ATLAS, LUNA

“Where are we going now?” Speinfoent asked as he and Grionc were herded aboard a shuttle.

This shuttle was clearly of a different make compared to the other Terran one they commuted to Luna on. It boasted a paint job in a shade of black so deep it seemed to devour the light around it, making it a bit unnerving to look at. The shuttle was angular and sleek, resembling the Terran combat ships that had escorted them into the system, only it was a mini version designed to carry a small crew of maybe a dozen people.

“Outer system. To our naval home base. We’ve shown you our methods and our plan. And now, you need to familiarize yourself with our hardware so when the time comes, you can know how to fight alongside us,” Carla replied.

“Isn’t that far away from your home planet?” Speinfoent wondered.

“Sure is. It’s close to the system blink limit. Built it right after we stumbled upon you folks in the Malgeir Federation. If there was ever an intrusion in our colony systems outside Sol, our ships should be able to quickly clear the limit and blink to respond.”

“You built the base to defend against… us?” he pressed.

Carla chuckled. “Hah, not specifically you, no. You were just the very first intelligent alien species we discovered, given your proximity to our space. The base was built to prepare for the contingency that you weren’t a friendly species. We discovered after a while you were not an aggressive threat, but it’s still the logical place to place the garrison in case of invasion.”

“Huh. Interesting,” Speinfoent mused.

“Let me guess,” Carla said. “You don’t teach that at your Staff College.”

“No, we don’t have one of those. And our initial trainers taught us to garrison our ships next to our objectives. And that’s how our Navy does it,” Speinfoent recalled.

Amelia joined the conversation. “That makes sense for some cases. In the other systems where we only have one station or colony to protect, we don’t mind placing our ships down the system blink well either. The problem is here we have multiple planets to protect in Sol. And our planets orbit at different speeds and very rarely line up. For example, right now, the first planet in the Sol system, Mercury, is closer to our home planet of Earth than the second planet, Venus. But that’ll change in a few weeks. Orbital positions constantly shift: it doesn’t make sense to constantly adjust our deployments based on the alignment of the planets. So instead of dividing our fleet into dozens of battlegroups and defending every colony or base in the system, it is more flexible to simply have a response fleet near the system limit that can blink out to stop the enemy before they get here in the first place.”

“Ah, that makes sense,” Speinfoent said. “And I’ve never thought of the… moving orbit problem like that.”

“Oh yeah, it’s a whole field. Mostly optimized by logistic computers now, but I knew a guy back at the College whose intuition was almost as fast as any simulator we built. Of course, if we do get attacked by an overwhelming enemy, we would probably sacrifice the outer system and pull our ships inward to defend the far more populous worlds of Terra, Luna, and Mars instead of fighting a battle to the death outside. Just don’t tell the districts out in the Red Zone and the Saturnian Resistance that; they might get too excited.”

Speinfoent nodded. “I can think of a few systems in Malgeir space where we also face this similar dilemma.”

“Indeed, there are a few systems that are no longer in Malgeir space because of this problem,” Carla reminded him.

“Fair point,” Speinfoent winced. “I did notice you also have combat ships around several of your planets though.”

“Kind of.” It was Carla’s turn to grimace. “Most of those are considered… law enforcement, not Navy. We used to have a much bigger piracy problem, mostly concentrated around Saturn.”

“Piracy? Saturn?” he tilted his head. “You keep mentioning that. On our way into the system. And now. What is the situation like there?”

“Pirates. Terrorists. That’s what we call the criminal gangs that hijack cargo, crew, ships… and the ones that launch senseless attacks against our people out there, military or civilian. The scum of the species. Because of the way the planet orbits change alignment, the pirates and Resistance would become more active during certain years when more commercial traffic passes near their bases of operations.”

“Intriguing. But this is not a problem anymore?” Grionc asked, curious how Terrans resolved the issue.

“It’s… less of a headache these days,” Carla corrected. “This latest Red Season came and went without too many major incidents before Saturn went into apparent retrograde. The pirate gangs and Resistance cells seemed more busy fighting each other than well… what they used to do. A few decades back, things got pretty dicey for the Republic in the outer system for a while when they decided to band together and see if they could kick our Navy out.”

