“How does anyone purchase anything?” asked the commander, perplexed.
“The Darhel,” responded the procurement officer, dryly. “There was a term associated with everything that we took to be price and that was how the AIDs were translating it. A more precise translation would be ‘mortgage’ or ‘debt.’ Unless you are massively wealthy, to buy the simplest items you have to take out a loan from the Darhel.” He smiled thinly. In every procurement officer there is a slight love affair with a really good scam.
“Federation wide?” asked the commander, thinking about the numbers involved. It was a staggering concept.
“Yes. And the loan is payable for up to one and a half centuries. At interest.” The procurement officer gave a very Gallic shrug. “On the other hand the products never break and are warranted for the life of the loan.”
“The ships?” asked the commander, returning to the most important subject.
“That was what brought about the understanding. The Indowy must have a hierarchy more complex than the Mandarin Court. An Indowy chooses a field, has one chosen for him, at a young age, the equivalent of four or five years old in human terms. The most complex hierarchy, and the highest paid, are the ship builders. Every piece of a ship, from hull plates to the molycircs, are made by the construction team, usually an extended family. Raw material comes in, finished ship comes out. Every part is signed and cleared by the master of the subsystem and the master builder. Every part. Thus, Indowy ships have a useful lifetime in the thousands of years and virtually no maintenance. No spare parts required; if anything breaks the component is remanufactured by hand. It is as if every ship is one of those skyscrapers,” he waved out the window at the towers beyond, “with every part made on site. All of their systems, equipment, weapons, etceteras are built the same way.
“An apprentice starts as a ‘bolt’ or ‘fitting’ maker then progresses through subsystems — plumbing, electrical, structural — learning how to make each and every component of the system. If they are lucky, in a couple of centuries they can be a master, in charge of construction of an actual ship. Because of this process, and the fact that there are very few masters available to make ships, there are rarely more than five ships completed each year in the entire Federation.”
“But… we need hundreds, thousands of ships within a few years, not centuries,” said the commander sharply, tossing the pen onto the desk. “And there are plans to produce millions of space fighters.”
“Yes. That particular bottleneck is why their ships are all converted freighters. They apparently did produce some actual warships, but very few, and losses against the Posleen have wiped them out. There is a Federation-wide shipping shortage because they are losing these converted freighters much faster than they can be replaced.”
“You would not have brought this to me if there wasn’t an answer,” the commander said. Sometimes the chief of procurement could be intensely pedantic, but his answers were usually worth the wait.
“There are only about two hundred master ship builders in existence…”
The commander was startled by the number. “Out of how many Indowy?” he asked.
“About fourteen trillion.” The chief smiled faintly at the number.
“Fourteen trillion?” the commander gasped.
“Yes. Interesting figure, don’t you think?” smirked the procurement officer.
“I should think so! For one thing, the pricing ratio on our troops was based upon Indowy craftsmen wages. There are, at most, one billion potential human soldiers,” the commander growled. “Putting their worth as equivalent to an Indowy now seems ludicrous.”
“Yes, our personnel are a comparatively finite resource. We seem to have been ‘taken,’ as the Americans would say, by the Darhel. But that is apparently normal. The Indowy make up eighty percent of the Federation population but their power is quite limited. The Darhel appear to skillfully control their interplanetary media and hold virtual control of the money supply. Since the Darhel control the money, they control the ‘chutee,’ the mortgages.
“Each Indowy has to purchase tools for his trade. If an Indowy steps out of line his ‘chutee’ is called and he becomes bereft of income and an untouchable. There is no social support for such; they either commit suicide or die of starvation. Even their family will not help them from a combination of associated shame, similar to the Japanese Giri and Gimu, and fear of retribution. The Indowy also are the servants of the Galactics and fill all servile and menial positions. That is why they are so common in the videos from Barwhon. Although technically a Tchpth planet, eighty percent of the population is Indowy.”
“Solution.” The commander stood up and paced to the window. He stood with his hands clasped behind him and thought about his longtime friend Chu Feng, lost due to faulty intelligence from these Darhel bastards. And now this.
“We should look for profit to ourselves for our nation specifically in this, but it will be necessary to develop a concerted front with other countries. We should convey this information to the other agreement parties, then begin using the Darhel’s strategy against them. Problems should occur in preparing the expeditionary forces; questions unrelated to the central issues should be raised. Finally, the central issues should be quietly raised and some agreements renegotiated. The soldiers and their governments should be paid at a rate conforming to their scarcity; a private should probably make as much as one of the Tir negotiators, for example. And the Darhel must use their power to induce changes among the Indowy.” He consulted his notes and tapped the pen on the papers.
“Although there are few accredited master ship builders, there are a vast number of component makers that can work from specifications. The Indowy must be induced to become component producers for assembly plants to be built in various locations. They will be unwilling — it goes against what could be called their religion — but they must be persuaded or forced.
“Then assembly plants can be built in the Terran System…”
“We don’t know that we can hold this planet,” pointed out the commander. In the distance a flight of pigeons wheeled through the light blue sky. He wondered if such as they might survive a defeat of the humans, or if only the rats and cockroaches would.
“Not on the planet,” corrected the junior officer, pedantically. “In orbit around other planets, Mars for example, or in the asteroid belt. Our current information is that, despite the resources available there, the Posleen do not explore or exploit the spatial regions of the planets they attack. Nor, for some strange reason, do the Galactics. Therefore placing production plants in our system is a limited risk. The Posleen will be virtually certain to overlook them; they have bypassed numerous spatial installations in other Galactic systems.
“To continue, there is sufficient excess capacity among the Indowy craftsmen to produce the necessary components for the war effort, but point-by-point assembly will not work in the time allotted. What we must do is produce a navy that assembles like the American ‘Liberty’ ships of WWII. If we can reach agreement on a few limited designs, components can be made throughout the Federation and shipped to this system. In the meantime we can be constructing assembly plants in various hidden locations in the system. Even if we lose control of the surface, most of our war-production capacity and a sizable gene pool will survive. Maybe enough to retake Earth.”