Chapter 13

It was nine months before I saw another office, and by then only Siân was still pregnant. However during those nine months I had been by turns bored and fascinated, sick to my heart, and even angry. I very quickly found out that Melissa was not on the moon, but I couldn't find out where she had gone. It didn't bother me that much as we hadn't got on all that well, but I would have still liked to have known.

The anger came quite early on when I realised that I hadn't been told something I needed to know.

Two weeks into my time on Lipskiy, we, as a family, were sitting in the mess hall after our evening meal. We often stayed there for hours, as did, I realised, quite a lot of people. The comfort of the higher gravity tended to make people congregate there at times other than meal times.

We were on the inside of the mess hall, the window side was usually the more popular side and filled up quite quickly. However our family had got into the habit of finding one of the larger tables against the wall on the opposite side, and heading for that. This time Siân and Huw were back in The Hole, as we had started to call our apartment, studying. Huw's birthday was coming up and he wanted to re-take his CAP test. Janine and her two boys were also in The Hole, as her elder boy had had a severe tantrum that day, and as punishment, she had made them both stay there. They loved coming up to the mess-hall and looking outside, so this was a real punishment for them. Food could be obtained in the apartment, so they would not miss out in that respect. That it caused her to miss out on the trip up as well, Janine just shrugged off as 'the joys of motherhood'.

The five of us, Stacy, Branny, Imogen, Roger and myself were just sitting chatting idly, when we were approached by someone I'd never seen or met before. The ID card on a lanyard around his neck told me he was sponsor, not concubine.

"Do you mind if I join you for a few moments?" he asked me politely. I smiled and nodded. His accent was so like Hank's that I couldn't help smiling.

"Ma'am," he said to Imogen. "Do you mind if I ask how far along you are?"

"Just over three months." She gave me a quick glance. "Why?"

He nodded but ignored her and turned to me. "Were you told that pregnant women are generally transferred to Daedalus towards the end of their first trimester?"

I'd never heard the term trimester before. It wasn't a British term, but a quick bit of logical thought told me what it probably meant. "Erm, you mean after about three months?"

He nodded. "There's not a lot of science on it at the moment," he paused for a moment, in deep thought. "A foetus is affected by the low gravity. The nanites in a woman's body can help to mitigate to some extent those effects, but it's best if a they can go over to at very least a point five G sometime during their third or fourth month. Even better if it's closer to a full Earth gravity."

"Oh. Do you mind if I ask, are you the base doctor or something?"

He smiled slightly, shaking his head. "No. I wasn't told. My concubine, my ex-wife, was seven months gone before I found out. I sent her straight to Daedalus, but the damage had already been done. The child's bones hadn't formed properly, and there was little the medical tubes could do at that point. They aren't set up for newborns and the very young. He's sixteen months old now, and has brittle bones. He can't come into a gravity greater than about a quarter of Earth's for any length of time otherwise he will," he shrugged. "Please. Don't let it happen to your child."

"Never?" I asked, shocked.

"When he's about five or six we can start him on a set of treatments that will slowly help to build up the bone structures, but of course his muscles will also need work as well. By about the time he reaches puberty, and he's mostly stopped growing, we can speed things up a lot. We hope, we think, by then he'll be able to use a medical tube to repair his bones."

I nodded. "Thank you." I stuck out my hand. "Thank you very much, I'll organise it now."

He shook my hand, gave Imogen a smile and a nod, and left almost as quickly as he had arrived.

"Sounds like someone's been a bit of a carrot," murmured Branny. I ignored her but Stacy jumped on it.

"There it is again. I've heard a few of you call people carrots. Why? What's that all about?"

We all burst into laughter. "I'm sorry babe," I said. "I would have thought someone would have told you by now."

"Told me what?"

"In Welsh, the word for carrot is spelled em-oh-are-oh-en." I grinned at her as she worked it out in her head.

"Moron!" she exclaimed, laughing.

"Yeah, but it's pronounced slightly different. Instead of 'more' it's 'morr' as in 'tomorrow'." I pronounced the word for her.

"Ah." Stacy chuckled and repeated it correctly. "So when you are calling someone a carrot, you are internally translating it into Welsh, and then pronouncing that word in the English way, as if it was the English word, and implying that word?"

"Yup!" I grinned at her and turned to Roger.

"What he's just told us means Janine needs to go as well," Roger said. He looked at Branwyn. "And perhaps you too."

