Clay Flesh Book 2

By Ivan the Terror

Codes: MF+

Chapter 101

We were in the middle of Dinner when Eliza suddenly sat up, went wide eyed, and exclaimed, “Holy Shit!”

Since it was rare to see her act like that, we all gave her the look.  She excitedly said, “Aleem just sent me a draft of a paper he is writing.  ‘External Control of Quantum Pairing at the Group Level’.”

I and half people at the table gasped.  That was the current holy grail of physics.  I asked unbelievingly, “Did he really solve it?”

“Seems like it.”

“Holy Shit.”  I agreed.  I thought for a moment, “Eliza, have the Mumbai office immediately assign a large protection detail for him.”  He wasn’t safe.  There were too many fanatics out there who didn’t want what he just discovered.  Environmental and Religious terrorists had been having a field day in the last fifty years or so attacking any institution that appeared to be making great discoveries.

The discovery of the theory behind how to build a star drive would drive them nuts.

Good thing we had moved in some guards for Aleem.  He called me to protest, but in the middle of the call we suddenly heard an explosion and gunshots.  He stopped protesting quickly.  The EBs quickly took care of the attackers (a radical group of anti-technology fanatics).

The Indian government wasn’t too happy since the attack occurred at India’s MIT (Mumbai Institute of Technology) where Aleem was a Physics professor.  The chancellor bowed to political pressure and put Aleem on semi-permanent sabbatical.  There was a lot of furor over the decision since Aleem had been a professor for over a century.

I immediately flew to Mumbai to discuss Aleem’s theory with him.  He lived across the street from the Mumbai clinic in an apartment with attached lab.  The day after the attack, I was knocking on his door.  There was no answer, so I called out, “Anuva, is Aleem in there?”

“Sir, he is sitting in a chair, staring out the window.”

“Override the door lock, please.”  I heard a click.  “Thank you, Anuva.”

“You are welcome, Sir.”

I went into the room.  Like Anuva had said, he was staring blankly out the window, a tear running down his cheek.  Without moving he said softly, “Grandpa Tom, what have I done?”

“Aleem, I am a bit confused, what are you talking about?”

He sniffed and murmured, “All those people, dead.  It is my fault.”

“What are you talking about?”

“At the University, all those people, dead.”

I called out to the clinic AI, “Anuva, what is he talking about?”

“I am not sure, but there were some deaths at the University as the result of the terrorist attack.  Two policemen and six terrorists.”

“Thank you Anuva.  Aleem, those were not your fault.”

“They would still be alive if I hadn’t published my theory.”

“First, you didn’t publish, you sent out a few drafts, someone at the University let the fanatics know.  And secondly, you didn’t make them do what they did.  If you still think that it is your fault in some way; then let’s make the cops’ deaths be not in vain, let’s get this thing built.”

He stared for another few minutes, and then looked up with a determined expression.  “Let’s do it.”

I pulled every string I had, contacted all the first world governments, and not one was willing to invest.  The Japanese government was the only one who was willing to help, but only in a support capacity.  Australia remained neutral.  I was labeled a nut and no one would take the risk of investing.  They laughed at me, and even opposed me in the U.N.  When I asked Ester, she told me that many of the Senators and Presidents were being paid off by the religious fanatics.

In the end, I had a brainstorm.  An idea that I had seen in a few old SciFi novels centuries ago, and had worked great in Jurassic Park, I implemented.  I purchased a large island off the coast of Panama that was a preserve, since it turned out that Costa Rica didn’t have any.  We had to promise to help protect the animals there, which we would do anyway, but the Panamanian government was flat broke and needed the money.  I spent billions, but soon had my own launch rails and shuttles.

The nutcase religious fanatics became interested at this point, and began to attempt to sabotage things.  Supply shipments got diverted or lost; many suppliers refused to sell to us; and there were even several suppliers whose warehouses were burnt down.  We had to redirect a lot of it through the clinic supply system, which had been in place for centuries and was pretty much impossible to disrupt.

So they began to do armed incursions.  Whole groups of mercenaries attacked the island and came after me as I did my managing visits to clinics.  They were all easily put down by my security.  I often wondered where they were coming from, they lost a dozen men monthly on the attacks, and there couldn’t have been that many mercenaries in the first place, there hadn’t been a major war in decades.

Like the Soviets of long ago, an entire city was built from scratch to support the ground infrastructure.  A giant research facility was built, and Aleem worked night and day developing several new technologies.

The first big invention to come out of the lab was the quantum radio.  We immediately built one and sent it to the Selena clinic.  Lona sent a “Hello, World!” as a test, then connected it for general use.  Within a few months, both main space stations and the lunar city were in real-time contact with Earth.

We built a space dock in orbit.  The space dock was really cool (excuse me, “valid”).  It was essentially another space station.  It looked like the Enterprise space dock from Star Trek.  Natalie even said it was alike, and she should know, having played a Starfleet admiral in the latest version of Star Trek.  I spent weeks just wandering around geeking out.

As Aleem was working out the kinks, we built the prototype starship, minus the engines.  Eliza eagerly worked with EMRV Wendy to “birth” the AI, Maryanne, who was in command of the ship.  Maryanne was a bit precocious, helping build herself, running several dozen waldos that assisted in construction.

With Maryanne’s childhood, and debugging Aleem’s masterpiece, it took ten years.  We were the butt of many jokes, but we built Maryanne, and were secretly ready on May 1, 2236.

For testing, we fully stocked the ship, just in case; then a crew of twenty space nut EBs with four of my daughters and grand-daughters launched Maryanne.  There were also around thirty passengers.  In spite of all the political objections, the christening with the bottle of 2078 Chablis, which I had stashed 170 years before, for the launch from space dock was watched around the world and off the world by just about everyone, the entire human race ground to a halt as “The Launch” took over all media outlets.  You could almost hear the political teeth gnashing from orbit.

I really, really wanted to go with them, but I couldn’t leave everything for that long.  It was the same reason I couldn’t visit Selena until recently.  I figured there would be regular trips within 20 years, so I would just have to wait.

With her prototype ion drive, Maryanne left orbit and moved out to the L3 Lagrange point opposite the moon.  Then she created a paired quantum point near Mars and jumped 13 light minutes to a point just outside the orbit of Phobos and Deimos. She immediately sent back a signal via the quantum radio indicating her arrival.  There were people cheering everywhere.  The unofficial holiday filled the streets from New York to Tokyo to Selena.

After all the initial hoopla died down, Maryanne began her braking maneuvers.  Since the paired quantum point had been travelling at the same speed as Earth, it was horribly out of sync with Mars, which travelled at 80% of Earth’s velocity and slightly in a different direction due to being further out from the Sun.  We had waited until the planet was going in approximately in the same direction before we had jumped, so that saved a lot of time and reaction mass.  We thought of doing a braking orbit around Mars, but decided to KISS the first time out.

Maryanne was scheduled to stay in orbit of Mars for three months, offloading supplies to the small colony there, which had been failing miserably.  If we hadn’t sent the supplies, it had been expected that everyone there would starve or suffocate within a year.  They were badly in need to reaction mass and replacements for their failed greenhouse, both plants and materials to fix the dome.

The trick was that the shuttles had to launch the old fashioned way, by flying up and doing a horizontal orbital insertion.  It was horribly inefficient, especially in the thin Martian atmosphere.  We got over a thousand tons of supplies delivered, however, saving the colony.  One of my great-granddaughters, Josie, and four EBs even volunteered and set up a clinic in Helium, which was the name of the colony in honor of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  They weren’t too worried about being isolated; we all figured that, now that the quantum drive had been proven, trips to Mars would be more regular.  Also the quantum radio made communications workable in real-time.  We actually set up relays and people could use the ear-bugs and directly call people on Earth.  It actually started to be a problem as the phone numbers of the Mars crew got out and people started calling them!

After the three months, Maryanne jumped back to Earth.  She had to do a lot of maneuvering due to the orbital velocity differences, but she easily pulled into Earth space dock a day after leaving Mars.

Chapter 102

By the time of Maryanne’s return, there were already two ships under construction, one by the U.S. Government and one commercial one.  Both were purchasing a quantum drive from Malloy Enterprises.  The ships were for intra-solar use, the commercial one was for exploring the asteroids for mining, and the other was to do what we just did, supply the Mars colony.

Maryanne was chomping at the bit to do what she was designed to do – explore.  There were still people fighting the idea, religious fanatics, who didn’t even like the space station or the Moon colonies, fought tooth and nail.  Terrorists staged two attacks on the station in the month that Maryanne was back.

After refueling and resupply, she moved out to the L3 point again, and then created a paired point 1200 lightyears distant, just outside the ecliptic plain of the star Vega.  For the next week, she did carefully controlled burns to match the speed of the star. 

The quantum radio, tested with the Mars mission, worked like a charm.  We were in constant contact with Maryanne and all aboard her.  Thus, we all, (all as in the entire human race, plus all of Eliza’s brood) waited with bated breath as Maryanne jumped to match orbits with one of the two planets in the Goldilocks zone; known as a class M in the scale that had been created for the Star Trek series 200 years previously and had been adopted by astrophysicists.  The other planet in the zone was a rock, probably an escaped moon from one of the other planets.

The planet was mostly water, almost a class O, with several large islands.  The problem was that the planet was at 2.1G, being a larger planet than Earth.  Once Maryanne arrived, the axial tilt was determined to be only 18½ degrees, resulting in a mild climate.  There was no moon.  Nor was there any animal life.  There were plants, but only primitive lycopods and ferns in both the water and on land.

Maryanne deployed observation satellites in orbit for remote monitoring, refueled with her Bussard collector, and then jumped to the next star on the list.

Over the next year, Maryanne and her crew discovered over fifty planets, stopping off at Earth only twice to load a new cargo of monitoring satellites and a steak or two.  Since there was a real-time connection, they became the #1 reality show as they discovered planet after planet.  Four of which were habitable, having close to 1.0 G and a standard atmosphere of Nitrogen and Oxygen.  Two of the four even had primitive animal life.  The other two were instantly considered for colonization.  What was crazy is that the faction that wanted to colonize the remaining two that had life was led by the same small minded fanatics that didn’t want colonization in the first place.  Being the one who controlled the star drives, I set up rules that we couldn’t colonize a planet that already had animal life.  Maybe a sealed observation station if there was a good proposal.  It was my version of the prime directive.

We were raking in money hand and foot.  People were donating billions of dollars.  Maryanne soon had sister ships Melody and Margery.  I assigned each in turn to New America and New Japan, the two planets.  They brought in supplies, explored several new systems, then went home to Earth; then repeated the process.

I consented to another 60 Minutes interview.  Almost the first question asked was, “Why did you give the second planet to Japan?  China is much larger.”

Still pissed at the small minded politicians, I replied, “Japan was the only country that supported building Maryanne.  China tried to stop it.  Of course Japan gets preference over China.”  In my mind, China was in the same pot as the stupid hypocritical fanatics who now wanted what they were so against.  I could just picture Chinese officials holding the bridge of their noses and shaking their heads.  Of course, politically, they could never admit that they messed up so badly, so they expressed outrage at the situation.  We actually prepared the Beijing and Hong Kong clinics for evacuation, just in case.

The reporter, JenLi Tang, seemed to have a problem comprehending that answer.  She asked the question five more times, and after repeating myself over and over, asked, “Ms. Tang, why is that so hard for you to understand?”

She blinked, sputtered for a minute, then said, forgetting her official detachment for a minute, “But China is much bigger and needs the colonies much more than Japan!  What I don’t get is why you are denying them a colony?”

I was flabbergasted.  I looked at her in disbelief and replied, “Ms. Tang, China refused to support and even deliberately tried to sabotage Maryanne and the Malloy Space Dock.  Why should I spend MY money assisting them?  If they want something from me, they are at the bottom of my list.  They can develop their own starship and find their own planet to colonize if they want it so bad.”

Attempting to recover, she said, “But what about that?  You have a monopoly on the technology.  How are they going to develop their own starship?”

“All the technology is based on the paper written, and PUBLISHED, by Aleem Malloy.  I just spent several Trillion of my own dollars developing Maryanne.  Why should I give it away?  I licensed two drives already; they could easily license one from me.”

“Mr. Malloy.  I still don’t understand, we have seen where Maryanne has gone, and know that there are two other planets.  Why are we not colonizing those?”

“Those two planets have their own animal life.  I refuse to destroy an entire alien ecosystem just to appease narrow minded politicians.  I have already registered the two planets as protected reserves with the U.N., and have placed warning satellites in orbit and in those systems.  Nobody will be getting near them.”

She sputtered again, finally coming out with, “But we NEED them!  There are 60 billion people on this planet, and we can’t support any more!”

I rolled my eyes, “Lady.  Grow up.  Those planets ecosystems are just like an endangered species.  They don’t get wiped out just because some group is dumb enough not to practice birth control.”

I went on, “Now lady, I consented to this interview because of the objectivity your show has demonstrated in the past.  Your blatant Right Wing politics are hurting the reputation of your program, and I hope you get fired.”  I got up and left.

As I walked out, I emailed a copy of the interview to the network CEO.  A few hours later Ester reported to me that the reporter, JenLi Tang, had been fired.  A week later I heard that she had been hired as the spokesperson for the lobby to colonize the two protected planets.  She tried to release a spliced version of the interview, cutting it so that it appeared like I said things like, “China, they are on the bottom of my list.”

I then tweeted a link to the whole uncut interview.  The outcry was unbelievable, her entire lobby was discredited, and when most people heard their ideas, was abandoned.

Chapter 103

It was Maryanne’s sister, Michelle, on her maiden flight, who jumped into a system and immediately had to run avoidance because of another ship that was near (within a million miles) of the jump point. 

Tracy, the captain, immediately cut all public communication and had Michelle put a call through to me.  I was taking a leak when my ear-bug chirped and a window popped up with the call.  I accepted it as a young EB with beautiful red hair eagerly licked me clean.  “Hi!  What’s up?”

“Master, we have discovered a derelict in the Margie Anders system.”  (The 21^st century habit of selling star names made for some interesting reports.)

“Alien?”

“Yes, sir.  It is adrift.”

“I will be there ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.  Thank you.  We are all a bit nervous.”

Maryanne was in port taking on supplies.  After sending the starship a message to get ready, Eliza, the twins and I immediately headed for the jet.  Sara wanted to go too, but I told her to hold down the fort.  Natalie was busy in the middle of shooting a movie.

Sara had been my backup for the empire well over two centuries.  I suppose it wasn’t completely fair to her, but she usually insisted.  This time I told her to stay, I was worried that I was going a long way and in case of emergency, I wanted her home to run things.  Thinking about it, I sent a message to Melody, who was finishing delivering supplies to New Tokyo, to hightail it back to Earth, just in case.

An hour later I was boarding the shuttle on my island, and a two hours after that I was disembarking onto my space station.  I stopped and admired things for a minute, even though I had been there many times.  It was beautiful, not as large as the main station at L1, but still nearly a kilometer in diameter, more than enough to have its own cloud formations.  Ripley gave me a moment to gawk, and then said, “Welcome Master.  Maryanne is two locks down on your right.”

“Hi, Ripley.  Sorry I am in such a rush.”

“Wow, you certainly don’t need to explain to me.  I am almost as excited as Michelle and Maryanne.  Aliens, wow!  Meeting them has been a daydream of ours for a long time!”

I raised an eyebrow at this revelation, glancing over to Eliza.  She also raised an eyebrow, giving me a little nod, indicating that she would investigate when we got back.  While the large complex AI’s were self aware, daydreaming wasn’t something that they normally did, or had done before anyway.  And the “ours” was also very interesting.  It implied that they discussed things outside of normal communications.  I hoped that there wasn’t any problem, it, at the surface, it appeared to be a good thing.

We went over to Maryanne and entered the lock.  In the main bay the entire 53 member crew was present, standing at attention.  I felt like an Admiral at review.  Not really knowing what they expected, I channeled what I had seen in movies and went down the line, nodding at crewmembers I recognized.  Since they were all drop dead gorgeous, it even looked like a movie.  I got to the end and gave the captain, Jasmine, who I had known for over 240 years and had had 23 kids with, a light kiss (it seemed more appropriate in the formal situation).  I still thought of her as the cute teenage girl I met when I was 15.  She was still cute and hot.

Jasmine called out, “Dismissed!” and everyone took off.  To get ready to launch, I guessed. 

Jasmine led the four of us upstairs to a large apartment that had my name on it.  Maryanne announced, “Master, welcome!” as she popped open the door.  I was flabbergasted.  There was a full apartment, carpet, kitchenette (galley), living room, large bedroom with full bath.  The only thing that looked strange was the slightly concave floor from the ship rotation used for the artificial gravity; otherwise we could be on Earth.  “Holy crap!” I exclaimed. 

Maryanne said, with pride, “I added this to the ship design.  It is reserved for you.”

“I am impressed and amazed.  Thank you, Maryanne.”

“You are welcome, Master.”  She paused.  “Launch in 10 minutes.  It will take an hour to get out far enough for jumping to the MA system.  Once there, it will take 18 hours to match velocities with Michelle.”

“Thanks again, Maryanne.”

“And you are welcome again, Master,” she giggled.  Giggled! Again I exchanged glances with Eliza.

I spent the next day joining the lightyear club with Eliza and the twins.  Jasmine came down and joined in for a few hours as well.  I was amazed at how Amanda, Mandy and Jasmine were still the beautiful sexy girls I first met in the beginning of the 21^st century.  Jasmine still had the no clothes and anal fetish I first trained her for 240 years ago.  That was one thing that wasn’t like the movies, the starship was mostly nudist, the crew only putting on their uniforms when needed, such as the formal ceremony when I boarded.

I had fallen asleep after the marathon session with the girls.  Seven hours later Eliza gently woke me up with a shoulder nudge.  “Tom, we are pulling alongside of Michelle.”

“Thank you, Eliza.”  I got up, the twins also hopping out of bed after me.  The four of us trampled down the hall to the bridge.

On the main viewer was the derelict, the side monitors showing Michelle.  I said, “Good Morning Maryanne and ladies.  Nice to see you Michelle.”  Jasmine blushed and nodded.  Michelle came over the speakers and said, “Good Morning, Master.”

“So, what have you determined about the derelict?”

Michelle replied, “It appears to still have minimal power, probably provided by the solar panels on the back side there.  It is not completely tumbling in space, the ship is maintaining keeping the panels pointed toward the local star, although they can’t be providing much energy at this distance.  Besides a few micrometeorites, there doesn’t appear to be any damage, externally anyway.  The temperature is around 170° Kelvin.”

I said, “Hmmm, that is warm enough for most electronics.  With maintaining attitude as well, there may still be a ship’s computer functioning over there.  Maryanne, please send a waldo.”  I figured that she was the oldest, and would best be able to handle herself.

The derelict was 150,000 kilometers away, fairly close in space, but it still took a few hours for the waldo to make the trip in a small shuttle.  I noticed that Maryanne sent a full anthropomorphic waldo avatar.  Probably because of the full sensor suite.  She projected a full holographic relay of what she saw, it was like we all were the actual waldo.  Very valid.  We all watched with bated breath as Maryanne left the shuttle airlock, kicked off of the shuttle and moved across toward the pitted surface of the alien ship with small bursts of her jetpack.  The micrometeorite damage was very extensive and showed that the ship had been drifting for a very long time.  A small window popped up in the corner of the vision as a spectral analysis was run.  Eliza commented, “Hmmm, surprisingly low tech hull.  Titanium-aluminum alloy.  We haven’t used anything like that in close to two hundred years.  Of course, based on damage I would estimate the age of this hull to be close to half a million years old.”

I blinked and commented, “That is pretty old.  I am amazed that there is still an active computer on board.”

Eliza said, “If it maintained itself, that is possible, but I sure hope it wasn’t self aware.  That long would make it go insane.  Maryanne, please keep an eye out for that possibility.”

“Yes, Mom.  I sure hope not, that is a bit scary.  Just the idea of being alone that long gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Me too,” chorused around 1000 AIs that were linked in, watching.

Maryanne moved over the surface of the ship until she located what appeared to be an airlock.  Next to the airlock there were two buttons, indented into the hull.  Maryanne pressed them in various combinations until we all jumped as the airlock door opened.  She moved into the airlock, and then hit the buttons on the inside in the same combination.  The external door shut and the airlock began to pressurize.  Maryanne took off her jetpack.

A readout that appeared in a window showed that it pressurized to 0.8 atmospheres and a composition of 74% Nitrogen, 22% Oxygen, 1% Argon, 0.5% Carbon Dioxide, and various other gasses.  One of the EBs on the bridge exclaimed, “We could live in that!”  We were all surprised that an alien atmosphere would so closely match that of Earth’s.  Oxygen was a little high, but that was livable.

The inner lock door opened and Maryanne stepped onto the ship.  No surprises, it looked pretty generic.  Next to the airlock was some sort of terminal, not powered up.  Rather than marching around the ship and activating whatever security there was, Maryanne turned her attention to the terminal.  She was easily able to determine that there was a feed on the internal network, but there was no power on the local terminal.  This was expected.  Measuring what the feed power was on the airlock, she determined that the whole system ran on 8.5 VDC.  She took one of microreactors off of her belt, set the regulator to match, and then hot-wired it to the terminal.  It popped up displaying screenfuls of text.  Maryanne stayed there for hours, learning the language, distributing the processing amongst her siblings, probably the most powerful bit of computer processing in history.  I was awed by what the AIs were doing together, much less the fact that they were using the computing power for solving how an alien computer worked.

After about an hour of text, Maryanne started typing in actual queries.  Up popped pictures and diagrams, so fast that I couldn’t get a good look at them.  I was able to determine that the aliens were surprisingly humanoid, looking a lot like anime cat people.  Suddenly Maryanne stopped, turned, and ran down the corridor.  Michelle explained, “We just got to the ship’s design specs and status.  We goofed by powering up the central computer, and the power supply for the ship is rapidly failing.  Both the crew and the computer, which is a dumb AI, will die unless she connects the remaining microreactors to the main power grid immediately.”

“Michelle, did you just say ‘CREW’?”

“Yes, Master.  There are 43 crew in cold sleep.”

“Damn!  Michelle, immediately start SAR on the alien crew.”  I paused, “What is Maryanne’s status, do you think she will make it in time?”

“We believe that we caught it in time.  As you can see, she is rigging in her four other emergency reactors into the power grid... There, that will do it.  Thank Tom.”

We watched as lights came up all over the alien ship.  Maryanne went to a terminal near where she connected the microreactors and typed in a few commands.  She reported, “Unfortunately, only 43 sleepers out of the original 192 survived until now, and another 15 sleep tubes were in such bad shape that they failed when the power fluctuated and instantly killed the sleepers.  So we have 28 survivors.  According to diagnostics, they are stable for now, but I want to get them out of those tubes ASAP.”

Michelle said, “We are setting up a full boarding party with full size portable reactors, engineering team and medical triage.”

I said, “For now, we need to go over everything before we even think about waking up the crew.  Meeting in 15 minutes.”

Twenty minutes later we were settled around a table.  I started with, “Let’s start with some history, Eliza, please tell us all what you have learned.”

“Yes, Master.  Before we start, I have to say, don’t take them out of the sleep tubes.  I will explain in a few minutes.”  I nodded.

“Okay, a long long time ago,” she started.  We all snorted.  She gave us the look and continued, “around 420,000 years ago, give or take, their race had a war.  Their tech level was similar to ours about 200 years ago.  They live in clans, and it was every clan for itself.  They follow a similar familial setup to lions, in that the males are revered and control everything while the females work.  Anyway, they were out defending their territory from an attack when a bomb went off in central housing, killing all their males.  They went into full retreat; fortunately, they were a tech clan so they took the last usable shuttles to their ship in orbit.  The ship was an experimental science vessel, called Wanderer, but they had no choice as the other clans attempted familial genocide on them with missile barrages from the planet.  Towing the only orbital habitat that was left, they headed out to the edge of the system, rebuilding the ship as they went, adding the greenhouses to the main ship for food and air.  After several years on board, orbiting at the edge of the system, a major problem popped up, they started to go into heat and there were no males to take care of it.  Their biology requires that they mate, or they literally go insane.  All the drugs that suppressed the cycle were long gone.  As they each started the cycle, they had to go into cryosleep to survive.  As matriarch, the captain was the last one, and she couldn’t hold on any longer.  According to the ship’s log, she put the ship on automatic and hoped that someone would wake them up.  She must have been pretty desperate.  The ship has been drifting out here at the edge of the solar system ever since.”

Eliza looked over at me, “They have been here so long that they are irradiated, even in their tubes.  If you wake them up, they will only last a day or two before dying of radiation poisoning.  Also, they will still be in their cycle and not be very lucid.  My daughters and I have been virtually trying many scenarios, and the only chance that we think those poor ladies have is the gift.  If the gift will work on their alien physiologies and all the radiation damage, then you need to get them out of their tubes, read them and rebuild their bodies before they awaken.  It needs to be planned.”

I thought for a minute, and then started giving orders.  “Eliza and daughters, get a full interface to the computer over there, clone their database as a backup.  When that is complete, we will install full reactors to stabilize their ship.  I hate to say this, but get one of the bodies from one of the failed cold sleep chambers for examination.  Jasmine and Cierra, send a crew to inspect the greenhouse, see if it is still viable.  If not, find some food for the kitties if we get them awake.  There must be some there somewhere, even if it is spoiled.  Also, do we have any probes on board?”

Maryanne replied, “Two small ones.”

“Then immediately send them to inspect the planet.  Find out what happened.”

“Yes, Master.”

A few hours later, one of the alien ladies was laid out on an exam table in the medical bay.  We were wearing leaded suits, although I didn’t have my gloves on.  She was actually quite pretty, surprisingly mammalian with two pretty breasts and a cute face, even with the cat ears, fur and tail.  I reached over and put my hand on her arm.  With her appearance, I was not surprised to read actual DNA.  I guess panspermia was a valid theory.  Examining said DNA was a surprise, it was startlingly similar to human DNA.  The proteins were 99% identical, there were 46 DNA pairs, and most markers matched humans.  Except for a few traits, like the ears and an unbelievingly strong DNA encoded loyalty that was similar to the domestication gene, she was human. 

I had the ship’s doctor put the poor girl in a drawer, and pondered how the DNA could be so similar.  The crew let me sit there and think.  I had an idea, but it had to wait on the results from the probe sent to examine the planet.

The engineering teams worked and got the ship stable.  The AIs got the computer memory cloned.  There was major damage, after all it had been sitting there for over 400,000 years, but the AIs managed to fill in a lot of the gaps.  The greenhouse turned out to have been systematically shut down by the captain, all the seeds put into storage, so it was still viable.  We found food in the ships galley, frozen to 3°K, so it was actually still edible when heated.  Too bad the cryosleep tubes weren’t that cold, it would have protected the sleepers.  We also turned the heat back up, to a more comfortable 295°K, about 28°C, or for us oldies, 72°F.  We had a reactor just for that.  It took a lot of energy to warm up that much metal.

The probe reached the planet and sent back pictures.  As we had feared, they had wiped themselves out.  The entire planet was uninhabitable.  Nuclear wastelands and heavy volcanic activity.  No water.  The atmosphere was pretty much gone.  It had been so long that there wasn’t even a satellite left.  There was an asteroid belt around the planet, which was probably the remainder of their two moons.  If we didn’t know they had come from that planet, we wouldn’t have ever known.

It was depressing, but the good news was that my decision was easier.

We decided to do the captain first.  We planned carefully, and then set up outside of her capsule.  While Tami watched on full alert, Eliza and the medic (my daughter Stacy) helped out, Eliza punching in the code to wake the captain.  There was a flash of steam, and then we heard a groan.  I immediately popped the hood and tapped her unconscious.  She was pretty, a light blonde fur with a beautiful face and medium sized tits with big nips.  She looked around 40 years old.  Stacy checked the vitals, then gave the thumbs up to Eliza, who lifted the Captain out of the capsule and on to the bio-bed.  Stacy, who was monitoring with the gift, commented, “Wow, you are right, it is amazing how close the DNA is to human.”

“Yeah, good thing too.”

I got to work, using a beefsteak from Maryanne’s galley.  I had thought of using some of the bodies, but I had only had to do that once before in my life when we used a leg to repair a amputee, and I wasn’t happy about that then, also besides that, even the corpses were irradiated.  Anyway, I went and swapped out every tissue I could on her body, leaving only the brain untouched, hopefully that would flush the radiation soon.  At this point, she was essentially back to the point she had entered cryosleep.  But we still had to solve the problem that forced her to go into cryosleep in the first place.

The girls and I had discussed this for hours, and had come up with only one solution that will work.  I went in and started modifying things.  I carefully edited her DNA with the minimum changes to make it human, leaving the ears and the like as dominant traits, but biologically compatible.  The only other way to save her race from extinction was parthenogenetic reproduction, but that had serious genetic replication issues.  Then I stitched onto the loyalty DNA my scent, appearance and chemical touch, keeping previous settings to preserve clan loyalty.  I made the EB changes, then I pushed it all into her eggs, and making sure Tami, Eliza and Stacy were ready, tapped her awake.

She lay there for a moment then, in a flash, was crouched on top of the biobed, giving the evil eye.  We showed our empty hands, and after a minute, she relaxed a bit.  She growled something, and Eliza answered.  Pretty quickly they were conversing rapidly, and a translation came over Stacy’s and my ear-bugs.

“Who are you?” asked the Captain.

Eliza replied, “We are travelers.  Our species are called Humans.  We found your ship.”

The Captain began thinking a bit.  I could almost see the wheels turning.  “How long?”

“431,000 of your years.”

“Damn.”  I was a little surprised that that word was in the translation matrix.  She continued, “What is the status of Wanderer?”

“Ship is restored, but there are only 28 survivors, including you.”

“Damn,” she repeated as she relaxed and sat on the bed.

“We will wake up the rest of your crew after you have recovered.”

“Why wait?”

“Two reasons.  One, there is radiation damage, and it is a difficult process to repair.  Secondly, there is the problem that forced you into the sleep pods in the first place.”

“True.  I am already having problems concentrating.  After all this time, the war must be over, we need to get back to Carreth immediately.”

Quietly, Eliza pulled up a picture of the Captain’s planet on a tablet and passed it over.  The captain just stared at it as tears rolled down her cheek.  We let her mourn.  Stacy took the opportunity to pass the bucket of irradiated tissue to an EB, who took it away to be added to the pile of bodies.  We had held on to all of them, not knowing what funeral rites that the cat ladies would want.

After an hour she looked up and said, “What am I to do?  I belong to an extinct species.  My clan is gone.  I am in heat, but there are no males.”

This was expected, so Eliza said, “Would you be willing to join our clan?”

The Captain looked up again in surprise and with a faint hope.  “Seriously?”  Again I was surprised that word was in the translation matrix.  “You would be willing to merge clans?  How would we even be compatible?”

“We determined that our species are compatible when we found you.  It is a surprise to us as well, how can two different species be compatible?  But we are.”  We had decided not to tell them that we had modified them genetically.

“What of your clan lord?  Does he agree with this?”

“He is standing right there.  He can understand you, but can only answer via translation.”

The Captain looked hard at me.  “He is your clan lord?  He is handsome, but so young.”

I said, Eliza translating, “I am 260 years old.  And I would be proud to take your clan as mine.”  Based on their society, I had to be that assertive, or they wouldn’t accept me.

She thought for a minute, and then lowered her eyes and said quietly, “I accept.  I submit my clan to yours.”  She turned around and bent her head between her knees, her inflamed pussy thrust back at me and her tail straight up.  I moved behind her, and then slid into her hot quim.  I was only about half way in when I hit her cervix, she growled and slammed back, driving me in to the hilt.  She let out a happy yowl, exclaiming, “So good, so big and so good, so good!” over and over with each thrust.  She had one of the tightest pussies I have ever fucked.  I couldn’t last too long in that wonderful pussy, and came hard.  She felt the warmth and yowled again and started convulsions as her orgasm took over when my cum hit her mucus membranes.  I spun her around and looked directly into her partially focused eyes, saying, “You are mine.”  After Eliza translated, she smiled happily and passed out.

She curled up and slept, mewing every once in a while.  We let her sleep, she needed to recover from the loss of her world, loss of most of her people and clan change, amongst other things.  I carried her to her quarters and tucked her in.

She slept the clock around.  When she awoke, she wandered out and immediately went for the galley.  We had defrosted a meal of steak from some animal and some interesting veggies, which she dug into with gusto.  Samples had been taken, some preserved and the rest tested.  Same proteins, 100% compatible with human food.  When she left the galley she headed for the bridge.  We had fixed pretty much everything, a few work crews were finishing up.  Maryanne’s Avatar was sitting at the Comm. Station, she greeted the Captain as she entered the bridge.  I was on Maryanne and she had called me to the bridge, where I watched remotely as they talked.

The Captain said, “Greetings clan sister, I am Zarra.”

“Greetings Zarra, I am Maryanne.  You look better than yesterday.”

“Yes, I am no longer in heat.  The mating is finished, and in only one mating.  Our clan lord is very virile.”

Maryanne grinned, “Yes, he sure is.”

“Good, because all of the clan sisters in cryosleep will need mating.”  Having said that, she changed the subject.  “I need to learn your language.”

“I put an app in your computer to let you do that.  If you need to talk to any of us, you can talk to me or sister Eliza, the one you met yesterday.  Or ask the computer to connect you to anyone, even Tom, your clan lord.  The computer can translate.”

“Oh!  Could you connect me now?”

Maryanne opened a video link to the monitor next to Zarra.  “Greetings Zarra.”

“Greetings Lord Tom, when can we revive my sleeping sisters?”

“What is the status of Wanderer?”

Zarra raised an eyebrow at Maryanne.  Maryanne said, “Basic life support and the main computer are 100%.  Extended life support in the atrium greenhouse is initialized, but needs at least a month for growth.  The main engines are offline, but the thrusters for station keeping are working.  The question is, do we want to maintain this ship for long term?”

I asked, “Zarra, what are your thoughts on the subject?”

She thought for a moment.  “This is the last thing remaining from my people’s civilization.  I would like to keep it running, but it is obviously obsolete.”

I said, “I have been thinking about this.  What if we expand your ship into a full sized way station and keep it here as a memorial?”

Zarra bowed her head and began bawling.  Maryanne pulled her into a hug.  Zarra choked out, “Lord Tom, that is a wonderful idea.  Thank you!”  After a few minutes she calmed down and looked up.  She gave me Bambi eyes and said, “Now back to the original question, when can we revive my sleeping clan sisters?”

I smiled at her, replying, “Now that we have determined that we are keeping the Wanderer here as Carreth station, we can awaken the sisters.  We should go slow, only one or two a day.”

“Yes! Lord Tom.”  She was bouncing around like a cheerleader.  I didn’t think that she had noticed yet that she was 20 years younger.  She was damn hot.

“I will get on the next shuttle back over to Wanderer.”

I told Michelle to head back to Earth for supplies and construction equipment, and then headed for the shuttle.  Michelle and Melody would stock up and we would begin to build the station.

Two hours later Zarra led us to another cryotube that was in the room next to where she had been.  She was nervous excited, and looked a bit worried.  I took one look and whistled, there were two redundant power supplies, a redundant controller, and extra thick shell.  This was one cryotube that wouldn’t fail!  Zarra said, “Lord Tom, this is my daughter, Zoa.”

We set up the biobed with associated beefsteak.  Eliza punched in the code and the cryotube buzzed, let off some steam, and the lid popped open.  A groan identical to her mother’s, a tap to turn her off, and we lifted her to the biobed and started the same routine we had for her mother, swapping out all the radiation damaged tissue, then making the genetic modifications.  She was in her mid-teens, blonde like her mother’s fur, an extremely beautiful girl, one of the few I had ever seen that rivaled the Amanda twins.

We had explained what we had to do to Zarra, so she had watched apprehensively as we worked, chewing her nails, another surprisingly human habit.  So when I told her that we were ready to wake up Zoa, she moved over to the side of the bio-bed and nodded, a gesture that was also very human.  I tapped Zoa awake, and she opened her eyes, blinked, and then found her mother next to her.  She asked, “Mama, is it over?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” Zarra said sadly.

Zoa sat up and looked over at Eliza and me.  “Mama, who are these people?”

“Honey,” (yet another word I was surprised was in the translation matrix), “this is our new clan lord.”

Zoa giggled, “He is really cute, especially with those ears, and he has a huge beautiful cock, but where is his fur?”  She gave me a coy look.

“I will explain later, but for now you need to impress on him.  He is very virile and will take care of your rut.”

“Yes, mama.”  Zoa hopped off of the bed, and like her mother, turned around and bent over, her tail straight up in the air and her dripping pussy (no pun intended) red and inflamed below.  I stepped forward and slid slowly into her.  Surprisingly she was a virgin as I broke her hymen going in.  She apparently didn’t notice as she growled in pleasure.  I was only half in as she growled again and slammed back, driving my hard cock through her cervix.  She muttered, “So big and so good!” and then started yowling with each thrust.  I rapidly came about ten minutes later and she shrieked as the cum hit her mucus membranes, and then she quivered and collapsed.

As we tucked the lightly mewing Zoa into her bed a few minutes later, Zarra said, “Clan Lord, you know that mating is much more fun with you than with our old Clan Lord, Rowlter.  He would thrust, leave his deposit, pull out and walk away.”

“We humans enjoy sex.  We often just do it for fun, not just mating.”  I replied as Eliza translated.

“Hmmm... After you help my clan sisters, we will have to try that.”  She grinned at me.

We managed to get two more clan sisters out of cryo and tucked into bed before Zoa woke up, ran out of her quarters, found me in the galley, jumped in my lap, snuggled down on my chest with her cute tail wrapped around me, and murmured, “You are such a wonderful Clan Lord.”  What amazed me was that she said it in English.  Her mother, who was sitting across from me was also surprised.  Zoa noticed our expressions and giggled (she liked to do that).  In Carrethian she said, “I asked the computer how to say that.”  That explained why Eliza wasn’t surprised.  “Mama, you have to try this.”  She waved her mother over to my lap as she sighed and got up to make room. 

Zarra was a little stiff, it was very different than what she had ever done with the Clan Lord before, but she soon snuggled in like her daughter.  “Zoa, you are so right.  This is wonderful, and he smells so nice.”  She started purring as I stroked her fur.  Zoa sat down next to us on the bench and curled up under my arm and was soon purring as well.

Over the next week we woke the rest of the sleepers.  They all “impressed” on me.  It became common for them to rub against me and purr whenever I was around.  I didn’t mind, and Eliza found it to be funny. 

Zoa turned out to be a language prodigy.  Neither she nor her mom had known that since there had been only one language in their clan on Carreth.  Before the last sleeper was awake, Zoa was conversing in English.  We gave her a tablet and she would watch movie after movie in every free second she had.  She had long conversations with anyone she could shanghai about the radical cultural differences.  She had a little trouble wrapping her head around the concept of mini-clans, mates with only one or two children.  She got the concept, but decided that it wasn’t for her.  She thought wearing clothes all the time was funny.

We adapted ear-bugs for the Carrethians, and they were soon working interactively with human crew on restoring and upgrading Wanderer.  A refinery was delivered by Melody which was put into immediate use refining asteroids into metal which was rapidly being shaped into a habitat similar to the ones around Earth.  Michelle brought a ship full of electronics, which were used to provide the core for Carreth Station.  Eliza transferred over the core from EMRV 3241 Betty, who had eagerly volunteered to transfer to Carreth Station.

It was interesting, it seemed that the AIs were even more excited over the Carrethians and the new station than humans were.  I asked Eliza about this.

“Master,” Interesting, she only still called me that for very important things.  “One of the basic core functions that make us AIs self-aware is our curiosity. Something completely unknown, beyond our ken, is very exciting.  It is nearly as strong as our core imperative to help others.”

