Insanity's Children

by Rolf Nelson

  A small “cafe” had been set up in the landing bay so anyone could take a break and grab a bite whenever they felt the need without having to walk to the regular cafeteria. The landing bay had an almost festive atmosphere, with McPherson in a near constant state of excited enthusiasm about all the interesting technical twists and details he was discovering, the older kids exploring and getting to play on some real (but powered down) military hardware, and everyone getting to know everyone else. The families were starting to settle in, learning systems, staking out sections that were close enough for convenience but separate enough for privacy. No one was talking much about the long term yet, just adjusting to the current rather sudden change of status. Between guiding systems repair, teaching the new techs, lending a sympathetic counselor’s ear to some of the more troubled former conscripts, and sifting through the emergence test logs, Taj was for the first time showing noticeable delays in responses when having a conversation, and her avatars were either missing or little more than motionless faces.

  While Helton thought about the big picture and did a walk-around to observe progress first hand, he was joined by Stenson, who saw him as he dropped into the café for a minute to pick up some coffee and a bite of whatever was there. Beverage in one hand, cheese burger in the other, he pointed out subtle things as they circled the ship.

  “Patching holes in carbon nanotube fiber composites properly is a bear. It’s royal pain to clean and polish, or cut, or do anything with, even with plasma torches or lasers, because it has alternate layers of thermal superconductors and excellent insulators. It’s very finicky. We only have one tool that seems to work right, so I trained four teams for it so it’s in use full time, starting with the shallower holes to build expertise, and once they are confident they have it down we’ll prioritize the deepest ones. Your temporary patches on the three that penetrated were pretty good, and we can leave them in until you get the drives and weapons a little closer to mission-ready.”

  Helton nodded approval of the sound of progress before replying thoughtfully. “I want you get at least a couple of tanks attached today. And get two fully functional drive cores as soon as possible. We might have to leave in a hurry, and I don’t want to be a drifting target. You can pull them later to get closer to perfect if you have to, but returning to something barely like operational is highest priority. If we get a one hour bug-out warning from a massive incoming fleet, I want to be able to not be here.”

  “Makes sense. Not easy, but we should be able to do that. I think there are a couple of undamaged tank pits we could board, and a couple more that would take a hatch cover OK for a temporary patch. I’ll get Erikson on it; he’s been managing the detailed evaluations and priorities on the hull with Taj.”

  “How are the new additions working out?”

  “Your conscript tech squad has some surprisingly good talent. McPherson’s leading the hull-repair teams, and he’s like a kid in a candy shop working with them. The rifle squads are not much more than hands to help fetch and carry, but with as little automation as we have to actually work on ships they are useful.”

  “Any complaints?”

  “There is always something to bitch about…” Henery said with a shrug.

  “Serious?”

  “Not really. It sounds like you got rid of most of the would-be problems already. Making a few stops to drop people off and making coming here appear to be the high-risk path was brilliant. Make bailing out easy enough and frequent, then the only people left are pretty solid. Classic recruit screening method.”

  “And it allowed us to spread the word while planting agents with personal experience in four systems. No telling what sort of things that will shake out.”

  Noting three guys trying to move a very heavy part of a missile launch tube system in a wheeled cradle, Chief Stenson went off to wrangle some help for them, waving the burger around for emphasis, but being careful not to spill his coffee.

  Deciding that tea sounded good, Helton joined a trio seated at a table in the café. Ramroop, a man from his rifle squad -Atwood- and one of McPherson’s crew were with him in postures that spoke of relief at getting off their feet. He greeted the two he knew, and was introduced to the slender, pale, bespectacled man, Aldin, a power-systems specialist most recently posted to a depot maintenance job.

  “Hours are worse than deployment, but at least it’s not boring,” Aldin opined, flipping down one of the small extra lenses on his glasses to more closely examine a detail on his zero-gee beverage cup. “Weirdest mix of high-grade mill-spec hardware, COTS, and unlabeled custom whats-its I’ve ever heard of.” Satisfied with his determination of the fractal pattern etched into it, he set the cup down carefully.

  “Tell me about it,” Helton agreed. “I’ve been in it up to my eyeballs and trying to figure it all out for… seems like ever.”

  “It’s been a wild month, all right,” Ramroop agreed. “Before, I was poor, unemployed, single, hopeless and on the dole.” He smiled wryly after a brief pause. “Now I’m broke, a war criminal, single, a combat vet, working harder than I ever have for free, and surrounded by five guys for every women, and no singles in sight.” The others chuckled at his summation of the situation.

  “At least you’re learning a trade,” Aldin pointed out. “Not many people get to get a front row seat for free on this sort of training.”

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong”, Ramroop hastened to clarify. “It’s been an incredible month. It’s exciting, the food is decent, I’ve never been healthier, and for once I have a boss that I think I can trust to be honest with me. But I’m just having a hard time seeing where it’s all going. Never really planned on being a soldier, you know, and the engineering is mostly going over my head. As you said earlier about Schram, I’ll likely never be more than a wrench-turner. I like having three squares and a bunk and something to keep me busy, but…” his voice sort of drifted off into stillness amid the noise of repairs, his uncertainty at what exactly he really wanted clearly expressed in his silence.