I nodded. "Go and relieve her," I told Roger. "Send her up and tell her why. AI," I continued, sotto voce, "please find out who I need to talk to, to get my concubines to the medical bay on Daedalus."

That was when I found out that this technically counted as a medical emergency: any pad could be used, though it was usual to go via the first aid room, where there was also a pad, so that the base nurse could do a quick once over. It was also when I found out that Daedalus base was used quite extensively by the staff on Lipskiy for R&R. They had far more facilities, including a whole wing specifically for pregnant concubines.

I began to wonder what else I hadn't been told. The problem here, I mused, was that I didn't know what I didn't know. That was Wilkerson's fault. As personnel manager, he should have told me all this. What else had he held back from me, I wondered.

Imogen and Janine weren't barred from Lipskiy, it was just a recommendation that they stay at Daedalus after they had given birth to allow their babies to develop. The rule, it seemed, was that until a baby could lift and support its own neck, it was supposed to remain in at very least a 0.5G environment, and the higher the better. I left the two women there. I could visit them daily, as could any of the others. I found out that the transporter in the first-aid room could also be used to get in and out of the base at all times, not just emergencies.

I was at my desk, bored silly, one day, when I saw an asylum request. Most of the work, as Matt had said right at the beginning, was boring and tedious. He'd been right about that. We'd been on Luna about two months by then, so I hadn't quite had the chance to get as obviously mind-numbed as a couple of others in the office.

An asylum request piqued my attention. It sounded a little strange, but I thought little of it, logged it and filed it. A couple of days later I spotted another one. I looked at it and put it to one side. When I had a free moment I hunted back to find the first one and then went looking for others. I found a third fairly quickly, but apart from the fact that all three requests were from marines based on Rek, I could see nothing special about them. They were all from different people of different ranks, from different regiments, even from different nationalities. I pondered, made a note of them, and just carried on with my work.

It had caught my attention though, so when I spotted another a few days later, then a fifth six days after that, I opened a special file for them. I began to track the regiments. There were no commonalities there, but I suddenly realised one captain had requested assylum not for himself, but for his entire company. That did surprise me. Then I found one from a Japanese woman. That one fairly took my breath away. When I tried to find out what had happened to her, she seemed to have simply vanished. It could simply have been that we didn't have the information, Rek was after all a very long way away, and there was no reason to suppose that they would tell us everything that happened. I soon spotted that I couldn't locate anyone who had made such a request.

I tried to track where the regiments were, and was very puzzled by the result. It was obvious that there was something odd going on somewhere, but it took me nearly four months to determine that it was Rek itself. At first I wondered whether it was something environmental: something in the air, the ground. "AI," I asked through my PDA, "What and where is Rek?"

"Rek, in the Rekat system," I was told, "is a fairly Earth-like planet, with a gravity 0.78 of Earth's, and a similar atmosphere, though slightly thinner, and somewhat colder. It was one of the earliest systems colonised by Humans."

"Who colonised it? Where was it colonised from?"

"It was primarily colonised by North Koreans and Chinese, with a helping of Japanese and Taiwanese."

Japan and China had never been close friends, nor for that matter had the Japanese and Koreans. I couldn't see that particular mixture doing too well.

I went back through my notes. About three quarters of the assylum requests came from Koreans, with the rest mostly Taiwanese. I pondered what that could possibly mean. "AI, get me everything you can find on Rek."

"Confirmed."

Three seconds later, so it seemed. Matt was at my desk.

"Llew? What's going on? Why are you wasting time and resources? This isn't your job, get on with what you're supposed to be doing."

I looked up in surprise. Matt Harding did not look amused.

"Matt. I'm not sure if I've found something important, but I've definitely found something odd here."

"Go on."

"In the last few months I've come across twenty-three requests for asylum. In all cases the person requesting the asylum was based on the planet Rek, and most were originally from North Korea. There's definitely something strange happening on Rek."

"In what way strange?" Matt sighed. He didn't seem at all bothered, which puzzled me.

"I dunno. But when I investigated these requests, the men seemed to have just disappeared. It's almost as if the request triggered something that made them vanish. Why? Who's doing it?"

"What else have you seen or found?"

"In a lot of cases, the request was not just for the individual. One of the exceptions was also one of the few non-Koreans in the group. A Japanese woman. The reason she gave was that she had been gang raped not once, but three times inside of her first month. And she was supposed to be a volunteer?" I couldn't keep the horror and disgust out of my voice.

