Chapter 2: Africa

“You won’t go down there without at least one platoon of fully equipped Marines!” The face of Major Clarke, the captain of the Tarawa class ship Pine Creek, was bright red. He had rushed into the office of Centurion Guido Marek, the commander of Lunar Base Plato.

“The AI told me that you plan to extract Africans from Sudan. That’s a damn warzone!” the major continued. Gina, Guido’s concubine and secretary, was standing behind the major, helplessly shrugging her shoulders. She hadn’t been able to even announce the upset major to her boss.

“Good morning Major,” Guido greeted his guest when the major had to interrupt his speech to take a breath. “You are talking about my latest plans?”

“You know damn well what I’m talking about. When I entered my office this morning, I found a request for transportation and support for a mobile test center and two Civil Service officers. I know you well enough. You plan to go down there yourself. Don’t you read the intelligence files? People are killing each other down there!”

“Major, please take a seat,” Guido asked with a now demanding voice. “I know exactly where we are going. Currently, Nubians and Arabs kill Christians and Nilotes, using light automatic weapons and machetes. The Nilotes try to get help from Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic, while a lot of Christians try to flee and reach Europe. Libya has established reception camps for the refugees but the Sudanese don’t stay there. I want to rescue parts of the rural population that are always on the losing track. We won’t leave the shuttle before we are sure that it’s safe. We will wear light body armor and personal force fields. Do you think there is anything down there that can penetrate a force field?”

“Where did you get those from?” the major asked curiously. “Even Marines don’t have personal force fields. That might be interesting for us?”

<A personal force field is useless against energy weapons or advanced conventional weapon technologies. However, it stops projectiles with a kinetic energy of less than ten kilojoules for certain, > the AI explained. <It limits the mobility to five kilometers per hour and limits the possibilities to interact with others. When Centurion Guido Marek came up with the idea of personal force fields, he mentioned that for his missions, talking would the most needed interaction and that’s possible.> Guido continued his speech. “You are damn right that I don’t want to show up down there with fully equipped Marines. We don’t want to invade their villages. We won’t fire on them if someone shoots at us. We will simply collect our stuff under the protection of the force fields and leave. We will not show signs of stress or anger or haste when we leave. This is a different demonstration of strength than the one Marines usually use. I know that perfectly well. But it is a demonstration of strength.”

Major Clarke eyed the Centurion for a while. “I’m impressed. That plan can work. It uses a lot more psychology than the usual Marine strategies. But I still insist that you take a platoon of Marines with you in case something goes terribly wrong. They can stay inside the shuttle, operate drones and the like.”

“That’s okay with me,” Guido replied. “Now where are my manners? Tea with milk as usual?”

“Yes, please.”

Guido signaled Gina to get the requested tea. The major was a regular guest on Plato Base, as were most of the Marines from the Pine Creek. The Marines from Vandergast not only helped with the extractions, they also showed by example to the freshly extracted people how relaxed a sponsor - concubine relation could be. Marines and their concubines were visiting the restaurants and arboretums of the base in their free time. Plato Base had become a little piece of their home colony to them.

Those freshly extracted sponsors who adapted smoothly to their new situation were recruited for a short series of extractions before they left the base in a colony ship. This multiplied the number of pick-ups. Plato Base currently held eight thousand sponsors, not counting the permanent crew of fifty sponsors, most of them Civil Service. None of the guests stayed for longer than three weeks, so they had to extract about ten thousand sponsors per month. Guido thought that this number was still too low. Colony ships still had to do their own extractions. Plato base was fully filling five kilo class ships per month and was regularly filling up free space on about thirty of the other colony ships.

When Gina served the tea, Guido continued to reveal details of his plan to the major, “if this type of extraction turns out to be successful, we have to face a lot of new problems. These people are poorly educated. And I don’t want to extract only the one or two sponsors that I might find in each village, together with a handful of concubines. I plan to extract everybody who shows the potential to reach sponsor level through education and motivation, together with every available woman, no matter how many supernumeraries that might be.”

“I agree to you that you’ll run into a pile of problems with that. I mean, you are talking about collecting people that live in tribalism. They are strictly patriarchal, as far as I know,” the Major said while sipping on his tea.

“That’s why we added a few filters to the CAP test. We won’t collect males who can’t cope with females or different colored people as their bosses. But I don’t expect that there will be too many problems of this kind. The bigger problem I expect to encounter is that we will break up families. Family structures are important to them. And the biggest problem of all will be to separate those men with guns that actually seem to like their situation, because it means that they have some power over other people.”

“You are really sure you don’t want my men to take them down first?” the Major asked.

