"Go ahead, Admiral," Jan said
"Comm, you there?" Turner asked of the deckhead above him.
"Recording, Sir," a voice came back.
"Message begins. From Fleet Admiral Jacob Turner, commanding Earth Expeditionary Fleet, to Rear Admiral Fritz Schmidt, aboard ENS Salamis. Hey, Fritz, I've surrendered. Ain't that a hoot? Go ahead and take the fleet into Mars orbit along with Jorge's ships. Slowly now, real polite-like, and make sure nobody's confused. We got a good deal going here. Also, get a couple cruisers, maybe a heavy and a light, worked up to accompany CSF units back to each of their home planets. That way they can tell our guys the shootin's over, not that we did any, and call 'em back home. Turner out. Message ends."
"Go ahead and transmit that, Comm," Jan said.
"Yes, Ma'am. Comm out."
They presented the populace with another plebiscite through the VR system. The choice was between putting new people into the empty offices of the existing structure, or having the military run the government while it designed a new, free government with the assistance of the Commonwealth of Free Planets. The latter option won with a huge percentage of the vote.
A peace treaty was signed between the Chairman of the Commonwealth, who had been along for the ride through all this, and Fleet Admiral Jacob Turner as the nominal head of state for Earth. Because the bulk of the Council was along for the ride as well, although spread across dozens of ships, a series of hyperspace conference calls and virtual meetings between the Councilors and both Turner and Hernandez, Turner's second, began work on a Charter for the Earth, with the Commonwealth Charter, various planetary constitutions, and documents out of Earth's own history as source material.
Jan sent over six hundred of her ships home, to take back possession of Commonwealth planets from the Earth detachments on station. Turner detached sixty-four cruisers in thirty-two pairs of one heavy cruiser and one light cruiser each to escort the CSF ships home and carry orders recalling his ships. Most of the Councilors, including the Chairman, chose to hitch rides on those detachments, but some got along so well with Turner and Hernandez, and were having so much fun writing a Charter for the Earth, they decided to keep working and catch later rides.
The liners and freighters stayed at the rendezvous point. They waited for word of what had happened. It was almost four weeks after the fleet left before a fast courier ship arrived in the system and gave them a coded order. They were to space for Earth. The system had been secured, the planet invested, the government ousted. The War That Didn't Happen was over.
It was ten more days before they arrived at Earth and joined the CSF forces around the planet.
"Mommy!" Peggy came running down the hallway of the admiral's deck on Lakshmibai, bouncing alarmingly in the 0.4 g, with Max thumping along carefully behind. Jan swept Peggy up in one arm, then snagged Max as well as he came up in her wake.
"How are my little Dearies?"
"Mommy, we rode in a shuffle!"
It had been forty-five days since Jan had seen her kids, their longest separation by far. Peggy was all excited about everything going on, but Max just clutched onto her neck like he would never let her go and whimpered. Jan knew this was a short separation as far as service families went, and made a mental note to review service policies for married spacers and spacers with children.
Peggy looked over Jan's shoulder across the flag bridge, with its displays, especially the big display on the far wall that showed the planet below, the image rotating with the ship's rotation.
"Wow!" Peggy said.
At this, Max pulled his head out of Jan's neck and looked as well.
"Wow!" he mimicked.
Jan turned around and showed the kids the flag bridge. It was a quiet period – or else the kids wouldn't be here – but there was always some action of people moving about. Peggy looked down at Jan's chest and then around at all the other people walking about.
"Mommy, you have a lot more ornaments than everybody else."
"Mommy's been collecting ornaments a long time, Peggers."
Bill came onto the flag bridge.
"I heard you guys were here," he said.
"Daddy!" Peggy said, and held out her arms to her father.
Bill took Peggy, but Max was happy where he was, and seemed to enjoy even more having his mother to himself.
Jan had sent half her warships home, but she held the liners and freighters at Earth. If there was a double-cross, they had no way to defend themselves. The rest of the CSF ships waited two months before first fast couriers and then a few CSF warships came back from Commonwealth planets, often in the company of returning Earth warships.
As the Earth warships returned to their home system, and CSF ships began making runs between Earth and the Commonwealth, it became clear all was going as everyone had said. There was no subterfuge, no double-game. Jan prepared to accompany the rest of the Commonwealth ships back home, and take up her office once again at Sigurdsen. Probably in a tent for a while, but hey, you can't have everything.
As they were getting ready to depart, Turner and Hernandez visited Jan for one last time aboard CSS Lakshmibai.
"Well, Admiral, we're gonna miss you," Turner said.
"We owe you a tremendous debt, Admiral Childers," Hernandez said. "The whole Earth does."
"Hey, don't forget, I was born here. Helping clean it up was sort of unfinished business for me."
"Understood, Admiral, understood. Our efforts in that direction on a Charter for Earth are going really well. You should come back and visit us sometime once we've got it up and running," Turner said.
"Maybe I'll do that."
"We did bring you a little something to remember us by, though," Turner said.
"It's not like I'd forget you two."
