Chapter 22

Coming of Age (TY27-month 317)

Susan, my first child with Rose, turned fourteen and tested as a strong sponsor. She wasn’t the first of my thirty children to turn fourteen. Jannali, Aro, Darana, Ja, Clik, Djalu, Lyle, and Deke had all turned fourteen. We were incredibly proud of them. Only Jannali and Ja had tested below the 6.5 CAP needed to volunteer and both had chosen to remain in our household as free concubines and my wives. Yes, if anyone was keeping score, that brought me up to six wives. Three were my concubines and three were freemen, but in our household, we made no distinctions among them.

Susan was different from the other eight. She was my eldest offspring living with me. I had another, Joseph, who lived with Rika Nakano and her family. As soon as he was fourteen he volunteered for the Militia. Letting go of Susan was especially hard for both Rose and me. She volunteered for Fleet Auxiliary and was immediately snatched up by the Amelia Earhart, along with her four concubines. Of course, she took only one with her on each deployment, meaning her other three concubines stayed in our household until she returned for a two-week visit and then went out with a different concubine for the next rescue operation. She and Harmony got along extremely well and even though she was just an ensign, Amelia immediately made her captain of the ship. Amelia had encountered resistance from the Darjee to her flying as her own captain and Harmony had filled in when they were challenged. Harmony had no objection at all to Susan becoming the official captain. One of Harmony’s two concubines made her home with us as well and switched with the other on deployments when it was time for one to become pregnant. Harmony already had two children of her own and was scheduled to get pregnant again, so having Susan in charge of the Amelia Earhart left her free to settle down with us for a year while Susan was on almost constant deployment.

I worried about my daughter. Amelia had been making frequent runs to Earth to extract shiploads of concubines and dependents, and usually animals. When Tara was first founded, most of the animals that got our farms and ranches started came as frozen eggs and sperm. The AIs had all objected strenuously to artificial insemination for humans, but had no difficulty with the practice for animals and for laboratory fertilization and test tube pregnancies. We found out quickly, though, that we needed actual adult animals to carry the fertilized eggs. A large part of the economy of Twelve Oaks was the animal laboratories where breeding was done and the surrounding ranches, like my mother’s sponsor, Amos, raised the pregnant animals and developed large herds for trading and breeding across the planet.

We’d had difficulty at first getting farm animals for Ponderosa before we had much of anything to trade for them. Our growing textiles industry had given us the footing we needed to get the ranches on Eldorado Continent started.

But ever since the first run from the Caribbean islands, we were getting free concubines, dependents, and hibernating animals. Livestock had pushed our farmlands farther out from the Loop road and we now had a belt around the city nearly ten kilometers wide in most parts. We had new roads connecting the main arterials so patrols could move quickly. Several ranch families had requested, and I granted, homesteads farther away from the city on what we considered open range land. I was concerned about patrolling out that far to keep predators away from the precious livestock, but the remote Yolngu and Lakota villages took on the task of predator maintenance in the outlying ranch communities.

The outlying communities had less in the way of automation than our metropolis and more of the work was done manually, like it had been on Erehwon and Elysium. I made sure, though, that each community had adequate firefighting equipment and trained volunteers to operate it. Each community was also equipped with transporters, but we’d kept our shuttle fleet active by moving the trade goods back and forth to the port. Up the coast a few kilometers, we had established the processing plant that made and stored the fire suppressant pellets for our half-dozen fire trucks. The trucks had been called out on numerous small fires and our rapid response led to minimal losses.

By the end of Tara Year 30, Eldorado had over 350,000 free concubines and a total population of over two million. The total population on the planet was slightly over ten million. What made our situation precarious planetwide was the ratio of dependents to adults. Surprisingly, our birthrate and population increase on Eldorado had not dropped off significantly at all. We weren’t having difficulty keeping all our female freemen pregnant because we had a constant increase in male freemen who were all too happy to impregnate the fertile women. Fewer and fewer freemen were being loaned out to the brothels at Sunnybrook and the other townships.

Prairie Fire (TY31-month 366)

Of course, it was only natural that our next major fire call was on the Erehwon continent just south of Twelve Oaks. Twelve Oaks was on a long peninsula of the continent that was mostly grasslands, rangeland, and cropland. It was the second oldest township on the planet, though not the most highly populated. It was also my hometown where Amos Radcliffe still kept my mother and older sister as concubines along with his daughter and three more he’d managed to convince to stay with him after they matured. To my knowledge, Amos had never sired a sponsor in twenty-five years on the planet. Just as well.

“Cricket, I’m joining the First Outfit.”

“They are boarding the Smokey Bear now, Niall. I suggest you go by transporter.” I ran to my office in the mansion and stepped on the transporter as soon as I got a clear signal. I was still fastening my skinsuit when I joined the other firefighters. The skinsuits were another innovation Marcie and Edie brought with them. They were environmental suits and would probably keep a person alive in vacuum for a little while, but they weren’t the space suits used by Navy and Marines. These were especially designed for firefighting and had an air filtration and cooling system in them that would allow a firefighter to walk through a wall of flame. None of us actually wanted to test that, but it felt good that we had something, especially to prevent smoke inhalation.