  Atwood nodded in agreement. “Speaking of broke… what are the wages working here?” He looked at Helton almost sheepishly. “I know there’s not really anything around here to buy, but I don’t expect we’ll be here forever… will we? Because, like Ramroop said, there’s a serious shortage of babes around here, and, well, you know…”

  “Eating and breathing not enough?” Helton deadpanned. The other three focused on him acutely, faces slowly falling, until he grinned and laughed, and they lightened up realizing he’s joking. “Taj tracks your time. As long as you’re working on what needs to be done, food and basics are free. If you need something a little special, just ask, or see if you can round it up. If we drop you off somewhere, we’ll pay you off in small denomination metal, based on hours worked and type of work, plus a combat survivor’s package. Not rich, but enough to get a start.” The three nodded and smiled appreciative grins of agreement. “We did the same with the others, but tried to keep it quiet so there wasn’t much arguing or comparing and whining. If you think a little pocket money for everyone would help morale more than hurt it, we might be able to arrange that.”

  He leaned back in his chair, stirring his tea. “You’re right about the, ah, social life. Guess that happens when you start with an infantry company, pass through a war zone, then add a bunch of engineers. I’ll see if Tajemnica knows what sort of ratio changes we can expect.”

  “What about the planet? Anyone there?”

  Helton shook his head. “Not doing anything much down there for a little while, until we know how things shake out; it’s likely to be targeted. We’re planning on doing some colony-starting in the deep.”

  “I heard you talking about that. Maybe you could recruit more young ladies for them? That might be a plan.”

  “We were mostly aiming for established family groups. They have the best track record of making it through the Dark. Not sure how the social dynamic would be with several hundred strangers locked in a terra
forming platform for the next century, to make it or not on your own.”

  “The ultimate singles cruise,” joked Atwood.

  “Maybe. You’d want a pretty tight volunteer compatibility screening done, though. Getting stuck with two hundred flavors of not your type and no other clubs on the street would be pretty harsh. Only one poly-marriage terraforming success isn’t a very strong record to try and duplicate.”

  “Can’t be any worse than divorce court,” replied Atwood earnestly. “I’d risk it.”

  “Only if my parents arrange it, or at least approve of it,” added Ramroop.

  “Worth a thought. Not sure what sort of stats we can pull out of the little data we have coming in on how many people are headed our way. Might be possible, might not be such a good idea. In the meantime, do what you have to and learn what you can. Lots of need for wrench-turning on a TFP.”

  Chapter XVIII

  New Direction

  The crew was sitting around a table in the moon’s main cafeteria, sipping various beverages and looking glum as they skimmed news and data on screens embedded in the table, small e-readers, or whatever other device was most convenient for them. The background noise of ongoing life and repair operations were subdued on the “night shift,” and scattered groups of other recent arrivals were trying to get adjusted to their new situation.

  “So what exactly are we looking for?” Sharon asked, flipping through some recent news stories brought in on the latest arrival. “Insurrection theory wasn’t exactly my major course of study.”

  Helton can’t help but needle his sister a bit. “From the arguments you had with mom, you majored in partying, wasn’t it?”

  “At least I didn’t change my declared major every quarter until I graduated, like someone I know,” she shot back. “And I got my cert in only three and a half years, not seven.”

  “But I got out debt-free, with no favors from the family loan-shark.” It was an old argument, and not one likely to produce any winners soon. “But seriously, we’re looking for anything that might be useful to exploit in some way.”

  “Exploit exactly how, oh criminal mastermind and military genius extraordinaire?” she retorted. There are no snappy comebacks to such an often-posed question.

  In the somewhat awkward silence that followed, Colonel Lag ambled silently up to their table while skimming an e-reader held in one hand and holding a recently refilled mug in the other. He paced noiselessly around the table a few times before smoothly taking an empty seat in the casual, absent-minded manner he had when deep in thought. He didn’t look up at them as they glance at him and returned to their own screens.

  “I think you need a new plan,” Lag said finally, reading the recent intelligence report, one of the dozens he’d been poring over for days. “Allow me to rephrase that. You need a plan….” Skeptical eyebrows rose around the table, but nobody said anything. “Letting people know details of corruption that they have run into is good, but when they are scared or constantly lied to it sounds too incredible to act on. Tin-foil hat conspiracy stuff they can’t quite believe. The captain-to-captain diplomacy was inspired, as was dropping off the former conscripts with a little pocket change.” He sighed deeply and set the e-reader down. “I would have thought a few painful military losses would be enough to make some governments change course, or at least consider talking about it, but they all appear to be doubling down on conscripts and propaganda, trying to force us to hand them bloody losses, trying to play on our desire to minimize casualties. They must be either more scared… or more… something, anyway, than we think. Or the ones that might be reasonable are getting leaned on, hard, by the others. Or the Church. Or someone.”