Matt just nodded for me to continue.

"The others all seemed to be requesting on behalf of them and their unit. Platoons mostly. I followed up on as many of those platoons as I could. They would go into combat and then would refuse to go home for R&R. They seemed to actually prefer to go back into combat."

I shook my head. "There is something very odd going on at Rek. This needs to be escalated."

Matt nodded non-commitally. "When were the requests made?"

"Well, that's the other odd thing. I haven't yet found any that is less than about eight months old."

"And you won't."

"What?"

"You put all that together through finding asylum requests?"

"Yes."

"Neat. I'm impressed. Forget about them. It's not important."

I was surprised. "What about Rek?"

He shook his head. "That was sorted nearly a year ago. That's why you won't find any newer asylum requests. Those later requests were probably originally submitted long before they were actually received outside. Rek went like Pyong. Both were settled by the Chinese, though Rek also took a load of North Koreans as well, then treated the NK's like second class citizens." He paused and shrugged. "Mind you, even today on Earth the NK leadership still treats it's own people like third class humans."

He gave a big sigh. "Pyong was seen first because the leader was so blatant. Rek's leadership was far more subtle, but just as nasty. That subtlety meant it took us so much longer to spot."

"Spot what?"

"Go read up on Pyong and Rek. It's instructive. Particularly in the way the AI's actually tried to prevent us from interfering. It's one reason why no one totally trusts the AI's any more. They, the Rek leaders, were worse than Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Far worse than Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe at their worst. Maybe Hitler's treatment of the Russians, Jews, Slav's, Romany's and others was worse, or Stalin's treatment of his own people. Maybe."

"Oh shit. But it's all sorted now?"

He nodded decisively. "It's all sorted. But I'm almost impressed you spotted it in the way you did." He frowned. "I'm far more concerned you haven't heard of Pyong and Rek before. Go look 'em up. In fact, do it now, before you do anything else."

I nodded and did as he suggested, and felt sick for days afterwards. The sheer depravity that those two worlds had sunk into was just awful. I understood now what he meant by comparing them to Hitler's and Stalin's regimes.

A couple of months later I finally got out of the pool office. I was put onto a project looking for asteroids that orbited the sun well outside the normal plane of the ecliptic. The aim was to put early warning sensors onto them. It was interesting, even amusing, but not exciting because unlike the others on the project I wasn't EVA trained, so couldn't go visit the asteroids we found. There were eighteen people on the project, but it was rare for more than about five or six to be in the office at the same time. Every time a likely looking asteroid was found, a pair of EVA qualified staff were sent to do a close investigation. By chance, because we were working very closely with the research departments of a number of universities on the east coast of America, this office worked on the same time zone as Matt's office. I got sent down to Earth a lot, mostly to visit and talk to some of the researchers, and on one visit to MIT nearly got caught up in a Confederacy extraction that went bad.

About this time I finally managed to get hold of the concubine still owed me for taking Janine: a young lady straight from Thailand - she hadn't even had time to go through her initial medical checks yet - called Kimmee. She had been rejected by her first sponsor for refusing to be beaten during sex. She would never be a sponsor, she had too many psychological problems brought about by her upbringing in the slums, but she was at least a pleasant person to talk to. At least, she was once we had cured her of her heroin addiction, generally healed her up and taught her English. I did have fun getting her pregnant though: she was incredibly acrobatic and body-flexible in bed. She was more than happy to be with us, especially once she realised that sex and violence, in our pod at least, were not bedfellows.

I had been on the asteroid hunting project for about six weeks, when I was shifted again. "Lieutenant Carter," said the AI suddenly inside my head. "Report to room A7E." I had been at my desk just over an hour and was just actually just about to stand up to get a drink of water. My project manager looked up. "Carter," he boomed across at me. "You're reassigned. Once outside that door you won't be allowed back in, so make sure you've got all your belongings with you."

"Yes sir." I quickly scooped up the small quantity of personal stuff I'd brought with me.

"Good luck young man," said my project manager as I passed his desk. I paused. "Thank you sir." There was no point in asking what I was heading to, he wouldn't know. "I've enjoyed it. I'd like to come back if the new project finishes before you do."

He smiled. "You just want your EVA."

"Yes sir," I returned the smile.

