Grind Forces

You should know, up front, that NAVY is an ETLA for "Never Again Volunteer Yourself", but, to my eye, MARINES should stand for "Maligned And Repugnant Individuals the Navy Excellently Screws"... so, when I joined up, I chose the Confederacy Navy.

Someone please shoot me, preferably in a fashion that the nanites won't be able to revive me. Sadly, the nanites have never heard of a DNR.

In any case, we get to deliver the Marines to the places the Sa'arm are in the process of moving in on... and we get to watch the engagements. People way above my pay grade pay a lot of attention to how the engagements evolve.

The good news about the Sa'arm is that they might take in a new technology-- as they have-- but can't innovate and weaponize. Sure, they now have shields, thanks to the races that tried to negotiate with them, but they've done nothing to re-tune them for additional threats. As long as the correlation of forces isn't adverse in the extreme, as we have seen in some places, we humans have all of the edge in inventing new techniques.

I talk with a lot of other folks about what they observe in the Sa'arm as we probe their strengths and weaknesses.

And, yes, applying some Zen is interesting. Some of their strengths are their weaknesses, but, then, it's the Marines who get to see that on a daily basis.

Initiative is a strange word since you can't apply it to the Sa'arm. It's a psychological question, for the most part. We may mistake their moves as initiative, but, truly, it is us, humans, who have it. We are proactive, the Sa'arm, for the most part, reactive.

Add to this that one of their strengths, the units their "hives" exchange to send inforation, kind of like "TCP/IP via Carrier Pigeon", has a LOT of bandwidth. At the same time these are the Sa'arm weakness; we hold the internal lines of communication, so the Sa'arm hives are easily isolated by stopping the couriers.

So that first step locked them down, at least in the areas we acquired influence. Because we dealt with these couriers while they were still in hyperspace the Sa'arm hives had no error detection or correction mechanisms, for they never had faced this kind of problem.

The analysts figured that it would be only time before the Sa'arm started to use hive ships to pass messages. My pool entry was "13 years".

Yes, we bet.

Never piss off human beings... and never bet against all of them, either. We had a tendency to look at even the most innocent of the technologies the Darjee had allow us to work with and found military applications.

Don't laugh, the Marines are already using food synthesizers to make chemical and biological agents to annoy the Sa'arm.

And, also, any humans down-wind of their experiments. We don't let them play with this tech on-board the ship any more.

We humans-- even with CAP testing to cull out the real wolves-- scare the Darjee at the glee we show in finding new ways to apply the dribs and drabs of technologies they've allowed us to have. The Darjee are smart enough not to tell this to any of the other races within the Confederacy... but I think it's because they're certain no one else will believe them.

I was in the middle of a star system between the main line of the Sa'arm advance and the Earth. There were two star systems between us and Earth, each with planets the Sa'arm would drool over, so we had some defense in depth.

I didn't like that the Confederacy would not allow us to force a rotation of the Sa'arm advance away from Earth, but, I soon learned, the Sa'arm "frontal assault" reflex was far more likely to rotate them to attack along our axis.

And, yeah, discovering, later, that the Sa'arm approach of throwing more and more resources at a problem area first insanely provided an "attraction" for the Sa'arm, even if it must have been unwitting. I'm not sure what kind of step in evolution it took to do that... but it was weird for us to learn.

Of course this reflect doesn't work too well when you are denying them their opportunity to pass along the lessons learned... and that is where I come in.

I was assigned to a deep-strike carrier that was trying out a new weapon.

Not only were we collecting the couriers between two of the major systems supporting the Sa'arm line of expansion, we were deploying a new weapon to ensure our advantage.

All right, so I admit it, I was the sadist who originally invented it, or, at least, the basic concept. A lot of folks helped me develop the idea and then it got turned into hardware.

Where did the weapon come from?

Well, many of the people who have chosen the Navy are heavy sci-fi readers... and authors, too. I've heard that Lois herself had been scooped up in a special operation and is one of the people tasked with working out "WWMVD?".

Anyway, I heard about the Aurora's incident and worked out how it happened.

Now, having read a lot of Chandler's "John Grimes" stories as a child-- in fact, I think the first book I found in my Uncle's stash of sci-fi was one of his-- I saw how the hyperspace drive we-- and the Sa'arm-- used did mimic some of the side defects of the "Mannschenn Drive", though, yeah, ours didn't really twist time. It did, however, lend itself to "phasing".

I worked with the woman who created what I jokingly referred to as the "mass proximity indicator" and she was even weirder than I was. Like me, she'd read a lot of both Chandler and Niven, so I could see where she was working from. Between us, we actually managed to make some useful tools.

