This post will kill two birds with one stone. A clarification and an announcement/brag.

The Fleet did win the war for us. Both wars. But it was OR/Aeneid's unflagging support of the war effort that allowed the Fleet to do it.

Ever since they were founded practically, OR/Aeneid has had interesting (read eccentric) maintenance contracts and lifetime replacement policies. And in explaining a little bit about that, I will also throw in the hint that I have recently benefitted from them. Thanks to my grandparents.

Once a customer has ordered and received a ship, the history of the ship is updated constantly in OR/Aeneid's databases. Obviously the database can't include every little physical and software patch/kludge/tweak that the engineer might put in, but if there are regular check ups (mandatory) with licensed technicians (spread all over the inhabited system) then most of the ships foibles and individuating traits will show up somehow in her database. It's in the fine print, and there's going to be a few owner/captains out there who didn't know this until now, but it's in the purchase agreement and maintenance contract that OR/Aeneid owns those modifications. So they can use the really clever ones on later models is what I'm guessing.

The captain-pilots that I know about don't care because they think it contributes to the safety of humanity in the Big if this kind of thing is shared. After all, a new tweak on the gadget for hydrogen flow to the fusion plant would benefit everybody.

I know there's a few recent immigrants who have become owners/captains/pilots and discovered this lurking in their contracts and decided to challenge OR/Aeneid about it.

It's going to be really interesting because there is no case law on this sort of thing, and the statutory laws, usually for the country of ownership, while applicable to the contracts, were created more for the Dirt and aren't really recursive. And there really is very little common law yet out here. But there will be soon, the way things are going. The UN is the 'sovereign state' in the Big as far as OR/Aeneid goes, so that's a lot of resources besides OR/Aeneid's own.

OR/Aeneid says that they will replace or repair any damaged or malfunctioning part or parts of the whole, including the whole, during the lifetime of the ship, and that under circumstances determined to be extraordinary by themselves will replace the entire ship anyway. Now I know most of you know that this is what happened during the wars.

When the Jovian and Saturnian settlements came under ballistic attack by the Thaiax, it was the ships that were hit first. And of course, since many of the ships were the habitats too, there were family casualties as well as crew - the two very often being the same.

OR/Aeneid unilaterally invoked extraordinary circumstances and began sending out replacement ships right away, usually with robot pilots so that they could go out at extremely high human-fatal accelerations. They even started redirecting new ships intended for the inner solar system outwards. All new ships were being outfitted with railguns and lasers, and the occasional plasma cannon.

Then as information came back about the severity of the attacks and the appearance of enemy ships, instead of just their weapons, the UN got nervous. That's when they started drafting everybody they could and shipping them out.

You can hopefully see the problem. The extra ships being sent outward from Ceres and the other factories around the Asteroid Belt would need crewing. There weren't enough volunteer AIs to do the work, and they couldn't be drafted, partly because back then they were generally too neurotic and antsy about everything. Control had become Command by this point and Command started press-ganging innocent bystanders out of the corridors (at least that's what it felt like to me and my friends) and throwing us into cattle-car ships, packed in jello (not joking) and accelerating us outward to try and get us to Jupiter/Saturn while there was still a war to fight.

Various branches of UN authority were drafting/shanghai-ing civilians from every piece of settled solar real estate between Mercury and Saturn so lots of spacers were being indiscriminately distributed over the range of rocks from the Asteroids to Jupiter local space to the Jovian Trojans to Saturn local space and what passed for the Saturnian Trojans.

It took five months at various accelerations for my ship to get to Saturn (pure existential hell), which would have been a pre-war record, hooray for war. I was assigned to UNS Isildur and I spent most of my time, as I have already said, examining starfields and plotting (literally and figuratively) strategies and intercept trajectories for our own railgun projectiles to take out absolutely any suspicious rocks. We'd drop a passive transponder on them anyway, just in case.

This was a slow war. That should go without saying, but if you live down on the Dirt, then it has to be said. Imagine a square meter of floor. Easy, right? Now imagine 100m² of floor. A little bit harder but doable, right? Keep going. Imagine a sphere. Imagine that even with computers, maybe even mature AIs (they do so exist) you have to keep track of absolutely everything you can see, all around you, all the time.

