Chapter 2

Within three months the men and women had sorted out their mating preferences, and everyone was relatively happy with the mates available to them. Within six months, all the women except one were pregnant. Lysis had been tortured by Ra to the point that her reproductive system was damaged too severely to bear children.

The first thirteen years, five-hundred-seven children were born. Year fourteen added twenty breeding females to our population, so that year there were fifty-nine births. The next year, nineteen females came of age so there were seventy-eight births. We were very fortunate that all the women were healthy and strong, so we didn’t try to space out pregnancies other than the natural spacing their schedule of coming into heat created.

It was difficult for our American crew to agree that fourteen-year-old girls were ready to bear children, but their lives as well as ours depended on having enough fighters. I was particularly surprised at how strongly the first daughter Freydis bore me affected me when she turned fourteen and begged me to accept the gift of her virginity. She seemed to share my feelings, and we had lots of practice sex as we waited for her to come into heat. Knowing the girl was my daughter and hearing her call me, “daddy” when she came almost made me a premature ejaculator. As a rule, we tried to breed other crew members’ daughters, but many of the crew felt as I did and their nubile daughters drove them crazy, most of the time on purpose.

As more children turned fourteen, our population grew faster and the genetic diversity was increased to the extent the limits of the original number of women and crew members allowed.

We decided that we would not have combat units composed of men and women. We put Lysis in charge of women’s units. We knew she had more reason than most to want to kill Ra and his followers. She kept her activities secret from everyone but the Captain and me. She was training the youngest and most beautiful women in assassination techniques. Soon the young girls in her special squad were experts in the use of poison and the short, throat slashing knife. She also formed light infantry units to move rapidly to areas of the battlefield where our forces were being overwhelmed to provide support and keep our positions from being overrun. She created other units to protect the gun crews.

We put a lot of emphasis on educating the new generations on why we were doing things as we were. We found that the women didn’t age and lived very long lives. The new generations of women seemed to have long life spans like their moms. Males had about the same length of life as the crew members. This made it even more important for the boys to learn the lessons we were teaching very, very well. The proportion of male babies born was considerably higher than the number of females. Apparently, this closed system was self-balancing. This didn’t lend itself to our purposes, but we did the best we could. Every female bore one baby every year. Even the modest numbers of females born allowed our population to grow.

The Captain developed a strategy to fight Ra, Horus, and their followers.

The women had explained how the ships communicate with each other and we were able to find a receiver in Ra’s compound. We adapted the receiver to make an alarm that would sound horns all over the village when signals on Ra’s band were detected. The pilot and pilot in training would take the shuttle up to the ship. A work crew would move all food into the shuttle. The pilot, trainee, and cadet would rig a booby trap on the ship’s airlock and then return to the planet. The work crew would store the food and then we would check the aim of the guns for a final time.

If they did not set off the sabotage device on our ship, we would setup for our original plan.

If they did, we would expect an airborne attack where Ra would come in shooting. We copied the heavy guns but scaled them down to fire a smaller projectile. We were hoping these light guns would be more maneuverable and able to be aimed fast enough to hit moving ships.

If Ra thought his forces were safe they would land to refuel. The ‘gods’ ships could only refuel one at a time. The first would touch down by the pit mine. The fuel was very similar to the “dilithium crystals” shown in Star Trek movies. Someone had to dig the crystals out of the pit, run them through a crusher to reduce the empty space between crystals, then load them on a conveyor belt. The conveyor carried the crystals to the surface and loaded them directly into a hatch on the side of the ship. When one ship was loaded it moved to a landing field and the next was moved into position.

Our strategy centered on attacking the ships when they were on the ground loading fuel or waiting to load. We wanted to hit them while “the gods” were in their ships, destroying all the ships, if we could, but at all costs keeping their army inside the ships.

We scoured the areas that looked like junk yards and came up with four heavy guns, for lack of a better term.

