Independent Command
Chapter 1: Heavy Cruiser Exeter, Tulakat Outer Patrol Force

Copyright© 2012 by Zen Master

Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 1: Heavy Cruiser Exeter, Tulakat Outer Patrol Force - Rear Admiral Thomas Williams is given a new task. (Part of Thinking Horndog's "Swarm" Universe)

Caution: This Science Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Coercion   Slavery   Heterosexual   Science Fiction   DomSub   Rough   Military   Sci-Fi DomSub Military Slavery

"We've been livin' in the flames so long" - Blue Oyster Cult

"Exeter, please connect me to Commodore M'beku. If he is busy, this is important but not urgent."

<Working.>

"Thanks."

"This is Commodore M'beku. How can I help you, sir?"

"Jimmy, I just got two personnel action messages that affect you personally. You got a couple of minutes free?"

"I will in a couple of minutes, sir."

"That's fine. Please meet me in Flag Briefing in ten. This will be short; we don't need any donuts."

I thanked Exeter for the connection and walked out of my office and around the corner into the briefing room, carrying the two messages and telling Hannah "I should be right back."


"What's up, sir?" Only 5 minutes after our conversation. That was one of the reasons I was good with this. No matter what Captain James M'beku was tasked with, it WOULD be done, it WOULD be done well, and it WOULD be done earlier than scheduled with an absolute minimum of fuss. I have a clear conscience about this. These are my people, and they aren't going to get fucked over or killed because some idiot is giving them stupid orders.

I handed him the two messages, mine on top. "Jimmy, Maxie-poo has finally figured out how to shit-can me. And, given how difficult it is to arrange transfers out here, he had a rare moment of common sense and you are getting your very own star. To be honest, I'm positive that he was led to that decision. He wouldn't have chosen you if he got to make up his own mind."

Tulakat's Outer Patrol Force wasn't quite a fleet in its own right, but it had been built up to much larger than a squadron and, since we were quite often out on our own, it rated a flag officer to command it and a flag staff to support him. Admiral Theodore Alexander Maxwell the Third had assigned me to command the OPF a year ago, publicly stating that the OPF needed someone he could trust to think on his own. The unstated aside was that the OPF was as far away as he could send me, as I did rather more independent thinking than he was comfortable with. At the time there were public discussions about whether the military or personal need was more relevant. My only comment was that "I think this is a good idea".

The OPF was officially a group of light scout/patrol ships, but we also had some larger ships that we had combined into what we jokingly referred to as our "battle line". I had formalized my senior captain's position as my second in command and "commodore" in charge of the battle line. They spent some time training as a group, but most of their time was spent individually on patrol with the smaller ships. The two of us really should have been on separate ships but Exeter was our only heavy cruiser and the only ship we had with the space for any kind of flag staff so we got to live together.

The top message was a personnel action ordering me to turn my command over to my relief, Rear Admiral James M'beku, and authorizing me to requisition appropriate transport to my new station as Commanding Officer, Ishtarat System Defense Force, in the Borneo Sector. The post carried an automatic promotion to Vice Admiral. The second message was another personnel action promoting Colonel James M'beku to Rear Admiral and re-assigning him from Commodore of the Tulakat OPF's battle line to Commanding Officer of the Tulakat OPF. Further, he was to promote from within the OPF to fill the vacancy at Exeter's CO (and battle line commodore) that his promotion was creating. I gave Jimmy time to read the two messages, then "The smallest ship we have here is a corvette, and you need them all. I'm not taking one of them just to get back to civilization. I expect that Admiral Maxwell will have also detached a courier for my use, just to ensure I am on my way as quickly as possible, but we won't see it for a day or so. So, we have time for a formal change-of-command ceremony tomorrow. Please spend a little time thinking about who moves up to fill the holes. Meanwhile..."

"Exeter, Jimmy is being promoted to Rear Admiral and will be formally relieving me here. Please give him full access to all flag traffic so he can get up to speed." Meaning all the stupid messages that we got addressed to "Senior officer on station only" that told me all the dirty little secrets that anyone had that A) needed to be aired out but B) were embarrassing to someone so maybe didn't need to be completely public.

Back to Jimmy. "I've never heard of Ishtarat, but if Maxwell and the AIs think sending me there to command the defenses is a good idea, it's not going to be a normal place. Give me some time to check that out. I may want to take some of my square pegs with me."

He looked up at me, then over to one of the hologram "decorations" on the wall. It showed a Cincinnati Tools "Shaper" from the decade before World War Two. That hologram was infamous, and central to why Admiral Maxwell wanted me out of his hair. He had publicly referred to me as a "square peg" that didn't fit into the Navy's round holes, and my response was to have that hologram placed on the wall of every briefing room in the OPF. I did absolutely nothing except order the AIs to place the holograms. I submit that it took at least an hour for someone to figure out the connection, and at least a day for it to get back to the Admiral.


When I was a little boy, there was a small machine shop down the road from my parents' house, and I spent a lot of time there watching the men turn pieces of metal into parts. When I got older, I got a job there as an apprentice machinist before I went to college. Those men's recognition that any job can be done in more than one way sank in, and it's a major part of my success as an officer, both before in the US Navy and now in the Confederacy Navy.

A milling machine is a power tool you see in factories and machine shops. It cuts (well, 'mills') flat surfaces on a work piece, maybe six flats on the sides of a bolt head so you can use a wrench to turn it. A lathe is another power tool you see in factories and machine shops. It makes curved surfaces, maybe some threads on that bolt so that it moves in or out when you turn it with your wrench. As the saying goes, if you have a lathe and a mill, you can use them to make another lathe, another mill, and anything else you want to make.

A shaper is somewhat of a combination; it makes whatever shape you want. Shapers are chiefly famous for being able to make ... square holes. When you have a square peg and a round hole, yes you can file the peg until it's round, but you can also make the hole square so that your square peg fits without using a hammer.

It was my ability to see more than one answer to any question -while Admiral Maxwell refused to look any further than the One True Answer- that was at the root of our issues. He hated me, and I thought he was an idiot. He was also my boss so I couldn't say that, but if he was going to give me an opening like that...

Every time anyone walked into an OPF briefing room, they were reminded that Earth's machine shops had included power tools for making square holes for over a century. There was no NEED to fret over square pegs. Unless you were so stupid that the only tool you knew how to use was a hammer. In that case, yes, square pegs were an issue. Basically, my pointing out that shapers existed long before replicators did was also pointing out that if Admiral Maxwell couldn't deal with square pegs, he was one of those hammer guys.

