddy. I ended up on the floor being fought over until they all got tired. Eventually, though, they all got pulled off me and Joannie and I were pushed into our bedroom and the door closed. Does it count as "premature" if you both do it?

Not that either of us had gone to any great effort, but we were just resting, waiting until I could do her again when the door opened and Hannah announced that dinner would be 'dressed' tonight since we had kids again. Grumble. Not only do I not want to get dressed again, I don't even want to get up again. Still, that's one of our principles. We can't expect the kids to grow up to be stable adults, the kind of people who pass the CAP test, if we don't give them stable homes with stable parents who make sure they eat well and always wash behind their ears.

On the other hand, what's the point of being King if you don't ever abuse your authority? I put my uniform back on to look respectable for the kids, but all I let Joannie have was a concubine smock that was too tight around her chest and only fell an inch or so below her crotch when she stood up straight. I had Joannie lick little Tommy clean before I put him away, but she was still dripping when we walked out of the bedroom. As a compromise I had Monique fold a towel up and put it on Joannie's chair at the table.

Dinner was kind of odd, since the kids wanted to act up but not get caught by me, Hannah was happily useless with Joseph on her shoulder, Monique wasn't really up to herding children, and Joannie wanted to concentrate on me. We needed LaRhonda. I think everyone agreed with that.

Eventually we escaped again and Joannie spent the rest of the night trying to kill me. That was good. It's hard enough for a man to wear out a woman who just enjoys making babies. When she also likes giving head, it's impossible. When you are idiot enough to have the med-tubes make her enjoy anal sex enough that she'll ask for it, thinking you can wear her out belongs on the children's aisle next to Snow White and Mary Poppins. Still, she got the emotional reassurance fix she needed and we could go back to a three-way rotation until LaRhonda showed up with the rest of the kids.

LaRhonda had been kind of rough when we had met, but with her future as stable and secure as anyone's, she had turned around and provided that same stability and security to all of our children. There was no question but that Hannah was the "head conk", but LaRhonda was the head Mommy and that was more important to, what? eighteen of the twenty-four people in this family. Any kind of question about any of the kids didn't get answered until we had heard her opinion.

When Beebe showed up with the rest of our people, we let all the rug-rats knock me down and play "King of the Admiral" on me for awhile before it was LaRhonda's turn. Each person is different. LaRhonda was fine with me fucking the hell out of her, but she also liked a long slow screw, and was very happy to just curl up for the rest of the night and sleep in my arms until we had to get up.

I'm sure I mentioned that was one of the things I liked about her, that she slept and I could sleep too. Tina and Joannie and Monique were all too restless and nobody got any sleep when I had them in bed with me. Hannah and LaRhonda would curl up and sleep until someone woke them up. Are you a man? Like to play with big fat titties? Get a woman with some padding, do what you want to do, roll her on her side and get behind her, grab a tittie and sleep all night long with your nose in her hair, unless she wakes you up because you're poking her rear end in your sleep and she wants it somewhere else. Being woken up for that is okay, too.

Eventually we got the three Monitors back out and working right. With all the added mass from structural improvements and several meters of armor they handled somewhat like a drunken buffalo, but they all worked and they all worked right and we could fire either gun in any direction without worrying about the ship shaking apart. By this time, not even a blind man would have mistaken them for the destroyers they had been based on. They were longer, wider, higher, and far more massive. And far less maneuverable. They were never going to dodge anything incoming.

We put Harpy in charge with the four of them as our heavily-armored main battle line, gave them the three Folk-Heros as auxiliaries and a few Shiro-IIs for screening, and told them to stay at L2 unless we had visitors. If we did get another visit, they were to do the same thing Paul Bunyan had done the last time: squat down between Beer and the Dickheads like a line of sumo wrestlers and make the Dickheads go through them.

With the prize guarded as well as we could, we pulled Taffy-1 out from there and let them rove around the system, waiting for trouble. Me, I moved me and my staff back into Barton's penthouse suite until we had another warship we could "waste" as fleet flag.

