Chapter 13

I sent Bumblebees 3 and 4 to watch over the city of Chihuahua. Sra. Gomez had told Renee that the slavers always showed up on the fifteenth or sixteenth of May each year, which would be the next two days. The slavers knew ahead of time which girls they wanted and where to find them. Sometimes they paid for the girls, sometimes they threatened the rest of the family, and sometimes they just kidnapped the girls. The authorities never tried to stop them, and when the pirates left, the city was always short one hundred to two hundred girls. I asked Serena to look carefully at any spies in or around Chihuahua. Someone was doing the recon work for the slavers. I showed the two Bumblebee captains what pirate ships usually looked like, not that there was one distinct look. The pirates would probably have one or more armed cargo ships with no visible insignias and one or more armed portable container ships to use transporting the girls. When the ships showed up, I wanted to record and track any communications with anyone on the ground. They were to capture the ships, being careful to watch for any other ships hovering high above the city’s shield. I would prefer intercepting the ships before they started, but if they couldn’t, they were to find a quiet place near the city to load the girls into shuttles to return them home, and then load the slavers into the portable storage units.

I preferred that the girls see as little as possible of our ships or troops. Once the ships were captured and on the way back to the estate, if one of the spy families was involved, I wanted their compound raided. Any rescued women and girls who didn’t live in the area should be brought back here for a physical before we helped to return them to their families. All family members on estates helping the pirates should be brought back for a trial of sorts. The estate should be shielded and we would send freighters to remove everything except the buildings. Serena would raid their bank accounts right before all of the computer equipment was removed and brought back for processing. I also wanted scans run to search for any hidden underground passages, or any hidden rooms in the buildings. The two captains were very excited when they left.

I told Bumblebee 7 to be ready to leave for Cairo at five the next morning to provide cover for Bumble 1. Bumblebees 5 and 6 went with me to provide cover in case anyone showed up while we returned the girls we rescued last night. We sent twenty shuttles, each with between one and seven girls, to twenty different towns and cities across South America. I stayed aboard the Inquisitive, monitoring the return of each girl. Seventeen of the families in the mountainous area of Colombia asked us to please keep their daughters safe, even asking us to take eleven additional daughters. If the slavers returned and found the girls still there, there would be trouble. I told the shuttles dealing with those families to ask if the families would be interested in moving out of the area. They were interested, but worried about what type of work they could do. All they knew was coffee growing.

One of the fathers asked if we had any high mountains near where we were going. When I told him we did, he suggested that they could grow coffee for us in those mountains. Coffee was, after all, an extremely profitable crop. The UN had decreed that it could only be grown in areas that wouldn’t economically support any other agriculture. That had effectively cut the coffee supply by over half, driving up prices astronomically. I told the guy that I would love to do it if he would supervise it for me. I called Stacey and told her what had been suggested.

She loved the idea, promising to have several thousand acres ready tomorrow so she could transplant their existing crops. She checked with each family to see what varieties they had. Twelve had the Corona Oro plants, a plant that provided two heavy crops each year for maximum yield. Five preferred the Mountain Blue plants. They also had two crops a year, but the yield was only about half of the Corona Oro. The difference was that the Mountain Blue beans produced a coffee with no equal. Unlike the Corona Oro, though, the beans didn’t all ripen at once. It was a much more labor-intensive process as the ripe beans had to be hand-picked from each plant every two or three days during the month they ripened. If they were left on the plant just a couple of days too long, the blue seed covering darkened to almost black and the flavor was just like any other coffee bean. Sounded like something ag androids would be good at. Heck, we could even convert some of the four-legged maintenance robots to pick coffee.

The families were shuttled to where I had landed the Inquisitive. Eight families went with me, filling the ship. The rest were loaded into the Bumblebee’s shuttles. Each house had a locator beacon left there so our ships could find them and load the family’s possessions. Stacey would have the beacons picked up when she was finished transplanting the crops.

We dropped the families in the tiny town of Organ on the west side of the San Andres mountain range. In its heyday, Organ housed only 700 or so people. The 132 we deposited there should have plenty of room. I left four shuttles, each piloted by an android for the people to get around with and told them that Stacey would visit them tomorrow to plan the coffee plantation. I also asked James to have food delivered, and asked Greg to send several medi-docs to check everyone. Overall, we only ended up with one girl, the oldest one of the group. She had been concerned about being seen again by a guy in town that had been following her around for two months, pressuring her to live with him. I asked her to talk to Serena the next day and let her know who the guy was. It sounded like he was or knew the slaver’s contact in this area.

Gwen found me when I got back. Her hunt had gone well and she had almost 500 new troops, complete with enough officers to form four android-enhanced companies of 200 troops. “Well, shit. With that many troops and as many ships as we have, I guess I’m going to have to promote you to General and Stan to Admiral,” I teased.