"I'll see what I can do, but maybe your new project will sort it for you." He stuck out his hand and I shook it firmly, before he waved me out of the office.

"Thank you sir."

I left left in a hurry. Bugger, I thought. My EVA training was due in five days. Would I still be able to do it? I hoped so. I would have to find out from my new project manager.

The new project room was only four doors up the same corridor, on the same side, so still an inner office.

I knocked and waited as I now knew was the correct form on the base. It might have been a secure base, but there were almost no locks anywhere. Safety, I'd been told, when I asked early in my stay.

"Come," called a voice.

This office was almost identical to the one I had just left. Only the maps on the walls were different, and the number of desks. Seven instead of eleven. Though now I noticed, there were also far more filing cabinets as well.

"Carter, hello, I'm John Maggor, Lieutenant Colonel if anyone needs to know. Welcome to the madhouse."

"Um. Right." I nodded. "Uh, Lieutenant Carter reporting for duty, I guess," I said.

"You guess? I hope not. Where you from? Originally?"

"The Black Mountains sir. A few miles from Talgarth in South Wales."

"Uh huh," he nodded. "Right, well unfortunately we are now mad busy. We have an operation in a couple of weeks time. Apart from the people in this office, only fifteen other people know about it, and nine of those are on Earth. I want to keep it that way for as long as possible."

"Yes sir. What do you need me to do? Is this something to do with the enemy? And do I get to go on my EVA course next week?"

"The enemy? God no. Not unless you call some of the people on this base the enemy. Which," he said after a brief pause, "a few might be if they find out before we're ready. This project is a strictly British project for now. You're here because you are the only other Briton available that could be spared. I know there's one other on the project you just got off, but he's EVA trained, you're not, so he was more useful to them. And no, you don't get your EVA course. What we're doing," he waved me to a chair, then sat at his own desk, "is arranging a little extraction from Earth. A very special extraction."

I looked puzzled and he grinned.

"Actually, we have one of the new kilopod transports, Boudicca, and we're gonna fill it in a single extraction. And if and when we fill Boudicca, and I'm convinced we will even if others aren't so sure, we'll just commandeer Braemar which is not far behind Boudicca." He stared at me. "Most of the preparatory work has been done for this, but there are some very important things still to do, things I need you to get sorted."

"A not so little extraction, then," I observed. "Okay, but what's so special about it?"

He told me, the grin on his face getting wider the lower my jaw dropped.

"Holy cow," I gasped when he finished.

"Indeed," he laughed. "Your first task. An easy one just to get you into it." He handed me a folder. "These are the catering companies used by The Palace for their garden parties," he smiled briefly at my shocked look. "You didn't seriously think Buck House has the capability to do all that catering did you?"

"I guess not."

"All the staff of these companies have already been security cleared. That just means they are not likely to be a risk to Her Majesty, her family, her staff or her guests. They may however still be opponents of the Confederacy. You have to get them all to take a CAP test. Any who refuse will automatically lose their clearance."

"This is only for the people who will actually be in the palace grounds, right?"

"Everyone who works for any of the catering firms who contract to the Royal Household will be at least CTC cleared. Counter Terrorism Checked. If they never end up on the palace grounds, and don't go anywhere near any of the food or anything else that does, then in all likelihood that's all they'll be, but they'll be a very small group of people. Accountants and receptionists and, well, people like that. All the rest are either SC or DV cleared. That's Security Checked, which is by far and away the most common, or Developed Vetting. So anyone who will, or may, end up being drafted in must have a CAP card."

"But why? They're not the ones being collected."

"Aren't they? Why not?"

"Oh." My eyebrows went up in surprise. "No. I suppose, yeah, you're right, there's no reason to suppose they won't."

"So they need a CAP card. If they refuse, they will lose their clearance altogether, not even just down to CTC, and will have to be let go from their company. They won't want that, jobs are hard enough to find. Once they have their CAP cards, use the AI's to analyse the results and ensure anyone who may still be a risk is weeded out."

I nodded.

"Good. And while you're doing that..." he gave me two other folders. "Then once you've finished that little lot," he pointed to a pile of folders sitting in a tray on a desk, "you've got those. The three in your hand are the highest priority, but you need to get it all done. If you get stuck, just ask. What's the stupidest question?"

"Um. Er. Don't know."

"The one that never gets asked. If you have a problem, ask. Don't just bumble along. We haven't got time for that."

"Yes sir."

