Chapter 18: Interlude with Mother and Daughters

"You need to know my story," Joan told Amanda as Dawn and Eve led Amanda into a small room. The floor and walls of the room were cushioned. The door slid shut behind Joan. "This is a secure padded cell, ideal for our use. Would you rather hear about how I met Hank and became a woman for him or--"

"Make love, Mom," the twins chorused.

Amanda was feeling like a bloated cow beside the three women. All three had golden tans and perfect skin. About the only thing Amanda felt she had over the others were her large breasts. Joan's breasts were firm mounds that could have passed as male pectorals with the right grooming. Joan was sleekly muscled; her abdominal muscles clearly defined and her legs and arms giving mute evidence to a physically active lifestyle. Joan wore her brown hair tied back in a chignon. Joan's twin daughters had breasts the size of oranges and shoulder-length honey- colored hair. Dawn and Eve had toothy smiles that reminded Amanda of kittens. The two young women's softly feminine curves and smooth, hairless bodies made Amanda regret her own potbelly and thick thighs. The four women did have bald crotches in common, but there the similarity ended. Amanda had protruding inner labia and thick outer lips. Dawn and Eve, as twins, had identical peaches that only displayed their outer lips, unless they were aroused enough for their clitoris to project beyond their fat labia majora. Joan, the eldest, appeared to have only a little girl's slit between her legs, the front of the crease visible from the front.

"It's okay to look," Joan said as she caressed Amanda's sex. "I want you to look. This is a bonding session. We will be physically intimate. Amanda is a good girl."

Amanda gasped in pleasure as Joan said Amanda's control phrase. Amanda's teeth chattered and she shuddered in mini orgasm.

"We are also going to talk. You belong to the best man in the world," Joan smiled and kissed Amanda's cheek, then her mouth. Drawing back, Joan looked deeply in Amanda's half-lidded brown eyes as Joan continued. "Henry James Dalton was a hero and the early Capitallian government betrayed him. I was part of the debriefing team, the team psychiatrist. It was the year 2089 and the United States had split into three countries. I received orders to go to Colorado Springs and evaluate a national security threat. Hank was the problem because he had just pulled off three impossible operations that I was told about. First, a mere gunnery sergeant of Marines, Hank had convinced an amphibious task force commander to put her career on the line and sail from completed relief operations in southern Africa to San Francisco to put down rebellion by Aztlan insurgents. Then he located and captured a mobile missile launcher that had two nuclear-tipped battlefield missiles still on board—the other missiles had been used on Las Vegas, Nevada and on Mexico City, the first time nuclear weapons had been exploded against civilian cities since 1945! The last operation was getting a scratch team of Marine commandos and Sailors to Boston and rescuing the three Capitallian delegates to the eastern seaboard.

"Hank panicked the new national command authority because there was no possible way that Hank could have predicted the three events," Joan smiled and then began massaging Amanda's breasts. "The national command authority was not able to accept that Hank just took in a lot of information, made some lucky guesses and acted on his hunches. At least that was the story Hank gave me under interrogation. No, interrogation is not correct. Under orders we tortured him. Hank described the Conspiracy of Dreams and the national command authority demanded to know how Hank had found out."

"Mistress," Amanda's attempt to be formal while two women were kneading and nursing at her breasts resulted in comedic gasping. "Uh, Miss--"

"I am Joan. Call me Joan," Joan commanded.

"You can't," Amanda began. She took a deep breath and tried speaking again. Joan's grin and dancing eyes betrayed Joan's mirth. "It is against the law to do that to someone not a slave. In fact, torturing slaves can only legally be done under court order."

"Today you are right," Joan said. "In 2089 Capitallia was still forming. During the transition the old US laws bridged the gap until Capitallia formed a government and passed appropriate laws. At first, the Capitallian central government was headquartered in San Francisco at the old Presidio. The first rule was that the various states would continue their government while the new national government sorted itself out. But there were issues that state governments couldn't solve on their own. Among those issues was war. Aztlan had just been formed after a decade of increasing violence that ended with four nuclear explosions--two in Las Vegas and two in Mexico City. Amanda, have you ever heard of the Patriot Act?"

"No, ma'am," Amanda admitted.

"It was originally the 'Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001'," Joan sighed, then continued speaking, "or simply the USA PATRIOT ACT."

