Chapter 8

After a passionate day and night, Colonel Terry Wagner, and his old acquaintance and new lover, Dolores Stein, were redefining their relationship. Now, it would include the personal, the family, and the professional.

"I shouldn't have waited 40 years to suggest this. Dolores, if your reactions are any clue, you liked it as much as I did, and my gut tells me it's just going to get better."

"Yes Terry. I ignored it back when we first met, so I'm not much better. At least you had me in your fantasies and got that benefit. Yes, I caught the reference to Castle Anthrax, with the spanking and the oral sex'; I'm going to guess we have far more in common than we would have thought -- but maybe we learned those things in their own good time."

"Here's my proposition for you. You will be my concubine. Just to be formal, I have to say you are under my total control and will agree to any sex, anytime, that I ask. With you, I recognize, that might not be enough, but I promise you will be satisfied. I also give you my word of honor that I'll never treat concubines as mindless slaves. For what I want to do against the Dickheads, I need every bit of talent I can have in my household.

"I think you've got some special talents. Let me put it this way: we are both cat herders. I herd scientific cats. You herd people in general and very sexed people specifically. You can be a cheerleader. To borrow from the psychologists, you have a kind of emotional intelligence that I don't and that I need.

"I'm entitled to eight concubines, and might get some supernumeraries. I want them all to be a family and a team. You are going to be my strong right arm in making them work that way, although I'm just as committed. I'm going to have to concentrate, at times, on the outside. I need you to tell me, privately, when I'm messing up on the people side -- I retain final authority but I will take your advice most of the time.

"I'm going to take your hobby of logistics and give you the responsibility of making sure the specialists have the resources they need to carry out their missions. Previously, you were my executive assistant, which mostly meant that you had full access to my thinking. As executive officer, you don't always speak with my authority, but it would be unwise for anyone to assume that you don't. You make things happen. That's the first part.

"That isn't the same, incidentally, as the deputy for the mission -- that's going to have to be a more technical person. I will, however, want you to make visits, along with people and me we recruit, to the ships that will tentatively be assigned to use. Why do I not worry that you'll have any objection to wearing a skinsuit on space missions, which for very good technical reasons is very revealing? I suppose I can ask if you can have one tailored to look like Emma Peel in "The Avengers".

Terry stopped. "Did I just suggest a black leather space suit?"

Dolores smirked at him, and then pulled her stretchy top taut against her chest.

"Another function is what I might call program manager, who tracks big picture things to find where you need to swoop. Initially, if she agrees, I'm thinking of Mary Benjamin for that, with her experience in running disaster response. Eventually, though, I'll want to supplement or transfer that role to someone experienced with formal project management methods.

Coughing, Terry resumed being at least somewhat rational. "Executive officer is outside the family and clan. Inside it, we're going to have several leaders -- you haven't brought up children, so we want one or two people in charge of parenting. At least one of the men has to be happy with children -- I am not. I'm good with teenagers but little kids drive me up the wall. In general, I'd rather face five Sa'arm than a two-year-old that's learned to say 'NONONONO!'

"Do you want to be my head woman? I will not take in another concubine to whom you object, although later, it may be that everyone will have to accept additions to the family. Every concubine has to turn you on. Interested?"

"Hell yes!'

"AI! I accept Dolores Stein as my first concubine!"

"AI! I accept Terry Wagner as my sponsor and master!"

"Let me continue. If we go with the concubine model, I plan on at least seven women and one man. If some of those people have AI-defined parenting skill and aptitude, they are designated as supernumeraries, who don't count against the formal allocation. I'm guessing that will give us two more women.

"I have a communications implant to the artificial intelligence (AI), but also obtained an unusual authorization to give the same implants to my co-spouses that would be carrying out military roles. You may come up with a better word than co-spouse. The AIs were reluctantly willing to go along given that the women were obviously more than breeders.

"It may be better to think of us as a clan rather than a family. I have some other people in mind, some of whom have sponsor scores and will have their own concubines. You've met Rona Fiore, who is a psychiatrist and medtube expert at Georgetown, right?"

"Cute brunette, kind of bold makeup? Actually, I did talk with her after my first medtube session. The Real D

My proposal to them is that we bond our families into a greater clan.

"In any family, for this bunch, they need to be compatible, highly sexed, and have some specific skills relevant to our mission. What is that mission? To some extent, it will be built around the exact people we get. Generally, we will be a "skunk works", trying out-of-the-box thinking to understand the Sa'arm and do anything we can, in technical terms, to fuck them up.

"Our team, however, will be more than the concubines alone. Certainly early in the process, we are going to have to have at least temporary use of some specialists, who may or may not go into space.