“Only if I still get to go on some of the raids,” she countered.

“Don’t talk to me about it. Talk to whoever is in charge of the troops. That’s her decision,” I replied. Gwen hugged me, giving me one of her wrestling match kisses to go with it.

“You still haven’t collected,” she teased.

“It’s been a little busy and I want to make sure we have plenty of time to do it right,” I told her.

“Have the troops split into three companies tomorrow. I want to take one company with me, have one stay here for defense, and have one ready to leave on a moment’s notice in case anyone shows up at either the Larch place or in Chihuahua, or if we need more help in Cairo. Have Stan split the big ships up the same way,” I said.

After one more kiss, she let me go. There were a lot of excited women chattering in the dining room. They were excited at the thought of what they might get to do to their former captors soon.

When I got to the bedroom, I discovered that my wives were also excited. Penny’s mom and sister had joined us. “Mike, Britney’s here tonight as a reward for doing so well with her schoolwork. Show him, Britney,” Anna encouraged. When Britney started to sing the alphabet song, I almost fell over. This was more than I had hoped for. She finished, flawlessly, beaming proudly at her accomplishment.

“My teacher says she’s never seen anyone learn the song so quickly,” Britney said proudly. Anna was beaming even more than Britney was. Britney thanked me in her own special way. She crawled on top of me and rode me to two orgasms, then lay, sated, on top of me when I came as she had her second one. She buried her face against my neck and sighed contentedly. That’s when I realized what the really big change had been. Anna had been lying next to me, waiting for the realization to hit me. She grinned knowingly at me and mouthed, “Thank you.”

“We have to get up early,” Vonna reminded us as she turned the lights down. She and Jenna each snuggled against me. I could only see Jenna but the look on her face was one of extreme pride.

THURSDAY May 15

It was Jenna waking me well before sunrise. Britney was still on top of me sleeping, with my cock still semi-hard and buried in her sex. The motion on the bed woke her up and she kissed me, and then thanked me for getting her the tutor. My wives each claimed their due before letting me out of bed, not that it was very difficult to convince me. Gwen joined us in the shower, ostensibly to tell me that Bumblebee 3 and Bumblebee 4 had captured three pirate ships over Chihuahua. There had been the two we expected that Bumblebee 3 captured, and there had been a third ship in the ionosphere providing cover. It had descended when contact with the first two ships was lost and had been captured, too. Bumblebee 5, along with the newly converted prison ship, the newly furnished hospital ship, and four troop transports were dispatched at the first report of contact. Two troop transports and a transport full of APCs and armed shuttles followed minutes later.

As directed, Bumblebee 3 sealed the estate of the person who had been in communication with the slavers. Serena drained their financial accounts of five billion Planetary Dollars before their computers were shut down. Hundreds of fireflies were released into the compound, taking down everyone they found except the women. Shielded androids raided the compound identified as the one where most of the slaves were kept. Overall, 142 women were released from cells or locked rooms and herded aboard the medical ship. As anxious as they had been to get away, they insisted on waiting until all the girls were safely with them. The last nineteen women were found scattered throughout the compound, most cleaning or busy preparing breakfast.

One girl was found in a dungeon of sorts, unconscious and more dead than alive. She was rushed to the hospital ship where Greg and four medi-docs worked feverishly on her until they were pretty sure she would survive. Watching how hard they worked to save the girl that their owner would have simply let die gave the girls enough trust in their rescuers to stay calm. There was almost a riot, though, when a woman and four girls were brought to the ship.

Evidently, the woman was the wife and the girls were the daughters of the owner of the estate. They did ask that the youngest of the daughters be allowed to stay with them, though. Apparently, she had done what she could to secretly help the girls, sneaking them extra food, salves, and medicine when they were injured. The other four women were put in one of the prison ship cells. The husband, three sons, and 25 guards were stuffed into four cells. The pirates from each captured ship were put into one cell for each ship to prevent them from discussing anything.

Nineteen of the girls were from the Chihuahua area and were offered the chance to return to their homes. Only two accepted, the rest being either too ashamed of what they’d been forced to do or afraid of retaliation if they were found. Greg did a thorough physical on the two girls, and fed them before releasing them. We did communicate with the other families to let them know that their daughters had been rescued and were safe. Five more families convinced their daughters to come home; they didn’t care what had happened. Each of the returned girls was also given a physical, and a necklace with an emergency transponder to trigger if they ever saw any of the slavers again. We also told them how to contact Sra. Gomez if they were worried about anything. The rest of the women were currently in the hospital, sleeping or relaxing. They had been fed, carefully bathed, and pampered by domestic androids. I commed Greg and suggested that we put in several therapeutic spas, showers, and a small beauty salon for when new prisoners were treated. He liked the idea and contacted Izzy, the head domestic, to arrange it.