No words spoken, no slight that he could take offense at, and as long as I did my job well the AIs would take the effect on the fleet's morale into account if he said or did anything about it. We couldn't out-breed the Sa'arm, so the only way to win a war with them was to out-fight them. That meant we had to build a fleet composed of well-trained, highly-motivated crews manning well-designed, built, and maintained ships commanded and directed by competent officers with the integrity to earn their men's trust.

If you had the clearance and knew which questions to ask, the AIs would tell you any number of interesting things. The Outer Patrol Force had already demonstrated that, under my command, it had a combat capability far exceeding that of the inner quarantine fleet, which not only had more ships but larger ones.

Much of that was directly due to morale and leadership, factors which involved the human concepts of "trust" and "respect", two concepts that the AIs could define but not use. I had mentioned to the AIs more than once, during conversations about this, that the Admiral and his cronies probably couldn't even define the words, much less use them intelligently in a sentence. The Admiral's pettiness would strongly -and negatively- affect fleet morale if he proved me right by responding in any way. Basically, any punitive actions he took would lead to his dismissal, for the good of the Diaspora. And, he wasn't stupid, just narrow minded.

I was safe from him. As long as I performed well, of course. If I fucked up, he would have me yanked in an instant. I didn't see this as a problem. Why worry about how your boss feels, safe back at headquarters in another system, when we were the ones on the front line, the ones that got killed if the Sa'arm showed up and we weren't ready? If I fucked up, I would in all probability be dead long before Admiral Maxwell found out.


Tulakat was a contested system. Tulak was the kind of planet that Humans liked, and it was a fair assumption that the Sa'arm would like it too. Certainly, the natives -we called them Tulaki- had seemed happy living there. When we had first entered this fight as the Confederacy's proxy, one of our first needs was intelligence, in the military sense. How do they fight? What weapons do they use?

We went to Tulak soon after the Sa'arm had, as an experiment to see how hard the Sa'arm were going to be to beat. We knew we weren't ready, but we had to start somewhere, and we thought that a new colony would be easiest for us to practice on. We established several things very quickly:

Fighting them on the ground after they got established was a bad idea; they could breed combat units faster than we could. So, we needed to prevent them from landing. That meant a fleet that could stop their fleet.

Their ships were armed, so we needed ships that could deflect, absorb or shrug off their weapons. Their ships were shielded and armored, so we needed ships with the firepower to penetrate their shields and armor. And, if we wanted to hold our own systems, keep them out of new systems, and kick them out of the systems they already had, we were going to need what the US military used to call a "Two-Ocean Navy", enough ships to protect both our coasts and also send fleets to wherever the trouble was. We were going to need a huge naval buildup.

We had some advantages; even the ships the Confederacy had given us were faster and Confederacy sensors appeared to be better than the Sa'arm's so we could see them coming before they saw us, but that just meant we could pick our battles, attacking or avoiding as we chose. We still were going to need a lot of ships of all sizes if we wanted to actually stop them in space and prevent landings. At first, though, all we could do was avoid combat when we wanted to.

Next, one-on-one our soldiers could take theirs. The Sa'arm, however, reacted immediately to any attack, and any one Sa'arm we killed would immediately be surrounded by others. We learned very quickly that anything that one learned they all knew. And, they were far better at coordinating widely-spaced units than we were.

We lost most of our ground force but everyone was sending live video so we got some close-ups of the Sa'arm. This included closeups of intact live Sa'arm using tools and weapons, somewhat intact dead bodies, and completely opened-up dead Sa'arm in various-sized pieces. They didn't seem to have the concepts of clothing or individual armor and we could not identify anything that looked like a radio link. We tried to avoid the obvious conclusion that they were telepathic, but eventually we ran out of other explanations.

They also didn't seem to "think" the same way we did. As the fighting went on we realized that they didn't respond well to new immediate threats, but the second time we tried a particular tactic they would have a response ready. That meant that if we found a way to win a particular fight, that way would only work that one time unless we destroyed all of the Sa'arm present before they could tell the others.

Their link, however it worked, did have a range limit. It seemed to stop working somewhere around a million klicks, and it seemed to lose a lot of bandwidth well before that. If we killed a dickhead on the planet, every other dickhead on that planet knew and responded immediately, but if we killed a ship in orbit the response was less focused. And, if we killed a ship elsewhere in the system, they may not ever notice.

This last became a central part of our research and testing effort. We could try anything out on an isolated ship, and as long as we made sure the ship was actually killed before it got close to a Sa'arm-held planet, the Sa'arm as a whole would not learn anything about our tests. And, on a larger scale, anything the Sa'arm on the planet learned would stay there as long as we kept the planet isolated. We could also use the planet to try different ground-based tactics and equipment.

So, after the Sa'arm settled in on Tulak, we pulled back. We didn't try to kill them all. We didn't have the firepower to do that, not if we wanted to use the planet ourselves when we were done. What we could do, however, was quarantine the system. We killed any ship that tried to leave the system before it jumped out, and we killed any ship that arrived before it could contact the planet. These dickheads knew an awful lot about the way humans fight. They really, really wanted to tell the rest of the Sa'arm about all the trouble we were giving them. We, in turn, really, really wanted them to never tell the rest of the Sa'arm what they had learned.

While our fleet out in space and our Marines down on the ground tried different weapons and tactics, we in the Outer Patrol Force made sure that no Sa'arm ship escaped from Tulak. Every time we tried something new, the Sa'arm would send out a ship. We assumed that it contained info about what they had learned. We didn't want those ships to escape. That was the job of the OPF. We didn't have to have bigger ships, as long as we had enough small ships to intercept. And, as long as we were willing to take the casualties it took to ensure no one got through the quarantine.


When I was promoted from Lieutenant to Commander (the lowest "command" rank) I had been given Avery for my first command. She was an early corvette sent out with several others to help create an outer scouting/patrol/chase force soon after we lost the planet Tulak itself. I had been promoted to Captain (and commodore in charge of the outer patrol) as a result of one of those running fights early on, while we were still figuring all this out. We knew what we wanted to do, but we weren't sure yet the best way to get it done. Well, that was why we were there, to find out.

One particular Sa'arm ship -it was the type we later named the "Venti" Destroyer- trying to leave Tulakat had been hit several times by the inner force of "real" warships as it passed their cordon. It appeared to be damaged but it was still able to dance around and avoid further hits. Unfortunately, only Avery was in the right place -and fast enough- to have a chance of intercepting before it jumped. My gunners didn't have any better luck than the blockade ships had. I had finally run out of patience and told the helm to increase speed to emergency max and hold course for intercept, then put the whole ship in the circuit while I gave my gunners additional incentive, ah, instruction.

