Chapter 12: Invading Hell

After three or four days we had gotten all the people we were going to get off Unity voluntarily, and we had to start using force to get the rest of them. I had to balance the risk of injuring innocent children in a brawl against the certain harm we were already causing by keeping them without food. By then we had a couple of transports standing by with plenty of room, so the only reason to not act was my desire to find a better way. Eventually I had to accept that there wasn’t one.

We used one of the transports as before, with Sponsors and stable conks available to help the dependents we sent to it. We set another Kilo up as a prison ship. Each pod was configured as open barracks on the upper level with bunks for 24 people. And when I say ‘open’ I mean ‘open’. There were no partitions in the upper level. If you were standing in the upper level you could see two rows of six two-level bunkbeds in the middle, a row of four toilets past the beds on each end, and four showers up against the walls behind the toilets.

A nice touch that someone suggested was a safety-orange shift on each bed. Each inmate would be stripped, transported to a temporary pad just outside the pod’s hatch, verified to enter that particular pod, and told he could wear the clothing on his bunk. Or she, but we decided to separate the DECOites by sex. That meant dedicating another Kilo, but by then we had a couple available. One prison Kilo would be almost full with an expected 18,000 male DECOites, while the other one would be half full with only 13,000 female DECOites.

Why only 18,000 males and 13,000 females? Because not every Sponsor on Unity was a DECO asshole. The AIs told us that a good many of the Sponsors stationed on Unity were support crew and would like nothing more than to watch their bosses be executed in the most painful, drawn-out way we could think of. Preliminary numbers were 3,000 male and 1,000 female support staff who would actually pass the full CAP test.

We really wanted to cram more into each pod, the upper floor had room for 16 pairs of bunkbeds and added toilets and showers, but the ship’s environmental systems wouldn’t handle every pod having that many adults in it. Still, we didn’t see why the DECO people should have any better housing than we had given their families.

Besides, we didn’t need every pod. Well, once we ran the numbers and set up a second Kilo as a female prison transport we didn’t need every pod. This just allowed us to sort the prisoners without worrying about where to put them. So, as long as we didn’t need the extra pods, we set them to 24 inhabitants each.

Once we had their prisons ready, we set up teams with Marines in riot gear, conks to calm the adults we found in each apartment, medics for the children, and a couple of prisoner escorts, then had Unity’s AI lock down every hatch on the ship.

That restricted everyone still on the ship to whatever space they were in at the moment, and we began a ship-wide sweep of every compartment. We started with one of the central transporter rooms just to keep our logistics simple and worked outward from there, carrying portable transporter pads to make things quick. It wasn’t as hard as it sounds, because Unity was providing us with accurate 3-D holographic drawings of the ship as well as letting us know which spaces were occupied.

We didn’t have to enter and search spaces that weren’t occupied but we still had to cover the whole ship. Cubeships are HUGE!

The AIs were right. I know, how surprising, right? There was a huge difference between the DECOites who staffed Unity as a headquarters unit and the Navy, Marine Corps, and Fleet Auxiliary personnel who kept the actual ship running. The ship’s command staff were mostly DECOites, but the lower ranks and almost all of the service, engineering, and weapons department staff were good people. Even some of the lower-level DECOites were honest, although there weren’t many.

We ended up apologizing for lumping the good guys in with the assholes, then we segregated them on one deck by themselves and ran them through their CAP tests as quickly as possible. The vast majority were clean and we asked if they would be willing to go back on Unity as crew once the ship had been converted back to a normal Cubeship again.

Some wanted to get off the ship, but we were able to retain enough of the core crew that we didn’t have to shanghai crew from elsewhere. Those guys, even the ones who didn’t stay, turned out to be really helpful in a lot of the trials. Certainly, we reunited all of them with their families as fast as we could get them tested.

Clearing out the rest of the ship was ugly. DECO hadn’t allowed anyone else into the upper-echelon berthing spaces since they had taken the ship over at the building yard a half-dozen years before. The Marines have always maintained that they’d rather deal with the simplicity of a life-and death fight with the Sa’arm to the slow agony of pickup duty, running security for the Earthside DECO extraction teams and waiting for an Earth First attack. At least out on a colony you are killing your peoples’ enemy. After every shift on Unity, our Marines said they’d rather go do extractions than deal with another weirdo’s apartment.

You know all the stories you hear about so-and-so served with someone who knew someone else who had a shipmate who turned all his conks into cat-women, or dog-women, or whatever? It looked like for every story there was at least one DECOite who wanted to out-do the story. Sometimes more than one.

We recovered concubines with fur in every color you could imagine. We recovered conks with feathers. We recovered conks with any number of breasts up to I think twelve was the most. We recovered conks with dog-heads and pig-faces and horse-heads. Those conks could generally only bark, oink or neigh, by the way. And how can you hold a pen to write a message when all you have is hooves?

Some cow-girls had udders that gave gallons of sweet fresh milk. All they could do when their udders were full was moo and walk up to someone who might milk them. Okay, I admit that when I heard about that little Tommy sprang right up to go see them, but it’s still wrong. I fought him off and took it out on Joannie that night. I’m sure her breasts were sore the next day. She may be lactating, but not that much!

