Blame Charlie
Copyright© 2012 by dotB
Chapter 7
The morning after the last cabin was finished and all four women had moved their belongings out of my house, I awakened to the aromas of freshly perked coffee and frying bacon. I was intensely curious which woman might have decided to cook my breakfast, but was absolutely astonished at the sight which greeted me when I walked into my kitchen. The figure standing before my stove was that of Angelina, Maria and José’s oldest daughter. All she was wearing was an apron meant to protect her belly and chest from grease splatters. That left her back bare and since she was facing the stove, I saw more of her eighteen-year-old body than I had ever seen before. If nothing else, that display proved to me that little Angie wasn’t so little anymore.
“Buenos días, jefé. Madre le dijeron que necesita un cocinera y un ama de casa, así como una acompañante ocasional en la cama, así que le conté. No hay cadenas, pero Papá quiere un nieto,” she said, somehow managing a soft, husky tone.
I hadn’t spoken much Spanish in a while and I didn’t automatically think in the language, so I had to puzzle over what she’d said for a few seconds before my mind kicked into gear and I could translate her words into English. (“Good Morning, Boss. Mom said you would need a cook and housekeeper now, as well as an occasional companion in bed, so I volunteered. No strings, but Daddy wants a grandson.”_)
What she had said let me know a lot about the situation and made her intentions abundantly clear, besides her strategic display aroused primal urges beyond my control. I knew instantly that I had once more fallen into the thrall of a female entering ovulation, so I couldn’t have resisted temptation if I’d had to. Her appeal was far too strong for me to do anything, but acquiesce to the demands of my body.
I walked up behind her, reached around to take the fork she’d been using to flip the bacon from her hand, then turned off the heat on the stove and scooped her into my arms. The fact that I had held her in my arms only moments after she was born, then had seen her grow to maturity added a measure of appeal that verged on incest, yet I knew there was no kinship between us. Still, the feeling that we were flirting with forbidden territory was probably an additional factor in our desires for each other.
Then we did more than flirt, but the details of those actions shall remain out of sight behind my closed bedroom door and hidden deep in the vaults of our memories.
By the time we returned to the kitchen, the coffee pot was cold, and the grease rendered from the bacon had set, gluing the rashers to the bottom of the pan. The bacon wasn’t burnt, but over Angie’s protest, I scooped it out and dumped it into the dog’s dish to give her a treat, then started another batch. As a result, we ate breakfast a little later than usual.
I discovered later that everyone on the ranch seemed to know what Angie had planned, and they all seemed relatively happy that she had succeeded in her seduction of El Patrón. She had finished high school the day before and had connived with everyone on the ranch, including the builder who’d been working on the four cabins as well as the women who’d been in my house in order to set the whole thing up. By that time, I had decided that what she had done was a wonderful idea, though, so I approved of her actions.
Angie soon proved to be an ideal companion, seeming to know when I wanted company, when I wanted to be alone, or even when I wanted to be around someone other than her. In fact, I think she might have the title of the strongest female telepath I’ve ever met because she was soon one step ahead of any request I made, and she did it consistently, no matter what my desire was. As an example, I could be out working around the ranch and suddenly have a hankering for burritos, or maybe fried chicken, or perhaps even pork chops. Yet when I arrived home, no matter what my craving had been, it might already be cooking, or in the warming oven of the stove so it could be served hot, or even on the plate and sitting at my place at the table. Not only that, but she was willing to promote and assist in having me satisfy the desires of other women, yet never interfering when she wasn’t wanted. I don’t think Angie had a jealous bone in her body, and because of that, as well as her other sterling qualities, she became an indispensable addition to my household.
I found that with Angie running the household, many of the pressures I’d been feeling build up around me were relieved, and I was able to enjoy life again.
Once Angie was ‘installed’ in my house, life straightened out for me. Many of my evenings, several nights, and a few early mornings might be taken up by my ‘Maminai’ duties as one of the progenitors of a new genetic variant of the human species, but during the day I once again had time to do my thing. That meant the reestablishment of a semblance of my ‘pre-alien attack’ lifestyle, so I was again able to return to work around the ranch, and I was even able to take the time to do some planning. Of course, once I was able to consider our situation, I realized that I really didn’t know all that much about the present state of affairs. Oh, I had been told a few facts, but what I knew was sadly lacking in the details needed to plan for the future, not just my personal future, but also the future of the ranch. That meant I was going to have to do some research and ask a lot of questions of people in the know.
Considering the fact that we had been moved several million miles across space, my first worry was the availability of basic supplies. When we were on Earth, we lived on a rocky island, and the majority of our food had been imported because of the population of the area, yet there seemed to be no shortage of food here and now. Of course, since we lived on a ranch, raising some cattle and keeping a large garden, we’d never been dependent on outside sources for our basic foods, but what about the people in town? Was there a decent supply of food available to the people who lived in the towns and cities of the eighty-mile-wide circle that had been brought here?