As we were speaking, or more accurately, as I was fucking Gwen silly while she tried to continue her report, androids were at the captured estate, loading freighters with everything that wasn’t a permanent fixture at the estate, down to the vases of cut flowers on the dining room table. Their computers were rushed to Serena in a shuttle so her minions could digest them. The androids had successfully attempted what they called a “hot swap” on one of the pirate ships. They attached the old AI to an external power supply, then turned off the power to it from the ship and replaced it with one of our new ones. When they powered the new one up, our AI successfully took control of the ship. It took the new AI three minutes to become acquainted with the ship and then the android was able to guide it back to the base. The shuttles attached to the captured pirate ships provided cloaking for the three ships as they were brought to the base.

The prisoners had been transferred into the cells at the old Holloman Air Base and had a contingent of androids guarding them. Each of the cells had been provided with enough food and other essentials for a week. Each of the 76 pirates, the owner of the estate, his wife, three sons, and three of the four daughters were in separate cells. The 25 guards from the estate were put five per cell, leaving us empty cells in case we needed them.

As I filled her with cum, I told Gwen that once the estate was stripped, to leave ten cloaked and armed androids, as well as four small armed shuttles in case anyone showed up to investigate. I also wanted four small shuttles to hover over the city in case any pirate ships returned looking for their comrades.

Gwen got a call from one of her troops at the estate. There was a building there that looked like it was attached, but wasn’t actually part of the estate. It was about the size of a 4X grav sled, and was obviously a studio where they had recorded porn videos with the slaves. Knowing that Danielle still might want to go into that field, I had them bring it back, but asked to have it dropped off at Holloman air base inside one of the hangars so none of the women would have to see it.

I got a call from Bumblebee 3 right after that. Her scans had located an underground facility, but no signs of life so they investigated and found 36 cargo containers. Four were filled with gold and currency, fourteen were full of ammunition, four had infantry weapons, six had heavy weapons to be added to ships, and eight had pulse ion cannons for ships.

I told her to have the fourteen with weapons for ships delivered to hangar fourteen, to deliver the rest of the ammo and weapons to hangar nine, and the four with currency should be delivered to my lab after letting Marco know it was on the way. Steve and Kevin should be happy, and busy. Marco would be in heaven. I laughed, visualizing him literally rolling in the money.

I told Bumblebee 3 to put a sensor in the bunker to notify us if anyone opened it after they left, and to make it look from the outside like we hadn’t been there. I also told her that they’d done an excellent job. It was at that point that her professional demeanor cracked and she practically giggled as she told me how great it had been, taking out two of the ships and then the entire estate practically by herself.

Serena called and told me that she found out Juan Munoz, the owner of the estate, also owned an android factory in Chihuahua. I called Bree and asked her to go to the factory in Chihuahua to see if she would be able to custom make androids. I warned her to take a full contingent of ships and troops, and let them enter first. The factory might be an armed extension of the estate. Bree informed me that every android factory had the ability to make to custom make androids so we would have another weapon, android copies of the prisoners we took from the estates to keep things running enough to avoid any suspicion that things were amiss there. That way, we might learn more about whom they dealt with, as well as avoiding spooking other estate owners into killing all of their girls and sterilizing their estates.

If she could do it, I asked her for one copy of each member of the family. I called Serena and asked her to interview each of the former slaves and the cooperative daughter we’d just brought back to find out as much about life at the estate as we could. The freighters should leave enough to make it look like someone still lived there. I was going to have Bree make android copies of every member of the household and any important guards to leave there. I hoped we could keep the factory open, using it to increase our own supply as well as making copies of people we captured.

I was pretty chipper at breakfast. I told everyone that we captured six more ships, and raided an estate, freeing 161 more women. The fact that we captured the factory, weapons, and five billion dollars from the bank accounts was just frosting. The money would help my accounts, which were hovering right around the $P600 billion mark. I also estimated that there was close to four billion in gold and cash, comparing it with how much room the stuff took up in my vault.

We departed for Cairo aboard the Inquisitive at exactly eight a.m. Albuquerque time. A shuttle and androids were saving us a landing space as well as seating in the audience. I grinned, watching Helga bounce excitedly all during the trip to Cairo. I had two cloaked androids stay with her when she went to line up with the other graduates. I told Danielle that I had a present for her. Expectantly she looked around, wondering who she would be having sex with. “Not that kind of present, a better one,” I teased. I told her about the studio we captured today and suddenly she was more excited than Helga.