"We cannot out-breed the dickheads. And, the way you boys shoot it's beginning to look like we may not be able to outfight them, either. That means that the only way we can win this war is to outsmart them. Now, if these dickheads get away, whoever they talk to will know everything we have taught these guys. We really don't want that to happen. However, you boys don't seem to be able to hit from this far out so we are moving in closer. Hopefully, you will be able to get some hits soon."

"If not, Avery will ram the bastard. It would really be nice to not have to do that but if you gunners can't kill it your way us CIC weenies will kill it for you. You have until impact to do it your way. All personnel not immediately required for maneuvering and fire control are hereby ordered to abandon ship. That is all."

I had followed that up with a call to the XO (on the bridge) with instructions to have Gunner Sams relieve Spec Harper at the plasma torpedo magazine, and another call to the ECR to tell ChEng that I wanted her on the liferaft with the XO and to designate someone else to stay in ECR. That was because both ChEng Smitty and Spec Harper were pregnant females and I was a male chauvinist pig who thought they should live. Neither of their unborn were mine, but I still thought I should save them if possible.

That left us with only 7 souls on board: me at the helm and Weps at Tac/Nav in CIC, the three gunners, Gunner Sams in the magazine, and the engineering tech in ECR. All males, and all with at least two children back at Truman.

Of course our gunners had eventually hit something that killed the dickhead's propulsion -or we wouldn't be talking right now- and as soon as Weps could say the dickheads were no longer accelerating I told the helm to veer off.

Staying close was a real bad idea, as the dickheads still had at least one trainable particle cannon working that was powerful enough to penetrate our shields, whereas all we had were weapons that fired "forward" so we shot them up as we passed, getting ourselves shot up a lot worse after we passed until we could spin ship and face them again. We were still moving very fast away from them so we killed our engines and coasted backwards out of range as quickly as we could and waited for help. My abandon-ship order earlier meant that we were severely undermanned and couldn't do much about repairs.

After awhile Johnston (another corvette) showed up and we moved in from opposite sides. Their single turret couldn't cover both of us, and I guess they thought they had a better chance of killing us than the undamaged fresh ship because they stayed on us. So, while we played "target", Johnston moved in and finished them off. Avery had enough damage by then that after we picked up our crew again from the liferaft and all of the survival pods, we were released from patrol duty and sent limping all the way back to where she was born, at the Jupiter yards.

As a matter of after-combat routine a complete data dump from both ships got sent back to Truman for analysis, then prettied-up into an "After Action Report" or AAR, and apparently this one got passed around. When we made it back to Sol system -which the AIs still insist upon calling "Earthat"- we learned that we were heroes. There wasn't much good news back then, and apparently my little talk to my gunners had been passed around as a morale booster. It showed the skeptical that we weren't just partying out there, it showed the pessimists that we could win if we played our cards right, and it showed the optimists that sacrifices were going to be required.


My willingness to ram the Sa'arm ship also got me court-martialed, as there seemed to be some questions about my sanity. My defense was short and to the point. While I gave my statement, I had a power-point slide on the wall behind me listing other times commanders had made my choice: The Ten Thousand. Thermopylae. Salamis. Horatius at the bridge. The "Great Siege" of Malta. Lepanto. HMS Revenge. Lake Erie. USS Essex. The Alamo. CSS Alabama. Little Round Top. Mobile Bay. Rorke's Drift. Coronel. HMS Jervis Bay. Stalingrad. Coral Sea. Wake Island. Samar. Bastogne. The Golan Heights. It was a long list.

"Battles are not fought in isolation. They are fought for various reasons with what is available under the conditions that you happen to find when you contact the enemy. If you choose to be a soldier, you have to accept that sometimes you will find yourself in a fight you don't want to be in. Sometimes you are stuck because you are unable to move. Other times you can move, but you have to stay because you are protecting others. Sometimes you have to attack someone bigger than you because you are all that is available, and again the only way to protect the people behind you is to attack a superior enemy force."

"You aren't always going to win these fights. If you cannot accept this, you shouldn't be a soldier or sailor. In this particular case, allowing the Sa'arm ship to escape would have led to all other Sa'arm systems learning a lot of lessons that would have allowed them to be far more effective, which would have vastly increased our casualties in the future. Avery didn't have the firepower -or the fire control- to kill it from a safe distance."

"No one else was close enough to help before they escaped. The only weapon we had that we knew could destroy the ship was our main engine. That wasn't courage, and it wasn't a cavalier disregard for danger. It was a calm recognition that killing that dickhead ship was more important to our future than preserving Avery. We cleared the ship of everyone not needed to shoot or ram, and we went in."

"In closing, I would like to point out that if our sensors and fire control systems were better, we wouldn't have been forced into that decision."


That got me acquitted of attempted suicide -the court-martial was a formality that was held any time we lost a ship and all I had to do was demonstrate that I wasn't crazy- and my closing comment got me a temporary assignment with the team working on upgrades for our warships. My only contribution while I was there was to point out that we generally only had people shooting at us from one direction at a time, and our combat shields were specially-strengthened debris shields that protected us from all directions.

If we could give the Weapons Officer the ability to strengthen them in one direction, even if that meant weakening them in other directions, it would have prevented a lot of our damage and most of our casualties. If we happened to find ourselves getting shot at from multiple directions, we would return the shields to their normal all-around configuration.

The brains said that this seemed doable, they could work on that, and we should get plans for that upgrade soon. Unfortunately an improved fire control system was going to have to wait until we knew why we kept missing.

I also got promoted to Captain, with command of the Antwerp, a new light cruiser being sent out to Tulakat in company with the like-new Avery and two more really-new corvettes. She had almost the same acceleration as the corvettes but much better weapons and armor. She had the same sensor suite and fire control system, though. It was still the best we could build.

Shields! Is now a good time to talk about shields? Avery had gone into combat with a beefed-up version of the Confederacy's standard all-around particle shield, something that any spaceship needs to stop ions traveling at relativistic speeds, and the odd bit of space dust that you might run into. While they helped some when getting shot at, they just weren't powerful enough to stop everything. They were a kind of sort of force field that affected anything with mass.

They didn't directly stop things like cosmic rays (which are just high-energy gammas), but they did something which changed their directions so that they missed the ship in the middle. From our point of view, we just said "it stops cosmic rays, too". You could adjust it to stop lower-energy photons, also, but if you did that to stop a laser beam, then you also stopped incoming visible light and you couldn't see to navigate, much less use radar or lidar.