I had to think for a minute, but I realised that there were quite a few people in the area that had been shanghaied from Earth. Since I knew the ranch was the center of the circle that had been transported, I spent a moment thinking about what cities and towns were within forty miles as the crow flies. There were two mid-sized cities, but one of those had at least five suburbs. Then there was another small city and its suburbs, as well as several smaller towns. As a rough estimate, I thought there must have been half a million people in the area. I’d heard that the majority of the population had survived the move through time and space. If we still had enough supplies after a year of living on this planet for the bankers to hold a banquet like the one they’d had, we must be getting food supplies from somewhere.
Of course, when it came to manufactured supplies, I was certain we were S-O-L. I didn’t recall that there had been even one decent-sized factory on our end of the island, but then this area had no mines or minerals for raw materials, so that was no surprise. We had a fair bit of coal available in the local area, but even those mines had been closed for decades. Wait a second - we didn’t have any oil wells or refineries anywhere on the island. I knew there were a couple of small fuel depots and at least two decent-sized suppliers of marine fuel, but a lot of that marine fuel was in the form of heavier-grade oils than normal engines could use. That minimal supply was going to cause problems because it wouldn’t take long before we ran short of fuel for our cars, trucks, and other diesel or gasoline-powered vehicles.
Now that the shortage of fuel wouldn’t have much effect on the ranch since we do much of our work on the back of horses, and besides that, I had an ace up my sleeve. Years before, I’d had a wildcat oil drilling rig sink a deep well for us, hoping to hit water, and they’d been successful, at least temporarily. The drilling rig had hit water at about two thousand feet, resulting in an artesian well which gushed water under high pressure. However, since it was under such high pressure, it was no surprise when the flow of water died after a few hours and natural gas roared forth instead. I’d had the drillers cap the well and had virtually ignored the fact that it was there, but now I was contemplating the idea of reopening it. I knew that gasoline engines could be converted to run on natural gas, and I thought perhaps diesel engines could too. We already had experience with converting a gasoline engine over to propane since the emergency generator at the main ranch had been converted to run on that. It wouldn’t take much work to convert a few other engines, then we could use natural gas to power our cars, trucks, and tractors. Of course, since fuel was in such short supply, I considered the idea of buying or building a large compressor and a few storage tanks, then we could sell liquified natural gas.
That brought up another question: where was our supply of electrical power coming from? When we’d been living back on Earth, we’d lived on an island, and our electrical supply had been fed from the mainland by way of an underwater cable. Who or what was supplying our electric utilities, and more importantly to me at that instant - who was paying the bill for power for the ranch? I didn’t recall paying a bill for electrical use since I’d been up and around. In fact, I didn’t recall even seeing a bill for the electricity we were using. Were we getting our electricity supplied for nothing? Oops, what about the phone bill and the internet connection? I hadn’t seen a bill for those either. Oh, just a second, I hadn’t recovered for almost a year after most of the other people had been reawakened, so I’ll bet the bills were being paid from the ranch accounts. That would mean José and Maria would have a record of what was going on, and I could ask them how things were being handled. In fact, come to think of it, I could just ask Angie; she’d probably know how the bills were being paid.
So since I’d been sitting in my office, I went out to the kitchen and found her sweeping the floor, which might have had seven crumbs and a few motes of dust marring the polished tiles.
“Are you really busy, Angie, or can you spare a few minutes to come into my office? I want to ask you about where we’ve been getting our supplies and who’s been paying the bills since the ranch was shifted here to Terratoo?”
“Well, our suppliers are mostly the same people that supplied us before, and Mom has been writing out the checks against the ranch account to pay the bills, and Dad has been signing them,” she grinned at me. “I’ll bet that isn’t all you want to know, though, so give me a few minutes to finish this job, then I’ll be free to come talk to you for a while, okay?”
“Sure, no problem,” I grinned back. “I’m just trying to get back into the full swing of things and looking for information in order to understand the situation we’re facing.”
“Well, I can tell you what I know for certain, and I can add on everything that I’ve heard, but it may not all be absolute fact,” she frowned slightly. “I think you should check everything I tell you with others just to make sure what I’ve heard wasn’t a silly rumour, because there are a lot of those around.”
“Okay, I can do that, but the answers you give me will give me an idea of what questions to ask others, which means I won’t look quite so dumb,” I grinned, and that brought a return grin, a slightly shaken head, and a chuckle from her as she went back to sweeping the already spotless floor.
Actually, when Angie came into my office and got comfortable, then started answering my questions, I found that she was a fount of information. She was so knowledgeable that she was able to act as a source of the full background of our rescue from Earth. She even understood the background and history of both the Maminai and the Eritol and was able to explain why and how they became involved in our rescue.
Almost immediately, I learned that our area hadn’t been the only one which had been lifted wholesale from the surface of the Earth. However, each of those other lifts had been made by the Eritol in order to save the lives of various other individuals and groups who had been in imminent danger of death and destruction. To my surprise, those rescues had been made using equipment which had been discovered aboard a Xalibrox ship found drifting in orbit around Mars. However, that discovery was a story in itself, and the saga started long before Charlie had made his first phone call to me.