"Even so." Turner turned to Hernandez, and Hernandez dug a long flat box out of his coat pocket.
"Admiral, one thing we had to get done before you left was to create this," Hernandez said, and handed the box to Jan.
She opened it and gasped. It was a 2-1/2" gold medal, hanging on a ribbon. On one side it had a bas relief of the Americas. She turned it over and on the opposite side it had a bas relief of the Eastern Hemisphere. The ribbon was the blue of the planet as seen from space.
"It's beautiful."
"We call it the Earth Medal. It will be our highest honor under the new Charter. It pleases us no end you are its first recipient," Hernandez said.
"Hey, it's not every day you conquer a planet and they give you a medal to say 'Thank you,' Admiral," Turner said.
With tears in her eyes, Jan hugged them both goodbye.
Finally, seven months after they had left Sigurdsen, the rest of the CSF fleet departed Earth for their respective planets within the Commonwealth. The liners and freighters left with them. The Star Runner arrived back in Jablonka orbit eight months after she had left.
The War That Didn't Happen involved a total of twenty-one hundred warships, with two million spacers aboard, the largest space war in history. There were only nine ships lost in the Battle of Earth – eight Earth battleships and one Earth heavy cruiser – for a total of just over ten thousand spacers dead, half the loss of spacers a similar loss of ships by the CSF would entail, due to the Earth ships' higher use of automation.
Jan hadn't had to beat them, she had only had to convince them they couldn't win. That was the brilliance of Tien Jessen's tactical plan. It targeted the overturning of the Earth kleptocracy and avoided the piling up of a blood debt between Earth and the Commonwealth, setting the stage for a lasting peace.
For his work on the Earth Problem, Tien Jessen would be promoted to Vice Admiral, and awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.
Phoenix
Of course, Sigurdsen wasn't there anymore. Much of it anyway.
The Code Black plan had included the destruction of much of Sigurdsen Fleet Base. There was simply too much information there, about ships and personnel and doctrine, to be able to evacuate it in any quick
way. It would have been an intelligence treasure, and compromised the prosecution of the war if the plans for the Battle of Earth could not be pressed to an early conclusion.
Potential intelligence troves like the Network Operations Center, the Intelligence Division Headquarters, and the Tactical Division Headquarters were imply gone, imploded by demolitions placed by sappers during the evacuation, the debris set on fire by secondary incendiaries.
Other facilities that would have been of use to an occupation force were also gone. Barracks, housing blocks, and mess halls were also demolished.
Orbital fleet repair facilities remained. That had been a hard call. But without support from the ground, they would have been pretty useless, and the supplies for the orbital facilities had also been evacuated on the freighters.
The Code Black orders had not entailed the destruction of any other fleet bases. They did not contain anywhere near the intelligence about overall CSF posture as did Sigurdsen, and they lacked sufficient facilities to sustain a planetary occupation force.
By the time the second half of the fleet had returned to Earth, the building of temporary facilities at Sigurdsen was well under way.
A fast courier vessel had been dispatched from Earth to Jablonka as soon as the Earth fleet had surrendered. It had activated contingency contracts put in place during the Code Black planning. Tens of thousands of construction workers had descended on the base, with plans that had been drawn up well in advance.
The first order of business was the construction of a large tent city on open land the CSF owned next to the base proper, to accommodate the returning staff. All of this was done by the time the first half of the CSF fleet had returned a month later. Huge barracks tents, mess tents and office tents with plank floors stood row upon row over hundreds of acres.
Then the construction teams began the assembly of all the temporary buildings that the CSF had stockpiled. These were moved to the base from their off-site storage during the building of the tent city. The temporary buildings started going up next to the tent city. Once half of them were in place, they rest were used to replace the tent city, one row of tents at a time.
Construction was also going on within the confines of the base proper. The first step was to clear the roadways of debris from the implosions. After that, heavy equipment moved in to begin preparing the building sites for the new buildings.
Removal of the rubble of the old buildings would be last.
When the Sun Runner returned to Jablonka three months into the construction, the construction crews had just finished the first half of the temporary buildings, and were ready to start replacing tents. There was enough square footage, if barely, for the returning staff of Sigurdsen Fleet Base to take up their duties.
With the shortage of space, however, shipboard crews taking planet leave after eight months of continuous spacing were put up in hotels in Jezgra. Tourism and business travel having fallen off drastically during the War That Didn't Happen, hotel managers were ecstatic to find themselves one-hundred-percent booked for two solid months as crews rotated for planet leave.
The houses on the Hill, Flag Row, and some other minor facilities had not been demolished during the evacuation. Jan, Bill, the kids, and their household staff moved back home, as did Kurt Wisnieski and Dez Deshpande and their households. A shuttle from the Star Runner brought them all directly down to the Hill, landing on the road in front of the houses.
They arrived in the afternoon, and had a dinner made from the non-perishable foods remaining in the pantries. After the kids were in bed, Jan and Bill moved out onto the front porch, watching the hum of activity across the old fleet base and the new tent city, continuing on through the night under the lights.