We learned how to power them up with the crystals as fuel. We also learned to make projectiles with a very high-density metal we found in the junk yards. We were able to melt and cast this metal into aerodynamic shapes. Our plan was to hit the ships in the engine area as they touched down and keep hitting them until they were destroyed or we ran out of

projectiles. We kept up production of projectiles as we were able to find more of the heavy metal.

I suppose the concept was similar to the rail guns the Navy used to arm their ships in the 2020s but our guns achieved a much higher projectile velocity. We had no idea what material the skin of the ships was made of, but perhaps enough hyper-sonic slugs would breach the hull and hopefully start a self-destructive reaction in the engine or fuel storage area. We couldn’t duplicate conditions inside one of their ships and we couldn’t shoot too many test shots or we would have to use up time and resources recasting projectiles. From the information Freydis gave us, we decided this plan was our best hope. We pre-aimed all the guns and checked the aim every month.

I’m getting old, and I don’t want a duplicate of events in Heinlein’s “Orphans in the Sky” so each of the original males have been training their replacements. We want to be sure everyone understands this is practical knowledge, not some mystic religious nonsense. We have made sure operations manuals are in the sections where they are used and not in a central library where they could all be destroyed at once. We also started training a Cadet for each crew position before the crewmember passed so that the trainees understood the instructions were for real mechanical devices, not some theological construct. We have explained these things to the women too so they understand it is real engineering. I’m hoping the knowledge doesn’t get lost. It seems people are mentally lazy and want to invent some religious, totally impossible explanation, rather than do the work and deal with facts.

Our ship is still orbiting the planet, but it is mostly empty. We have been using it for food storage because we can suck the air into storage cylinders and the vacuum will keep the food safe from insects and rodents. We have been working on increasing our protein sources for the last twenty years and the ship also makes an excellent freezer.

We are pretty sure the orbiting hull will not escape Ra’s notice even though we have parked the ship on the night side of the planet and adjusted the orbit to always keep the ship in the planetary shadow. Ra’s scanning equipment should show there are no life forms aboard. If they brought a ship close and tried to board, our bomb would blow up their boarding party and hopefully at least one of their ships.

Freydis told me she thought she would live at least another thousand years, and I was able to teach her a lot about how we got here, how the ship worked, how the power plant worked, and our plan to destroy Ra’s ships. I hoped my favorite wife would provide the intelligence and continuity to hold our little colony together.

The Captain and I are the same age. He did most of his training in hot scram jets while I was at the University getting my doctorate. Freydis came to me and said, “I know that I started as your slave, and I sometimes miss the intense feeling of belonging to you that I had in those early days. I can’t bear to lose you Master.” Those words caused an immediate stirring in my loins that I had not felt for months. I took Freydis then and there, as if she was a slave girl.

My favorite wife laughed and said, “Master did you know there are some of the original girls who formed ‘The Order of the Whip’ and find the most demanding men and secretly give themselves to the punishments those cruel men devise? There is something bred into Pleasure Slaves that responds to being owned and whipped.”

“I loved owning you, but I preferred to test your endurance in the bedroom rather than with the whip. Did you think less of me?” I said.

“No Master. It was what I wanted and needed. Different women have different needs and some of us have dark places in our souls,” Freydis said.

“I have a possible solution for your mortality Master. I have been reading the medical scrolls and I believe there is a small amount of the medicine which gives the gods and their playthings a long life. I do not read anything that limits the age of the human when given the medicine. I would like you to take the draught and see if it does give you a long life. The worst that can happen is a quick death. Even that has an upside because you would not be chained to the pain of the progressive failure of your body that precedes normal human death.” Freydis said.

“Is there enough of the draught for two people?” I asked.

Freydis frowned and said, “I believe there is. I am reading about how to make the draught. I think it may be possible to duplicate the formula, but it is difficult chemistry, and I would like to have the help of your doctor. I want to duplicate the draught so his knowledge is not lost. He has told me it is not possible for one man to adequately train a doctor in less than twenty years, so his trainee should be thought of as a Nurse Practitioner, not a fully qualified doctor. I want to keep a fully trained doctor available to the colony in case someone becomes seriously ill.”

