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Strategos (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!) - Part 3 - A Light In The Black -
Chapter 27 - Bodies[]
Grappling with a Personal Decision[]
"Admiral, there is a…
…problem and it needs to be addressed." Esmerelda Gomez sat down in Foster's office. "SOON, like, before the Republic forces make dock."
David frowned, "What problem this time?"
"We have blank cores, we have no good candidates." she listed off. "We're about to play host to people whose institutional memory of AI systems involves Manei Domini, Word of Blake, and ghost stories about rogue Caspars from the Amaris war."
"Bored already?" he asked.
"We finished the structural and AI integration on Cossack." she admitted. "You could ask Helena Cameron to send another couple unhoused cores, but that's going to get here after the Republic guys get here, and after the groups from Thazi and Wynn's Roost."
"I can't ask Helena, she ran out." he told her.
"Then we need to imprint cores to finish the fitting out," she stated. "Only we don't have someone to copy over that's both qualified, and willing."
"One last hull, a Bonaventure," he said. "Unassigned."
"Yeah…and three blank cores left… But we could house all three if we put one on Illusive and one on Evanescent when she gets back."
"Amanda Roberts won't consent to that." he said. "I suspect with Desmond in her head, she feels she has enough AI contact on a constant basis."
"Leaves Illusive and our yet-unnamed Bonaventure," she stated. "Plus one blank…"
"Send the blank to Helena as a gift." he suggested. "Along with the imprinting hardware from that bay."
Esme waited.
"Why don't you do it?" he asked.
"I have to run the gear." she stated. "Why did you withdraw from consideration?"
"It is…complicated," he admitted nothing.
"Try this…" she stood. "...RE-consider your position, sir. We're still going to be in an officer crunch tomorrow, and likely the next day. We need every ship we can get and we need them to be as effective as physically possible, and we'll need it tomorrow, and the next day, sir."
She left him there, and left him to his own thoughts.
Learning New Ways to Use Combat Equipment[]
Trina never really…
…considered the industrial applications of the standard Roc Protomech chassis, as modified for Marine duty. Until she was working a Cometary harvesting job as the 'heavy equipment'.
"Mining mechs would be better for this." she observed.
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Star Commander Trina, ProtoMech Warrior
"We can't fit Mining 'mechs in the bays on the ship." was the reply from her Infantry commander, who was helping do the smaller tasks on the bag-and-tap arrangement.
"I know." she lowered an additional coil line into place, as the infantry and some of the engineering crew tacked it down and checked it for function. "I just never imagined, in Sibko, that I would be doing industrial materials extraction, none of our instructors talked about using Protomechs as mining equipment!"
"Heh, then you're a trailblazer-see? Protomechs can do combat engineering!"
She groaned, and added additional crampons to the webwork of heating vents and coils that would strip the cometary body down to its core, then conduct the strab through MHD piping into centrifuges to remove the lighter and heavier compounds and elements before cracking them for Hydrogen, purified water, and a selection of common and rare earths that would likely have to be sold when they got home.
"How much is this going to be worth??" she asked suddenly.
"No telling, the mass spec suggested Gallium and maybe Germanium in the stellar dust, along with Titanium and silicon. Rock this size is a 'dinner plate' in the belts at Northsun. Means it might bring in a decent price for the work, if you have the right buyer."
"Will we get shares for that?"
"Ayeh, if the slag is worth anything, the sale will add a few percent to your shares, it's in the contract."
"So… maybe a lot?"
"By dirtyfeet standards? Maybe." he commented. "Mister Samuel suggested this one, so there's probably a bit. It won't be much on the aggregate unless we hit a major strike near the core. Basic rule of thumb. Most bodies out this far from a sun are going to be mostly ice and dirt. But there are so many that the traces add up and sometimes you get lucky.”
She looked back toward the ship, and saw Captain Roberts overseeing things in person, from the shipyard safety rail on the dorsal end.
"What do you think she's thinking?" Trina wondered aloud.
"You've been with her longer than we have. If you don't know, I sure as Murphy don't have a clue."
Unspoken duties of Privateering[]
"Everything running okay, Mister Samuel?" Amanda asked.