“I’ve been studying like I promised. I’ve already learned seven of the numbers,” she beamed proudly.

The graduation ceremony was ... a graduation ceremony. Having previously survived four of them, high school, Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD, I was fairly inured to them by now. The speeches and speakers had bored me instead of inspiring me, but watching Helga as she walked proudly across the stage made this one special.

As the crowd stood up and began dispersing, there was a disturbance where Helga had been. I rushed up to find Helga kneeling on some guy’s chest. An android voice in my ear explained to me on my way what was happening. The guy that had been bothering Helga for some time now had approached her and told her to go with him quietly or he’d hurt her. When she told him to fuck off, he’d slapped her ... sort of. Her bodyguard put a shield between his hand and her face so that he made contact and everyone nearby heard. The bodyguard had spoken to her through her earpiece, warning her to stand still.

When the guy roughly grabbed her arm and tried to jerk her away, she flipped him. Her android-assisted flip carried him a little further than she could have done herself. Still shielded, the androids helped hold him down, making it look like she was doing it all. He kept threatening her, saying that he was going to finish raping her tonight and that his guards would be there any second. On my way over to Helga, I called Kateryna and told her to have Stan send the reinforcements and the two prison ships, and to shield our immediate area, expanding it until the Inquisitive was inside the shield. I wanted the girls inside the Inquisitive for now, and then shuttled up to Bumblebee ASAP. I also asked for 30 fully armed android troops and four APCs on the ground and visible. Any armed ships that were here or that showed up I wanted piggybacked immediately, but they were to wait on the capture until the ships started shooting or I gave the order to attack.

“Aren’t you embarrassed, getting your ass kicked twice by my wife?” I asked him sarcastically when I got there. “Oh, wait, last time it was your nuts, not your ass,” I goaded him.

“I’ll kill you and rape your wife when my guards get here,” he threatened.

“Shouldn’t they be here by now?” I taunted. “I don’t see them anywhere. Maybe they are afraid of my wife and ran away.”

For the first time, I saw nervousness on his face as he looked around and realized that I was right. The crowd had quickly dispersed and there was a big empty area around us, with no sign of his guards. “Fine, I challenge you to a duel,” he blustered.

Helga gasped. “I accept. We use swords,” I said. Helga gasped again. She hadn’t ever seen me using a sword during our martial arts sessions. It was too dangerous to use with so many people around. Those sessions had been private for the last ten years.

“Nobody has swords. We’ll use pistols,” the guy yelled.

“No. The law says that, since you issued the challenge, I get to choose the weapons. We use swords. Maybe you should have one of your bodyguards go get you one ... oh, I forgot, they ran away and left you here all alone.”

By the time the police arrived, I had rolled him over and bound his hands and feet with the special tape. I explained what happened, and that I had been challenged to a duel. I knew there was a problem when the head officer apologized to the jerk I had tied up. It seems his name was Rasheed Shareef and his father was Massoud Shareef, finance minister to the president of Egypt. When they started to arrest me, I told them that I expected him to be arrested too.

“Don’t be silly, Rasheed would never do anything like that,” the officer said.

“I have android witness,” I told him, having one of Helga’s bodyguards give him the mini data cube with the assault on it. He put it in his pocket. “Now you have no evidence,” he said smugly.

I called for my troops and told them to take Rasheed into custody and put him aboard the Inquisitive, as well as the police official. When they tried to draw their guns, the androids stopped them. “I will wait right here for a judge to sort this out. Then I will also charge your boss with withholding evidence,” I told the other two officers. “One of you may stay here and make sure I don’t leave, and the other should get a judge,” I offered.

“Get Judge Nasser,” the top official ordered.

“You know what? I think this Judge Nasser is on the payroll of the Shareef family, too. I think it’s time to call in an unbiased judge,” I told them.

It took a minute, but the phone was answered. “Sven, Mike Miller here,” I said.

“Mike, are we going fishing again soon?” he asked eagerly.

“Maybe, but it seems I’ve run afoul of a high ranking Egyptian official’s son in Cairo. The local police and at least one judge appear to be in his pocket. I was wondering if you could send someone with authority to hear an assault case to help sort out the problem.” I explained what happened and he said he’d be here in a little while with a judge.

I suggested that they let me send a ship for them. There were two hostile ships in the area and I could guarantee his safety in one of my ships because nobody had anything that could hurt them, not the Russians, not the pirates, and not even the UN. He was intrigued and asked if he could bring a third person. Naturally, I asked whom he had in mind. He wanted to bring the head of the UN navy, Fleet Admiral Zhao. I agreed, and called Stan. I wanted a ten-passenger shuttle in the air immediately to the UN building. When I told him who was being picked up, Stan said he should go, too, since he knew Zhao.