Chapter 1. In which our heroine has a disturbing dream

RAF Forward Air Base, Crete, April 23, 1941

Air Marshal Curtis Prestridge, Commander of the British forward base on the Mediterranean island of Crete, really didn’t have time for this foolishness. The Hun was practically knocking at his door, and that daft Lieutenant Wilson was on the telly from the guard post wanting him to talk to some young local girl.

Eavesdropping though I was, I couldn’t help but find it annoying (yet again) that in his head he pronounced it “leftenant”. I know there is no love lost between the French and the British, but that’s no excuse for going out of their way to mangle every French word they import into their mongrel language.

“Please, Sir,” the lieutenant pleaded on the phone, “You have to come see this. A woman, Sir! She-she brought back Simon, err, Flight Lieutenant Tremaine. Sir, she flew!“

Simon Tremaine was one of Prestridge’s finest young officers. The senior officer had been sad when the man had not returned from his reconnaissance mission two days back. Fortunes of war, wot? He was, of course, happy to have the boy back, but something about the lieutenant’s frantic tone set the base commander’s teeth on edge.

“Steady on, lad,” replied the base commander, “Is Tremaine alright?”

“Oh, yes sir,” said the young officer, “His plane crashed, bumps and scrapes and whatnot, oh, and his left arm is a bit dicky. But he should be fine in a few weeks. We shipped him off to the infirmary.”

“Right then,” said the commander, breathing a bit easier, “And his crew?”

“Sorry, sir. All lost in the crash. But sir, the woman —”

“Blast it, Wilson,” growled Prestridge, no longer able to hide his annoyance, “we’ve lost one of our best bomber crews and you’re prattling on about some female. So she can fly. What’s so bloody amazing about a woman pilot? Some of the RAF’s finest trainers are women!”

“No sir. You don’t understand. She was just ... flying. Without anything. No plane, no wings, no Flash Gordon rocket-pack, not even much in the way of clothes — bare arms, bare shoulders, bare back, bare legs, like some sort of pin-up girl in a swimsuit — beg pardon, sir. Carrying Simon in her arms like a child, she was. I saw her as she came in, but I was so shocked I couldn’t utter a peep. When she landed she startled Hawkins, sir. He ... well, sir, he shot her.”

“Ah. Poor lass. But wait ... you wanted me to talk to her, right? Did Hawkins miss?”

The Royal Marines officer sucked air sharply as if personally affronted. “No sir, not a chance! Begging your pardon, sir, but Hawkins is my best marksman, cool as a cucumber when under fire as well. Sir ... you’d best just let me tell you.”

Prestridge heard Wilson draw another deep breath. “When she saw that Hawkins was raising his rifle she moved quick as the devil’s own cat. She turned her back to take the bullets for Simon. Hawkins had already loosed three rounds by the time I yelled cease. Beautiful pattern too. Tight cluster of holes right between her shoulder blades.”

On the phone, Prestridge heard the lieutenant pause and draw a slow breath, as if trying to figure out how to continue.

“Except, well sir they weren’t bullet holes. They were bullets, little pancakes of hot brass and lead. She flexed her back a bit and they peeled off and fell to the ground. Her hide was less marked than a tank would have been after such treatment!”

Prestridge was still having trouble parsing what his subordinate was saying.

“So you’re saying she flew without wings and stopped three rifle rounds with her bare skin?”

The lieutenant sighed audibly. “Yes sir. That is precisely what I am saying.”

“Well then, Wilson, I suppose I simply must meet this remarkable young lady.”

What ensued was the most incredible night of the senior officer’s life.

At first, he thought that it must be some sort of grand joke. The woman was beautiful and voluptuous, but couldn’t have been more than twenty, no more than a child really. She was clearly a local girl by her coloration and facial features. And then there was her, ah, attire. Burlesque dancers wore more clothing, and less garishly colored besides that.

But she spoke the King’s English perfectly, with an Eton accent even. And her bearing was noble, regal. And her eyes. There was something about her eyes that forced him to take her seriously. He was reminded of his last posting in Britain, before shipping off to Crete. A few of the royal family had come to “rally the troops” before their deployment, and he had somehow wound up briefly entertaining young Princess Elizabeth. From the outset he’d tried to joke with her as he did with his own daughters, but she would have none of it. She was there for a serious purpose and behaved as such. Friendly, but with every bit the gravitas of the King himself. Even so, his memory of the majesty of young Elizabeth’s bearing seemed but a shadow of the majesty projected by the girl standing before him now.

