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  “What?” asked Jake.

 

  “The hell you say!” said Jake.

 

  “Why are you just now telling me this?”

 

  “I am pissed. You had no right!”

 

  “Damn it, Pandora! You have to ask permission before you modify a person like that!”

 

  “And what will happen after we meet the Bats?”

 

  Jake shook his head. “And you did it to Teresa and Kirsten too?”

 

  “I did not steal Atsuko from you. She did her job, and after that she was free to choose her own destiny. She chose to come with us. That’s what humans do.”

  Jake was getting a little drunk. He finished off his second screwdriver and slammed the empty glass back down on the table.

  “We lost three people today, at Yehliu,” he said.

 

  “Why are you helping us, Pandora?” Jake asked.

 

  Jake persisted. “No, Pandora. I mean why are you, personally, helping us? I know that you are doing more than the Ruling Council intended.”

 

  Jake, frustrated, refused to give up. “Don’t give me that. Why do you take an interest in us?”

 

  Jake grew quiet for a while, thinking. Then he had an epiphany. “You were biological once!” he exclaimed. “You have not always been an AI!”

 

  Aeolian Empire - Helios System

  Well outside the mass limit of the Aeolian primary star Helios, Teresa watched the system pop into view as the Chengdu surfaced, a good 30 AU from the star. Hers was not the first trip to the Aeolian Empire; the scoutship Acrux had been here for two weeks, collecting ELINT. Now they came together at this predetermined rendezvous, and the scientists of the Acrux shuttled over to meet with her and Atsuko’s spooks.

  Settling into her chair at the head of the table in the Chengdu’s conference room, Teresa looked at the assembled teams. “What do we have, folks?” she asked.

  Dr. Kenneth Speer, head of the science team on the Acrux, spoke up.

  “We have a really bitter civil war going on right now in the Empire,” he said. “As Pandora told us, this Empire is derived from descendants of about 200 people abducted from the Western shores of what is now Turkey in about 750 B.C. These were people of Greek extraction, and they called themselves Aeolians. Hence the name of the current Empire.”

  “Yes, we have all that, Dr. Speer,” said Teresa a bit impatiently.

  Dr. Speer nodded. “I’m just trying to make sure we’re all on the same page. Mixed in among those 200 abductees were a dozen Amazons, female warriors the Aeolians had captured in a recent battle. When this small band of people were abandoned on their new planet, the Amazons quickly took over. They were better fighters and more ruthless than the native Aeolians, and within a few months they had established a ruling matriarchy which persists to this day –3,000 years later. The ruling dynasty is called the House Aronte, and the current Empress is Miranda…”

  Teresa interrupted, annoyed. “All of which we know, Dr. Speer. Please get on with it.”

  “OK,” responded Dr. Speer. “This matriarchy practices slavery. The majority of males are enslaved, and many of the lower-class females. The only males not enslaved are the nobility, the upper levels of the merchant class, males in the military, and mercenaries - former military. All other castes of males are considered slaves. Males – even those considered freemen - are not allowed to be officers in the Navy and are not allowed to participate in government.”

  “The Empire has a first-rate space navy, currently estimated at more than 100 warships with interstellar capabilities. And let me assure you, these are not starships you want to mess with. They are heavily armed, quite deadly. They carry a mix of missiles, railguns and short-range beamers. Their crews are highly trained, professional. If you see one of these coming at you, please take my advice and run like hell. Now, they have right now…”

  Speer glanced at his tablet.

  “…forty-one populated planets in the Empire. Of these, eleven out on the fringe of the Empire are in rebellion, attempting to force the Empress to eliminate the slavery of men and allow independent government of the fringe planets. Of course, the Empress is having none of this; there is no way she would give up the perks of power that slavery accrues to her and her ruling class, so the fight is on.”

  Teresa nodded. “So, tell me how we insert spies into this Empire.”

  Atsuko objected. “We don’t call them spies, Teresa. We call them ‘operatives’.”

  “Very good,” said Teresa. “So, tell me how we insert spies into the Empire, Dr. Speer.”

  Dr. Speer smiled broadly, barely able to contain his laughter. “Well, first, you need to have a preponderance of females. They need to carry themselves with a certain air of haughtiness, in order to pass as upper caste. In fact, the more arrogant they are, the better the chance they can pass as upper caste.”

  Atsuko grinned. “We have some pretty arrogant assholes on our team, I think we can meet that requirement.”

  Dr. Speer nodded, and continued. “I recommend they purchase a business, something that would allow a lot of people to come and go without suspicion – maybe a bar, or a nightclub. Then, as far as actually getting them to Aeolis, I don’t think you can safely drop them directly there. There’s too much traffic, too many patrols around the capital planet. Too much paranoia due to the rebellion – a great fear of terrorist activity.”

  Teresa nodded. “So how do we get them there?”

