Rebuilding Faith Ch 01
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Independent CommandChapter 7: Month 82 - Rebuilding After The Storm free porn video
"We don't need another hero" - Tina Turner
While Abbot was checking out what Majorca had flushed, Taffy-1 arrived on the scene in the inner system and merged with Taffy-2, Commodore Ramsey in command from Harpy. However, once we were as sure as we could get that there were no more dickheads in the system, I ordered Taffy-1 to remain near Beer and I took a shuttle to Lesotho to ride back to Barton Yard with Taffy-2. Montserrat joined us soon after, having demonstrated that our Webb's World L2 missile depot worked fine. It hadn't helped us at all during the battle, but it would help us a lot if we got jumped on our way back. With Nice out of it, she was the only ship -Two had with missiles.
Paul Bunyan got a very public and official atta-boy from me for doing exactly what she was built for even if we had completely forgotten about her. She also got another very public and entertaining dressing-down about learning how to share from one of the task force captains, for spoiling what was "promising to be lovely good fight". Through the years, the second speech ended up with a much higher replay rate on the Womb's entertainment system than mine. She also got told to go back to hiding at L2 until we needed her again.
The ugliest part of being a commander is taking responsibility for your losses. As both Beerat System Commander and the Admiral in Command of the Beerat Defense Force (not quite the same titles, as the System Commander would also be in charge of offensive forces, when we had some) I could take all the credit for our latest victory. But, if I did that, I also had to take personal blame for the deaths of roughly 500 men and women who had gone into battle trusting me to make the right decisions and do everything I could to bring them out again.
Since we had expanded crews on most of our ships for training our new people, the AIs could tell me we lost 378 people on Kestrel alone, and another 127 on Nice. For those 505 men and women, I had failed in my duty. Two hundred and eighty-seven volunteers. Two hundred and eighteen concubines. Ninety-three of whom were pregnant. I really, really didn't need to hear that last.
The only thing I could do for them was to establish policy about the families they had left behind. I sent a message to all of the various senior officers asking them to think about our next step. We would get together and make sure they were taken care of. Harpy immediately asked for my authorization for an order that Tina had already given on this subject, that the AIs were holding up as beyond her authority. I got her on conference.
We had talked several times about her job and the lack of training the Civil Service provided. It was getting better, but the CS was still in its experimental, maybe developmental, phase. Back in Sol system she had gotten some sleep-training that the system CS coordinator had developed, but mostly her institutional knowledge was in a pair of document sets that the CS called "what worked" and "what didn't work".
In theory, this was really no different than any other field of knowledge. It just wasn't organized any better than that yet. Older fields had textbooks, classes, entire colleges that taught their students all about architecture, infantry tactics, or painting. The CS didn't have any of that yet. Someday the CS would have classes and textbooks and college degrees on colony management, but right now all Tina had was reports on what different CS reps had tried, what worked, and what didn't.
She had come to me several times for advice, orders, and clearance for orders she had given that surpassed her authority, and I had tried to be helpful. My priorities were to safeguard our people, safeguard our bases, protect the Beer, and give our people the best life we could after those other priorities were met. I dealt with the ships and the people on them, I had Bill to handle the fixed assets, and I had Tina to handle the non-military people. Sometimes her reports gave us ideas to try, and other times they convinced us to not try something we had already started doing.
One of her reports was from Thule, an appropriately-named planet that sounded horrible if you weren't an Eskimo or Lapp. Their CS rep had even less training than Tina, and she had gotten a whole Marine transport's worth of concubines and children dumped on her when said transport got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and was lost with all hands, including the regiment or whatever it was carrying. The AIs at Thule had basically tried to recycle the whole lot of their concubines since they no longer had sponsors.
Tina wanted to ensure that this did not happen here, and had ordered Woomie to transfer, for administrative purposes, all widowed concubines and their children to her as their sponsor, and to allow them to continue to use their current housing until further notice with no reduction in services. They were not losers who had been rejected by their sponsors; their sponsors had died in Confederacy service and their dependents would be taken care of.
"Okay, what part of this exceeds her authority as the Beerat System CS Coordinator?"
Things like this make you look for a concrete wall to beat your head against. "Is there a numerical limit to how many concubines the Civil Service is allowed to house as a temporary measure during an emergency?"
"Okay, can the CIVIL SERVICE take these widows and orphans in?"
"Great. Now, who is the ONLY CIVIL SERVICE REP in this system?"
"Very good. That's probably why, in her instruction to you, she used the phrase "for administrative purposes". She meant that she was claiming them for the Civil Service so that, for your needs, each of them would continue to be listed as having a sponsor. Now, if this ever comes up again, is there a better way for her to word this instruction, that would have avoided this?"
Jane
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