Most of the crew were over seventy now. Many of us were not in good health. Some of us actually were looking forward to death. The Captain and I were still mentally sharp because of all our work trying to make the colony self-sufficient and preparing our defenses., but our bodies were beginning to wear out. Both of us missed being able to rock a girl’s world. The Captain felt he had a duty to live and command if it was possible in order to protect us. Of course, I wanted to lend my skills and knowledge to the defense of our little village, but my prime motivator was to live and love all the pretty girls possible with my rejuvenated body.

We had two experiments. The Captain and the doctor took the two doses of the draught Freydis had found. I took the draught Freydis and the doctor had copied. All of us volunteers were lucky and the draught worked as the scrolls said it would.

Freydis is the best wife a man could have. She brought me ten virgins, all of them fourteen-years-old, and I satisfied them all in one orbit of our planet around our sun. I smiled at my reflection in the mirror because I looked twenty-years-old. The next orbital period, I loved Freydis fiercely and left her fainted, her body quivering and panting. When she revived, she whispered to me, “You are worthy to be called the god of love, if you so choose, Master.”

I laughed and said, “I will remain your Lord and Master and your god of love behind the door of our bedroom. I will however need to introduce as many maidens as possible into the joys of carnal love and show them the delights Eros has taught me.” We laughed and fucked each other senseless all over again.

Our unrestricted breeding program had built up our population until there were too many people for a village. The Captain and I led a group of pioneers out onto the plain in the direction we called EAST and out of sight of our original settlement. We brought farming machines on an anti-grav sled and tilled the soil for the first time. We planted and christened our first farming community. We had one of the original women to be the matriarch and manage the community, a range of breeding females, from fourteen to fifty, and of course a large number of the normal lived males to do the heavy lifting and to impregnate their women. We had determined the proportion of males to females being born and the demographics mirrored those proportions.

The pioneer volunteers were screened and tested so only people who could work together amicably, were mentally stable, and temperamentally pleasant were in the party. We kept the poets, artists, and moody sorts in our original settlement.

Two years later we led a similar party WEST, out of sight of the “capital.” We had planned the first pioneer settlement well, so we didn’t need to make any adjustments. Of course, the personality of the matriarch had a lot to do with how successful the settlement could be, so we tried to pick our best to manage the pioneer settlements.

We had to wait for five years to send out the next pioneer party. We realized we had not sent out enough people. In addition, we needed to send more women with midwife skills to adequately care for the pregnant women. We sent these settlers NORTH of the capital. The terrain here was different. The elevation was higher, the temperatures cooler and there were more hills and valleys.

We got fruit tree seeds out of the seed vault and planted apples, peaches, and all the varieties that were compatible with the conditions. We planted the trees on terraces we built on the hillsides to preserve the flat land for grains like oats and barley that tolerated cooler temperatures.

Five years after that we sent a pioneer party SOUTH. The climate here on the shore of the ocean was definitely Mediterranean. We planted olive groves and grape vineyards on the hillsides. The wheat fields were planted on the flatlands.

So far, we had found no apex predators. There were the expected insect type organisms that ate plants so we had to store grains carefully after harvest to protect them. There were also rodent type animals which also ate grains. These pests had stronger teeth than the Earth versions, and we had to do things like electrify the metal silos to keep the things out of our food.

On the plains we found a horse type marsupial with four horse type legs, but the ability to stand up on its hind legs, rising up over nine feet tall. They were herbivores but had wicked looking teeth. Because of their ability to become bipedal, they were not useful as draft or riding animals. We experimented and found their flesh edible and nutritious. We carefully harvested only a few individuals so we didn’t impact the herds. Being marsupials, their numbers were small and they often lost young between birth and the pouch. This was good for us because we were not competing for grasslands on the plains. It was relatively easy to keep them out of our grain fields.