Guido shook his head, “It’s definitely the last option, Major. I hope that in about thirty to fifty percent of all encounters with armed people, those who want to leave convince the others to take their weapons down. There may even be potential sponsors among the armed people. As I said, I want to save the rural population, not the brigands.

“The first thing we will do, once we get them to Plato Base, is a basic education program. We will teach them English and Mandarin, the two most common languages among Confederacy humans. Math, physics and chemistry, a summary of human history and the current situation concerning the Confederacy and the Sa’arm attack. The AI will constantly observe their development and it will add sleep training lessons for their individual interests and talents. This will take about one month where we won’t even try to find a place on a colony ship for them. After a month, we will repeat the CAP testing. I expect we can double or triple the number of sponsors by doing so. And then we will start with mixed dating events with people of many different races. About twenty sponsors and an adequate number of concubines so the sponsors still have choices at the end of such an event. The sponsors will have to collect their concubines from among these preselected concubines, so we hopefully don’t run into the problems that those colony ships had, that allowed their sponsors to search for their concubines freely during the trip to the colony.”

The major had finished his tea. “That is an excellent plan. I see you don’t play around and the risk is minimized as much as possible,” he said. “But it is a time consuming plan. You’ll have to CAP test all those people. What are you doing about that?”

Guido grinned. “I have more than enough Confederacy citizens here that I can send out for one such trip or two. If everything goes well, there soon will be five hundred mobile test centers all over the world in the disregarded regions. I made the machine that’s still working at the bottom of the Plato Base Shaft build an industrial-sized replicator near the base of the shaft. It currently produces mobile testing stations with their own power supply and a powerful force field generator that can protect an area of fifty meters around the facility. An attacker would need heavy artillery to break through this.”

Major Clarke quickly calculated his own transport capacities. He came to a bemusing result. “When your initial test run is over and you start with the number of test centers you told me, my shuttles will permanently be on duty, relocating the test centers. I think I’ll have to increase my capacities...” The major paused when he realized that this were the exact words he heard from the Centurion so often. Both men laughed.

“Okay then, when do you want to start this experiment?” the major asked.

“Tomorrow,” Guido answered.

It was a hot sunny day over East Africa. The shuttle Pine Creek One had come down from orbit and now was flying only one hundred meters above the savannah of Sudan. Within five minutes they had seen three villages that had been burned down, one of them still smoking, and a convoy of armed jeeps and trucks. They were not part of the Sudanese army, since Sudan’s army had vaporized several years ago. Master Sergeant Conroy, the pilot of the shuttle, guessed that they were marauders, responsible for the burnt down villages.

The shuttle passed the convoy, flying a few kilometers in their general direction. About twenty kilometers ahead of the convoy, they found another village. About fifty mud huts and two brick buildings settled between a few hills. People wildly gestured when the shuttle approached. Some armed people appeared, but they didn’t open fire. They also manned a nest of machine guns on top of one of the brick buildings. The AI mentioned that there were only a few ammunition belts. The village’s defenders would quickly be overrun.

Guido, who was sitting behind the pilot, ordered to land. “This village is as good as any other village.”

“Sir,” the pilot mentioned, “I have strict orders not do drop you in a battle zone.”

“Sergeant, this is not yet a battle zone. So we go down and see if we can prevent the upcoming battle at all.”

“As you wish, sir.”

The shuttle landed on the only street of the village, dispersing only little dust. Guido left the shuttle under the protection of a force field. His assistant in this mission, Decurion Angelina Smith, waited inside the vehicle, as the eight Marines did. The residents had fled into the questionable safety of their huts.

With the help of the AI translating and an amplifier, Guido started to speak, “Listen, people. We don’t mean any harm to you. We are from the Confederacy. There is a convoy of armed vehicles approaching from the west. They are currently twenty kilometers away. Can I please talk to your leader or elders?”

For a minute, nothing happened, but then a group of three men approached Guido. The man in the middle was a very old man with white hair. The burden of his age was visible in every movement. The other two were younger and armed with machine pistols. But they did not aim at Guido or the ship.

“My name is Zingabe Bishop,” the old man said. “What do you want? The Confederacy doesn’t come here.”

“Well, I want to change that,” Guido answered. “My name is Guido Marek. I had the impression that it’s worth extracting people from Africa. And you seem to have a big problem approaching.”

“How many vehicles did you count?” the younger man to the old man’s left side asked.

“Ten trucks full of armed people. Four jeeps with machine guns mounted. We guess they are marauders.”

The young man turned toward Zingabe Bishop. “We can’t stand them this time,” he said.

“I agree with you, Kafil,” the old man said. “So do we have any alternatives?”