Joan explained how the name was an acronym formed by the name, that it was intended to paper over acts that were not criminal but constituted war on the United States. Joan said that it was entirely unnecessary because the mechanisms were already in place, despite court rulings that decriminalized rebellion. The last edition of the Patriot Act was the 2076 version and Hank Dalton had fallen under one of the classified, not for public dissemination provisions.

"How can you obey the law," Amanda asked, "when you are not permitted to know what the law is? That makes no sense at all!"

"Hank said that the law had been written by the Conspiracy of Dreams--if you didn't know the law, you could not defend yourself in court against charges that you didn't have the right to know," Joan agreed. "You could be held without trial, you could be tortured, and your incarceration kept secret. Hank had three things on his side, but many people were taken away in the middle of the night by the US government and never seen again. One 'crime' was use of psychic powers. There was no real defense against the charge because under the 2076 Patriot Act the defendant was required to prove innocence. I'm told that you specialized in Constitutional Law."

"I'm no lawyer," Amanda admitted, "but I know about the rights of the accused. The state has enormous resources and the individual in custody is helpless. Requiring the state to prove before a jury that one is guilty of a crime and that the law was just are two important safeguards against arbitrary tyranny. As it stands now, the prosecutor has to make the case three times--once before a judge who issues an arrest warrant, once before a Grand Jury in the case of criminal enslavement to see if there is cause to proceed to trial and once at the actual trial. You said Hank had three things on his side. What were they?"

"First and most important was that the people enforcing the law were men of honor," Joan said. "I know that honorable men wouldn't enforce such laws. From the beginning, such men resisted any but necessary brutality. They were very careful about who they tortured. Hank had information and we had the way to get it out of him without hurting him. The means we used were drugs, hypnosis and severe mental distress. Yes, pain was a part of it, but the techniques used didn't leave scars. With the drugs even the mind emerged unscarred. The victim didn't remember being interrogated, much like the person we caught trying to kill Kandi and Dot and the other girls, people who were going to murder the Bakers and their slaves. Hank told us things that scared us and we wanted to know who told him. No, that's a lie--we wanted proof that he was making up the Conspiracy of Dreams. But Hank wasn't. It soon became apparent to us all that Hank was a hero and not a villain. That Hank was the victim of a flawed system."

"That was obvious." Amanda said. "Ned Saunders is my father. He was in Hank's commando unit. Hank had physical evidence--the nation of Aztlan, two nuclear weapons, and now five dead senators. Dad told me that Hank would solve this."

"That is the second thing that Hank had going for him," Joan said. "Hank had a lot of very loyal friends. Those friends included your father, a newly minted colonel named Benton Harold and the new head of the Capitallian Defense Organization, Admiral Shields. When Hank disappeared they left no stone unturned looking for him. We had him hidden in the old Norad headquarters beneath Cheyenne Mountain. Only a few of us knew that Hank Dalton had been arrested and was being interrogated in the hospital. Our cover story about a soldier suffering from a nervous breakdown didn't last long. Cheyenne Mountain was heavily defended. The problem was that commandos, especially Benton Harold's commandos, didn't know the meaning of impossible. Several of Benton Harold's commandos had learned Hank's methods of finding people and things. They had the new commander of the entire Capitallian armed forces on their side and Admiral Shields made available all resources to find Hank. They found him and our asses were grass! But we had already surrendered by then.

"Huh?" Amanda asked. The twins giggled. "Surrendered? To whom?"

"Hank, of course," Joan said. "Hank talked under interrogation--he talked and talked and talked. Based on what Hank told us, several Capitallian officials were arrested for treason. Hank's biggest ace in the hole was Henry James Dalton."

"How did he do that?" Amanda asked.

"Simple," Joan chuckled. "We only thought that we were interrogating Hank Dalton. The truth was that he interrogated us."

"He what?" Amanda asked. How did he do that?"

"He talked. He told us so much--and he told us to look into things. Following up those leads led us to the traitors. In the process I got to know Hank Dalton better than any other person on Earth. I know Hank better than Hank knows himself. Every little personality flaw. Every phobia. When Hank was six he was kidnapped from school and molested for several days--the scars from that trauma are still with him. He can't stand body hair to this day. Hank's mother, father and siblings were murdered by Mexican narco-terrorists while Hank was in Marine Corps boot camp. Did you know that Hank was really not a very good soldier? He was a troublemaker. No wonder--it seemed that when he was a good little boy and followed the rules, he got hurt. When he broke the rules, Hank was rewarded. Hank was only arrested because he didn't kill the capture team. Admiral Shields said that if he had killed us, she would have stood up for him at his court martial."