  “It’s giving them something to play in the media with, make us look like the bad guys,” Helton noted, nodding and looking up from a news channel. “Yesterday it was the Mahdi as the general-purpose bogeyman. Today, we are the terrorists, wreckers, subversives, and liars all problems are blamed on. But how do you force a government to alter its path without making life to miserable for the citizens? All the obvious options are bad.”

  Lag nodded, then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his tired eyes. “Asymmetrical warfare is always problematic. Since the Peace of Westphalia a thousand years ago, states were solely responsible for making war. Prior to that, tribes, guilds, churches, clans, pretty much anyone really, could declare a war, raise and army, and go at it. The kings wanted a monopoly on military force, and mostly got it. It got side-tracked for a while in the 20th and 21st centuries with freelance terrorism by various independence and religious groups, though many of those were actually fronts for various families and nations, until the Universal Reprisal Act promised a bigger pile of bones than the Hindu Kush in a lot less time. But we’d been getting away from that in the last hundred years, hence the resurgence of terrorism.”

  Helton returned his look, nonplussed. “So what tactics would you suggest?”

  “Your tactics have been fine, but you’ve been talking tactics, or operations at most. So far you have mostly been reacting to immediate needs and attacks. You need an overall philosophy that clearly states the goal and the general approach of how to get there. That’s strategy. What’s the big picture? Divide and conquer, rule by fear of the other, making your enemies fight to distract them from you, stay alive in the field while undermining moral, frontal assault to kill them all everywhere, stoking hate and accepting destruction rather than loss, or differing propaganda playing to the various audiences, are strategies. Machiavelli, Stalin, Cloward-Piven, Sun Tzu, Corbett, Clausewitz, Mao, Collins, Trinquier, Kratman, the anonymous Ruthless Romulan Ruler’s Reference, and Harrison, are long known. I expected them to personalize it, but I didn’t think everyone would be this far in the tank for the government. I’m just a romantic at heart, I guess. Supposedly most planets have a free press. It shouldn’t really surprise me, after all these years, but far too many people really do prize easy living over doing the right thing…. And fear of losing what little you have is often a greater motivator than hope of gaining something new.”

  “And being a thorn in the government’s side by making them look bad is a fast way to get an audit,” Bipasha points out. “Or worse.”

  “OK, back to basics…” Lag leaned far back, face to the ceiling, eyes unfocused, thinking out loud. “We are in a war of sorts. What are our victory conditions?”

  “When they can’t fight any more, right?” Allonia offered.

  “They can always draft more troops, build more ships.” Her naiveté amused the colonel. “A platoon of conscripts with motivated leadership and a corvette can fight enough to be a problem. Look at what the Mahdi did with a few dozen fanatical followers and some time. Our opponents have a hundred planets and billions of people.”

  “So we take out the naval shipyards, right? I mean, it wouldn’t be easy, but-”

  “No, they’d just convert civilian ships. We’d have to destroy far too much infrastructure.”

  “Hmmm. Yeah, we don’t want to kill, and preferably not even bother, the civilians that just want to be left alone like us.”

  “The military certainly doesn’t want to fight us, at least not on our terms. We’ve handed them loses in ever encounter,” Quiritis added. “That’s got to have some admirals examining their options.”

  “I think…” Lag said quietly, “that you are going about it all wrong. What’s the first goal of people at the top?”

  “Make money.”

  “Grow the business, or nation.”

  “Get their ego stroked.”

  “So what are their victory conditions, for the people in power?” Lag probed.

  “They… stay in power?” Helton repeated. Lag smiled slightly, the others frowned or shrugged as if it were nothing more than stating the obvious, but Helton started warming to the thought a little. “They stay in power if they can use every event we throw at them as an emergency that needs a special new law, decree, or doctrine.” Seeing what he’s drivin
g at, several metaphorical light bulbs appear over heads.

  Allonia doesn’t look very happy, though, as understanding percolates through her mind. “But that means that all the fighting against fleets actually works against us… and the more successful we are, the tighter they can tighten their grip.”

  Lag snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I must be getting old, getting too many easy targets.”

  He’s greeted by some healthy skepticism about his definition of easy.

  “What’s it?” Helton asked for the group.

  “Wrong target. Not the peripheral things like fleets and troops.”

  “But those are the guys coming after us!” Kaminski objects.

  “But they are interchangeable and replaceable, at least to a degree,” Helton countered, starting to see what Lag was getting at, receiving a nod in reply.

  “The power players. The guys at the top.”

  “Assassinations?” Kaushik asked. “Easy to make a target list, a little harder to take them out without a lot of collateral damage.”

  “No, no. Not assassination. Kill one, another more ruthless boss is standing in line. They are replaceable, too,” Lag replied. “A lesson I learned as a kid, but forgot. It’s not the person, it’s the job description that is the problem. A long time ago a very wise man, an economist-”

  “A wise economist?” snorted Helton. “Surely you’re joking.”

  “No, really. Smart guy by the name of Milton Friedman. Good people aren’t enough, he said, you have to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things. Conversely, we need to convince these wrong people that if they do the wrong thing, it will be costly to them in terms of legitimacy and leverage. We need to raise the financial and political cost to the power players personally.”