“Niall,” Davis said as I came aboard. “Glad you’re with us. I know you’ll want to get down on the ground, but I’d appreciate it if you’d work with Charmaine on the flight deck to chart landing spots and keep us apprised of wind changes or sparkouts.”

“I’m at your service in this, Davis. On my way to the flight deck now.” In the organizational structure, Davis reported to me. When we were active fighting a fire, I was just another resource she could assign wherever I was needed.

“Coordinate with the Fire Storm. She’s coming up from Oasis and should be onsite before we get there. If she isn’t, I’m going to be all over Capo Sanders to get her cadres drilled. We really need more than one Cohort per continent trained up.”

“What about volunteers?”

“Once we assess, we’ll start pulling in volunteers via transporter. As you know, most of the volunteers are in Ponderosa. Maybe this will shake a few more loose in the other townships.”

I headed to the flight deck where there was one other seat beside the pilot’s. I took it and began scanning the reports and images we were getting from the satellites.

Tara AI was pissy about having freemen and Militia running around her planet, but when there was a disaster, then she was all accommodating in providing us satellite imagery and good wishes for our firefighting. Sometimes I couldn’t figure that AI out. It didn’t seem to want to actively harm any of the unhomed concubines. It just didn’t think they should be unhomed. It was in an almost constant argument with the Military AIs begging for more sponsors to be sent to Tara. Of course, the military was taking every new sponsor off planet to fight in the war. I wondered if the Tara AI was completely stable at times.

Fire Storm, Erehwon’s shuttle, was on the west of the fire so we swung over toward the northeast. Prairie fires move incredibly fast. Our only advantage was that we could move just as fast across the flat prairie with any of our equipment. The recycling engines we used for cutting trees in forestland mowed a swath in front of the fire and recycled all the cut dry grasses. I realized some of what we were cutting and recycling were hay, wheat, and other grain crops, but losing this swath of a kilometer wide would be better than losing everything. We unloaded the firetruck and ran water through her transporter to spray down everything south of the firebreak hoping to slow it down so it couldn’t make the leap.

Then we saw the livestock.

The most remote ranches had kilometers of open range to run their horses and cattle on. They were driving the livestock north, but a wing of the fire was closing in from the west. They were about to be cut off.

“Charmaine! We need to swing around the livestock so we don’t startle them back the other way. Then prepare to open the chemical transporter. Base, we need volunteers at the tank and on the Smokey Bear. Prepare for aerial bombardment.”

I heard the footsteps of the volunteers as they came through the personnel transporter and headed for the hosing stations. Charmaine would swing around the herd and hover so the pipemen could spray from the bay on the side of the ship. Once we were around the herd, I could see that it wasn’t just horses and cattle, but deer, rabbits, and other wild animals. Once we got them all protected from the fire, we were going to have a chaos of wild and domestic animals bearing down on the densely populated city of Twelve Oaks in a stampede.

It was a near thing, but the chemical bombardment stopped the fire short of the homestead. We circled again and brought the shuttle to hover in front of the stampede, eventually herding them back toward the pens at the homestead. It looked vaguely familiar. There were more buildings, more machinery, and more people than I remembered, but it would be a shame to get this close and not say hello to my mother and sister.

“I’ll hitchhike into Twelve Oaks and take the transporter from there,” I told Charmaine. “As soon as they’re sure the fire is out, round up the equipment and personnel. Let’s get home.”

“You got it, Cho. Later.” She settled the shuttle near the farmhouse close enough that I could jump out on the ground, then took off for another loop around the grasslands to pick up our crew and equipment.

“I never thought there would be a time in this life that I would be happy to see you,” Amos said as I walked up to where his workers were corralling the livestock and separating out the wildlife. “I have to say, though, we’d have lost everything if you and your Militia hadn’t shown up when you did. Thank you.”

The expression was heartfelt and his grip of my hand was firm and not threatening.

“Did you have heavy losses before we got here?”

“The crops are almost all gone from what I can tell. What didn’t get burned, you either turned into mulch or destroyed with that chemical stuff. We’ll get along, but the stock has gotten picky about what they eat. They don’t want replicator forage.”

“I can send you some hay. We need to check with the other ranchers out this direction and see what they need,” I said.

“Why do you care? I’m sure there is nothing in the Militia contract that says you have to provide forage for our livestock. And I know you have no love for me, Niall.”

“We don’t willingly let animals starve or people either, for that matter. You shouldn’t have to butcher all your stock because you can’t feed them. It’s the way of the world, Amos. We take care of each other.” If he were the only one to be affected, I’d just leave and never look back, like I’d done twenty-one years earlier.