Chapter 30: Growing Pains

Allison's hockey career had started just after the Halloween party. Samantha was confronted one morning at breakfast by an uncharacteristically nervous and subdued Vickie. The Liverpudlian was clearly reluctant to ask this favour of her mistress.

"Mistress," she began formally, "you know that Allie wants to be like you?"

"A Civil Service officer?" Samantha guessed. "Pregnant? Bisexual? Horny?" She batted her eyes fetchingly at her senior concubine. "Cute?"

Samantha's guesses didn't make it any easier on Vickie, for both of her young charges had expressed interest in all of the above – except cute, which they both already were in spades. "No, a hockey player," she sighed, not really anxious to have her youngest charging around a rock-hard and slippery ice surface with others who bore large pieces of timber in their hands and wore razor-sharp blades on their feet. "At what age can she start learning?"

"'Tykes' starts at five, although basic skating can start as young as four. AI, do we have Tykes Level hockey classes?" Samantha hadn't paid a great deal of attention to the hockey set-up for the younger kids, as she was still more concerned about the Minor Bantams issue. Many Minor Bantams were now hard-charging two-metre-tall Marines, and had nothing "Minor" about them. Clearly, something had to be done lest the teens start smearing each other into strawberry jam whenever they did a legal, clean body-check into the boards. She herself was considered ineligible to play at the moment due to her pregnancy, and she was not the only girl player from the Tournament Extraction to be so blessed.

"Affirmative, Sub-Decurion Redburn. There is a class at fourteen hundred that has not yet filled up, at the Frank McGee Arena."

"AI, please register Allie for that class."

"Mother Sam, can I be a goalie?" begged Allison. Allison called all the women in the pod "Mother", as in "Mother Vickie" and "Mother Callee".

Samantha flashed a grin at Vickie. "Not quite like me, then." Samantha was a right-winger. "OK, Allie. AI, please replicate one set of goalie gear, Allie's size. Pink, please, she is a girl after all."

Vickie confessed, "I've been told she's been dragging the boys out to play 'road hockey', whatever that is." She looked at Samantha nervously. "That isn't anything bad, is it?"

"You have no clue?"

Vickie shook her head. She wasn't from a part of the world where hockey was part of growing up. She'd barely heard of the sport before becoming a Fille de Roi. "It isn't like this 'tonsil hockey' you've talked about, is it?"

Samantha snickered. "Not by a long shot. It's literally hockey played on the road, with a tennis ball, standard hockey sticks and something for a net. A real net if you've got one, they make road-hockey nets, but a couple of rocks or old tin cans will do in a pinch."

As Vickie said "Oh" as if she understood, Samantha saw she'd have to show the woman. "Come."

"I'm naked," Vickie protested.

"Yeah," Samantha agreed leeringly, then shook her head. "I mean, why yes you are, now that you mention it. So what? Come."

Moments later, a still-nude Vickie was watching her first game of road hockey. Samantha had used her communications implant to get the sponsors of several kids in the eight to ten year old age range to send their sprites out for a sudden, unplanned pickup game. Allison was delightedly between the pipes at one end of the makeshift playing area, determined to keep the puck – or rather, tennis ball – out of the net. Sergeant-Major Blondell's male concubine Greg held down the other end of the short stretch of road.

"I think she's got some talent there," Samantha observed to Vickie's dismay as the ratty old tennis ball made yet another beeline for the curb, deflected from the net by an eager Allison. Samantha had dressed Allison in an oversize T-shirt that bore the legend, "I'm not the girlfriend, I'm the goalie – and I'm going to shut you down!" So far, the youngster had lived up to the boast. "I can't wait for this afternoon's session."

"I can," Vickie reassured her sponsor, chewing nervously on her lower lip.

Five-year-old Allison stood bravely, covered in thick leg and chest padding and a pink and white hockey jersey. The goalie mask had the head of a growling pink wolf cub painted on it. She tried to look fierce. She managed to look cute.

She felt bewildered. The practise coaches were shooting pucks at her diminutive form as gently as they could, but the speed was still faster than she could handle. And as she had not had much experience skating, with neither her late mother nor her Aunt Vickie being skaters themselves, the little girl was using the goalie stick more as a prop to stay vertical than as a means of keeping the puck out of the net.

One puck gently nudged her stick's massive blade and rebounded, most of its energy absorbed in subtly but fatally changing the angle of the piece of hardwood that Allison desperately grasped in her right hand. She leaned forward a tad to examine the phenomenon of a black frozen disc of rubber slowly spinning in front of her.

"Dependant Allison Redburn has lost lateral stability," reported the calm voice of the AI.

Vickie stood up beside Samantha, who rapidly followed suit. Anxiously, the Liverpudlian vet grasped hold of Samantha's arm, squeezing as she watched her niece's remorseless loss of balance.

Glove hand windmilling in a vain effort to prevent the inevitable, the thickly padded youngster fell over into a perfect faceplant like a conifer felled by a woodsman's axe. The puck was smothered under her chest protector as if she'd planned it. Two Marines seated in the stands near Vickie and Samantha snickered at the sight.

"Dependant Allison Redburn has fallen over," the AI updated unemotionally.

"ALLIE!" yelled Vickie, distraught.

"Dependant Allison Redburn is undamaged," assured the AI, still as calm as if announcing the next selection of classical music. Samantha bit her fist to keep from laughing outright at the sight of the now utterly immobile young goalie-in-training, as the two practise coaches rushed over to help Allison back to her feet.

"Help up, please?" asked the polite little girl unflappably.

Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy:

"It's a similar plan to that which gave Thule its first Marine draft, except about ten times the size" the Scottish-accented Marine major advised. "We should be able to top the colony off at one go."

Miles Chandler nodded and signed off on the document. Operation Bawdy Check would be the largest single extraction plan that the Office of Targeted Extractions had performed. It would also be the riskiest set of extractions, if word leaked out. Well, that would help the Marines train to fight the Sa'arm. The Earth First hazards were nothing for him to worry about.

The next morning saw Samantha standing before the Board of Inquiry once again, wearing her full-dress greys and holding her pace stick under her left arm. The queries this time were less about how she handled Sa'arm and more about how she handled sponsors – and their concubines and dependants.

They'd spent the last two hours grilling the girl. This, she reflected as they dissected yet another incident from her recent past, must be how a primate in a zoo feels, constantly under scrutiny.

"Now, Sub-Decurion, relax for a moment," instructed the Dux.

"Sir, yes Sir," Samantha replied, not relaxing one whit.