The Confederacy -look, when I say "The Confederacy" I usually mean this human military buildup, the Navy and Marine Corps and the various supporting structures like the Fleet Auxiliary and the Civil Service, all of which had nothing to do with the real "Confederacy" with Darjee and K'treel and Tu'ull and who knew who else- had nothing that corresponded to anything like Earth's "week". All the military organizations were on 24/7, and that was that. Still, we needed to look ahead towards a time when there was more than just a military.

Besides, that "everyone 24/7" was very shortsighted. No one could be "on" all the time. People got burned out if they tried to stay focused for too long. Everyone needed some off time. To that end, we here in Beerat tried to set up a rotation where everyone got a day off at least every ten days.

That was a real day off, completely off, unless we were actually in the process of shooting at live dickheads. If you have an assigned C3 -Battlestations- task, you have to let the ship's AI (and XO) know where you are going, but you don't have to ask permission. If you are shore-based without an assigned C3 task, you are completely free. That was worded that way because a good many of our people may not have been assigned to a particular ship but they still had a headquarters or other Battlestations assignment and their day off was getting cancelled if we got another visit.

Yes, if your ship was four light-hours out in a patrol sweep of the Oort Cloud, you weren't going very far. Still, the knowledge that you had 24 hours off with no one hassling you did a lot to keep our people focused on the other nine days.

We made it work by carefully going over our manning documents and recognizing which jobs must be done at all times, which jobs only needed done at C3, and which jobs were there only because we had needed that job done on Earth. When we looked at manning from the C3 perspective, most ships had enough extra personnel that they could handle the 10th day off without too much trouble.

The non-warship jobs that had to be done around the clock we filled by pulling from a labor pool that was chock full of temporary workers, our Cadet Corps.

Have I mentioned our Cadet Corps yet? As long as we didn't have any emergencies, I tried to get our Executive Council together for an evening "steering" conference at least once a week, to make sure that all our people were moving in the same direction, and that this direction was as close to the right one as we could get. Back on Earth, that was just me, Bill, and Kevin at first, then Arturo and Janet got dragged in once we organized the Taffys.

Once we got to Beerat, we re-defined a "week" to be ten days, and started adding people to the group as we grew. Deepak and Tina got added first. Deepak was officially added because as a Lt Colonel he was formally the Commander, Ale Sector Defense Force, but he was really there as the shipyard guy who told us what we could have and when, as well as what we couldn't have and why. Tina was there as the head of the Civil Service, to keep us up to date on what the concubine in the corridor thought, as well as all the dependents.

We kept these conferences as informal as possible, as the idea was to find out what was really going on and get people's real thoughts, not to get sullen obedience. We had formal meetings for the sullen obedience stuff.

I really enjoyed the informal ones, because we could hold them as part of a dinner, and I could cheat. Each of us "important people" would bring a concubine for company, and of course whoever was hosting it had their whole family present if they wanted. What I mean by cheating is that, even if Bill or someone else was hosting the conference, I'd probably have at least three of my girls there. I would bring Joannie or LaRhonda or Monique, then Tina would be there in her own right, and since we usually had an assistant or aide with us, Tina was more likely than not to bring her head assistant, who happened to be a concubine named Hannah Williams....

Anyway, we weren't getting regular shipments of colonists, because we weren't really a colony. However, DECO was hitting its stride with a couple hundred Auroras and the new Kilos and fifty or so extraction teams taking turns pulling people off Earth, so they set aside an Aurora for people they thought we could use. That, we were pretty sure, was a euphemism for "odd people we don't have a place for".

It didn't matter, one way or another, we could use whoever we got. We got two trips from the "I Can't Pronounce That", no shit, that was its name, before we got Hillary and Beebe in service as our own regularly scheduled shipping line and they sent ICPT somewhere else.

Back to the cadets. We had gotten a load of people from the Can't and we were discussing their general lack of qualities, and somehow that got turned into a discussion of what we were doing to develop tomorrow's leaders, the people who would have to lead and manage these guys. Tina told us about another case in her "What Works" file about some CS rep who had been forced to defend their home with nothing but concubines and dependents, because the supposed defenders were off doing something else.

The upshot was that we set up a cadet officer training program, and allowed promising 12- and 13-year-olds to serve as apprentice officers, or cadets, in their chosen field. That got them to think about something beyond getting laid on their 14th birthday, and got us adults some free labor. It would also, eventually, give us some baby officers who weren't completely green.