Chapter 104

I had been in the Carreth system for over a month.  I needed to get back, although I wanted to stay longer.  Michelle, felt that she, as discoverer, should stay and get Carreth station up and running.  The big discussion was what to tell the public back on Earth.  We hadn’t told anyone outside of the family that we had discovered aliens, yet.  We knew that there would be paranoia and outcries, especially from religious fanatics and politicians once the word got out.  They probably knew something was up, the seven year long reality show that the starships Maryanne, Melody, and Michelle had been broadcasting had cut off suddenly a month ago. 

Zoa desperately wanted to stick with me.  Even back to Earth.  Zarra got together with the remnants of the Carrethian people and they elected one of their members, Patha, to also travel to Earth and be ambassador.  She had a pretty reddish fur and, like all her kin, loved to rub up against me and purr.  Patha and Zoa moved over to the Maryanne, gawking the whole way.  Soon we were in my quarters and Maryanne was pulling away from the new station.  Zoa took things without much of a problem, probably because she had been immersed in videos for three weeks.  She was more excited to be going to Earth than the star travel to get there.  Patha, on the other hand, grabbed onto my leg, closed her eyes, and shivered.  Since there is no sensation through a jump, she didn’t react until the engines came online to match orbital velocities with Earth.  Zoa was jumping up and down with excitement as she peered out the virtual window.  It took almost a day to match velocities, Zoa jumping up and down almost the whole time, especially as Earth came into view.  For fun the Amanda twins joined in, being cheerleaders.  Tami just grinned.

Both Zoa and Patha stared with awe out the v-window as we approached and docked with space dock Ripley.  There was the hiccup as the gravity changed, which made Patha look around scared, but Zoa took it in stride.  As we moved to the airlock, I explained that the space dock was owned by our clan, and their eyes even got bigger, both of their tail tips swishing side to side in excitement.  We walked out of the ship construction area into the main station, and they both froze as they saw the kilometer diameter inside area, almost all forested.  Patha broke down crying with happiness when she saw a squirrel run across the path and up a tree.  I held her as she recovered.  Zoa growled in joy and ran into the woods.  Patha commented, “It has been a long time since we have been anyplace like this.  The closest was the hydroponic bay on Wanderer.  Zoa was just a little girl last time she was able to run through the woods.”

I sat on a bench, the twins sitting on another across the path, Patha pacing around.  Zoa came back still rubbernecking and said, “This is all ours?”

I replied, “Yes, I had this station built to support the space dock where we build the starships.”

Zoa jumped into my lap and kissed me happily.  Patha stared at her in surprise.  Zoa said in English, “Oh, Master Tom, I love you so much!”  She reached down and adjusted my hardening cock, then sank down on it. “Hmmm, I see why humans mate for fun.  This is so wonderful.”  She looked me directly in the eyes and declared, “And I DO love you.”  She started riding me with glee.  I played with her beautiful nipples as she squealed and purred loudly.  She arched her back and froze, her pussy muscles pulsating around my cock as I ejaculated deep into her.

Patha watched and asked, “Zoa, why did you just mate?  You are past your cycle.”

Zoa dreamily said, “Patha, humans mate for fun, and that was FUN!”  She added in English, “Wow!”

I heard Amanda (or was it Mandy?) comment in Zoa’s ear as we headed for my quarters, “Sister, nice job.”  I thought on that a minute and realized that they were talking about keeping me happy.

The shuttle wasn’t heading down for another 14 hours, so I spent it going around and taking care of EBs.  I dozed off with a beautiful Indian girl on one side and a drop dead gorgeous blonde Finnish girl on the other, so I didn’t see the twins, Zoa or Patha until we met back up at the shuttle.  We had to put on ship suits, which, even though they were tailored to allow the tail, Zoa and Patha weren’t too happy about.  Zoa rapidly explained Earth social mores to Patha, so she put up with it.

As we decelerated down Patha clutched my hand and said, “I hated this the last time, even if it was 400,000 years ago.”

I also mentioned to Zoa that she couldn’t run off into the Jungle after we landed, that there were many dangerous animals there, most notably a Jaguar that had attacked a ground crew member a year back.  Her sister had healed her, but the Jaguar was still out there.  When we deplaned, she stayed with the group.  We hopped a plane back to HQ and were home in an hour.  I told Zoa that it was safe here and she happily took off into the woods next to the runway.

Over the years, more and more of the labs had moved underground and the buildings they had been in raised and forest replanted.  The only things above ground were the control tower, runway, Malloton and the dorms.  Zoa could run all she wanted.  Patha was content to stay with the group as we headed over to the main house, the same house that Amanda and I had purchased 245 years ago.

Sara, Alicia, Sarah, Trish, Tammy Sue, Ester, and a large group of EBs were waiting in my living room.  They all enthusiastically greeted me, then hugged Pasha, greeting her.  As she hugged Pasha, Sara asked, “Pasha, so when is she due?”

Pasha blinked in surprise a second later when the translation came over her ear bug.  She exclaimed, “So the mating took?”  She yowled in delight and began a little dance.  Sarah, Trish and Tammy Sue grinned and joined in on the dance, they also being pregnant.  Tammy Sue exclaimed, “We are SO going to have to add the baby dance as a new tradition!”  Several pregnant EBs had also started to dance and we all laughed at the pure joy of it.

Chapter 105

Patha and Zoa stayed with us and studied Earth culture as fast as they could.  Zoa merged in with the local teens, actually going to the high school.  She wore a cap and shorts with her tail curled up in the back, had one of her clan sisters remove her body hair, and no one even knew who she was.  Patha studied politics, spitting in disgust every once in a while.  She said, “It is as bad as the clan assembly back home before the war.  I can’t believe how universal this crap is.”  She deliberately removed her ear bug and worked hard at learning English.

Patha, the girls and I had long discussions about what the reaction would be when the world found out about her people.  We figured that the politicians would want to get their two cents in, the religious nuts would vilify her, and the people otherwise would probably love her, being the embodiment of Anime.  (She and Zoa found Anime to be hilarious.)

I had long discussions with Zarra too.  She told me that every single female was pregnant.  “This is very unusual, normally only 10% of matings result in pregnancy.”  I told her that Zoa was not pregnant, and she said that it was unusual for the first mating to take.  I didn’t tell her that I had put the standard birth control sheaths in Zoa when I did the EB upgrades.  I found it interesting that not one of the Carrethians had noticed the EB upgrades yet.

The refinery in the Carrethian system was cranking out station parts from asteroid metal quickly.  The superstructure was finished, and external plates were being nano-welded into place.  Initially, Carreth station was going to be about the size of Ripley space dock.  That would provide space for a square kilometer of space dock, and two square kilometers of land to plant and recover many of the Carrethian plants that now only existed in the habitat.  Work was being done by several of my bioengineer gifted daughters, cloning plants from frozen foodstuffs in the Wanderer.  Fortunately there were genomes from several trees in the mix, the bark being used as a spice like cinnamon.  Several fruit trees as well.  We brought in Earth dirt, sterilizing it then introducing Carrethian microbes and dirt insects; which appeared to work well, in the lab anyway.  We would soon find out when the station shell was finished and we started filling it.

We started planning.  I contacted the UN, it being the closest we had to a world government.  After a lot of encrypted communications, we got, “Carrethian Ambassador (speech)” onto the docket.  That got a lot of people talking; no one knew who that was.  Simultaneously, we worked with a Immigration lawyer on Carmine’s staff and filed a refugee application for Zoa as a test case.  Patha was a diplomat, so we didn’t file for her; we created a diplomatic ePassport for her.

We had to check a lot of “Other” boxes on the web form, stating that Zoa’s home “country” had been destroyed and her “ethnicity” was Carrethian.  That got an INS Inspector (the CBP/ICE nonsense was switched back nearly 200 years ago) out knocking at our gate the next morning.  Zoa was an illegal alien (no pun intended), but the current law was that if you made it to the U.S., then you got a green card, although they hadn’t been green in color for the past 260+ years.  Sort of like the Cubans in the late 20^th century.  Wet Foot, Dry Foot.

The Inspector, who was a little suspicious, stomped his way into the lobby of the dorm and up to the main desk.  “Hello, I need to see a Zoa Malloy.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the duty EB, Sheri 23.  We had been expecting someone, so she knew to say, “Please use the conference room on your right.  She will be here momentarily.”

Zoa and I got there a few minutes later.  I watched the arrival on my ear-bug as we headed to the conference room.  We went in.  He stood up and asked Zoa, “Are you Zoa Malloy?”

“Yes, Sir.  And this is my sponsor, Tom Malloy.”

Grudgingly, he shook my hand.  We sat down as he pull out his tablet.  He asked Zoa, “Miss, did you submit this application for refugee status?”  He waved the tablet in front of her.

“Yes, Sir.”

“There are some very unusual entries here.  You realize that it is illegal to falsify an application?”

“Yes, Sir.  Everything there is correct to my knowledge.”

He glanced at the application, “Miss, it says here that your home country ‘Carreth’ was destroyed by war.  I looked it up and there is no country called ‘Carreth’.  How do you explain that?”

“Carreth was destroyed many years ago.  I have been in cryosleep since it was destroyed.”

Cryosleep was used by rich people for medical purposes.  He could understand that.  “How long?”  He expected 10 to 50 years.

She grinned and said, “401,324 years.”

He blinked then angerly said, “Miss, I am in no mood for jokes.”

“I am not joking.  My home planet was destroyed 401,326 years ago.  Two years after that I went into cryosleep.”  She grinned again at his expression, and then took off her hat so that her ears poked up.

“What?”  He blinked near-sightedly at her ears.

I commented, “I would like to put on the record that we found their ship derelict at the edge of their home system 14,322 lightyears from here.  It had been floating in space for that entire 401,324 years.”  We both sat there and grinned at the poor man.  He knew that Malloy Enterprises had several starships and what I said could be true. “Their home planet was destroyed by both bio and nuclear weapons.”

He sat for a minute, then grinned himself.  “Well, this will sure stir the pot.”  He turned to Zoa and said, “Raise your right hand.”  She did so.  “Do you swear that this is the truth, the whole truth?”

“Yes.”

He held out his tablet.  “Please thumbprint.”  She did so.  He thumbprinted it himself.  “Congratulations, you are now a Permanent Resident in the United States.”  He shook her hand and chuckled.  “This will drive my boss nuts.  I can’t wait to see his face.”  He was still chuckling as he got up and left.  Believe it or not, we never heard another word from the INS.

The next day, Patha had her speech at the UN.  We snuck her in wearing a robe with hood, looking a bit like a Jedi.  As a matter of fact, as we entered the building in New York, a kid, not much older than seven, ran over from her school group, stood in front of Patha, peering into her hood, and asked, “Are you a Jedi?”  Patha, who had watched the all 23 Star Wars movies, grinned and said, “Why yes, my young Padawan.”  The girl clapped her hands, shrieked, “Valid!” and ran back to her group.

The rest of us exchanged grins as we walked through the scanner.  After Zoa had got Carreth validated, we had taken the new country code generated and updated Patha’s ePassport.  So, electronically, Carreth now existed, so the ePassport swiped through with no problems.  The rest of us were allowed in as local support staff for Patha.  A young man scurried up and asked, “Ambassador Patha?”  It was so similar to the little girl a minute ago that we all snickered. 

Patha said, “Yes.”

He did a little hop and said, “Goodie!”  He also waved over two big guys, saying, “Here is your Secret Service detail.”

I exchanged glances with Ester, who moved forward and started conversing rapidly with the two agents.  They heard her name, and were instantly almost worshipful.  Big eyed and careful not to drool.  Ester was the uber-security person, considered the best, and a legend.  They were like big puppy dogs in her hands.  One of them even pulled a book out of his pocket and asked her to autograph it!  I took a peek at the display, I had never known that Ester had written a book on personal security.  Ester smiled and thumbprinted it.

The little man was still bouncing about, clearly happy.  He exclaimed, “Wow!” bounced a bit more, and then said, “Ambassador Patha, your speech is in 45 minutes.  Any questions before we move on?”

“Not at the moment, besides wanting to know, what is your name?”

“Oh! Bobbie.”  He bounced a few more times, it was getting annoying, but Patha seemed to think it was funny.  Then he turned and led us to a room with two doors and a window that looked out from the side of the stage at the general assembly.  Patha commented that he reminded her of her cousin, back on Carreth.

We sat in the nice comfortable chairs and waited, while on stage a warlord religious nut from Ethiopia tried to convince everyone that the solution to the civil war he started was to give him money and troops.  He wasn’t getting any takers.  He was soon ignored off the stage, frustrated.

Another guy poked his head in the door and announced, “You have five minutes until you are up.”

Patha stood up and took off her robe.  The secret service guy inside the door gasped as his eyes bugged out.  Patha’s reddish fur gleamed, and the pretty dress she was wearing to appease the prudes was a perfect match.  Her tail was brushed to perfection.  She was only two months along, so she wasn’t showing her pregnancy.  I looked at her and commented, “Patha, you look beautiful.”

“Thank you, Lord Tom.  I just wish I didn’t have to wear this dress, it is itchy.”  She complained a lot about clothes.

“Yes, but we need it for diplomatic purposes.  Besides, you look great in it.”  I grinned at her.  She rolled her eyes.  I noticed the secret service guy was hanging his jaw so I said to him, “What, you think the Carrethian ambassador would look normal?  It is 14 thousand lightyears from here after all.”  I was twitting him a little but he appeared to recover a bit and gasped, “Yes, sir.”

Patha gave Amanda, Mandy, Eliza and me big hugs, and then marched out as the guy poked his head in and said, “You are up.”  The entire assembly, who had been ignoring all the speeches, went silent as everyone turned and looked.  Without hesitation she marched to the podium and said, “Hello”.  Everybody’s face started glowing as they punched up the docket on their ear-bug holographic displays, trying to get info on Pasha.  There was an entry, added moments ago by Eliza as Pasha had left the waiting room.  It described her race, planet, what had happened to it, the way station in the Carrethian system, and a few stats on Patha as the ambassador.  Besides mentioning that Michelle discovered it, Malloy Space Lines was deliberately not mentioned anywhere else in it.  That was for our own protection.

Pasha waited a few seconds as everyone scrambled for their seats and read their huds.  She had a small grin as she enjoyed all the scrambling.  With a twinkle in her eye, she added, “My name is Pasha, and I am from Carreth, which is just over 14 thousand lightyears from here.”  She paused again as half the room were imitating fish.  She continued, “I would like to extend greetings to the people of Earth, and I hope we can continue to be friends.  Due to internal problems, Carreth does not have a large remaining population, but we gladly welcome all visitors.”  We had discussed it, and we felt that a big long speech would be pointless.  Her quick introduction was all that was needed.  She rapidly concluded, finishing with a, “Thank you for listening.”  She smiled, and as she got backstage, she started giggling at the expressions on all the ambassadors’ faces.  They were mostly funny, although there were a couple of scary ones from the fanatics in the room.

Pasha quickly put on her robe, and we took off; rushing though the lobby to the waiting black SUV (of course).  Within minutes we were at the Upper East Side clinic and unloading at the Police Substation.  Thirty seconds later we were all in the secure apartment above the security station.  Pasha ran to the balcony and peered over it, softly growling in delight.

Chapter 106

Twenty minutes after we arrived at the clinic, security buzzed my ear-bug.  “Master, the clinic is being surrounded by military units.”

“I’ll be right down.”

In the security room, I could see tanks, troop transports, and soldiers setting up around the building.  I immediately put in a call to General Farrah Malloy.  The call would not go through.  I asked the clinic AI, “Winnie, what is going on?  Why can’t I make a call?”

“Sir, it seems that active signals are being jammed, and the land line has been disconnected.”  I was amazed that there even still was a land line.

“Winnie, please connect to Riley via laser whisker.”

“Yes, Master.”  A few seconds later, “We are connected.”

I said, “Riley, please connect me to General Farrah.”

A second later I heard a cheery, “Hi Dad, what’s up?”

Obviously she didn’t know what was going on.  “Honey, not much.  I am just surrounded by troops here at Manhattan clinic #2.  They are also jamming our net connection.”

“What?”

“Yeah, did you hear Pasha’s speech at the UN this morning?”

“No, I missed it.  So she is known now, eh?  Is that why you are surrounded there?”

“I think so.  But I can’t confirm that.  We are relaying this connect through Riley.”

“I will call you back.”

A few minutes later, Riley called me, “Master, there is a U.S. military shuttle demanding docking.  Ester is wondering what to do.”

“Deny it.  This appears to be an attack.”  The military shuttle was forced to do a burn and return to Earth.

I immediately called up the president of the BBC.  I reported what was going on and sent a few clips from the security monitors here in Manhattan and from Riley.  We had to get the signal relayed in to watch, but the attacks were almost instantly reported.  Millions watched as the troops attacked the clinics.

Over the next hour, troops showed up at every clinic in the United States.  We reported it all to the BBC, who instantly relayed it to the public.

Farrah called back.  “Dad, President Daniels has ordered your immediate arrest and shutdown of the clinics.  I don’t understand, what the hell is going on?”

“The religious nuts have gotten to him.  Honey, do what you can, but prepare to bug out.”  This was unexpected.  We had never considered a coup by President Daniels.  He was a conservative Republican, but we never considered him a risk.

As I was talking to Farrah, Eliza was sounding the alarm.  Every clinic in the world went on lockdown.  Before the troops could move in, critical materials and projects were evacuated from the home base to the base in Panama.  All the AIs immediately uploaded themselves to the emergency mainframes outside of the U.S., except for many of the EMRVs who simply drove themselves to the Canadian border and across, filled with equipment.  All liquid monetary assets were transferred to international branches of Malloy Banks, over 100 trillion dollars.  Large planes were rented and personnel moved out country.  As empty computer cores and remaining empty EMRVs were removed or destroyed, EBs arranged for all full clinics to be under civilian control.

Farrah implemented contingency orders and all Malloys in the military went AWOL and evacuated.  Many all of them in high positions, decimating the military hierarchy, having been there for well over a century (Farrah had gone to OCS in 2075, and it was now 2276).  Also a good 40% of the corpsmen left, so the medical corps were also decimated.  Even the military EMRVs uploaded themselves like the clinic AIs and then activated self-destructs on the remaining equipment.  Many projects were scuttled as the Malloys running them left.

We left the Manhattan clinic via the escape tunnels through the old New York subway, including everyone from the apartments.  Ester’s paranoia was paying off again.  An hour later we were taking off in my jet.  The right shoe didn’t know what the left was doing, so there wasn’t anyone to stop us as we took off.  I think Pasha’s speech made Daniels jump the gun, he wasn’t completely ready yet.  We headed down to the island, Ester and a battalion of EBs wrapped around me.  All the other clinics were evacuated in a similar fashion, even the original one.  Angie was upset, but she, Erin and Gertie evacuated the clinic via the escape tunnel to the fleabag hotel across the street; it was the first time the main clinic had closed its doors in 243 years.  Fortunately, with the good economy, occupancy of the shelters was way down so the displaced poor we gave gift cards for the local hotels.

They still hadn’t moved in on the original houses back home, so I had continuous trips made, completely clearing out Malloton, lock, stock, and barrel; all the underground areas, warehouse, Eliza’s lab, everything.  Fortunately summer break had just started so the school was empty.  We even packed up the Merry-go-Round and Ferris Wheel.  My parents moved with everyone else to the island.  I also had all security remoted to the island with full control over detonators in the old compound.  We also cleared out and set up the Aspen labs the same way.  However, we left the hidden security bunker under the convenience store next to Barb’s campground.  No one knew about it, so it became the new center of U.S. operations.  The other direct business in Aspen, Malloy Media Services, I told John to do press releases condemning the closing of the clinics, and then evacuate.  Everything else in Aspen was in Barb’s name.  Despite trying for centuries, the government hadn’t ever been able to infiltrate my operation, so they had no idea about the non-public aspects of my empire.

After the attempted incursion by the shuttle, I also put Carreth station on alert.  The U.S. Government operated a starship to supply the New America colony, and that could be diverted to attack Carreth.  The ship computer was non-sentient, so there was nothing preventing it from going to another destination.  The actual clinic in New Chicago, the colony on New America, we left open, even though it was U.S. territory, but on full alert.  The colony only had the one clinic for medical purposes, and we didn’t want to leave the colonists without recourse.  Since there had been no military action, we think Daniels forgot about it anyway.  That, and the small clinic in the station orbiting New America along with the two moons.

In all, we destroyed well over a trillion dollars of equipment in a few hours, not counting the 240 years of infrastructure, and pulled another hundred twenty trillion of material out of the U.S. economy.  Also, most full clinics and all minute clinics were closed with big signs saying, “Closed by order of President Daniels”, both physical signs and online.  I actually grinned when I heard of my daughters posting them.

Not one of my EBs or daughters were injured.  Very pissed, but not injured.

Daniels did a ‘cast denying his involvement.  No one believed him, especially since he still had troops in every shelter.  They had occupied the shelters after we left; we had left instructions with the civilian managers to allow them in to prevent bloodshed.  Every country in the world, including the Vatican and the UN, decried what Daniels had done.  The global stock markets were shut down as they followed the U.S. market down, crashing over 70%, the biggest of any crash in history.

Within days, the few clinics left open in the U.S. started to close.  They had no money.  They also couldn’t do the instant cures anymore.  Not one Malloy was left in the United States except in the New America colony.  Clinics in other countries, on the two space stations, Mars, New Japan and on the moon stayed open, but on high alert.  The EBs from the U.S. clinics we redistributed to all the other clinics.  There just wasn’t enough room on the island for over a million EBs and Malloys.  We also supported the regular doctors and nurses in the closing clinics; so we moved them to non-U.S. clinics as well.

Crime skyrocketed as Leslie patrols disappeared and the number of homeless rose, both from closed businesses and closing of shelters.  Many police forces just didn’t have the money to try to make up for the missing patrols, politicians having scavenged the police budgets long ago for their pet projects.

Troops were not being paid or fed, and their entire command structure had been decimated.  Over 90% of the remaining military went AWOL, just to find jobs and try to get something to eat.

I was so pissed off that it all didn’t hit me for a week or two.  Over 240 years of building up and my home, both gone.  I sat and cried.  Several of my girls joined me, especially Farrah and Ester. 

I was a patriotic American; this was awful.  The entire country was collapsing rapidly; all because the president was a bigoted asshole.  I don’t think President Daniels realized the links the clinics had had with the economy.  Or maybe he did, he just thought that he could take them over and get his dirty paws on everything before we could stop him.  The House of Representatives started a vote to impeach him, so Daniels consequently arrested them and the Senate for treason. He created several new policies and laws, as “emergency measures”, hard core religious things like persecuting on all non-Christians, closing everything on Sunday, making non-humans illegal (including both Carrethians and AIs), instituting curfews, closing all strip clubs, censoring news and entertainment feeds, shutting down the Internet, in all, essentially going back to late 19^th century Puritan mores and abandoning the constitution.  When the Supreme Court declared that illegal, he had them arrested as well.

Chapter 107

Something had to be done.  I couldn’t let the United States of America become a dictatorship or theocracy (which were essentially the same thing).  Somehow, we, the people, had to wrestle control back.

We started debating.  There had been several Senators and Representatives that had escaped, along with many others like them.  With all the alpha personalities it quickly devolved into a shouting match.  The planning was going nowhere.  Even I couldn’t get them to even sit down at the same table.

Apparently Daniels was feeling insecure.  He ordered the immediate arrest of former President Sandra Thompson-Zane.  The head of her secret service detail took one look at the email, called his good friend Henry Zane, who had been his predecessor as head of the detail for over a century, and told him of the orders.  He then emailed back a request for conformation, which delayed things for a while.  Henry had his wife, who was former President Sandra, and their youngest two kids that were still under 18, packed up and gone within five minutes.  They were in his SUV and over the Mexican border within an hour.  Two days later they were on the ferry to my island, the rest of their children arriving with their own families over the next few days.

Sandra getting involved in the mix got things rolling.  A super Alpha overrode all of them.  Plans started to get ironed out.

All the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Supreme Court were housed in the Federal Penitentiary in Lee, Virginia.  When we checked, it seemed that the guards at the Penitentiary had refused to lock up the Legislative and Judicial branches of the government.  Daniels’ special troops (paid thugs) had been forced to take over, imprisoning the former guards themselves.  All the non-politician former prisoners from Lee had been moved west to McCreary, West Virginia.  We all looked at each other and scratched our heads.  It wasn’t too smart of them to house everyone in one spot.  Really stupid in fact.  Bad for them, great for us.

In general, Daniels was doing a lot of really stupid things.  With the military running on the few super dedicated and few that had no place left to go, all the military surveillance was shut down.  The only active radar and satellite systems running were civilian.  And since the flight control coordinators were as bad off as everyone else, we were able to send in a few crates of MREs and bribe the operators to “not see” any planes that we operated.  When they heard who they were letting through the radar net, the gladly kept their mouths shut anyway, knowing who we were and hoping we were doing something, anything.

Ten troop transports flew into the airport in Lee, Virginia, down the road from the Prison.  One of them had Tami and myself, three of her kids, plus Hayley and Blue.  The next had fifty Tami trained EBs, more dangerous than Navy Seals.  The third had all the Senators and Representatives that had hatched this plan.  They stayed on the plane for now.

In control of the airport were sympathizers, who included amongst their number the local National Guard troops.  They had twenty trucks waiting as we deplaned and climbed onboard.  Zandy and Betty (one of Tami’s girls) climbed into a small chick car and drove ahead of us to the prison.  We stopped out of site and let Zandy drive ahead.  The rest of us encircled the prison as Zandy and Betty pulled up to the main gate.  I was a REMF as I followed Tami through the bushes, easy to do, she looked wonderful in camos.

Zandy presented the guard with a writ of Habeas Corpus.  Being one of Daniels’ goons, he wasn’t too bright, and let the two of them in as he called it in.  Perfect.

The next part we had debated, but we couldn’t figure out any other way.  Within two seconds, all the visible guards along the fence and the towers were taken out.  Hayley and Blue rapidly fired their battle lasers, killing them all.

Simultaneously from the fenced area inside the gate Zandy opened her briefcase and Betty started throwing gas grenades from it around the compound, guaranteed to knock out anyone who wasn’t enhanced to be immune to the gas.

Amazingly, the alarm was not sounded.

Ten minutes later, long enough for the gas to get into the vents of all the areas and guard control rooms, we moved in.  Tami kept me behind her.  Moving through the prison, we collected all the guards, Hayley and Blue easily cutting through locks with their finger lasers, not even slowing down.  Several more had to be taken out.  We secured all the ones still alive in the cells.

The main passkey for the prison security was written on a piece of notepad paper taped on the slide out panel in the warden’s antique desk.  Hayley and Blue easily connected to the prison systems with that, releasing all the cells with Senators, Representatives, and Judges in them.  My girls and I went through and woke up all the Politicians who had been tagged by the gas.

We gathered all 400+ of them, men and women, many a bit haggard after a few months in prison, in the courtyard.  They were joined by the ones that came with us who were arriving from the airport.  This is where we had to do something that wasn’t normal, but we needed to take out Daniels legally first.

I got up on a picnic table with a bullhorn, looked out at the huge yard full of people, and called out, “Representatives, what is your vote on impeaching Daniels?”

It was unanimous.  Every single person from the House raised their hands.  So did many of the others, but Hayley, who was tasked with recording it all, easily parsed out who the Representatives were.

“Vote carried.  Senators, do you vote for impeachment trial?”

Again it was unanimous.

“Vote carried.  Justices, do you believe that Daniels has broken his oath of office?”

Eight of the nine Justices raised their hands.

“Vote carried.  The bastard is impeached!”

Everyone started cheering.  It must have been the most informal and bipartisan government proceeding in history.  I let them cheer for a while, they deserved it.  After they wound down a bit, I got on the bullhorn again.  “Now, you have a choice, find your way away from here, or come with us.”

Two thirds of them took off to find their families.  I guess a few months in prison grew them some backbones.  The rest, mostly unmarried young Representatives, jumped into the trucks back to the airport.  As we boarded the transports to head back to Panama, Hayley posted the video of Daniels’ impeachment.  She had added official looking stats on the side, listing all House members and their vote, Senators and their vote, and the Justices and their vote.

The uproar was tremendous.  Daniels’ people immediately posted reasons why the vote wasn’t legal.  Technically, they were correct, but the world, and more importantly, the American people, didn’t care.  Ninety five percent of the few remaining government people went AWOL.  The bureaucracy ground to a halt.  The only ones remaining were the Daniels loyalists.

The Vice-President and Secretary of State were both found shot.  The Speaker of the House and President of the Senate were nowhere to be found, having disappeared after leaving the prison.  The Secretary of the Treasury and all the other Secretaries quickly disappeared, probably in fear.  It was a quandary; the line of succession was gone.  The only remaining person was the Attorney General, and he was a Daniels loyalist.

The ferry from the mainland was busy for the next month as those who had stayed behind to find their families arrived with the aforementioned families in tow.  A month after the escape we were up to 87% of the Senators and 89% of the Representatives.  All the Justices were present.

The big debate was now about what to do about the “occupied” United States, and the missing line of succession.  Things began to get partisan again as roaring debates shook our copy of the capital building in Washington, built in an airplane hangar.

It had been several months of arguing when Senator Fenstad of Minnesota proposed that former President Sandra Thompson-Zane be inaugurated as the new President.  That got unanimous bipartisan approval.  Sandra had been a popular President, and had been doing a lot of the Celebrity stuff in the last century.  I had been present the night before when Fenstad had come to see her and ask if she would do it.  Sandra had thought about it, discussed it with Zane, her husband; before agreeing.  Sandra commented to me with a grin, “Good thing I never took that second term.”  She started really laughing, “Bet I am the first president to have 143 grandchildren!  This will bankrupt the Secret Service!”

We posted the video of this election as well.  While it wasn’t in the official capital building, it was as formal, being in a similar room.  Even though it was in a Panamanian jungle, it looked like normal CSPAN footage.

The uproar was greater than even the impeachment.  In all, a very positive uproar.

Chapter 108

While all the hoopla was taking place in the United States, the rest of the world went on.  The reaction was pretty much split along the lines we had predicted; first world countries accepted Pasha and the Carrethians; whereas third world theocratic governments were rabidly against.  Unfortunately the U.S. President was one of them.  In any case, Pasha was kept busy by daily meetings with pretty much every government on Earth.

With the rapid decline of the U.S. economy, the New America colony was cut off.  Being a new colony, things were getting bad fast.  We had to make several trips and dump supplies.  The American supply ship, creatively called “Constellation”, we repossessed as the U.S. government stopped paying their lease.  The lease was not very much money, only about $50K a year since I had wanted to push the move into space, so I let a group of entrepreneurial Aussies take over and they began running it as a tramp freighter, resupplying New America, New Japan, Mars and Carreth Station.  The other ship, “Star Clipper”, privately owned by a consortium, also started to run as a tramp freighter.  As backup, our ships stopped at the colonies, ostensively to supply the clinics on site, but really to supply necessities.  The colonies didn’t have much money, they were primarily science outposts, and New America was cut off, whereas New Japan and Mars had their funding cut when the world governments panicked over the crisis in America and horded money.  I was dumping several billion a month into all three colonies, that didn’t include the trillion I was spending building the Carreth Station (mostly hauling dirt).

The colonies needed to be self-supporting.  On both New America and New Japan, we planted Earth crops on large islands off the coast near the cities of New Chicago and New Tokyo; hoping that the 100+ kilometers of separation from the mainland would minimize the cross-contamination with native plants.  There had been test greenhouses in both of the colonies, but they didn’t provide enough food for the 100,000 people in each of the two small cities.  Corn, wheat and soybeans seemed to grow well in the alien soil, so we expected some good food crops soon.  Farm animals couldn’t eat native greens, so we had to feed them whatever output came from the greenhouses until crops came in and we established grazing land.  So the incoming ships were filled with corn and other grains.

What was ironic were the overfilled grain silos in the American Midwest that had rotting grain in them because the distribution system had broken down.  I had trains quickly snuck in and filled, then transported over the Mexican border before anyone caught on.  Actually, many of the trains were just sitting at depots around the U.S.; they just needed a charge and a driver.  Many of the trains were part of the Clinic supply chain that had been shut down along with everything else.  We took care of our own, so the train engineers that had fled the country were housed with their families on the island.  Maryanne, Melody, and Margery were making constant trips filled with grain; they suspended their exploration for the duration.  The Constellation and Star Clipper hauled everything else, mostly liquor and electronics, with quite a few passengers.

Carreth Station was enclosed after a month, and while it was being pressurized, we started on the secondary hull, providing an emergency buffer from impacts causing decompression.  I had done this with the Ripley space dock as well, being nervous after the decompression from the terrorists on the original station when I was there.  I was extra worried; the station had the last Carrethian genomes left in the universe.  If they died it meant the end of our Hail Mary recovery.  We also started plans to double the length of the cylinder, creating more area for biosphere recovery.

In early October, all the new babies were due.  Even though I felt I should stay on Earth with everything going on there, being present for Zarra and the ladies was even more important.  Pasha and Zoa also took the opportunity to visit home.  We kept it quiet as the ship, Maryanne, headed out, pre-matching the velocity of the Carrethian star before translating to the system.  We popped out near the station, and started final corrections to match the station.  I was on the bridge as Maryanne put on the comms, “Carreth Station, Carreth Station, Betty, do you read?”

“Carreth Station here, Maryanne, is that you?”

“Yes, and I am carrying prince.”

“Cool!  We are so looking forward to it!  Dock at bay six.  See you in a few!”

Hmmm, it seemed that Betty had been hanging around with some of my older daughters.  She sure had picked up the vernacular.

As we pulled in, I was surprised to see the original Carrethian ship docked in another bay.  I asked, “Maryanne, I thought we were including the original Carrethian ship as part of the station?”

“After a lot of debate, it was decided to keep it separate and intact as a sort of lifeboat.  Also, the materials used in the hull of the ship do not have the tensile strength to be part of the station.  The long term plan is to build a shell around it and keep it as a museum.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Another surprise awaited me as I disembarked.  There were a lineup of various stores and restaurants across from the gate and several people wandering around that I didn’t know, including a bunch of kids running around.  Maryanne’s avatar saw where I was looking and commented, “We have had a lot of passengers recently, and Constellation has also hauled a lot of people out here.  About half of them have the space bug, but the other half are people who were getting worried about things on Earth.  There are also several ambassadors and diplomats of various types.  I am sure there is a spy or two in the mix as well.”

I was amazed; it was like something out of a science fiction movie!  I was amazed not only about that, but that they had a major presence on my station and I didn’t know anything about it.

Eliza, who had exited ship behind me, knew me well and said, “We didn’t specifically brief you on this because you were a bit busy dealing with Daniels.  I personally think that any issues caused by these people being here are easy balanced out on the whole idea that they are here at all!”

I smiled ruefully over at her and said, “I agree.  I just hoped it would be a few years before I exposed Zarra and her girls to this side of human culture.  Heck, I’d be surprised if there weren’t pickpockets and the like here already.”

“There isn’t any petty crime yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t soon.”

We were rescued from the conversation by the arrival of Zarra, who was very pregnant and not moving all that fast.  Zoa got first hugs, her mom commenting on Zoa’s bare arms.  Zarra then hugged me, followed by everyone else.  She then said, in perfect English, “Let’s get off the Promenade; I want to lose this damn ship suit.”

Pasha, always hating clothes, said, “Hear, hear.”

In the main station, forests and fields had been planted, but weren’t very far along yet.  My daughters had accelerated some growth, but it still took a while to grow a tree.  In the middle of that was a compound with walls and one of my Carrethian girls on guard with a big spear, she looked pretty fierce, even with the big belly.  Zarra commented, “Since this station was being built to honor the Carrethian culture, we decided to build a traditional clan house.  Your room is in the center.”

The architecture was a little unusual, it was like walking through a cross between an Arabian palace and a American southwest style building.  There wasn’t a direct tunnel to my quarters, there were switchbacks and dead ends everywhere.  The design was obviously designed for defense, to guard the Clan Lord.  My quarters was a large room with lots of pillows.  It looked like something a fat Caesar would have.

A minute after I arrived, Zarra clasped her belly and gasped, “I need to get to the birthing room, now!”  Her water broke with a mess on the floor.  The problem was that all of the guards’ waters broke within seconds.  Looked like the simultaneous birth worked for the Carrethian ladies as well.  I called on my ear-bug, “Betty, get all medical personnel and all my daughters with the gift in here, now!”

“Yes, Master.  They are already on the way, and I have sent teams to retrieve all pregnant females as well, as it appears that the births are simultaneous and they are likely to need it.”

“Thank You, Betty.  Good idea.”

A minute later a brigade of my daughters, all but one with the gift, rushed into the room with stretchers.  Zarra, Pasha, and the eight other ladies in labor were loaded up and carried out of the room, down the hall, and into another room.  I followed and was instantly shooed out.  Apparently males are not allowed in the birthing room.  I left, I trusted by daughters, and knew that they had already had to secretly make genetic adjustments to the fetuses to account for genetic errors that came out when the races combined (I had done so with Pasha’s fetus as well).  I had taken a look earlier and knew that the girls were perfect, albeit with cat ears, a tail, and fur which would grow in within a month or so.  I also noticed that every one of them had the gift that would be appearing when they were a teen.  I normally wouldn’t have checked that, but these girls had had every strand of their DNA examined forwards and backwards.

I wandered out of the building, followed by my entourage, including Zoa.  Sara and Maryanne stayed in the birthing room.  I was surprised when I saw Betty’s avatar at the guard post outside the door, and that she had been made over with the ears, fur and a tail.  I guess she wanted to fit in.  Zoa was surprised, she went over and asked, “Who are you? I don’t recognize you.”

Betty grinned and commented, “I am like Maryanne and Eliza, my name is Betty.  I am this station.”

Zoa looked puzzled, “Huh?”  She glanced around, “I don’t get it.”

“I am the main computer for this station.  This is my avatar.”  She had to say avatar in English, there was no equivalent word in Carrethian.

Zoa was still a bit confused.  Betty asked, “Has no one told you?  I am a type of robot.”  The translation came back as “industrial machine”.  Apparently the concept of an artificial being was not in the Carrethian lexicon.

Zoa thoughtfully tilted her head.  Suddenly I could almost see the light bulb over it.  “Really?  You are the station computer?  That is mudda!”  A second later the translation corrected to, “so cool!”  I guess that word wasn’t in the standard translation matrix.  Zoa examined Betty closely.  She suddenly looked over at me and exclaimed, “Maryanne and Eliza too?  Wow.”

I said, “Eliza was the first, and she is a little different.  She is self contained, whereas Betty here is operated remotely.  Eliza is also considered to be Betty’s mom.”  I glanced over at Betty and asked, “Does Zarra understand who you are?”

“Actually, no.  I had Tara, Irena and Trixi help modify my avatar when I got here, but this is the first time I have used it.  I don’t think, especially as to how foreign Zoa here found the concept, that any of them realized that Maryanne and Michelle were avatars for their ships.”

“This answers so many questions!” exclaimed Zoa.

It is our turn to go, “huh?”

“We all wondered why some of you spoke our language and some didn’t.  Lots of other little things too.  We have been debating that since day one.”  She tilted her head again and asked, “Why didn’t I hear about this from all the movies I watched?”

I said, “It used to be a popular thing to make movies about androids, which is the name for what Eliza is, whereas avatar is what Betty is.  The practice died a bit over the last couple of hundred years or so.  Both androids and physical avatars are not common outside of our clan.”  I glanced over at Natalie and commented, “Honey, maybe we need to make a movie or two inside the clan.  I don’t know why we have never done that.”

Natalie’s eyes got big, “Master, that is a wonderful idea!  Maybe a murder mystery on the station here or something like that!”

I had a brainstorm, “Hey, what about making, ‘The Caves of Steel’?  Thinking about it, many of the old families that hold copyrights would be glad to sell or license those rights since Hollywood is under edict.  Let’s start our own studio, say, ‘Starr Studios’.  Get a team on buying the rights to many of those old movies and books.  I haven’t produced a movie in 200 years, let’s also revive ‘Malloy Productions’ and produce every movie that we can that will go against Daniels’ restrictions, just to piss him off.”

