CHILDERS_Absurd Proposals

by Richard F. Weyand

  "To both of you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart."

  "Thank you, Madam Chairman," Durand said.

  "Thank you, Ma'am," Jan could finally say.

  Foreign Minister Sally Howell stood and began to applaud at that, and the rest of the table, even Desai, stood and joined in as Jan – and Durand! – both sat and blushed. Desai sat down, and everyone else followed suit.

  "On to other matters, then. What is the status of our colonization cooperation with Earth?" Desai asked.

  Jan turned to Durand, and he consulted his notes.

  "As of last report, they had sent some two hundred survey drones out to survey planets. They can survey about one system every five hours, including travel time. They each have a solid angle along which to pursue their search, so they don't reproduce effort. After they have surveyed a hundred systems, they return and dump data before resuming. The earliest survey drones sent out have already returned once, were refueled, and left again.

  "It is our joint plan to send out the new cruiser destroyers, both ours and Earth's, to do detailed on-site studies of the most promising planets. We have been waiting for sufficient numbers of the cruiser destroyers that we can spare them from their defense roles, but the dominance of the drones in the recent fracas has made that a moot point, I think. We should begin that effort as soon as our next squadron arrives, which is due in another couple of weeks.

  "As for Earth's production of colony ships, they are on schedule. Our first shipments of the ships are actually complete, and have been piling up in Earth orbit pending the resolution of the crisis just ended. The freighters will have all the durable goods and non-perishables for the colonies loaded before delivery. We just put on the perishables and the colonists, and head them out. We can start any time."

  "So the pacing item right now is to get the detailed studies of some of these planets completed?" Desai asked.

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  Desai turned to Jan.

  "Admiral, I leave it to your military judgment when that can begin, when you can spare some of the cruiser destroyers to perform that mission. It seems to me, though, that time may be now."

  "We're looking at that right now, Ma'am."

  "Good. It is also probably time to start your advertising efforts on the twenty planets we've just, um, shall we say, disrupted, to let them know we will be recruiting colonists."

  "Yes, Ma'am," Jan said.

  Desai turned to Richard Wong, the Minister of Defense.

  "What about the colonization itself, Rick? The people we need to assign to the colonies for the first six months or so to help them get started? Have you decided how you will organize that?"

  "We've discussed the matter, Admiral Childers, Admiral Wisniewski, and I, and we think it should be under the CNO, Ma'am. It's more of an operational sort of thing, and it will take a lot of manpower. A couple of hundred people per colony, for six months. If we are establishing a hundred and fifty colonies or so every year, that will be fifteen thousand people. The CNR doesn't have the manpower reserves to staff that sort of effort, and it's the wrong sort of manpower," Wong said.

  "Well, there do need to be some science types assigned to those efforts, don't there?"

  "Yes, Ma'am, and I can staff those positions," Wisniewski said. "But most of them will be manpower and supervisory positions. Clearing land, running the bulldozers and things, setting up housing, using the empty containers for housing and hospital and the like, running roads between what we think of as one major and two minor settlements on each colony. It's mostly labor positions, or positions supervising the colonists doing the labor. That's much more up Operations' alley."

  Desai turned to Jan.

  "We have the manpower, Ma'am," Jan said. "One of the things that has become clear in the last month is we no longer need twelve hundred warships to defend the Commonwealth. Those twelve hundred warships have total crews of almost one and a half million officers and crews. Fifteen thousand people is not a big number to Operations. What we do not have is the organization to organize that effort. We will need to establish a Colony Division to manage it."

  "Will they travel on the colony ships?"

  "We were thinking of equipping existing light and medium cruisers with the new hyperspace generators and using them to transport the assistance personnel to the colonies. We have worked up plans to retrofit them with the new generators, and one such conversion was done as a test case. The ship can stay on site and return with them when they are done."

  "Does it make sense to retrofit them, rather than new build? I am aware retrofitting systems can sometimes be more work than starting from scratch," Desai said.

  "Yes, Ma'am. The hyperspace generators on our current generation light and heavy cruisers were designed to be removed and replaced when needed, and the new hyperspace generators fit the same footprint. For destroyers and battleships, it would be impossibly difficult. Those are much more integral to the ship, though for different reasons, and would not be appropriate for retrofit."

  "I see."

  "The other consideration, Ma'am, is that, people being what they are, some of the spacers assigned to these efforts will not wish to return," Jan said. "They will fall in love with someone, or with the planet, and wish to remain with the colony. As we will be staffing down as we reduce ship counts, this will be in our best interest anyway. We can retire them in place. I was considering asking for volunteers for these assignments, in the hope I would get people more likely to want to stay on. Even couples who want to go out with the colony. They would remain on our payrolls for those six months."

  "And the defense of the colonies? Against pirates. Against the Outer Colonies."

  "We are going to establish mail service to the colonies as we go, Ma'am. And we will post a survey drone in each system to keep watch for that sort of thing. We have plenty of drones coming on-line. We can reactively defend them from here."

  "Even the more distant ones?" Desai asked.

  "We are probably going to have to maintain response drones in a couple of systems other than Jablonka to hold down response times. We think we can do that, Ma'am."