He should have thought her mad, prattling on about “Immortal Amazons”, and “Greek Gods”, and “Gifts of Power”. But he could not deny that she could back up everything she said. Her demonstrations of speed, strength, toughness, magic even — what else do you call it when someone rises up in the air before your eyes and flies around the room? — were beyond dispute.

But what she wanted from the Base Commander was even more amazing. She wanted to fight the Nazis, but not as some lone vigilante partisan, and not as some Mata Hari spy. She wanted official sanction as a warrior, a place in the Allied command structure.

“I’m a soldier,” she said, “I don’t want to act on my own, like some foolish gunslinger. I want to act in concert with my fellow soldiers. You have seen my powers, and there are more besides these, but I know that I am only one soldier. I need your army as much as you need my power. Find me a place. I will fulfill whatever role I am given to the best of my ability, as a cog in the greater machine.”

Prestridge was flummoxed. He was happy that the girl did not want to strike out on her own because he was quite certain he would have no way to stop her. But the idea of a woman in combat ... there was simply no way this would pass muster on the home front. This whole situation was political dynamite far beyond his pay grade. But he had years of experience to guide him. He knew when to bump a problem further up the chain.

“How far can you fly without tiring?” he asked her.

“As far as it takes.”

Prestridge rousted his staff clerk, young Corporal O’Reilly, and began dictating a letter of introduction for the young lady ... to Allied Command in London. Of course, he did not just want to dump this problem, this amazing opportunity, in someone else’s lap and run for cover. He owed his superiors his best take on how to handle things. After another two hours of thought and dictation, he handed her two envelopes. The first, the aforementioned letter. The second was fixed with the Top Secret seal and the title: “A Proposal for Project: Majestic“.

She was on her way before the dawn broke.

Portal City, Arizona, USA, August 14, 2013

It had been a long day for Cynthia Royal, Amazon Warrior Princess. You would have known her these past seventy-odd years by her call sign: Majestic Woman. For over twenty-four hundred years before that, she was known to a select few simply as Kynthia.

Where was I? Oh yes, long day. She had foiled two robberies, one at a bank, another, oddly, at an army munitions depot. And she had answered a Legion of Heroes call to deal with yet another two-bit supervillain, a weather-maker whose grandiose name she couldn’t even remember right now. She, Magic Lamp, and Sea King had stopped the villain from generating a series of category five hurricanes aimed to level the entire US eastern seaboard.

The outcome of the supervillain encounter was never in doubt, but it was still hard work for all three of them. I had been piggybacking along with her all day; I knew she was tired. Of course, she had no idea I was there, or that I might even exist. Air Marshal Prestridge never knew about me either, even though I monitored him daily until Crete was overrun by the Nazis. I guess you could call this eavesdropping part of my “super power”, but I don’t really think in such terms.

But we are talking about her, not me. And I had to hand it to her. She made it look easy. When I was only in the middle of my third millennium, I wasn’t nearly as accomplished as she was. Of course, is hard to compare cases. My third millennium was a long long time ago.

But, impressive or not, even superheroes get tired, and Cynthia was worn out. So she put on some comfortable night clothes, not particularly sexy, alas, and slipped between the covers. In no time at all I could see that she was deep asleep, lost in her dreams. As is normal for dreams, hers were fragmented, a miasma of images, feelings, desires, fears, all logic-free and without narrative, very loosely tied to events of the recent past. As is normal for a person who lives a life of danger, Majestic Woman’s dreams were violent.

I decided to strike when her dream had her naked except for her tiara and boots, in the grip of a giant blue fist generated by Magic Lamp. Except, in this dream Magic Lamp had the face of Ares, her sometimes nemesis, a rogue “Greek God”. If you knew what I know, you would know why I used those quotes. In any event, none of that had been my fault. Her true dreams were her own. But it was a perfect opening, and so I took it.

It was a simple three-body in-place swap. I have been doing them for much longer than there has been written language. First I swapped with my slave girl, Annette, then from inside the girl’s body I swapped with Majestic Woman, then from Majestic Woman’s body I swapped back to “my” body — actually a male slave, Greg, that I am riding right now. This left my slave girl and Cynthia in each other’s bodies, and me back where I started (that’s the “in-place” part). Call it another part of my “super power” if you must. In fantasy or science fiction stories, this is often called “mind swapping”, but of course from my perspective, my “mind” is always with me, so I have always thought of it as “body swapping”.