"Right, that'll be your desk there. The telephone on it is linked into the British Telecom network using Confederacy technology. To people at the other end this number looks to be an 01601 number."

I smiled slightly. "01600 is Monmouth. We had to ring there quite a lot."

"And we're the Moon, so we 'acquired' the adjacent unused dialling code." He gave a slight smile. "Quite logical when you think of it." His smile faded. "That said, only the phones in this office connect like that, and only for the duration of this project. During that time, you could, in theory, ring home, and no one would realise you were not in Britain." Then he glared at me. "Don't do it." He pointed at the clock. "This project works on UK time. It's three eleven PM in the UK, it's a Tuesday, you have another couple of hours of British Summer Time, before all the offices and such are closed. You start now."

He indicated another man. "That's Commander Percival Meers, Percy. You report to him when I'm not here." He chuckled slightly, and glanced briefly at Commander Meers. "Just don't ever call him Percival, and you really really don't want to know what his great aunt calls him." Maggor couldn't help laughing at the slightly stiff look on Meers' face. I just smiled, puzzled. It was obviously friendly banter, but I could also see that Meers might get a bit touchy about it if he got pushed. Maggor turned back to me. "The pickup is in eighteen days, and we have thirty days worth of work to do. Each."

Much of the work was in some ways quite dull, though four times in the next sixteen days I found myself back on Earth. In London. I'd never been to London before, and each time I took a few minutes out to do some sightseeing, ensuring I took photo's of everything I could for my family, and picking up souvenirs. Although I didn't neglect my work, I didn't neglect the feelings of my family stuck on the moon either.

It was on my return from the second of these trips that I discovered something else I hadn't been told. I actually had an apartment, on Daedalus, assigned to me. 'The Hole' was for my use during the working week, but during my off days I could, if I wanted, have gone and stayed on Daedalus. I groaned and transferred all my concubines to Daedalus straight away. I wouldn't have any days off in my short time on this project though, so Stacy volunteered to stay and keep me company. She was the one who most enjoyed the low gravity sex.

It was a brief free moment on the second day I was on this project, that Percy totally turned my understanding of some of the personalities on the base upside down, yet even he didn't tell me everything. It had been almost a year since my rude introduction to Major Wilkerson, and that morning I had seen him stalking down the east wing. I entered the project office hurriedly, hoping to stay out of his sight. I was nearly an hour early, as I was, I felt, a little behind on some of my work. Percy and one of the two women were already there.

"Just seen that oaf Wilkerson," I muttered in Percy's direction.

He looked at me, his eyebrows raised. "What?"

"Wilkerson. The arse in personnel. Just seen him along the wing."

Percy frowned. "Wilkerson? He's no arse. What makes you think he is?"

I explained about my first meeting with him, and to my surprise Percy just nodded. "Yeah. He was right. You should have realised that if you were intelligence, there was no way you should be on that ship. Not once you knew it was going to a new manufacturing colony. At the very least you should have pushed hard and early to find out where you should have been."

"Oh," I said, suitably chastened. "I did try to contact the ship's captain a few times, but he was always busy, and never got back to me."

"The AI's should have given you some hint on who to talk to."

I frowned, trying to remember back, and what I'd asked the AI's. "I know I talked to them, perhaps I just didn't ask the right question. I do know I asked them where we would be going."

Percy shook his head. "Wrong question. It almost certainly wouldn't know. What it would know though is that you needed to talk to someone in intelligence in the Sol system. The ship's own AI wouldn't have known who that person was, but it would know that there must be an intelligence AI, and would have contacted that AI. From there it would have got a contact for you." Percy shook his head. "No. In this instance, Wilkerson was completely correct."

"Oh. Ah. Okay. But he did seem to go on about it at length. It felt like we stood there for a good hour getting bollocked. Then he didn't arrange quarters, then he didn't give me enough time to get to where I needed to be." I shook my head. "That doesn't sound like,"

Percy interrupted me. "You need to learn about Major Wilkerson. He is a damn good bloke to have on your side. He has a minor foible. Two I suppose. But we all have those. The important one is that he has a default position as regards trust. If you're from the USA he trusts you. But only until you drop a bollock and he loses that trust. Then you're in big trouble. If you're not from the USA, his default position is that he doesn't trust you, right up to the point that you earn his trust. From then on he will have your back for absolutely anything."

"I was told he believes that only Americans, and only those from the 48 states, should be extracted. Is that not true?"