We couldn't let the cadets serve on an active warship if it was out where it might get shot at, but they helped us in all our construction projects, helped man our in-system freighters and ferries, helped us repair our broken ships, helped us build new ones, and generally acted as that many more sponsors. They also acted as temporary stand-ins on our active warships, sometimes, when one of them was close enough to the Womb or Hotel or the shipyard or even L2 to use transporters.

Also, just to cover our consciences, we made every one of them watch a short presentation that showed a ship getting repaired, it getting underway in an attack before repairs were completed, and last the ship getting shot up protecting our people. Before the cadets could be posted to a ship as part of a repair or passage crew, we got a recording of the cadet and their sponsor acknowledging that they understood that under some circumstances their temporary posting could turn into a combat posting whether we wanted it to or not.

Of course there were some issues with the kids, but then our adult sponsors weren't perfect either. We accepted the problems as part of the cost of training tomorrow's leaders.

Somewhere in there, we got notice that our request for a Mercury had been granted. The unit it was bringing us didn't mean anything to me, really, but Bill seemed pleased when he saw the message. Apparently it was a company of light Marines that had taken some losses in a Naval fight that got their transport shot up, so the whole unit -or what was left of it- had been sent back to Sol to reconstitute.

That 'light' meant that they specialized in recon and raiding and not open combat, not that they weighed less than the other Marines. The Marine Corps still stood by their policy that an unarmed Marine should be able to beat an unarmed Dickhead in arm-wrestling, so they were all huge compared to normal folk. The only difference between a light and a line company, according to Bill, was equipment, training, and tactics. Our 'lights' even had their own powered armor, and practiced using it often enough that they could, if they needed to.

These guys had been minding their own business, playing acey-deucy, practicing their anal sex on each other, and getting ready for a landing when the transport they were in took some hits. The ship itself wasn't crippled, but the cargo got shot up enough that there wasn't any point in dropping what was left, so it was pulled from the assault and sent back for repairs rather than giving the Dickheads a chance to finish the job.

The Powers That Be decided that what we wanted to do would be a good training period for one of the reconstituted units, so they pulled the old Thor off the scrapheap and sent her out to us with Echo Company of the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Regiment aboard.

That, in turn, made us stop and think about our vague plans for using Marines if we ever got them. The weapons platoon would definitely get sent to Ale under Deepak to beef up, train up, and maybe add some to the yard's fixed defenses. The yard's defenses, I mean, since beyond the Big Dick it didn't have any dedicated mobile defenses.

The other three platoons were going to be put to work practicing their breaking and entering skills. Meanwhile, we asked the AIs for their best-guess on what trajectories all the various ship-parts we had made in the last few years might be, and rapidly cobbled up some unmanned probes to go search those trajectories for suitable wreckage. We might still be able to find something from Maiden Castle's fight, and the Vacuna that Majorca and Abbott had killed might have something worth poking around in, too.

Other than that, though, we were pretty sure that there wasn't anything left to investigate. Since we didn't have any boarding parties, in all of our fights we had made sure that we didn't leave anything worth boarding.

Once the probes found something worth investigating, we sent one of our tugs out to go get it. We had built a dozen or so tugs when we first set our yards up and they had been very busy at first. However, once we got our initial outer sensor shell up, then upgraded the stations with manned control modules and missile modules and finally installed the inner sensor shell, the tugs had nothing to do and were pretty much sitting around helping the miners deliver stuff to Barton Yard. No one objected to a long trip out into the Oort Cloud to bring the wreckage back so the Marines could play with it.

We did get one visit from the Dickheads during this period, before we got any of our big ships upgraded, but all it did was leave us scratching our heads. Our sensor shell told us that we had some visitors 'way out, and while we were scrambling to get everyone moving they watched them jump to the system proper.

We were desperately trying to build our forces, because we didn't know how much that group of snoops that Majorca had chased had learned, and we had no idea where they had gone, either. If all they knew was that we had beaten a Volumna screened by two Vervactors, they would probably send three times as much next time. We knew what we were doing now, and we could handle that. However, if they knew how one-sided that fight had turned out to be, we could expect them to send 9 or 27 times that force, and we weren't sure we were ready for that.