Hence this wonderful tableau: Cynthia lay before me naked. Her knees were on the floor but spread apart, her lovely rear raised high, her head and her bountiful chest bowed down to touch the floor, her arms stretched out before her, palms raised in supplication toward me. The slave girl I chose for Cynthia to occupy was a virtual duplicate of Cynthia’s own body, though clearly without her powers or physical training. I had worked seventy-odd years to breed such a duplicate from within my slave herd: those piercing brown eyes set in that beautiful face, that flawless Grecian olive complexion, those wild cascading black curls, that amazing hourglass figure, topped with those huge yet firm mammaries, bottomed with that generous heart-shaped, um, bottom.

Since this body belonged to one of my slaves though, there were a number of “bonus features” that were not in Cynthia’s own body. For example, even if I had not had the slave masturbate to the edge of orgasm before the body swap, this female slavebody would be very sexually aroused. There would be no way she could help it. The apartment was permeated with the smell of my male slavebody’s pheromones. And there were other aspects of temperament associated with this body that would work toward my interests and against Cynthia’s.

Now it was time for me to deploy another “power”: seed thoughts. I can plant them, but I can’t make the receiving mind believe them. I use this ability carefully, sparingly; it can backfire. Remind me to tell you about Isaac Newton some time. In any event, there is always some risk, but I didn’t think this seed would fail me:

«I must be dreaming.»

The seed was planted. She eagerly accepted the thought as her own. She wanted to believe it.

She was sprawled worshipfully before me. She was more horny than she had ever been in her whole multi-millennial life. She thought she was in a dream. So far, so good.

At the risk of interrupting whatever ... activities you might be engaged in at the moment, I should probably explain myself, lest I confuse you beyond reason. Well, best to begin at the beginning, right? I, as I think of myself, was born approximately twelve thousand years ago somewhere in Eastern Europe or Western Asia. I think.

Sorry, that’s the best I can piece together at this point in time. We didn’t exactly have GPS smartphones back then. There were rolling forested hills, green meadowy valleys, and snow-capped mountains in the far distance. That help any? Not surprised. Hasn’t helped me either. Anyhow, the body into which I was born lived a mere fifteen years, but I live on.

My name was Jovan, and, like every other young man I knew, I was a hunter. In point of fact, at the tender age of fourteen summers, in only my second summer of hunting, I was the lead hunter for my village. I always seemed to know where the herds and the predators were. I always seemed to know which animals would be easiest to cut out of the herd. And, perhaps more importantly, I knew the other men. I knew their strengths and their weaknesses; I knew their thoughts and their impulses. I knew how to meld these men into a team.

Of course, I was not yet at the peak of my physical prowess, but neither had been my predecessor. The lead hunter before me, my uncle, had been an ancient man of thirty-seven summers. His mind had been sharp; his experience, invaluable. But he was old and his wind was failing him. Over the years he kept leading shorter and shorter — and hence less and less successful — hunts. When I took over, our fortunes improved dramatically.

So I was a leader, a provider, a good and — in my way — strong man. And I was in love. Although I had known Navya all my life, suddenly she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen: long, tangled sandy brown hair atop a perfect heart-shaped face, a beautiful shy smile, and at eighteen summers, all the bodily charms a stone age man could want.

Furthermore, I knew — knew — that she wanted me too. I knew she saw scrawny Jovan as a man who would one day lead his people. When she smiled and batted her eyes at me with outward innocence, behind the eyes I saw avarice. It disturbed me, but I had to admit that the things I felt about her were not altruistic either.

Even so, the cunning I saw behind that pretty face froze me with fear. Spear in hand I could face down a charging elk, but I could not face Navya, No matter how much I lusted after her. Fourteen was still fourteen, even back then.

Of course, the other men gave me no end of grief about it. I remember the playful taunts of my older brother Eevan. “We wonder that you can see our thoughts, magic boy”, he teased, “but when you look at Navya, every man can see your thoughts ... We see them rising up between your legs!”

This, of course, brought gales of laughter from the entire hunting party. I marched stoically on in silence, ears burning red. I was the leader, but a leader among friends. Some days I was the joke, some days the joker. But this was my team, my hunt, my world, and it was a good one.

It was in the spring before my fifteenth summer that my life changed forever. We were following a herd of goats on the hillside — yes, it’s not all aurochs and mammoths; sometimes it’s goats — anyway, we were hunting goats. I was crouching behind a rock about the size of a small table, reaching my mind into the herd, looking for the easiest kill. The rock that hid me had probably stood there for endless eons, but it chose that moment to give way. I tried to jump to the side, but it caught me anyway, crushing my foot.

Eevan carried me all the way home. I was screaming in pain, then moaning in delirium, and finally, mercifully, I passed out. In the village, our old wise ones treated me as best they knew how. When I awoke Eevan was there.