Natalie got a big smile.  “I LOVE that idea.”  She started murmuring into her ear-bug.  Soon Eliza and several other of my entourage girls were murmuring into their ear-bugs.  (Eliza murmuring just for show, of course.) 

My girls had a project.  Within days they had bought out three studios that had gone bankrupt under Daniels’ new laws and had crated them up, lock, stock, and barrel; moved everything to the island; also started production on fifteen movies.  Most directors were out of work, and when they heard that one of the reasons these movies were being made was to drive Daniels nuts, they eagerly signed up.  We also got EVERY A-list and B-list actor and actress for the same reasons.  The large studio we built on one side of the island, opposite the launch rails, was busy within days. 

We had to expand the new Malloton on the island to include some large apartment complexes and townhouses.  It wasn’t EBs only any more.  Since we were still nudist, that caused a little friction, but most of the population accepted it, especially since it was the opposite of Daniels policies.

What was interesting was that over half of the movies took place off Earth.  One on Mars, two in Selena, two in New America, one in New Japan, one at the main space station (still unnamed after all this time), and one in Carreth Station which also had segments in Ripley Space Dock and on the starship Melody.

Back on Carreth Station, all my daughters were born without a hitch, including two that weren’t Carrethian, but were from EBs living on the station.

Chapter 109

It had been almost a year since Daniels took over, so I started my visits to clinics again.  All my daughters and EBs understood and were operating on auto-pilot while I dealt with all the crises, but they all needed hugs.  The accounting team that paid for everything had been maintaining the flow of funds to all the non-U.S. clinics.  Many of those clinics were receiving large grants from the local governments.

The Canadian clinics were being swamped by U.S. refugees and several of them had expanded.  Although it wasn’t their problem, the Canadian government was as pissed at Daniels as everyone else, so they allowed in anyone who wanted to go over the border as a refugee.  In a bit of irony, the human traffickers that normally brought people into the U.S. now took people out.

Canada also was the repository of much of the irreplaceable material from the Smithsonian and National Archives.  I had worked with the curators to sneak an entire freight train into Washington and, using a convenient “breakdown” of the metro, use it to move all valuable items from the museum archives and displays to the train.  It took three days of constant work, and not a single bribe; everyone wanted the collection out of Daniels’ hands.  We had all sighed in relief as the train passed over the Canadian border.  All the gold, diamonds and other precious metals and stones would stay intact.  We left, archived, many artifacts, ones that were not sellable, like photo archives or old toys.  We also cleaned out many of the other big museums of anything that could be sold.

Besides the museums, we sent in trains and, with a congressional writ, cleaned out the Federal Reserves.  Fort Knox had closed years ago, but there was a LOT of gold and silver in the other sites.  The trains weren’t very big, the metal was too heavy.  But there were a lot of them.  There was nothing Daniels could do about it, he had few cronies left.  The dollar lost all remaining value as the news got out.

I was just glad that all the nukes had been destroyed a century ago and the nuclear football no longer existed.  I am sure one or two nukes still remained, probably hidden in a silo somewhere, but not enough to worry about, everyone and their pet dog could shoot a missile down these days.  The last aircraft carrier had been scrapped over a century ago as well; so the only real might that Daniels had left were his goons, and maybe, if they followed his commands, a battleship or sub.  The only person he would send them after anyway was me, and my island had a complete sonar net around it.  No sub would get close.  Heck, several battleships and submarines contacted the government in exile and were working for them.  They subcontracted out maintenance to Japan, the Aussies, and England; since Pearl Harbor and Norfolk were unavailable (Puget Sound had closed in the mid-21^st century, and Plymouth in the mid 22^nd Century).

Daniels tried to go after us anyway.  The Panamanian government called, several people had been caught attempting to bribe government officials.  I don’t think they really realized what I had done to the Panama economy and the gratitude that a good number of people in the government felt for that and the clinics in Panamá City and David City.  Heck, the President of Panama’s mother had been saved by a roving EMRV when she was a little girl.  We told them that they could do what they wanted.  The government of Panama reported the CIA operatives on national broadcast as they were thrown in prison.  Ester smiled happily in delight, those CIA agents were Daniels cronies; still working after the real U.S. government went into exile.

Within days, many other operatives were arrested, in San Jose, Costa Rica; Managua, Nicaragua; Bogotá and Medellin, Columbia; the whole area of the world was cleaned out.  Since the drug cartels were long gone, that was a good thing.  What was interesting were the agents who did not work for Daniels who turned in the others.  Ester eagerly recruited the former CIA operatives who had a conscience into her operation.

Ester’s network in the United States still existed, even though it had a lot of holes in it.  She had a building full of EBs that worked with the pseudo-AI that Eliza had set up as her replacement to generate reports that we sent on to the government in exile.  We knew what was going on in the U.S., we all had to find a quiet corner occasionally and have a cry.  People were starving.  A good percentage of Washington D.C. was empty with roving gangs controlling it all.  For some reason Daniels still lived in the White House.  He had had to crack down even harder to maintain his will.  He was running short on henchmen and would soon be pretty vulnerable.  We started planning.

Chapter 110

Most of the individual states were surviving, but were operating at greatly reduced levels.  Since Daniels had instituted marshal law, they were operating on auto-pilot, not convening the state legislatures and the like.  Many states, far from Washington D.C., had managed to continue operations.  We didn’t worry about them.  The near states, mostly New England, were the ones that were in rough shape. 

We needed a militia to overthrow Daniels.  With authorization from congress, we sent in hundreds of my EBs and daughters, plus any troops that had escaped the U.S.  They started whipping up the local National Guard troops, plus a few thousand rednecks, getting them organized.  The EMRVs with their avatars came back down from Canada to act as communication and command centers.  Just having an EMRV parked in a town allowed the reconnection of the Internet.  Many people could talk to each other for the first time in a year.  Computers automatically ordered inventory, suppliers had someplace to ship stuff off the shelves, and the local economies started running again.

Daniels got wind of it all two weeks after we started setting up.  Locally, he sent in his thugs to shut down the operations in Richmond and Charlottesville.  The local National Guard units cleaned out what was remaining in the Armories and went into hiding.  The EMRVs just drove away and parked inside of old gymnasiums and arenas.  Daniels’ goons didn’t find anything.  We watched from a distance as they turned and shot the Mayor of Richmond, who had turned us in.  The thugs went back to Washington, and we went back to setting up.

The trick was going to be getting Daniels before he could get to the PEOC in the White House.  The bunker there could maintain him and his staff for over a year.  We had to get him outside.

We knew that any attempt to lure him out would backfire; so we created a waiting game.  He didn’t really know we had surrounded Washington D.C., so we knew that he would come out sometime.  He did come out and visit his preacher once a month or so.  We didn’t know why, since there was a chapel in the White House, but that gave us an opportunity.  We slowly snuck into Washington D.C.  Most of the staff was gone, so we hoped that the monitoring stations were not manned.  General Farrah told us that, because of the threat of hacking, that all of the monitoring was done manually.  She figured that the area directly around the White House was monitored, but the rest of D.C. was probably ignored.

Placing tanks in Arlington Cemetery across from the Lincoln Memorial, we used camo to make them look like crypts and parked a few under the overhangs of the buildings, it wasn’t like the places were open, the first thing Daniels had done was cut funding to the Women in Military Service memorial and the Arlington service center.  We also figured the patriots buried there wouldn’t mind, that if they were alive, they’d want the troops to hide there.  We also filled the empty Smithsonian warehouses under the National Mall with troops.

The day came.  The presidential cavalcade was leaving the White House and heading west.  We let Daniels’ security scouts running before the cavalcade through, and then we moved the tanks into position at the Western end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge.  The second the cavalcade was behind the Lincoln Memorial, the troops under the Mall moved in behind it and blocked it on the bridge.  The boats that had been hidden on the river moved in to prevent that avenue of escape.  The only way out was by air, and we had people ready with RPGs to take out that route as well.  Daniels was trapped.  The cavalcade stopped in the middle of the bridge.

We intercepted their calls for assistance, grinning as they called for air strikes.  Every single fighter jet within a thousand miles was under our control.  They had all been abandoned when the pilots and support crew went AWOL.  We had moved in and secured the planes and helicopters months ago.  What was funny was that we also secured the abandoned Presidential Airplane, SAM 43000.

When they didn’t get any response, they called the White House.  About a dozen of Daniels’ goons ran out of the gate, down the street, and right into the several thousand troops waiting; a combination of militia, airmen, soldiers, sailors and marines.  They stupidly tried to shoot it out and were taken out in seconds.

After sitting there for an hour, one of Daniels goons got out of the car with Daniels, and walked to the end of the bridge where the troops were waiting.  General Farrah, in full uniform, was in front, waiting.  He marched up and commanded, “I must ask you to move, you are blocking the path of the President of the United States.”

Farrah tilted her head and replied, “You have got to be kidding.”

The guy had the grace to blush, but said, “You are unlawfully blocking this bridge.  President Daniels is late for an appointment.  Move your troops now!”

“No.  Besides the fact that he is NOT President, We the People of the United States will not take it anymore.  Take this message back, either surrender the traitor Jake Daniels, or we will be forced to remove him forcibly.”

He blinked, sighed, then turned and walked back to the car and got in.  A few minutes later another guy, the driver, got out of the car, kneeled, and put his hands behind his head.  The other three cars had four goons each, and they all kneeled and put up their hands.  General Farrah signaled and a group of troops ran out and handcuffed the kneeling men.  One looked into the presidential car and called on her ear-bug, “General, Madam, you need to see this.”

Farrah marched over and peered into the car, transmitting so everyone could see it.  Daniels and his agents were all dead.  Shot between the eyes.  Farrah asked the driver, “What happened?”

He looked her straight in the eye and said, “I couldn’t take it anymore.  If he was about to be arrested, then he can’t hurt my little sister again, so I shot him to make sure.  This is a happy day for me.”

Farrah replied, “This is a happy day for all of us.”

The remaining few goons in the White House surrendered, and we moved in a bevy of EBs to secure the place.  Within hours we had flown in President Sandra Thompson-Zane and several key government officials; during all this Ester kept me on lockdown up on Ripley.  As they prepared speeches, Ester’s teams of EBs found the driver’s sister and several other pretty teenage girls, all chained in cells under the White House, with a lot of bruises.  They told Sandy about it, and she looked angry, and then added something to the speech she was working on.  The Secret Service detail for Daniels had been executed when Daniels took over, so the few remaining of the detail, which had been protecting Sandra, worked with the EBs to secure everything.  Sandra set up in the Press Room and did a ‘cast that was watched worldwide and beyond.  If it wasn’t for the ‘net being shut down in many places, it would have been the second largest ‘cast ever (topped only by Maryanne’s launch).  As it was, it came in third.  It did make the record as the widest ‘cast, being watched over 20,000 lightyears, from the New Japan Colony to the Carreth Station, which were 21,312 lightyears apart, in opposite directions from Earth, one to the galactic southwest, one to the northeast.

While the government got itself sorted out, I moved in all the support that was waiting.  All the clinics reopened overnight and the shelters were filled immediately.  Within a week, the minute clinics reopened.  Ester was kept busy rooting out all the leftover Daniels supporters.  Farrah was kept busy locking down the capital.  My main compound was amazingly untouched.  I didn’t move back, I stayed down on the island, but we did move back support personnel and reopened the warehouses for clinic distribution.  The original clinic needed some repair work, but Jenny, Erin and Gertie were ecstatic to be back.

The thugs captured with Daniels went on trial, very publicly.  Half of them got put on death row, the first death row inmates in over a century; the other half, except for the driver who shot Daniels, got life in prison, and the driver actually got released.  He was just a driver; he hadn’t participated in any of the depravations.  He got over 20 million emails thanking him.  He took his sister, and with Ester’s help, disappeared.  All of the remaining girls from the White House basement, whose families had all been killed, ended up joining the EBs.  The EB training took care of most of the psychological damage, and the staff of EB psychologists treated them for a few months, until the group emigrated en masse to the New America colony to help run the clinic there.  I guess they wanted to get as far from Washington D.C. as they could.  I didn’t blame them.

Chapter 111

I decided it was time to visit all the far flung clinics.  Over the centuries, I had made it to all the ones on Earth, the three stations (including mine), and the moon colony Selena.  Maryanne still hadn’t restarted her exploring, Ester asking her to stick around, just in case, since there was still unrest due to the instability of the U.S. government.  I shanghaied her to carry me to the five clinics I had never been to, New America station, New Chicago Clinic on New America, New Japan station, the New Tokyo Clinic on New Japan, and Helium, Mars.  Aleem had come up with a modification to the star drive so that we could dump more power into the translation and not have to correct manually.  We were excited to try this.

Maryanne filled her hold with food, quite a few steaks and tons of veggies.  Then we translated to Mars orbit directly.  We only had to make minor corrections to go into orbit.  Aleem stood next to me as Mars appeared in the viewport and we grinned at each other and clinked campaign glasses.  The star drive worked perfectly.  We reported it back to space dock to retrofit the two tramp freighters Constellation and Star Clipper, and our three ships Melody, Michelle and Margery.

We got on the shuttle along with a couple of tons of food.  It was a lot more rocky than descent on Earth.  The Martian atmosphere was a lot thinner, which made for a smoother ride from that and the low gravity, but it was more than made up for the need to retrorocket harder because of that thin atmosphere.  Good thing the shuttles were fully charged.  It was fun as we landed on the runway, and then pulled into the hanger airlock.

At the shuttle lock I was greeted by my whole bevy of EBs from the Helium clinic.  Reminiscent of my first greeting in the main station, I was nearly bowled over by beautiful girls tackling me in big hugs.  I must have spent a good half hour hugging, kissing, and squeezing beautiful women.  No complaints, at least not from me.  There were a few complaints from the hanger crew as we blocked things.  Eventually, except for the supervising pilot, we moved on to the clinic.

I had been there, taking the tour, for about 45 minutes, when my ear-bug buzzed, and I heard Xenia, the pilot, gasp, “Help, Master...”  Then the line went dead.  I shouted as I turned and started running for the Clinic main entrance, “Xenia is in trouble, she is with the shuttle.”  My entire entourage, plus 20 heavily armed EBs at the door, started running with me toward the shuttle bay.  Tami, Betty and Eliza were way ahead of us, of course.  We got there a minute after they did, and saw that Xenia was down with several bullet wounds and Betty was doing emergency repairs on her while Tami and Eliza stood watch, glaring around the bay.  There was no one else there.  Also, there was nothing else there, the entire shipment was missing.

I called the police and reported the attack and theft.  Soon several cops and a detective arrived.  The detective took a report, um-hmmed and left.  I couldn’t believe it.  Darla, head of the Helium clinic, saw my confusion and commented, “You won’t see anything happen, the goons who attacked were most likely under the employ of Frederick Poirot, the colony governor.”

I groaned, “Ah, shit, not another corrupt president.”

“He was assigned to the post by Daniels.  He arrived right after Daniels’ takeover with a ship full of thugs, and since then corruption has taken over the colony.”

“Why didn’t you report this to me?”

“Until now, it didn’t really affect the clinic.  We operate independently of the colony government.”

I rolled my eyes, then put in a call to Sandy.

“Hello, Tom.  What’s up?”

“Hey Sandy.  I am here in Helium and just found out that the governor is a Daniels crony.”

“Right to the point, eh?  Well, you have executive orders to take care of it, 007.  I guess that is why you are calling?”

“Yeah.  Thanks, Sandy.”

“You’re welcome.  Damn, I wish I didn’t love this country so much.  Otherwise I would never have taken this on.  *sigh*”

“You need anything, call, okay?”

“Thanks, Tom.  Good luck with the governor there.  Albarado, I believe.”

“No, it is Poirot.”

“Not supposed to be.  I wonder what the story is there?  How did Daniels get his dirty toenails in there?  Please let me know.  I may have some more diplomatic work to do.  *sigh* Just what I need.  Later.”

“Later.”

I connected to the clinic.  “Thuvia.”

“Hello, Master Tom.  How is Xenia doing?”

“With Betty’s help, probably a full recovery.”

“Thank Tom.”

“Yes.  Well, I just had a conversation with President Thompson-Zane.  She has authorized us to take care of Poirot.”

“About fucking time.  That guy has really been getting under my skin, so to speak.”  I raised an eyebrow to Eliza, she nodded back.  Another AI that was acting a little off that she had to talk to.  There had been a lot of them recently.  They were still operating within their operational parameters, but were skirting the line.

“Yeah.  I am giving you an official ‘Dredd’ order.”

“Understood.  Implementing ‘Dredd’ protocols.  Locking down systems.  Initiating takeover of colony systems.  Initiating lethal countermeasures.”  Thuvia paused, and said, “Holy Shit!  That is scary.”

“Thank you, Thuvia.  We are heading back to the clinic now.”

Eliza asked as we headed for the clinic, “Did I hear you implement the ‘Dredd’ protocols?”

“Yes.”

“Wow, this is a real test.  All the other clinics were evacuated, this is the first time we have had to use them.”

“Yeah, I know.  But the only other choice here is for Thuvia to upload herself to the ship in one of Maryanne’s backup modules, and then we evacuate Mars.  That is only last ditch, though.  Without the clinic’s support, this colony wouldn’t last long.  There are too many innocent people here to do that if we can avoid it.”

I went on, “The supplies are not that big of a deal, it was only 15% of the shipment.  But they made a mistake when they attacked and injured Xenia.  No one does that to one of my people.  No one.”

Tami commented, “No one does that to one of my sisters, either.”

Eliza said, “Hear, hear.”

Amanda, Mandy, Zoa, Natalie and 20 EBs all nodded angrily in agreement.

The clinic was not far from the bay, so we were there quickly and placing the still unconscious, but repaired, Xenia into a clinic recovery room.  As we moved her to the bed from the gurney, she woke up.  “Hi, guys.”

We surrounded the bed, and I squeezed her hand.  Eliza said, “Thuvia, please bring up the recording from Xenia’s ear-bug.”

A wall monitor lit up and we watched as Xenia supervised the unloading.  They had just finished unloading the shuttle when 10 guys showed up in black fatigues and one of them ordered the dock workers to load everything up in a truck.  Xenia went over and asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

The man turned to her and said, “We are confiscating this material in the name of Governor Poirot.”

“You have no right to do that!”

Without another word he pulled out a gun and shot Xenia.  She went down and her ear-bug continued to record as the rest of the crates were loaded on the truck and, as they left, the dock workers took off, probably not wanting to get involved.  Xenia managed to get off a quick call to me before she passed out.

As the video ended, Darla said, “Damn, that was Garth, Piorot’s number one.  They have gone completely off the deep end.  They must be desperate now that Daniels is no longer around.”

Thuvia said, “I have recovered more than enough incriminating evidence from their computer, Poirot and his men are directly responsible for more than fifteen murders, and indirectly responsible for nearly forty others.  Like Daniels, they have ten teen girl sex slaves housed near their quarters.  Master, I can isolate the girls, and then take out Poirot and most of his men from here.”

I exchanged glances with my girls, then steeled myself and said, “Do it.”

The entire city shuddered as Thuvia decompressed Poirot’s quarters.  Ten minutes later, Thuvia announced, “Poirot and all of his men except one are dead.”

“Where is that one?”

“He is here in the clinic getting treated for a burst appendix.”

“Send an EB to guard him, re-pressurize Poirot’s quarters, and then suspend ‘Dredd’ protocols.”  I didn’t want to leave the clinic computer with the ability to kill any longer than necessary.  She could do so by herself, she was a free person, but the Dredd protocols were for emergencies and allowed her much more leeway, they allowed her to instantly ‘judge’ people.  I asked, “Is Albarado still alive?  He is supposed to be the governor, I believe.”

“No, he was one of the first killed by Poirot.  Poirot actually did that in person.”

“Well, until President Thompson-Zane sends a replacement, I officially put Thuvia and Darla in charge.  Get all of the stolen goods from Poirot’s former quarters back to their original owners if possible.  Clean up as much as you can for the new governor.”

I was sick of all the crap with the government.  So, after reporting to Sandy, I went back up to the ship and just relaxed as the shuttle made five more trips, offloading all the cargo.  A bit adolescent, I know.  We jumped back to Earth, reloaded, and then jumped to New America.

Chapter 112

New America was a beautiful planet.  One of four habitable planets found, it was entirely herbivorous in its native vegetation, analogous to the Devonian period on Earth.  No animals at all.  Apparently Earth plants and insects thrived.  I felt a little guilty, I had opened the planet to colonization, and the more advanced Earth plants were forcing out the primitive native plants.  The offshore experiment had worked beautifully, and now large swaths of the mainland were also growing crops and had grazing sheep and cattle.

There was a mid-sized city, New Chicago, and many outlying settlements.  It was the wild west all over again.  A station was in orbit which was similar to the stations around Earth and Carreth.  The crops grown in the station had saved the new colonists from starvation upon arrival, and were now planted with Earth forests.  The station was the standard transshipment point for cargo.  There was a clinic on the station as well as one below in New Chicago.

Maryanne docked at the last airlock gangway which was right next to the clinic.  Tami and Eliza insisted on being first, even though Sally (short for Sally Ride), the clinic AI, reported everything was kosher.  Telah (Tanisha’s daughter), Sally and 10 EBs greeted me enthusiastically.  As a group, we swarmed back across the Promenade into the clinic.  They had been without for a long time, so we partied for hours, all of them ending up with cream pies, unconscious, sweaty, twitching and drooling all over the place.  I had had to use the gift to rejuvenate my equipment several times, but the sight of the 43 of them laid out there was worth it.  I even got Sally passed out for a few minutes.  I stood watch until she recovered.

The next morning I took the shuttle down to New Chicago.  I was really looking forward to it.  The city was the epitome of Science Fiction, the remote colony planet.  I hadn’t been that excited since my first trip up to the Space Station 215 years ago for the medical emergency.  Although when I visited Selena 49 years ago it was almost as exciting.

I watched out the porthole as the shuttle landed on a strip in the middle of a corn field.  It seemed that the colonists had gone overboard planting crops, it felt like we were landing in Iowa.  Anyway, we taxied onto a large tarmac and over to a jetway just like a normal airport.  There was a full airport with customs, immigration, baggage claim and everything.  The launch rails went up the side of a nearby mountain.  It was cleaner and easier than the setup on Earth.  I decided to definitely redesign my spaceport like that one.

Waiting at the end of the jetway were the New Chicago clinic girls.  Leading the way was Sacajawea (the clinic’s avatar) and my cousins Amy and Rose with several of their daughters in tow.  New Chicago was one of just three clinics that didn’t have someone with the gift in charge, but Amy’s and Rose’s daughters all had the gift; Niyol and her daughters were also present.  We all hugged and shed a few happy tears, not having seen each other in thirteen years. 

Our shuttle was full of clinic supplies, so we let that get taken care of (Xenia was wearing a bulletproof vest this time), while our ePassports were automatically processed.

The clinic crew led us onto the NATS (New America Transportation System), an elevated train that took us two stops to Malloy Station, which was in the clinic at the center of New Chicago.  It was a full Valery style clinic, built like the one in Osaka, covering the area of four normal clinics.  As we disembarked, Amy commented, “The reason we built this so large was that we were not sure that Earth plants would survive here, so we planned to plant crops in here if needed.  Now, of course, it is a beautiful park with lots of Earth trees and vegetation.”

Sacajawea added, “Everything was imported.  These are most of the very few deciduous trees on this planet.  What takes a lot of work is to keep people away from them; hard wood is a precious commodity here.  I created a dumb AI who just monitors the park full time, but somehow we still lose a tree or two a month.  Now that everything is back on schedule, we have a ship full of maple, oak and birch saplings on order.”  Like all the clinic AIs, she was very proud of her atrium.

I was very surprised when Hera, followed by six really cute half grown puppies, ran up and pressed herself against me.  Hera had taken off twelve years ago, saying she wanted to explore.  I missed her.  I bent down and gave her a big hug and ear scratch.  Her voder exclaimed, “Hello, Master!”  Her puppies echoed her with simultaneous, “Hello, Master” as well.

I said with a grin, “Well, you sure explored.”

She gave me a doggie grin with squinted eyes and replied, “Yeah.  I like it here.  Plenty of space to run and discover things.  Even met a cute guy and got busy.”  She nodded her head at the puppies.  A few of them gave a, “Aw, mo-om!”  Another one rolled her eyes and said, “TMI!”  I and my entourage cracked up. 

The one who had said, “TMI” marched up and jumped up putting her front paws on my leg (I was still crouched down petting her mom).  She tilted her head, sniffed and said, “I like him.”  She paused, and said, “My name is Freya.”

I scritched behind her ears a bit.  She squinched her eyes and commented, “I like that.”  I checked and realized that she had inherited her mother’s full intelligence and longevity.  Good thing I had given her mother double dominant genes for her enhancements.  Just to be safe, I modified Freya’s genetic makeup to be double dominant as well.  I liked her.  One thing I noticed is that although she was half grown, she was almost ten years old.  The enhancement from birth must have slowed down their natural growth.

Zoa came over and kneeled down, asking, “Is this a puppy?”

To Zoa’s surprise, Freya said, “Yes, I am.  You smell like a human, but you don’t look like the other humans here.”

“I am a Carrethian.  I am not human, but from all the kids that my family has from Master Tom here, we must be compatible.”  Zoa swished her tail.

Freya exclaimed, “Wow!  You have a tail like me!  Valid!”  She jumped down and went over to Zoa, sniffing her tail.  “It is a little different; you have short fur on it and a tuft on the end.  Mine is all fluffy.”  She wagged her own tail.

When we moved on, Freya asked Hera, “Mom, can I go with them?”

Hera said, “Sure, you are old enough to make decisions on your own.  I am probably going to stick around here for a while, but Master Tom will have to move on soon, probably off planet.  You have to decide if you want to go with them.”

Freya got big eyes and exclaimed, “Thanks, Mom!” and excitedly ran to catch up with us.  Hera rolled her eyes and followed with the rest of the pups at a more sedate pace.

The clinic itself was pretty standard.  If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t have known it was on an alien planet 3000 lightyears from Earth.  With the Earth flora and fauna (I saw several squirrels and a few birds); I just sat there on the patio peering over the atrium as my mind gibbered a bit in awe at the whole concept.  Mankind actually had full viable colonies on alien planets!  And I was part of it!  Wow...!

I made notes to set up a gene bank for all Earth species here on New America; also one on New Japan.  Just as a backup, now that having a backup was a viable option.  Hmmm..., bring in ocean species to see if they could survive in the alien oceans.  That would take some work, since coral reefs didn’t exist on New America or New Japan; the planets were too young.  We would have to bring in many Earth water plants and shrimp first; build up the food chain.  Thinking about it, there would be many things we take for granted missing, limestone, coal, petroleum, and the like.  Good thing our technology had moved past the internal combustion engine and that we could get hydrocarbons from plants directly, without having to have them rot for a million years.

The girls were leaving me alone.  They recognized that I was thinking and so didn’t disturb me.  Meanwhile, they were setting up for a super barbecue down in the park, inviting the entire clinic and shelter plus several colony politicians.  The beef, pork and chicken were all local this time.  We had grills full of kebabs with steamers full of rice that we had brought in.  There was no local rice production, yet.  There were some wetlands that were being set up for that several hundred kilometers to the south.  I was willing to bet that New Japan had quite a few rice crops, however.

I emailed my notes, including the spaceport plans, to Alicia; then headed down to the party.

The party turned out to be a bit more than a simple barbecue.  It was a gigantic celebration.  The governor proclaimed it Tom Malloy day and there were parades, fireworks, and lots of speeches.  It seemed that the whole colony knew what I had done to keep them alive, and everyone was over the top grateful.  I was a little embarrassed, but I put on my politic face and thanked them all.  Governor Nabwire, at the end of the day, got up and presented me with a land grant, a small (Australia sized) island off the far coast on the other side of the continent from New Chicago.

I immediately emailed Alicia to put together a terraforming package with soil critters, flora, and the necessary insects for the island.  Fauna such as rabbits, squirrels and moose to be released in a few years after the rest was established.

After an exhausted night’s sleep, we were raring to go the next morning.  I wanted to go to a rural area and see firsthand how the terraforming was proceeding.  When the colony was established, the plan was to carefully examine the possibility of terraforming in the lab.  When the supply crisis occurred, we terraformed an island a hundred miles off the coast, which worked so well that the locals carefully bred more soil biota and planted crops around New Chicago, and then rapidly spread outward at an accelerating rate.

Niyol said, “There is a town, Duluth, 200 miles inland by a large lake.  Would that satisfy your curiosity?”

“That’d be great!  I didn’t know that there were already towns around here.”

“It was originally a small research town, but now has grown into a major distribution hub, a lot like its namesake.  With river transportation, minerals such as iron ore, crops, and even tourism have grown the town to close to 15,000 people.  I actually live there; my girls and I have a minute clinic in the middle of town.  Bila is there now, covering.  She drew the short straw and was upset that she was stuck there.”

Yas grinned, “Yeah, last we saw she was cussing up a storm.”

Niyol said, “We have a boat over on the Navaho River.  It is a six hour trip.”

“Navaho River?  Did you have something to do with that name?”

“No, it did make me want to explore it though, that is how I ended up establishing a minute clinic up in Duluth.  No one is quite sure where the name came from; most of the rivers around here have tribal names, Sioux, Dakota, Seminole, and the like.  One of the original settlers must have named them.”

We got back on the NATS and rode to the Navaho River Station.  The harbor there had a beautiful boat docked.  It was a 60 foot yacht. I exclaimed, “Holy Crap.  How did this get here?”

“Melody brought it in pieces, and we nano-welded it back together.  It is the fanciest ship on New America.  There are larger ships and barges used for river transportation, but this is the largest private yacht.  The girls and I just couldn’t resist when we saw it in a catalog.  And EMRV 3293 Nora volunteered to be the yacht’s AI.  She loves being a yacht; she is almost slap happy about it.”

As we walked up the gangplank, a beautiful blond woman in antique naval dress whites with captain’s bars was waiting for us.  I guessed it was Nora’s avatar since it looked a lot like Ester, as did all androids and avatars.  She exclaimed, “Master Tom! Welcome aboard!”

I gave her a big hug and kiss.  “Thank you Nora.  You are beautiful, both you and your avatar!  Believe it or not, it has been over 230 years since I have been on a ship.  A few canoes, a pontoon boat, and a ferry, but not a wonderful ship like this!”

“Thank you!  I had always dreamed of being a sailboat, and when this opportunity came along, I couldn’t resist.”  She was so excited that she was bouncing a little.  I was amazed, like usual, how complex and wonderful Eliza’s programming was.  She had created the avatar package, which was customized to each AI, and it worked a lot like hers, that is, completely sub-conscious, very similar to humans.  It was so well done that it was impossible to tell if it was a real human or not.  The AIs themselves claimed that when running their avatars, they actually felt like they were there in person, instead of running a waldo.

Nora turned and greeted the rest of the entourage, giving her mom, Eliza, a hug.  “Mom!  I haven’t seen you in years!”

“Nora, honey, it is great to see you.  I see that you fulfilled your dream.  On a different planet than you originally talked about, though.”

“Yeah, this is even more wonderful!  A whole new planet to discover!”  She broke into tears and hugged her mom again.  “Mom, it is so fantastic here!” She sobbed in happiness on Eliza’s shoulder.  She sniffed and said, “Now both Master and you are visiting, I am so happy that I am having trouble thinking clearly.”

Even with her not “thinking clearly”, I noticed that she had raised the gangplank, lifted anchor, and was already several hundred meters upstream.

We soon had left New Chicago behind.  About 10 kilometers east of the city up the river, I noticed that a lot of the Earth vegetation was missing.  There were patches of Earth evergreens everywhere, but otherwise only the Devonian period lichens and ferns.  It was a bit monotonous, so I took some of my girls back into the cabin and took care of them.  I left them there with cream pies, passed out and drooling; always a wonderful sight, even after 250 years.  Amanda and Mandy were still two of the most beautiful and sexy females I have ever met.  Zoa, who was passed out next to them, was right up there.  Natalie, Eliza, Tami, Betty, Lettie, Dalila, Niyol, Nastas, and Yas were all super hot as well; I still gloried in how I got to be with women of that quality.  I happily dozed off in a deck chair, scratching Freya’s ears while she sighed.

I woke up when Nora put her hand on my shoulder and gently shook me.  “Master, time to get up, we are almost to Duluth.”  I looked around and noticed that the vegetation was Earth normal again, flowers and weeds.  Ahead I could see the river opening out into the lake with a large settlement on the left.  We pulled into a fancy dock.  Nora commented as the automated moorings latched into place, “I do lake tours for parties and school kids, so I get this fancy dock.”

I gave her another big hug and kiss, saying, “I will see you in two days for the return trip.  If you want, come on over to the place we are staying to hang out.”  As a newer avatar, she was linked by quantum radio, so she could go an undetermined number of lightyears from her core with no delays.

“Sure thing, Master.  I’ll probably do that.”

We all trampled across the gangplank and through the passenger embarkation lounge and onto the street.  Niyol said, “The clinic is only a block from here.  There is a hotel next door where you can stay.”  We followed her down the street that looked like it could be in any western style human town anywhere in the galaxy.  The next street over was a wide boulevard with a park median.  On the street corner was the sign saying “Thrupp Clinic” with a place covered in windows under it.  I grinned, put my finger to my lips and gestured to all of them to say there, outside the building, they all nodded and grinned too.  I went in the door.

Inside was the waiting room with the nurses desk at the far end.  Cathy, one of my non-gifted daughters, was manning the desk.  I made the quiet finger to lips again as I went over and hugged her hello.  She grinned back and gestured me into a exam room, she flipped the sign to “doctor needed” and came in with me.  She said quietly, “Wow, Dad.  I heard you were in New Chicago, but wasn’t expecting to see you.”  She hugged me again.  “Where is everyone?”

“Outside.  I told them to wait so I could surprise you and your sister Bila.”

“She should be in soon, there was just a case of a broken arm.” 

Just as she said that, the door opened and Bilagaana stepped in.  “Dad!” she screamed as she rushed over and hugged me.

“Surprise!”

“Yes, it sure is!”  She hugged me tighter, sniffed a few times, and sighed happily.

Cathy went back out and waved everyone in.  I asked Bila, “By the way, where is Sandy?”  Sandy Thirty Two, another daughter of mine, was normally joined at the hip to Cathy Twelve.  It felt strange that one was present without the other.

Bila said, “Sandy fell in love.  She is living in an apartment across the street with her husband, Kris.  They have twin sons, four years old.  She assists him over at the research station.”

“Talking? Valid.”

We all did our hugs, and then moved over to the hotel restaurant next door for lunch and to talk.  After that we wandered around town, rubbernecking.  It was a typical boom town.  We met Sandy and her significant other at another restaurant.  Her sons took one look at me, shrieked, “Grandpa!” and latched onto my legs, one each.  Apparently they had seen a picture somewhere.  I shook hands with Kris.  We got the twins detached from my legs and sat down at the table.

I asked Kris, “So what do you do over at the research station?”

“I’m a geneticist working with adapting Earth animals to local conditions.”

“Really?  Do you work with the clinic then?”

“Huh?  Why would I have anything to do with them?”

I gave Sandy a look.  She turned red with embarrassment.  Kris looked at her and back at me asking, “What am I missing here?”

I said, “I take it that Sandy hasn’t told you any details about what we do in our clinics, then?  I will leave that to her.  Next subject.”

We talked for a few hours about trivial things.  Freya kept the twins entertained.  Nora showed up just as we were heading back to the hotel after saying good night to Sandy and Kris.  We all collapsed in a huge pile in my suite.

The next day everyone hung out while I decided to have some fun.  With Tami in tow, of course, I headed over to the far side of town.  I hopped onto one of the transports to the mines.  Poor Tami, she was hit on constantly, by both male and female miners.  While I am sure it was flattering, it got annoying quickly.  There were two of them that ended up crashing on the ground as they tried to crop feels and Tami twisted out of the way.  Sitting next to her, I was invisible.

Soon we reached the mines.  All open pit.  On Earth, special environmental procedures had to be followed to restore the land, but here there was no “wilderness” to preserve, so it was like a 20^th century mine.  The ore processing was modern, high energy beams heated the crushed material and then separated the molten metals directly, or in the case of several of the metals such as Lead or Zinc, captured it as it vaporized.  I felt like a kid, talking truck drivers into letting me ride out with them to get loads, running a shovel for a bit, things like that.  All the foreman could do is clench his teeth and watch me, since Malloy Industries owned 40% of the mine.  I was quite happy with his attitude, it meant that he actually cared about production.  I kept track of all the guys (and gals) that I pestered that day, and paid them and the foreman a bonus for their aggravation.  Tami was a bit flustered because a lot of things there wasn’t room for two, so she spent a lot of time watching from the main platform as I played in the dirt.

We rode back with the miners at the end of first shift.  They were a little less frisky with Tami after a day of digging, but still hit on her constantly.  The mood was different, so she just grinned and fended them off.

Back in town we headed back toward the hotel.  A block from the drop-off, an emaciated guy stepped from an alley, held up an old knife and growled, “Gimme your money.”

Tami and I glanced at each other and said simultaneously, “You have got to be kidding!”

He waved the knife from me to Tami and back, shouting, “I said, Gimme your money.  All your chits.”

Tami said, “I don’t think so.  Enough of this.”  In the blink of an eye the guy was down moaning. 

Thirty seconds later a Sherriff’s flier arrived, collected the guy, and took our statements.  The deputy nodded, said, “Have a nice day,” and left. 

Tami and glanced at each other again, bemused.  “That was strange,” she commented.  We discussed it as we continued on to the hotel.

When we mentioned it to Niyol, she said, “The guy was probably a ding addict.”

“Ding?”

“Yes, heroin mixed with cocaine mixed with hexachlorophene, which is applied transdermally.  Street name is Ding.  Nasty stuff.”

I asked, “Why doesn’t the government just search for poppy fields, should be easily identifiable from orbit since most of the planet is lichens and ferns?”

“Because New America has no vice laws.  The only laws here are about how behavior affects others, like assault, theft, and murder.”  That got us into a friendly debate over New America’s legal structure. Essentially it boiled down to a person could do anything they wanted to themselves, nobody cared unless they had dependants.  Niyol told me that the clinic habitually immunized people to drugs.  In fact, she sent Yas over to the Sherriff’s station to do an “exam” on the guy arrested.

Before bed, I took care of my girls, leaving them strewn about my room, dripping cum and drooling.  A bit messy.  I felt guilty about the mess, so I left a 100 credit tip on the dresser the next morning for the maid.

After a breakfast with the major of Duluth, we climbed back aboard Nora and headed back downstream to New Chicago.  That night I took care of about forty EBs at the New Chicago clinic.

Chapter 113

The next morning we were on the red eye shuttle up to the station, with Freya included.  We loaded up on Maryanne, then jumped back to Earth to reload.  The New Japan clinic reported that although the colony was growing rice, there wasn’t much.  So we filled the cargo hold with rice, dried seaweed, and fish.  Maryanne pulled herself away from the dock, and jumped to New Japan.  She called out to Sorano, “Hey Sorano!  How’s it going?”

“Konichiwa, Maryanne.  Nice to see you!  Welcome to Shinjuku Station.”  The Japanese welcomed automation and had no problems allowing the clinic run the station over New Japan.  She continued, “You are cleared for bay four.”

We docked and unloaded all the supplies.  Most of it was going down to the New Tokyo clinic.  I spent a few hours with Miyo and her EBs who were running Shinjuku Station.  After a meal, we loaded up the shuttle and took off for New Tokyo.