Antwerp had MUCH better shields than Avery! In fact, all the new ships did. That had turned out to be fairly simple in theory, if somewhat messy in practice. The research guys I had been assigned to came out with a two-part "field mod".

The first part was easy, a ship modification that could be done while underway with just a few techs and a new generator. With a little modification (done by the AI with nanites over a couple of hours), our original all-around shield could be re-configured to be hemispherical, just covering the front of the ship, and roughly three times as strong as the original. A second shield generator, bolted down a few feet from the first one, did the same thing for the back half.

As an added plus, either generator could go back to being spherical just as fast as the AI could flip some internal switches. This meant if one shield went down in combat the other would take over. Yes, whatever was coming in when the first shield went down would get through, but everything following would be stopped again. Unless that one penetration took out the shield generators, of course!

The second part of the mod was messy. These two improved shields were still the all-around type, just hemispherical instead of completely spherical, and we still had to drop them momentarily to shoot. The second part of the mod added individual modules in various places to poke holes in the shields. Each missile launcher, each turret, any device that ejected anything got its own module that made a temporary hole in the shield for our missile/slug/plasma torpedo/whatever to go through.

This was a major improvement, since we no longer had to drop the whole shield, or even half the shield, to shoot. This was also a major headache, since any weapon emplacement that could be aimed had to have the hole-producer set up to ensure that the hole was in the right place. I mean, the temporary hole for a missile or torpedo launcher was always in the same place, and setting that module up only took a few seconds.

The pair of modules for a twin-beam turret, however, had to move with the turret and make the holes appear in exactly the right place no matter where the turret was aimed. It wasn't too bad on most of our ships, as at least the turrets themselves never moved. We had heard rumors of a new big cruiser design, however, that had several turrets that could move around the ship's skin on tracks, and I'm sure that tuning THOSE modules took days if not weeks. When you add in the fact that the ship had to be drifting, not necessarily "stopped" but certainly not under acceleration, in order to mount all these modules on the skin, the second part of the mod was just easier if you had a shipyard do it.

About the only other down side was that the shields took much more power, like four times as much, something about the square-cube rule, and some of the smaller ships didn't have much to spare. The Castles, our original class of scout/escort corvettes, for example, would jump on these shields, but they also meant that the ships had to manage power better. No more running everything at once. And, probably never any better weapons, either. No power to spare for that now.

This was much better, and the change was happening as fast as shield generators, hole-generator modules, and the instructions on tuning them could be shipped out to the fleet. The first part of the mod wasn't even a shipyard job. It only took a few hours, and since the second generator could be physically mounted with the original still running, the install crew would do everything needed for the new mod, then shut down the original and fire up the new one (in spherical "backup" mode) while they worked on the original. I wouldn't recommend installing the mod while in combat, but any other time that you had a few hours to spare, sure.

I think that this was the first major use of the new "Stagecoach" small freighters. As each of the first few were built, they were stuffed full of the new and improved shield generators and hole-generators and sent out everywhere we had ships. Of course any base could make the generators on the spot once they had the plans, but this got them to the fleet as fast as possible, and we noticed an immediate improvement in our combat results.

For scouting, the Sa'arm used a small ship we called a "Vacuna", don't ask me where the name came from, and it was undergunned compared to our scouts -the Castles and variants- but otherwise they were about the same size, maybe a bit smaller. They had the Confederacy's standard "Nav Shield", the one we all used before we beefed it up for our warships.

Actually, we understood that the Sa'arm having shields was a recent development. When the Confederacy had first run into the Sa'arm, they didn't have shields at all. Now, they had the Confederacy's standard Nav shield. This was one of several items that made the Confederacy determined to not allow the Sa'arm to ever capture any Confederacy property, whether ship, base, or planet, that might have more tech they could use.

Since every Confederacy installation was run by an AI, the AIs were instructed to self-destruct if capture seemed likely. Just great; we are going to space in ships that might blow up on us. On purpose. About the only concession they would make to our morale was to agree that, if any crew were still alive, the AI would not self-destruct without said crew's permission.

Anyway, even before this new development our scouts had more guns and better shields than the Vacunas. A Castle should win against a Vacuna, although whichever one "won" was still pretty much guaranteed to have enough damage that it may no longer be a hyperspace-capable ship. This factor also may have contributed to why we lost so many Castles at first. Of course it was worse, because it was a toss-up whether you would find one Vacuna or three. Two and four did not seem to be options. The Sa'arm seemed to be trilateral beings the way that we were bilateral, so maybe they thought in threes. Or, maybe they believed in threes for good luck the way some humans thought that seven was good and thirteen was bad.

The bottom line here was that, with these shields, our scouts were at a stroke significantly more battle-worthy than the Swarm scouts, and we started getting ships back from fights that we had previously been losing. In fact, if you ran into a Vacuna triad our scouts were now just short of equal to all three together.

Oh, yeah. I also got a flood of applicants for the Antwerp. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy, knowing that several thousand recent pickups wanted to serve under a captain who had already proven he was willing to ram an enemy ship if that was the only way to kill it.

Anyway, the Admiral commanding the blockade was glad to get Antwerp and the new shields, but he didn't want me back. The AIs wouldn't let him relieve me without a reason, though, so he sent us all out to the outer patrol. This also happened to be about the time that the outer patrol got big enough to rate a Rear Admiral, and I got a gold star very soon after I got my Captain's, now Colonel's, eagle. I also modestly admitted that I was the officer who had asked the research people if these improved shields were possible, and I became very popular with the men under my command.


Jimmy looked at me sideways. "How many square pegs do you want? You cannot take the entire Square Peg Fleet." Soon after the holograms had gone up, we had noticed that we were being informally referred to as "The Square Peg Fleet". SPF for short, of course.

Good, he wasn't going to be a dick about it. "No, but I've got a list of square pegs that are only out here because Admiral Maxwell doesn't like them. Maybe ten, twenty weirdos like me. They would be fine under you, but when you go, too, Maxie-poo will get someone just like him in here. I want them out of here before then, and I may well need them myself, if Ishtarat is as fucked up as it probably is. After all, if it was a normal place Maxie-poo wouldn't want me sent there, and the AIs wouldn't approve it."

I stood up and said "Lemme see what I can learn about Ishtarat first before I make any decisions I may regret. Meanwhile, Admiral M'beku, I'm sure you have things to do."

I went back to my office and called for Hannah.