I'm going to say right now that remembering all of this is almost like a dream. I got drafted as I was walking towards an actual physical mailbox in Tycho, Luna. I had just finished the most important contract of my life (training the Talos series of AIs) - said 'good-bye' to my friend who had just been drafted himself - and was walking across Sagara Square when I got shanghai-ed. Not just because I was a body alone, but because they knew who I was, what I could do and how I would be valuable to the war effort if I was out at Saturn. And once I was out there, I was never called upon to deal directly with an AI.

I sat through shift after shift of hours of eyeball fatigue, following up the computers' recommendations on objects to target. I drank more liters of ersatz coffee than there are real liters of coffee in the Big, I swear. For months, I got screenputs from the robots onboard, or maybe the AIs on other ships on the same triangulating sweep and made educated guesses about the objects in the scans. I sat there - occasionally hung there - and just made plans to throw our rocks at their rocks.

At Mimas, after months of travel, fatigue and boredom, Isildur was attacked. We should have seen it coming, but we didn't. Her spine was split by a rock that, if it had come a few dozen meters forward would have holed the habitat module. The precision of the attack was noted. I say again, we don't call it the Big for nuthin'. Then - this is hard to write and you had better appreciate all of this - the Thaiax ship came swooping in on us out of nothing. While we had railguns and lasers on Isildur, she - the enemy - was still throwing rocks. But they were close and fast and many. I was nearest to the docking bay. I got into a suit. But I also got five of my crewmates into an airbag and all of us attached to the escape pod that our other crewmates were in. Isildur herself was lost. We were picked up by UNS Valiancy about a day later. The longest day of my life.

I hung there outside the escape pod with a laser in my clumsy mitted hand. I was essentially immobile, umbilicaled to the pod, likely to survive as long as they did inside. I watched as the Thaiax ship closed on us. The pod was moving perpendicularly away from Isildur's wreckage but the enemy was following us, not our ship. It looked like a big winged balloon - wings being silly and ineffectual out here, so it was purely aesthetic (unless intrinsic to the technology) - and a door opened. I went nuts. I started firing. I burned scars onto the alien ship, onto our pod, onto the bits and pieces of Isildur that were trailing us. The figure that emerged from the enemy ship was kind of like a starfish with a bulge in the middle, and it came towards me with an easy grace. I don't know even know if it was an actual alien or a robot or what, but it came close enough before I ruptured its suit for me to see its face. And you've read what I saw on scores of websites now, from my UN testimony to my interviews with the Star, Globe and Sun.

Isildur was replaced from Ceres, but without us. I was on Calamity Jane which saw no action, and when the Thaiax broadcast their surrender rebus, I got to go home. It was a few days after that when I met the Admiral.

And so along to my recent inheritance.

It is generally believed that my parents are dead. As former citizens of the province of Ontario, Canada, and even under UN law out here, they are legally dead. I admit that I have feared this for many years. I did not feel at all right when I had to admit it to my grandparents. But eventually, we all agreed. If they were still alive they would have tried to contact us, some way or other.

What had not occurred to me, but had to my grandfather Robert Joyes, was that before they left, in order to leave, my parents had bought a ship from OR/Aeneid. Which ship had apparently failed them in some way. And I was a war hero.

OR/Aeneid did not dither when my grandfather contacted them. Two months after he submitted his claim on behalf of his daughter and his grandson, a robot pilot (who was also a provisional AI) delivered a brand new Lustre class spaceship to High Manhattan,where I'm living right now.

I am now the captain/pilot/owner of UNS Kirkfield II. While I will continue to update this log as per Command's request, I am leaving for Mars in two days.

Some more notes, ideas, etc.

...........................................................

To the kid in Montana, USA, who's thinking 'who cares about a martian kid not memorizing the state capitals? Who cares?!' Well, there's that martian kid and a whole lot more who're thinking the same thing about you. And think about this, Montana, they've got a whole planet to terraform, and there's a good chance that your grandchildren will grow up there. Or Titan or Europa. So lose the attitude. This is my forum.

...........................................................

