Chapter 9

Two weeks later I got a call to stop by the R&D lab for a discussion of body armor. I took my wives with me because I wanted them to wear the armor, too. For what I had in mind, the body armor had to be tailored for an exact, skin-tight fit. That was going to require some meticulous fitting to get it just right. I smiled to myself as I thought to have the women wear the body armor over their tits, but to have small holes in the right place for their nipples to stick out.

We three showed up and met with the supervisor who showed us samples of cloth that he thought would work for body armor. Each sample of cloth was slightly different, and I was immediately drawn to the one which was not likely to reflect light. The other samples seemed too shiny for the kind of stealth capability that I wanted. The cloth that I preferred was a little thicker than the others, and it was a little softer than the others. Frankly, it felt a little bit sexy as I rubbed my hand over it. The women agreed with me about the sexy feeling and were intrigued by the thought of having their bodies completely encased in the fabric.

We went to the lab and saw demonstrations of how the cloth could resist sword and knife cuts. There was no protection against bullets, but that was not something that I had asked for. We so seldom faced bullets that it was not such an important concern. The protection offered by the cloth was enough for me to ask for suits for each of us to be made available as soon as possible. The women were really turned on by the thought of having their bodies completely covered by clothing, something that neither one had ever experienced. I wanted to go so far as having hoods with only the minimum number of holes so that we could see, breathe, and hear. We would start with only eye holes and go from there.

Some woman came in and measured us for our new clothes. I never did find out what her normal job was: none of the R&D people wanted to talk about it. We were told that the first fitting would take place in two weeks. We could hardly wait to try the outfits on.

Two weeks later we showed up for the first fitting. Nobody expected the armor to fit perfectly because this was the first time in many years, if ever, that full body covering had been tried on Horurie. Nevertheless, the clothes did fit much better than had been expected. The woman had some different helpers this time, and they tacked the loose places with some sort of adhesive. By the time they finished, the armor fit us like a second skin, and that was exactly what I had been looking for.

There was some stretch in the cloth so that we did not feel any binding as we moved. In fact, after a few minutes of moving around, we completely forgot that we were wearing anything more than our bare skin. The seamstress had been thoughtful enough to leave us a trap door for shitting and pissing without having to remove the entire outfit. That was appreciated. The outfits were taken away, and we were told to be patient. We could expect the outfits to be ready in a couple of more days.

The day we returned, we were told to be prepared to leave our flier for the modifications and tests that the women had requested. As a result, we looped around to the military base to pick up another flier to use while ours was being modified. That was easily done, and Anslee flew our flier to the R&D lab while I flew the spare vehicle. I was amused that she was not interested in flying anything but "her" flier.

We picked up our outfits and left for home with Sinola piloting this time. We had all of our weapons with us as was normal, and we wore our new outfits for the fun of it. The final outfit consisted of pants, shirt, and hood. The overlap at the waist was fitted out to hold all of the things we usually carried while on a mission.

I had not flown over our new estate since I first inspected it, and this was an opportunity to do so at a leisurely pace. There were some very wild sections on the estate, and I especially wanted another chance to look at them. All three of us were admiring the scenery on the ground and not worrying about what might be sharing airspace with us, so we were caught completely by surprise when we were attacked by three fliers equipped with Gatling guns.

Sinola was not the accomplished pilot that Anslee was, so she was not able to avoid the attack. In fact, I doubted that Anslee could have done much better under the circumstances. Anyway, Sinola hit the emergency message button as we went down in the forest, which might be accurately termed a jungle in this area. The call for help went out with the beacon broadcasting a marker that could easily be tracked, but we crashed into the trees and skimmed along the tops for some distance before we came to a stop.

The sliding along the tree tops probably saved our lives because we were spared a major crash into the ground. However, it left the flier in plain view on top of the trees, and the attacking fliers swooped around to make a strafing run at us. We dove for the trees to escape the well aimed bullets that did not take long to start the flier to burning fiercely.

We swiftly dropped to the ground and ran about 100 yards away from the burning flier before it could explode and take us with it. We could only hope that the military would respond promptly to our call for help because we were caught without food or water, though we did have our weapons and a lot of ammunition.

One of the first things that jumped to my attention was the question of why had we been attacked. As far as we knew, and we would know, there was no armed insurrection currently afoot; therefore, there was no obvious enemy for us to blame. All of the other possibilities were equally unlikely, except for one: this was a well organized bandit group that had its headquarters on my property. And the reason it could be there was because I had neglected my duties in respect to the estate.

There was free trade all over Horurie, so there was no money to be made in smuggling. The only thing that we could think of was that this was a gang of very successful slavers or drug sellers. Slavery was forbidden by the king, but it was impossible to wipe out the trade completely, so we knew that slaves, especially young sex slaves, were still being sold despite everything the police and military could do to stamp it out.

Likewise, there were a few drugs that were so dangerous that they were forbidden. Even though only abject fools would thinking of using them, there were young people who did so just to prove that they could get away with it. The trouble was that these drugs were so addicting that only one experiment with them was enough to trap the user into life-long addiction. Thus, there was a market for the drugs that was small, but very profitable. Usually, the first use of the drugs was free because the vender knew that the user was trapped from then on.

Either one of those illegal activities was so profitable that the purveyors could easily afford large organizations with plenty of arms, some of it of military grade. We were afraid that this was what we had run into, and we had been shot down because we were getting close to a base of operations.

Dammit, this was such effrontery that we decided to declare war on the miscreants immediately. We had an excellent clue as to the location of the criminals: surely they must have been close to the direction that we had been following, and they must have been close by. We were in excellent physical condition, so we decided to try to find the operation on our own as they were likely to be within convenient walking distance and large enough not to be missed.

Yes, we were young enough to be confident in our invincibility, and we had some proof of that, so we decided not to wait on the military to rescue us. If worse came to worst, I did have a small radio that I could use to call for help, though I was sure that I would not need it. However, not being a complete fool, I did call in to report what had happened to us, our thoughts on the matter, and our intention to start remedial action at once. The poor private whom I talked to was not in a position to order me to stay away and let the regular military handle the situation. Nevertheless, he did report my conversation to higher authority.