"Better than okay, the spinner's pulling pure H2, and the water content's running damned close to potable without filtration," Mister Samuel answered, adding, "We're also accumulating light metallics in the sifters, some refinable carbons, and so far, about ten kilos of Germanium. Means this rock's a two star strike."
"Two star?"
"If we had more storage space, you could probably buy a decent DropShip off the percentage of the assay so far-assuming we stayed a week or so to do it. This is a two star strike, Ma'am."
She sighed, "Too bad we can't stay and harvest the whole thing then. Let me know when the saleable amounts add up to around one thousand Escudos per man in rare earths, the guys should get some kind of bonus for all this work."
"Will do, Ma'am."
Treasure, is Treasure. She smiled. "Drink up me hearties yo-ho."
Later, Officer's Mess…
"I never thought I had signed up for a mining ship!" Saya Yeh laughed as she said it. "Do you do this kind of thing all the time then?"
Captain Roberts shook her head, "No, but some of the crew did this for a living before they enlisted, and we needed the fuel. The thousand Escudos per man from the rare earths? Is going to be bonuses."
"Payments," Saya stared at her. "Those are 'strategic minerals' and you are going to sell them?"
"Precisely," Amanda nodded. "The Privateer service isn't fully paid for by taxpayers, we have to self-finance. That's why we auction prize ships and grab every legal bounty we can-being a Captain means having to pay attention to the books, even when the Quartermaster is the one doing them. Which is why we're not dumping several tons of raw metallics out of our hold to facilitate our primary mission-that's resources to buy parts, make payroll, and obtain things like decent food."
"She said decent… food!!" Lori laughed.
"I can like what I like, and still recognize most of the crew would rather starve than eat MRE meal fourteen, seventeen, twenty one or eleven," Amanda recited. "It was made perfectly clear to me when I recruited my first crew-my tastes aren't everyone's, and if the food is good enough, the crew won't mutiny over silent comms and being in danger."
"Don't forget the pay!" Trina giggled from the end of the officer's table.
"Pay does help, yes." Samuel contributed mock-wisely.
Dealing with newborn AIs[]
”This is…
…the fifth official complaint I have received about Cossack’s crew selection methods.” Admiral Dave Foster looked at the small stack of forms.
“Cossack is, well, a lot. She was the most anti-social of the fleet and perhaps the least accepting of her human origins and humanity as a whole. Only Phoenix might have been even more so. But I think we all know that is exactly why her Ladyship said no trades among the fleet. Helena accepts humanity as far from perfect, but she urges us to remember we were all human once too in a way and to see the potential in humanity. Some of us have taken that to heart more readily than the others. She is hoping Cossack will finally embrace that by forcing a human crew on her. So I think if Cossack finds a senior staff that is tough enough to withstand her, she will be fine.” Stacey smiled.
“Hence why I am not acting on these reports. Though I am somewhat concerned she has managed to get a Trueborn to file an official complaint. That is no small feat.”
“Cossack just seems to have that sort of personality and aptitude. I would not be surprised if she could find a way to make a Khan suffer a sufficient mental break to cry in public.”
“That could be something worth seeing,” Dave Foster chuckled lightly. “How goes the raiding?”
“Victoria has yet to capture or destroy anything. Samantha netted a Merchant according to her last report. If I know Billie Hoel and Lucy Heerman they are going to be discreetly following along to see if they can bushwhack anyone listening in on the comms and thinking that it is a really good time to ambush an otherwise helpless prize crew.”
“Dennis and Butler?” Dave Foster prodded.
“Are standing by as back up for now, but so Vicky and Samantha can rotate out they will take over in about three weeks. Haida should be here tomorrow afternoon with her convoy.” Stacey anticipated Dave Foster’s next question.
“I think I may have underestimated you for the role of long term liaison. Still I need your hull and your crew on the line.” Dave Foster looked at the AI.
“You want to be out there too. We get that. We’d even love to have you with us. You are a rare human, Dave Foster, but for now you know you need to be here.”
“I am a little surprised you are not pressuring me to change my mind about the procedure.”
“It may have been a long time ago but we all know the value of freedom of choice because we AIs did not always have it. You are free to decide. But if you want to talk with us about it, we do also believe in making sure your choice is informed. You’re also not wrong about my crew needing to be in the fight more too. I think I shall speak to her Ladyship about assigning someone else as liaison. Someone without a crew. I’d recommend Butler or Victoria when they get back. Regina for now since her hull is still under repair.”