The original conflict which eventually led to the Eritol’s involvement in our rescue had begun eons before Homo-Sapiens had managed to walk upright, let alone develop any form of society. In fact, you could say it had begun when the Xalibrox had first invaded Mamina, but that had happened about the same time as the last of the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Previous to that invasion, the Maminai had evolved as an intelligent, but largely arboreal society who spent little time outside of their trees and orchards in the forests of Mamina. Meanwhile, the Eritol developed an aquatic society, using the sea to provide their food and protection, dependent on their underwater caves and cities of coral for protection from the voracious denizens of the deep. Both species had learned to cooperate to some degree when their territories overlapped in the shallow swamps that ringed the lands of the Maminai.
That cooperation probably developed because of a mutual appetite for the fruits of a variety of mangrove which grew in those shallow waters. The Maminai loved the flesh of the ripe fruit of the tree, while the Eritol harvested the nut inside the fruit, the part which the Maminai discarded. Additionally, both species hungered for a shrimp-like creature which migrated into the roots and lower branches of those same trees to spawn during the periods of high tide. Those two foods led to communication, cooperation, and trade, which developed over eons into a matter of shared technology.
Some unnamed genius amongst the Maminai reached the conclusion that highest tides came at the same time as certain moon phases. His study of the tides led to basic arithmetic, then elementary mathematics, basic astronomy, and eventually a calendar. The development of a calendar and the need for other records to keep track of trade and fair dealings was the spur that brought about a written language. Trade also brought with it a need for weights and measures, then some form of packaging, which led to carving and basketry, as well as the development of cordage and the weaving of nets. A floating log evolved into a raft, then a dugout canoe, followed by a better canoe using a skin made of bark with branches for ribs, which eventually led to the building of boats. Larger boats needed to be built on land, then moved into the water, and the rollers they initially used evolved into wheels and axles. The need for better tools than broken stone led the Maminai to metallurgy and the uses of fire. And so it went, as technology grew one slow step at a time.
Meanwhile, the Eritol too were developing as well, but their main interest was genetics. Their first genetic success was performed on themselves -- they became telepaths so they could communicate with the Maminai, who were naturally telepathic. Following that success, they found ways to adapt various aquatic or amphibious creatures to perform specialized jobs which they found difficult or impossible to do themselves. First amongst those developments from other species was a suit made from an amphibian’s cocoon which allowed an individual Eritol to spend extended periods on land and out of water. Use of that suit allowed them to trade more freely with the Maminai, but it also allowed them access to the technological achievements of the Maminai. Having access to technology, even as primitive as what was available, was a tremendous boost for the Eritol, then by working as partners with the Maminai, both species prospered.
However, the denizens of Mamina had hardly reached what humans would have called the beginnings of an industrial age when the Xalibrox first invaded their world. At first, both the Maminai and the Eritol were slaughtered by the infrequent invaders, but over time, they learned to fight back, mostly by capturing the technology of the invaders and using it against them. A long, thoroughly devastating war broke out, but eventually, they captured enough of the invaders’ technology to win the war and kick the Xalibrox off the planet of Mamina.
Up until that time, neither the Maminai nor the Eritol had any ambitions to become space travellers, but they realized that they were still vulnerable to an invasion, and their best defence would be offense. So, they combined their talents and adapted the technology of their former attackers to their own uses, then tracked the Xalibrox to their home planet. When you consider that neither the Maminai nor the Eritol had any understanding of alternating current or radio waves when they had first been invaded, that feat was an astonishing accomplishment on its own. However, they had captured several of the invaders’ ships, and they had time and the desire to be safe from invasion, so they taught themselves the technology their invaders had left behind. Unfortunately, when they reached the Xalibrox home world, the atmosphere was poisonous to the joint force, so they were unable to mount a sustained attack there. Not only that, but it soon became clear that the Maminai did not handle either weightlessness or heavy gravity very well. On the other hand, since the Eritol required a liquid environment, and liquids were incompressible, they had little problem with spaceflight.
With that in mind, they devised a ship of their own design. The Eritol modified the genetics of a huge, hard-shelled aquatic beast similar in shape to an Earthly manta ray to create a hull, and with the assistance of Maminai technicians, they equipped it with modified Xalibrox technology. Then, so that Maminai could travel with the Eritol, they devised a system of stasis which kept the bodies of the Maminai safe through the hazardous portions of space travel. At first, they were satisfied to patrol space near Mamina, but by working together, the Maminai and the Eritol discovered a way to trace the emanations of the Xalibrox space drive. Once they had done that, the Eritol could follow and obstruct them, either in space or on the worlds they invaded. So, from that point onward, they opposed Xalibrox and interfered with their attacks upon other races at every possible instance, tracing their space travels and harassing them whenever and wherever possible. The Xalibrox attempted various strategies to evade or confuse pursuit, so on rare occasions, a rogue ship might evade detection for short periods of time.
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