When the Confederacy had first come to us looking for a solution to their "Sa'arm Problem", they had started by secretly grabbing anyone who was willing to go fight and wouldn't be missed, but they had, um, "personnel problems" from a lot of the people they got, and frankly anyone who was willing to go fight the Sa'arm and was violent enough to actually win was, well, even more frightening to them than the Sa'arm were. Keeping us from being an even bigger threat to them was a higher priority than saving Earth or even beating the Sa'arm. They and we had eventually reached a compromise where they got to shove us in a sort of tank that did hypnotraining and give us a test that showed them how we would respond to various situations if we were in charge.

Those who showed restraint, responsibility, integrity, compassion were allowed to volunteer for service; everyone else was not. It was a pretty small fraction, only one out of twenty or so, but almost eight billion humans still gave them a lot of "Volunteers". That still didn't work, though, because this was a one-way trip to the stars, you weren't going back, and so the volunteers generally wouldn't go without their wife, girlfriend, or whatever, and invariably they didn't pass the test.

Revision Two or whatever of the system gave the non-qualified people the option of going anyway, if the qualified one was willing to accept responsibility for them. Complete responsibility. Honey-bun was going to basically be property, his slave. If she couldn't pass the trustworthy test and you weren't willing to deal with her on that level, Honey-bun wasn't going. And, since we were also trying to create colonies in case we lost Earth, the higher your score the more "concubines" you could take to make babies with and build up our out-system population.

Humans being humans, that degenerated pretty quickly. The AIs didn't care what you did with your property, and power corrupts pretty damned fast. Worse, neither human law nor cultural mores nor alien propriety stood a chance against a woman who wanted her children to be taken to the stars and safety. Most of us tried to be good to our girls, but when you were getting picked up and women were taking all their clothes off and asking which hole you preferred it was hard to be rational about it and take someone you could actually get along with.

I had been one of the lucky ones. When the pickup team had isolated Little Creek Mall just outside Little Creek Amphibious base in Norfolk, Va, I was out shopping with my wife. We had discussed our options many times before. I could go on my own, but I really wanted her with me if we could swing it. She couldn't go without becoming someone's sex slave and she really didn't want to do that with a stranger but it probably wouldn't be too horrible with me.

In fact, like many couples, we went everywhere together just so that if we got picked up we could go together. My score on the CAP test entitled me to four playmates, and she knew that instead of being my one and only she would be one of four, but I always reassured her that she would be "number one" of four.


So, legally, Hannah was merely my favorite concubine, which was a polite way of saying "my personal property and sex toy". The Diaspora was full of fascinating stories about how us volunteers dealt with owning other people, but a warship doesn't have room for passengers that do nothing but suck cock.

Any ship, whether out in the Atlantic or out in space, is too fragile to have unstable people deciding that they can end it all for everyone if they just push the right button. The Navy had very quickly established that things worked much better if each concubine was given an official place on the roster and formal duties. Those duties could not directly control any weapon systems, but that left a lot of jobs available, jobs that the ship needed done. This made them part of the crew with specific jobs to do, work schedules, duties and responsibilities, and the sense of self-worth that goes with it. Because of this, generally a Navy "crew conk" was far more stable than a Marine concubine.

Part of that policy was manpower, of course. We allowed each volunteer serving on a warship to bring one concubine with him (or her). The 'Castle' Corvettes were, as re-designed for Humans, crewed by 6 officers and 38 enlisted. If we built a corvette that needed 44 different people doing 44 different things at once to navigate, fight, and repair damage, we could do it two reasonable ways.

First, we could build in living space for 44 different crew members that usually contained 44 (or more) concubines just sitting on their asses watching movies and eating popcorn, waiting for their owners to ask for a foot rub. That was the original 'Castle' class of corvette, which supposedly was an old Confederacy design that they gave us to play with. That was one of the "reasonable" ways to man them.

There hadn't been enough room for all the bodies, though, so some idiot at Central Command had decreed that, for these smaller ships with higher stress levels, the enlisted crew would share one concubine -and one berthing compartment- between each six crew. First, exactly how do you provide that 1/3 of a concubine for the regulation 37th and 38th crewmen? Second, how long do you think any of those people will put up with those conditions? The concubines will kill themselves -and take the ship with them if they can- and the crew aren't much happier. Mutiny is a really ugly word, but we came very close to it with the first few Castles. This was NOT one of the "reasonable" ways to man the Castles.

Or, we could put those extra bodies to work helping the crew. The Ainsworth -or 'Improved Castle'- class had berthing for 28 (6 officers and 22 enlisted) volunteers with each volunteer accompanied by one concubine who took over one of the 16 extra jobs that didn't have a formal volunteer assigned. This was the other "reasonable" way to man these ships.

Where possible, we tried to put volunteer and concubine together. The engineering gang had their concubines in the engine spaces with them, helping monitor their various toys. The gunners had their concubines right behind them, either flipping switches or running for sandwiches. As Captain, my concubine served as the ship's clerk, dealing with all the endless paperwork so that I could concentrate on useful stuff like guessing which way the dickhead in front of us was going to zig next, or why the FUCK Ensign Richards could not learn to be nice to her concubines. My second in command -officially the ship's Navigator- used his concubine to manage the mass of navigation data that the ship's AI maintained instead of us having a storeroom full of charts.

This let us build a ship with the exact same equipment as the 44 volunteer (actually 56 and 1/3 bodies) ship but only had 28 volunteers (actually 56 bodies) aboard. The ship had the same engines, the same sensors, the same weapons, but it was slightly smaller, which meant it was slightly faster. And, "smaller" and "faster" both translated directly into "harder to hit" which we all considered to be a good thing. All of our second-generation ships, the ones we designed ourselves using the lessons we learned from the first generation "gift" ships, were manned this way. All critical non-AI positions were manned by volunteers that the AIs would accept orders from, and everything else possible was done by said volunteers' concubines. The volunteers thus saved went towards manning another ship. The fleet probably had a couple of hundred ships that had been built as "Castles", and probably a couple thousand that had been built as "Ainsworths", the improved-manning version.

A little bit of thought should predict the personnel result: anyone who could serve as a crew-conk would benefit from the experience, training, and responsibility, and it was normal for retesting after a year or so to show a 1- or 2-point increase in CAP score. And, since most of the concubines who survived that long had started with 5.0 or above, a lot of concubines got to trade their coveralls for uniforms. Everyone benefited from this except for the sponsor who lost his fuck and suck toy, but if he had treated her decently she generally stayed in his bed anyway until they could both get new concubines. In the end, the same number of original volunteers-with-concubines that it took to man a single "Castle" ended up, after a year or two, manning about three "Ainsworths".


