In the Navy

Once again a Fiverrrr vendor has missed the deadline without a single communication. Meanwhile, I drew up two cover concepts and restarted my order at 100 Covers. I'd like to cut a deal and order the whole series at one shot, but I am still iterating.

I need to get that cover, finish the description, complete the front matter, upload to KDP, and then I'll be ready to apply at Book Sirens and see if they will let me do an ARC run before release. I'm moving slowly from book prep to publicity. And behind this book, there's clean-up and re-release happening on the previous books -- and the possibility of new books to come.

My old work called and I will be going in for a day or two this week to help with a project. Earnest is months away, at least.

And I am starting to outline the MilSF book (All Systems Blue).

The subgenres merge and blur, but within the SF genre one can generally point at something called Military SF, and within that (and also crossing over heavily with Space Opera) a story form that focuses on the career of an individual. These are books in which the character arc of that individual can only be understood within the frame of their military career. (In fact, it is often understood that their growth is entirely because of the military.) Which means, practically, there are a lot of pages of people doing military things. Not just fighting, but making bunks and having inspections.

The plot I've concocted for this book is mostly planetary setting, with no fleet engagements (at least not yet). I had hoped to start the thing on a planet. Even then, I was going to have to figure out something about how the ships work. Starting on the ship, which is the current plan, just makes that a more immediate problem.

So here's what I've got for a working premise:

A Merchant Marine. This is a system that sits at the heart of space operations, forming a centralized body of training and certification (under the Colonial Administration), operates maybe half the hulls out there, and those CA-flagged ships and people are also available to the CA in times of war.

But let's back up. Started with a colony of Earth. They built up one world and sent their own Navy as protection (strictly a military arm, this). It was an extraction colony, meant to send much-needed materials (partially-processed; FLT ain't that cheap) back to the Sol system. So it was always very industry-focused.

The colony grew, expanded, and in time won independence. By that point value-added had reached the point where the colony was actually competitive in manufactured goods. But standard of living, and the population, were enough that they'd started their own extraction colonies, which in time also grew sufficient populations to desire self-governance.

At this point we've got something more like a federation than an alliance, a strongly centralized government that is otherwise weak in comparison not so much to local rule, but to the large corporations, and the remaining structures of the old Colonial Administration.

The Navy is still there on tax dollars, their aging ships too large and expensive to crew and trotted out just enough to blow the dust off them. They and several other functions of the old CA are largely subsumed into the new government, just another bit of local rule as far as they are concerned.

So the hull and the crew of a typical Merchant Fleet ship come out of one or more of the various "worlds" (self-rule polities, aka states) but are built to Fleet standards and trained at Fleet-qualified and overseen academies, to be given the standardized Fleet certifications. The latter two being true of essentially every crew with an actual rating, and particularly important to officers.

And on paper they cooperate with the Navy, which still has some people out there serving the remnants of "Papa Earth will watch over you to make sure the big bad aliens don't bite."

And yes, that is a hell of a lot of agreements-on-paper and traditional cooperation and all sorts of interesting ways for things to fail. I am fairly sure it did get tested when fighting broke out between a couple of the secondary colonies but I haven't worked on that yet.

In structure, I'm mixing mostly American merchant marine with a bit of US Navy and particularly submarines. For no particularly good reason. Which means I'm bogged down right now with things like watches and titles which I wouldn't have to deal with at all if Keri were to spend the entire book dirtside trying to get back in contact with her ship!

Plus, as an engineering cadet...well, just figuring out watchstanding brought up the matter of the Power Gang. To figure out how the ship runs I need to know how the ship runs -- that is, what it actually looks like when we "take her out, Mr. Sulu, Warp 6."

Yet another wrinkle. So the Merchant Fleet is generically "carry stuff" for commercial trade, plus various government businesses (it ain't wartime so they are getting properly paid for it). The companies have their own vessels, of course, which vary more in design and have their own cut-outs but more-or-less follow the same regulations. The Academies are well-tested by time and the certifications are trusted so... why change what works?

They also have some more specialist branches. Support is the big one for the book here, a fairly vague category of repairs, setting up and maintaining navigation satellites and the like, probably wormhole operations, closely connected with the labs/yards that are busy testing safety systems and so on, rescue services most likely...

So our boat is T4M (Ln). Doesn't get a name (the crew calls it "Tammie.") Support Branch, built like a Swiss army knife for a little fire-fighting, a little repair, a little survey. There's a standardization taken a bit too far for Support, meaning flexibility was optioned over utility (not that they don't have very specialized and very effective single-role ships and crews). Support was really intended to support, well, Fleet operations. Most of them, especially the gopher ships like Tammie, were never meant to go all Starship Enterprise out into the wilds far from the core worlds.

Add one more thing into the mix. That moment when Earth figured out how to run an extraction colony far outside of the Solar System, that moment when the extraction colony really, really needed a bigger breadbasket and developed Keri's "Ag-world" home planet as basically a big-ass farm? Well, that moment has happened again.

Keri's world is now developed enough, and with a rising technical competence and population and rising living standard putting the lie to the "bunch of hicks on a farm" stereotype, that they are joining the clamor for markets (and mines) somewhere else other than their own scenic mountain ranges. So is everyone else. And the dendritic network has touched a whole new cluster of potentially rich worlds to exploit and/or trade with. Trade with, because they already have locals.

That's put everyone into running around with their own Bright New Ideas. The CA is jumping out from hiding with a "See, this is why you kept us around!" The Navy is being very wary and enquiring if perhaps they could get that increased budget Real Soon Now. The corporations are eager to show who is most bleeding-edge of the bleeding edge and some of them are going Full MacNamara in wonderful schemes for how they can make their crews safe and effective.

Which is how Keri gets yanked out of her career progression of getting her degree in mechanical engineering and a nice quite job in Fleet HQ running the future space equivalent of a Steiner Tunnel, or helping to develop the next better version of a Halon fire suppression system. Fleet needs warm bodies to fill those new hulls. (And Tammie is so new it still has that new car smell.)

And one of those labs she had hopes of joining has been brainstorming with big-brained Terry expats and has found a way to download terabytes of survival skills into an adult human brain. If they can just get it to work right, this will surely be exactly the thing for crews getting sent to the frontier in this new gold rush.