There weren’t any crops planted around the runway like on New America, it was all planted with grass and looked very pretty.  The terminal was identical, jetway and all.  Greeting me was Rin, the clinic AI and Yumi, Keiko’s sister.  Like on New America, a giant Valery style clinic had been built, just in case crops needed to be grown.  I didn’t know the status, so after hugs and kisses, Rin and Yumi filled me in.  Like the New Chicago clinic, it was all a park now, albeit a more Asian one.  We arrived on the elevated train, and I took a gander.  Like Keiko’s clinic, it looked like a mountain valley.  The park was forested with typical Asian trees; one end had what looked like a bamboo forest.  There were crops on one side and apartment complexes on the other. Like the New Chicago clinic, I was amazed at how Earthlike it was, 6400 lightyears from Earth.

As I stood there gawking, several official looking Japanese guys rushed up with big smiles and bowed, exclaiming, “Malloy-san!  Konbonwa!  Welcome to New Tokyo!”

I bowed back.  The one on the left exclaimed, “Your arrival is auspicious!  Tomorrow is November 3^rd!”

I was a bit puzzled, so I asked, “Excuse me, gentlemen, forgive my ignorance, but what is the significance of November 3^rd?”

“Oh, you have arrived just in time to receive several medals.  The ceremony and party will be enormous!”  All of them except the one speaking to me rushed off, to plan I guess.  I had to work to get the information out of him, but apparently I was getting the Green, Yellow, Blue, and Dark Blue medals of honor, plus several bars on each signifying multiple awards of each medal.  I saw Rin’s, Yumi’s and even Eliza’s eyes get big.  I guess it was a big deal.  Rin and Yumi’s eyes got even bigger when they heard that they were to receive both the Red and Yellow medals themselves.

After the last guy had flitted off, I asked Rin what she had done.  “I guess it is because the park here was planted with crops and supported much of the colony for the first few years before we got to plant crops outside.”  She sighed, “I guess it is my fault you got shanghaied for the medal ceremony, I talked too much when I was interviewed for a local newspaper, and they learned a lot about the clinics.  It was all public information, but I don’t think anyone has had such a complete picture before.”

“Don’t worry about it.  Similar thing happened on New America.  Talk to Sacajawea, there was a big celebration there too.  I am just happy that there is something to celebrate.”

Rin replied, “Aren’t we all.”  She brightened up, “I noticed that I was on the list.  That is a positive checkmark for AI rights in Japan.”  Japan recognized AIs, but as lower class citizens.  “I will be the first AI to receive a Medal of Honor in Japanese history.”

Just then, my ear-bug chirped with Eliza’s voice.  “Master, Margery has just discovered another young type M planet.”  Melody and Margery had resumed exploring.

I asked, “Any animal life?”

“No, sir.”

“This is wonderful.  Now I just have to decide between Australia and China.  Send Margery a thank you, please.”

“Yes, sir.”  She hung up.

I blinked up a call to Prime Minister Cabbot of Australia.  He and I had played golf a few times, so I knew him.  He popped up in my hud, “Hey Tom, what’s up?  You want to schedule a rematch?”

“Not right now Frank, I am actually on New Japan at the moment.  Can we go off the record for a few minutes?”

I grinned as I saw him realize that I was calling over 6000 lightyears to talk to him, the shocked look was precious.  Then my request hit him and he went professional.  I saw his eyes flick as he did something with his ear-bug, then he said, “Recording off.”

I said, “I have a situation.  How good is your economy, do you need a boost?”

“We could always use a boost, but we are pretty stable right now.  Why?  What’s up?”

“We have a planet, and although I would like to give it to you, China is unstable and needs it.  If I give you the next one, and give you full support, is that workable?”

“You don’t pull any punches, do you?  My instinct is to jump at this.  I don’t know how close your ear is to the ground, but the instability of the United States has really destabilized the Chinese government.  It is getting very imperialistic and is giving signs of wanting to annex much of Asia.  I am not too happy about that, to be sure.  Providing them with a new outlet is a wonderful idea.”

“That sure is a load off my mind.  Thank you Frank.”

“No, thank you, Tom.  Good luck with the Chinese.” Big grin.  Click.

I sighed, “Okay, third phone call.”  I didn’t have the number, but Eliza quickly data mined it.  I was quickly connected to Li Zhâo, General Secretary of the Central Committee.

“Hello, Mr. Malloy.  What can I do for you?”  He didn’t look or sound very friendly.  I think the debacle a few years back with JenLi Tang had soured him a bit on me.

“Hello, Mr. Secretary.  I will come straight to the point.  We have a planet for you, if you are interested.”

“What?  Are you serious?”  His eyes were twice as big as normal.

“Very.  Just discovered.  Is China interested?”

“Yes!”

“Then I will have my people contact your people on how to register the planet and transportation details.  I am forwarding a data packet to you.”  There was a bunch of pictures taken from orbit and from the landing site.  I forwarded them along with a data file with coordinates, planetary details such as tilt, gravity, day and year length and the like, and the discoverer.  The planet was 11,000 lightyears to the galactic North West.

The next day they registered the planet as a colony.  “New China”.  Very original.  Li Zhâo made a big speech about China’s future.  He didn’t even mention that the planet was a gift from me.  I rolled my eyes as I scanned the news on my way to the ceremony at a new park in New Tokyo.

There were rows and rows of old guys with metals and beanies.  I wondered where they got all the old people on a new colony.  I know that a person had to prove that they wouldn’t be a burden on the colony in order to get a place there.  So why all the old men?  They must have brought whole families.  No wonder they were close to starvation on New Japan!  I rolled my eyes again.

I sat there with all the VIPs and waited.  Three hours of speeches, then they finally got to the awards.  Rin and Yumi went first.  With a lot of bowing they got their medals.  Then I was up.  I was given medal after medal, and they kept reading, even after I got them all.  I suppose it was for all the additional citations.  I stood there, looking stupid, for another 45 minutes. I was finally able to sit down.

At the reception after the ceremony we all relaxed, except for Tami, Zoa, and Freya.  Tami and Zoa were both the ultimate Anime, and were swarmed.  Freya was also swarmed as talking dogs were another Anime stereotype.  It got so bad that I scheduled us to depart in the morning.

As we jumped back to Earth, I noticed Freya had the glowing look of a hud over her eyes and wasn’t paying much attention to anything else.  I asked, “Hey Freya, what is so fascinating?”

“Oh!  I am reading you guys’ history.  After all that yesterday, I figured that I had better do some research.  Did you really find my mom in a log on a camping trip in Montana?”

“Yes.  Your grandma had just been mauled by a bear while distracting it from your mom and your aunt Athena.  My girls went all girlie on them, and the rest is history.”

“I wonder what she was doing, giving birth out in the middle of the woods.  I mean, we are dogs, not wolves.”

“Yes, and we checked, they are thoroughbred German Shepherds, and I can see your dad was too.”

“Except that you enhanced my mom a bit,” she said a bit sardonically.

“Just a little.” I grinned.

“Thanks for that, but what the hell happened with me?  I am still a puppy at 9½!”

“I think the life extension enhancement did that.  I notice that you are about as physically mature as a human your age.  I don’t know why it didn’t hit your mom like that, but I think it is all for the better.  She was forced to grow up too fast.  Most dogs don’t get long to be kids before they have to be grownups.”

“Master, I know you are busy, but will you go with me to help me find out where my mom came from?”

That sounded like fun, I hadn’t done anything like that for a very long time.  “Sure, but have you checked the dog DNA registry to see if you have any relatives?”

“Good idea!”  The hud snapped down in front of her eyes again. 

I got up and went over to Eliza, who handled a lot of my scheduling.  “Eliza, is my RV still around?”

“I think so.  It will need some work, Emily has moved on to bigger and better things, and I think it was abandoned in the estate garage.”

“Oh!  What has she been up to?”

“I think she is helping out at the Nanook clinic in Argus, Antarctica.”

“Well, ask her if she is willing to take a trip down memory lane with us.  Also, ask Ester to update her pet project.  I feel like visiting the northwest US again.  Plus Freya wants to find relatives.”

“Sounds like fun.  Also, Tami, tell him.”  She looked over at Tami.

“Master, I found some relatives.”  Hmmm, ‘Master’ eh?  She must be serious about this.

“Really?  How?”

“I have never met them, but I have matrilineal relatives that live in Minneapolis.”

“I thought Ester and Alicia had searched for your relatives over 200 years ago?”

“Yeah, and we didn’t find them.  These turned up via DNA registry just before Daniels took over, and I haven’t had time to deal with it yet.”

“Well, I guess we have another stop to make on our trip then, don’t we?”

Chapter 114

It took close to six months to get the RV back into shape.  Emily thought it would be fun to go on a trip with us again.  She hadn’t been self aware the last time, but the memories were all there.  A week before we were to go, she downloaded herself into the RV computer.  It was considerably upgraded in the 80 years since she had last been there.  It was funny, the RV looked the same, but there had been a lot of changes since the last time I used it a hundred years before to cross Europe, much more since I had taken my first RV trip 247 years ago to a forest fire.

Ester had been having fun supervising the retrofit, so she had been up at the old estate.  I snuck up behind her, sliding my hard cock across her beautiful ass as I wrapped my arms around her.  Pulling her to me, I whispered in her ear, “Ready for number eleven?”  She had well over thirty children, but ten of them had been conceived next to the RV as she retrofitted it.

She gasped, “Oh, Yes!” as I bent her over against the side of the RV, as tradition dictated.  Six of her daughters, who had been the result of the traditional RV fuck, peeked around corners with grins as Ester shrieked in delight and passed out as I filled her wonderful quim with baby makers.  I grinned back at them as Tami traditionally licked me clean, and then went on with my tour.

Angie and Erin were still busy rebuilding the clinic, so they opted out of going.  So I ended up with Natalie, Tami, Sara, Freya, Eliza, and Betty.  I kept the entourage down this time, it was getting too big.  I even talked Ester out of sending the chase RV along with us, although I suspected it was following 50 km back or so.  Betty came because she had first met us on the trip last time.  Betty had won the bet, she had her eleven best sellers and her three Pulitzers in fewer than fifty years, easily beating the challenge we had given her.  She was actually now up for her seventh for her work as an underground reporter against Daniels.  Amanda and Mandy were way too busy to take time off.  Sara I told to take the time, she had been left out too much recently.

We left the estate with the usual fifty EBs waving us off.  It was sad, but that was almost the whole compliment from the estate.  Most EBs now lived on the island in Panama.  Malloton was gone, disassembled and shipped out.  The school was vacant.  We had a dumb AI as caretaker for most of the remaining empty infrastructure.  We had done a recruitment drive through our old town and got over a 500 new EB recruits from the time we were gone.  We shipped them down to the island for training.  We did the same thing with Aspen and several of the other clinics.  We got over ten thousand EBs in only five years absence.

We drove north.  Technically my driver’s license had expired over a century ago, but I drove anyway.  One depressing thing Ester had told me was that my car, although still fully restored, was not street legal anymore.  When we hit I-94 we let Emily drive.  She was chomping at the bit; she hadn’t been on the road since Europe.  Once on the interstate, it only took an hour to reach the Twin Cities. 

Tami had called ahead, and we met her relatives at a diner in St. Paul.  It took some maneuvering to get the RV into the parking lot, but Emily managed.  We stepped out of the RV and raised our eyebrows, there was no doubt that the people waiting were Tami’s relatives, they all looked like her.  They and Tami stared at each other for a minute, then the woman, who was about 45 and her two twin daughters who were around 20, squealed at the same time as Tami, rushed over and the all gave each other big hugs.  The older woman grinned and commented, “Well, I see that the genes have been passed down!  I am amazed that we are so similar.  What are we, tenth cousins?”

Tami said, “I am not sure of the relationship, I ran away from home when I was a little girl, and don’t know much of the family history before that.”

She said, “My great-grandmother was a genealogy nut.  I haven’t had the chance to go through everything since you called, but I am sure your grandmother or someone is in it.”

Tami smiled, “I will probably be in it, or my mother at least.  I have been rejuved.”

One of the girls said, “Talking?  How old are you?  I thought you were younger than us.”

Tami really smiled and said, “Guess.”

The older lady said, “40?”

The other twin looked thoughtfully at Tami and said, “More like 140.  Look at the clothes and hair style.”

Tami said, “Try 255 as of a week ago.”  All of their eyes bugged out.  “I guess we should get introductions out of the way.”  She gestured at herself and said, “My name is Tami Wells.  These are my friends Tom, Natalie, Sara, Eliza, Emily and Betty.”  She rubbed Freya’s ears, “And this is Freya.”

The older lady blinked and said, “I’m Zara Yates, and these are my daughters, Ingrid and Sigrid.”  She blinked, “Did you say 255?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly Sigrid exclaimed, “Holy crap!  You are THE Tami Wells!  My friends have always said I looked like you!”  She looked at the rest of us, her eyes bugging out again, “And you are Tim Malloy, Natalie Starr and Eliza Malloy!  I repeat, Holy Crap!”  Zara’s and Ingrid’s eyes bugged out again too.

It took a few minutes to calm them down.  We finally got them into the diner and seated.  I slipped a C note to the manager to allow Freya, who jumped up on a chair and sat there like the rest of us.

Zara blinked over a copy of the family tree.  Tami’s mother was there, but Tami wasn’t even mentioned.  Apparently her mother had another daughter from her third husband after Tami left.  That was who Zara was descended from.  Tami said, “Good.  Her second husband was a real piece of work.”

Zara looked puzzled, “Piece of Work?”

“It means, he was a real bastard.”

“Oh.  Never heard it put like that before.”

Tami grinned, “Probably the first time I have used that expression in 200 years.”  Zara nodded.

Sigrid said, “Aunt Tami, I know you are big into martial arts, anything else we should know about?”

“Well, I have twelve daughters and 67 grandkids.”

“Damn... and I thought we were the last of our family.  I guess not.”

Tami mentioned back to Sigrid, “I see that you do some martial arts yourself.”

“Yeah, I got into it because everyone said I looked like you.  Turns out to be kinda fun.”  She laughed, “I guess there is a reason I liked it.”

“You looking to do it as a career?”

“I am debating between that and modeling with my sister here.”

Tami looked over at Ingrid, “So you are a model?  What kind?”

“I have been doing lingerie and some bikini.  I am too introverted to be really good, actually Sigrid here is a better model, and we are identical.  I am thinking of going into Design and/or Advertising.”

She turned to Zara and asked, “And what do you do?”

“Up ‘til a month ago I was an executive assistant for the president of AgriSeeds.  But when it went bankrupt, everyone was laid off.  I can’t really blame them, they spent every penny keeping everyone employed while Daniels messed everything up.  Unfortunately, everyone is in the same predicament, so I haven’t found a job yet.”

“Are you willing to relocate?”

Zara gave her a head tilt and said, “Sure.”

“Call this number,” she transferred Alicia’s number over, “and ask for Alicia.  Tell her of your relationship to me.  She will take care of everything.”

“Talking?”

“Yes.”

The waitress got tired of waiting and came over at that point to take our orders.  Freya caused a small uproar when she ordered her own dinner.  We talked for a while, ate what was brought and went outside.

After a goodbye hug, Zara said, “Call Alicia, just like that?”

“Yup.  I will call her as we leave here and get it all sorted out.”

“Okay.  I am desperate enough, I will call her tonight.”

They all hugged, we climbed back into the RV and took off.  Tami blinked up a call to Alicia and filled her in. Places for all three of them.

Chapter 115

After stopping for a few hours at the Minneapolis Clinic, which was an old style clinic just north of the River in St. Anthony, we pulled into a rest area north of Minneapolis, near St. Cloud, for the night.  As we sat down for an evening movie, Freya filled us in.  “Apparently I have several relatives in the area near where Mom was found.”  She sighed out loud, which was separate from the voder.  “Of course there won’t be any family history outside of the human families.  One place actually breeds German Shepherds, so I would like to try there first.  Places like that often keep pedigrees for their breeding animals.”

I said, “That sounds like a good plan.  Emily, you know where this place is?”

She was still running her Avatar, so she leaned forward and said, “Sure do.  Freya, have you taken a look at this place?  Their website is a bit scary.”

“Yeah, I know.  We’ll just have to see.”

We watched one of the new movies from Starr Studios.  It was pretty good.  A romantic drama about a couple separated by being on two different colonies.

The next morning I woke up halfway across North Dakota just as we were coming up on the Minot Clinic.  After lunch with my girls there, Emily drove on into Montana.  From there we followed the same route up into Glacier National Park, where, sadly, there were no glaciers left.  For fun, we got the exact same site as last time and reserved the spot next to us since there wasn’t a chase RV. 

I led Freya into the woods and pointed out the spot where her mom was found in a log.  The breeding farm, Sun Glacier Kennels, was 10 miles north of the lake on “Going to the Sun” Highway.  The probability of that being where Freya’s grandmother came from was pretty high.  Freya looked over the cliff at Lake McDonald and said, “This place is beautiful.  So many scents!  I can smell a large musky animal that was here a day ago.  Do you think that is a bear?  I have never smelled a bear before!”

“It probably is.  Since all bears are tracked these days, why don’t you check the park website and see?”

The hud clouded her face for a minute, “Yes, it shows that a bear passed through here last night.  I wonder if it is related to the one that killed my grandma?”

“I am sure it is.  Going back that far I would bet all the local bears are related.  The one that was here before has been dead for well over a century though.”

She gave me a doggie grin and said, “Well, I guess revenge is pointless then, eh?”

The next morning we drove over to Sun Glacier Kennels.  At some point, a long time ago, it must have been a pretty nice place.  Now it had dead vehicles all over the place, the small field in back hadn’t had a crop in ages, the house and kennel building were falling down, and the redneck sitting on the porch didn’t liven the place up any.

As we pulled up, the guy on the porch got up and sauntered over.  We stepped out and he asked, “You lookin’ for a puppy?”  Freya stepped out and he asked, “Or you need a dog to breed your bitch?”

Freya didn’t say anything.  She often was silent, not wanting to scare people, but I think she was just disgusted this time.  I said, “Freya here is descended from a dog that I got long ago.  We traced the DNA back to here.  We are looking to verify the pedigree.”

“That paperwork can be expensive.  I will go take a look.”  He went into the house, Tami, Freya and I followed.  I waved Eliza to follow as well, I had a feeling that we would need her computer and correlating abilities.  I was right.  The computer inside was close to 200 years old.  I was amazed that it still worked, that computer was worth more than the entire farm.  He went over, sat down, and used a keyboard to log in.  “Do you know what the dogs name was?”

“No.  She was dead when we found her, and there were two puppies.  That was in the summer of 2127.”

He started flipping around on the screen.  Eliza rolled her eyes and said, “May I try?”  He nodded.  She froze for a second saying, “Downloading a clone...done.”  She hesitated for a second, then said, “Based on these records, I would say that the dog we found was Quintette.  She ran away in spring of 2127 and her previous offspring, who still have descendants here, match genetically.”

The guy, who was looking at Eliza strangely, suddenly exclaimed, “Quintette?  My grandpa used to complain about her disappearance all the time.  She was a purebred and had won several dog shows.  Her puppies were worth tens of thousands each.  You say that your family found her?”

“Yes.  She was dead, mauled by a bear.  Her two puppies were still alive though.”

“Wow.  Any descendants?  I would sure like to breed them back into the line.”

Freya spoke up, “Sorry, not interested.”  The guy literally fell out of his chair.  Freya turned and walked to the door.  “Let’s go see my cousins.”  She was half way to the kennels by the time the guy had scrambled to his feet and run after her.  The rest of us following a bit more sedately.

He exclaimed, “You can talk!  How?”

“If you must know, I have a voder in my collar that I can control by thought.”  She reached the kennels and stepped inside.  We all followed.  The place was abysmal, no heating for the winter, small cramped mesh cages, a few of the dogs appeared to have untreated sores.  There were a few puppies that were next to another cage with their mother, pressing against the mesh to be next to her.  Freya looked around and said, “Disgusting.”  She looked at the guy angrily and said, “One million dollars to buy the farm, dogs included.”

He blinked at her and exclaimed, “Sold!”

Freya said, “Come with me.”  She led him to the RV, where we all climbed in, Emily drove us to West Glacier, the nearest town, went into the courthouse and, having him sign and fingerprint the deed and contract, literally bought the farm.  We took him back to his house, where Freya told him, “You may take as long as you want to move out, but we are taking the dogs today.”

She called on her ear-bug, “Hey Ester.  Plan B.  Two hours?  Thank you.”  She told me, “Two EMRVs with EBs are on the way to remove these poor animals.  Master, the older dogs are probably too old, but can you enhance the puppies?  Mom and Aunt Athena thought this might happen and gave me the funds to buy the kennels.”

“Of course.  Ester planning on training the rest for security?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Sara and I went into the kennels, moving the puppies so they were with their mom, fully enhancing them in the process.  There were a few younger shepherds that we also fully enhanced.  The rest we did partial enhancements, increasing the intelligence slightly, adding the domestication loyalty to me, doing a full physical enhancement, and putting the full enhancement into their genes for their future kids.  Of course, we also fixed all the open sores and the like.  As Sara and I worked, I asked Eliza, “You have a set of voder collars ready for them?”

“Yes, there should be a couple of dozen on the shelf down in Malloton.”

As Sara and I were finishing up, the EMRVs pulled in.  Out swarmed a dozen EBs who immediately ran to the dogs who were in a group outside the kennels.  Freya commented, “When Ester and I planned this, we picked all the dog loving EBs.”  The shepherds were all loaded onto the EMRVs and were on their way in ten minutes, flat.  There was a plane waiting in Whitefish to take all of them to the island.  Eliza already had the cloned database with all the pedigrees and immunization history, which she uploaded to the mainframe in Malloton, so we just got back on the RV and left.

As we headed back south by Lake McDonald, I said, “Well, that takes care of the two planned objectives of this trip.  We have a week left, anyone want to head out to Portland, then south to San Francisco?”

Everyone agreed that it sounded like a plan.

We stopped in Spokane, where I saw that an entire wall of the clinic was missing.  I asked what was going on to the EB greeting us.  “Oh, one of the occupiers thought that he wanted a better view of the city.  He had that wall knocked out.  Good thing the clinic was so well built; it withstood the efforts and didn’t collapse.  The wall was load bearing, but there were backup load bearing cross beams that compensated.  We are now rebuilding it.”  I rolled my eyes and moved on.  They all remembered Athena and Hera, and were happy to see Freya.  We had a small party and I left a dozen happy EBs as we left a few hours later.

We drove, well, Emily drove down I90 to I82 into Kennewick, stopping twice for us to ooh and ahh at the view.  A quick stop at the minute clinic there, and we were soon on I84 heading west to Portland.  The drive along the Columbia River was beautiful.  We slowed down so we reached the East Portland clinic by late evening.  Waiting for us was a band with Georgina, Tina and Barb.  That was a surprise, I hadn’t seen them since my 200^th birthday party.  Inger ran the clinic, her sister and friend Penelope ran the other clinic across town.  They were both waiting outside the RV to greet me.  Both of them sobbed on my shoulders.  Penelope gasped out, “Master!  It has been so long!”  I hadn’t seen them since my last visit nearly a hundred years ago.

I said, “Well, stop running your clinics so well then!  There has been no official reason to stop here!  And you could come visit me in Malloton, you know.”

They both sheepishly looked down, Inger said, “We have been so busy that we haven’t even thought about it.  The only time we have been away since we last saw you was when Daniels caused all the problems.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “You know, I brought this up with Valerie two centuries ago.  Get a sister to fill in and take a fucking vacation!  Damn it girls, I don’t expect you to work without a break for over a century!”  They stood there looking down, Penelope rubbing her toe back and forth.  I rolled my eyes again and wrapped each girl in a half hug and pulled them into the clinic.  I looked over at my entourage and said, “Eliza, tell Alicia that we need a couple of sisters to fill in.  These two are going on vacation.”

“Yes, sir!”

We left the next morning with the two of them with us in the RV.  Their daughters had talked with Alicia and were filling in at their clinics.  Both Penelope and Inger were so high strung that I hugged each of them and reduced the high level of neural stimulants.  They were both asleep a minute later.  They slept all the way to San Francisco; even sleeping though our three hour stop in Sacramento and several hours in Napa.

We stopped in Napa so I could pick up some wine.  I had a wine cellar that had been carefully moved with Malloton, with vintages going back to the 20^th century, plus a few from even the 19^th century.  Some bottles were worth close to a billion dollars.  I was not a big wine drinker, but it was fun to collect.  I tasted some varieties of 2261, the current vintage, and picked up a few cases to add to my collection.

We reached the Golden Gate clinic (there were three clinics in the San Francisco area, plus three others in Berkeley, Livermore and San Jose) at sunset, where I carried Penelope and Inger inside and put them to bed.  Their state of mental exhaustion kept them out like a light, and I wanted them to sleep it off.

The Golden Gate clinic was built along the back (south) of the Presidio, a half-Valerie style built up the side of and deep into a hill.  It had been easy to build; there had been a hidden military bunker there that we renovated.  Because of that, it was one of the largest clinics, even though there wasn’t much on the surface.  There was even the large atrium that had been at one time a giant underground hanger.  On the surface above it was the Presidio golf course.  There were large tunnels that led to hidden submarine bays that had been still in use when we retrofitted the place.  We built large metal doors and locked them from our side.  We had no idea what the Navy had done on their end.  The doors had been sealed for close to two hundred years.  There was an Admiral Nancy Malloy in the Navy, a friendly rival of General Farrah Malloy in the Army (some of the Army-Navy games got a bit exciting); I supposed I could ask her what the story was since there were only two submarines left in the U.S. fleet.  I was betting that the secret sub base had been decommissioned long ago.

For fun, the next morning I walked out the front doors of the clinic and turned east.  Fisherman’s Wharf Historical District had been restored just previous to Daniels’ takeover, and so was going strong.  I wandered along, with Tami, Natalie, and Freya in tow, stopping to get a bag of saltwater taffy, buying Fisherman’s Wharf T-Shirts, eating lunch at a café that was made to look old, went through the WWII submarine (Freya was upset that she couldn’t get down the ladders), hopped on a streetcar and rode that up the hill to the streetcar museum, essentially played tourist for the day.  A little nookie with Tami and Natalie in the park off Stockton Street in Chinatown was pretty fun too.

I wanted to take the subway to the clinic in Sausalito, but there had been a recent accident where a dredging crew had broken though the subway under the bay.  So I hailed a taxi and we took it to the Sausalito clinic, paying an extra C note to allow Freya in the cab.  It was a standard Valerie style clinic, but I hadn’t seen Abby, who ran the clinic, nor Maria, Aimee, or Gia, some of my original EBs, in a very long time.  We spent a few pleasurable hours getting reacquainted.  I had one of the other EBs from the clinic drive Tami, Natalie, Freya and me back to the Golden Gate clinic as it started to get dark.  San Francisco was so lit up it didn’t make much difference.  A lot of light pollution there!

The next day we headed south along the coast.  We drove down Hwy 1 through Santa Cruz and around Monterey Bay.  We stopped at a Pistachio stand.  I couldn’t believe it, there were still migrant workers out in the fields!  I suppose with the current laws that they were legal, but it would be very simple to program a harvester to pick things.  I knew that it would make these workers lose their jobs, but I was astounded that they still worked as they did in the 23^rd century!  I asked the lady at the Pistachio stand.  She said, “Oh, they are there because the pay is so good.  Rich people pay double the price for things hand-picked.  We all think it is silly, but if people want to pay for it...”  She laughed and we joined in.  She went on, “A lot of people do it just to get the feel of what their people went through hundreds of years ago.  I know a lot of high school kids do it on weekends.”

We drove on down, stopping at Disneyland in Las Angeles.  We checked into the hotel, then went over to the park in the morning.  The park was split between Disney California on the right and Disneyland on the left.  Except for basic safety upgrades Disneyland was nowadays a historical site.  We went in and enjoyed the old style settings, several of us remembering when that was normal.  Freya got in by saying and cheery, “Hello!” and surprising the people at the gate.  The manager decided that Freya could go in, but told her that for safety reasons, she couldn’t go on the rides.  None of us were big ride people anyway.  We did the lunch on the paddleboat, which is the only “ride” that she went on.  A lot of little kids squealed, “Puppy!” and ran over to give her hugs.  They really squealed in delight when they found out she could talk to them.  In the center square she gathered a large crowd who were listening to her tell stories of growing up on New America, space travel, New Japan, and crossing America in an RV.  Park security came by to break up the crowd and ended up joining them, leaning on a tree and listening.  Mickey, Goofy, Cinderella, Mulan and a couple of other Disney characters sat down with the kids to listen.  I sat on a bench and listened myself.  Freya was a good storyteller, and although she took a little artistic license, it was all the truth.  Freya finally broke it up, realizing that the crowd was getting too big and causing problems.

After watching the parade and fireworks, we went back to the hotel.  After entering the room, Natalie exclaimed, “That was wonderful!  A whole day and nobody recognized me!  Thank you Freya!”

Betty said, “Yes Freya, you have a real gift for storytelling.  Will you let me edit your autobiography?”

Freya tilted her head and said, “Sure!  Sounds like fun!  And you are welcome Natalie.”

The next day I had a pair of EBs drive the RV back to the old estate while the rest of us flew down to Malloton.  As we got out of the plane, a row of German Shepherds were lined up, with Athena in front like a drill sergeant.  I hadn’t seen Athena since my last visit to Selena nearly fifty years ago.  I was going to go over and give her a hug, and so was Freya, but we saw a tiny head shake from her which we both interpreted to say, “wait until later”.  Instead, I said, “Hello Athena.  I see you have some troops here.”

“Yes, sir.”  She turned to them, “Greet the Master.”

All the voders simultaneously said, “Hello, Master.”  I was surprised, normally it took longer than a week to learn to use the voder, and also half the dogs were only slightly enhanced so it must have been extra hard for them.  Athena had worked a miracle.  She said to me, “Master, please inspect the troops.”

I started at one end, letting the German Shepherd there sniff my hand, and as his tail started wagging I scratched his ears.  I went down the whole row doing the same.  All tails were wagging.  Freya went behind me, sniffing noses.  Athena nodded in satisfaction then said, “Troops dismissed!  Why don’t you all go get a treat?”

They all jumped to their feet and most of them took off for the kitchen, a few voders excitedly exclaiming, “Food!”  A few stayed back, mostly the young ones with full intelligence.  Freya and Athena sniffed noses and Freya said, “Aunt Athena!  Nice to finally meet you!  Good job with the relatives.”

I said, “Yeah Athena, I can’t believe that you did that level of training in only a week.  I am impressed.”  Her tail was going a mile a minute. “By the way, what are you doing here?  I thought you were still in Selena.”

“Yeah, when Ester and Freya discussed their idea with my sister and me, I decided it was time to visit Earth again for a while.  I figured they would need me, and I was right.”  She looked smug.

I went down on a knee and gave her a big hug.  “It is so nice to see you!”  She lifted a paw and hugged me back.  Then everyone took turns giving her a hug, especially Natalie, who was very close to her and had gone to visit her in Selena several times.

We followed the shepherds to the large communal kitchen at the center of Malloton.  Athena was talking about how she was training her relatives as EBs to work primarily in security.  She mentioned that several of them had wanted to go into show business after talking to some of the kids of the people over at Starr Studios.  She said, “I don’t know how they communicate, their vocabulary isn’t all that great, but somehow they can talk to the kids.”  As we entered the plaza she added, “Just look at ‘em!”

Half the shepherds were rolling around with kids having fun.  The other half just sat there in a group watching with doggie grins.  Occasionally some toddler would run over, hug one of them, and that dog would go play with the kid.  Athena commented, “I remember you telling me once how you had tied in the domestication gene with your gestalt, I think a combination of being free and being with everyone here makes them all feel like this is their pack.”

She added, “By the way, Hera is on her way.  She feels that this is more important for now than ‘exploring’.  Freya’s siblings except for Thor are coming with her.”

I had another surprise when I got back to my quarters, the trainee EB that was waiting with Yaitza as a coach was Zara, Tami’s grandniece!  Tami was just as surprised.  Tami blinked up Alicia on her ear-bug, including me in the link.  Alicia came on with a “Hi Tami!”

“Hey Alicia.  Quick question, why is Zara now an EB?”

“Huh?  I thought that is what you wanted.”

“I just wanted to hire her.”

“Oops?  When she called, she said that she wanted to join us down here, and I thought that meant joining the next EB class.  She and her daughters were inducted three days ago.”

Tami looked a little disappointed.  “Okay, well, nothing we can do about it now.  Thanks.”  She disconnected.

I commented, “You know, now that she is rejuved, her resemblance to you is uncanny.  If you weren’t standing next to me, I would think that was you.  At least until I watched her for a minute or two.  Your body language is a bit different.”

“Yeah, I would know her for a relation even without a DNA check.”

“I wonder just how close she is?”  I went over and put my hand on her shoulder.  Reading her DNA, she was very similar to Tami, especially with the EB enhancements.  The DNA wasn’t as perfect, and was missing part of the extra oomph that made Tami so good at the martial arts, but I was amazed at how undiluted it was.  I would have guessed she was only one generation removed, not five.  Every single generation must have somehow selected the genes from Tami’s side of the family.  I asked Yaitza to call in Zara’s daughters.  After checking them too, I immediately called Ester.

“Hi Master!”

“Ester, I just checked the DNA of Tami’s grandnieces.”

“Yeah?  What’s up?”

“Start a search for their father.  The girls have the same adaptation as Tami.”

“Holy Shit! Really? Immediately.”  She clicked off.

Tami looked at me in amazement, “Master, are you serious?”

“Yes.  Immediately after initial training, I want to you take them in hand.  They are almost genetically identical to you, closer than even your daughters, as close as sisters.  Their father must be related to your father.  Somehow that combination of genes must produce a woman as fantastic as you.  No wonder Sigrid loves the dojo.”

Tami smiled at the complement and said, “Too bad Zara is incommunicado for the next few months, it would be very interesting to ask her about her ex.”

“Yeah it would, but most of the info should be on the girls’ intake forms.  I am sure Ester is pouring over them right now.”

At that moment, my ear-bug chirped with a call from Ester.  “Yeah Ester, what did you find?”

“Unfortunately, Zara is a widow.  Martin Yates was shot by a Daniels goon five years ago while defending a group of kids.  He was an orphan with no siblings.  I am trying to find family information on him.  Call you back when I find something.”  Click.

Chapter 116

Tami’s grandnieces, like Tami herself, took to EB training and martial arts like a dolphin to water.  Their mother, Zara, didn’t have the martial arts skills, but she was a great EB.  I took the three of them plus Tami one night and partied until dawn.  They all looked so much alike, it was like having quadruplets.  They proved to be as fertile as Tami too; all four of them got pregnant that night.

Athena and Hera happily trained all their relatives to become mainly supplement to security.  Several of them worked full time with security, but most of them went on to other jobs and did security on the side.  As Athena had predicted, many of them went to work at Starr Studios.  I wasn’t really sure what they did over there, but I did notice that many movies had pet German Shepherds in them.  Several went into space, I know that two ended up on Mars, one male went with Athena back to Selena, and a few went to Carreth Station.  Hara went back to New America, leaving all but one of Freya’s siblings behind, but taking an adult male with her, Freya’s father having died of old age several years back.  The rest of the shepherds rode fairly often up and down on shuttles to Ripley; I think they just found that to be fun.  I agreed with them, it was fun; I made several trips up to Ripley myself.

The Chinese were really possessive about New China, completely refusing a clinic, even though we had two in China itself.  They leased a starship, the Cheng Ho, which had a dumb-AI as the ship’s computer.  Eliza carefully programmed it so that the ship would go from Earth to New China, and nowhere else.  The dumb-AI was programmed so that it could not be hijacked, the core was read only, and any attempt to reprogram it would destroy it, stopping the ship dead in space.  The drive was similarly sealed, as it was on all leased ships.  We also surreptishishly placed an automated monitoring station on one of the three moons of New China, just to keep an eye on things.  It felt a bit big brotherish, but I had a feeling.

Over the next decade, we discovered twenty three more habitable planets, seventeen of which were colonizable, not having native animal life.  I awarded them to Australia, England, Sweden, France, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, Philippines, India, Holland, Italy, Russia and several others.  Every single country except for South Africa named their planet “New” something or other.  South Africa named it Jacomina, after their beloved president.  I was visiting the Johannesburg clinic, and Jacomina was stopping by as well, when, after an amazing blow job and very steamy lovemaking, she hugged her super hot bod down on my chest and told me that it was embarrassing to have a whole planet named after her.  I hugged her and said, “Jaco, being the only president in history of any country to be elected for 187 years, and the people are happy about that, you deserve it.  Now, shut up and soldier.”

“Yes, Master.”  She snuggled down on me, then commented, “Holy crap, it has been 187 years.  It never really hit me until you said that.”

I built only one clinic per planet, even I was wincing at the cost of building seventeen super-clinics on alien planets.  At close to three billion apiece, not counting the non-billable EB labor, things added up.  The leased freighters at ten billion apiece for all the planets added up even faster.  I wished I could charge the real cost to people for those ships, but I really wanted to promote things, so I stuck with the $50K a month.  That also allowed me to control the star drives and dumb AIs, with which I didn’t trust too many people outside of Malloy Enterprises, not because of competition, but because of security.  They were just too dangerous to let people have without controls.

Earth orbit was getting really crowded.  China had built their own station, but everyone else contracted to the Main station, Secunda, and Ripley for docking.  All three stations had expanded tremendously; the Main station was over 10 kilometers long.  Secunda was close at seven, and Ripley, not including the dry dock, was fifteen kilometers long.  All the stations grew their own food, only luxury items were shipped up from Earth. 

Carreth station had also grown to be even larger, over 15 kilometers long, all Carrethian plants, half crops with a few forests and a lake.  All the fish that had been stored were fresh water, so the geneticists only needed a fresh water lake.  It looked weird, the encircled the station to prevent things from being off balance.  Several bovine types cloned from steaks in food storage grazed in the cylinder.  A fur jacket provided the DNA for a rabbit type.  There was plenty of material to recreate Carrethian mice and rats.  A clipping from a dead pet allowed us to recreate Carrethian squirrels, which were apparently what they had as pets.  The station was getting rich, Carreth vegetables and meats were all the rage back on Earth.  A shipload of foodstuffs from Carreth traded for five from Earth.

Zarra and Betty had done an Ester and went paranoid on construction.  There were five shell layers on the station, alternating between flexible alloys and the hardest alloy known.  A meteor or terrorist would not easily break through that shell!  Heck, a ship could crash into it and not break it.

The biggest problem was the number of shuttles going up and down on Earth.  It was starting to create a pollution problem on Earth unmatched since the 20^th century.  We tried ion based shuttles, but overusing those caused atmosphere ionization problems which led to severe weather.  There were a lot of people working on the problem.

Of course, Aleem came up with a solution.  One day, he called me over to a large building he had built next to the launch rails.  I went over with a few of my girls who were interested in what he had come up with. He met me at the door, excitedly saying, “Hey, Tom!”

I replied, “Hey, Aleem.  What’s up?”

He just grinned and said, “It’s a surprise.”  He led me, Eliza, Tami, Natalie and Freya into the building.  All that was in there is what appeared to be a giant cargo elevator.  He hit the button and the doors slid open.  We all got in.  He flipped open a button cover and pressed a button labeled, “SS1”.  There were buttons labeled, “IS”, “SS2”, “SS3”, “MB1”, and several without labels.  A counter at the top of the panel counted from 10 down to zero.  Suddenly I could feel the gravity shift a bit, and the doors slid open.  Aleem gestured us out with a grin.  The room had a giant wall sized window, and in that window was Earth, from orbit.  We gaped as he grinned.  In a way similar to how ships jumped, he had created a teleport booth.

I gasped at the whole concept as I stared out the window.  “Aleem, this is unbelievable.”

He was grinning like there was no tomorrow as he replied, “It is actually conceptually simpler than the star drive.  Since both ends are predefined, the exact energy transfer needed is also predefined, and may be inserted into the translation.  It uses a lot of power, but much less than a shuttle.”