The Marines never had recruited for brains, of course, and the way they treated their concubines was just another example of men thinking with their dicks. The Marines had a very rigid division between their volunteers and their concubines. If you weren't a volunteer with your very own suit of "Iron-Man" powered armor, you were just a slut, good for nothing except making baby marines.

That didn't mean that Hannah couldn't make babies, of course. I tried hard to keep her pregnant, and since we were picked up she had given me two more daughters and another son. Well, one of my daughters was actually from someone else but we were supposed to be doing that, mixing up our genes as much as possible. One of the reasons for the Diaspora was to keep our species going when we lost Earth, and we were all strongly encouraged to have large families with mixed parentage.

Every ship had a slightly different culture, with squadrons and fleets each adding their own slant to things. As commanding officer of a ship, I got to decide how things would work on my ship, and I liked to use my concubine as a reward. Teach the replicators how to make a decent apple pie? LaRhonda is going to show you how deep throat should be done. Get the first hit on today's outbound "bandit"? I don't want to see you or Hannah outside your room until tomorrow morning, at which time the whole crew would want to know how it felt to have the ship's "head bitch" in her gold suit spend the night in your room last night instead of fucking the CO like she was supposed to.

Of course I got the rewardee's concubine in trade until I got Hannah back, so I didn't have to sleep alone. And it was fairly standard for one of the crew who wanted a favor to send their concubine to ask for it, where said "asking" involved providing services that would have had Hannah demanding a divorce back on Earth.

Yes, Hannah was my wife back then. I took her with me, along with three young mommies-with-babies, when I got picked up at Little Creek Mall. We knew each other, we understood each other's moods, and I knew I could trust her. She was my best friend. Our two children were both grown. We had even talked about it a few times. She had seemed happy that I wanted her to go with me if I went, and she understood that our relationship would change.

Boy, did it change. When we got picked up she balked at undressing, and then again when I asked her to kneel down and give me head. Both times though, I merely said "Honey, you don't have to go" and she did it. When I let her get back up again she tried to cover herself with her hands, though, so I made her put her hands behind her head and walk around with me like that while I checked out the other women available. I like big tits. Hannah has big tits, and that makes me happy. I mean, they weren't why we married, but they were a big factor in why we were dating in the first place, and if she was going to be naked I was going to look at them. Probably play with them, too.

For my other three concubines I wasn't looking for pretty, I was looking for healthy and maternal. We were supposed to be ensuring we had enough kids to keep the race going if we lost Earth, and taking along a ready-made family helped our genetic diversity. I understood that appearance could be adjusted if needed, so the willingness to have -and take care of- children was more important than a pretty face. Besides, young mommies usually had high sex drives. That turned out to not be relevant but we didn't know that at the time.

I ended up with Tina, Joannie, and LaRhonda and six children. Other than LaRhonda's three -who were all conveniently color-coded- it was hard to remember who came with which. Oh, yeah, Hector came with Tina so Johnny and Sally must be Joannie's. It didn't matter, though. They, and the herd that came later, were all my children.


My four ladies were each special in their own ways. Hannah was my wife, my partner, my better half, the mother of my first two children. I could trust her to make decisions for our good as a family. LaRhonda was no rocket scientist, but she was warm, fun, and a wonderful mother no matter whose children they were.

Tina was an independent woman who I thought should be a Sponsor in her own right. If I needed something done without supervision, I'd send her. She was wasted as a concubine. She kept me happy in bed, but I always felt it was more her job than something she wanted to do. And, she had some odd quirks.

She grew up in a Hispanic macho culture, and she had a deep need to occasionally be 'taken' to affirm her status as a desirable woman. What I as an American considered to be abusive rape was something that Tina needed every so often. I think it was Hannah who figured that out. Tina wasn't acting up until I got tired if it and put her in her place, she was acting up to make me put her in her place.

That bothered me. Yes, I'm probably on the aggressive end of that spectrum, and I definitely get a hardon when I see a woman forced to serve a man, but I don't go looking for women to beat up. I suspect that her mother was a true beauty, and she grew up watching her father force her mother to serve him. Somewhere, deep in her psyche, she felt that that was the right way for a man married to a beautiful woman to behave, and if I really loved her and found her desirable I'd beat her into obedience. If she was my wife I'd have sent her to counseling.

Joannie, well, frankly Joannie was a psychopath who should never be trusted alone with children or the elderly, but as long as she was devoted to me and the AIs watched everything, she was okay. The only time she went off the deep end was when she started suspecting that I didn't love her any more and was going to dump her. When that happened the AIs had standing instructions to sedate her on the spot and go get one of us.

We all knew the signs and could easily ward it off whenever it happened, except for one trend: Both of the times she got pregnant and sent to Truman to drop, she had to be sedated. Of course the one time we expect women to become needy and worry about being abandoned is the one time I can't be with her.

That was the real reason Joannie wasn't pregnant right now; I didn't want to go through that a third time and the other girls backed me up on it. At least until we were somehow more stable. Meanwhile, sex-wise Joannie was the greatest thing since sliced bread for me; she looked like a porn actress and acted like she wanted me to star in her next movie with her.

We were supposed to only take one concubine with us on board ship, leaving the others behind at some base taking care of the children, but as always there were ways to get around a rule that was causing trouble. You just had to find a higher-priority rule that said you could do what you wanted. In this case, I wanted anyone within a few months of birth to be safe back at Truman until the baby was safe to move, but otherwise I wanted my girls with me. We ended up setting up a sort of pregnancy rotation, where the one closest to birth (both before and after) stayed on Truman as the children's "Mom", and the other three came onboard ship with me. When the one who was farthest along started having trouble with shipboard life, we would send her back to Truman to watch the kids and dump her baby, and the previous den mother would rejoin us on ship.

Any ship had one or two volunteers with no concubines available. Killed in action, released back to Fleet for whatever reason, simply left behind because she was about to drop twins, there were many reasons. The CO and XO had to deal with this just like any other kind of personnel issue, and my solution was to bring all of our concubines who weren't about to drop and temporarily assign them to any crew who needed one. Most volunteers only had two at most, and if one was back at base dropping a kid and anything happened to the other, the volunteer had none on hand. It sometimes happened that the volunteer was the one killed, in which case we had an extra concubine, but usually we were short.