According to the practical physical laws we know about, we can get data from Point A to Point B even all the way across the System as fast as will ever be possible.

Mass, however. According to all the cosmic laws we know we can get mass from Point A to Point B only as fast as our current technology (or, as has been pointed out, our application of current technology) will allow. We know there must be faster ways, we just don't know what they are yet.

...........................................................

Communitats are being commissioned and built as fast as OR/Aeneid (and licensed contractors I feel obliged to point out, cousin thing) can go. There are stations in out-of-plane solar orbit that are practically perpendicular to everything else. There are all women mini-worlds, all afrigen, all tall. There is one communitat at L4 (Ell Fore not Ell Cat) where absolutely everything is decimal, including time. There is one where the humans are agitating in the UN for the granting of full citizenship to their AIs and the AIs are lobbying against it, claiming they're not ready. (!!!!) And if I didn't mention it before, one of my first jobs, and occasional contracts since, was training AIs, including etiquette and diplomacy.

...........................................................

I have received complaints from some Clavians about my description of Clavius in the first item in this log. They feel that I was not kind.

There are two ways to design an underground city.

A) Contract all your tenants, occupants, and lessees first, then build.

B) Don't.

Clavius is a Plan B city. I ought to know because I used to live there.

...........................................................

I've done a little research recently and found out something interesting.

After about 2020, when humans starting actually living in the Big, on the ISS and Luna, and then later at L5, UFO sightings went down, first in the West, then in the Third World (terms, I will point out, that are meaningless to a martian outside a purely historical context, like Holy Roman Empire or phlogiston are to you.)

Then, after the discovery of Wreck (but not so much the Czech Probe earlier) the reports of sightings increased again, especially during the wars.

Now with the Great and Terrible Humanic Protection Fleet of Fleets (q.v.) patrolling the skies, sightings have started to drop off again.

...........................................................

And speaking of sightings, reports of Barbra Streisand have started to drop off, kind of like Elvis Presley about this long after his death. Now people are starting to see Lance Bass in odd places, like L5-l'Usine and Kyiv.

...........................................................

Every database on the Dirt, every web server, every kid's homepage is probably backed up somewhere in the Big. Permission be damned in some cases.

Big companies like Stawarz and Xerox-Heptagon, Microsoft-Yoshioka, Kimura-Murdoch, GM - all of them have contracts with spacers that ensure that all databases are constantly copied and stored out here, on asteroids, long-orbit roboships, or deep shafts on Luna or Mars.

Hobbyists are constantly just trolling cyberspace in VR or letting bots do it, to take copies of every single website and copy it for posterity.

These aren't mirror sites. These are backups that will survive the worst that might happen down there. There's people who really do think it's just as important to save pictures and commentary on the most recent trip to Wasaga as it is to save all of Shell's credit transactions for the last quarter.

They've figured in some legal cases where the original page was defunct but a copy was maybe found in archives on Luna or wherever.

...........................................................


My Grandda, Robert Joyes, told me that after my parents were married and living at 'the quarry' as they still called the fish farm, they seemed to be living in a world of their own. They worked, did their jobs, got along with everyone, but they spent a lot of time on the web, researching all sorts of things, and then a lot of time alone together discussing it. Sometimes, Grandda said, it was like they were play-acting everything but their lives together. He told two jokes about them, one for each. He said that the jokes summed up how they seemed to look at life and the impression they left on people. Gramma Eva told him not to tell me those old things, but he did anyway. Keep in mind that my mother was an only child and a moby, and my father was the youngest in his family by 18 years.

Lillian walks into this livestock vendor's and says 'Give me 200 chicks.' So he does. A week later, she's back and asks for 200 more. The vendor thinks 'what the heck, it's a sale.' A week later she comes in again and asks for 200 more. The vendor says 'I gotta ask, lady. What's happening to all these chicks?' 'Don't know' says Lillian. 'I must be planting them too deep or too close together.'

Norm calls 911 and says 'Help! My wife is having a baby!' The operator says 'It's alright, sir. We're here to help. Now is this her first child?' 'No!' says Norm. 'This is her husband.'