We recovered conks with multiple vaginas, fully capable of enjoying vaginal sex with three different men at once -and all three were set to be constantly horny. I don’t know how pregnancy would work for them, though. And don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.

We recovered conks with flippers instead of hands and feet, for God’s sake. There was one apartment that had a huge aquarium with what looked like dolphins in it, except that the dolphins had soft human lips, big human breasts and tight human pussies. Oh, and deranged human brains from their treatment.

The Marines doing these recoveries were good boys. They almost never killed the Sponsors they found in those apartments. An awful lot of those sponsors were badly injured in accidental falls, though. It was a problem, but we were pretty busy and I just couldn’t see investing the time and resources it would take to fully investigate all those accidents.

The DECOites were all office workers and klutzes, everyone knew that. And as long as their accidental injuries weren’t life-threatening, we didn’t have the free med-tubes to help them heal. All of our med-tubes were going to be busy for the foreseeable future turning cat-people and cow-people and horse-people and dog-people back into human-people.

When we started getting the crew back from their tests, they provided an amazing set of documents on what was going on. Environmental Control had monitor access to every pressurized space on the ship, and the Assistant Chief Engineer was one of the good guys. He had before and after video for almost every apartment, plus in most cases recordings of those Sponsors ordering the medical staff to make these changes to their concubines. There was no way for them to say “I dunno, they were here when I got this apartment.”

I know, the AIs had all that information and all we had to do was ask for it, but we wanted to run this as a human-style trial as much as possible so we used human witnesses and records. It didn’t matter though. In almost every case the accused would claim that the witness was lying and the records were faked. At that point we had to bring in the AIs and their records and ask if they were going to accuse the AIs of making this stuff up.

I mean, they were living with those concubines for years. They didn’t just magically appear that morning when the DECOite was out. The AIs had years and years of video going all the way back to the original pickups where an innocent woman had trusted the bastard to take care of her. The dog-person self-identified as the woman the DECOite had sponsored, we had records of him ordering the med-tube changes, and we had video of them living together afterwards. What further proof could we want?

A lot of those trials were quick. I have taken the personal responsibility, over the years, for sending thousands of intelligent, dedicated, loyal and brave sailors and Marines into combat that they didn’t survive. It weighs on my soul, but it also gives me the determination to make sure their sacrifice is never wasted.

It didn’t bother me at all to assign the death penalty for anything we could prove the DECOites guilty of. If nothing else, endangering little Joey’s emotional stability by making him watch his mother get turned into a cow. We’re not wasting our time looking for another charge to pin on him. That one’s good enough. We need more sponsors, and he endangered his children’s future stability.

We let them commit suicide if they wanted. We set up an injector with a nerve activator that caused whole-body agony if used, set the injector to a 30-minute delay between doses, made sure that it took at least three doses to kill them, and invited their surviving conks in to watch but kept a barrier between them. They could watch him shit himself and die in agony, but they had to let him push the button each time himself.

Most of them chickened out after the first one; they couldn’t bring themselves to push the button a second and third time. Good. We have uses for you, you steaming pile of canine feces.

And the recovery teams had a hard time NOT getting laid, by the conks they were pulling out of those apartments. Many of those conks expressed a desire to follow ‘their’ Marines everywhere, and it became one of the Diaspora’s legends. When the boys got to talking they’d say “ ... and I had two cows, a dog, and three cats following me around that damned ship...”

None of those stories were true. All of the modified conks went into sleep-trainers as quickly as we could make them available, because that was the only way we could really communicate with the mind inside the pig or dog or whatever. Once we’d made contact with them, though, we could establish what they wanted to look like and set that up.

Unfortunately, that took time and resources. A lot of it could happen while they were sleeping, but a lot more couldn’t. We couldn’t just give some of the girls nanites to convert them back to being beautiful young women; a lot of the changes were too intrusive and they had to wait for time in a med-tube. The transports had a lot of med-tubes, but there were just too many calls for them. Every concubine and every child had to be at least checked out, and in many cases needed work.

On the other hand, a Cubeship has a LOT of medical support, and once we had Unity cleared out we could move them back in and do the changes. In the end we had a lot of beautiful young women who used to be cows, or whatever, looking for the Marines who rescued them.

I made the girls all wait for their re-modification, though. It may have been overkill but I wanted the emotional closure of cleaning out the whole ship. We wouldn’t get that if we started using deck L while we still had DECOites on deck F.

So, until we could announce that Unity was sterile -there were no live humans anywhere in the ship- we kept all the conks who needed time in a med-tube with us at Mars, on the same transport that had all the crewmen and their families. And, of course, that section of the ship became known as “the Barn”. Marines who wanted some strange could go to the Barn and get something stranger than they’d ever had before. Yeah, I’m sure that some of them who had grown up on farms had had even stranger than these, but don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know, okay?

The higher up we rose into DECO’s executive layers the worse it got. The DECOites used their property as status symbols, and their property had to look and act perfect or they would lose status.

The female executives were far harder on their concubines than the men. The men just did things to their conks to make them more fun playmates, and those changes to concubines belonging to male executives were all physical. The women, on the other hand, seemed to have focused on behavior. The concubines we pulled from female DECOite apartments were invariably perfect in both their appearance and behavior, where perfect was in the eye of the sponsor.