Part 3 - Month 75 - Building a Family

"I will protect you from all around you" - Phil Collins

That night when I got back to our quarters, Hannah greeted me at the hatch, completely naked and smelling, well, ready. Okay, this is good, but she generally only does that when she's in trouble and wants to get out of it, or when she wants a favor. And, I don't think she's in trouble.

"Hi, honey, you're looking good today!"

She gave me a really good full-contact hug and kissed my neck. "I've talked it over with the girls. We need an Affirmation Ceremony so that Monique knows she is home and safe. Then I want her to spend the night in bed with you and each of us in turn. She will watch while you do everything you want with the three of us. The fourth night will be her turn, and by then she'll know you won't be cruel to her."

"I dunno about that. I had to talk with Tina today about her job, and somehow we ended up talking about that first time we had anal sex and Hector asked about her tattoo. Didn't that count as cruel?"

"I remember that! And, I remember why you did it, so I don't have a problem with it. I also remember you deciding that you shouldn't play favorites, and making the rest of us do anal sex, too. That I had a problem with."

"Well, I'm supposed to be getting Monique pregnant, and anal sex isn't going to help there, so hopefully we won't have to go through that again. Sure, if you think it will help we can do your ceremony. It's not like I don't enjoy it! Have you told the other girls yet?"

"No, I have to talk you into it first."

"Absolutely right, and that's why you greeted me this way. Your nefarious plan is approved, but I want her to hear from me that it's approved. I'm supposed to be the one that's in charge, here."

"Yes, of course, Master! And, I guess that as long as you are already thinking about it we may as well do it right." She said that last with an ugly face like maybe she had found half of a cockroach in her salad.

Whatever you say, honey. So, we let go of each other and she led me into the family room where LaRhonda, Joannie, and Monique all stood, stark naked, waiting for us. I like this place.

I walked up to LaRhonda, hugged and kissed her, and said "I love you". She smiled and said "I know", and kissed me back. Then I did the same thing to Joannie, and she gave the same response. Last I stepped over in front of Monique, took her hands, and looked her in her eyes.

"There are two ways of looking at this family that you have just joined. One is..." and I changed my voice to be as deep as I could "...I am your owner. You will obey me." Then I changed my voice back to normal, pointed my thumb over my shoulder at Hannah, and said "The other way is that Hannah was my wife before we got picked up, and I still do whatever she tells me to do, just like I did back on Earth."

"Right now, she wants to do something she calls the Affirmation Ceremony. She got it from another concubine when we were first picked up and having trouble with the change in our relationship. I think that they got it from a porno movie, but it fits our situation, and she tried it. It seemed to help her, and whenever we start to lose our way here she makes us all do it again. Please remember that this was her idea. I'm just the guy who benefits."

Then I turned back to Hannah. "Okay, honey, it's your show."

Hannah had been so happy with this Affirmation Ceremony that she pushed it on other concubines who were having trouble. When I started climbing the ranks, I had a lot of recent pickups working for me, and many of them had the same home-life problems that we had gone through. It was just easier for me to tell them "Send your head girl to see Hannah, with orders to do WHATEVER THE FUCK SHE SAYS TO DO." Some did, some didn't, but it worked for a lot of the ones who tried it, and they in turn passed it on. There are a lot of us out here who have seen this, and I'll certainly swear by it. Hannah and I can't claim to have started it, but I'm probably the most senior of the men who benefited from it.

Hannah pulled me over to my easy chair -we're not sposta call it a La-Z-Boy because that's a brand name and their factory never saw this one or even got paid for it- and pushed me down in it, then pushed the lever to make it go back. Yeah, I know, but ever since I got my first command -it floated on water- I've had a manual easy chair in my quarters. I can adjust it myself; I don't need no stinking AI to adjust my own damn chair.

Then, when I was laying back, she climbed on top of me. Remember, she was nude but I was still in my shipboard uniform coveralls. I did have an erection, of course, and it was pretty obvious. Those coveralls may be rated for space, but they aren't armored. I had a tent you could hold a church service under.

Hannah rubbed her crotch on mine for a few seconds -if I had been nude it would have put me inside her- while I fondled her, then stopped and held her head above mine, her glorious hair covering both of our faces. She spoke clearly and loud enough for the other three to hear her.

"When you married me, you promised to love and protect me, and I promised to love and obey you. You always kept your promises. I always loved you, but I didn't always obey you. Then, when you volunteered to serve the Confederacy and asked me to go with you, I stopped being your wife and became your concubine, your property. You own me; I belong to you. My body is yours to use in any way you wish."