  "That all sounds workable to me, Admiral. I'll leave the details to you. You may proceed as discussed. We have our window of time. Let's not waste it."

  With that, Chairman Miriam Desai folded her notebook, stood, and walked out of the room.

  Jan sent her AAR, including the twenty-three sets of system views, to Jake Turner on his private mail address. She received his reply several hours later.

  FROM: TURNER

  TO: CHILDERS

  SUBJECT: (none)

  I SURE AM GLAD WE'RE FRIENDS!

  Colony Division

  "Admiral Joshi is here, Ma'am."

  "Come in, Admiral. Have a seat," Jan said.

  "Thank you, Ma'am," said Vice Admiral Nancy Joshi, head of the Supply Division.

  "I'm sorry I haven't had much time for you the last couple of months, Admiral."

  "I heard some scuttlebutt running around you were pretty busy, Ma'am," Joshi said with a straight face but a twinkle in her eye.

  Jan laughed.

  "You might say that. Admiral, how much confidence do you have in your number two? That's Rear Admiral Felix Chou, isn't it?"

  "Yes, Ma'am. Quite a lot of confidence, actually. I'm more worried he's going to be assigned away from me. He's overdue for promotion."

  "As are you, Admiral. That's good to hear, because I think I want to promote Admiral Chou to vice admiral and head of the Supply Division. I have a different assignment for you," Jan said.

  Joshi sat and waited, not asking the obvious question.

  "Admiral, I want you to start an entirely new division within Operations, called the Colony Division. It would use a lot of your skills from Supply Division, and would include a promotion to Admiral. Are you interested?"

  "Yes, Ma'am. That sounds interesting."

  "Here's the setup. We're going to be establishing a lot of colonies, as y
ou know. You've been involved because of the need to procure and load the perishables for the colony ships. The other thing we have to send, though, in addition to colonists and supplies, is help. Organized help, to get the colony started. Clearing land, setting up housing, setting up infrastructure both physical and institutional. We're thinking maybe two hundred or three hundred people that go out with the colony for six months or so, come back, take planet leave, then go out and do it again.

  "That's going to be the charter of Colony Division. Organizing and running that work force.

  "It's also going to be a grab bag of all the other efforts going on around the colonies effort. Turning the ships when they come back. Screening colonist applications. Picking up the colonists. Staffing the colony ships themselves. Follow-up visits to the colonies taking along anything they need. More colonists to the ones who are ready for them. The list goes on and on.

  "It's a logistical nightmare, and we're in deep water over our heads already. What I need is someone who can run a logistics organization with a hundred balls in the air at once. Luckily, CSF already has one of those."

  Jan waved her hand toward Joshi with the last sentence.

  "Now it sounds really interesting."

  "Good. You'll have to work with Personnel Division to get the people, for your organization, for the colony ships, and for the work crews. We're going to have a bunch of light cruisers and heavy cruisers converted to the new hyperspace generator so they can go out with the colony whips and take the work crews with them. Together with the colony ships, that's going to be a couple of hundred ships, all told. Those will be transferred to your organization, and you'll have to staff all of those.

  "We're going to be downsizing the number of ships we maintain. After the recent unpleasantness with the Outer Colonies, it's clear we don't need twelve hundred ships and one and a half million spacer to protect the Commonwealth, so there are a lot of resources becoming available. I suspect some of the people on the work crews aren't going to want to come back from one of the colony planets they work on, so we're going to retire them in place. Maybe give some extra time on their retirement credits to encourage that. The more of them that retire out to the colonies the better. So you should probably be asking for volunteers from ship crews back for planet leave.

  "As for your organization here, I'm going to give you the Operations Annex, right behind the NOC here. We'll move everyone out of there and that will become the Colony Division headquarters building. For personnel, you can have pretty much anyone you want, as long as they're not from Admiral Jessen's group. Look for people who are overdue for promotion where they're at, but their superior isn't. That sort of thing. Work with Admiral Faletti in Personnel Division on that. But be picky. This effort has to work. We don't want to take several hundred thousand colonists out there and have them all end up dying because we couldn't be bothered to know what we were doing.

  "You probably need someone with squadron command experience to head up your Ships Section. You need to begin a policies and procedures book. Write down all your decisions and then revise it as we learn. Tons of things to do.

  "You should get together with Admiral Jessen first thing, and pick up copies of all the things he's been collecting toward this effort.

  "Any questions?"

  "A million, Ma'am. Let me see how many of them I can answer for myself first."

  "Excellent. I'll want to see your proposed organization chart once you have some ideas down. Get a chief of staff first, and a couple of obvious subordinates, so you have some help putting it together. Oh, and congratulations on your promotion, Admiral Joshi."

  "Thank you, Ma'am."

  Ship Tour

  Jan and Bill were looking out the shuttle window. Orbiting together were twelve ships, six passenger liners and six freighters, new arrived from Earth. The passenger liners were of the standard design, a bit bigger than a battleship, with eight cylinders instead of six, all of them rotated out perpendicular to the ships' axes to provide gravity as the spun. They looked like spinning daisies.