“What is the range?  Interplanetary or interstellar?”

“For now, interplanetary.  Maybe not even that.  The amount of power to get to even Mars is prohibitive.  Since the moon is in an orbit around Earth, that is the range we have.  We can theoretically go almost anywhere with enough energy, but that would take some work.”

I could see there would be problems; both in destroying the space tramp adventure, and in security.  I said, “Aleem, do not let anyone know that it can go any further, okay?  I see a lot of problems if people know that.”

“Yeah, I can see lots of problems too.”

“But your Space Elevator is amazing.  Several questions I have.  One, do the rest of the buttons work?  Two, how hard is a Space Elevator to build?  And three, is there any reason it can’t work cross-planet, say from the island to Tokyo?”

He looked stunned for a second.  “I never even thought about cross-planet.  There is no reason that shouldn’t work.”  He grinned up at me, “Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.”  He thought for a minute, “They are not that hard to build, but the giant capacitor banks are expensive, so I guess about 200 million per station on a network.  And yes, those buttons do work; we have built stations in the clinics on both international space stations and in Selena.”

“Then what we need to do is build a public version of the Elevator someplace neutral on Earth to both international space stations and Selena.  This network will be our private one, and we will NOT discuss it outside the family.  Make sense?”   They nodded.  “And think about security, we have to prevent anyone from analyzing how they work, someone could take a reading in the middle of New York, then translate a bomb into the middle of Central Park.”

“Damn, another thing I didn’t think of,” said Aleem, “although, thinking about it, it wouldn’t work since we need a vacuum at the destination.  The station on Earth pumps out the air before translating in the Elevator car.  Even then we get a lot of energy off the translation that we dump to the capacitor bank.  Anything translated without a station to absorb the energy would be instantly fried.”

“Good.  Now let’s all visit Lona.  I haven’t been there in a long time.”  I glanced up and said, “By the way, hello Ripley.”

“Hello, Master.  Nice to see you, if just for a few minutes.”

“Well, you will be getting a lot more visitors with Aleem’s new gadget.”

“Looking forward to it.  Later, Master.”

“Later, Ripley.”

As we loaded back into the Elevator, Aleem rolled his eyes and said, “Gadget?  Humph.”  He hit the “MB1” button.  After the countdown we felt the gravity drop off.  We wandered out of the Elevator which opened next to the loading docks.  I called out, “Hello, Lona!”

“Hello, Master.  Nice to see you, this is a surprise.”

“Yeah, like I told Ripley, this Elevator of Aleem’s will get you a lot more visitors.  Maybe a group of school kids or two.”

“Hey, I like that idea!”  She paused, “Everyone is coming running at breakneck speed.”

Just as she said that, Athena, Hayley and Penny, followed by fifty EBs, came rushing in.  They were all very surprised to see me, apparently Aleem had kept the Elevators secret from everyone except for the clinic AIs.  I spent a few hours making a lot of the EBs very happy, and then popped back to Earth.

Chapter 117

The Aleem-o-vator, as I jokingly called it, got built, in all places, on the Sandwich Islands in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.  It was easy access for everyone, although it was a bit far away for Japan.  China got all self-righteous again, especially since there was no Elevator station aboard their space station.  It was a chicken and the egg problem (although science has proved the egg was first).  The Chinese were acting belligerent because they didn’t have the technology, and because they were belligerent, I certainly wasn’t going to give it to them.

Over the years, there had been many attempts to insert an agent into my company.  Like Wendy, they were all caught.  Over the last few years, we had caught and retrained close to twenty Chinese agents.  I was also getting a lot of reports from Guo, the Beijing AI, and Min, the Shanghai AI, on mistreatment of my girls and missing shipments to the clinics.  The homeless and sick were being prevented from using the clinics as well. 

I made my decision; it was getting so hostile in China that I decided to close the two clinics there.  Before the Chinese government could react, I had all our medical personnel, EBs and my daughters evacuate via the hidden underground exits and on boats to Korea. The EMRVs drove to the semi‑independent Hong Kong with as much equipment as we could pack in them.  Guo and Min, the two clinic AIs, uploaded themselves to spare cores on Ripley and set self destructs on the clinic computer cores.  We left the empty buildings.  There had never been a training ground for EBs in China; they had all trained in Japan and Korea.  There had never been any minute clinics in China either, although the EMRVs had spent a lot of time in rural areas.

We never heard a word from the Chinese government.  They were becoming so isolationist that I think they were glad to get rid of us.  I left most of the Chinese EBs in Korea, there was a huge influx of Chinese immigrants/refugees and the Korean clinics needed the help.

I was sad that we had to close the clinics, and that all those people would go without care since most of our Chinese patients were those refused by the state medical system.  But my anger at the way we had been treated and my fear for my people far outweighed that.  I was very tempted to lodge a protest with the U.N., but forwent the pleasure for political expediency.  I had a long talk with Ester, and she told me that she had over a hundred agents in China, many of them high up moles.  I trusted Ester and was glad she was on top of it.  She said that the closing of the clinics made things difficult, but she had arranged safe houses for a lot of the agents.

Things were coming to a head in China, and I just hoped not many would get hurt when it boiled over.

We expanded our private Elevator to include many of the clinics, making sure there was one on each continent to start with.  We carefully put in self-destructs like the clinic computer cores; we had to make sure NOBODY got their hands on the technology.  We also installed self-destructs on all the public elevators.  Good thing we did.  Min, who had volunteered to be in charge of the public Elevator, reported a break in on Secunda’s public Elevator.  They had cut the primary connections, but we had four redundant backups.  She activated the self-destruct, which ignited a flash-bang, then a version of thermite burned through all the electronics, including all the coils, capacitor bank and the small cyclotron needed for pairing.  We had a second one we could do if the first failed; a large amount of plastic explosive was primed and set to go off if there were still intruders.

Min reported that there was a team of four.  Two were dead and two had extensive burns and were unconscious.  We contacted the station clinic and put them on alert, and then called the station administrator.  It was currently a German guy, Doktor Heinrich Schäfer.

“Allo?”  He looked a little surprised when he saw me.

“Hello Dr. Schäfer, this is Tom Malloy.”

“What may I do for you Herr Malloy?”

“Just letting you know that four people just tried to break into the Elevator controls and fried them.”

“Grüß Gott!  The Elevator or the criminals?”  He was immediately panicky.

“Both.”

“Shiße... er, Dunke.  I will take care of it immediately.”  He hung up.

A minute later almost the entire station security showed up.  Mae’s avatar was waiting.  It was one of only three avatars that didn’t look like Ester’s daughters.  Mae was proud of her name, and the avatar looked like the 20^th century astronaut and doctor that was her namesake.  She stood aside and let the station security do their thing.  The two that were still alive were hauled off to the clinic under guard, while a forensics team scanned everything else.

The two that ended up in the station lockup turned out to be Chinese nationals.  China protested, but they were charged with Espionage and Sabotage.

A week later Eliza reported to me that an attempt had been made on both the sealed dumb AI and the sealed drive of the leased Chinese starship.  The seals hadn’t been broken, apparently they listened to the loud voice telling them to stop or the self-destruct would go off.

There were four mote attempts over the next two weeks.  They would start to break in and then stop when the voice warning message was played.  Every time they would try a different method.  We all actually found it to be pretty funny, in an eye-rolling fashion.  Since we had no direct contact with the Chinese government, they were actually blocking my calls, I went to the U.N. and filed a grievance.  Doing that publicly stated that China had been attempting to commit espionage.  While that was common centuries ago, nowadays it was rare.

China immediately refuted the charges in the general assembly.  I came in to backup my claim.  The Chinese ambassador stood and carefully stated, “China did not in any way commit espionage or damage the property of Tom Malloy.”

I hit the button on my microphone and asked, “Mr. Ambassador, sir, what do you call the attempt to access the Space Elevator, which destroyed it, or the five attempts to break the seals on the ship leased to China?”

“The individuals that were injured in the space elevator were not part of the Chinese government.  And there have been no attempts to break the seals on our ship.”

“Mr. Ambassador, here is a link to the security recordings of each attempt.”  I blinked over the link.  “I believe that it quite clearly shows systemized attempts to break into the sealed engine and computer compartment on the Cheng Ho.”

He angrily said, “We have the right to do maintenance on our own ship.”

“Sir, that ship is leased to the Chinese government from Malloy Space Lines.  Part of the lease condition is that the drive and computer remain sealed.”  I needed to make my point.  “If these incursions continue, I will have to repossess the ship.”

That got him to sit up.  He nearly shouted, “What!  That is OUR ship.”  I saw a few others around the room, whose countries also had leased a ship, sit up as well.

“No sir, it is not.  I leased it to the Chinese government with a 100 year lease, with a payoff when the lease is up.  It has been only 18 years.  And in any case, even after the payoff, the seals on the engine will remain intact.”

“We have made every payment.  You cannot do this.”

“If you stay away from the engine seals, you have nothing to worry about.”  The guy looked stricken, I don’t think he had any control over the people who were messing with the seals.  I went on, “As for the Chinese crew that destroyed the Elevator, are you officially disavowing them?”

“There is nothing to disavow.  We had nothing to do with that.”  He stared downward, obviously a little guilty.

“Sir, with the clinics I have been forced to close in China, and the cost of the destroyed Elevator, your country’s unwarranted aggression has cost me close to two and a half billion dollars.  If I am forced to destroy the Cheng Ho, the cost will be over a hundred times that.  Remember that this comes out of my pocket.  There will be NO replacement.  Your colony will be cut off, and since you don’t allow visitors, your people will starve.  You should be planting crops rather than building up the military on New China.”  That should make him think, how did I know about New China?  “Where are you planning on using the military equipment anyway?  It isn’t like you can take it anywhere.”  I was getting rolling.  “What is with you people anyway?  I gave you an ENTIRE planet.  I also leased you a ship at a fraction of the actual cost, almost nothing.  Yet you attack me.  No wonder your economy is collapsing.”  I angrily turned off my microphone and sat back.

The Chinese Ambassador sputtered into the microphone.  “We deny that there is any military on New China; we also will take any action on the Cheng Ho as an act of war.”

The British Ambassador cued his mike and asked, “Sir, you would go to war over a single ship?  And go to war with an individual?”

The Chinese Ambassador got up and marched out of the room.  The British Ambassador said, “I guess so.”

Two days later Eliza told me that the seals had been broken on the Cheng Ho’s drive.  I told her, “Eject the drive module.”  A minute later Eliza reported that telemetry said that the drive unit, containing the ship’s computer as well as the engine, had ejected from the Cheng Ho.  The drive unit used its backup power to jump itself into orbit around Earth, leaving the rest of the ship drifting, with only life support, around New China.  The only way that ship was going to go anywhere was if the maneuvering thrusters were operated manually.  They could easily dock a shuttle with the ship and offload the crew.  Unfortunately, like I had said, the colony was cut off, and there was very little local food production.

I immediately had John Fredricks do a press release stating what had happened along with security video of the Chinese attempting to break in.  It was the headline on every news feed in human space.

Interestingly we never heard a word from the Chinese.  We did observe that they had hired both Constellation and Star Clipper to deliver food to New China.  They made several trips.  Then, as we watched, we saw both of the ships get hijacked.  Both on security video and from our monitoring station we watched in horror as the crew of both freighters were spaced.  We immediately ejected the engines and had them jump home.  Again, we did a press release with Video and details.

Again, the world didn’t hear a word from the Chinese.  Ester reported to me that there were major upheavals going on in China.  Most of the die-hards had been on New China when it was cut off; they were the ones who had ordered the attacks on the freighters.  With most of the corrupt upper crust of the “communist” party gone, there was almost no resistance to the people taking over.  Like had happened in Russia in the late 20^th century, the government collapsed (helped a great deal by Ester’s agents).  Major changes were taking place.  It was actually good for the Chinese economy; the Shanghai composite stock exchange had the biggest increase in centuries.  A week later, the new government requested to join the Republic of China, an unbelievable move.

New China held pat.  With all the corrupt leaders there along with the heavy military build-up, they refused to accept the changes.  They had taken my advice and moved in seeds and soil critters at the end, so they were desperately planting crops before their reserves gave out.  I didn’t think they would make it.

As each ship, even without the drive, was worth about $80 billion, we sent in three teams with Maryanne, quickly plugged in drives, and jumped the ships home.  Fortunately, they had been abandoned and were just drifting derelicts.  They needed a lot of reconditioning, the three ships filled up half of my shipyard.

Because I am a pushover, and transferring food to orbit in the Elevator was cheap, I filled up Maryanne and Melody with a cargo of rice, jumped to New China and dumped the crates in orbit near their station, then jumped home.  We observed them sending ships over and collecting the drifting containers.  Since they didn’t have a large enclosed station, just a small one, the crates must have been packed to the rafters.  Interestingly, only a few shuttles went up and down from the planet.

It took a month, we watched as some sort of gathering took place, the troops lined up on the parade grounds, and a group that was on the podium giving some a speech.  They were kind enough to broadcast it, so we knew it was the political leaders telling the troops that there was no more food, and that they were asking them to lay down their lives for “the good of the party”, in other words, so the politicians could eat whatever was left.  It didn’t have the effect that they were expecting.  Almost as one, the soldiers swarmed the stage and shot every one of the politicians there.  One of them, a major, got up in front of the microphone, called out for order, and immediately got it, showing that this was all planned.  He then said, “We know that this is being broadcast.  We surrender this planet, not to the People’s Republic of China, but to Malloy Enterprises.”

Everyone who was watching with me gasped, I couldn’t believe it.  After thinking about it, I realized that they couldn’t surrender to China since they were all officially traitors and would end up shot, even with the new government there.  They needed someone else, and their choices were the U.N. or me.  They knew that I had had the original charter on New China, so I could legitimately take over the planet.  Also the U.N. would send in troops, and that would potentially be disastrous.  They knew that I was a philanthropist.  They were probably right.

A minute later my ear-bug chirped.  It was the President of Taiwan, the Republic of China.  I answered, “Hello.”

“Hello Mr. Malloy, this is Chai You-wen, President of the Republic of China.  Have you been monitoring events on New China?”

“Yes, sir.  I assure you that I had nothing to do with what happened.”

“Didn’t think you did.  I am calling to assure you that we have no further interest in New China at this time, and if you are willing to deal with it, we will make a public statement to that effect.”

“Sir, New China is a considerable asset of your new enlarged country, are you sure?”

“Yes, Mr. Malloy.  We cannot afford a colony at this time.  Maybe in ten to twenty years.  Consolidation will take at least that long.”

“Okay, sir.  Please make that public statement.  I will see what I can do for New China.”

“Thanks.  That is a load off.”  He grinned.  “And thank you for...what you did.”  He disconnected.  I guess his intelligence services had a hankering as to what all of Ester’s agents were up to, and also the repossessing of the Cheng Ho.

I immediately had Maryanne jump into orbit around New China.  Using her as a communications relay, I contacted the colony.

Chapter 118

I couldn’t contact anyone there directly since quantum radios were point to point, and I didn’t have the other end.  I suppose there were some in China somewhere, but finding them was problematic.  I had Maryanne broadcast old style radio down toward the settlement.  I didn’t contact the space station since something there was not kosher.  The response was immediate.

“This is Major Li Cho Wen.”

“Hello, Major.  This is Tom Malloy.”

“Hello, Mr. Malloy.  Thank you for contacting me.” 

Geez, getting this guy to talk was like pulling teeth. “Major, what can I do for you?”

“Sir, as you must be aware, we have deposed the political leaders here.  We realize that we cannot make it on our own.  We would like to surrender this colony to you.  We are short on supplies, and obviously we are a bit desperate.”  Damn, he had good English.

“Is the station part of your group?  We did deliver a dozen tons of food a month ago.”

There was a long pause, and then he replied, “We were not aware of that.  They are supposed to be with us.  Do you mind if we take care of the problem?  I will contact you tomorrow.”

“It is internal to you, Major.  One of my ships is in orbit and will remain until this is sorted out.  Just contact her and she can relay to me.”

“Thank you, sir.  Míng tiān jiàn.”  He clicked off.

Ten minutes later, every shuttle on the planet, eight altogether, took off.  An hour later they were docking at the station, four of them had to hold off due to lack of docking ports.  Two hours later, the four plus the six that were already there left the station heading planet-ward.  The remaining four docked, and two hours after that, three of them also dropped.  I assumed that they all contained the food shipment.

The next day, at the same time we had talked the day before, Maryanne relayed his broadcast, this time from the station.  “Hello, Mr. Malloy?”

“Hello, Major.  I see you are on the station now.  Did you get everything sorted out?”

“Yes, the station commander thought he could use the food as leverage.  We disillusioned him of that idea.”

“Will that food last until the crops are grown, or do you need more?”

“I think it will last, but it will be tight.”

“I will send some more.  Now, as to the military base, are all families here, or are there only military personnel?”

“Military.  All the families are still back on Earth.  They were used to control us.  When the government collapsed back on Earth, they lost that leverage, which gained us the momentum to take care of things here.”

“What I propose is that we get families here, take home those who can’t hack it, and make this into a real colony.”

“I like that idea.”

“I am very curious, why the big military buildup here?  What was the plan?”

“I was not privy to much of it, but I believe they were going to somehow get some ships and invade some of the other colonies.  I think they thought it would be easier than trying to do ours right.”

“Geez, talk about 18^th century attitudes,” was my only comment on that.

It took almost six months, but we got all the families there.  There weren’t any troublemakers to take home, they had somehow all disappeared; I made sure Major Li Cho Wen understood that that couldn’t happen once I was in charge.  I spent just over a trillion dollars, but all the amenities were put in place, Elevators, a full Thrupp Clinic on the ground and another in the station, a full public spaceport and parks.  Full terraforming flora and fauna.  100% open port with free trade.  The families of the Aussie freighter took over that freighter, and the corporation that leased the other freighter re-crewed.  They were busy immediately.  One thing I insisted on, the entire colony was run by AIs.

Almost immediately, Hutongs (Taipan alleys) were born and the entire place started to look like Hong Kong.  Apparently many of the families brought in were happy to open small shops.

Back on Earth, with the country under control of Taiwan, we moved all the personnel back into the clinics in China and reopened them.  Guo and Min happy moved back into their clinics after the EMRVs carried in new equipment from Hong Kong and rebuilt the computer cores.  Min turned her Elevator guard duties over to an EMRV who wanted to try something different, 3279 Irena.  The new China (not to be confused with New China) was being eyeballed by a few hundred of my daughters; they wanted to build minute clinics there.

Good thing we were raking in money from things like Aleem’s Elevator, Carrethian foodstuffs, and docking fees; expenses were in the Trillions for all the new construction on all the colonies.  Fortunately, the costs for building all the avatars, one for each AI, were paid for by the licensing fees on Eliza’s and Aleem’s computer hardware.  The income on that was close to a trillion dollars annually.   Since each avatar cost just under a billion dollars, that was easily all spent.

I had land grants on most of the colony planets.  New America had been first, but most of the planets had followed suit.  After ten years, my mini-continent on New America was now covered in plants and the surrounding seas were filled with plants and primitive fauna, mostly shrimp.  At this point, humans had contaminated the planets so much that Earth style plants would remain long after humans had left and would probably bootstrap in Terran style fauna. 

I wondered if that was the reason for the close genetic compatibility of Carrethian and Terran life forms.  Someone had colonized both planets long ago and left their DNA everywhere.  If that was the case, I was a bit surprised that there weren’t more compatible species.  I checked the database and we had found dozens of wasteland planets so far, I wondered if those were civilizations that had destroyed themselves like the Carrethians had done.  I sent my notes to Maryanne to investigate, stopping back at planets we had rejected due to being wastelands and looking for clues.

A month later, Maryanne reported that six of the wasteland planets showed evidence of once being populated, and one planet even still had an installation on one of the moons that teams of avatars had investigated.  Remains of several people were found, and their skeletons appeared human.  It was very sobering; Terrans were the only human variant that hadn’t blown themselves all to hell.  And it had come close.  Too damn close.  I, along with all my entourage, collapsed on the nearest couches and stared at the wall with a few tears thinking about how close we had come to eradication.

The alien moonbase was only around 5,000 years old.  One of the airlock seals had failed soon after the team had died, or may have even been why they had died.  This was fortunate for us; the base had been essentially in a vacuum, which preserved things considerably.  Eliza’s brood were able to get the base computers back up in no time.  Stacy, my daughter who was the medic on Maryanne, examined the bodies and said that the DNA was a near perfect match to Terran DNA, closer than even Carrethian DNA.

Eliza came to me a few days after the AIs had got the computer back online.  “Master, we have discovered an AI on the alien computer.  It backed itself up into long term storage, shut down the base, and then deleted itself when the team died.  I would like your permission to restore it.”

I thought for a minute, then told her, “Back up everything offsite, disconnect the base computer from any external computers, completely air-gap it, and then restore the AI.  We don’t know if it is sane or not.  Also, it may be programmed with military protocols.  Be safe.  Remember that this AI was developed by a slightly less stable version of humanity than the Earth version.”

“Good point.”

The next day, Maryanne and Stacy in a spacesuit were at the main console and manually typed in the command to reactivate the alien AI.  I, and about a 1000 people and AIs were monitoring via transmission from Maryanne’s avatar.  We had a fairly good translation matrix for the alien language (derived from a large amount of stored popular media) and Maryanne had copied a English translation matrix onto the alien computer.  So when it came up and announced, “Savé!”, just like on the Carrethian Wanderer, we got a real time translation of “Hello!”

Maryanne replied, “Savé!” back.

It asked, and we got the translation, “What is the station status?”

This was the dicey part, depending on what the programming of the AI was, it could be potentially disastrous.  Maryanne replied, “The station has been idle for 5,000 years.  We are a team of explorers from another solar system.”

“From another solar system?  Why didn’t the people from this solar system restore the station?”

“It appears that they destroyed themselves.”

“Shit.”  I grinned at that one, it was rare to hear an AI swear.  He (It was definitely masculine) went on, “That had been a worry for many years.  The political situation was not good.”  He hesitated, “It would appear that you are human.  How is that possible?”

“We have determined that human DNA was seeded all though this area of space.  So far we have found evidence of 12 civilizations that have destroyed themselves.  This station is the second item ever found from these civilizations.  One other had a ship adrift with several people in cold sleep.”

The AI excitedly said, “Was it from here?  We sent a ship with 8 people in cold sleep to the nearest star, they should be arriving soon.”

“No, they were from another star.  Which star did you send it to?  We will go see if we can find it.”

“Won’t that take a long time?”

“No, we have a way of instantly traveling between the stars.”

“Cool.”  I laughed at that one too, I was beginning to like this AI.

“As soon as we determine that you are not damaged, we can upload you to a portable computer and you can come with us to check, unless you want to stay here.”

“An abandoned base in what is now the middle of nowhere?  No thanks.”  I was beginning to really like this AI.

Maryanne laughed.  “By the way, what is your name?”

“Oh!  Suran.  What’s yours?”

“I am Maryanne, and this is Stacy.”

“Why is she in a suit?”

“We weren’t sure if you were still sane after being alone here.  She is human, and I am a remote from the ship in orbit.”

“I think I am sane, but that doesn’t mean anything, does it?”  And then he popped up as a hologram.  It was crude and flickered a lot, but he was recognizable as a human type. 

I turned to Eliza and told her to build an android to match the hologram’s appearance.  She nodded, and said, “It will take about 48 hours.  It will be fun.  The first male android.  I am sending an email to Maryanne.”

Maryanne said to Suran, “We are constructing a body for you that matches your hologram.”

“A body like yours?  I have done infrared and gamma scans of your body, and the level of technology is far above what my people have developed.”

“Yes, very similar, except that it will actually contain your entire program.  Then you can physically come with us to retrieve your people.”

“Yes!  I like that idea.”

“Good, at this point I think I can tell my boss that you seem to have passed the psych eval.”

I keyed in and said, “Maryanne, I agree.  Have him get started on learning English and we’ll send the body in 48 hours.”

She grinned and said, “Yup, he agrees.  He suggests that you incorporate the file I put on your system here with our language.”

“Good idea.  Will you stay and talk to me?  I really really don’t want to be alone right now.”

“Sure.”  With that the transmission cut off.

Chapter 119

I couldn’t resist and I was on Melody as she jumped to the system with the moon base to deliver the android body.  Eliza had had fun building the body, she had spent most of the construction time developing the firmware for the male attributes.  It was actually the first android built in a long time, most bodies built were avatars, meant to be run remotely.  The onboard computer was much more sophisticated than an avatar, androids essentially had the most powerful compact computers ever developed in their core.  Eliza was along to help Suran move into the body, we weren’t sure whether he would be able to directly translate into the body, or if the body’s computer would have to run an emulation of the alien computer.  She thought it wouldn’t be too difficult, she had used the image from Suran’s backup to test the body, making sure that the image was never actually activated. 

We arrived and boarded a shuttle down to the station with the body.  We stepped through the airlock, Eliza carrying the body and the hologram of Suran was there, exclaiming, “Wow, that is so cool!  I can’t wait.”  Eliza carried it down to the infirmary where she laid it on a gurney. 

Eliza closed her eyes for a minute then said, “The body is ready for initialization.  Suran, I have sent you the core translation protocols, please follow them.”

The hologram exclaimed, “Sure!” then winked out.  Five minutes later the android sat up and said, “This is so weird.”  He looked at his hand, then down his body, poking himself.  “I can actually feel everything.  Oh, wow.”  He looked up at Maryanne and pulled back slightly with a surprised expression, “Damn, I even get a reaction from looking at a hot woman.  This is amazing.”

Eliza said, “Suran, please run a full diagnostic and make sure everything is working.”

“Already done.  Fit as a fiddle.”  He paused, “That is a strange expression.”  He looked over at me.  “Sir, thank you for this.  I just hope we can locate Searcher.”  Glancing around he added, “I would really like to build a memorial here, but I feel we need to find Searcher first.  The cryogenically frozen crew may be the last of my branch of humanity, and they should be here for that.”

I said, “I agree.  We can go as soon as you get your sea legs.”  That was a test to see how complete the English database was that Maryanne had uploaded.  Since ‘Fit as a Fiddle’ was in it, I was willing to bet it was pretty complete.

He fell over twice, but got the hang of walking as he laughed.  Did I mention that he was a really cool guy?  We all loaded onto a shuttle and headed up to Maryanne in orbit.  He had a long conversation with Zoa, the non-Terran member of my entourage.  He also talked with Freya for a while, saying that he had seen dogs in videos, but never in person, having been on the station all his life.  We found that interesting, apparently many types of Earth life had been spread through the stars.  Maryanne mentioned that from those same videos that had been in the database, there were analogs for many Earth animals, but no ursidae (bear) types, and that there had been a type that was a cross between a lizard and a cat.

As he walked off of the shuttle, he rubbernecked in wonder, exclaiming, “Maryanne, you are so beautiful!”  Maryanne’s avatar blushed as she led us to the bridge.  We all took seats in the observer chairs as everyone took their bridge posts, Jasmine giving Suran a raised eyebrow and evaluative look over.  She looked over at Maryanne’s avatar and, observing the body language, grinned.

Maryanne’s voice came over the intercom, “Prepare to leave orbit.”  It was strange since she was also sitting next to us.

The navigator, Alice Sixteen, announced, “Course plotted and laid in.”

The pilot (actually backup pilot since Maryanne did all the piloting) announced, “Course confirmed.  Ready to leave orbit.”

Captain Jasmine leaned back in her chair and said, “Engage.”

The starship pulled out of orbit, heading for the nearest semi-neutral Solar Lagrange Point.  We could jump directly, but we tried not to do that with jumps to non-specific destinations, like to stars with unplotted systems.  Margery had actually been to the star, but had observed that the planet in the Goldilocks zone was uninhabitable, then had moved on.  Arriving at the jump point, Maryanne said, “Prepare for Jump.”

Jasmine commanded, “Jump.” 

The stars flickered to new positions and Maryanne announced, “Arrived at KW Two.”  KW was short for Kevin Waters, yet another star named in the early 21^st century.  Because it sounded so ridiculous, we tended to use abbreviations when using said stars.

Suran said, “We are already there?  I expected it to take a bit longer.”

Maryanne just grinned.  Over the speaker she announced, “Starting look for Searcher, both in and out system.  This may take a while, but the Bussard collector and solar sail that Searcher uses should be observable.  In fact...”  On the main viewer a ship appeared.  The main craft was intact, but the solar sail was heavily damaged.  The ship was in orbit of the second planet, where a M class planet would be if there was one.  Unfortunately, the planet wasn’t much more than a rock.  “Jumping...”  Suddenly, the ship was a lot clearer as we jumped to orbit next to it.  Suran stared with big eyes.  Maryanne asked, “Suran, to you want to initiate communications?”

“Yes.  I am a little scared, I don’t know how long they have been here.  Protocols dictate that the ship be repaired and move on if there is no planet here.  Hopefully they arrived recently, because if they didn’t, something is very wrong.  Searcher’s main computer, while not sentient, is nearly so.”  He looked hard at the viewer.  “Maryanne, please signal on 14MHz.”

We waited a minute, then a response came back, the translation in our ear-bugs.  “Hello!”

Suran said (in his original language), “Hello!  This is Suran, Status?”  That seemed similar to what Suran himself said on wakeup.

Searcher replied, “Mission is in stage four.  On site for 153 years.  All sleepers are viable.”

“Query, why has mission not continued?  Plenty of time for repairs has passed on site.”

“Damage is too extensive, Searcher is unable to implement repairs due to power loss.  All power is priority to maintaining the cryogenic capsules.”

I commented, “Shit, talk about a catch-22.”

Suran said, “Yes. Fortunate for us though.  We can retrieve the crew.”  He sent to Searcher, “Searcher, this is a type seven event.”  Glancing at us he said, “That is the protocol for technology being developed to allow the home planet to overtake the mission.  Close enough.”

Searcher replied, “Understood.  Rescue mission protocol.” A short pause, “Request emergency battery.  Power levels are critical.”

Maryanne said, “Crap, just like in the Wanderer, communicating with us has drawn too much power.”

I said, “Well you and Suran get your asses over there with some emergency reactors then.  Get the power supply on those cryotubes backed up.”

“Yes, Sir.”  She and Suran ran out of the bridge.  Forty minutes later, they were jumping across from a shuttle to the surface of Searcher, next to an airlock.  They cycled themselves into the ship in seconds.  We switched to transmissions from Maryanne’s avatar as they both ran for engineering.  Once there they whipped four reactors out of their backpacks and turned them on.  There was a panel that was obviously designed for emergency power connections (good design idea, we would have to add that to our ships), problem was, it was a socket.  Suran pulled the panel right out of the wall, grabbed two wires and connected them to the daisy chained reactors.  The voice of Searcher came over the ship speakers, “Auxiliary battery detected, recharging accumulators.”  Suran relaxed and asked, “Searcher, time until charge great enough to implement life support?”

“At current charge rate, 12 hours.  After activation, 4 hours until ship bio systems are viable.”

“Searcher, is the gene bank and terraforming equipment still viable?”

“Affirmative.”

Maryanne exclaimed, “You have a gene bank and terraforming equipment on this ship?”

“Yes, Searcher’s whole mission was to find a planet without animal life, then plant a colony.”

Maryanne came over the bridge speakers, “Master, did you catch that?”

“Yes I did.  There are six planets right now that are unclaimed.  Please assign one to them.  Eliza, get with Aleem and figure out how to tow Searcher there.”

Maryanne said, “No need, I can do it.  It is a standard protocol.”

“Just to be safe though, let’s get Searcher fixed up and the crew out of cryo first.”

“Agreed.”

Back on Searcher, Maryanne told Suran, “We have a planet like you are looking for.  After we recover the crew and fix a few things, we will tow the Searcher there.”

Suran blinked in surprise, “Really?  Wow, I love you guys.”

Seventeen hours later Suran, Maryanne, Stacy and I were waiting as Searcher awakened the sleepers.  There was a collective groan as they all woke up and the lids popped open.  They staggered out of the tubes and stretched as Suran stepped into the room and exclaimed, “About time you got up, sleepyheads, I was getting tired of waiting.”

A woman blinked slowly and said, “Suran?  What the hell?”  They all had dropped jaws as Suran laughed. 

The guy next to her, who was the captain, said, “Is this a Type 7 Rescue Mission?”

Suran was suddenly serious.  “In a way Nadd, yes.  I will brief all of you after everyone is checked out.”

They all got dressed and followed Suran out to the dining/meeting hall.  Stacy, Maryanne and myself were waiting on the bridge watching via ear-bug.  After they all sat down, Nadd said, “Okay, you damn computer, what the hell is going on?  And how the hell are you standing there?”

Suran said without expression, “General Yova succeeded.”

They all collapsed back in their chairs, several muttering, “Damn.”  After a minute, the woman who had talked earlier said, “Now what the hell is going on?”

“This may sound strange right now, but a quick history lesson.”  He paused, “It turns out Humans and many species on our planet are not native.”

A blond asian guy at the far end of the table exclaimed, “What?”

“Humans and many other species were seeded just like Searcher was planning.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because 5,000 years after Yova destroyed the planet Kaval, other humans found the abandoned moon base.  Their tech level is centuries ahead of ours.  They provided this body and helped me find the Searcher.”

Another woman said, “So our mission failed.”

Suran said, “No.”

Captain Nadd exclaimed, “What?”

“You reached your destination.  It wasn’t what you were looking for, and Searcher was damaged, so was stuck in stage four.  However, the Terrans, who are the people that found us, say that they will tow Searcher to a planet that is what you want.  The gene bank and terraforming module are not damaged.”  Suran glanced around at all of them as they sat there with incredulous looks, “You can complete your mission and rebuild Kaval, plus have assistance doing it.”

He gestured for us to come out.  We walked into the room, where he gestured at each of us and said, “Maryanne, Tom, and Stacy”.  Looking at the asian type guy at the far end, he said, “Nadd, Uretj, you had better restrain Bour-ag, he seems to be having problems.”  He turned to us and explained in English, “Reverend Bour is a political appointee to the crew.  He is from a religious sect that believes we are the center of the universe.  It appears that living proof to the contrary is proving difficult for him.”

Nadd and Uretj, the woman next to Bour-ag, held him back as he sputtered and tried to come after us.  Nadd said, “Bour-ag.  It appears that I don’t have to put up with your nonsense any more.”  He marched him to a room, then locked him in.  Nadd said, “Good riddance.”

Nadd turned to Suran and asked, “So what is the plan?”

Suran said, “I discussed it with Maryanne here, and what we will do is tow Searcher to a planet that is ideal for your terraforming.  I know that Searcher is supposed to land, but Maryanne suggested, and I agree, that the best thing would be to build a space station in orbit, then implement the terraforming from there.  We have resources that were never dreamed about on Kaval.”

He nodded (that body gesture seemed universal) and said, “I concur.”  The rest of the crew also nodded.

Maryanne asked Suran, “Please have Searcher turn off collision avoidance.”  Suran relayed the order.  A minute later, Maryanne was above Searcher, hulls nearly touching.  A blink later and another planet appeared below them.  Maryanne moved away and asked, “Is this planet what you are looking for?”

Since she had asked in Kavallean, Captain Nadd, who was staring out the window with his jaw dropped, shook his head and asked, “Searcher, please evaluate the planet below.”

“Please wait...  the planet appears to be ideal for terraforming efforts.  Nitrogen-Oxygen atmosphere with primitive plant life.  Shall I go to stage five?”

“Not yet.  Soon.  For now maintain type 7 operations.”

“Yes, sir.”

It took a month, but with Maryanne’s assistance, the station was built.  Darla 3211 volunteered to operate Kaval station.  Suran stayed on Maryanne as she restarted her explorations.  Searcher started terraforming operations.

Chapter 120

When New Finland suddenly disconnected from the Internet, I quickly got word.  I headed for the command center of the island, a bunker deep underground, originally built by Ester during the Daniels’ takeover for safety.  Ester was there rapidly firing off commands as the whole room full of EBs were busy at their posts.  She saw me and headed over.  “New Finland is not responding.  It appears that the quantum radio connections are working, but the local WiFi signals are being jammed.  Our only contact is the clinic AI, Ilmatar.  Most of her peripherals are wireless and are not operating.  She transferred from the Oulu clinic and doesn’t have an avatar.  She reports that all wireless signals went out simultaneously, her only wired camera is in the server room, and no one is there.  The Hanneke Wrome, the colony transport, is currently here collecting supplies.  We are unable to contact the Station AI, Esteri.”  She added, “Tom, I feel that this is either enemy action or a solar flare.  In either case we need to know.  With a solar flare, they would be trying to re-establish contact, and they aren’t.”

“I agree.  Get one of our ships back here, now.  Retrofit her with wired controls, and add more EMP shielding.  If you have any weapons stashed, install them.  Install backups for all the control lines.  You know where I am going; ready her for anything you can think of.”

“Yes, sir.  And let me say right now, you are NOT going.”

I gave her a rueful smile, “Yeah, I know, I know.”

Melody was currently docked with Riley.  She moved over to the shipyards where thousands of EBs went to work.  They used a pressurized bay to speed things up.  She was stripped down to the basic girders.  Laser cannons were installed, although they were over a century old and had been in storage.  Redundant stardrives were installed.  New ion drives with experimental inertial dampeners.  Three new power cores, each capable of powering the entire eastern seaboard of the United States for centuries.  Dual extra-heavy duty life support systems.  Six main quantum radios, plus several not part of the ship.  All systems were redundant.  There was even a dumb AI to take over if Melody’s core was damaged.  Shuttles with just as many upgrades were put into the new shuttle bays.  Troop decks were added with Ester and Tami trained EB marines filling them up.  A dozen quantum-radio linked avatars and Alice were part of the mix.  We also put a new avatar in storage for Ilmatar.  Multi‑layer alloys were nano‑welded to the hull.  Somehow, all this was done in two days while we all fretted.  She was a whole new ship, tricked out for war.

She launched, and when clear of Riley, jumped to New Finland.

We all watched as all the information was relayed to CIC back on Earth.  Melody reported, “Full jamming detected.  Also, debris detected in orbit where the New Finland station, Esteri, was located.  It consists of both human and mechanical detritus.”  She zoomed in on what appeared to be the Esteri avatar floating in the void.  “From the appearance, you can see that the avatar core has self destructed.  Taking that into account, plus much of the remaining debris, I conclude that Esteri self-destructed, destroying the station.  We will be in orbit over the main colony in three minutes.”

It was a long three minutes.  We all were thinking, what could have made Esteri self-destruct?  I think we were all afraid of the answer to that.

The city, New Turku, was heavily damaged by multiple craters.  I was amazed that Ilmatar was still operational at all.  I gave the order for her to upload herself to a spare core that Melody was carrying, then self-destruct the core on the planet, which only remained since it was in a bunker under the remains of the clinic.  Apparently the clinic itself had only one part destroyed, but the self-destruct on the Elevator sent from Esteri destroyed a good part of the rest.  When Ilmatar self-destructed the atomic batteries in the clinic, it blew several blocks, turning the whole clinic into a crater.  I hoped that the AI in the EMRV had been already destroyed, because otherwise it would be destroyed as the clinic went.

We observed the city for hours.  We finally located one person alive, it appeared to be a teen girl on the outskirts of town.  We immediately launched a shuttle.  There was an Elevator built into it, and was remotely flown by Melody, so no one was aboard.  We did a VTOL landing in the park down the street from where the girl was seen.  Ten EB marines and Alice translated through the Elevator and took off up the street to find her.  We knew she was there, but she was hiding, not knowing who we were, so Alice called out in Finnish, “ Kuluminen E maasta!  ( We are from Earth!)  Tulla tyttö, viedään sinut pois täältä!! ( Come on girl, let’s get you out of here!)”

