Saturday, August 03, 2002

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.

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