We could say that I only had one, usually Hannah, because the others were assigned to Ensign Smith, or Petty Officer Jones, or Gunner Parker. And, when we got a draft of replacements we could often send the single crewmen back to base for some R&R. More often than not, they would come back with a concubine of their own, freeing our girls up again. Hannah and Tina hated being handed around like they were sluts, but LaRhonda and Joannie both said it was no worse than what their boyfriends used to do to them. Actually, since they "really" belonged to the ship's Old Man and no one wanted to piss me off, it was usually a lot better than what their boyfriends used to do.


When Hannah came in I held my arms out. That told her I wanted her to sit on my lap so I could play with her belly. When she wasn't pregnant I would open her coveralls and play with her big fat titties, but whenever she was showing I would also rub her belly. Right now she was about five months in. Her belly wasn't too big yet; she could still walk, but she was definitely showing and having her belly rubbed calmed her. Okay, I spent most of my time tickling her nipples, but I did her belly some, too.

Should I mention the "Williams" coverall mod? The standard coverall for warship concubines was pressure tight, and it came with a small pouch that held gloves, booties, and a clear head-cover that made it completely space-worthy for short periods of time. It was donned or removed with a zipper that went from the neck all the way down between the legs and back up to the lower back. This made quite a few evolutions easy without getting undressed, from a quick fuck to simply taking a dump.

The first time I had to make Hannah take her coveralls off, though, just so I could fondle her titties, I had the pod's replicator make her a set with two extra zippers, from each armpit straight down to her waist, and all of my concubines had standing orders to have those two zippers completely down any time I was within arm's reach or could reasonably be expected to get in arm's reach. I wasn't going to tell anyone else they had to do it too, but those two extra zippers seemed to be getting pretty common on ships I visited.

On any ship, the CO's favorite concubine was the ship's "head bitch". It wasn't universal, but most ships gave her gold coveralls and official authority over all the other concubines. The Bitch also got unofficial authority over anything that she thought the CO would back her up on. For me and Hannah, that was pretty much "everything". To quote one of my favorite science fiction authors, if my life depended upon cutting a rope at the right time, I wanted the knife in her hands and no others.

Hannah wasn't Exeter's Bitch (that was Jimmy's Linda), she was the Fleet's Bitch which wasn't a recognized position but who was going to argue with her if she wanted to wear gold? Not I, not Jimmy, not Linda, and no one else on Exeter got any say in it. Sometimes it's good to be king, and being queen ain't too bad either.

"Honey, I want to send two girls to Jimmy's room for the night. What are your thoughts?"

"Why? What did he do?"

"He's getting promoted to Rear Admiral, and that's a big step."

"Rear Admiral as in your rank? Do we need two Rear Admirals out here? What are you not telling me?"

"I'm not telling you the scary news yet because I wanted you to have some time thinking about something fun first. Do you want to go spend the night with Jimmy, or not?"

"Of course not! And of course I will anyway if you tell me to."

"Well, then, we are being transferred, and Jimmy is getting my job. That means that we have to pry LaRhonda and Joannie out from the clutching arms of LT Rivers and Sgt Jamison anyway, so they are available if we want to send them to Jimmy tonight."

"When are we leaving?"

"That depends, as always, on transportation."


We got interrupted by the ship's AI, asking if I could talk with Jimmy. Sure, make it audio so Hannah can hear it too.

"What's up, Jimmy?"

"You were right, it's in the routine traffic. Tomorrow we are getting two couriers with fresh warm bodies for our growing fleet. One of them, the Postman, is to report to you for your use after unloading. He really, really wants you gone, boss!"

"Grump. As flagships go, a courier is a pretty big step down from Exeter, y'know?"

"Life's a bitch and then you die. I've never gotten to tell you that before, you bastard."

"Nope, you've always been an insignificant little piss-ant Captain before. Uh, do you have a pax list yet for your shipment?"

"It's on its way. I don't see anything that looks like your family."

"Great. We're sposta go immediately, and maybe we'll see our family again after the war."

"A disinterested observer might get the impression that Admiral Maxwell doesn't like you."

"I don't understand how you could have gotten that idea. It's simply absurd to think that someone of his exalted rank cares about junior officers like me. He probably doesn't even know I exist."

Jimmy laughed and ended the call.


Hannah asked "Where are we going and why the rush?"

"We are going someplace called Ishtarat, I'm going to be the system commander" -no way was I mentioning my own promotion to her; the fewer that knew that the better- "and I have no idea why the rush. Besides Maxie-poo wanting me out of here as quickly as possible, I mean. I have never even heard of Ishtarat; I really don't know why they want me. I was going to check on that after I gave you your marching orders, young lady."

"Will my 'marching orders' include cock? If not I may go track Jimmy down myself."

I smiled and kissed her neck. I play with her titties because I like to. The fact that she always gets horny when I do is a completely irrelevant side effect that in no way affects my life. Right.

"I think I could find a cock around here somewhere, if you need one. Why don't you just bend over the end of that couch there while I look for it?"

"Try not to smash the baby."


"Well, that was fun. We should do that again sometime."

"Maybe in an hour? I can stay here on the couch if you want."

"No, people would think you were a slut or something. I have things to do and people to see, now that I have done the people I need to do. You go get cleaned up and then go get Joannie and LaRhonda. I've got to decide what we're doing next and that means some research."

With that I sent Hannah out and asked Exeter to give me everything it had on Ishtarat. It wasn't much, what there was was confusing and contradictory, and NONE of it was good! I was reminded of that old tale about the Chinese pictograph for the concept of "crisis" being a combination of the two simpler symbols for "danger" and "opportunity", but there didn't appear to be much opportunity here.

- Ishtar was a planet with a human colony. In a system far behind "enemy lines" where we couldn't even expect our biggest battlecruiser (Stupid name! Conceptually, they were "pre-dreadnaught battleships" or even "casemate ironclads", not "battlecruisers") to survive.

- The colony was incredibly poorly-manned, because it wasn't properly authorized in the first place so no population buildup plan had been approved and acted on. And, because it was so far into enemy territory, Central Command refused to try to reinforce, considering it to be undefendable. The colony appeared to have no trained defenders at all.

- The colony's main defense appeared to be an atmosphere so corrosive it ate Sa'arm missiles before they could hit. They had no warships, they had no fortifications, all they seemed to have were some unmanned tenders and some ground-based laser cannons that themselves were destroyed by the atmosphere whenever they were used. And the colony's AI was busily terraforming said atmosphere to be non-toxic as fast as it could. What The Fuck, Chuck? They needed to stop THAT shit ASAP. Maybe they could have the AI try to make the atmosphere worse?

