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.