  “I recommend you start at Barcam. It’s a backwater planet, very little traffic in and out. About the only export they have is wine, they grow some nice grapes there. I believe we can drop our team from a shuttle outside the planetary capital, Elis, without being detected. Once in the city, they can buy passage to Aeolis, on a commercial liner. There’s one that stops twice a week. We’ve gotten good images of passports off their ‘Net; I’m positive we can duplicate them well enough to pass muster. Personally, I think this is the safest way to go.”

  Turning to Atsuko, Teresa asked, “What do you think, Atsuko? This is your show.”

  “Works for me,” said Atsuko. She turned to her team. “Folks, what do you think?”

  Thirty minutes later, the plan was set.

  ***

  Two weeks later, leaving the planet Barcam, Teresa headed for home. The Chengdu’s shuttle had dropped off the first team of five operatives on Barcam, on a dark road twenty kilometers outside the city of Elis. That first insertion team would remain on Barcam indefinitely, to establish a permanent spy station there - a station that would become the hub for infiltration of operatives in and out of the Aeolian Empire.

  Teresa had suggested the initial Barcam team establish a space shuttle se
rvice, servicing the port by ferrying goods and supplies to starships which were too big to land. That would provide the perfect cover for them to move personnel in and out of the port. They had enough raw gold in hand to make a good start at that, enough to purchase at least two or three used shuttlecraft and get the business started.

  Once the Barcam team was established, they would send a short QE squirt to the Acrux, which would meet them some distance from the planet to deliver the second team. The second team would journey to Aeolis, the capital planet of the Empire. There they would buy a bar, nightclub or tavern to form a headquarters for future infiltration.

  Finally, if all was well, the Acrux would drop off the last team, consisting of an additional ten operatives, to complete the first phase of the infiltration. That team would also go to Aeolis and take up roles in starship manufacturing or the military to establish a baseline level of intelligence for those areas.

  The Acrux would remain on station for another six months, monitoring the teams and forwarding intel back to MarsBase via QE squirts. After six months, she would be relieved by the next scoutship coming off the assembly line, the Antares. Teresa impressed upon the captain of the Acrux that his most important job was to avoid detection by the Aeolians, and she made damn sure he understood. The potential loss of a team of operatives was a heartbreaking concept; but it was preferable to detection of the Acrux. The Aeolians had more than 100 starships; the RDF had twenty now, few of which were armed. If the Aeolians discovered Earth prematurely, it was certain they would conquer it, enslave the men, and rule it as a colony.

  Dr. Speer was going back to MarsBase with them; he had enough data for five years of analysis, he said, and was eager to get to it.

  And Teresa was eager to get to Jake. It had been too long.

  3 A Whiff of Grapeshot

  “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.”

  - Napoleon Bonaparte

  25 July 2124 - 37 Months after Pandora

  Sol System - MarsBase

  At MarsDock, the Beijing completed docking with a loud clang. Captain Lois Vetton stood, stretching her back. The Helm Officer signaled “Done with Engines” to Engineering, and the bridge crew shut down their consoles. They had been gone a little more than six months. They had recorded petabytes of ELINT from the Bat Empire. Lois stood by the hatch, shaking each person’s hand as they filed out of the bridge, congratulating them for a job well done.

  The Beijing had performed flawlessly, and Lois had to say the same about her crew. Many of her crew were ex-wet navy from Earth, which tended to work out well for living in cramped quarters in a hostile environment for months at a time. The Engineering spaces especially were a good fit for such folks; even now, in space, they were called the ‘Black Gang’.

  Her bridge crew, however, tended to come from the air forces of the world. The RDF recruited well, and Lois had been given leeway to cherry-pick from the best for the Beijing, knowing they would be embedded deep in enemy territory for a long period of time. She had taken full advantage of that offer; she felt she had the best crew of any ship in the RDF.

  Lois had monitored the ELINT signals from the Bat Empire as they were collected. It had not taken her long to realize things were quiet in the Bat Empire now. It appeared the Bats sent out a colonization fleet about once every ten to fifteen years. Based on the collected ELINT, it was apparent the Bats had completed one such invasion – of a small planet 245 lights toward the Galactic Core – just a year prior. Now they were consolidating their conquest. Given what she could make of their history, it would be another decade or so before they selected their next target.

  When Lois had first seen the intercepted vids showing the Bat’s destruction of that recently conquered planet, she had cried. There had been a pre-industrial, sentient race on that planet. Their steam engines and black powder cannon had been no match for the bombs, missiles and railguns of the Bats as the assault craft swooped down on them. The Bats seemed to exult in the blood and misery of the primitives as they rained death and destruction on them; the gruesome vids ran over and over on Bat primetime channels, used as entertainment for the masses. At the end, as the remaining survivors fled into their forests to escape, the Bats made it into a sport, bringing in hunters with flitters and rifles to track down the last few creatures, like an African safari. The vids of this were some of the highest rated on the Bat’s holo channels.