The young man named Kafil looked at the shuttle. Suddenly his face showed a wicked grin. “I bet this ship can easily defeat the marauders.”

The old man slapped Kafil on the back of his head. “Just forget what you are thinking right now if it is what I think it is.”

“Dad!” Kafil shouted. “We have to think about every possibility. You taught us to be open-minded.”

“I also taught you about behavior and hospitality. This man came to us and he has an offer, right? So let’s invite him and listen to his words. There has to be enough time for that.”

“I hope so,” Kafil mumbled.

Zingabe turned his attention to Guido again. “Let’s talk about this at the men’s haunt. You like tea?”

The four men turned around and walked down the street. Zingabe waved towards a hut from time to time, signaling someone to follow. When they reached a place with a large tree, five other old men had joined them. Zingabe ordered his son to organize a samovar. They all sat down on the floor and Zingabe introduced the other elders to Guido.

“I understand that we don’t have much time, so let’s shorten this a little,” Zingabe said. “This is the council of elders of our village. You said the Confederacy has an offer for us? We know a few things from satellite TV but I don’t expect it’s all the truth.”

Guido looked at the men sitting on the ground around him. He had to explain a plan to them that would vaporize their small community. “You were right; the Confederacy normally does no extractions from central Africa, Arab nations and parts of South America. The reason is that the alien races can’t cope with the level of corruption that they found there. Each human has to fit into several standards before they are accepted as potential citizens of the Confederacy. Therefore they have the CAP test. This test scans their inner being for their virtues. You can’t lie to the machine doing the testing. In the countries where the Confederacy is doing extractions, less than one-quarter of all people pass this test.”

There was a murmur among the elders. One of them asked, “So you want to take our best men with you, leaving the rest behind?”

“That’s how it is done in the USA, Europe, China and all the other countries,” Guido confirmed. “Please let me explain further. Those who pass the test, and that is not only men, are allowed to take a number of people with them, who have failed the test. They are then responsible for these people, according to the Confederacy law. Their main purpose is to breed, so most groups consist of one man and two or more women, even if the one with the high CAP score is a woman. The one who passed the test is the boss. There is no way around that.

“Another important point is that the Confederacy doesn’t like closed ethnic groups. You would have to cope with the idea to be split up and mix with Europeans, Americans and Asians. Do you think you and your people can cope with this?”

“A woman in charge might be the bigger problem for several of our young men, but on the other hand a lot of us are ruled by their wife or mother,” one man answered smirking.

“You might know how an extraction normally works from TV? I’ll tell you now what I have in mind for you. First we will CAP test everybody over the age of thirteen. I expect that we won’t find more than three or four sponsors, but that is not important. We will take everybody who’s willing to come with us. We will train and teach you, and after a month, the test will be repeated. I expect that we will find then as many sponsors as among Europeans or Americans. Those sponsors will then be offered citizenship of the Confederacy and they can collect their concubines from those who have failed the test, including people from other countries.

“Those who have failed the test a second time, especially the men among them, will be offered the opportunity to return to Earth. We can support you with contacts to groups that want to defend Earth against the Sa’arm. We won’t support you with weapons to fight your civil war here in Sudan.”

“That sounds more than fair,” Zingabe Bishop nodded.

They were interrupted by a child that came running from between the huts. “We spotted them! They are only five kilometers away. What should we do?”

Zingabe looked at Guido. “If we accept your offer, how long will the initial test take?”

“How many people live here?” Guido asked.

“Roughly one hundred and seventy, age fourteen and above and about double the number of children,” Zingabe answered.

Guido made a quick calculation. There were ten testing chambers available in the testing station. “About nine hours,” he said. “And as long as we are here we can erect a force field that protects a fifty meter area around the testing station.”

They didn’t really have any other options with a small army approaching their village. So they decided to take the CAP test and at least temporarily flee from the planet. Guido was pleased when the AI told him that among the tested people there were no sociopaths or ethnophobics. The average CAP score was below the worldwide standard but that was what they had expected. There had been two people with a high enough CAP score to volunteer, but Guido offered them to take part in the education and training program too, and they agreed. One of them was Kafil, the son of the village’s elder.

The brigands outside the interdiction field fired at the field and even tried to break through with a truck, but failed. They destroyed the huts that were outside the field, but that was it. The Marines inside the shuttle observed them but did not interfere. The villagers within the field didn’t even notice them.

At the end of the day, all the people of the village were led through a transporter nexus and entered Plato Base. They were all impressed and intimidated by the sheer size and the strangeness compared to their old home.

The very next day, a tight sleep learning program mixed with recessing exercises started, opening a whole new world to them.

“Sir, Major Clarke is here. He wants to visit you,” Gina announced over a communication link to Guido.