- Last, with all that, even after being hit three separate times by Sa'arm ships, their orbital repair yard was apparently doing more repair work than our own yard at Truman. And also, apparently, exporting rabbits. The children would love that.

"Exeter, these people need help. We don't want to send them people and equipment that will only be destroyed, as other systems also need the same people and equipment. Does the Confederacy Navy have any equipment that is unused because we cannot find a use for it?"

<If we restrict your answer to only that equipment under Human control, only the Earthat system has what you are asking for.>

"Please show me a list. Thank you." The only things on it that looked remotely useful were the old "Mercury" transports and the even older K'treel "Explorer" ships.

"Okay, please show me details on the K'treel Explorer class."

Hmmm. Not very useful, no, but manning levels are VERY low for those ships. Really, a navigator and an engineer could fly one themselves if they had to, which means that two men -and their concubines- could take a load of trainees and have a complete crew by the time they arrived anywhere. And, yes, they are very self-sufficient. With time, they could build themselves or anything else. Just like starting a machine shop with nothing but a lathe and a milling machine and a lot of steel stock...

"What justification would I need to requisition a pair of these K'treel Explorers?" One would be enough, but two is redundancy.

<Unless a use has been found for them, your requisition should be approved simply due to your rank and position as System Commander. However, they have no crews.>

"Leave that to me. 'Relax, I got an angle.'"

<I do not understand that last.>

"It's another quote from an old movie, 'Heavy Metal'. It means that, for some subjects, I know more than you do. Next, please display my private list of 'square pegs'. Right. Please copy that list to Admiral M'beku's private files, and let him know I want them all."

22 people that had been sent out here to get them out of someone else's hair. Commander, uh, Lt Colonel Jackson (CO of the Brennan), three Lieutenants, an Ensign, and seventeen 'enlisted' men and women of various ranks who did not hold formal commissions as officers. Every one a cut-up and unreliable. Unless, of course, their commanding officer was also an unreliable cut-up and thought they were actually the cream of the crop. It just depended upon what you wanted. Maxi-poo really should have been a Marine. He doesn't deal well with chaos, and that's pretty much what naval officers do. They embrace chaos and impose order. An officer who requires that others create order before they can function is not, in my professional opinion, an effective officer. He is a drag on the others.

Yes. "Exeter, please send a message to BuShips at Earthat asking for three of their K'treel Explorers for the Ishtarat System Command. I will provide the crews." If no one wants them, why stop at two?

<What priority should this message be?>

"Oh, routine, of course. I wouldn't want anyone to think this was urgent."

I went back to the mass of paperwork that is the real job of any executive. Now, however, instead of making decisions to be acted on, I noted my decisions as recommendations for Jimmy. If he has to live with them, he should get the final word on them.


Before long Exeter told me that Jimmy wanted to talk again. Sure, connect us.

"Tom, our three worst-damaged units are Norham Castle, Brennan, and Akashi. By an odd coincidence, they also happen to be the ones with almost all of your troublemakers. An outside observer might wonder how it is that the troublemakers always seem to get the most work done."

"Now, we can make some personnel shifts as part of the general shake-up as you leave and I institute my reign of terror, so that all of your people are on those three without too many questions. If we send all three to your new duty station for repairs, you can keep Norham Castle and Brennan if you send Akashi back. I'm not letting you keep our only Shiro, we need her too badly."

I had to blink a couple of times. Clearly, he had been reading the same reports about where I was going as I was. "Jimmy, we never have enough ships out here. You can't do that."

"Whaddya mean I can't do that? I'm an Admiral!" A little quieter. "This is an experiment in maintenance. We can't really afford to send them back to anywhere that can repair them, it takes too long. But, we can't leave them here on station, either. None of them are really fit for combat. Now, you're going somewhere nearby with a repair yard, if it still exists, and I want to use it. It's worth it to cough up a shot-up Ainsworth and a crippled Castle if it gets us our Shiro back in full health. You know how much we've come to depend on her."

I sat back and thought for a minute. Fuck tradition. I'm sending Hannah AND Joannie AND LaRhonda to his room tonight. "If you're sure. You're the one who has to deal with the fallout."

"If all you have is a courier, some Explorers, and some unarmed yard boys, you'll need Norham Castle and Brennan. They will be major units in your new fleet." He ended that with a snort. I had to agree, they really would be major units in that 'fleet'.

"Didn't take you long to start reading my messages, did it?"

"An Admiral has to keep up with the news."


If you are the guy in charge, the AI does things for you that they may not do for others. I was watching the security cameras when Hannah, LaRhonda, and Joannie walked up to Exeter's CO's suite and requested access. Well, Joannie walked. Hannah and LaRhonda waddled.

The hatch opened to show Linda, a lovely lady who was Jimmy's current 'skanky white ho' and the only other concubine on the ship with gold coveralls. "Hi, Bitch, what can I do for you?"

Hannah jerked her thumb over her shoulder. "Hi, Bitch, yourself. You can hit the road, that's what. Tom told the three of us that tonight we're going to take care of whatever nasty perversions your ol' man is into these days. That means you're out of a job for the night, got nuthin' ta do. Now, I've got no authority to give you orders, but I am allowed to predict the future. Here's my prediction: When I get home in the morning, if I don't find you keeping my man warm I'm going to stuff you out an access hatch without your hood."

Linda smiled and posed in the doorway. "Are any of you fertile? I am. And you know Jimmy is going to be pissed if I pop out an all-white baby."

"Do I look like I'm fertile?"

Joannie said "No, you look like the circus fat lady."

"You can go out that hatch, too, Joannie. Justifiable Homicide, calling me fat. The AI will back me up."

"No, it won't. Someone has to wear the gold suit and hassle the sluts when you get sent back to dump your load."

"LaRhonda can do that just fine. She'll help me push you out."

"LaRhonda is just as fat as you are. Try again."

"You know? I bet I could convince Tom and Jim to trade you for Linda." End of conversation. Hannah had never been a bitch, but she did a good job as The Bitch.

I spent the rest of the afternoon doing paperwork and conferring with Jimmy about personnel actions, promotions and transfers. He was right. Those three ships did already have most of my 'square pegs'.

When I gave up for the afternoon and went 'home' to the flag suite, I found Linda in my bed waiting for me. I spent a very enjoyable night trying to make sure Jimmy's next child looked nothing like him. Not a problem, Linda was lovely. And wonderfully compliant. A bit skinny, but Jimmy liked the model look.

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