"Who was this Admiral Shields?" Amanda asked.

Joan explained that Admiral Elizabeth Shields was the Navy task force commander and a future President of the Capitallian Republic. The Marine battalion commander was Colonel Wilson-Brooke and the commander of the Marine composite combat aircraft squadron was Colonel Bridgette Moore. Major Benton Harold, the future senior senator of the Capitallian Congress, reported directly to the battalion commander because Benton Harold commanded the small special operations detachment of about 50 commandos, depending upon who was available for duty.

Under the old USA system, there was a battalion commander and a squadron commander for a Marine Expeditionary Unit's air-ground team. Admiral "Lizzy" Shields was in command of the Marines and of the ships transporting, protecting and supporting them. The amphibious warfare ships carrying the Marines and their aircraft, a submarine and several Navy destroyers completed the task force. A battalion of Marines isn't that big, just 1200 Marines with 4 tanks and 16 Light Armored Vehicles and 15 Amphibious Assault Vehicles--but this small unit cleared the Aztlan forces out of San Francisco and Sacramento before the Aztlan forces desperately attacked Capitallian ground forces in Las Vegas and Mexican ground forces in Mexico City.

"Special operations personnel are often frittered away on details," Joan was saying. "Typical was what happened to the 6th Ranger Battalion in the Philippines during 1945. The outfit won't ring a bell with you, but a battalion of mule-packed 75mm Howitzers was formed into a Ranger battalion because President Roosevelt was enamored of the commando concept. Army commanders at the time had no idea what specialized light infantry was for, so the 6th Rangers were guarding General MacArthur's headquarters when a prisoner of war camp was discovered at Cabanatuan. Electronic intercept had captured the orders from Tokyo to murder all prisoners of war to prevent them from being returned to Allied control. So a company of the 6th Rangers, a few men from a group called the Alamo Scouts and several hundred Filipino guerrillas did something that the Japanese routinely did themselves, but something those racist Japanese thought was impossible for an army of white men--the 6th Rangers foot-marched 50 kilometers beyond their own front lines, through Japanese-held territory, and with the Pinoy guerrillas securing the flanks the Rangers attacked the prisoner of war camp, defeated a Japanese force five times their number, and rescued more than 500 American and Allied prisoners of war who had been too sick for Japan to ship out as slave labor. Despite as many as 9000 Japanese soldiers in the area, the 133 Rangers and 250 Filipino guerrillas managed to carry, drag or march those 500 plus sick ex-prisoners back across 50 kilometers of hot, humid jungle along with all their wounded and dead. Doing the impossible was routine for commando forces."

Dawn and Eve had sandwiched Amanda between them and were nuzzling Amanda's turgid nipples.

"The reason that Hank was free to fly into Baja California and seize control of the remaining nuclear weapons held by Aztlan forces was that Benton Harold's commandos were being used to protect Admiral Sheild's headquarters." Joan shook her head, chuckled. "Lizzy told me later that she was relying on Hank to tell her where to find the Aztlan irregulars. Lizzy Shields said that every time Hank told her where to find those irregulars, they were there and her Marines caught them. The Marine robot aircraft, tilt-rotor Ospreys, attack aircraft and helicopters could move Marines anywhere faster than the Aztlan forces could get word that the Marines were on their way. You see, by that time the Aztlan irregulars had alienated the Hispanic communities in California and everybody had cell phones. If the Aztlan forces broke up into small groups of less than 20, the local residents killed them off. When the Aztlan forces got 100 or more together, the Marines landed on them. That was one of the things we questioned Hank about--and he told us that he earned the local residents' trust. Hank would ask questions, he passed out weapons captured from the Aztlan caches--the Marines didn't need them and somehow Hank talked Lizzy into letting the local Hispanic communities arm for self-defense. Most of those weapons were no threat to the Marines but the Aztlan forces didn't wear body armor, mostly. Those captured weapons were good enough to defend the many communities and freed up Marines to operate offensively."

Joan caressed the inside of Amanda's thighs and Amanda sighed. Amanda opened her legs to give Joan better access.