The pioneers at the EAST settlement experimented with human assisted births and human management of the herd, similar to the nomadic herders of the Eurasian steppe. This led to a very low infant mortality rate. The increase in herd size allowed us to harvest more individuals for protein and maintain the herd size at a level that didn’t over-graze the plains.

The WEST settlement found salt flats that extended for many miles. Temperatures were high and fresh water was scarce. However, we found ore of the metal used to make our guns. We were able to build a smelter, extract the metal from the ore, dig a mold for the rail, pour the molten metal into the mold, and then let it cool. We were able to build an anti-grav sled big enough to move the guns. We set up gun positions for every village and increased the positions defending the capital. We increased production of projectiles and one of the young engineers designed a gravity feed system so a rail gun could put a projectile in flight every two seconds.

The engineer’s association designed a larger rail gun that could launch a two-ton projectile. We actually built one of these giants for each settlement and four additional for the capital. It was getting difficult to find the dense metal for the projectiles and providing one-hundred for each gun exhausted the supply we had found. We have yet to find deposits of the high-density metal or ore to make it.

Because I had to shoot the power plant engineer, we were deficient in electrical engineering knowledge and while we had trained mechanical and civil engineers, we didn’t have any electrical engineers until one the daughters Feydris bore me taught herself from the PPE’s books. She proposed an electrical weapon that might allow us to immobilize Ra’s ships and could even let us capture one intact so we could study it and perhaps continue space exploration one day.

The engineers’ association gave her design a thorough and fair evaluation and agreed it might do what Wana said it would. Once all the rail guns and projectiles were completed, they helped her build the device. It was clunky and definitely experimental, but in testing it released a giant electric spark, like lightning. It reminded me of what Tesla’s “death ray” was supposed to look like. It seemed to be possible to aim the lightning bolt at a point in space.

Because of the limits of what our ship carried we were living a primitive life style. We didn’t even have electricity in the pioneer settlements and we didn’t have television or cinema in the capital. Wana’s cousin, Lara, developed a device similar to radio, and we were able to communicate with the settlements, but we didn’t have the resources or production capacity to create home sets or do entertainment broadcasts. Of course, with so much wonderful sex available there was no real need for entertainment.

We did not want to risk the small number of crew members to the possible dangers of doing a thorough exploration of the planet. Knowing where you were was always a problem. There didn’t seem to be a magnetic field, so the compass wasn’t any help. We didn’t have enough shuttle fuel to do photo mapping, until we converted it to “dilithium crystal” fuel. Once we made the conversion, we put up geosynchronous satellites that responded to “Where am I?” pings and located the user on a dynamic chart display we built from a scavenged iPad type device.

That century I was as deeply in love with my daughter Maya as I was with her mom Freydis. I was blessed that my number one wife didn’t get jealous, she just loved me better than any woman has ever loved her man. We slept together and they bore me lots of babies.

Why is it that people can’t stick to the facts? I alluded to Heinlein’s “Orphans in the Sky” earlier. Since males tended to have an average life span of sixty to seventy years, the workers and agricultural laborers began to believe that the Captain and I were gods. Nothing we could say or do dissuaded them. Women I had deflowered reinforced the silliness, exaggerated my sexual powers and gifting me with recollections of a twelve-inch phallus. This caused mothers to compete to get me to deflower their fourteen-year-old daughters, no matter what their daughter thought about the idea. I tried to kill this god talk as quickly as possible, but it wouldn’t die. Why are people so mentally lazy? Why do they prefer creating impossible to please gods over doing the work to make their lives successful?

A girl named Kate was literally dragged into my bedroom so “the god Eros” could bless her by making her a woman and quickening her womb. I threw the parents and their helpers out and talked to the girl. She said her parents thought she had no intelligence or ability to learn skills so they thought her great beauty and the notoriety of having borne a child “Eros” fathered would ensure her survival. I shuddered at that. We were trying to establish and maintain a socialistic society where no one would go hungry and fathers would not feel a need to sell their daughters.