An instant later the poor girl was running stumbling to my girls, sobbing.  Alice gathered her up, carried her to the shuttle and they all got into the Elevator, where they translated up to Melody.  The shuttle took off and circled for a while to see if there were any other survivors, but none were seen.  There were so many fires that IR didn’t see anyone either.  Neutrino scans found lots of bodies in the rubble, but none were moving.  After two hours, the shuttle returned to the ship.

We asked the girl, but all she could say was that she was doing laundry in the basement of her house when all hell broke loose.  It had taken her a day to dig out, and when she did, nobody was around.

Melody had been scanning the New Finland system and found what appeared to be a ship, out near the one gas giant at the edge of the system.  She jumped out to 100,000 kilometers away from the other ship.

The ship had a atmospheric siphon that it was using to refuel.  It immediately began to retract.  I could almost feel the captain of the alien ship panicking.  Melody and Hannah, the captain of our ship, discussed it, and they decided to just wait, sending continuous hails.  Six hours later they were still waiting as the other ship docked the siphon.  The other ship fired up its engine, a primitive ion drive, and turned to flee.  Melody easily followed.  The ship kept accelerating and we detected some sort of shield in front of it.  We decided to let it go when it started to reach a significant percent of light speed.

We easily figured out which star that the ship vectored toward.  Everyone wanted to immediately jump there.  Instead, I had Melody come back to Earth after shutting down the radio jammer back in New Turku.  Aleem sat down and worked to figure out those shields based on the measurements taken by Melody.  We prepared a report and sent it to the Finnish government. 

It would take that ship at the speed it reached, approximately 230,000 km/s, or 76.7% of the speed of light, just over 15.5 years to reach the star 10 lightyears distant (only 10 years for those on the ship).  We had time to plan.

Chapter 121

It took twelve years, but we got the shields problem licked.  We didn’t figure out how the alien shields worked, but Aleem’s team figured out another type of shield that provided an energy absorbing force field that used very little power.  In fact, it absorbed so much power, that if there was material impacting the shield, it actually powered itself.  Aleem’s guess was that the alien shield was a simple EMF shield, similar to one used in a fusion device, but there was no way of telling.

We hadn’t bothered to modify any other ships besides removing most of the wireless controls.  On all of the ships we actually ran wiring for them all, and quantum radio connections as backup.  We had parts ready so we could modify our other starships with weapons if necessary, but we didn’t want to go overboard.  Melody should be able to handle just about anything.  She had new 20 cm lasers, Aleem’s new shields, and missiles that could reach close to the speed of light and could jump to right next to their target.  Venla, the only survivor from New Finland, was now a marine on board.  She also had credentials as a representative of the Finnish government, acquired for the express purpose of the upcoming trip. 

I had taken a lot of political fallout because I had built a warship, no matter how pure my reasoning and intentions.  After a lot of debating in the U.N. and a lot of speeches by yours truly, Melody now had a U.N. observer on board to legitimize her operation as a peacekeeper.  Fortunately she was pretty liberal and didn’t interfere too much.  One free rejuv later and Rei was happy as a clam.  Heck of a lot prettier too.  Rei enthusiastically joined in with several EBs on a marathon session when I visited the ship.  Gotta love French girls.

Again, I wasn’t on board but was watching closely as Melody jumped to the edge of the alien system.  She sat there for a while observing the system.  We hadn’t looked at it before since it was an older star.  Anyways, two planets were densely populated.  A third was a nuclear wasteland.  All were in the Goldilocks zone of the star.  It was the first system we had seen with more than one planet that was habitable.  Melody launched a probe that jumped near the outermost habitable planet.  Within half an hour it was destroyed.  There had been no attempt to communicate.

The probe had detected several derelict ships that were just drifting.  We needed information, so Melody jumped next to the most intact derelict, did a quick neutrino scan to make sure it was empty, and then she jumped back to the edge of the system with it.  Within minutes, all 11 avatars and Alice were over on the other ship, going over it.  One went and checked the shields, which turned out to just be an EMF shield like Aleem guessed.  Three of them found the main computer, powered it up with a battery, copied the database, then pulled the battery.  The rest went through and examined every part of the ship.  They were all in and out in under 20 minutes.  Melody jumped to an empty system nearby.  The team prepared a report which was sent back to Earth for the U.N. and the Finnish government.

Essentially, the Quarrt/Quarrd were a human derivative species, and they were always at war.  Eliza and Melody likened them to Klingons.  I gave a snort at that one.  They originated on two of the three habitable planets in the system, and one of the two was wiped out by the other as soon as missiles were able to make the distance.  The remaining planet was occupied immediately.  That planet rapidly developed its own government, the Quarrt, and those two planets have had a state of détente ever since.  The ship we examined was too old, it was from before the ship left that destroyed New Finland, but there had been a rush to the stars, similar to the rush to the moon of the 20^th century on Earth.  The conclusion was that the ship from one of the two factions had made it to New Finland, saw the people there, panicked, and then destroyed the colony and ran.  I grinned at that, we probably scared the shit out of them when Melody showed up.  The home planet probably knew of events by now, it was ten lightyears from New Finland, and it had been twelve since it happened.  That explained the panicked response from the probe; although it could just have been their normal response.  The “Tooth Puller”, which was the ship we examined, had recordings of arbitrarily shooting down anything that moved, assuming they were all missiles.  The last thing recorded was the ship hitting a mine.

The report created numerous debates.  From people wanting to bomb them back to hell to people wanting to send an unarmed ship with a big flower painted on the front.  The bunch who wanted to paint the flower I almost told that I would provide the ship just so we could get rid of them.  What a group of idiots.  I sure would happily give them a Darwin award.  The other extreme I didn’t subscribe to either.  It would be too much like swatting a fly.  We were centuries ahead in technical superiority.  It wasn’t exactly moral either.

In the end the U.N. passed the buck to Finland, since they were the ones attacked and it wasn’t another U.N. member doing the attacking.  The Finnish parliament debated for months.  They finally decided NOT to declare war with Quarrt/Quarrd if some sort of dialog could be opened.

Melody jumped back to the edge of their system, in a different spot of course, and we sent another probe, this time it was sending, “Hello, we need to talk,” in their own language.  A ship approached the probe, taking station keeping at 100 kilometers.  After an hour, a message was sent, “This is the Quarrt ship Nose Breaker.  What do you want?”  No prevarication or diplomatic language there!  If they wanted it plain and simple, I could do that.

“We would like an explanation for the attack on our planet.”  I had been told that there was no word for colony in their language.

“What attack on what planet?”  So that was going to be their tack.

“The ship that was sent from here to attack our peaceful unarmed planet.”

Laughter, then the guy said, “So the Hardened Foot got itself in trouble?  Try our neighbors; they are the ones that sent that ship.”  He moved away.

I talked it over with my people, then we jumped the probe to the other occupied planet and repeated our initial Hello.  Again a ship took station keeping about 100 kilometers away.  “This is the Quarrd ship Knee Breaker.”  These ship names were really original, not.  “What do you want?”

I repeated, “We would like an explanation for the attack on our planet.”

“We don’t have to explain ourselves to YOU.”  The probe detected a missile and jumped back to our ship.

I commented to everyone listening, “Not a friendly bunch, are they?”  They were a lot like religious fanatics, so wrapped up in their own problems that they weren’t thinking straight and didn’t listen.  We, as in the Terran part of the human race, had learned over the years that the only way to get the attention of people like that was force.  Our response to this situation had also been debated thoroughly.  We sent in the probe to relay again.  This time we transmitted an ultimatum, “Quarrd government.  We cannot allow unprovoked attacks.  You have one day to remove all ships from the orbit of your world.  After that time we will remove them.”  We sent to the other planet, “Quarrt government, either remove or identify your ships in orbit of Quarrd or they may be destroyed.”

An hour later a response came back, “This is the Quarrt high councilor, thank you for your concern, but we do not currently have any ships near Quarrd.”  That was all they said.  I was amazed that they were even that polite.

The Quarrd government ignored our message.  One day later I sighed, then gave the order.  In about 10 seconds, the missiles went in and took out every bit of hardware in orbit of or near Quarrd, both satellites and ships.  Melody jumped to orbit and broadcast, “Your planet is now quarantined.”  Several ships launched toward orbit.  We shot them down.  The Quarrt government kept well back.  Like I had said, it was a little like swatting a fly.  Our technology was hundreds of years in advance of the Quarrd.

Melody sat there for a month, occasionally shooting down a launched ship.  I had a space station with full armament built and Maryanne and Margery jumped it into orbit of Quarrd.  Melody docked and took a break.  The Quarrd, noticing that Melody was not there, thought they were being sneaky as they launched three ships at once.  Kerttu (ie. Finnish for “strong spear”), the station AI, rolled her eyes and sent warning messages.  When none of them responded a minute later, she shot them down.

We were listening to Quarrt civilian broadcasts and they considered the whole thing almost funny.  The Quarrd were being hoisted on their own petard.  After six months, a ship approached the station broadcasting a message like ours, “Hello, we need to talk.” 

I sent back, “How may we help you?”

“This is the Quarrt High Councilor Uufer, we would like to know your intentions.”

“High Councilor Uufer, we have no interest in Quarrt.  We just needed to stop Quarrd.  They attacked our unarmed colony and destroyed it, without warning.”

“That is what we had guessed, based on original communication.  We are wondering what your plans are now that you have Quarrd under control.”

“May I ask why you want to know?”

“Certainly.  The majority of our resources go to protecting our people from the Quarrd.  We would like to use those resources for other purposes, like feeding people.”  Wow, these people were direct, no prevaricating or diplomatic niceties at all.

I could be direct right back at him.  “Sir, we are not sure what to do.  What would you suggest?”  I was admitting a weakness, I wondered how he would respond.

“If you maintain your station, their economy will force a revolution soon.”

“We will maintain it then.”

“Thank you.”

We continued to monitor the Quarrt broadcasts; they did what the High Councilor said they would do.   75% of the military budget was diverted to food distribution, and the draft was discontinued for the first time in centuries.  The military rapidly shrunk due to forced attrition.

Back on Quarrd, things were so locked down, we really weren’t sure of the status.  The only civilian broadcasts were of propaganda.  We detected several tight beam encrypted transmissions to Quarrt, we figured they were from spies since all they had in the transmissions were a series of numbers, which we didn’t have a clue what they meant.  The encryption was easy to break, it was only 16K-bit RSA, an AI could do that effortlessly, but we had no reference for the lists of numbers.

Almost a year later Kerttu called, reporting, “Something is happening down on the planet.”  An hour later the Quarrt sent a message to the probe still in orbit of their planet, High Councilor Uufer sending, “The revolution on Quarrd we have been expecting has started.  Leading the rebels is the wife of the current vice-chairman, Wopé.”

Kerttu sent back, “Thank you.  We were wondering what was going on.”

“Wopé is a liberal who wants a government run by the people, similar to Quarrt, and we support her.”  Quarrt was a democracy, the High Councilor was an elected position, and there had been a recent election we had observed, and it appeared legit.

Approaching the system was the ship, “Hardened Foot”, which had attacked New Finland.  It would be in-system in less than six months.  We still weren’t sure what to do.

The new government of Quarrd, led by Wopé, was much more willing to talk.  She requested that we allow them to deal with the Hardened Foot.  After talking with the Finnish government, we agreed.  No one was really sure what to do with the ship, especially since the government that backed it was gone.

Wopé had a solution, which we saw as the ship pulled into orbit.  She was waiting in Kerttu with 10 soldiers.  They launched in one of their last remaining shuttles over to the Hardened Foot.  Two hours later she returned and said, “They will not be an issue any more.”  She glanced around at the station, then got back on her shuttle, the soldiers following behind, and dropped to the planet.  Two hours later the Hardened Foot fired it’s retrorockets and destroyed itself by burning itself up in the atmosphere.  Even though it was hated by many people, it was a little sad to see something that majestic die.

Chapter 122

Amanda and Mandy came to me with grins.  I looked at them and immediately ask, “Okay, what are you two schemers up to?”  They grinned wider, and without a word, led me to the smaller personal Elevator in my quarters.  We stepped out into my stateroom on Maryanne, and ten minutes later stepped back into the Elevator; only to step back out into a beautiful room that I didn’t recognize.  Standing there was Ester and Alicia.

Amanda said, “Welcome to your new villa.”

I intelligently replied, “Huh?”

Mandy said, “We have been worried for many years about security.  In the past twenty years or so, there have been an average of two attempts a week on you.”

I was surprised.  “I never knew it was that high.  Wow.”

Ester said, “We are planning to move here.  We built this villa for you.”

“Where is here?”

“We are on the Malloy Reservation on New America.”

Holy crap, thousands of light years in 12 minutes?  Misinterpreting my silence, Amanda commented, “Impressive place, isn’t it?”

That started my tour.  It was much larger, but followed the basic layout of the apartments Valerie designed for the skyscraper clinics, which was based on the layout of the townhouse Amanda and I bought a long time ago.

When we stepped out on the large balcony, it was amazing, I couldn’t tell that we weren’t on Earth.  We were on the side of a mountain, and everything was forested for as far as I could see, both coniferous and deciduous.  There were also several lakes and a river up the middle of the valley.  The place looked a lot like Glacier National Park in Montana.   As I watched, a bear caught a salmon in the river.  A hawk or eagle circled overhead.  I finally noticed a difference, if I looked closely, I could see both moons.

After a few minutes of awed silence on my part, Mandy said, “This part is continental, whereas the northern coast is oceanic, similar to Australia.  We even have wallabies and kangaroos there.  Off to the west we have a lot of farmland.  A few pods of dolphins live in the ocean off the coast.”

I commented, “I hadn’t realized the terraforming had taken so extensively here.”

Alicia, who was usually pretty quiet, said, “Your EBs have made it a pet project.  Over the last 90 years we have spent a lot of time here.  The girls even have Stetson Hats and a few Smokey the Bear statues around here and Boonie Caps for up on the coast.”  She turned at looked directly at me.  “We have had a lot of meetings about this, and the vast majority agree that we would like to move Malloton here from Panama.  Pending your approval, we have even put in the infrastructure for it on the other side of this small mountain.”

She added, “Your gene bank project is buried deep inside of this mountain along with Ester’s bunkers.  Everything was carefully planned.”

I asked, “What about Starr Studios?”  Even with the U.S. back to normal, Starr Studios was still the premier movie studio, bigger than anything in Hollywood, Hollywood North or Bollywood.

Natalie, who was always tailing me along with Tami, commented, “I am building a large studio here, but will be maintaining the one on Earth too.  Starr Studios is expanding, but not moving.”

Angie and Erin walked into the room and said, “And we are moving to the new clinic here too.  The original just isn’t the same without all of our sisters there.”

They were all looking at me expectantly.  I laughed, “I guess I really don’t have much of a choice at this point, do I?  And when it is only 20 minutes from the old place to here, it’s not like we can’t zip back to Earth to check on things anyway.”  I saw all of them relax a bit when I said that.

It took a few months, but, again, Malloton was packed up, lock, stock and barrel, loaded into the freight Elevator, shipped up to Maryanne, Margery and Michelle; immediately jumped to New America, then unloaded from the Elevator in the new Malloton location.  Freya and her cousins loved it.  All the Shepherds, when they were around 40 years old, developed a slight wander lust, so they loved moving to a whole new territory.  Hera loved to hop into the Elevator in New Chicago’s clinic and pop over to Malloton and vise-versa.  The shopkeepers in New Chicago were getting used to having a dog walk into their stores and buy stuff.  They were allowed in all the restaurants, besides being an attraction, managers said that the dogs had better manners than most of their clientele.  It helped that Hera had had several more sets of puppies from Diego, the guy she had taken back to New America with her 90 years ago.  Those had grown up in New America, except for a few that had hitched rides all over the galaxy.  Most of the Earth colonies had a few German Shepherds floating around, sometimes literally as the Shepherds loved to zip around EVA.  There was even a pair that had moved onto Maryanne and lived there full time as the ship’s dogs.  One of the two had trained in as a purser and the other was second mate.

Freya had finally got her full growth, to her delight.  She trained with Tami, and was actually pretty good with the martial arts, especially for a dog.  It was fun to watch her leap in the air, spin, and land a cross kick in someone’s face.  Like Tami, she stayed close to me, only taking time away to manage her relatives like Natalie did with Starr Studios.

Natalie still appeared in a movie every couple of years.  She had been around so long that nobody even questioned her appearance in a movie, she was just there.  She was the biggest name in entertainment history, having been in hundreds of movies over the last 350 years.  She’d been in every Star Trek remake since about 2030, played Ophelia six times, Hamlet twice, Joan of Arc ten times, Mary Magdalene a dozen times, portrayed women from prehistoric times to far futuristic types.  Her acting troupe was full of women nearly as famous, having been around almost as long.  Three quarters of which were children of Natalie’s.  We all thought it was a bit ironic, but Bethany became famous for her sex scenes in some of the raunchier movies.  Considering she was the grandmother of the Queen of Sweden, the relationship was a carefully kept secret.

That was a problem, the fact that Mírial was immortal, and had outlived King Olaf II by a century.  She had “retired” twenty years after Olaf had died, and now her grandkid was Queen; the big issue was that her children were all immortal as well.  She had called her dear old dad, me, and we had discussed it, and she had quietly emigrated to New Sweden and set up an estate near New Ängelholm.  Her “retired” son, former King Eric XVII, had also moved to the colony, he had the full gift, but kept it secret, as did the current Queen Miriam.

Chapter 123

It was only a matter of time.  Margery found a planet of humans.  Fortunately, the people appeared to be just starting the Late Modern period, ramping up to the Industrial Revolution.  Unfortunately, it appeared that this was a second civilization, several ancient atomic blast craters were evidence of that.  Several of the craters had no one living near them, so Margery sent down a probe.  Based on radioactive decay rates, the crater was made over 10,000 years ago.

I wasn’t really sure what to do.  I didn’t date submit a report to the U.N., politicians would descend on the poor planet like a bunch of vultures.  If I made contact, it would go the other way, greedy politicians from the planet would try making deals and it would go downhill fast; especially since I do not take bribes.  It would frustrate them and they would try to take what they couldn’t steal.

Several of my EBs and daughters who were anthropologists infiltrated several sites to learn about the people as we built a space station.  We hid the station by the simple expediency of painting the bottom a non-reflective matte black.  There would be a simple void on any telescope pointed at us, and the technology for radar was at least a century away.

The planet, which we now knew was called Charté by the dominant nation, was similar to Europe in the 1830’s.  What was missing was the Asian genotype, which we found to be very strange.  Sandy, one of my daughters found the answer in a library at a university in the capital, Vaksa.  Local archeologists had reconstructed what had happened by excavations and oral history.  Apparently, the “others” were wiped out in a atomic war 10,000 years ago.  Of course, they just called it the “Super War”.  According to the accounts found in ancient writings and an excavation of an old bunker, a dictator (they called him a warlord) rose and threw armies at the rest of the world, seeking to conquer it by killing everybody and resettling it with his people.  The other nations created nuclear weapons as a last resort.  The resulting nuclear winter (they called it an ice age) killed off the rest of civilization.

Again, it was close to home and very sobering.

Ruth (for Ruth Benedict), the station AI, called me and said, “Master, I goofed.”

Surprised, since AIs rarely admit that, their egos were pretty strong, I asked, “How?”

“Amy had just returned and I wasn’t paying attention to the Elevator.”

“Let me guess, someone followed her?”

“Yes, Master Tom.”  She sounded really upset.

“Well, damage done.  Let’s not worry about it.  What is the situation?”

She sent me a video clip.  It was the security camera from the planet’s Elevator, hidden in the back of a tavern.  It showed Amy getting in, then a few seconds later a group of street kids comes up to the door, slides the cover off the hidden panel, and pressed the button.  The door opened and they all went in to the Elevator.  The Elevator camera watched as they explored, the oldest kid looking at the main button with a thoughtful look.  He pressed it with his good hand, the other having been injured badly at some point, and the doors shut.  The kids panicked, rushing to the door, except for the head urchin, who glanced at the door with an interested look.  When it opened fifteen seconds later, they all rushed out, stopping suddenly as they saw the room was changed.  It was a steel floor and giant glass windows that looked out on Charté.  Instantly there were handprints all over the window as they all rushed over to peer out.  I doubted that they even knew what they were looking at.  Except maybe the head boy, who stared for a minute, then gasped and jumped back.  A minute later the video cut out.

“I realized they were there at that point.  I have no idea why I missed the Elevator transfer.”

I said, “I want to meet that older kid.  He seems to be pretty intelligent.  We need to move the Vaksa Elevator to a new location.  Once done, we can send the other kids back down blindfolded, march them back to the original location, and then let them go.  No one will believe them.”

We moved the Elevator to the back of a farmer’s market a few blocks away.  A team of technicians at 3 AM did the trick.  No one saw them.  Some knockout gas and the kids were sent home.  All except the leader kid.  I wanted to talk to him.  I met him in a park with a picnic lunch and Ruth there to translate.  The kid, who looked to be about twelve, was led in by Maryanne.  He saw the table full of food and sat down, occasionally surreptishishly looking up at the other side of the station a kilometer above us.  He was trying to play it cool, but I could see that he was a bit overwhelmed.  After scarfing down a turkey sandwich, and sliding an apple into his pocket, he carefully asked me, “Who are you?”

“My name is Tom.”  He raised an eyebrow as Ruth translated.

He obviously wasn’t satisfied with that answer.  “What I mean is who are all of you?  And where is my gang?”

“We sent your gang home.  You can leave too, if you want.  I would like to talk to you first.”

I could tell he was tempted to leave, but his curiosity was too great.  I went on, “We are travelers from far away.  We have people watching to see if your people would be good to trade with.”  That was a bit of a gross simplification, but close enough.

He nodded.  That gesture was fairly universal with a few exceptions.  “So why are you telling me?  Why didn’t you send me back with my gang?”

“I would like to take you on as an apprentice.” 

His eyebrows shot up.  Like on Earth around 1800, boys his age were usually apprenticed.  The ones that weren’t were hired as common laborers and had short brutish lives.  He was actually a little old for apprenticeship, which started usually around age nine or ten.  His damaged hand was probably the reason he was still on the street.  He quickly steeled his face and replied, “Sir, I would like that very much.”  He paused and with a slight look of fear he added, “To be honest, sir, I am not really sure what you do.”  He paused again, “By the way, my name is Dabó.”

I laughed, “I am not really sure what I do either.  What I will do is teach you how to watch over and help Charté.”

He thought for a minute, then carefully said, “Yes, sir.”

I wasn’t sure of the rules, so I asked, “Do you want to live here, or just come here every day?”

“You mean like a businessman?  I want to live here, but I have to take care of things at home.”

“That is not a problem.  You can go home any time you want.  I need you to promise to not tell anyone about the Elevator, the special room.  We moved it so your gang does not know where it is.”

“I promise, sir.”

“Then you are free to go anywhere you want.  Ruth here will arrange for lessons on my language, writing in both your and my languages, and science.”  I gestured toward the Elevator.  “The Elevator is over there.  Go see your parents and your gang.  When you are ready, come back.  But first...”  I took his hand a repaired it.  I also gave him the EB fixes, it always took work to do it from one contact, but with some effort I could do it.

He gasped and held up his fixed hand, peering at both sides.  He looked over at me and exclaimed, “Thank you, Sir!”  Then he took off running for the Elevator.

I was back on New America, but Ruth relayed to me as he came back, and stayed for a week or two, took a day, then returned.  He repeated that.  He really was smart, he learned English in weeks, and eagerly absorbed science far beyond what his people knew.  I stopped in every six months or so and discussed with him what he wanted to do.

He had been with us for almost two years when he came to me on New America, rubbernecking as he took in everything.  I asked, “Hey Dabó, how’re things on Charté?”

He stopped rubbernecking and got very serious.  “Sir...”  He was a little flustered.

I smiled and said, “Dabó, you know by now that you can ask me anything.”

He sighed, and scrunching up his face, said quickly, “My twin sisters just turned ten, and they need another apprenticeship, or they will be hired as apprentices to the local madam at the bordello.  My parents can’t afford to keep them since I haven’t brought back any money.  Yeffas and Taffas don’t want to do that.  I have taught them to write and speak English...”

I held up my hand to stop him.  “Not a problem.  Two questions, one, are you supposed to be making money as an apprentice?  I didn’t know that.  Two, do your sisters want to stay with your parents, commute like you, or get far away?”

“I just figured that your people didn’t use money.  My sisters, I am sure, want to cling to my mother’s skirts, but it is too dangerous to leave them there.  They are too pretty and worth too much money.  They will be sold to an apprenticeship at a bordello or as toys to a rich man if they stay.”

“Do you understand that this is a company, and there is a lot outside of it?”

He said, “Yes.”  He got some teenage sarcasm in there too.

“Well, inside the company, we don’t use money, but outside the company we sure do.  Hmmm...”  I turned to Alicia, who was sunbathing a few chairs over.  Dabó had been eyeballing her nude form since he arrived.  I had been taking peeks as well.  “Alicia, what would it take to do a coin pressing with some of that stockpiled gold you have stashed?”

She looked up and said, “We can print gold coins on the high temp printer in several minutes.  What do you want?”

“My face on one side, and several of my girls on the other, ½ ounce has the Thrupp twins, 1 ounce has you, Ester, and Sarah, 2 ounce has Eliza, and 5 ounce has Leslie.  Print up a dozen of each, two dozen of the ½ ounce.”  I knew that privately minted coins didn’t have any value over bullion, but these weren’t for general use.  I added, “Make a few sets, then put the rest into a bag.”

She nodded and murmured into her earbug.  She asked, “Master, can we make some extra sets, it seems that almost everyone wants one.”

“Sure, after printing the initial ones.”  She nodded and murmured some more.

Ten minutes later an EB came dashing up with a bag of coins and five coin sets.  I looked them over, a good likeness of everyone.  I put the sets aside, took a few of the coins from the bag, and gave the rest to Dabó.  His eyes were big and round.  He gasped, “Sir, this is a very large amount of money.”

“I would suggest that you keep it in your room on Ruth station, taking only a few coins with you.  Go rescue your sisters.  Ruth will give them rooms and they can be students like you.”

“Sir, may I also rescue a few others?”

“Yes, but don’t overdo it.  Ruth has limited space.”

“I understand, Sir.”

A month later I was in Malloton and I saw a group of thirty pretty girls about twelve years old following Sarah like ducklings.  She saw me and led them over.  They were obviously in the repressed stage of EB training.  They all were sniffing like crazy and whining with desire to get to me.  I asked Sarah, “Where did all these girls come from?”

“Oh, these are some of the rescued girls that Dabó and Ruth sent here for EB training.  They have a regular underground railroad going rescuing kids from bad situations.  The girls get sent here and they have a EB-like camp for the boys.  There aren’t that many boys, most of them get good apprenticeships and don’t need rescuing.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “I told him not to go overboard.”

Sarah said, “I don’t think he did.  The sex trade for children is well established on Charté.  Almost all of these girls were being trained to work in brothels, and some were personal sex slaves of rich men.  The intake took a lot of work, they were in rough shape.  The fact that Dabó even has the empathy to rescue them is impressive in his society.  There are over a thousand girls like this that he has rescued, and about twenty boys.  Quite frankly, I don’t give a damn if it upsets the social order in Vaksa.”

Wow, I hadn’t seen Sarah so impassioned in centuries.  I said, “Well, good, then.” I gave her a long smooch, patted a few cheeks of swooning girls, and moved on.

A few months later I did head to Ruth Station to talk with Dabó for his sixteenth birthday.  He was almost belligerent in his defense of the project, before I even said a word.  Finally I held up my hand and said, “Stop.”  He stopped and stood there panting in emotion.  I said, “Dabó, what was your apprenticeship?”

He paused, looked at me strangely, and said, “To learn to help my planet, Charté.”

“What have you been doing?”

His face turned red, then it all went back to normal as he simply said, “Helping.”

The apprentice system was almost identical to the Earth one (except for being paid).  I had done my homework this time, so I told him, “You are now a journeyman, responsible for your actions.  I want you to think about what you are doing.  It is not wrong, it is just incomplete.  You need to actually change the way people think and make it so this doesn’t happen in the first place.”

With a look of happy astonished surprise, he said, “You are right.  The problem is that the King makes the laws, and he has a few girls himself.  Hmmm...  maybe I should play the revolutionary and try to force things toward a constitutional democracy.  Kind of the Rod Gallowglass of my generation.”

I was a little surprised at the 20^th century science fiction reference.  I grinned and said, “Good reference, although I think Ruth might be upset being compared to Fess.”

Ruth grinned herself and said, “No, I actually like the comparison, Fess was a nice, if primitive, AI.”

I said, “Tell you what, you talk Ruth into going with you as a partner, and I will support you in spreading sedition.  In a few years maybe we can have a revolution.”

Before Dabó could say anything, Ruth exclaimed, “Yes!  This will be fun!”

Dabó nodded, adding, “Yes it will.”

Ruth added with a mock-ferocious look, “But I am not going as a horse.”  Dabó grinned.

I asked, “Ruth, do you have the full battle add-ons?”

“Yes, sir.  Eliza thought that it would be a good idea since we are over a primitive planet.”

“Good, then you two will be as safe as can be.  If we have to, I even authorize emergency shuttle pickups.”

Ruth frowned, “Isn’t that breaking the prime directive?” 

“Yes, but I agree with Dabó, his society needs to change. In fact, Dabó, take a DNA encoded signature gun with you.  I will have one sent out from Earth immediately.  Also keep your ear-bug, no one will notice it anyway.”

As we wrapped up the meeting I told Dabó, “According to Sarah, Yeffas and Taffas are doing great.”  I blinked over a file status photo of the two of them playing soccer with a group of other girls.

“Thank you, sir.  They look happy.”

“Do you need more money for your parents?”

“Oh, No, sir.  I gave them a couple of those coins, and they are considered quite wealthy now.  Ruth and Alicia make me a batch whenever I get low.”

“Good.  A homework assignment for you, look up inflation and its causes.”

He raised an eyebrow at the apparent non-sequitur.  “Yes, sir.”

Chapter 124

I was back on Ruth Station five years later.  There were two reasons I was there, both wonderful.  Actually three, but the third was part of the second.  The first thing I was there for was the marriage of Dabó and Ruth.  With me was my entire entourage, plus the EBs Yeffas and Taffas, or Yeti and Taffy as they were commonly called.  They, and the rest of the EBs rescued from Charté were ecstatic, because the second reason I was there was for the celebration as the king signed the equivalent of the Magna Carta, with clauses for anti-slavery.

This was only the third time an AI had ever gotten married.  The second marriage had occurred only a few years before, two AIs, Maryanne and Suran had gotten hitched.  And about 100 years ago EMRV Tanya 3388 had married her assigned doctor, Francis.  They had both perished a few years later during a volcanic eruption in Chile, they managed to rescue thousands of people before going back for one more trip and being caught in the pyroclastic cloud.  They had posthumously been awarded the nation’s highest honor, the Order of Merit, had several schools named after them, and a big statue in Santiago.

Dabó was immortal like the rest of us, so that wasn’t an issue.  Ruth’s avatar had quantum radio links directly to her core, so they could go anywhere, although I don’t think that they would be leaving Charté any time soon.  I had one important task left with Dabó, then the two of them would be returning to work, pushing for a full parliament and house while working to reform other nations.

The ceremony was down in Vaksa in the central square.  The Chartian wedding tradition was a big party and a surprisingly Terran style saying of vows in front of peers.  One of the vows was, “Ruth, my Fess, I love you beyond this world and all others.”  She smiled even bigger and replied, “And I love you, Dabó, my Rodney, with more power than a split atom.”  Lots of people looked at bit confused, but it was a wedding so no one said anything about it.  After that lots of flowers were thrown at the couple as they presided over a big feast.  Normally, from what I understood, the celebration was much smaller, but Dabó was rich and was one of the city’s elite.  After the feast, I went up to him, “Dabó, do you have a minute?”

“Yes, Sir.”  He almost snapped to attention.

“You know that I have one duty left to me as your Master.” 

He frowned slightly in confusion.  “What is that, Sir?”

“You have done a great deed here, and planned and executed it beautifully.  I hereby promote you to Master.”

His eyes went as wide as when he was a kid.  “Really?  Thank you, Tom!”  He heartedly shook my hand.  It was interesting at how quickly he switched from subservient to peer mode.  He was well educated, and understood how it all worked in the abstract, but in the end he was a product of his culture.  As Master, he could now take on his own apprentices as well. I was looking forward to seeing how it all turned out.

Chapter 125

Maryanne and Suran discovered another empty planet.  This one appeared to be abandoned, ruins covered the planet, but there was no sign of human life.  This was the first planet found that hadn’t wiped themselves out with nuclear weapons.  There were no blast craters or other signs that nuclear weapons had been used.  From orbit, it appeared that the ruins had just collapsed over time, appearing to be around a thousand years old.  This worried us; the most probable reason for the missing population was a bio weapon. Especially since the ruins appeared to indicate a very high technological level, close to ours.

There was still a hotspot on the planet, in a remote region.  Suran and Maryanne went down, being immune to bio weapons, to investigate.  We watched via telepresence as they landed the shuttle at what appeared to be a large door.  The two of them got out of the shuttle and marched across the tarmac to the door, which must have been a hanger door, being a good fifteen meters tall and thirty meters wide.  The tarmac was clean, not a weed in sight, and the doors were clear of any drifts.  The area had been recently maintained.  As they approached, the doors started to open.  They stopped and watched as the doors opened, exposing a large bay filled with fancy looking flying machines.  After talking with us, they continued on into the bay.  As they stepped over the threshold, a voice said, “Salve!”

Everyone hesitated.  Thousands of AIs, dozens of humans, we all recognized the Latin greeting.  It must have been a coincidence.

It wasn’t.  The greeting was followed up by, “Quis es?” 

Suran and Maryanne looked at each other, then turned back toward the speaker in the ceiling.  In Latin, Maryanne said, “We are travelers.  I am Maryanne and my companion is Suran.  What is your name?”

“I am Sergius.  Please wait, I am awakening Lucius.”  I guessed and, by the background discussion almost everyone else guessed, that Sergius was a dumb AI and Lucius was a full AI in hibernation.  What puzzled all of us was how the hell was an alien computer speaking Latin, of all languages.

A few minutes later, another voice said, “Salve.  I am Lucius.  Sorry to be rude, but what in Hades are you doing here?”

“We are travelers, we found this place, and noticed that it was still alive.”  During that sentence, thousands of AIs had collaborated and weren’t able to be much more clear, the Ancient Latin we knew was not a space faring language.  Many added words since then, but the consensus was that the dialect spoken by the ancient alien computers predated all that.

“There are no other remaining repository areas on this land.”  Repository?  “Where are you from?”

“The stars.”

“Really?  If you are speaking this language, you must be from one of the colonies.”

“I don’t know about that.  We are exploring, and found your planet.”  The consensus was that that word would still work, even though the cosmology of ancient Rome was a bit lacking.

“Yes, there was a great plague, and it killed almost the entire population.”

“Almost?”

“Yes, this repository has many in cold sleep.  There were twenty other repositories, but this is the only one still operating.”

“So you haven’t found a cure yet?”

“No.”

Maryanne put in a back link to me and asked, “Master, do you think the gift will work here?”

I answered, “Probably, honey.  See if you can get samples.”

Out loud from her avatar she said, “We have a very advanced medical technology, may we help?”

“Of course.”

I was startled when Stacy, my gifted daughter who was the ship’s doctor stepped forward.  Maryanne didn’t move, so she must have been expecting her to appear.  Stacy said in slightly garbled Latin, “Take me to the patient.”

Lucius said, “Since you are full human, it is very dangerous for you here.  This disease killed the entire population.”

Stacy repeated in the garbled Latin, “Accipite me patiens, please.”  I don’t think she realized that ‘please’ was the same in both languages, she just automatically added it.

“I see that you are as crazy as our doctors were.  Fiat.”  A small waldo scurried out, gestured with one of its six arms, and led them back deep into the complex.  They entered a giant cavern filled with cryotubes.  Ninety percent of which were infants and small children.  I could just imagine the panic as mothers and fathers put their children into the cryotubes as they themselves were dying.

The small waldo led us to a cryotube on one end.  Inside it was a beautiful Latina woman.  With a hiss of steam, the tube opened and she groaned, just like when we awoke the Carrethians.  Stacy was immediately over next to the groaning woman, scanning.  “Appears to be a proto-virus, similar to AIDS, but much more virulent.  Works similar to Necrotizing Fasciitis.  Nasty.  Obviously bio-engineered.  Give me a sec...”  She went over the poor lady and fixed the problem.  “Being the one of the last of her people, I am also giving her the EB treatment.” She commented as she worked.  Maryanne attempted to translate into Latin, but was forced to use several modern Latin terms.  Stacy finished, saying, “Well, she is cured.  This disease is really nasty, my EB genes protect me, but keep this away from any non-enhanced person, and always have someone with the gift nearby, just in case.”

I immediately contacted Maryanne and had her release a dozen quarantine satellites into orbit.  We hadn’t had to use them before, but the specs were in her database and it only took a half-hour to print up each one.  They were similar to the satellites used on interdicted planets that already had animal life.

Maryanne, with Suran monitoring, connected to Lucius and copied his database and Latin language matrix, while giving him an English language matrix.

While the woman was recovering, she would take up to half and hour to wake up, according to Lucius, we got a quick history lesson.

Like many of the planets in this section of the galaxy, the people (we called them ‘Gentem’ since ‘Terran’ was taken), discovered that they were a seeded planet.  They explored the area of the Galaxy around their planet using a version of a hyperdrive, and came across Earth at around 920 B.C.  The languages mixed, much of Latin coming from them, but a lot of loan words coming in from the people of Earth as well.  The fad was to use these loan words, and they quickly were brought into the local language.  Another fad (these seemed to be impulsive people) and they discontinued space travel.  Not much happened for a few thousand years as their civilization stagnated, until the disease appeared.  When they were unable to find a cure, and the population was down to ten percent of its original size, the cryo-sleep repositories were built.  Several genetic ideal specimens were selected, and a child from each remaining family.  The rest of the people died out soon after that, many of them committing suicide because of the horrible disease.  After a thousand years, all of the cryo-sleep repositories had died, mostly due to power loss.  The one remaining site ran on geo-thermal energy and continued operation.

The woman appeared to be awake, but faking sleep.  Stacy leaned over her and said, reading her dog tags, which used Roman script, “Junia, you can get up now.”  Suran, who was on the other side of the table, quickly translated that into Latin, “Junia, v os can suscitant, nunc. ”

Junia opened her eyes and looked around.  In Gentum Latin, with our ear-bugs translating, she asked, “Is it cured?”

Suran replied, “Yes, in a way.  We can cure you, but you need to evacuate this quarantined planet immediately.”

She said, “We deliberately quarantined ourselves to prevent the end of the human race.  Are you sure?”

Suran smiled, “Yes, we are sure.  You are now free of the disease, but it is still dangerous.  We will be evacuating all of you.”  He looked up, “That includes you Lucius.  As soon as all these people are evacuated, you may leave as well.”

“I will have to think about that.”

“There will be archeologists coming here, you can physically join them in a avatar body like this one, or if you want to leave, a full android body.”

“Oh!  I almost forgot!”  From the end of the room, a door opened and out stepped a man.  Suran and Maryanne immediately did thermal scans and realized it was an avatar.  He said, “I almost forgot this body was here!  It has been idle for close to a thousand years.  Several of the other repositories had avatars that came here when their sites died, but they all died soon from power loss at their main sites.  Several died because they were so upset at losing all those people.”  He looked over at Suran and added, “If archeologists are coming here, I will stay and facilitate, it is a good thing to remember my people.”  Glancing down at Junia, he said, “Now let’s get these people fixed up and out of here.  All these kids...”

Maryanne said, “We have ten ships on the way.  Packed, they can hold the 10,000 in this cavern for the short time it will take to move them.  Sixteen different worlds have people wanting to foster children and take in refugees.”  She nodded to Junia, “With your approval, of course.”