The thing is, looking back, even the way they left me at school when I was 15, I get it.

...........................................................

A short note from the Admiral during her busy schedule: "You still haven't disabused your readers of their romantic notions of what our Fleet actually was. I can't really order you to, but..."

Well, alright. Those of you with romantic notions about the Fleet, consider yourselves disabused.

Seriously, now, because spacers have no sense of humour.

Since there was no reason whatsoever for humanity to maintain anything more than a police presence in the Big - no enemies - there was no need of heavily armed battle cruisers lumbering around from orbit to orbit. My ship, Isildur, and her sister ship, Anarion, were ore freighters that had been doing the loops from Ceres to Mars to Earth/Luna for years until they got conscripted just like I did.

You already know (and I think I already said it at least once) that almost all spaceships were made by OR/Aeneid. The design is highly functional and beautiful in its own way. A long spindle with the fusion plant at the back, fuel tanks in the middle, and the hab module plus whatever on the forward end. They all follow the same plan and they're modular. Even the Iona-Cathay cruise ships are built that way.

There's that classic postcard shot of L5-l'Usine's aft with a sidelit forest of ship spines all sticking out from the docking cap. Those bulges on the ends are the fusion plants and the bulges in the middle are the fuel and/or cargo mods. The reasons the ships aren't all the same length are different for each one. Older ships had a slightly higher danger of fusion plant explosions so the spine was longer. (If you can make out thick disks forward of the fusion plants, those are the older ships.) Newer ships that are that long are usually just to allow more cans to be attached to the spine, for cargo or passengers.

Freighters are the most common type of spaceship. When a ship is ordered, the owners specify how big the habitat ring is going to be; how much floor space, the diameter and rotation speed (Coriolis really bothers some spacers. I miss it though when I'm down there) and any particular amenities.

Then they get a contract. Luxuries from the Dirt are the real moneymakers and will continue to be for a good long time, since we don't have antiques, a Kona Coast, a Levis factory, or Carrara. Failing Dirtside goods, the contract could be for ordinary metals, precious metals, volatiles or rare earths from the Asteroids or manufactured goods from anywhere for anywhere. The big seller/moneymaker that OR/Aeneid practically has a cornered market on is ice. They're the only ones to put fusion plants on comets to guide them in to Ceres or Mars (for the terraforming but they mine them on the way too). Once in-system, the ice usually gets distributed by freighter. Buyers will then melt it and - ahem - use the water. Or they will split it and use the oxygen for air and the hydrogen for the fusion plant.

The economics of distribution and remuneration are the same out here as they are down there. So say it's a load of municipal construction robots from Ceres for Helium on Mars (let's say the one in Aeria). The client provides them all crated up in a big system-wide standard container (only we say can) that just clamps on to the ship's spine aft of the hab and forward of the fuel. (Usually, since there are exceptions based on what's being hauled.) A few more cans bound for other locations or Mars too, and the ship's ready for its run.

Alright, now say the contract is to take a group of immigrants from a geosynch to Mars. Same kind of cans but now they're habitat modules and the cargo clamp section rotates too. Iona-Cathay's ships are like this, only the setup is semi-permanent and much classier than an immigrant config.

The Guard's ships were the same but with mass-drivers/rail-guns, really high-powered lasers,and other 'experimental' weapons. You already know how the Guard were basically simple peace-keepers and escorts out in the Big.

Then we started losing ships. We didn't realize it at the time, of course, because ships went missing all the time. And sometimes showed up again under miraculous or terrible circumstances light-minutes from where they were supposed to be. The buzz-word for a recovered drifter was 'raft' as in that painting 'The Raft of the Medusa', even though sometimes there were survivors.

Statistics gathered over years suggested that we could expect a certain amount of losses for any given number of successful passages, at any given level of preparedness, including safety training, emergency supplies, quality of ship design and so forth. When caravans full of immigrants started going out to Jupiter and then Saturn was when our actual losses starting rising out of the realms of expectation.

The Guard requested and got the funds to order more and better armed ships from OR/Aeneid. Since the most likely culprits for the losses were pirates a lot better organized than usual, no one - no one - suspected aliens.