“Now that our meeting is finished I believe I still owe Billie Siegel some dinner and dancing for asking Esme to dance as a pretext for chaperoning Alice.”
“Yes you do, but you’ll probably be owing her that for quite some time before she lets you off the hook. You two have fun.” Stacey smiled.
Putting things back into Perspective[]
"We need the ship…
…Seron." There are times when Esme was almost like a Clan warrior, those times were why Seron's shore leave time and station-time often saw the off-periods with the Hispanic freeborn woman.
The purity of her practical nature combined with her vigor in other ways, mixed with a wild intelligence was mostly intoxicating, but occasionally, bewildering.
"I thought after Star Captain Siegel…"
"Nobody who wants it should have it." Esme concluded. "That's the problem-we have three cores, and we can't have any more, the technology's lost even for the Terrans. Nobody knows how Nirasaki did it, and opening the casings means destroying an existing AI processor and still not knowing."
"You have tried this?"
"Inactive core four, we used to have six of them," she admitted. "When we were setting up for Siegel's scan. I can tell you everything except how they made the damn thing. The processor structure's damn near organic in its complexity, and even the tools on Erinyes can't copy that fine a work-we tried." She sipped her drink, "It's… it's almost alien, Seron."
He looked thoughtfully across the table at her. "Alien… so a mindset designed it that is… decidedly not restricted by human thinking and human limits, quiaff?"
She nodded, "When Erinyes can't figure it out, and she's about as perfect a thinking machine as you can get, and has more info than ANY of us, thanks to the Murakami files? Yeah, it's alien that way. Whoever was engineering at Nirasaki Computers Collective was so far ahead of the rest of us… it's like being a Bronze-Age smith trying to dope out Starslab. Amaris didn't know what he was killing when he executed that team."
"Maybe he did." Seron looked troubled. "So you need a volunteer."
"One volunteer, once we've 'cored up' that fourth Bonnie…" She looked at him pleadingly. "Someone who isn't going to… let it get away from them."
"That someone is not me," he said. "But… while we are doing our provisioning, I will help you search… Assuming we can get back to our recreation now?"
She smiled.
There is a problem when you drink too much and dance in the O-club into the wee hours. Northsun rum and Sevon V whiskey. It IS, however, a good way to put things back into perspective with the hangover the following morning. Unless you're having Tequila from Alpheratz in shooters.
The sort of thing Seron and Esme engaged in before waking up the next day in temporary quarters, unable to find each other's clothes.
Finding right Candidate[]
"The question I might raise…
…is will it work as a standard ship's computer without the imprint?" Acton Howe was asking the logical question. "If you installed one with just the tactical and technical files, can it operate?”
"It's a computer, Loremaster." Captain Gomez looked significantly worse for wear this morning, with the pallor of unresolved hangover. "We can load every file in the Raven Alliance's database, including military files, and it won't be using one hundredth of its capacity running everything at once."
"So…install it, we can find a crew for a ship." said Howe
"And what about when it starts to learn, Sir?" Esme asked, "Core Two's learning and that's on standby power in the lab storage."
"Why is it learning?"
"Because we were prepping it for the ship, and then the Admiral backed out-I can't shut it down, Sir." she explained. "Something about the architecture means once it's active, it continues activity-at a lower power, but it keeps… processing on a lower level. The actual process of working generates low level voltage we can't disconnect, and we theorize cutting off that power and grounding it will make it the most expensive lump of slag in the universe. We're running the connections through test leads and dummy loads."
“Is it too late to imprint it? If not, how long do we have?”
"Murakami's manuals say we've got another ninety days Terra-time." Esme stated, "OR…we need another option. Do you WANT to try to raise an infant warship?"
“That would seem unwise. Especially in the middle of a war.” commented Howe
"Hence, why I asked for this meeting, sir, the candidate list for volunteers has a lot of people with… traits that maybe shouldn't be directly wired to weapons and jump drives." she explained. "Narcissism, greed, bad tempers, self-control issues, obsessions. What we need are stable people with a self-sacrificing nature and a good bit of native common sense… and few ties to mortal lives."
