Chapter 1: Back Home Again

... Time here was screwy. I had no idea how much time had passed for Millie and Ceecee, but it was well over four months of my time, a hundred and thirty days if I had kept track right, after I walked into the bank with Donna, when I finally walked into the shop and called “Honey, I’m home!”

I had put the rest of my party up in Gerard’s tavern with a request to take care of them for a few days, but I’d brought my secretary Brian home with me. I’d hired him in Small Cove, and during the long trip he hadn’t really had anything to do yet beyond playing messenger.

Jim looked up from what he was doing and said “Jason’s home!”.

I heard some squeals from upstairs, and the first thing I noticed after that was that Millie was no longer pregnant, but that Ceecee was. Millie gave me a very enthusiastic hug. Ceecee was a good bit more reserved, but she was showing quite well. She didn’t need to be trying to knock me down like Millie was.

Eventually Millie let me breathe, and Ceecee gave me a good hug, too. What surprised me was that not-so-little-any-more Gina did the same when Ceecee let me go. After all the I’m-glad-you’re-homes, Gina whispered in my ear that “Millie says that I’m old enough for you now.” And she’d shot up quite a bit while I was gone. She’d shot out some, too, and was a good deal curvier than the last time she hugged me. Well, I hadn’t been laid in four months, not since Alyssa had sent me to Michaelsport, and I was ready to drag any one of the three upstairs.

Let’s see. Officially, I’m a “Hero”, a man from Earth who is ‘of healthy mind and body’ who comes to this planet which is named Chaos, to rescue women from yet a third planet named Cassandra. Confused? Yeah. Me too.

None of this was my idea. I knew a man who really was a Hero, you are supposed to capitalize that, and he brought me here as a sort of assistant while he looked for one of those women to rescue her. I ended up in a project that kept me busy for a while, and when Eric left with Leslie Clerk I stayed behind at Widemouth. If you must know, I was upgrading the town’s defenses prior to a pirate attack.

At the time I’d thought that the pirates were idiots to give us that much time after the warning, but I’d since learned better. The trade winds blew almost directly from their home to the south end of this island, and they were in standard medieval cogs. If you aren’t familiar with them, think “Viking Longship” only much, much fatter so that they could carry more cargo. I suspected that they were also much slower but I didn’t know.

To the best of my knowledge, the pirates didn’t actually build many of their own ships. What they did was capture cargo ships from the big mainland seafaring states, take them home and loot them, and then bring them back stuffed full of men to capture more. I’d seen eight different pirate ships, and every one of them was a standard cog with a single square sail hung from a yard. Actually, the sail itself was attached to the yard, and the sail was ‘raised’ by raising the yard. The sail was lowered by lowering the yard.

The ships only sailed well when on a ‘run’ or going directly downwind. They didn’t ‘reach’ or sail crosswind well at all, and ‘tacking’ or sailing upwind was simply impossible. They were built to be beached, and they had no keel worth mentioning. They could only sail downwind. So, it hadn’t been the pirate’s fault that they had given Widemouth so much warning. A squadron of raiders had approached Bridgetown, been scared off by the new wall and other defenses, and gone home to resupply and discuss their options. Then, they had come back and attacked a different town. That second town just happened to be Widemouth, the one I was at.

They simply got stuck by their position and technology. Running downwind from the Pirate Isles to Hunter Island was quick, maybe a couple weeks of sailing. However, that ‘gone home to discuss their options’ part had taken forever. If they were two weeks of sailing downwind to us, then they could well be a month or more of rowing upwind to get home again.

By the time they had rowed home, gotten some rest, resupplied their ships, and sailed back down to attack Widemouth, their first target -Bridgetown- had passed the warning on to all the other towns and Widemouth had set its defenses to rights. On the land side, the wall and moat and soldiers had held the raiders out of the town. They hadn’t been able to drive the pirates off, though. The pirates had done a lot of damage to the farms and buildings outside of the wall and anyone they caught was either dead or worse.

On the river side, the catapults and other siege engines I’d built for the town had sunk one ship, damaged a second, and allowed us to capture a third when it ran aground trying to escape. The pirates had been completely routed on the water. The damaged ship had hurried off downriver as fast as they could go, and that had allowed the town to concentrate on the land-side battle which had ended just as decisively.

For my part in all that, I had been awarded half-ownership of the captured ship. I had been able to sell that to the town council, and that had made me a very wealthy man by the town’s standards. What was more, I’d been able to raise the one that we’d sunk, and that ship was unquestionably 100% mine. Repair it, clean it up, modify it to be a brig instead of a cog, give it some very crude anti-ship weapons, and man it with soldiers and sailors who didn’t like pirates, and it had become a warship to reckon with. After capturing and then selling three different pirate ships, I had gone from very wealthy to obscenely stinking rich.

