Chapter 7

The next morning, I had what I hoped was a workable solution to my problem with the too-heavy gun. I remembered some pictures of war machines that I had seen, and I decided to mount the gun on the ATV. I finally wound up putting it on a cross bar at the top of the roll cage on a pintle mount. That way, Mary could fire it while standing in the passenger seat. Mary ordered breakfast from the replicator before I took it over to make my new version of the oversized shotgun. I decided to call this one the Mark 8.

I drove us a little way from the creature from last night and Mary fired a couple of explosive shots at the beast. With a little playing around, we found that the effective range was approximately 300 yards for the explosive round and a little farther than that for the cut round. The range on the normal free shot was about the same at 75 yards as before.

We found the tent to be an adequate shelter during this warm weather, so we were in no hurry to construct the permanent house. Instead, we played around with the replicator until we had Mary some more comfortable clothes. Once that was done, we decided to fabricate a larger replicator. Specifically, I wanted something large enough to form panels as large as 10 feet long and five feet wide. That would make a house with a lot fewer potential air leaks than we could get with the four by four foot panels we were limited to now.

That was a project that would take almost a week of full time use of the replicator. There would still be time for fixing meals, but that was about all. Once we had the new replicator, we could make a special building for it and make our permanent home from panels produced by the larger replicator. Then we could retire the smaller replicator to jobs like meals and other such things for ourselves and our home.

Right now, Mary was on a contraceptive shot that we had run off as soon as we escaped the town. We didn't want Mary partially incapacitated by a pregnancy until we could get a more secure home established. At the moment, she was on a three-month sterility regimen. That would put us into winter, and we would not be moving around outside so much.

As soon as we had the downtime for the large replicator, I wanted it to construct a learning machine so that I could be trained as a midwife. I was amused by the fact that our replicators were first or second generation offspring of the main replicator in the spaceship, and they could use any of the programs that replicator had. I seemed to be the only person on Hafh to know that. The communication range of the large replicator was approximately a lightyear, so there was no way for us to move out of range even if we moved to the other side of the planet.

My desire to be a midwife was to be sure that Mary and any of our children could receive all of the medical care that they might need. The thought had also occurred to me that other people might eventually join us, and midwifery would be a very valuable skill to have under those circumstances.

We were in the habit of working steadily on a project because that was what we had to do as serfs, so we had the larger replicator assembled within an hour of the last subassembly being produced and delivered to us. At that point, I started the new replicator making the various subassemblies for its enclosure and our house. It was imperative that the large replicator be protected from any inclement weather. Mary and I could live in the tent if we had to.

That turned out to be a non-problem. Both buildings were finished before the first snow. The snow was a bit deeper than it had been last year, and Mary and I had a ball playing in the snow now that we had warm clothes. No serf played in the snow because there were no warm clothes for them. We even built a snowman.

We had put a special room onto our house to contain the learning machine and our computers. Yes, there was now a computer for Mary and one for me. At last, Mary had gone through the same education program that I had used to get a high school level education. Now she could use the computer as well as or better than almost any other person on Hafh, and she was quite proud of her accomplishment, thank you.

To my surprise, we were even able to tap into the movie feed from the library in town. All of those movies and TV shows were available on our own computer, but there was a certain thrill in stealing them from town. I spent a lot of my time during the worst snows watching old war movies and similar TV shows. I was particularly attracted to "Combat." I learned a lot about weapons and small-unit tactics. Mary got interested in her own shows and movies after I showed her how to access them. Occasionally, I did wonder if the queen had ever found anybody else to feed the movies and TV shows to her as I had done.

I don't know exactly how it happened, but Mary and I got hooked on a study of history, especially about how various styles of governments worked. We immediately recognized the almost parody of the Russian governments under the Czars that had been usurped by the local lords and ladies. We speculated about how we would treat those people who had tricked our people into coming along and then forced them to be serfs. Would it be better to kill them, or should we force them to be serfs in our place? We suspected that the reversal of fortune would result in a large number of whippings and other abuse, possibly worse than the current serfs were suffering.

We started speculating about how we were probably strong enough to take over and oust the current rulers if we had only a few more people to help us. It was too much for two people because only two people could not look in every direction at once. Even the ratio of 88 to 1,000 might have been pushing it close to failure had it not been for the machine guns and complete surprise when everybody was wakened from suspended animation. Dammit, sometimes I wanted to go in and clean out that cesspool just on general principles.

That was when my curiosity got the better of me, and I discovered how to hack into the security system, both the audio and the video channels. Actually, it was easy once it occurred to me. With those people, electronic security was a joke. They had no one who understood electronics, and no one in power wanted to bother to learn the subject, even though it would only have taken two or three hours with the learning machine.

Hot damn, I found the video and audio tapes of our first fuck back at the library. The tapes showed signs of many views. I had no idea that there were that many voyeurs in the leadership. I pointed out the tapes to Mary and asked if she wanted copies. I did say that I knew how to clean up the scratches and other such on the tapes, so I could return them to their new state if she were interested. She watched the tapes a couple of times and decided that she was not interested after all. I offered to erase them, but she said not to bother. That might lead somebody to guess that we were still around.

That experience led me to other tapes that we found very disturbing. Somebody was taking young children and sexually abusing them somewhere in the depths of the spaceship-palace. That was unforgivable! I started tracing the tapes to try to find out who was the perpetrator. Dammit, it was the king, himself. Some of the tapes were as much as 12 years old, but I found one that was only about a month old. All of the tapes traced back to the same person. Shit, I didn't know how, yet, but I was going to put a stop to that. Right now, I didn't know what I wanted to do to the king in punishment. My first thought was to hang him from the gibbet by his balls.

There was one thing that I could do. It might point to me, but I was going to rig all of the TV screens to show continuous runs of these tapes whenever they were turned on. I could block all of the regular programming and substitute these tapes much the same way as I had done with the library stuff for the queen's amusement. I was also going to put a permanent caption on all of the tapes saying that the king was responsible for these atrocities. I was curious to see what the king did about this revelation.