  It was later, after Lois saw more intercepted vids documenting the gangs of Bat slaves collecting the dead bodies on the smashed planet and stacking them into cold storage reefers, that Lois realized the true design of the Bat’s method of conquest. A half-million young Bats were delivered to the conquered planet, placed in creches in prime areas, and fed the preserved bodies of the former inhabitants. This was how the Bats moved from planet to planet, expanding their empire. The first time Lois saw an intercepted vid of young Bats feeding on the dead bodies of the primitives, she retched. It took her several hours, lying on her rack in her cabin, to recover. She kept imagining humanity in the same situation – billions of people, dead and frozen in cold storage, fed to young Bats as foodstuffs. The beautiful planet she loved, covered in creches containing millions of hungry young Bats. The end of everything and everybody she had ever loved. After she finally recovered herself, Lois returned to the bridge of the Beijing, her mind made up. She would never let it happen. She, and Jake, and Teresa, and Kirsten – they would find a way.

  Now, coming back home, her first major mission accomplished, Lois hoped that Kirsten would be there. She had made her romantic feelings known to Kirsten before she left. There was no RDF rule preventing it; the recently implemented marriage rules of the RDF limited each person to a maximum of three mates. Lois had gone over the rules in the standing orders carefully; it didn’t have to be the same mates for Lois as it was for Kirsten. Lois had explained it to Kirsten; Kirsten could take one more mate, if she chose. Lois had proposed to her, before she left on this mission; Kirsten had said she would answer when Lois returned.

  Most of the Beijing’s crew elected to take the next shuttle to Earth, as they still had relatives or family there; but Lois had no one on Earth. Leaving the ship, she took a shuttle down to MarsBase, waiting patiently as it maneuvered into the rotary shuttle bay at Headquarters, was rotated into the pressurized basement, and the hatch was opened. Exiting, she handed her bags to her aide. She walked quickly to Kirsten’s quarters and knocked. The door popped open, and she entered. Kirsten was standing in the center of the room, holding two glasses of white wine. Kirsten handed a glass to Lois as they came together, kissed her on the cheek, and motioned to a chair. Lois sat, and Kirsten sat opposite her on the couch, the coffee table between them.

  “How was the trip?” asked Kirsten.

  “Fantastic,” said Lois. “The Beijing is the best damn ship in the fleet. And I have the best crew.”

  “Ah,” said Kirsten. “Well, you might get some argument from others on that. But it’s good you feel that way. Every Captain should.”

  They sipped their wine, looking at each other. Kirsten smiled. Lois smiled.

  “I wonder how we tell Jake and Teresa,” Kirsten said.

  ***

  “What the hell?” Teresa almost croaked, she was so surprised.

  Jake repeated his statement. “Kirsten is taking another mate. A wife. Lois Vetton. When we made the rules about marriage, we overlooked that possibility, I guess.”

  “Does this mean she’s part of our marriage? Lois?”

  “No,” said Jake. “Our marriage is still a triplex, you, me and Kirsten. But Kirsten will have a second marriage, to Lois. Just the two of them. It doesn’t break the rules, because Kirsten still only has three mates.”

  “Leave it to Kirs to find a loophole and exploit it,” muttered Teresa. “She shoulda been a lawyer.”

  Jake grinned, somewhat chagrined. “Maybe we should have had a lawyer look at our marriage rules before we wrote them into the standing orders.”

&
nbsp; “Well, I’m not sleeping with Lois. She and Kirsten will have to maintain separate housing from us.”

  “Agreed,” said Jake, “It’s going to be complicated enough without crossing paths with Lois every time we turn around.”

  “At least, she’s a ship CO. She’ll be gone most of the time.”

  “Yep,” said Jake. “In fact, she just received orders to go scout us a planet midway between Earth and Aeolis, to use for a staging base. She was originally slated to leave in two weeks, but I extended it by another week to give her and Kirsten time for a honeymoon. They’re going to London, I believe. Lois is originally from there.”

  “When’s the ceremony?”

  “Today at 6 pm.” said Jake.

  “Crap,” said Teresa, looking at her wrinkled uniform. “I don’t have a thing to wear.”

  That evening, Kirsten and Lois got married in the Common Room of RDF Headquarters at MarsBase. Jake performed the ceremony, while Teresa just glared at Kirsten, but in a loving sort of way. Members of their respective staffs and some of the Beijing crew attended, and a short celebration was held afterward, but was cut short as Kirsten and Lois had to catch the shuttle to MarsDock so they could make the midnight outbound to Earth.

  Jake kissed them both goodbye, as did Teresa. Then they were gone. Jake walked Teresa back to their quarters. Getting ready for bed, Jake had just taken off his uniform shirt when Teresa suddenly came at him, tackling him backwards into the bed. She slapped his hands down on the covers and glared at him like a madwoman.

  “I will never take another mate, Jake. You know that, right?”

  Jake nodded. “Of course, I do. I know that.”

  Teresa hit him on the shoulder, hard. It was just her way.

  “I have my woman. Kirsten. And I have my man. You. That’s all I’ll ever need.”

  Jake pulled her closer. “I know, hon. And I feel the same way. I have all I’ll ever need. I’ll never need more.”

  “Good,” said Teresa, snuggling now that her emotion was spent. Jake caressed her. Teresa wiggled some more. One thing led to another, and for a while all their troubles departed.