Grionc’s eyebrows knitted together. “They sound like a formidable force.”

“Used to be. Now, the Saturn Red Zone is more a place for our Navy to blood and train our new officers. Almost like a more dangerous live-fire test range.”

Grionc nodded thoughtfully. “I see. You send your least experienced commanders against the criminals there to engage in battle and become more experienced?”

“Precisely. There’s only so much that a classroom or a simulator can teach a cadet. At some point, they need to learn how to cope with combat. Some cadets fail or break down in combat. But it’ll have been better to find out who would or wouldn’t when fighting against low-level pirates in peacetime than if they do it when we throw them in the deep end against the real deal when the Saturnian Resistance gets all uppity.”

Speinfoent chimed in. “We certainly don’t have an equivalent to that in the Malgeir Navy.”

Amelia snorted sarcastically. “No, that’s why more than fifty percent of your losses are commanded by fresh officers on their first combat mission.”

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Grionc squinted. “Is it really? I’ve always known that new captains are more likely to perform disastrously, but I didn’t know it was that bad!”

“You lose a lot of ships. And Grionc, that is a low-bound estimate by our computers,” Amelia replied. “It’s probably even worse in reality. My gut says we’re looking at a first mission fail rate closer to eighty percent.”

“How do we fix that? We don’t have a… piracy problem like you do. And I’m not sure we want to.”

“Which kind of surprises me because your criminals don’t seem to have a problem with regular violence on the ground… Anyway, that’s part of why your new officers must come here to learn from our Staff College. Don’t worry; we won’t be running out of these assholes any time soon,” Amelia said. “Our suppression raids keep the pirate numbers manageable, but the low-level threat will probably never go extinct as long as there is profit to be made on the routes.”

“Fair enough,” Grionc shrugged, scratching her snout. “I’ll try to lobby to send as many of ours to you as possible, though there will be a lot of resistance to increasing our recruit training time to years from… a few days.”

“Good luck with that. A lot of our hopes for your species are riding on you. No pressure.”

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The shuttle flipped over as it started to decelerate.

Carla announced a few hours later, “We’re almost there.”

She pointed to one of the several interior display panels and manipulated it to zoom in on a moon. “Charon, moon of Pluto. About a fifth the gravity of Luna. No atmosphere. Plenty of canyons to dig ground support bases in and easy enough to transport supplies to and from orbit.”

Then she focused the display on the fleet anchored at the station in orbit. “That’s home. Naval Station Charon.”

Dozens of ships were on display. Grionc and Speinfoent were used to the much bigger Malgeir ships, but the sleek, deadly black ships in the dark that made them difficult to spot against the background of space promised a different kind of violence.

These were not the civilian patrol ships they saw in the inner system.

A few of them looked like the same kind of ship Amelia had escorted them in, but most were a larger, bulkier design.

Amelia introduced them. “These fatter ships are our last generation combat vessels. We call them the Peacekeeper-class destroyers. Older sensors, older avionics. They’re the frontline workhorse of the Terran Republic Navy. In combat, they have kinematic performance almost on par with my Mississippi, but with much worse reconnaissance and stealth characteristics. Still enough to hide from your radars at medium to long range, say a few light seconds, but I wouldn’t risk taking them closer unless they’re the upgraded Block 40s with the new radar coating. And even then, their thermal signatures are… not great against the background of space. They’re more than capable of taking on pirate ships solo though, and I’ll take them against Znosian Forager-classes any day of the week and twice on Sundays.”

Then, the screen moved to show the ships that looked like mirror images of the Mississippi. “These are our new combat ships, straight from Ceres. Some of the civilians had a vote to name them the Rabbitkiller-class, but that was a little too on the nose for Naval Command. We ended up naming them Python-class missile destroyers. Similar in stealth characteristics to my Mississippi, less electronic warfare features, but they pack a lot meaner of a punch. We’ll show you the internal missile bay later. Oh, and their propulsion specs are absolutely ridiculous. These things regularly achieve twenty or thirty to one kill ratios against our older ships in exercises, and I can’t wait to see them eat Bunnies for breakfast.”