What our visitors did was jump closer to Ale, as if they wanted to check that out. From our point of view that was better than Beer or the Womb, but we didn't have much covering it. We had Big Dick and John Henry on station, and Harpy could get there soon, and several missile bases and a whole lot of leftover beam turrets and particle disruptors set up as fixed defenses, but we didn't have any other mobile assets available to help defend Barton Yard and Hotel.

Besides, it looked like it was just three Vacunas. I regretfully told all three Taffies to stay out of it, but start moving towards Beer. These guys may be a part of something larger, they just didn't get the memo delaying the attack for two days. I had Harpy start moving, and Jennifer had a half-dozen of her small boys start converging behind them.

Meanwhile, one of our construction policies was that the engineering spaces came first, specifically for this kind of situation. Deepak and crew shifted from "build everything we can" to "get everything possible moving", and before long the plot started to show "Unnamed Shiro-II #14" and "Unnamed Monitor #3" and various others getting underway. Barton himself was going to stay as long as he could, to make sure that everyone got out.

Every ship has value, no matter how old. As the saying goes, no weapon is obsolete in the hands of a man who knows how to use it. Still, the older ships took men to crew them and if we had better ships available but not the men to crew them, we would move those men from our older ships. The next time we commissioned a batch of our new Shiro-IIs, we were planning to start mothballing some of our old Castles, both because they were obsolete and because we wanted to use the men elsewhere anyway.

Our Patricians were likely to stay in service for awhile though, because we were light on mobile platforms with missiles. Before the bandits got within range of the yard, Laguna Beach got close enough to launch two salvos of missiles from far beyond powered range. None hit, but they came close enough to get the triad's attention.

They re-oriented on her, and Laguna Beach withdrew slowly, allowing the range to close while she occasionally launched another missile. That kept their attention well enough that when Smalley arrived, she got a free shot 'up the kilt' with her complete armament suite before they reacted. One down.

Smalley was a lot closer than Laguna Beach was and a good deal larger to boot, and the two remaining Vacunas pivoted and attacked Smalley. That was probably a fair fight, but Laguna Beach kept taking potshots at them both, and after awhile Capps showed up to the party as well.

Smalley was the only one damaged on our side. She had her PT launcher pretty much destroyed when the two Vacunas started synchronizing their salvos, taking the gunner and his conk with it, and one engineering rating was injured when the forward shield generator overloaded. He would recover.

We left the three dead hulks alone. We had Marines coming! We left Capps to keep an eye on them, since we had no idea what kind of damage-control or repair capability the dickheads had, but otherwise did nothing to disturb them. The Marines could use them as a training exercise. Maybe with live-fire, if the dickheads weren't all dead.

The only trouble they ever gave Capps was a trajectory thing. They may have all been in formation when they came in, but by the end of the battle they were going three different directions at three different speeds. We ended up calling a couple tugs to herd them together where Capps could keep an eye on all three at once until we decided what to do with them.

That synchronized fire thing bothered us. What would happen to the target, if we got 9 Volumnas and 18 Vervactors, and every one synchronized their fire on a single ship? It probably wouldn't be good.

Meanwhile, we had decided on a two-part fire discipline doctrine for us defenders. The scout shell would stay behind or outside of any visitors in hopes that some or all would turn to chase them, and they would concentrate all their fire on one visitor. A colony ship, by preference, but in any event whatever ship appeared to be the most dangerous. If the visitors seemed to be easily killed, then they could make the decision to split their fire among several of them.

Our battle-line, on the other hand, we wanted to believe had the firepower to deal with whatever they met, while we also assumed that they would get the brunt of the attack. Further, since they were defending a habitable planet from colony ships, it was important to get all of them. Completely vaporizing 8 escorts while allowing one damaged colonizer to get past them was not a better result than merely crippling all 9 so that we could deal with them at our leisure. Therefore, our doctrine for them, when presented with multiple first-priority targets, was for each of our ships to concentrate on one enemy until it was dead -or at least crippled- and only combine their fire on one enemy if the one-on-one thing wasn't working.