"This may become my favorite view for the next year or two," Jan said. "It's just so interesting to watch all the construction."
"Too bad you had to blow it all up," Bill said.
"Had to be done. If the war had gone on, it was too tempting a target, as well as too tempting to get nailed down defending it. Without it, there was no focus to concentrate against. Earth would have dissipated their forces trying to hold down thirty-two planets while defending Earth. In a war of attrition, we win, because they can't suffer any attrition. There's only one Earth. We had to keep there from being only one Commonwealth planet of interest, keep them from taking Sigurdsen and Jablonka and using them as a bargaining chip."
"Oh, I understand, but it's going to be rough going for a while."
"But it'll also reset our own thinking. There's much more to the CSF than Sigurdsen. Sigurdsen's really the least part of the Navy. It had gotten psychologically more important than it was, both to the Navy as a whole and especially to the people who came here and spent their whole careers here. Graham wasn't the disease, he was a symptom. That whole 'Sigurdsen is what's really important, you just shut up and do as your told' mentality that would allow them to uncover a Commonwealth planet for the sake of an exercise they thought was interesting. How crazy was that?" Jan asked.
"So you tore it down so you could rebuild it differently?"
"Well, it certainly shook the pillars of creation for the kind of people who thought the sun rose and set in the NOC. Maybe now they'll take a different view."
"Eight months in space would pretty much do that, too," Bill said.
"Yes, and we mixed up the Sigurdsen crowd with the spacers on the passenger liners. Gave them exposure to some different world views. Even while spacers on the warships went out and won the war for them while they sat and did nothing. Worked out pretty well all around."
"And we get rid of a bunch of buildings that were getting pretty long in the tooth anyway."
"Yep," Jan said.
"Meanwhile, spacers on planet leave are in the hotels downtown, and base staffers are in tents."
"It's funny. There were three separate attempts by people within the NOC to modify the plans so that spacers would have planet leave in the tents, while Sigurdsen staffers would all be living in the hotels."
"Really?" Bill asked.
"Oh, sure. Never underestimate the entitlement attitude of a career Sigurdsen staffer. 'Why don't the spacers have to live in the tents while on planet leave?' 'Simple. Because the rest of the time, on board ship, they live like sardines, with eight bunks in a shoebox.'"
Bill chuckled.
"Well, I'd better hit the sack," he said. "I have to go into the tent in the morning."
Jan laughed, and they both went inside.
Appendix
Inhabited systems mentioned
Earth
Members of the Commonwealth of Free Planets:
Bahay - Capital: Kabisera
Boomgaard
Calumet
Jablonka - Capital: Jezgra
Kodu
Pahaadon
Parchman
Saarestik
Valore
Waldheim
Outer Colony Polities
Brunswick
Feirm
Lautada
Paradiso
Samara
Tenerife
Villam
Notes on Navigational Notation
The Commonwealth Space Force uses the following standards with respect to navigational bearings and distances.
Navigational bearing and distance are specified as:
rotation mark/minus elevation (on point) (at distance)
All such references are with respect to a point, a baseline, and a plane.
If no point is specified, the point is the ship, the baseline is the long axis of the ship projected through the bows, and the plane is defined by the plane of the ship with the command cylinder(s) considered to be 'up'.
If another ship is specified as the point, such as 'on the enemy', the point is the enemy ship, the baseline is the vector of the enemy ship's velocity, and the plane is the plane of the ecliptic.
If a planet is specified as the point, the point is the planet, the baseline is a line from the
planet to the sun, and the plane is the plane of the ecliptic.
If a sun is specified as the point, the point is the sun, the baseline is a line from the sun to the primary inhabited planet, and the plane is the ecliptic.
If the galactic center is specified as the point, the point is the galactic center, the line is the line from the galactic center to the ship, and the plane is the plane of the galactic lens.
Bearing angles are always specified as 'number-number-number'. Designations such as 'ninety-three' and 'one-eighty' are not permitted. These are correctly specified as 'zero-nine-three' and 'one-eight-zero'. An exception occurs for 'zero-zero-zero', which may be stated simply as 'zero', such as in 'zero mark zero' or 'zero mark one-eight-zero'.
rotation is specified as 'number-number-number' in degrees clockwise from the projection of the baseline onto the plane when viewed from above. Leading zeroes are included, not dropped. number-number-number runs from zero-zero-zero to three-six-zero.
If the point is the ship, 'above' means from above the ship with the command cylinder(s) considered to be 'up'.
If the point is an enemy ship, a planet, or the sun, 'above' means from the north side of the solar system as determined by the right-hand rule: with the fingers of the right hand in the direction of orbit of the planets, the thumb points north.
If the point is the galactic center, 'above' means from the north side of the galaxy, as determined by the right hand rule applied to the rotation of the stars about the galactic center.
elevation is specified as 'mark/minus number-number-number' in degrees up/down from the plane. 'mark' is used for bearings above the plane, and 'minus' is used for bearings below the plane. 'Above' is defined as for rotation. Leading zeroes are included, not dropped. number-number-number runs from zero-zero-zero to one-eight-zero.
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