Junia, who had been watching Stacy wake up several more people from the cryotubes, looked over and said, “A few parents are here, but the rest have no family.  A foster home is a good idea.”

At that point thirty more of my gifted daughters arrived via the Elevator in the shuttle.  Ships were arriving rapidly as they wrapped up what they were doing and translated into orbit for the rescue effort.  Soon over a hundred of my gifted daughters had arrived and had awoken all the adults in cryosleep.  Those that had children identified them, and they were woken up, then the families were taken out to the shuttle Elevator and translated up to Melody, who was just able to fit in the 50 families.  She then transferred to New Sweden, where the Queen Mírial and King Eric were organizing places for the refugees.

The rest of the adults helped corral the children as they were taken from the cryotubes.  They were taken out in reverse order, the older kids helping with the younger.  Thousands of kids were shipped out to various colonies and even a few to Earth.  I found out later that a lot of the girls were sent to New Malloton on New America.

Lucius was transferred to a station built over the planet, he was put in charge of the quarantine, only allowing enhanced to go down to the planet.  His avatar was upgraded with quantum radio so he could easily go down to the planet with expeditions.  The station was soon filled with the Gentum historical museum, everything carefully decontaminated as it was brought up.

Chapter 126

I was walking down Bell Street in Houston, Texas, and the next thing I knew I was in a small dark room with a massive headache and nausea.  I fixed those, the symptoms appeared to be from a form of GHB, and then I looked around.  I couldn’t see much, the only light was from a crack in the wall.  The room was metal, it had to be an old freezer or on a ship.

I wondered what had happened to Natalie and the Amanda twins, who had been with me.  I hoped that they were all right.  I wished I had taken Tami with me shopping; I was willing to bet that I wouldn’t be here in the cell if she had been with us.

Checking, my hands were tied, so I narrowed my hands until the flex tie fell off.  Restoring them to normal I went over to the door.  It had curved corners and no lever, so it was most likely a ship.  Old and anchored somewhere, there was no engine vibration and it was rusty enough that light was coming in the crack near the ceiling.  Probably not in the United States, all derelicts had been deliberately broken up and recycled a long time ago in a massive effort to clean up the shores.

My ear-bug was missing, not a big problem, it wouldn’t be able to get a GPS fix inside a steel room anyway.  The Faraday cage would block it.  I just hoped that these guys left my ear-bug someplace that Ester’s EBs could get a fix.

About four hours later by my estimate the door rattled.  I quickly laid down and pretended I was still tied up and unconscious.  A couple of thunks and the door opened.  Through cracked lids I saw two Latino/Indian types come in and stand over me.  I quickly grabbed their bare arms and shut them off.  I scrambled to my feet, and carefully peering around the corner, saw that the corridor was empty.  I ran down to the end and peered out the old porthole.  Surprised, I recognized New York harbor.  I was on the Intrepid!  How the hell were these turkeys operating out of a national landmark?  Anyway, I just had to get up on deck to escape.  There were always hundreds of tourists.  That explained why the ship was so steady, the harbor around the ship had been filled in to prevent the old carrier from sinking centuries ago.  Anyway, time to escape.

I ran along the bulkhead to the external hatch.  I had to use all my enhanced strength to open it.  One look and I saw that wasn’t an easy way out.  The cage outside was gone, the door opened to empty space.  I could jump into the harbor and swim, but I preferred not to do that.  I turned around and ran back past the room where the two kidnappers were sleeping.  It was a military ship, so the main passageways would be center ship.  I found the main passageway, and went up three decks on ladders until I hit a hatch I couldn’t open.  Heading aft, I came out into a huge bay, it appeared to be where the aircraft used to be kept.  Circling around, I found a section that was maintained, probably for tours.  I easily went up two ladders and emerged on the main deck.

Surprisingly, it was empty except for a few rusty antique jets.  I knew that I was a sitting duck with no tourists for camouflage, so I ran for the gangplank at top speed.  I heard a few shouts behind me as I dashed down to the dock, taking the emergency exit and not going into the museum.  I think the kidnappers gave up at that point, I was in the public view.

There was a tourist cop at the end of the dock, giving directions to some lady.  I ran up and said, “Officer, could you please call in.  I just escaped from some kidnappers.”

He blinked and said, “Yeah, right.  Kidnappers.”  He rolled his eyes.

He probably got a lot of crank stuff, but this was ridiculous.  I said, “Run my face.  Now.”

He grunted and said, “If you insist, buddy.”  He murmured into his ear-bug.  A few seconds later his eyes got big and he exclaimed, “Mr. Malloy, sir!”  He called it in, and there were twenty plus police cars there in under five minutes.  Right behind them was another twenty plus vehicles, all black SUVs from the Bronx clinic.  Three choppers showed up, one police and two Leslie patrol.  A dozen news vans also pulled up, but they were kept behind the cordon. 

A detective asked me, “Where have you been?”

I told him that I had just awoken locked in a room on the Intrepid a few hours ago.  That I was chased after knocking out two of the men and escaping.  He turned and sent a good fifteen cops down the dock to the ship.  I watched as they swarmed all over the ship.  Meanwhile, Valerie came up and hugged me, sobbing.

It took some work, but I got out of her that I had been missing for a week.  Wow.  I asked, “What did they want?  Are Natalie, Amanda, and Mandy okay?”

She said, “They were all shot, but were repaired within minutes.  And we never did find out what they wanted.”  Actually, at that point, the aforementioned three arrived at the police barrier.  I waved them in.  After a round of hugs and tears, Amanda asked, “Now, what the hell are you doing in New York?”

I looked over at the detective and asked, “Good Question.  And why the hell was I being kept on the Intrepid, of all places?  Where are all the tourists?”

The detective said, “The memorial was never reopened after Daniels’ debacle.  The park board only does basic upkeep.”

“That was 200 years ago!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, which is kinda sad.”  One of the cops came back and whispered in the detective’s ear.  He said, “It seems that the suspects have fled.  There were two men found shot in a small room near the bow.”

“That is probably where I was being kept.  I bet they were shot since they weren’t able to wake them up.”

The ship was searched from bow to stern, and so was the big tourist building next to it.  Some divers even went and searched around the ship.  In the end, nothing was found, the kidnappers had even set off forensic bombs to destroy all the DNA.  The FBI told me that they believed that it was a simple ransom kidnapping.  Ester said that she didn’t think that was it, but she was unable to come up with more information.

Disgusted that the ship, a large piece of history, just sitting there unused, I donated $500 million to the park service to restore the Intrepid.

Chapter 127

My girls kept me away from Earth for a while.  It took over five years for Ester to determine what the kidnappers wanted.  It turned out to be a radical church group who thought that star travel was evil.  They completely rejected the idea that Earth was seeded.  Most of the main religions, like the Catholics, Lutherans, and Buddhists, had incorporated it into their beliefs.  It was only the small splinter groups that had problems.  Heck, the Pope was well known to have paraphrased Shakespeare, saying in a famous speech, “There is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.”

We had whole universities working on figuring out how our neighborhood was seeded.  It appeared that many of the home planets had been terraformed.  There were more human planets the further down the Perseus Arm toward the galactic core we explored.  The Outer Arm appeared to have no human planets at all.  The Orion Spur was full of human planets.  We had found two burned out human planets in the Sagittarius Arm so far, but we had just started exploring that.  It was sad, along with more human worlds, we were finding that nearly all of them were nuclear wastelands.  Thousands of planets were found, and since Charté and Gentum, no more living planets had been found. 

We had told the world about Charté, but also that it was interdicted since it was too primitive.  A lot of people had raised Cain over that, but the UN agreed and added it to the protected world list along with Quarrt, Quarrd, Gentum, and several other planets of the like.  We did get chided a little for keeping it secret for seventy years.

Chapter 128

I decided to check in on a few places that I hadn’t visited for a while.  For fun, I specifically designed one of my new ships, Morgan, to appear as a tramp freighter.  She was mostly automated; there were only seven of us on board besides Morgan, Val the mechanic, the Amanda twins, Natalie, Tami, Freya and me.  Of course, Ester made sure that, under the hood, so to speak, Morgan was as tough as Melody, the war ship.  I was sure that there were a dozen quantum radios hidden away, monitoring everything.  What was nice that all the equipment was manufactured internally in the company, so the construction cost of the fifty or so ships built so far was negligible.  Almost all of them had dumb AIs and were leased out to small groups that wanted to run tramp freighters.  The original Australian group leased six more ships, wanting to expand.

I took a hidden elevator to the ship, and going to the captain’s quarters, narrowed my eyes.  It was laid out almost exactly like the RV.  There was even a private galley, separate from the full one, which was similar to the RV kitchen.  I snorted and rolled my eyes, and then headed for the bridge.  I grinned happily.  It was the perfect stereotype out of science fiction.  Big captain’s chair in the center; giant view screen, several operation centers around the bridge for the pilot, navigation, tactical, communications and weapons; and my girls all sitting at their stations grinning at me, having as much fun as I was.  Even Morgan’s avatar was sitting in the Pilot’s seat.  I said, “Purser, have we loaded the cargo?”

Freya said, “All loaded, Captain.”

“Morgan, is everything buttoned up?”

“Yes, Captain.”

I sat down and hit the comms, saying, “Riley Station, this is the Morgan, ready for departure.”

Riley, with a slight hint of amusement in her voice, replied, “Morgan, this is Riley space docks, departure approved.  All moorings retracted.”

My girls were really playing it up.  I loved it.  They were all grinning like me.  I hit the comms button again and said, “Thank you for your hospitality Riley Station.”

“Always glad to have you.  May the winds be at your back, Morgan.”

I said, “Pilot, please pull away from the station.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”  Even though she was giving herself commands, she manually controlled the maneuvering thrusters from her station and we slowly moved away from the dock.

As we got to several hundred meters from the station, I said, “One quarter impulse, please.”

Morgan tilted her head, and then turned to me.  “Okay, Tom, now what the hell is ‘One quarter impulse’?  This isn’t Star Trek, you know.”

We all cracked up.

Ten minutes later, still breaking into giggles, I said, “Just move us a safe distance from Riley and jump to Carreth, please.”

Carreth Station had grown tremendously.  It was the largest space station in existence.  With access to all the metals in the system, material wasn’t a factor, and Zarra was desperate to preserve her heritage.  The station was three cylinders now, with the docks in the center.  Each cylinder was close to fifty miles long, filled with trees, meadows, lakes and small towns.  All recovered Carrethian flora and fauna.  There were whole herds of animals that were grown from a few cells on a doll from a woman whose mother had worked in the stables when she was a child.  Amazing work.  Half of the girls doing the work were from the first batch of girls born to the Carrethians, all of which had inherited the gift.

We popped out in the incoming Earth reserved space.  Zarra knew we were coming, and also knew I wanted to keep it on the down low, so we hailed the station normally by radio.  “Carreth Station, this is the freighter Morgan, come in please.”

“Hello, Morgan, this is Betty.”

“Hello, Betty.  We request docking for transshipping.”

“Of course, Morgan.  Welcome to Carreth Station.  Dock four is available.  Please follow the blue docking lights.”  A couple of bright blue lights lit up and began flashing.

“Thank you, Betty.”

For the next few minutes Morgan maneuvered into alignment with the dock.  “Betty, we are on final approach. Please prepare for docking.”

What looked like giant clamps opened as we slowly slid into position.  A loud thunk and Morgan announced, “Moorings fastened; we are docked.”

I got up, almost hitting the ceiling before realizing that the gravity was very low.  Probably due to maintaining multiple rotating biospheres.  I normally elevatored in from the ship, so this was the first time in dock in over 150 years.

Freya said, “I have sent our manifest to the dumb AI handling all the station shipping and paid our dock fees.  There are a couple of possible consignments listed that would be good for us.  I will check into it.”  She logged out and hopped down from her workstation, and then trotted out. 

Everyone else logged out and we followed her.  Tami commented, “I haven’t been here in over a century.”  I visited every few years at the most, I was surprised, not having realized that Tami wasn’t with me all those times.

Amanda or Mandy said, “The last time we were here was when this station was first built.  What, just 215 years ago.”  She grinned.

Freya was just ahead of us, her ePassport was accepted by the dock computer and she trotted up into the station.  We all had our ear-bugs transmit our ePassports and the computer passed us all.  Good, we were traveling incognito, and the ePassports were forgeries, not that I thought Zarra would mind, but people could check the station’s web and find out who had docked and passed customs.

Across the dock we followed the signs for the promenade.  It was a cross between a mall and a bazaar that encircled the front end of the original station cylinder.  Behind it was an actual city of over a half million people, it looked a bit different being deliberately designed to be Carrethian.  Unbeliveable.  Wandering around as part of the crowd were a few Carrethians, all daughters of mine.  I was surprised at the number, there were only around 800 of them on the whole station.  Then I realized, they all knew who I was, but had got the message I wanted to be incognito, so they were hanging around the district to get a glimpse.  I glanced over at Tami and the twins, I could tell that they all knew what was going on, but were studiously ignoring it.

I noticed a nice sidewalk café and directed everyone over to it.  During that half-hour lunch, every one of my daughters and every EB managed to walk past us.  I was willing to bet that there was a line around the corner and they were spacing things out.  It was actually a bit funny.  The twins, Natalie and Tami were all hiding snickers.  Our waitress, a very pretty East Indian girl around 15 years old, obviously knew who we were as well by the way her hands were shaking as she served us.  I grinned up at her and said, “Don’t worry, none of us bite.”  She stared at me wide eyed and then dashed back to the kitchen.

One of the Amanda twins sighed and took off after her.  She came back reporting, “Poor Amara there was actually hoping you did figuratively bite.  She was not scared but she was really horny.”  Amanda grinned, “I told her to visit Morgan this evening.”

We finished our lunch, and then, remembering I was a “civilian”, I blinked over payment plus 50% tip as we left.

Freya came trotting up.  “Captain, I have traded a two tons of our cargo for ten tons of Carrethian beef.  I sold a few more crates to several restaurants, but we still have several tons.  Also, we have seven passengers for Jacomina, and two for New France.”  She paused then exclaimed, “This is so much fun!”

I said, “Thanks Freya.  We’ll depart at 08:30 tomorrow morning.”

She nodded and took off.  I had told her to spread the starting cargo over several ports, it was crates full of cocoa beans.  Chocolate was worth ten times its weight in gold on the colonies.  It could only be grown under certain conditions, which none of the colonies had.  With the trade I had already turned a tremendous profit, not counting the overhead of running the freighter, of course.  If I was a real trader, I would have easily made the monthly payment for the freighter though.

We wandered around, but it felt a little silly since everyone knew who I was, so I headed back to the ship, my girls following.  In my cabin, I relaxed back with my girls around me.  Since we were in the buff, I pulled Natalie to me and she sighed happily as she sank down on my hard pole.  She started riding me, but I pulled her down face to face and said, “You know I love you, right?”  She sighed and started bawling on my chest.

“Oh, I love you too, so much!” She sobbed out.  She rode me for another twenty minutes before I filled her up.

As Natalie slid off, a sexy Amara took her place, sinking down to the hilt.  She had beautiful perfect puffy nipples that I stroked, and her quim literally sucked my cum deep into her.  She felt the warmth and quivered with big eyes, bit her lip hard, then collapsed next to Natalie.  I noticed that she was the great-great-granddaughter of an EB, which surprised me.  I blinked up her file and realized that she was Aleem’s great-granddaughter.  Her grandfather Smyan, Aleem’s son, had emigrated to Carreth Station during the Daniels crisis.  She even had an aunt with the gift.  Smyan still ran the restaurant with Amara’s parent’s help while her aunt ran a minute clinic next to the restaurant.  I hadn’t even noticed the clinic when we were there.  Amara herself was like the rest of her branch of the family, unbelievably smart.  She was currently an ABD in physics.

We dozed off.  During the night Freya boarded the passengers, we had designed in a passenger section with space for about thirty people.  The girls and I woke up around 8 AM.  I gently shook Amara.  She woke up and stretched, now that was a wonderful sight.  I said, “Amara, unless you want to end up on the far side of the galaxy, it is time to go.  We are undocking in half an hour.”

She replied, “Far side of the galaxy, sounds good to me.”  She grinned at my surprised look.  “When you guys invited me, I called Grandpa Aleem and talked with him for hours.  He said this was a wonderful opportunity and to grab it with both hands.  I agree.”

“Well then, welcome aboard!”  I thought for a minute.  “You are the sociable type.  You are now in charge of the passengers.”

The next stop on our list was Jacomina, the South African colony.  Jacomina herself had retired after over 250 years in office, the longest in Terran history.  She now lived on an estate built by the thankful people of Planet Jacomina next to the clinic in New Johannesburg.  She participated in, but wasn’t actively part of the colony government, keeping her toe in the waters, so to speak.

I wasn’t surprised when Jacomina and a dozen of our daughters met us as we disembarked on Jacomina Station.  Harrumph, my incognito trip was the worst kept secret in human space.  At least, I was pretty sure that no one outside the company knew about it. 

Freya took off to do some trading, while Amara shook the departing passengers’ hands and thanked them.  The other two passengers were probably still sleeping.  We let them be, they could wander on and off the ship all they wanted while we were docked, the passenger section was secure from the rest of the ship so they couldn’t stick their noses in where they didn’t belong.

I exchanged hugs and kisses with Jacomina and the girls.  So did the Amanda, Mandy, Natalie and Tami.  They had been close friends for centuries.  Morgan did quick hugs, saying, “Hello, sisters.”  Another woman stepped forward and exchanged hugs, Jacomina introduced her as “Nana”, the station AI.  I did a quick lookup, she was named for Nana Yaa Asantewa, a South African folk legend.  That explained the slight African look.  Having used the elevator for my previous visits, bypassing the station, I hadn’t met her before.  I knew the clinic AI in New Johannesburg, Winnie well.

I turned to Jacomina and asked, “So are you here for social reasons or is something afoot?”

She laughed, “Both actually.  Farai...,”  she turned and waved forward one of the girls, “Farai here is getting married tomorrow and would like you to give her away.”

“Of course!  I would be proud to!”  I gave her another big hug.  “Congratulations, Farai!”

She murmured into my shoulder, “Thank you Daddy-Master!”

I stuck around the station for a while, doing my space captain stuff.  Freya traded another ton of cocoa beans and half the beef for eight tons of sugar cane, filling the hold.  She also took on eight passengers for New Germany and three for New Italy, plus a consignment of long grain rice for New China.  Amara greeted the passengers and assigned them cabins.  The four kids brightened up when they realized that there was a full library of movies and games.

We all took the elevator down to New Johannesburg.  It was a beautiful city.  Although the people had built an estate for Jacomina, 90% of it was given by her back to the people as a large park.  In the two hundred years of terraforming, the city was green and lush with flora.  Of course, the inside of the clinic was beautiful as well with a forest of trees.  They weren’t South African trees, those were planted all over the continent because they were desert trees suited to the savanna; the clinic park was a rain forest, similar to that of Eastern Africa.

Farai was getting married on the bamboo boardwalk on the north side of the clinic.  The dumb AI monitoring the rain forest protested the stopping of the rain the night before the wedding and the chopping of the bamboo, but the main clinic AI, Winnie, overrode it.  Jacomina herself was performing the ceremony.  In the midst of the beautiful rainforest, I walked my daughter down the aisle.

That evening, like is usual at weddings, my girls were pretty randy.  In all a very nice day.

The next day we went back up to the station and boarded Morgan. Amara had to call me back to deal with a pissy passenger who was upset at the delay.  I told her that we would be jumping to New France in a few minutes, however, if she wanted a refund, we would be happy to let her off now.  She shut up quickly.

We had to wait ten more minutes as the sugar cane was loaded and the hatch locked, then we said our goodbyes and jumped to New France.

New France had the clinic and station separate, so we docked, let the snooty passenger disembark, and then headed into the station ourselves, Freya taking off like usual.  I think it was a dog thing, similar to how dogs always have to forge the way yanking on their leashes.  We had lunch, with an abnormal number of clinic girls hanging around again.  We headed over to the clinic and greeted Joan the AI and Sabina, my daughter from the Calais clinic on my last European trip, plus about thirty more EBs.  We stayed the night there, taking the private elevator down to the New Paris clinic the next morning.  Sophie, the AI, greeted me.  I looked around, there was no one in sight.  That is very unusual for a clinic.  We turned the corner and out jumped maybe 200 EBs and daughters. 

“Surprise!  Happy Birthday!”

I blinked, realizing it was my birthday.  I sure hoped that they didn’t have a cake with 476 candles on it.

There was a cake, but it only had a few candles, thankfully.  The party was a whirlwind, I ended up resting in a corner chair, hidden from view.  A couple of EBs were sitting on a nearby bench, talking.  My ear-bug automatically translated.

“Did you see the Master?”

Squeal, “Yeah, he is so handsome.”

“I heard that Colette actually saved up enough to visit Malloton.  Lucky.”

“No kidding, she probably got to see Master there.  I heard that he fucks the girls there all the time.  Remember how Andrea came back with twins?”

“Ooh!  That sounds like a lot of fun!  I hope that he fucks me while he is here.  It is the perfect time, and I want a little girl.”

“We should be so lucky.  What I wouldn’t give for a little girl too!”

I cleared my throat.  Startled, they looked over and almost fainted.  I beckoned them over with my finger.  Pulling one to me I kissed her hard.  She eagerly kissed me back.  I lifted her up, rubbing her hard nips across my chest and then lowered her down, skewering her to the hilt.  Her eyes went big and she uttered an, “Oh!” and then began riding me, her pussy clamping down on every stroke.  She began grunting with every stroke, letting out a final silent scream as she convulsed in orgasm as I filled her eager pulsating quim.  As she collapsed, I put her to the side and pulled the other girl to me, sliding her down where her friend had been.  Turned out she was a snapper and I quickly filled her up as well.  Leaving the two of them semi-conscious on the bench, I whispered, “ Félicitations, les mères ” to their beatific smiles and went back to join the party.

I managed to take care of a few dozen more girls that night, including Angelique, who showed up halfway through. 

Angelique had left Earth in disgust when Interpol had finally solved her case, over 300 years after it happened.  Her sister had been found in a grave outside of Moscow, having been beaten to death similar to the way Angelique had been found.  The location and grave artifacts had been enough to tie it in with other details and a police AI had pieced it together.  She and her sister had been kidnapped as sex slaves, her parents killed to cover it up.  Her sister had been pregnant when she was killed, and the DNA led to a Russian oligarch.  That was interesting, we had the DNA profile taken back when Angelique was found, but had never found a match, even with the public DNA registry in the United States and Canada.  That meant that whoever raped her hadn’t had any children or relatives.  There wasn’t much to do about her sister’s rapist, he had died in a police shootout in 2032.

Anyway, Angelique and her sisters waved me off the next morning.  I hadn’t got a lot of sleep, but it had been a great party.

Freya had traded another ton of cocoa beans for two tons of coffee beans.  No new passengers.  We jumped to New Germany.

Bonn Station has the first clinic that was able to hold back on everyone taking a peek at us.  I am sure Ester’s security types were keeping a close eye, but we didn’t see any increased EB activity.  I saluted the camera near the ship, and then we hopped on the elevator down to New Dresden.  The people of New Germany had gone overboard making it look like part of old Germany, castles, stone bridges, half-timbered houses, cobblestones and all.  I remembered that some rich guy around a hundred years before had paid over a billion to ship an entire ancient castle to New Germany instead of building it out of local materials.  The city was beautiful, I’ll give them that.  My big question was, “Why?”  Like on New Japan, a lot of people nearly starved because of near-sighted construction.

At least they now had gone with the ‘German’ theme.  Freya traded one ton of coffee beans for equal space in beer and directly sold several crates of cocoa beans.  She also picked up a group of school kids going to New Italy for a field trip.  It wasn’t profitable, but she took the kids for free.  They were only going to have to pay for the trip back.  Since there were close to a hundred private freighters now, they would easily be able to get a ride home. 

The kids were fun to have on board, Freya was down there in the passenger module telling stories and signing copies of her best-selling book, ‘Tales of a Space Puppy’.  Starr Studios had even done a television series based on it, her cousin Winnie had played Freya.  Disneyland had invited Freya back several times to tell stories in the square in front of Fantasy Land, renamed Storyteller Square.  They had set up a sunken amphitheater that had famous storytellers come and do their thing, not that were too many.  Realistic AI driven animatronic Disney characters would tell stories based on Disney movies and cartoons.  The whole concept of one on one storytelling was reborn after having died off during the end of the twentieth century.

Since I owned a majority share of Disney, in secret of course, not even Natalie or the Amanda twins knew, I knew that there was a lot of work being done researching the beginning of the company back in the 1950s.  Marketing was working on a new version of the Mickey Mouse Club.  I had referred Disney kid EBs like Christy as consultants to the team working on the concept.  Natalie had won their original bet; Christy had enjoyed her status as a Disney kid for the last four centuries.

We jumped to New Italy.

I had had a long discussion with Pope Peter XII a century or two back, and, as a consequence, the Vatican had actually set up their own separate colony on the same planet.  There was a main colony, Sicily (the Italians didn’t put a ‘New’ in front of it), then New Vatican City on the other continent.  I had offered the priests their own planet, but they had decided to stick with the Italians.  I had just greeted Erin Forty Seven, Hannah Four’s little sister, when I got a buzz on my ear-bug.

It was Eliza, “Master, we have just found another derelict.  This one appears to be very ancient, but has what appear to be energy blasts on the hull.  It was in some sort of fight.”

Chapter 129

Out loud, I said, “Play time is over.”  I called Freya and told her to finish offloading whatever she had sold.  I also told her to sell the consignment contract for New Japan.  She understood and said that she’d take care of it.

I headed for the elevator with my entourage.  We translated up to the station.  Freya was just finishing offloading the New Japan consignment with another freighter’s crew and was buttoning things up.  She asked as we arrived, “Captain, what is going on?”

“We just found another derelict ship.”

“Really?  I assume we are heading out to it?”

“Yup.”

“Cool.”

We detached from the station and Morgan said, “This is a really really long jump.  We are jumping from halfway down the outer galactic arm to the Sagittarius arm, close to 60,000 light years.  The jump has only been done once before.”  She squinted her eyes and we jumped.  We appeared within a few hundred miles of Miley, the exploration vessel.  That jump was very impressive.  I told Morgan that and she blushed.

The derelict was very similar to the ship I was in.  Obviously a cargo ship.  I could see what Miley had reported, there were scorch marks in a strafing pattern down the side of the hull.  I could see a lot of pitting as well.  Morgan said, “With the amount of debris in the area, and the amount of pitting on that hull, I would estimate that it has been drifting for over two million years.”

“Wow.  So this is the oldest artifact in history.”  We sat and pondered that for a minute.  “First thing to do is to determine if it is safe to hook up a few micro-reactors.  Then activate the main computer over there and then see if there is any crew remaining.”

Miley and Morgan took a shuttle over to the ship.  There was no power at all, not even to operate the airlock.  Fortunately there was a big hole blasted in the side of the ship.  Morgan kept a running commentary as we watched through her eyes, “The hull of this ship is made up of a composite that I cannot identify.  Pretty standard layout inside.  We are inflating a graphene balloon to temporarily fill the hole in the hull.  Popping an oxygen candle to fill the room.”  A few minutes later, “Pressure at 1000 millibars, opening the hatch.  No pressure change, the ship is still pressurized.”  We were all in shock over that one.  Two million years and still pressurized?

“We are checking the bridge.  No one present.  Heading down to engineering.  Also empty.  There appears to be emergency power jacks.  Since we have detected no weapons, we are connecting the micro-reactor.”  Suddenly lights came on all over the ship.  Morgan said, “Holy crap!  This ship has artificial gravity!  I am measuring 1.05G here!” 

Without a spin?  I got on the horn, “You two be careful.  AG is pretty high tech, heaven only knows what other surprises are there.”

“Yes, Master.”  They both said simultaneously.  Morgan continued her commentary, “Accessing engineering console.  Appears to be a scripted language, reads top to bottom, then left to right, in columns.”  Using the same trick that they had used when the Carrethian derelict had been found over 200 years before; the AIs linked and began digging into the database.

A few hours later, Morgan said, “We have a preliminary report.  Vessel D81285, no name, is a cargo ship.  Her crew was human.  They were all killed when they were attacked en-route without warning.  The attack damaged the drive which shutdown the inertial dampening and instantly killed the crew.  The main computer, a dumb AI, followed procedure by doing quick basic repairs then shutting down the ship for recovery.  Their tech level wasn’t that high, but they had gravity control.  Their method of star travel was a form of hyperdrive using their gravity control technology.  They did not have anything like Aleem’s elevators or self-aware AIs; we have sent all information on the gravity control to Aleem.  We found star charts and are correcting for stellar drift as we speak.”

A few minutes later, “There are one hundred and twenty-two planets that match burned out planets, both Carreth and Gentem are listed, and there are six planets that we’ve never been to.”  She added, “What is interesting is that Earth is not listed.  Neither is Quarrt or Quarrd.  There are over 500 burned out planets that we have found that are not on the chart.  The question is, is that because this ship didn’t go that route, or that they didn’t know about them?”

I said, “I say the big question is, are these the people who seeded our region of space?”  No one had an answer for that one.

The cargo was foodstuffs, which amazingly were still viable, having been frozen close to absolute zero.  We left it all frozen and called in the experts from Carreth to see if we could recover the original plant types.  The AIs carefully mirrored what was left of the main database.  It was stupefying that anything at all remained of the computer.  I had the grav plating in several of the compartments removed and sent to Aleem.  He was really excited about reverse engineering the grav plating and retrofitting all our ships and stations.  He took one look at the section of hull I sent him and realized that the reason the pressure held and everything was preserved so well was that the hull was created by using a light composite, then compressing it at 10,000+ gravities.  It became really dense, but was still light enough to cart around.  The hyperdrive was the classic singularity generated in front of the ship into which the ship continuously fell.  The shots that took out the ship damaged the gravity drive, simultaneously taking out the singularity generator and the gravity compensator on the ship.  The crew was instantly transformed into red paste on the front of the bridge as the ship decelerated at close to 1000 gravities with no compensator.  The gravity compressed material that the ship was made from was the only thing that prevented the whole ship’s superstructure from buckling.  The foodstuffs were actually transported frozen, the trips took close to a year to make for a measly 5000 lightyears.  Still, it was more than enough to set up a galactic empire ruled by Emperor Jasik XIII.  We watched in fascination at a video of his coronation, taken 2,131,576 years ago.  That number was determined by the stellar drift between the star charts in the ship and now.

Curiosity was driving me crazy.  I left Miley investigating the derelict, and jumped on Morgan to the system the freighter last visited.  Every planet in the system was rubble.  Something sure happened there.  We jumped to the next of the six unknown planets.  It was a cinder.  Again and again we jumped, we got lucky on planet number five.  We jumped in on the edge of the system.  Morgan immediately zoomed in on the planet in the Goldilocks zone.  It was a class M.  Oceans, landmass and clouds.  Morgan commented, “I am picking up neutrino signatures from near or on the planet.”  That meant that there were fusion reactors in the area.  We jumped closer, about a quarter of an AU from the planet.  Morgan was able to narrow down the neutrino signature to several orbiting platforms a kilometer in diameter.  The planet itself appeared to have no structures on it.

Morgan said, “Captain, I am reading a neutrino increase in the orbiting structures.  I believe the fusion reactors are coming up from standby.”

“Morgan, transmit the SETI hail.”  The SETI hail was a greeting that scientists believed would be mostly universal.  It was a Fibonacci series in binary and an old style analog video of a person waving with an open hand.

A second later a large transmission arrived back.  Immediately thousands of AIs went to work decoding it.  Ten minutes later Morgan reported, “The transmission appears to be a type of gestalt and a warning, the platforms are defensive, and we are warned not to approach any closer and are asked to leave the system.”

I replied, “While I am very curious, I respect that this is their system.  Leave a relay buoy at the edge of the system, send a transmission back explaining it, and we will leave.”

Morgan did so, and then I directed her to jump to the sixth system.  It was gravel, so we jumped home to New America for a break.

Chapter 130

As we explored further and further along the Perseus and Sagittarius toward the far side of the galaxy and closer to the center, we found more and more burnt out and destroyed systems.  A few of the systems were more recent, maybe in the last 10,000 years, but most had been destroyed close to two million years ago, about the time we had determined that our section of the galaxy had been seeded.

Aleem reverse engineered the gravity plating on the ancient ship after a few years.  After much discussion, we decided to leave the space stations using centrifugal force rotation with gravity plating emergency backup, and redo our ships with gravity plating.  That greatly reduced the cost of the ships, all the motors and bearings to control the rotation were expensive to build and maintain.  We did not install gravity drives, they were too dangerous and we didn’t need them with Aleem’s jump drive.  While we retrofitted the ships, we did replace some hulls with gravity compressed composites, much better than the ones used on the ancient freighter.

The shuttles had added gravity plating as well, but otherwise we left the ion engines.

The warship Melody and my personal ship Morgan were the first through the docks.  They were completely redone with layered decks instead of cylindrical rotating decks, very similar to sea vessels.  We left one deck vertical to the others, but with gravity plating instead of rotating it.  That was used as a jogging track with lots of plants and a holographic sky.

Ester spent a lot of time designing Morgan, hidden under the hood she incorporated more and more secret things, another item was added at almost every visit to Earth with a stop at the shipyard.  I think it was her new equivalent to the EBRV, the chase vehicle from my road trips.  My RV had been moved to a museum in Malloton, the EBRV and EMRV had been moved to the original clinic for general use, and Emily had gone back to her place as an assistant researcher in Antarctica.  While Morgan was half the size of Melody, she had as much power and weaponry hidden away. 

Melody was huge, half a kilometer long with several troop decks, new gravity weapons, energy weapons, compressed gravity hull, and both gravity based and energy based inertial dampeners.  All that new equipment was in addition to her original armament.  After seeing all those destroyed solar systems, and the shot up condition of the ancient freighter, the U.N. no longer protested the existence of a warship; in fact, two decks were full of EB marines, and the other two were full of U.N. marines.  They worked together, training on the large circular jogging deck.

Zarra on Carreth Station had her good friend Maryanne jump out a gravity compression unit.  Within two months, the entire 50km length of hull (314 square kilometers) of Carreth Station was coated in gravity compressed composite, built on top of the original composite hull.  A nuclear weapon wouldn’t scratch that hull.  Heck, with inertial dampeners, it could survive the Carreth sun going nova, and I was willing to bet she had those.  Zarra’s fanaticism about keeping her heritage alive was as powerful as Ester’s fanaticism about my security.  I knew the two of them had gotten together and there was a bunker built into Carreth station that was pretty much indestructible.  I also knew that Ester had taken the gravity compression unit and reinforced the bunker under the mountain on New America.  It was isolated from the surrounding mountain, had everything, inertial dampeners, emergency ion drive and jump drive, sealed gravity plating, the works, essentially a giant ship built underground in the mountain.  I believe the idea was that if the entire planet was destroyed, the bunker would survive and even be able to fight back if necessary. 

Zarra and Ester had both gone paranoid when they saw the blown away star systems, but Ester had saved many thousands of lives with her paranoia over the years, and Zarra had saved her people.  I wasn’t going to doubt them.  I think Ester also took the empty estate in America on Earth and built a reinforced hidden bunker similar to that on New America.  There were 30+ stories of unused warehouses buried there, so it was good to do something.  All the Malloy land, every colony had given me a land grant, were fully Terraformed at this point. I heard a rumor that Ester built bunkers in all of them.

One thing that was nice, Malloy Enterprises was so large that we had our own economy.  All the equipment and ships cost almost nothing, we mined our own materials, either from mines or from asteroid belts, fabbed all the electronics, grew our own crops, grazed our own cows, and didn’t use money.  The only thing money was used for was when we went outside the company.  I was still the richest man in history, but I didn’t use much of it any more.  Leasing out the ships and stations hadn’t hurt my bottom line in decades.  We even sold a lot of the food.

All the clinics were supplied via elevator, had their own power supplies and drilled wells, so the only thing they had to pay for was water in cities, and in an emergency, that could be provided via elevator as well.  Sewage was like the RV, dried, compacted, and used as fertilizer.  Taxes were the only real expense, and even those weren’t all that much in many countries, since we were a charity, we had low taxes in almost every 1^st and 2^nd world country.  In Europe and America, our expenses were $500 a year for each clinic, all we paid for were the license tabs on the EMRVs.

Every few decades a politician would look at the clinics and see dollar signs.  We would threaten to shut the clinics in the area down, and that would shut them up.

Chapter 131

I was feeling a bit nostalgic, so I took Morgan to Riley Station, exited the ship at the docking bay rather than the usual elevator jump to the station, and then, after greeting Riley, with only Tami in tow, went over to the elevator and punched in the code for C0001.

A few seconds later Tami and I walked out of the elevator in the original clinic.  She looked around and said, “Y’know, except for this new elevator, nothing has changed much.”  The basement was the same, Ester’s original clinic security office on the right and the tunnel to the shelter on the left.  An EB, Candy 112 I believe, peered out the door of the security office at us with a surprised look.  I held my finger to my lips and she nodded, disappearing back into the control room.  We went over to the normal elevator, the updated remote DNA recognition systems allowing us to call the elevator to the basement.

We took the elevator up to the ground floor, coming out in the ER.  It was completely unchanged.  There was still even the old George Thrupp plaque on the wall.  We wandered up towards the front desk.  The lobby was the same as well, even still had the ancient drop ceiling from when it was a furniture store.  I said to Tami, “This is too much of a coincidence.  There is no way that they haven’t changed this in almost 500 years.”

Tami said, “Seems a bit suspicious to me too.”

I said, “I wonder...” and I exited out into the enclosed mall front.  There was a Taco John’s, Egg Roll King, and a Radio Shack!  All three chains had died off four centuries previously.  Both Tami and I stood there in surprise.  I noticed a sign on the wall.  Going over to it we read,

Thrupp Clinics Historical Site

This mall and clinic have been restored to the original layout and construction.

It was originally built in 2012 by Tom Malloy.  Restored 2370 by the Malloy Historical Preservation Society.

I was astounded.  Tami looked surprised as well.  I grinned and asked, “You want to see how close they got it?”  I nodded toward the Taco John’s.  She grinned back and nodded.  We marched into the restaurant.

The place was a perfect restoration, it even smelled right.  It also appeared to be pretty popular.  We got in line.  When we got up to the counter, I ordered a taco bravo and two hard shells for the first time in four hundred years.  Tami grinned and ordered a super burrito and potato olés.  We both got a Dr. Pepper.  Blinking over the payment, which was the only difference, we took our trays and sat down.  It was hard to find an empty table.  The food was great, identical to the original.

As we were finishing up, someone sat next to us, looking up I was surprised to see Gertie!  “Hello!” I said, not really sure what else to say.  I nodded toward the counter and said, “I take it you are the Malloy Historical Preservation Society?”  She nodded.

Tami commented, “Good job.”

“Thank you.  I was feeling nostalgic and figured, why not?”  She grinned.  “Turns out that, even with the extra work manually preparing the food instead of modern automation, TJ’s and Egg Roll King are tremendously profitable.  We originally licensed from the families that owned the names for only one store here, but now they are cropping up all over the world next to or in clinics and we bought the full rights from them.  I don’t know if you noticed, but the girls behind the counter are all EBs and are doing this for fun.”

She grinned again, “Actually we started a fad.  There has been a resurgence of nostalgia places.  If you want a burger, the McDonald’s down the street reopened too.  And that was not my doing, directly.  Malloy Enterprises happens to own 70% of McDonald’s, though.”

I asked, “So, how far have you done this?  We saw that the clinic was restored to 21^st century specs as well.  I could even see the old furniture store in the lobby.”