And very, very happy with my life here. I had a wife, a mistress who was accepted by my wife, and the beginning of a trained and loyal crew. I was slowly bringing the town out of the dark ages by teaching them hygiene and some other odd concepts like the scientific method.

The fly in the ointment was that I came here as Eric’s “Assistant Hero”, and I was expected to behave like a Hero, save the Damsels, and get them back home. Not that I particularly minded, as the program included rules like “They are invariably beautiful and horny” and “They need Earthmen to get pregnant, as their own men are too damaged” so part of the process -it was in the instructions- was to, after they had been safely rescued, screw them until they got pregnant.

I still didn’t believe the story, there had to be something beyond that. If they as a planet were really desperate for Earth-man spunk they would save what we gave them and artificially inseminate all of their women at once. Doing it one at a time may be fun, but it wasn’t very practical on a world-wide scale. We couldn’t be hearing the whole story.

I ended up accidentally rescuing one of their ‘Damsels’ which was fine, but when we were done and she was pregnant they sent me back to Earth. That, I had a problem with. I didn’t live on Earth any more. I lived here. If they couldn’t get that right, I wasn’t going to play their game any more.

As soon as their idiot waiting period was over, I went back for another rescue mission and did what I had to do and said what I had to say to get sent back out here to Chaos. Whereupon I promptly dumped their stupid rescue mission and started for home. As I said, it took me something like two months to get back home again after I got Donna pregnant and we went our separate ways.

Time was not the same on the different worlds. Eric and I had spent two or three weeks here before he was done and went back home. Only fifteen minutes had elapsed on Earth when he got back. I spent about four months here before I got sent to Earth, and Eric said I’d been gone about two hours. I knew more time had elapsed here while I was gone, but how much? Millie was expecting and now she wasn’t, and Ceecee looked about ready to drop soon.

It was several hours before we got to talk any. Both women had needs and I was the one responsible for meeting them. Millie and Ceecee drug me upstairs, and Gina called out “See you in the morning!” to our backs.

I woke up to them sitting on the bed with my dinner. This was service! This was very GOOD service, as both of them were stark naked. Now, it should be admitted that Millie was never going to win any beauty contests. Didn’t matter, that wasn’t why I married her.

Ceecee might win one, if the contest was held in a small town. She wasn’t big-city devastatingly beautiful, just small town pretty. Actually, she was pretty enough that a pirate raid had taken her with them as a slave when they were done looting her home, instead of just raping and killing her.

Both considered themselves to be my wives. I had rescued them both just as surely as any Cassandran Damsel, but they were locals and weren’t going anywhere. So, they had each individually hitched their wagons to mine as a demonstrated protector and good guy. And they both kept me happy enough to not ask too many questions about what was going on.

I ignored the food and reached out to heft one of Millie’s breasts. It felt full and looked well-used. She had had, and lost, three children before we met and her figure was maternal. You know, short, dumpy, and very grateful for attention. She looked better now. “You look wonderful. Time has been good to you. How long has it been?”

That was yet another concept that caused trouble here. Chaos had no moon, so the concept of a ‘month’ was alien to these people. They counted days, and they counted years, but very few of them had enough math to know how many days were in a year. I’d have to check that sometime, if I was left alone long enough. A stone sundial would be accurate enough to tell the solstices, and if I didn’t get yanked off the planet again I could count days between them.

The gravity seemed the same to me as on Earth, and as far as I could tell the Sun was the same, too. Was the year the same length here? Was this an identical Earth in an alternate dimension?

The stars at night were different, or at least all the constellations were. There was certainly nothing like Polaris, the North Star. The planet had an axial tilt like Earth, though, creating seasons, so orbit and tilt had to be pretty close if not exactly the same.

The maps we’d seen in Shelly’s place on Crossroads hadn’t looked anything like Earth. There was one huge super-continent, like Europe and Asia and Africa all mashed together, and that was ringed by islands on all sides.

We were on one such island, just over the horizon on the northwest side, about where Great Britain was on Earth. It was even shaped roughly like Great Britain, but there were no other nearby islands. No Isle of Wight, no Isle of Man, no Ireland.

There was an archipelago roughly south of where Earth had Iceland. That was where the raiders came from. Apparently they called their home the Pirate Isles, so they were proud of their heritage. Not much chance of shaming them into quitting. We’d have to punish them into quitting. As a last resort, we could kill them all. That would solve the problem, too. One of my favorite authors had a character in one of his stories state that “dead people almost never cause any more trouble.”