We were a bit weak on the detailed math... and the AI we were working with was, well, uncomfortable with the actual weapon we were proposing. She provided the sensory, I did the "delivery".

Our first SPAM shells-- yes, that was my nomenclature, for Something Posing As a Mine-- worked. The official name, dammit, was HSIT - Hyperspace Synchronizing Interference Technique, pronounced as "shit".

Yes, I invented the basic concept of the HSIT shell. Don't you all bow to me, it was useful... but, I discovered, was not going to win the war. The most we could do with it was enforce a blockade, though, even against their largest ships.

So we were finding Hive ships being sent off, we'd drop off a couple of active SPAM/HSIT shells in hyper, they'd find the Hive ship, match location and velocity... and then find the phase the ship was in.

BLAM

No more hive ship.

Well, sometimes it took three or four shells to do the job. We had to give chase anyway to make sure they couldn't learn anything if they survived such a shelling, too, though, when necessary, we used more conventional weapons.

The Sa'arm are incredibly backwards, too. They're awful at compartmentalization, but, then, given the way they seem to work, that's not much of a surprise.

Anyway, we'd use SPAM shells on the couriers, too, so we were really spamming their mail.

The best part?

The Sa'arm do NOT have any kind of back-up communications, so, other than their ships disappearing, they've got no idea that they're up against anything.

And, so, they keep hoping one of their ships get through.

Note that if they ever implemented a hypercomm-- as if they didn't already have example to work from-- to counter this tactic, we'd win, simply because we'd be able to talk to them.

My bet? That they wouldn't develop a new communications technique for at least five hundred years.

Barring accidents... we're likely to be around for me to collect on it. I'll admit that this is one bet I'd prefer to lose, however.

I do not like marines, did you know that?

And, no, it's not the usualy antipathy between squids and jarheads, no.

I didn't start out disliking them... but, then, one of them decided to play with my SPAM shell and...

Maybe I'd better step back and explain this so you understand what this gropo was trying to do. I have to admit that it was good logic but the outcome wasn't one either of us were likely to predict.

You see, under normal circumstances a Hive ship has one hellacious active defense system-- probably because their home world has rings around it, and, when rocks decay from orbit, they (or the visitors they stole it from) need active protective measures, there, and, so, they had counter-fire weapons. They had to have learned, somewhere along the line, how to use artillery of their own, so they weren't easily attackable, frontally or not. And you can't be stealthy with anything re-entering from orbit which their counterfire is designed for!

Until this one jarheaded sergeant decided to play with one of "my" shells and tried it out on a world that had been fully "swarmed" and every three days sent a hive ship-- and fleet-- off to another star system.

We learned that an HSIT shell isn't all that destructive, at least in hyperspace.

Phasing into normal space from hyper, while inside a planet, in normal space, is something else again.

If we hadn't been hiding behind the moon we might not have survived at all.

A SPAM shell weighs in at less than two tons, about the mass of a mini-van.

Now, imagine, if you will, that mass suddenly materializing inside a solid object. Especially since the active counter measures of the parked hive-ship on the surface didn't know it passed through it.

No, it doesn't convert directly into energy, so, no, E=mc^2 didn't translate its mass to energy. That would have been bad, instantly fatal to anything within that star system.

But, thinking about the sudden addition of all of those neutrons, protons, electrons-- and all of the other particles-- to the atoms already making up the planet, did, however, make for one hell of a fission bomb that cracked the planet open, exterminating all life on the planet... and local space.

The AI that I had worked with almost went catatonic and I was glad none of the Darjee were around. It had never, despite watching Star Wars, had conceived that there was a way to destroy a planet.

And, to be honest, I hadn't, either.

And, truly, destroying a planet in order to save it wasn't something any of us liked the idea of. The AI wasn't too pleased with me for providing the basic technology, either, since we could use it against the Confederacy, if we decided to get pissed off.

Well, the cat was out of the bag.

We tried it out in that system-- now that all of the Sa'arm had been killed off and the rest of the system wasn't much use to anyone-- on the moon that had shielded us.

From a distance.

Ummmm... from a great distance.

I'll admit that it sure made it a lot easier to mine the materials from deep within that moon. The AIs on each ship did decry the danger of such a weapon. So did I because this use wasn't as a weapon but more of a doomsday device, implementing the concept of "denial value".

Unfortunately, one of the Marine engineers re-christened the new version of the shell as "Shattering Planets And Moons".

So it only takes one SPAM to ruin your whole day.