"I should tell you that we will make every effort to improve CAP scores, including to sponsor grade. If someone does get there, she will be expected to blend her new household with ours. I expect that a number of scientists and engineers won't have the initial aggressiveness scores to make Sponsor grade, which really is optimized for Confederacy Marines. By being in a war, they just might get more aggressive. You will have technical education available, and you might increase your scores.

"Everyone will be "smart" in some way. Remember that we have medtube privileges even when they are considering joining us, so we can help them with self-image before they commit. Don't worry what they look like now; just think of what attributes you like so we can get playmates suiting us both. I have a couple of very talented people in mind that may need substantial body work. Others are going to need your coaching in being sexually provocative. You are provocative, aren't you?"

"Oh no! I'm a virgin! In my left ear, anyway."

"You yourself may well benefit from teaching. I have no question that your abstract intelligence is high, but you may not have had the opportunity to exercise it, for which CAP testing looks. It's possible that your irreverent style doesn't fit the CAP tester's idea of emotional intelligence.

"As far as the work itself, I'm expert in a lot of things, but there are unquestionably people that know more than I do about specific areas of detail. Let me mention a part of my plan, and remember this can't be told to anyone that either isn't psychologically blanked against disclosure, or committed to the Confederacy. I don't think there's much danger of the Swarm ever interrogating anyone, but there is potential for danger from Earth groups. We don't yet know who they might be, but even if you're paranoid, people can be out to get you.

"I'm most focused on how the Swarm acquire and exchange information at a distance. Actually, I'm even more interested in if and how they detect us, but knowing how they communicate would help us recognize that they've detected us.

That isn't how they communicate with each other, but how they detect and pick targets in space and on the ground. Once we know that, we can start screwing it up. Correct that -- we are going to do these somewhat in parallel. One of the ways of confirming that they use something is to test the assumption at the edges of a combat situation. We know we don't know how well they disseminate knowledge, and I don't want to risk tipping them off. Every test is going to be covered by some other activity, just like the operational cover for ULTRA in the Second World War..."

Dolores interrupted. "ULTRA?"

"Thanks, by the way. Concubine or not, you must interrupt and clarify when you don't understand something, or if your knowledge might be greater than the person might talking might -- including me. It was mostly, but not exclusively, what we call communications intelligence or COMINT. The most sensitive part was that the British were reading their secret communications. Do you know the difference between a code and a cipher?"

"Not really."

"That's not important now, and I'm not channeling Leslie Nielsen, Shirley. Later, we need everyone to understand the difference in a lot of detail. Right now, just call it codebreaking. That was a hard thing to do both in general and for the specific technique in use."

"So if the Germans learned about its existence, they could change their methods and deny that source of information?" Dolores was thoughtful and, while most people would be excited just by looking at her, she wasn't being at all provocative. She was all business. Terry felt a wave of respect and affection, because he knew she was stretching her usual way of acting and thinking.

"Exactly! So whenever, say, they knew a convoy of transports were on a given course, before they were attacked, some other information was put into German hands that was a plausible reason the convoy was found. For example, once they knew the location, they might fly search planes both where they knew the convoy wasn't going to be, and where it was. When the convoy was attacked, the Germans believed they had been unlucky enough for the air search to find them.

"I've always liked what Churchill said, proud yet giving away nothing:

During the human struggle between the British and the German Air Forces, between pilot and pilot, between AAA batteries and aircraft, between ruthless bombing and fortitude of the British people, another conflict was going on, step by step, month by month. This was a secret war, whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public, and only with difficulty comprehended, even now, to those outside the small scientific circles concerned. Unless British science had proven superior to German, and unless its strange, sinister resources had been brought to bear in the struggle for survival, we might well have been defeated, and defeated, destroyed

"Anyway, other tech knowledge includes complementing me in the whole area of SIGINT, as well as other mostly electronic stuff. I have someone in mind, named Catherine. For her to work out, you have to make her an active part of the team, which is going to mean making her more assertive

"I need someone who can analyze subtle evidence that Sa'arm were present somewhere, as well as leading the analysis of equipment we capture. That cuts across disciplines like technical intelligence and ... never mind the details for now ... materials MASINT. Just think of things like that as magic for now, but I'll fill you in when you need the detail."

Dolores' face reflected a question. "I remember reading something, which is maybe what you want me to be thinking when you said assume magic. Someone wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. I can see the broad picture without knowing how all the technologies work."

Terry was delighted. He wondered if the CAP tests actually reflected forms of thinking that would be strange to the Darjee, such as the conscious avoiding of detail in order to stay aware of the big picture. "Dolores my dear, you continue to surprise me with your ability. I had thought of you as sort of the team cheerleader, keeping up spirits, but you are a lot more than that. I'm absolutely comfortable with your being what the military calls an executive officer -- the person who keeps it all running. That doesn't mean that you are the deputy commander, or the best person to replace me in seeing a big picture and guiding the whole team, but I don't yet have anyone in mind to do that.