Then came a series of abrupt disappearances culminating in the video transmission from Ring of Solomon out at Saturn that showed the alien ships, kin to the Wreck, and their destruction of Ring of Solomon right up to the point where the transmitter failed. Her crew was lost.

Since military secrecy in the Big was almost non-existent, Ring of Solomon's file was soon downloaded all over Earth/Luna and then back out to the Asteroids and to the isolated and vulnerable outposts, stations and settlements in the Jovian and Saturnian systems.

Here's where the Fleet came from, its humble origins. The Guard, while technically under the control of the Secretary General of the United Nations, was de facto run by the Chief of Police of Tycho City on Luna. That was Murray Scott, a civilian immigrant but long time EMT IT tech and paramilitarist from Vermont, USA. He immediately called a halt to any planned caravans and commandeered all the ships in port at L5-l'Usine, even though that was Euro property, not UN. The Euros weren't arguing under the circumstances.

Word went out to Ceres and Zion-in-starlight and after a bit of a false start due to innate spacer bloody-mindedness, all the ships that could be were armed and sent out. The main weapons were mass-driver/rail-guns and giant lasers from R&D stations. Plasma cannon were still experimental at the time, but there were enough prototypes that a good few ships could be armed with them.

All the places doing research on the Czech Probe and the Wreck were taken over 'for the duration of the hostilities' and all efforts were put in to tracking down the enemy. A formal declaration of war was made by the Security Council, endorsed by the General Assembly, and broad-beamed out to every part of the Solar System. This was mostly for any humans not in regular contact with anyone else, like prospectors or Utopians in the Asteroids or even the crazy isolationist survivalists that had long before claimed the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt for true humanity. (And they really are out there, probably still on the way in very old OR/Aeneid ships. We're going to be there to meet them when they arrive.)

The enemy was by then already being identified with the species of the Wreck and the Czech Probe (Prague trying to change the popular name back to TMA 1 with commercials, banner ads and pop-ups). So we were at war with the Thaiax.

The Fleet that saved humanity twice was a hodge-podge of mining ships from the Asteroids (which would also be actual habitats for the miners), freighters, mostly for ore and ice, the few pleasure yachts that existed at the time and the few cruise ships ditto.

There still weren't a lot of AIs around back then, but a few volunteered to join up and were invaluable in the most boring parts of recon and surveillance.

We didn't call it the Navy back then, like they do now. It was just the army and I think practically everybody thought it was essentially temporary. That all the ships would be returned to their owners (if the owners weren't still with them) and life in the Big would go back to normal; fast data and slow travel.

In this guy's army there at first were no ranks, no stripes, pips, bars or medals. The core discipline was from the Guard training that everyone got. We dug up titles from TV, VR, old movies and old science-fiction (which had been blurring the line with reality for so long that it had lost much of its appeal).

Attacks increased, hab cans were added to the mining ships turned warships and crewed with draftees (although not me, not yet). Non-critical vessels were cannibalized for their telescopes and the warships went out hunting for the tell-tale optical signature and trying to identify any non-visible EM traces that would help us identify an enemy ship.

There are lots of guys still around who were drafted earlier than me, but our service record was the same. So what did the draftees do? We sat and watched what the telescopes were seeing. We looked for anything moving out there that wasn't already identified or wouldn't identify itself. There were passive transponders on practically every moving hunk of rock that had ever come near a human ship (it was considered meritorious to brag about how many rocks you'd tagged on your last trip.) You pretty much couldn't miss an ice block of any size. There was very little human space junk along travelled trajectories, since it was stupid to leave it there and it was easily recyclable.

What we looked for a lot was untagged rocks travelling too fast on intercept trajectories towards anything human. That was how the attack on Ring of Solomon had started, and we already knew that was what had taken out the Wreck.

At some point the Thaiax must have figured out we were on the defensive, because, especially in Jovian and Saturnian space, the number of projectiles we discovered increased sharply. We would give them a new heading by taking a rock of our own and mass-driver blasting it at the projectile with enough oomph to nudge it into a non-threatening path. And we did that a lot. Sometimes it seemed that that was all we did over and over. Until their ships actually started attacking ours.