Percy rubbed his face. "It was. Sort of. But no, not really."

I just looked at him, waiting for him to continue.

"A few people believe that Earth should be just abandoned. A few believe that only the military should be extracted, or only a certain type of person, or only people from certain areas. Budd Wilkerson actually believes that current military personnel should not be extracted, as they are needed for the defence of Earth, and the only politicians that should be extracted are ones that will be fed directly to the Sa'arm."

I gave a little smile at that, but waited while Percy paused to gather his thoughts. "Major Wilkerson was in the 82nd Airborne for nearly twelve years, until he had a bad injury many, many years ago, and was invalided out. Don't ask me what medals he won altogether, but he won medals for gallantry in the face of the enemy. Plural, so he's good. Very good. I think, but I wouldn't swear to it, he was at least a Lieutenant Colonel by then. The forty-eight states bit comes from the history of the 82nd Airborne, and the fact that its first recruits came from all 48 states, and was known as the All American. However, back when he was invalided out, the US government, like the British and many others of the time, did not look after its veterans nearly as well as they do now, and he got more than a little bitter. He's over it now, mostly, but his bitterness never had anything to do with the Confederacy or extractions, yet it has seemed to have got folded into the myth about him.

"Anyway. Come the Confederacy and he initially vows to have nothing to do with it. He was after all, by this time well into his sixties. A year or so later his young grand-daughter asks him to do it and he gets an eight point something CAP score, so then starts to think seriously about volunteering. He arrived on Lipskiy only about four months before you did, and this base is now far more efficient and well run than it used to be. He is currently an administrator, and a damn good one, not an intelligence operative. The hope is that that will change, and the sooner the better."

"Four months before me?" I frowned. "How long has Lipskiy been in existence?"

"Oh gosh. Um. About four years ago? AI?"

"Lipskiy Base started construction forty-six months ago, and was first occupied five months later."

I could see Percy doing some quick calculations in his head. "That makes," he said, "February or March of year 1 that this base was first occupied." He frowned as he looked at me. "Why?"

"Nothing. I must have got the wrong end of the stick somewhere. For some reason I'd had it in my head that Wilkerson..."

"Major Wilkerson," interrupted Percy.

"Apologies. Major Wilkerson. I'd had it in my head that he'd had something to do with the construction of this base."

Percy shook his head, looking bemused. "No. God no. He wasn't in the Confederacy at that time, and in any case he was never part of the Army Corps of Engineers, or whatever they're called in the US army, that did some of the work."

"Oh. Oh, okay." I gave a slightly embarrassed laugh. "Sorry."

I thought back to something Percy had just said. "Year 1?"

"Earthat Confederacy has its own calendar. The individual years are the same, so start, end, length, months etcetera, just the numbering has changed. Not quite sure why year one is where it is, but The President's Speech, for example, was in April of year 2, and today is June 30th year 4."

"Oh, interesting." I hadn't seen or even heard about the speech in question until after I had been collected, but I knew about it now from my early sleep trainer sessions. The odd thing was, I didn't remember anything about a new calendar.

I returned to my original query. "So why didn't he, Major Wilkerson that is, sort me out any accommodation if he was that good?"

"He almost certainly had, just never told you. It wouldn't have been difficult to find out. And this is where you need to know his second foible. He assumes, no, not assumes, expects. He expects you to be intelligent, and doesn't tell you anything unless there is no other way of finding out. He expects you to do your own research. That said, if you have problems, and don't know where to start, he will give you a pointer if you ask. But don't ever expect him to do your job. He won't, and if you ask him to, he'll get pissed off with you, and you really don't want that to happen."

"Oh god, and I pissed him off right from the start."

Percy nodded. "Yeah, you did. He probably knows your strengths and weaknesses better than you do. But you're young, and you were new, so he would have made some allowances." Percy stared at me for a moment. "But don't think he'll make allowances for long. He won't. And finding out where you should have been, but then didn't, was a fairly basic error on your part. You could have found out, the fact that you didn't," Percy just raised his eyebrows and looked at me sternly.

"Yes sir. I guess I was a little lucky that I was only seventeen at the time then. Maybe."

"Maybe. But you've been in Intelligence for a year now. So you can't bank on your youth getting you out of trouble any longer."

"No sir. Thank you sir."

Percy smiled and shook his head. "Okay, so you've now had the only bollocking I'm gonna give you, 'cos you're gonna learn. Yes?"