"As I was saying," Joan was playing with Amanda's labia and was slowly pistoning two fingers in and out of Amanda's vagina. "I got to know Hank. I peered into his very soul. It was on my recommendation that Project Cassandra was started. It was a breeding program for psychics.

I lied and told them that Hank was a psychic, that he was telepathic and clairvoyant. Actually, Hank was just perceptive and has great empathy, but I lied. Hank's explanation was reasonable and scientific. He just processed a lot of information more efficiently than the approved think tanks. Hank claims that these think tanks were hobbled by regulations and by a risk adverse culture. Hank said that if they were poker players they'd all be broke, they'd all lose to someone who took calculated risks.

I felt that we owed something to Hank. Project Cassandra was a secret eugenics project illegally run by the Capitallian government. There was enough merit in the program that it was picked up by private organizations. Slavery was something new, so I did two things for Hank." Joan's gaze softened as she reminisced. "First, I acquired a handful of nubile fertile females for Hank to do stud service. Next, I went under the knife and had sexual reassignment surgery. Hank is a beautiful soul and I discovered that life was empty without him. There was a problem. I was the wrong gender. Hank is strictly heterosexual. Men don't interest him sexually. I shared that--I'm a total lesbian except where Hank is concerned. You've heard the old joke, haven't you?"

Amanda shook her head 'no.'

"A person who likes women and has a dick is called a MAN." Joan chuckled. "I do men occasionally, mostly to please Hank, but there is only one man I like between my thighs. His name is Henry James Dalton. Sex is in the mind and Hank's mind is the most beautiful I've ever encountered. Yes, Amanda, I'm laying it on thickly, but I love Hank so much that getting my dick and balls cut off so that I could be one of his women was a small sacrifice. I used to be John Lawrence Jakefield, but I got my sex changed and volunteered to be Hank's slave girl in 2091. I had to become his slave, to submit totally to him. It has been the best time of my life."

"Were these two adopted?" Amanda asked.

"Oh, no," Joan replied. "I'm telling you a state secret. Are you familiar with Lagrange points? There are five and they capture small moons." During the 18th century mathematicians Leonhard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange discovered that there were five special points of gravitational equilibrium around the Earth and Moon. An object captured in any one of these five points would stay there because the various gravitational fields cancelled each other out. Such objects would then orbit the Sun, maintaining the same relative position with respect to the Earth-Moon system. These five points were named Lagrange points.

"Earth has more than one moon," Joan explained, "but the others are only a kilometer or two across--except for that big one captured in 2061, it is about 11 by 3 by 1 kilometers and calved off from Haley's Comet. We thought it was going to be the end of life on Earth but Lucifer settled into the L3 point. Anyway, there was a space ship at the L2 point where it isn't visible from Earth. The space ship was discovered during moon missions in the 1960's and a series of secret US missions in the 1980s brought back to Earth some advanced medical technology. Once we knew what to look for, we were able to find other extraterrestrial spaceships--their remains, really--and discovered that Earth had been visited repeatedly over the last 50,000 years.

"We discovered something else, too--those visitors from other worlds were human." Joan grinned as Amanda's expression betrayed skepticism. "I see that you don't believe me.

"One reason that my lie about Hank being psychic worked was that there are many legends about people from the stars and their magical abilities. If you are bored sometime get Hank to tell you why those people from other worlds were not psychic, as we understand the term. Hank was involved in some recovery operations to get records from Aztlan territory while he was working as a researcher.

"I was a happy slave girl. Hank was shaping up to be a world class lover, even though I preferred the other slave girls to men. Sex is in the mind. It was just right to submit to Hank.

"Hank's part of Project Cassandra concentrated on producing twin girls because the Eugenics Council thought that girls had superior psychic abilities, and that twins had a natural telepathic link. Hank was allotted four slave girls and all four are still with him. The daughters were encouraged to get pregnant by Hank, to be his slaves for a few years, because it was thought that this inbreeding would produce better psychics. They were not REQUIRED to do this--there never were any 'slaves by birth' in Capitallia, but the private Eugenics Council provided economic incentive. By that time new and rediscovered medical technology was beginning to filter into Capitallia's medical system. Nanites were expensive mostly because at first you needed a control box mounted on your skin. Genetic medicine advanced rapidly in Capitallia. Hank and I took an interest in the mind control technology and by 2109 I had a working model of the Jakefield Unitary System. It was injectable and programmable. First, we used it on animals.