After a time, Kate confessed to being attracted to me and we mated with both of us being equally enthusiastic. Of course, the fact the fourteen-year-old was in heat for the first time accounted for most of her ardor. Her body was tormenting her to get herself filled by any available male in order to get herself impregnated. I was there, I was available, I thought she was beautiful, and I was happy to oblige. Kate was a healthy girl and she caught the first time I shot my load against her cervix. Once her physiological torment stopped, we had lots of pleasurable recreational sex. We also had lots of entertaining pillow talk. There’s no accounting for taste, and Kate fell in love with me. This was a phenomenon we were seeing more and more. I was wondering if the population density had reached a point where Mother Nature was trying to slow population growth by making females selective about the males they would accept for mating and especially breeding.

The Captain and I set out to visit the pioneers and all their settlements. Every five years each settlement had sent out their own pioneers so that there were many villages, all in straight lines from their mother settlement and each out of sight of the last village. The WEST settlement had not tried to explore the dessert because it was hot and waterless and deadly. Instead they sent out their pioneers to the north one five years and to the south the next. Rather than send out their own pioneers after the first two settlements were founded, the WEST settlement contributed to the pioneers of their two colonies.

We used the shuttle and did mapping as we went. The SOUTH settlement ran into similar limitations because it was on the seacoast. In a manner similar to the WEST settlement, they sent out their pioneers to the east and west along the seacoast.

Kate accompanied me on the trip and we had sex almost constantly. Her lovely face and sexy body kept me aroused and her pregnancy hormones demanded mating almost as urgently as when she was in heat.

The Captain laughed at me and my young “bride.”

I said, “Sir, have you in all our years here never felt a bond with a girl stronger than the duty to procreate?”

“Never,” The Captain replied. “Perhaps you really are the resurrection of Eros,” He said with a laugh.

“Sir, I’m not complaining. I dearly love teaching fourteen-year-old girls to enjoy the carnal delights and to plant the first seed in their wombs. When they catch and their torment from being in heat ends, the look of worshipful love in their eyes might sway me to pretend to be a god so I could make a career of deflowering fourteen-year-old virgins, full time. However, as was amply demonstrated in the old movie, “The Man Who Would Be King,” pretending to be a deity is generally short lived and ends very badly.

“Remind me of that Kate, when our daughter is even more beautiful than her mother and I go crazy trying to convince her I should be her first mate,” I said.

Kate laughed and said, “I will honestly have to tell our daughter that her father makes love to me in a way worthy to be a god, if such beings exist.

The Captain and I determined that our pioneers had not been sending out their own parties of settlers on schedule, and it was indeed causing an increase in population density. We had been lax in the capital too.

Starting at the NORTH settlement, we flew the shuttle in a circular path, clockwise, until we were out of sight of the settlement. We marked the point, then measured the angle between the straight lines to the capital. Using that angle, we laid out the locations of the next pioneer settlements for years to come. Using aerial mapping, we determined how the SOUTH and WEST settlements should send out their pioneers.

Next, the Captain ordered an aerial survey of the desert, hoping to find the other side. We were surprised to find very high mountains that were the cause of the desert, making all the rain fall on their west side due to orthographic lifting of the moisture laden air masses moving east over the ocean.

We found a coastal area, green and fertile. We landed and determined that the cool temperatures and hilly topography were best suited to raising fruit trees and planting oats and barley on the level areas. For the next five years we studied our planet carefully and when we sent out our next groups of pioneers, they were targeted for specific places and equipped with the crops best suited to the region they would occupy. We looked for areas where we could grow plants that produced fibers: cotton, flax, and hemp.

The Captain began seeing a certain recklessness among some of the young men. He organized these men into military units and sent them to scout the mountains. We planted three colonies along the west coast. While we were in contact by radio, it would be better if we could find mountain passes that would allow trade routes to be established.