“You scared away the goats,” he joked, but his eyes reflected my pain.

In my pain I tried to joke back, “I guess even I can’t see into the mind of a rock.” Yeah, we were a laugh a minute.

My foot was mangled beyond recognition, and soon it was infected too. For about a month, no one was sure whether I would live or die. Navya came to see me every day. Her words were hopeful, but inside she was saying goodbye. She thought I was dying; she never said it, but I knew. So I stopped wanting to know what she thought, and so I didn’t.

After all, it does take me some act of will for me to penetrate a mind. And really, it was just as easy not to “hunt in others’ heads” while I was in agony. I was a bit ... distracted.

Slowly, though, I got better. By Midsummer, I was standing with the help of a stick. By Leaf-fall I was hobbling around with an improvised crutch, trying to find some way to be useful. I even tried to help with the women’s work, but the women just shooed me away like the child I had once again become.

Eevan took over the hunt. I was happy for him; he was a good leader. But I didn’t see much of him after that. Even when he was in the village, he was avoiding me. I saw Navya almost every day, but the pained look on her face told me I still didn’t want to know what she thought, and so I didn’t.

I actually did look in her head once when she was with me. She had seemed distracted, so I wanted to know what she was thinking about. Big mistake. She was trying to figure out which bachelor to set her sights upon now that I was useless to her. I vowed I would never read her mind again. Ha! Never say never, right?

One day not long after that, Navya found me alone in the bachelor’s hut (yurt? yaranga? tipi? lodge? The word we used wouldn’t mean anything to you). She told me that Eevan was back from the hunt and wanted me to meet him at the falls. I knew exactly where he meant, even though Navya didn’t. There was a rocky outcropping overlooking a nearby waterfall that had been a favorite haunt of ours as young boys.

I hobbled away from the village and struggled up the path to the cliff’s edge as best I could with my crutch. Eventually, I dropped in exhaustion and pain next to my big brother, happy to see him, legs dangling over the precipice, watching as the river fell endlessly onto the rocks below.

I saw the pain on Eevan’s face as he began.

“Jovan,” he said, so serious, and stopped as if searching for words. So I looked into his head to see what was bothering him.

And then ... I knew.

I knew Navya had declared her love to Eevan (whatever that really meant). I knew Eevan loved Navya (Truly. I was seeing his innermost thoughts, after all). I knew they were going to share a home and a life and children, and that this is what he had come here to tell me. In that moment I hated my brother. It was the boulder, not Eevan, that had taken my life, my standing, my woman from me, but he had been more than happy to step into my place. I wanted to kill him. No, I wanted to be him. A stabbing pain blossomed behind my eyes, and I passed out.

When I awoke, I sat up, but something was different. I looked down at my two perfect feet, attached to a larger and more muscular body than the one I knew. I felt the full beard instead of my own boyish face. And then I saw... me.

The other me had also fallen unconscious, but was wakening. My other self looked up at me, clearly confused.

“Jovan?” he asked.

It was the last thing my brother had said to me before we blacked out. And even in that higher, reedier voice, my voice, I knew it was my brother, speaking to me with my lips, looking at me with my eyes. And I was looking right back at him, with his eyes. I was still confused but I remembered my pain, my anger.

Eevan had the life that I wanted. Eevan had the life that I deserved. But now ... now I was Eevan.

Grabbing my frail and crippled former body, I looked my older brother in the eye and threw him off of that cliff.

But enough about me ... where were we? Oh yes, that Fabulous Femme, that Amazing Amazon, that Luscious Lady, that Super Slut. Majestic Woman — well, a woman with Majestic Woman’s mind — lay naked and prostrate before me. Of course, she didn’t stay that way, more’s the pity. She shook her head slowly and rose unsteadily to her feet, disturbed by her nakedness but still certain she was dreaming.

“Whoa, Cynthia girl, this is a bad one,” she said, shaking her head, trying to take in her surroundings.

It was clearly a man’s apartment, a large, luxuriously appointed one. As she turned to take in her surroundings she saw the spotless, well-lit kitchen. Further, a wall of windows, ceiling to floor, displaying an outdoor patio and a sweeping city skyline. It wasn’t a skyline she recognized: Portal City, or Cosmopolis, or Carthage City ... or London or Los Angeles or Singapore for that matter. But it was clearly “civilization”. Turning further yet she saw a massive entertainment center, a giant wide-screen displaying ugh a football game. Completing the circle she saw the front door, the hallway to the rest of the apartment, and, apparently for the first time, me.