Chapter 1

I hate traveling.

I'd taken a transfer within the company after being notified that I had 60 days to find a new job or I was Oh yoU Tee. While the package would have been nice, I kind of liked the idea of staying with the company, so, when I found a suitable job opening in global business solutions, I took it.

Even though it was touted as requiring 80% travel.

One of my former co-workers who decided to take the package and leave the company teased me about the travel percentage by saying "Well ... that means you get to spend 20% on the customer site and the rest of the time waiting in line to get through airport security".

After six months of this, I think he understated the ratio of time spent waiting in security lines.

So, there I was, stuck in an airport, waiting for a delayed flight, hoping it wasn't going to be canceled since I wanted to get home — well, back to where my apartment was — before Christmas. The whole of the north-eastern United States was, for the most part, guaranteed a White Christmas, though some spots were getting black ice, instead.

Here, the snow was blowing outside. This airport was keeping up with the deposition of the white stuff, so the local weather wasn't likely to close the airport. What most people - those who do not travel much - do not know is that the delays and cancellations are NOT caused by the airport you are waiting to leave from, but, rather, due to the airports that planes are supposed to be leaving from, in an almost transfinite cascade.

I would not mind traveling if I could use those matter stream "transmat" devices the Confederacy has shown off, but we are not likely to get them in the kind of volume we would need to make a difference. The fact that the Confederacy has been pushing their replicator technology at us in huge quantities has been handy, though.

The windows showed a snowy day outside with flights both leaving and arriving, though I could tell that the arrival rate was falling short of the departure rate, pointing to a situation where we would, eventually, run out of planes.

Gray, cloudy, snowy ... and then just ... gray.

I've seen this in the news, before, though, nowadays, Confederacy extractions no longer get video air-time, just a mention of how many were done "today" in local news. Unless something spectacular happens, there's almost no national coverage. There are websites where you can get counts, and, I am told, even names. I didn't tend to peruse these lists.

Looking at my flight's information on the "Departures" screen, I saw that my flight had been canceled.

This cancellation no longer could bother me much, since, with a CAP score of 7.9, I wasn't likely to need to head back to my empty apartment for the Christmas Holidays any longer.

I wondered how big a pickup this was and how many people I could choose from.

If you think I should have been thinking of collecting my ex-wife, well, she'd already re-married, giving me one more reason to be happy with the idea of a job that required travel. I might've wanted to grab our children but they were all already over 14 years of age.

So I found one of the Marines - who, with three others, had just finished disarming the TSA folks - and asked her where I needed to be.

After looking me over - and, I thought, talking to an AI or others in her group - she pointed at the nearest gate area, Gate 12, and told me they were setting up over there.

So I ambled over to that gate, still dragging my usual carry-on (or is that carrion?) bag, my parka bungeed to it, and my back-pack with my laptop.

I'll admit that I wasn't expecting to leave with much in the way of luggage, but, in another corner of my mind, I wasn't sure I wanted to leave bags that the bomb squad would want to try to detonate. I don't like to litter.

So I got in the check-in line when they announced that they needed to see all of the volunteers with CAP scores over 6.5.

Not!

I think some joker in the extraction team was having fun, given that we were in an airport. They first called for what they called pre-packs, of which there were three, and got them through the transporter gate first, then called the rest of us by CAP scores, starting with the 9s.

The two, both women, who lined up were, to my eye, all go and no show. Easily near my age, these two were Type A all the way and didn't waste time trying to look like anything other than serious workers. You know the type, function and to hell with everything else.

In other words, the kind of people I liked to work with, far more interested in getting the job done rather than garnering political capital. In the business world I guessed they would be considered performance oriented rather than politically or socially oriented, though, in this changed venue, the term "performance" suddenly had a much different connotation.

When they were set loose to find concubines, they each had a Marine following them as they worked through the people there. One of the women came to me and asked for my CAP card, and, once she saw my number, smiled at me and shook hands before moving on.

The next group-- with CAP scores of 8 and above—had 5 people get in line and were checked in and got their escorts to find concubines.

At this point there was a bit of a stall since they needed to get the first two clusters out of the way. The two 9s worked through four large family groups to build their harems. In the end all four went ... but they had separated all husband and wife pairings.

One woman, trailing three children, came to me asking if I had a high enough score to be a sponsor. This woman, Kate, told me that she had watched when one of the 9s had approached me, earlier, and was hoping I would take her. Body-wise she was a definite hausfrau type, a pleasant face but cushioned body, but her kids, a 13 year old boy and two younger daughters, seemed to be happy and well-behaved. I could tell from the clothing that they weren't rolling in it though her children had better coats than she did. Finding that her CAP card displayed a score of 6.2 was a surprise. I got up and went to the counter to get one of the readers for CAP cards and put hers under it. Her libido was not as high as I might have liked, as were her scores for aggression and independence, but her parental drives were way up, matching her intelligence, with a good dose of initiative, proven by her seeking me out.

She was in, even though she was rated as a "dead fuck", but, then, considering my track record with my ex, so was I. I could probably collect four dead fucks and still come out ahead.

I smiled. "Kate, you're with me."

She smiled back. "I know that you can tell from my CAP score that I am not thrilling in the sack ... so ... thank you..." she trailed off.

"My name is Alex, Kate. Just keep an eye on the kids for us."

She nodded. "Always."

I got introduced to Joey, 13, Jackie, 10 and Joanie, 7. They all seemed bright, pleasant and far better behaved than mine ever were. They also didn't look at me like some kind of pond scum and I later learned that their folks had been divorced for a while.

Once both of the 9s were finally through the transport gate, the 8s were getting their harems in order with only a little bit in the way of friction.

It seemed odd that, of the seven who had already been through the line, five of them were women, especially in an airport.

When they called for the sevens, I managed to be the fifth in line out of twelve. I didn't even want to think of what it would be like when the sixes got to pick.

This time there were eight men and four women ... and I was one of the men.

When I met the sea of supplicants I went through CAP cards and eliminated a whole bunch of all-show-no-go women and even girls, which seemed to be the majority of those in this pool. I noticed that many of these women also tended to be high in independence, a trait I wasn't too keen on, especially when combined with low parenting drive, low libido ... and low intelligence.