Kate went into mechanical engineering and was working on a ground transport vehicle using anti-grav technology combined with a forward propulsion system. Having self-sufficient villages was necessary in the early days, but we needed to grow and mature our infrastructure. One shuttle could not meet the needs of an entire planet.

We began to suffer the effects of a potent enemy who doesn’t attack for hundreds of years. Many people wanted to take down the rail guns and use the metal for other things. The high-density metal was also useful for devices that used the “dilithium crystals” as a power source because the metal could contain the energy releasing reaction and shield the operator from harmful radiation. All those thousands of projectiles were a tempting target for engineers developing new equipment and devices.

Wana lobbied hard for increasing the use of electricity as a power source and transmitting the high voltage power from the capital to each village via the “death ray” technology, which she had modified for power transmission, as Tesla said was possible. It made sense to the Captain and the managing council not to have a bunch of “dilithium crystal” reactors all over the place, and we limited the use of the reactors to very large machines and transport vehicles that did not lend themselves to electric power. In ten years Wana had developed transmission methods that allowed the trucks carrying goods from where they were produced to where they were needed to run on electricity. We didn’t have evidence of harmful effects from “dilithium crystal” power, but the Captain and I shared memories of an earth trashed by industrial waste, and we thought it might be a good idea to limit the number of reactors running around the planet.

Kate was laughing at me because I was also apparently prophetic, adding another god-like characteristic to my legend. Our daughter Eileen was the most beautiful girl born on our planet in the last thousand years. All the settlements sent delegations to Kate requesting Eileen be gifted upon their village. Kate and I pissed off most of the planet when Eileen gave me her virginity and Kate and I made love to our daughter.

“I love what mom does to me with her tongue, but only daddy can get me pregnant and stop my body from torturing me,” Eileen said, as we all relaxed in post-orgasmic bliss in our big bed. Eileen appreciated getting fucked by her daddy more and more as the years went by.

Besides being a great beauty, she was very intelligent and she started teaching herself chemical engineering. Soon she was producing a number of safe and useful chemicals in her lab. The managing council recognized chemical engineering as a necessary discipline and directed Eileen to begin teaching trainees and cadets.

For practical reasons engineers normally did not mate with their trainees, but Eileen fell for her top candidate, Norman, and the next twenty babies Eileen bore were all Norman’s. While Norman was working on a project on the edge of the salt flats Eileen came into heat, and I fathered her next baby. I understood how men who thought I stole their woman had felt. We did our duty and produced a baby, but it was all biological necessity because she was in heat. I could sense she felt none of the joy we had shared when we made her first baby. Her lack of ardor spoiled things for me.

I began discussions of this phenomenon in the council. We consulted the matriarchs and asked how they had survived being in heat for many hundreds of years with no males to ease their suffering.

Freydis laughed her head off and produced a phallus shaped object. “This was our little helper. There were a number of versions in use among the slave girls. We got tremendous guilty pleasure from using them because we had been prohibited sex with anyone or anything until our Masters returned and reclaimed us. We also did a lot more female to female love making than had ever been ordered or permitted by our Masters,” She said.

Lysis let loose with a laugh that shook her body. “Do you know why Ra tortured me so viciously? He didn’t ever try to make me cum when he fucked me and I got caught using my little friend too many times when Ra was here on the planet. I was coveted by all men for my supposed sexual insatiability. The ignorant called me a sex goddess while others claimed I was a succubus sent by the god of the Hebrews to lure men into sex and then drain them until they died. Some of the alleged ‘gods’ feared this was true. Of course, I was just a woman with a strong sex drive, and I could be satisfied if a man knew what he was doing. Unfortunately for me, Ra didn’t know or didn’t care. He simply wanted to own me because some thought I was a goddess. He used me as a masturbation object. It hurt his manly pride when I needed release from an inanimate object because his fumbling stirred me up but never brought me to orgasm,” She said.