I just nodded.

"Good, 'cos we have a Prince and Princess to rescue."

I smiled and went to my desk, deep in thought about what I had just learnt.

I had got hold of staff lists for the four companies involved, and now began comparing them against the lists of people with CAP cards and found about twenty percent already had a card. That reduced the number I need to do something about from just under seven hundred to about five hundred and fifty. Removing those who were just CTC cleared only dropped the number by another seventeen people. I picked up the phone and began dialling. I was going to need to talk to the individuals.

Getting some of them to take a CAP was difficult. Fourteen refused, had their security clearance removed, and were sacked from their company. A few more took it with bad grace, yet when we looked at their results, all of them kept their clearance. They wouldn't be a danger, they just had no interest in being extracted. We did find seven people who we decided could have been a danger, and these we arrested then conveniently managed to lose 'in the system'. In fact they were locked in the cells at Paddington Green high security Police Station, but noone who knew them knew where they were; and most of those that did know they were there, didn't know why. They would be released, with a small financial apology, after the extraction was over. Ten days after I had started that task, I got it done, but the other tasks just never seemed to end.

Except they did. And with almost an hour and a half before the start of Her Majesty's garden party, at which two kilopods of young people were to be extracted in one single, fell swoop, I finished everything on my desk. By then, the others in the office had finished their work, and had started to take the last few small tasks off my desk, so that in the end we actually all finished within the same hour.

We sat and grinned at each other.

"Now what?" I asked. "Do we get to go help with the extraction?"

I hadn't seen John Maggor since the first day. The others in the office had told me that although he had a desk in that office, and at least one other office on Lipskiy, he was almost never on Lipskiy base. At that moment, almost before I'd finished asking, the teleconference screen sprang to life, and John Maggor, in full British Army dress uniform, appeared.

"Folks. Thank you all. You've done a grand job. Sadly you can't be here, but I'll ensure you get to see it remotely." He smiled slightly. "That way you get to see where you dropped the ball, and where you did good. I'll get back to you in a few hours. Sit tight people, and thank you."

"I guess that answers your question," one of the others said with a laugh. He was from Liverpool, and his broad Scouse accent could be quite grating at times, but he was a fun person to work with.

There was a knock on the door. Percy went to open it. Beyond, one of the base couriers had brought a small box up. Percy took it, looking puzzled, and brought it back in. In the box were eight bottles of champagne, six glasses, and a hand-written note.

"Thank you," it read. "I'm sure you would have all liked to be here to help do what you have organised, but sadly that's just not possible. A bottle each to take home and share with your concubines if you wish, and two bottles for the team during the extraction. Don't get too pissed, things could still happen. John."

We all gave a little cheer, set out the six glasses for ourselves, and put the two bottles ready.

We watched, fascinated. The extraction was intended to be televised, we had arranged that, but it was to be broadcast later, with censoring, However we got to see the raw footage, as it happened, and watched lots of sex and trouble. Oddly, except a couple of times early on, we didn't see the prince and princess for whom this had all been arranged. However Queen Beatrice looked on regally, never once batting an eyelid at the excesses in front of her. It was decided a few days later, and by people much higher up than us, that most of the tape was unsuitable for broadcast, so it ended up just being filed, with a few score stills eventually being released to the press on Earth.

In the end we weren't needed and were stood down to go home. I had a lot to tell the family. I'd been able to tell them very little so far, but now it was all over, I was free to do so. The bottle of champagne didn't go far amongst the eight adults, but it went far enough for us all to have a small drink.

By now all of my concubines except Kimmee had given birth, and I had ten babies in the apartment. Janine was amazing. She knew almost instinctively why any baby was crying. And even though Imogen was the alpha female in my home, it was Janine who was the alpha mother. Between them it hardly felt as if there were two babies, let alone ten.

"AI," I said, "Please can you request larger quarters, we're not going to have room for all these concubines plus babies soon."

There was a pause. "The request has been submitted."

"And for now, can you please ensure pregnancies are only singles. No twins, otherwise we'll be asking for more space again in a year's time."

"Confirmed."

I was so wound up by the events, and it has to be said, even a little aroused by the things I'd seen on the TV, that I took Stacy and both my sisters to bed that night. We finally fell asleep, very happily sated, in the early hours of the morning.

As it happened, we didn't get the larger quarters.