  The freighters were much bigger. Only two small crew cylinders stuck out at the rear, the rest of the ship being covered on all sides with row upon row of cargo containers. A huge shuttle rack on the bow contained two personnel shuttles like the one she was in, and four massive cargo shuttles. The personnel shuttles were in the center of the shuttle rack, so they could be launched or retrieved when the ship was spinning by the simple expedient of counter-rotating the rack. The cargo shuttles on the outside of the rack would only be used to off-load cargo when the ship wasn't spinning.

  The six freighters dwarfed the six passenger liners, themselves bigger than battleships. And this was all for two of the cruiser destroyers previously delivered.

  "OK, now that's impressive."

  "Boy, I'll say. Look at the size of the freighters."

  "That's Earth's largest standard freighter design, Ma'am. Your list of necessary supplies to get a colony off to a good start, which we agree with by the way, needs three such ships per colony just to pack it all," said Vice Admiral Bradley Monroe, the Earth representative in charge of the turnover of the ships to the Commonwealth.

  "How many containers are on each ship, Admiral?" Jan asked.

  "Five thousand."

  "Five thousand standard-size containers?"

  "Twelve by twelve by eighty feet. Yes, Ma'am," Monroe said.

  "That's almost one per colonist," Bill said.

  "Almost, but it's a long list of supplies. And it has to include temporary housing, a hospital, water treatment plant, power generation – it's a long list."

  "I see."

  "There's not much to see aboard the freighters. The overview from outside is the big item with them. We're going to dock up with one of the passenger ships, and we'll take a tour inside."

  First they toured the mechanical and crew spaces of the passenger liner, the CCS Morning Star.

  "The mechanical and crew spaces look pretty standard," Jan said.

  "Yes, Ma'am. They're unmodified from our standard liner design. The needs are all the same, and we felt any changes would be gratuitous. They would just slow down getting the ships built," Monroe answered.

  They then toured the passenger spaces. All of these had been designed as steerage accommodations. The differences to a standard liner were immediately apparent.

  "These hallways are narrower than I'm used to," Bill said.

  "Yes, just wide enough for two people to pass each other," Monroe said.

  They looked into a cabin. There was a set of bunks on each side, for a total of four beds in the cabin. The bunks were each three feet wide and six feet long, with three feet between them at the door and about four feet between them at the far wall. Each bunk had a helmet-and-hands VR kit hanging on the headboards. At the far end was a small bathroom with toilet, sink, and a showerhead on the wall on the left, and a storage closet on the right. The doors of these spaces, each 24" wide, hinged off the center partition between them.

  "This is smaller than the crew spaces, Admiral" Jan said.

  "Yes, Ma'am, but they are only aboard for a couple of weeks. The crew is going to be aboard for months at a time, making multiple trips out and back. For the colonists, it's a one-time adventure, like going camping or something. For the crew, it's their life aboard," Monroe said.

  "That makes sense," Jan said. "And how many aboard?"

  "Thirty-two rooms like this on each deck, nine decks total, in six cylinders. Sixty-nine hundred and twelve passengers."

  "I'm surprised there aren't more rooms on a deck."

  "That's what I'm going to show you next, Ma'am." Monroe said.

  The passenger cabins were all around the outer wall of the cylinder. Monroe let them into the center of the deck through one of the occasional doors on the other side of the hallway. They were in a large cafeteria, with seating for a hundred and twenty-eight, with sixteen people at each of eight long tables. A serving counter ran down one side of the
room, with doors in the wall behind.

  "We decided to put a mess on every deck, Ma'am. There's just no way to move that many civilians around three times a day, up and down ladders, like a ship's crew. It's going to be hard enough to get everybody aboard and then back out just once. The tenth deck in each cylinder, the top deck, is the kitchen for that cylinder, and we put in a dumbwaiter system to deliver food to each of the mess halls. That's what those doors behind the counter are."

  "All right. That makes sense, Admiral," Jan said, looking around. "A lot of sense, actually."

  "We thought so, Ma'am. This room also serves as the clubhouse or recreation hall between meals, so people can escape claustrophobia. Or they can seek relative privacy in their cabin, or in the VR."

  Jan's eye noted the missing volume on one side of the mess hall.

  "What's behind that bulkhead, Admiral?" Jan asked.

  "The mechanical room for this level. We have to pump heat out of every deck separately, or the cylinder will thermally layer out. Be intolerably hot on the upper decks and cold on the lower ones. Here, Ma'am, I'll show you."

  Monroe led them out of the mess hall and around the corridor to the other side, and led them into a crowded mechanical room. Pumps, tanks, air handlers, and electrical boxes crowded the space, and pipes, valves, ducts, and conduit were everywhere.

  "Fresh water, grey water, and brown water pumps, water heaters, air handlers, and circuit breakers for this level, all in one place."

  Jan had seen her share of mechanical spaces, and this one looked tidy and well laid out.

  "All right, Admiral. This all looks good. I want to see the galley," Jan said.

  "Certainly, Ma'am."

  Jan had picked deck seven in cylinder B at random for inspection. Monroe led them up three decks to the galley deck. Jan looked around with interest. All was as it should be.