Amelia moved onto a much bigger ship that looked more like the scale of a traditional Malgeir ship. “Camel-class support ships. Carries munition, supplies, fuel, shuttles, or troops. Configurable mission flexibility means we can easily swap out the interiors depending on what we need them to do. These didn’t come cheap. They’re more expensive than even our new Python-class.”

Grionc nodded. She’d come to learn that the Terrans love their transport ships for some reason. Then she pointed at the largest ship on the screen. “Is that Alpha-class your fleet flagship?”

“No.” Amelia shook her head. “Our flagships are now just missile destroyers. We used to have parasite carriers as our flagships, but our doctrine has evolved past their use in combat. That large one is our biggest ship by tonnage: the TRNS Mercy. It’s a hospital ship. Forty-eight shuttle bays, two shuttles per bay. It’s got enough beds on the inside for a whole Marine division of casualties and enough facilities to do their job.”

Carla added, “As the Marines say, if you are still breathing when they bring you onto the Mercy, your ticket to hell is invalid… The facilities hold state-of-the-art trauma, surgical equipment, and a tier five testing lab.”

“And that’s a lot of shuttles in its bays.”

“Search and rescue,” Amelia said. “We know you just use your combat ships for that.”

“Yes,” Grionc challenged. “Is that a… problem?”

“Only if you need your combat ships for combat.”

“I can see how dedicated search and rescue shuttles can be useful,” Grionc admitted.

“Yeah, we discovered their effectiveness the hard way in pre-space war. They don’t make the difference in any single battle, but we learned that if we’re fighting a war, it’s quite handy to keep soldiers, sailors, spacers, and Marines around that can learn from their mistakes.”

“That’s something we can actually adopt,” Speinfoent said, looking thoughtful.

“Indeed,” Carla nodded at him. “Passenger or transport ships can be converted into makeshift hospital ships. Probably the one thing you can do to reduce your casualty rate most significantly. Well, other than to stop losing battles. Even the Bunnies do this for their naval personnel, though their ground services don’t seem to care much about casualties for some reason.”

Nodding absentmindedly, Grionc spotted another shuttle. It looked more… conventional to her experienced eyes than the other Terran ships, painted in a bright white paint as opposed to the usual dark black. Clearly, stealth was not a concern when this was built.

She pointed it out to the Terrans. “This looks… is it some kind of diplomacy vessel?”

Carla tilted her head and looked at her strangely. “Diplomacy? In some ways…”

Grionc stared at it.

Carla continued. “That’s one of our two long-range strategic bomber classes. This is the older one. Carries a bit more firepower, but as you can see, it stands out a bit more with its anti-flash white paint.”

Grionc scratched her snout. “Anti-flash white?”

“Anti-flash white. For reflecting thermal radiation from our nuclear— You know what? Don’t worry about that one for now, we probably won’t need these against the Buns,” Carla said hastily.

“Hey, what about that one?” Grionc asked as a new, unique-looking ship slightly larger than one of the missile-destroyers floated into view. Its outer surface was covered with radiator panels. “A transport ship?”

Carla smiled. “That’s our ice cream barge. Produces enough ice cream to fill every liter of empty space, in every ship in the fleet, every twenty-four hours.”

“What’s ice cream?” Speinfoent asked, curious.

“It’s a frozen dessert.”

“What’s a dessert?”

“It’s the food you eat after you finish your regular food,” Carla explained patiently.

“Oh! Like the cheesecake we got at the mess hall last night?” Speinfoent asked, suddenly feeling hungry for more.

“Kind of, yeah. It’s like that, except frozen liquid.”

“Why do you need ice cream for your fleet?”

“There’s an official reason and a real reason. The official reason is that we run stealth ships hotter than Terrans are accustomed to, to make their heat sink tanks last longer, so we store and give spacers ice cream to cool their body temperature in combat to maintain their morale and performance.”

“And what’s the real reason?”

Carla burst into laughter. “The real reason is that everyone loves ice cream, including the people in charge of the Navy budget, so we got an ice cream barge.”

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META

Joke’s on all the non-believers; the astrologers were half-right. As it turns out, planetary bodies being in retrograde can have massive real effects on logistics, prices, and yes — long-distance relationships!