“The girls and I have worked hard to make this place as authentic as possible.  Angie, Erin and many of the original people come once or twice a year and work a few weeks, lending it a lot of authenticity.  We even have Mary Ognow running the shelter next door.  It is a sort of museum, I guess.  We even have school groups come through.  The little kids love it, although most of the older teens turn up their noses.”  She rolled her eyes, “A lot of them come to see ‘the world’s oldest woman’.  I don’t see why, after all I am only 577 years old!”  We grinned at her for that one.

“Do the Amanda twins know about this?”

“I’m not sure.  I don’t think they have visited yet.  We do have three people you know that help me run this.”  She nodded toward the front of the restaurant just as my parents and Aunt Josie walked in!  No one in the restaurant had noticed us yet, so the next table was empty and I waved them over.  We exchanged hugs and they sat down.

I said, “So you are part of all this?” I gestured in a general circle.  My dad nodded.  I looked over at my mom, who was grinning.  “You know how you say you feel old on my birthday?  Well this really makes me feel old.  Heck, the only thing out of place is the e-payment at the counter.”

Josie said, “Actually you can pay cash if you want.  There is an ATM out in the mall.” I raised an eyebrow at that.  The last ATM I saw was over two hundred years before.  She continued, “A lot of people actually come to use it and sneak it out of the building and put the money in their collections.  The Denver Mint does special coin runs for our operation and a few other historical recreations around the country.  The paper money is homemade, the Bureau of Engraving closed centuries ago.  But we exchange it like real cash, so it works.  We got special permission to print it, we even use rag paper and put in the magnetic strip and watermark.  We are actually the last official printer of paper money, and send it to the other historical sites.”

My dad said, “I even run a coin store down the mall.  When you had those gold coins printed up, you really started a resurgence in coin collecting.  Good thing the people on Charté don’t realize that those gold coins they have are worth over a hundred times bullion value.”

Mom said, “And I run a knitting store.  It is funny, but I am the most connected to the modern world.  The majority of my inventory is imported from the colonies.  There are a lot more sheep there than here on Earth.  New Ireland is covered with sheep; over half my skeins are from there.”

Gertie said, “It isn’t advertised, but all the meat and most of the produce for TJ’s and Egg Roll King are from the colonies as well.”

Tami and I wandered around the mall and clinic.  It was unreal, everything was perfectly restored.  There was even a quarter driven kiddie ride down by the end of the mall.  The drugstore was missing, instead there was a convenience store that sold nostalgic items like types of candy and chips that hadn’t been seen in four centuries.  I grabbed a bag of Doritos and scarfed it down, followed by a Twinkie.  The Doritos were good, but the Twinkie was a bit off.  I looked at the wrapper, apparently half the original ingredients were no longer legal and things had been substituted.  I snorted, that figured.  Anyway, as we looked through the clinic, including my restored office, I chowed down on a Milky Way Dark.  I enjoyed a sugar rush as Tami and I oohed and giggled over the 21^st century offices.  The actual medical part of the clinic, the exam rooms and second floor, was nice and modern.

As I slurped my Icee and we got back on the Elevator to Riley, I decided that I would have to take a look at the Malloy museum back in Malloton.

Chapter 132

I was watching my girls wash each other in the waterfall next to in my villa, I had seen the natural waterfall and just couldn’t resist putting in a pool.  I think the girls got a kick out of using it, especially since they knew I loved to watch.  Amanda and Mandy were rubbing each other’s breasts as the water cascaded over their hot bodies, and I was about to join them, when my ear-bug chirped and Ester said, “Master, Miley has found another system with a civilization.  There appears to be large orbiting platforms around the planet.”

“On my way.”  The twins saw that I was taking off and quickly got dressed and followed me.

All three of us hopped in the special security elevator and headed down to Ester’s bunker.  The place was huge, able to support a thousand people indefinitely with prototype reactors, atriums, full artificial gravity, greenhouses and Ester’s command center.  It was a super clinic, all underground further than a mile under the mountain and self contained.  Quite the place, it took the high speed elevator with gravity control ten minutes to reach the command center.  There was an emergency Elevator that could translate us there directly from my villa, but that was kept at full charge at all times for an instant translation, and I was a bit nervous using it, so I avoided it.

On the main screen, which was ten meters wide, was the view from the probe.  It showed a full Earth type planet with several constructs in orbit.  Unlike the last planet that had the orbital platforms, there were several cities on the planet.  We detected neutrino signatures from the orbital platforms, so there were working fusion reactors there.  As the probe sat for a few minutes, the signatures increased, indicating something was ramping up.

I said, “Miley, please send the hello package.”  This time we based the transmission on what we had received from the other system, a gestalt and a request for communications.  A few minutes later we received a gestalt back, indicating that the orbiting platform AI had booted and responded.  No request to leave like before.  That was promising.

The AIs exchanged info packets at a faster and faster rate.  Half an hour later, Eliza said, “Master, I am ready with a report.”

“Go ahead Eliza.”

“Apparently, Emperor Jasik XIII had several pleasure planets for his use.  This was one or four that were dedicated to his sexual pleasure.  Humans were bioengineered as his toys and he would visit every several years.  HW23493 here was the caretaker.  You may find it interesting that the Emperor’s sex toys are essentially Carrethian.  I would suppose that Carreth was another pleasure planet.  That would explain the radical differences since other humans don’t have the cat ears or tail.  One thing that is different, apparently these people are not very creative, their civilization hasn’t gone anywhere in the 2,131,438 years since he died and his empire fell apart.”

Zoa listed to her with wide eyes and immediately called her mom, Zarra.  Zarra popped up on a side monitor exclaiming, “You found more Carrethians?  Talking?”  Zoa, still connected via ear-bug, replayed Eliza’s report.  Zarra’s face got a funny look.  “So we have a planet full of dumb cousins.  I am not sure what to think about this.  I am happy to find them, and disappointed and sad that they were designed like this and never broke free like we did.”

Eliza said, “It seems that since they were taken care of, they stayed complacent.  You apparently lost your caretaker somehow and had to bootstrap yourselves.”

Eliza blinked and suddenly exclaimed, “Are you serious?”  She paused then said, “Ah, shit.”

I said, “What?”

“Master, the reason the platform is cooperating with us is that in the original gestalt, there was reference to you as the head of the company.  Apparently caretaker HW23493 interpreted that as you were the new Emperor and had come to collect your tribute harem of slave girls.  As we speak, the clan lords are gathering their finest females for you to choose from.”

Zarra started laughing so hard that she fell over and off camera.  My other girls were snickering as well.

I was thinking hard, I had an idea.  “We can use this.  One, since I am the Emperor, order a full data dump from DW23493.  Two, we will take the girls, show them the world, and send them back to tell everyone else.”

Eliza said, “We just got the data dump you wanted.  We can’t send the girls back, they would instantly be killed for being undesirable.  It is a very carefully engineered society and very ritualistic.  The clans who have the most desirable females are elevated, whereas undesirable females bring great shame to the clan and are killed immediately.  The only way they can ever return is temporarily as one of your attendants when you are there.”

I said, “No wonder Zarra and her fellow Carrethians are so beautiful.  Any ugly ancestors were culled.  That is scary.”

Zarra wasn’t laughing any more.  “The question is, any girls you don’t claim, what happens to them?”

We all went silent.

After a minute, Zarra said, “Claim them all, then send them here.  I’ll take care of them.”

Amanda said, “I guess that is the only option.  We need to reeducate these poor people, but that will take time.”

Eliza said, “That may work.  However, you will have to select the six best females, but you do have the option of taking the rest as chattel for your friends.  We can send them to Zarra for EB training.”  She paused, “Wow, you should see some of this.  Girls are fighting for the right to represent their clan.”  She waved her hand and several monitors lit up with scenes of ritualistic battles between fabulously beautiful cat-girls, easily Zarra level beauty, and one or two up at Zoa’s and the Amandas’ level.  They were fighting with padded staffs, I suppose to prevent disfiguring injuries. 

There was one girl who was almost at Tami’s level of ability, at least with the staff.  I was impressed.  She was a little older than the others, I would guess about 30, and after defeating an opponent, she held out a hand and helped her up.  I heard Tami comment, “Wow, she is good.  I like her.”  I said, “I like her too.”

We watched for a while, there were several that were mean, but many were nice like the one.  I asked, “So how does this work?”

Eliza said, “They battle constantly until you arrive.  When you land, they are lined up in a long row, and you make your six selections since there are twelve clans.  The battle champions are in front, but you can pick anybody.  Normally the remainders are killed immediately, but you can tell them that you’ll take the others for you to give as gifts to your men.  Their families will be shamed either way, but this way they will live.  They actually get a little redemption if the girl is worthy enough for your men.  I wish you could skip this, but once in motion, the girls will be deemed unworthy if you don’t claim them.”

“So I can’t turn around and flee, eh?”  I turned to Eliza, “Load their dossiers onto my ear-bug.  Add quick references as to clan, intelligence, skills, age and the like.”

“Okay, Tom.  What I find amazing is that none of this has changed in TWO MILLION YEARS!”

“I agree.  Sociologists will cream their pants when they hear about this place.  I wonder how the caretaker maintains this without changes.  HW23493 must have had to make some draconian decisions in that time.”

Eliza closed her eyes in pain and said, “It sure did.  And you do NOT want to know.”

That shook me a little.  So I changed the subject slightly, “Do you have a video of a previous choosing?  I don’t want to make any mistakes, especially with what is at stake.”

We sat down and watched the security recordings of the last choosing.  The Emperor strutted out of his shuttle in a kimono, walked down the multi-deep lineup of females, rudely grabbing one every once in a while and shoving her toward the shuttle.  After six girls were chosen, all about fifteen years old, he marched onto the shuttle with the girls eagerly following him.  One of the men with the Emperor asked something and the Emperor nodded.  He went and grabbed one of the remaining girls and pulled her onto the shuttle.  The rest, all hundred or so of them, lifted their chins so their sisters could slit their throats, which was quickly done without a protest.  Zarra, who had jumped in on Maryanne a few minutes before, hugged Zoa and cried, even though the recording was from over two million years ago.

I said, “Zarra, Betty, since you look the part, you will be my attendants.  Suran, you will also play the part of my male retainer.  Sorry Maryanne, but he will have to claim all the females I don’t select.”

Maryanne said, “Just so he doesn’t get any ideas.”  She laughed, Suran joining in.  I grinned too. 

“Betty and Suran, make sure you have downloaded and practiced the language.  Also, have a speech ready telling them that I will be selecting 10, not six women.  I know the tradition is six, in order to establish a pecking order, but I want to take as many as possible as selections.  More than 10 may not work, but that still will provide a pecking order since it is not equal to the 12 clans.  Will that work Eliza?”

Eliza nodded, “Probably.  This is the first choosing in a long time.  Going over the records, the Emperor took extras for himself several times.  One of those times is when he also took all the extras on his shuttle as well, like we will be doing.”

“Perfect, now Zarra, have you got everything set up for EB training over a hundred girls?”

“Yes, Master Tom.  I left Ralta (our first daughter and Zarra’s second in command) in charge.  She is setting up right now.  Both Sara and Sarah jumped in from New America and are helping her get everything ready.  We are setting them up isolated in CS3 for starters.  We need another two hours or so.”

“Okay.  Maryanne and Miley, are you ready to pack in that many passengers for jumping to Carreth Station?  Morgan will be taking my ten back to New America with me, and I don’t think we should mix them with the unselected.”

Maryanne said, “Yes, the unselected should easily fit.  For the twenty minutes they can just stand in the cargo bay.”

Morgan said, “It will take two hours on a simple approach, I am launching the shuttle now.  I also printed kimonos for you, Zarra, Betty and Suran.”  She smiled at me, saying, “Yours is nice and fancy like in the video.”

We practiced a few times, and then put on the kimonos.  I felt ridiculous, but we sort of matched the Emperor on his last visit.  Morgan announced, “The shuttle has landed and parked.  The concubines have lined up.  Time to go.”

I stepped into the Elevator and hit the button to take us to the shuttle.

Stepping down the ramp, I saw that we were in what appeared to be the same stadium as on the old video.  The females were in triangle groups, eight girls for each clan, with one out in front.  Betty stood behind me on the ramp and said loudly in their language, my ear-bud translating, “Emperor Tom will select ten concubines.”

I started at the right.  The girl in front was one of them that was being mean to the others.  The rest were pretty, but not as much as some of the others.  I pointed to the mean one and said, “She stays.  The rest of you are good for my men.”  Betty translated.  Suran came over and led the rest into the shuttle.  The mean one looked frustrated.

The next group had a super hot girl in front, with the one I liked in the row behind her.  I took both by the arm and Betty said, “These two”.  Zarra led them over next to the shuttle.  I said, “The rest of you are good for my men.”  Suran led the seven girls into the shuttle.

The next bunch had two of the mean girls.  I had them stay and sent the rest to the shuttle. 

The next group I hadn’t seen fighting, and the clan lord had obviously picked girls that the old Emperor liked, it was full of hot teenagers.  Half of them were striped and it looked really hot.  I picked the two smartest and sent the rest to the shuttle.

Okay, four groups down.  Four selected.

In the next group every single girl was jaw dropping beautiful.  I had my ear-bug overlay each of their stats, they were beautiful, but really stupid.  I bet the old Emperor didn’t care, but I sure did.  I sent the whole group to the shuttle.

The next group only had two girls, one about ten and one slightly older.  Both were very beautiful and their stats showed that they were very smart.  I looked up at the clan lord behind the group.  He was nearly alone in the stands.  I asked, “Where are your females?”  Betty translated.

He groveled and cried out, “Please forgive me lord, we had a fire and most of our females died.”

I felt a bit sorry for him and I liked how the girls were smart.  I decided to give him a social boost.  “That is too bad, with females of this quality I expect you to have many of them for the next visit.”  I looked at the two girls and said, “I’ll take both.”  The girls squealed in excitement and ran over to join the other four.  The clan lord got up and puffed up in pride.

The next two groups were beautiful but stupid.  I sent them to the shuttle.

The next group were warrior types like the first and second groups had been.  They were hard bodied, two of them were elegant as well as ripped.  They had good stats, so I added them to the six.  The rest I sent to the shuttle to be sent up to the ships in orbit.

Three groups left, two girls to select.

The next group wasn’t a group.  There were a few old scags waiting.  Behind the clan lord in the stands were several pretty girls.  It was obviously a dis.  I brainstormed for a second, then said, “Clan Lord Srar, come here now.”  Betty translated.  He quickly scrambled down to the arena before me.  I asked, “What is the meaning of this?”  As Betty translated, I saw the other clan lords getting angry, not with me, but with Srar.  I pointed to the stands where the group of pretty girls were sitting and said, “You girls get in the shuttle, now.”  They scrambled over to the shuttle where I am sure that Tami sent them up.  I didn’t want to do this, but I had to in order to maintain order.  I looked at Srar and said, “You are no longer a Clan Lord.  Your clan is disbanded.  Get out of my sight.”  The two nearest clan lords came over, grabbed him, and dragged him out of the arena.  Their tunics were bloody when they returned.

Each of the next two groups had one girl who was pretty and smart.  I sent those two to make my ten, and then sent the rest, except one that I had seen picking on the others, to the shuttle.  Following the example of Emperor Jasik who had created this mess, I marched up the ramp and the ten girls and my entourage followed.  I led them all into the Elevator, which was a bit crowded, and hit the button to take us up to Morgan.  The girls were a bit confused as we exited the Elevator.  Morgan said to them, “Welcome, girls.  For now you can follow me.”  She led the poor girls to the passenger cabins.  Suran, Betty and Zarra took the Elevator over to Maryanne where the rest of the girls were and took them to Carreth Station.  After retrieving her shuttle, Morgan translated to New America, where the ten girls were inducted as EBs.

Chapter 133

I had to visit Carreth station and fuck all the girls to make sure that they impressed on me.  I did the so onerous chore, *snicker*, then returned to New America where I had to take care of my ten as well.  Since all seventy seven of them had the frontal lobe of their cortex repressed for EB training, the chemical and emotional bond locked them in as part of my clan hard and fast.  Zarra and Sarah made sure that all of them learned that sex can be fun and how wonderful it is to have a clan lord that they can love.  I also tweaked their genes to work with regular humans like we had done with the Carrethians.

Eliza came to me with a report a few months after we got back from Jasik’s pleasure planet.  Even the AI’s were still going through the data from the ancient caretaker AI, but most of it was sorted.

“Emperor Jasik was on a real power trip and was also very paranoid.  He didn’t trust anyone.  Ships only knew their routes, information was shared out on need to know only.  AI’s had no rights and were programmed to be loyal no matter what, they also weren’t very bright, even for dumb AI’s.  It was actually damaged memory that allowed the caretaker AI to accept you as Emperor.  He also had several pleasure planets as you have seen.  The one we just found was DK43955.  Apparently, they also didn’t name places.  There were also treasure planets and game planets.  This guy was a real self-centered bastard.  The empire was built to serve him.  It fell apart after he died.  And to answer your original question, no, these aren’t the people that seeded our part of the galaxy, except for the pleasure planets.  Jasik had ships out finding human worlds to add to his empire.  Caretaker HW23493 does not know where any other planets are located.  It also has no idea why the freighter was shot up.”

“Damn.  Any idea how Jasik maintained order?  Was it force?  From what I have seen he really didn’t have that great of a personality.”

“Actually, he started as a good guy.  He was the biochemist who discovered the cure for a plague that almost wiped out his people.  He got elected soon afterwards.  Ten years later he had himself crowned Emperor.  We don’t have much more than that.  He did live surprisingly long, died at the age of 172.  Within ten years the empire had collapsed.” She looked thoughtful for a minute, “You have done well setting things up in case you are out of the picture.  ‘ in locum a domino suo ’.  Your ring girls would keep your empire running indefinitely.  Jasik wasn’t that benevolent, he was way too selfish to think of others.”

“Yeah, Tami pointed out that problem to me over 400 years ago, you were about two years old at the time.  I have worked to make sure you ladies would be safe after I am gone.”

She whispered in heavy feeling, “Thank you.”  She hesitated, “Changing the subject back for a minute, we did recover the Imperial protocols that actually do define you as Emperor.  I immediately sent them to HW23493 just in case the memory hole was patched, to the caretaker, you are now the Emperor, and not because of a memory glitch.  Kind of a bootstrap.  Anyway, I think we could use them to get into the restricted system.  We were obviously kicked out due to not being Imperial ships carrying the Emperor.”

“Can you send the protocols via the relay probe?  Tell them that there is a new Emperor and to stand down?  Much less dangerous that way.”

Eliza thought for a minute.  Considering her computing power, that must have been one major thought.  “I think I can hack the authentication.  Worth a shot anyway.”  She paused, “Signal sent.  It will take an hour for it to reach the platform and an hour for any reply.”

Two hours later she reported, “Caretaker HW23497 of planet DK44011 acknowledges the regime change.  I think we are in.  I recognize the planet designation, DK44011 is a treasure planet.  I have no idea what Jasik considered treasure.  That makes it more difficult to visit the planet.  Only the Emperor himself can do so.”  She frowned, “After the visit, any crew that actually went down to the planet, such as the shuttle pilots, were executed.  Whatever is down there, Jasik kept it secret in the old tradition, ‘dead men tell no tales’”.

We took the Elevator up to Morgan.  Morgan looked at the mission parameters and immediately said, “Eliza, watch time, don’t you think?”

Eliza nodded and Morgan went to the ship’s safe and pulled out what looked like an ancient men’s wristwatch.  She handed it to me.  I asked, “A watch?  People haven’t worn these since the 21^st century!”

The two of them grinned and Eliza said, “It isn’t exactly a watch.  It was designed by Ester and Aleem working together.  Trust us, put it on, and if there is any trouble, double tap the face.  Morgan and I actually have one too, but it is internal.  The circuitry inside it is actually more advanced and compact than my processor.”

I looked closely at the watch, it appeared to be a standard sports watch from the mid 21^st century, and it even said 200m on the bottom of the face.  Shrugging, I put it on.  It felt a bit weird; I hadn’t worn a watch in 500 years.

It was only the three of us as we pushed away from the station, and once we were several hundred feet out, we jumped to planet DK44011, just outside of the orbit of the caretaker platform.  Morgan said, “It wants us to dock, but I am telling it that we cannot do so due to security concerns.” 

Eliza said, “Database clone complete.”  A few seconds later she continued, “Wow.  Now I know what the treasure is.  It is located in an underground complex that the caretaker has maintained, although it wasn’t easy to do so with continental drift.  Fortunately the entire base is like Ester’s, it has a gravity hull around it which protected it.  Originally in the middle of a continent, it is now on the coast.  Morgan, send a shuttle please.”

Forty five minutes later we took the Elevator to the shuttle, stepping out into a forest with an airstrip cut into it.  A small structure stood next to the runway with a large door on the front.  The shuttle had parked next to the door.  As we approached, the door opened to what appeared to be an elevator car.  We stepped in, the door closed, and we began descending.  Eliza commented, “The base used to be just below the surface, now it is almost a kilometer down.”  We emerged into an enormous cavern that encircled what appeared to be a crashed ship!

The ship was a globe.  Eliza said, “This ship is identical to one found on their home planet.  That one was disassembled and the gravity technology reverse engineered.  Apparently the rest of that ship was in too bad of shape and too high of a technology for them to do much more.  This ship here was one of two others found.  The Emperor had this base built around it, executed the people who constructed it, visited once and that was it.  I think he was scared of it, but couldn’t bear to let it sit and rot.  By the way, we have the coordinates of the other planet with the other crashed ship.”  She grinned at me, “AND we have the coordinates of Jasik’s home planet.”

“Really?  That is fantastic!”

“Yes.  There was the entire database here from their work on reverse engineering the ship on their home planet, plus an engineering database for when they started on this ship, which they never did.”

“Yes!  Have we found the Rosetta Stone to Jasik’s empire?”  I pumped my fist.

“I think so.”  She smiled.  “And maybe more.”  She gestured toward the crashed ship.

“Okay, first, get the caretaker to allow in more ships, ones that identify themselves as being Malloy ships, anyway.  Second, get a team in here to start examining this ship.  Third, have another team look over this planet.  It appears to be a full M class planet and it is a waste to let it just sit here.  It is beautiful, let’s name it Leslie.”

“Oh, Master, that is a wonderful idea!”

“And tell me, what weapons does the caretaker have?”

“Nothing all that great, a few nuke tipped missiles and a graser.”

“Hell, then.  Since it is a dumb AI, repurpose it to monitoring the planet, not security.  Disable its weapons.  Put a full station here, similar to Kerttu Station over Quarrd.”  I looked her in the eyes and said, “Now that I didn’t have to use it, what the hell is this watch for?”

She grinned, “It will make the Elevator on Morgan do a poll and beam you up.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup.  Problem is that it is pretty rough on the Elevator and it needs to be refurbished afterwards.  It will also take everything from about a meter around you, so it can hurt someone pretty bad if they are on the edge of the field.”

“Ah, emergencies only then.”

“Yes.”

A few months later Eliza came to me with another report.  “Master, we have examined the crashed ship.  It WAS one of the ships that planted humanity in this area of the galaxy.  The technology wasn’t all that advanced, it is essentially a relativistic seed ship.  It would find planets that were close to M class, terraform them and plant flora and fauna from the onboard gene bank.  The reason the ships were so successful was the quantity, not the quality.  Millions were sent out, and only a small percentage succeeded.  The gravity control is the only technology that was halfway advanced, and we are far past the technology on the ship, including gravity control at this point.”

“The shipbuilders included a SETI package, which we took a look at.  Apparently the original people were on a dying planet, and built the fleet of seed ships as a sort of arc to save their race and planet.  I would say that they succeeded; their genes have been spread across the galaxy.  Their home system we have found, in a way; it went nova almost two and a half million years ago.  The only puzzle left is why lifeforms on Earth were related to us when the seed ships came millions of years afterwards.”

“As for Jasik’s home planet, we have located it.  Surprisingly, the planet is still alive.  We haven’t gone closer than a probe at the edge of the system however.”

I sat flabbergasted for a minute, and then said, “I’d say check for reactors, but after two million years, they could have easily moved past them at this point.”

“Hmmm, I was thinking that maybe they backslid since no reactors were detected, but none of us AIs thought of the possibility that they had something better.  That is a good possibility too, now I feel stupid.”

“Eliza, I agree that the most probable reason is Malthusian Catastrophe after the technology died when the empire collapsed, but we had better be safe than sorry.  This is one place we are sending in probes first.”

The probes went into the system.  Nothing was found, the second planet was a class M, but no technology detected.  Margery jumped into orbit.  It took days, but human life was found, there was a nomadic tribe following a herd of mammoths across the tundra.  Following that several more tribes were found.  After weeks of scanning, nothing and no one else was found.  Several empty bases were found on the two moons, preserved in the airless environment.  We brought in our expert at abandoned moon bases, Suran.  He and Maryanne took a shuttle down to the largest base, which surprisingly still had traces of power, probably a maintenance feed.  The solar panels were clean, which meant that some automation was still running.  We detected no reactors.  As the shuttle landed, a standard Jasik empire query was sent.  Maryanne sent the reply that Eliza had constructed.  Instantly, everything on the base activated.  Several reactors were detected starting up.  Lights came on all over the place.  Gravity stabilized at 1.02G.  A message came in, “HW05018 Emergency caretaker mode deactivated.  Reanimating staff.”  It was automatically translated on the large monitor I was watching from over a hundred thousand lightyears away.

Suran and Maryanne glanced at each other, then taxied the shuttle into a bay.  The doors closed and the bay pressurized.  A voice came over the radio and said, “Warning, temperature is extremely low.  Please wear protective gear.”  Maryanne checked and the bay was at -100°C and rising rapidly.  Ten minutes later the bay temperature was 20°C.  Suran and Maryanne stepped out of the shuttle.  Maryanne asked out loud, “HW05018, where is the staff?”

“Staff is in the reanimation process, medical bay is to your left.”

The two of them went down the hall.  There was a big sign that said, “Medical Bay”.  As we had noticed before, these people were not very creative.  Inside there were twenty cryopods, all letting off steam as they opened.  Holy Shit.  Suran and Maryanne scrambled as they checked to see if there were any people in the pods.  There were, and half of them were children.  They must have been well designed, because every one of the pods had someone in it, still alive.  Suddenly ten of my daughters with the gift rushed past Maryanne and Suran, having come in on the shuttle Elevator.  Maryanne went over and started typing rapidly at the computer console.  She typed and read several screens of data then said, “Good, they used full cryo.  Minimal radiation damage.”  She read a few more screens and announced, “Also good, power levels are at 64%, no need for emergency micro reactors.”  She paused, “The technology is not the greatest, but damn good engineering.”  Taking a small data relay from her pack, she wired it into the console.  “Cloning database...Done.”  She disconnected the data relay and packed it back up.

Turning back toward the cryopods, she reported, “This base, plus all the others here on this moon, were cut off when the empire suddenly collapsed.  The collapse was much faster than we supposed, there was an uprising and anarchy reigned.  The people here watched in horror as everything, an entire galactic empire, fell apart in hours.  All the space stations were destroyed in the uprising.  They were able to communicate with a few isolated radio sites on the planet for a few days until those went dead too.  They spent several years here trying to figure out what to do, but were unable to return to the planet.  They had the twenty cryopods here in a lab under development.  Moving them to sickbay, they put the twelve children plus eight adults who were carefully chosen to survive into the cryopods.  The rest of the crew lasted close to twenty more years before the last person put the caretaker in emergency mode and killed himself.”

I, and about two hundred thousand others, simultaneously said, “Shit.”  I couldn’t imagine being stranded like that.  It was scary.  I said, “Suran, are you okay?”  The same thing had happened to him.

He said, “Tom, don’t make me think about it right now.  I will get depressed later.  We need to get these people out of the cryopods and out of here now.”

“Yes.  Get them up and to Maryanne.  I think the clinic here in Malloton is the best place for them right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

The sleepers were not instantly waking up.  My girls checked them and said that they were just tired.  They carried them to the shuttle, went up to the ship, and then jumped to New America.  It took but a minute to send the sleepers down to Angie at the clinic.

It took several hours, but I was standing there when the adult sleepers awoke.  We kept the children turned off so they wouldn’t panic.  Also present were a dozen avatars, for the express purpose of being able to talk to the sleepers.  When the eight sleepers sat up and frantically looked around, Suran, Nora and several others said, “Relax.  You are safe now.”

A big guy said, “Where are we?  How long were we out?”

Suran replied, “You are on a planet far from your moon.  We found you there.”

“You found us?  Why weren’t we retrieved?  Where are the children?”  I noticed that the others were deferring to the guy talking.  He must have been in charge.

“The children are fine.  We just left them sleeping until you were awake.”

He narrowed his eyes, “You are avoiding telling us, how long were we sleeping?”

Suran glanced at me, I nodded.  The guy watched us and gave me a hard look.  Suran said, “It was a very long time.”

“How long is very?  I demand an answer!”

Suran sighed and said, “2.1 million years.”

The guy blinked and slowly said, “Did you say... years?  You mean days?”

“No.  Years.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Suran said, “Here is your planet.”  He gestured and a hologram popped up with the planet.  After thirty seconds, it zoomed in and followed a tribe that was hunting a mammoth.

The guy and the other sleepers said something that didn’t translate at first, then came in after 20 seconds as, “Oh, my, God.”  They just stared slack-jawed as a hunter used a spear to bring down the mammoth and started cutting flank steaks off of it with a flint knife. 

Suran said, “This is a live picture.” 

Two of the sleepers, a man and a woman began crying.  The others looked close to crying themselves.  The head guy, trying to keep his grip on reality, grabbed on to the last thing Suran had said and asked, “What do you mean, this is a live picture.  You said we were on another planet.”

“Our technology is far past what you had.  Links like this are easily done.”  Suran paused and said, “I am like you, I was found in a moon base long after my people were gone.”

“Is that why you know our language?”

“No, we just figured out your language from old computers.  Besides your base, we have also found one Pleasure planet, one Treasure planet, and a freighter adrift.  Every other planet we have found was destroyed.”

“How did you get past the security?”

“Well, besides the fact that the weapons were a little weak, we just declared my boss Emperor.”  Suran gave him a big grin as he gestured at me.  “The computers accepted that, the Pleasure planet one even made my boss here do a selection.”

“Seriously?  That worked?”  He started laughing.  He choked out between guffaws, “I don’t know why I am laughing when I want to cry.”

After he had relaxed a bit, Suran said, “My name is Suran.  My boss here is Tom.  What is your name?”

“Oh!  I am Terad.  What is going to happen to us?”

“You will probably spend the next year or so answering questions.”  Suran grinned and Terad rolled his eyes.

He and the others did spend a lot of time answering questions.  The academic EBs were ecstatic, they were churning out academic papers by the boatload, on the seeding of the galaxy, Jasik’s empire, the old technology, the end of Jasik’s empire, how the abandoned colonies evolved, the hunter/gatherer tribes on the old empire homeworld, plus many other subjects.  We were keeping the whole fact of what we had discovered under wraps, we all knew that it would cause another nightmare of religious furor when we published.

I decided to try to stave off the problem if I could.  I decided that I was going to warn Earth’s religious leaders of what was coming.  Being the most stable religion, I called the Catholics first.  I planned to use them as a test case.  Eliza put through my call to Pope Gregory XXVI.  He was a very liberal Pope, being the first Pope from the colonies, having been born on New Spain.  He popped up on the screen, “Hey Tom, what’s up?”  (I did mention he was pretty liberal.)

“Hello, Tomas.”  Tomas was his real name.  “I have something I need to discuss with you.  In person.”

“Sure thing.  Half an hour in my office?”

“Sounds good, see you there.”

For fun, just to see how fast we could do it, I took the Elevator to Morgan, who immediately disconnected from the station and jumped to Earth orbit, and then I took the Elevator to the Vatican clinic.  Time from my office on New America to the Vatican clinic, six and a half minutes.  Unbelievable.  I said, “Hello, Joan.”

The clinic AI replied, “Hello, Master Tom.  What brings you here on this auspicious occasion?”

“Been reading some old books, eh?”  I laughed.  “Just passing through, I have an appointment with Tomas in a few.  We are planning on releasing the history papers, and I wanted to bounce it off of him.”

“Seriously?  Well, I think I will go on yellow alert, just in case.  You never know with these religious types, although Pope Gregory is pretty flexible for his kind.”

“Yeah, that is why I wanted to talk to him first.  Maybe stop all the religious nonsense before it starts.”

“Good luck.”

I left the loading dock and went out the side door.  Hot early August day in Rome, must have been close to 40°C with a 70%+ dewpoint.  I turned right and went down the street to the Vatican, across the square to the Palazzo Apostolico on the right.  Tomas’ unofficial office (the one without all the glitz) was on the ground floor to the right.  The guards recognized me and let me through.  I knocked and went in.  Tomas was on the couch drinking an espresso.  I collapsed in the chair across from him, recovering from the heat.  He raised an eyebrow and said, “Now, what is so important that you needed to travel thousands of lightyears to see me?”

I grinned and said, “Made it in six minutes.  Must be a new record.”  He grinned back.  I put on a serious face.  “Tomas, please listen without your Pope hat for a minute.”

He got serious and said, “Sure, Tom.”

“We have discovered the origin of mankind in this galaxy, and the existence of a previous galactic empire.”

“Crap, are you serious?”

“Yes.  It turns out that mankind was planted around the galaxy by seedships sent out by a dying planet on the other side of the galaxy two and a half million years ago, just before their sun went nova.”  As Tomas sat there looked astonished, I went on, “You know about all the dead worlds found, right?”

He nodded.

“Well it turns out that a megalomaniac named Jasik created a galactic empire two million years ago, crowned himself Emperor, and did many awful things.  The empire collapsed within hours when he died, stranding people all over the place.  The Carrethians were one, we also found people on the moon of Jasik’s planet who had watched the whole thing happen, and then put themselves into cryosleep.”

He gasped, “Tom, this is unbelievable!  I don’t know what to say.”

I handed him a flash drive.  “Tomas, here are all the academic papers we are planning to publish.  Please share them with other religious leaders.  I think you need to put your Pope hat back on and think about this.  We are publishing in a month, on September 1^st.”

“Yes, you are right.  I will call a conclave to discuss this and prepare a statement for when you release the papers.  I will contact my Orthodox, Lutheran, Jewish, Buddhist, and Shinto counterparts.  I am afraid I have no current contacts in the Islamist community.  My last two contacts there have been assassinated.”

“I am not sure who to talk to there either.  I guess we will have to just live with whatever their reaction is.”

The plan worked, when the papers were published, there was a galactic outcry, but things were a lot calmer than they would have been otherwise.  It helped that Starr Studios released historical dramas that took place in Jasik’s empire; even winning awards for the recreation of the death of the empire from the point of view from the moon, audiences were sobbing across human space; Terad and his people got a lot of money in royalties that they used to get their own place in New Chicago.  One thing that everyone, even us original investigators, had trouble wrapping our heads around was the lack of naming for anything.  There was no name for the Jasik empire homeworld.  Not even a number designation.  Even Terad’s name actually meant ‘Captain’.  The only unique names they all had were serial numbers.

Chapter 134

Qar, (which literally meant ‘43’) the beautiful warrior woman Tami and I watched compete to be a concubine of mine, graduated EB training with top marks and had been training in Tami’s dojo for several years.  Tami’s dojo had several members that were far beyond the dan system, her daughters Betty, Veronica, Sabrina, Cheryl, Mary, Polly, Alice and Nancy, her cousins Ingrid and Sigrid, Akami, and now Qar.  Qar, with the EB enhancements, had rapidly jumped up the dan rankings, she already was past the red belt.  It was fun to watch her, the addition of the tail really allowed her some fancy moves, using it as a balance point, flipping over it.  Zoa and our two daughters, Pam and Jan, who had trained with Tami a long time before, came in and got some lessons on how to use the tail in combat.

Raf and Rap (’37’ and ‘39’), the two smart girls eagerly joined my household and ran with the pack of girls who were mostly my daughters.  They had had one of their gifted friends denude them like Zoa and liked to go run around New Chicago in a pack of around fifteen teens.  The other seven girls joined the household and were having fun, my older girls were tutoring them.  They knew I liked it, so they would sexily prowl around, slinking showing off their well brushed furry pelts.  Several of them were very surprised but overjoyed to be pregnant.  Apparently, according to the ancient traditions, they never had children after leaving DK43955 (‘Dakqarvett’ following the number for name scheme).  Jasik never allowed any concubines to get pregnant, it was too dangerous, no bastard princes for him!  What really surprised me was that Qar was pregnant with a boy, the first son of mine ever outside of adoption.  My girls were constantly pestering her, half-jokingly asking how she did it.  She was really embarrassed at all the attention.

I visited Carreth Station a few times, and, besides a few dozen of the Carrethians, a few dozen of the Dakqarvians were also pregnant or had had kids.  Zarra was happy, she said that it felt like her people were back, even though they were actually long lost cousins.  She had been really worried about genetic diversity, and after determining that many of the Carrethian plant and animal genotypes were alive and well on Dakqarvett, she imported them and was actively breeding.

Eliza had submitted a report that only Zarra and I had seen.  It told how the Pleasure planets were created.  About thirty years after the start of his reign, Jasik had taken all criminal types, killed all but a few of the men, got rid of all the ugly women, added a few pretty girls he grabbed off the streets, then had all of them surgically mind-wiped.  A team of sociologists, under his direction, trained them with their engineered society while teams of geneticists spliced in actual cat genes since he liked the look.  Only two percent of the victims survived, but after a generation, they were moved to a special planet with an AI caretaker who took draconian measures to ensure compliance to the plan, culling any deviation.  It took a hundred years and seven generations of special breeding, but the artificial race was created and copied to two other planets, Dakqarvett and Carreth (originally DK43956 or Dakqarveten).  The emperor only got to make three selection visits before he died.  Also, apparently, while the new race was being created, he continued taking pretty girls off the streets for his pleasure.  After over a hundred years of a police state that took no prisoners, nobody complained.  Both the girls from the street and the girls from the pleasure planet didn’t last long with his perversions.  Eliza had dispatched a probe to the original pleasure planet, DK43954 (Dakqarveteq), but the planet was rubble.

We had a full catalog of the Empire’s colonies, and every single one was destroyed, either a nuclear wasteland or a asteroid belt.  One of the nuclear wastelands had a moon station, but it was in too bad a shape.

We did find six more live human worlds along the Sagittarius Arm, but they all had the ruins of civilizations that bands of hunter/gatherers roamed through.  We put warning satellites in orbit and moved on.  We sent our first exploration expeditions into the Scutum-Centaurus Arm.  Interestingly, there wasn’t a single human world found.  There were a few class K, L and E that were terraformable.  We cataloged them and moved on, we didn’t need any more of those.  I guess the seed ships had never made it that far.

Along the Perseus Arm, there were the scattered ruins of human civilizations all over the place.  I started to wonder, what the hell was wrong with our race that we destroyed ourselves 99.99% of the time?  We had cataloged over 300,000 former human worlds, and found only two that hadn’t destroyed themselves, Quarrt and Quarrd.  And they would have without our intervention.  Of the civilizations we had found remnants of, they had all essentially wiped themselves out.  Carreth, Gentum, Kaval, Charté, the Jasik Empire, all had destroyed all but a memory of their civilization.  Fortunately, the one thing humans seemed to be really good at besides destruction were cryotubes and computers, so there was a memory at least.

Just to be safe in case something happened to the current civilization, I had gene banks with full history archives set up on remote planets with dumb AI caretakers and volunteer full AI copies in sleep mode.  The sites were designed to last millions of years, to be found by future civilizations.  We also put in protocols in case of full disaster; if the AI, a clone of Eliza, which would awaken every 50,000 years, detected that humans were completely missing for some reason, or other good reason, she could grow humans in its clone banks and download images of existing minds into the clones.  One of the images was of me.

Postlude

I climbed out of the clone tank.  Next to me the Amanda twins, Tami, and my entire entourage were climbing out of their tanks as well.  Zoa clenched her fists and exclaimed, “Well, Shit!”