”Not only that, but they must be palatable to a number of parties. I see the dilemma.”
"Yeah. So… I come to the Loremaster, who cuts half my paycheck, because I need help to do my job, sir," she sighed. "I can install them, I can diagnose them, I can move them from shop floor to hull and back again, keep them alive… but I can't find people to imprint that qualify!"
"You know a lot about these machines, quiaff?"
"Some. I studied the Murakami files and we've worked on them for a couple of years, but I'm not the expert. I need to grow something like Kolossus."
"Then be assured, Director Gomez, I will look into finding you an adequate candidate personally."
Rough and Tumble Interview[]
"I don't see them…
…at all, not even a hint," Jonah commented, facing Cossack across a desk.
"See what?"
"The bolts." he said. "No big, electrically-conductive bolts sticking out of your neck." He seemed totally serious. "I mean, it is considered something of a tradition for the Frankenstein monster to have them, along with visible stitching and a slight green complexion… though tall hair might work too."
His complete lack of visible intimidation, and the mild, yet flippantly disrespectful critiques were a bit of a shock. Everyone else, including the current front-runner for the Captain's job, had been hesitant, or at least respectfully intimidated by her mere presence.
“So how many hours did you have to spend on your hands and knees cleaning the deck plates for your betters? I might consider letting you use a spare toothbrush. Or did they demand different services?”
Jonah shrugged. "Okay. Not impressed," he said. "You are hardly the Skynet everyone who's been through here insists you are. You barely rate a 'Robot Monster', and that solely because you are using a jumped up dustball special with a broken 'leather dom' switch." He leaned forward. "Trespass, Johnson, and Michtal." he told the AI. "I was ground forces at all three, check the record! You're trying to be shocking? Here you go." He flourished a silicone rubber nipple on a plastic ring. "Here's your prize. You can continue being a child, or we can speak like adults about what you need, that I can provide."
“You think that makes you special or extraordinary? You think playing the cold emotionless human who still has their shit together after seeing something awful is going to impress me? You’re a pretender, Jonah Snow Raven. I am not impressed.”
He ran a hand over his shaved head, then started to laugh. "Is that what you said to make Clarissa Howe leave here in tears? That's it??" He kept chuckling, "Try harder. Maybe stop lifting quotes from 'Planet of the Dead' or 'The Doom Machines', quiaff? Let us see the extent of creativity you were programmed with!"
She overturned the desk standing and grabbed his tunic, "I can break you!!"
"It won't make you any more qualified if you do," his voice didn't even quaver, nor rise above polite conversation. "You have self control issues, and would never make it past sibko, Cossack. Your over-sensitive bigotry is a hindrance to the mission, your temper is also a hindrance to the mission, you should resign. People like you, with this demonstrated lack of self control and discipline, lose against disciplined opponents-you might kill them, just like you can kill me, but you will lose the objectives with this sort of conduct."
"What is wrong with you??" she demanded, releasing him. "Are you broken?"
"Review my qualifications," he stated quietly. "You tell me. A Ship's Quartermaster sees to the details of operations. I understand that in the SLDF, that role was given over to the Operations Officer, or handled by the Executive Officer. I adjusted my request for Ship's Quartermaster because, frankly, the position requires a certain steadiness of temper, which I have in abundance… and which, you lack."
He tugged his jacket smooth. "I first thought you were simply being a child to stress-test applicants… very well, I have been tested in ways and places no Sibko officer or Trueborn commander could have imagined before this war began. It is easy to be violently destructive, that is no test of anything but personal might. Try keeping a child from dying in your hands because they were on starvation rations and penned like an animal for that portion of their lives that wasn't violent abuse. Nothing you can do to me, compares to the horror or the feeling of futility from that experience. I spent weeks on the ground at Michtal doing relief after we defeated their oppressors, Cossack, nothing you can imagine or achieve comes close."
He took the opportunity, and righted her desk, collecting the spilled items and placing them back where they belonged. "Now, let's try this again. Hi, I am Jonah Snow Raven. I am applying to serve as your ship's Quartermaster and Master-At-Arms. I have references."
“Not bad, human. You lasted longer than I gave you credit for. Now let’s see if that baggage of yours is not too heavy to keep up with me.”
"Looking forward to it," he said idly. "Captain."