"You didn't change. You still love and protect me. I lost my ability to disobey you. I lost the requirement to love you. I gained the requirements to serve and please you, and to give you as many children as I can. I choose to continue loving you, and I will always serve and please you, and give you children as long as you want me to."

"Tonight, I am going to please you with my mouth, to demonstrate that I will serve and pleasure you whether you give me pleasure or not, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. After that, I am going to please you with my ass, to demonstrate that I will pleasure you even when you give me pain, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. Last, I am going to please you with my pussy, to give you an opportunity to pleasure me, if you wish, while I pleasure you, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. You aren't supposed to get me pregnant again until I've had six months off." Then she kissed me and got up.

LaRhonda was next. She climbed on board and rubbed herself on my crotch, then started on her own version. Her hair doesn't hang down, though.

"When you volunteered to serve the Confederacy and asked me to go with you, I became your concubine, your property. You own me; I belong to you. My body is yours to use in any way you wish. I promised to serve and please you, and to give you as many children as I can. There is no requirement to love you. I choose to love you, and I will serve and please you and give you children as long as you want me to."

"Tonight is Hannah's night. Tomorrow night, I am going to please you with my mouth, to demonstrate that I will serve and pleasure you whether you give me pleasure or not, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. After that, I am going to please you with my ass, to demonstrate that I will pleasure you even when you give me pain, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. Last, I am going to please you with my pussy, to give you an opportunity to pleasure me, if you wish, while I pleasure you, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. You aren't supposed to get me pregnant again until I've had six months off, either." Then she kissed me and got up, too.

Then it was Joannie's turn to try to rub herself off on my coveralls. Irreverent as always, Joannie won't ever get Hannah's speech right no matter what Hannah threatens her with. Her hair also isn't long enough to cover our faces; she likes looking like a sex-addict pixie.

"If you're still alive after all that, I get to try to kill you with sex. I am yours, and I always will be. Whatever you want me to do I will do. Whatever you want me to be I will be. You are the only man I have ever wanted to belong to. Unless you give me different orders, when you come home that third night I will be kneeling in front of the hatch, naked. I am not going to suck your dick in public. I am going to stay still with my mouth open while you fuck my throat as hard as you want in front of whoever wants to watch. You aren't getting in our home until you cum in my mouth, but if you also want to spray my face and tits for the audience that's fine, whatever you want to do with me. I'm your personal slut, and I take your cock whenever, wherever, and however you want me to take it."

"After dinner, you are going to waste a whole bunch of your baby-makers in my ass, and I'm going to enjoy that just as much as you are because you told the medics to make me enjoy anal sex. Then, when we go to bed, you are going to get me pregnant. The AIs say they can make sure I am fertile and will conceive that night as long as you do your part of the job, so don't fuck that up. And when my tits fill with milk you are going to play with them every day and nurse until they are empty until the baby is weaned and they dry up again." I don't think it's possible to get harder.

Joannie also gave me a quick kiss, but instead of climbing off she scooted down until she could also give the tent over my crotch a long wet kiss, too.

After Joannie was out of the way, Hannah led Monique over and helped her climb on top of me, with both legs outside of mine so that her crotch was open, then pushed her down until we would have been joined if I wasn't STILL wearing my coveralls, dammit, and told her to rub on me for a bit. She was shaking, but she did as she was told, and I started to get to know her body while she did it. When Hannah got tired of that, she pushed Monique over until her long black hair was covering our faces, and Hannah did the "Repeat after me" thing with her:

"My name was Monique Delacroix. It is now Monique Williams. When I was homeless you gave me a home. When I was going to be killed you saved my life. When I had medical problems you ordered them corrected. When you accepted me I became your concubine, your property. You own me; I belong to you. My body is yours to use in any way that gives you pleasure. I hereby promise to serve and please you, and to give you as many children as I can."

"Tonight and the next two nights your first three concubines will show me how to please you. The fourth night I will show you what I have learned. I will please you with my mouth, to demonstrate that I will serve and pleasure you whether you give me pleasure or not, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. After that, I will please you with my ass, to demonstrate that I will pleasure you even when you give me pain, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. Last, I will please you with my pussy, to give you an opportunity to pleasure me, if you wish, while I pleasure you, because it is my purpose to serve and please you. I will get pregnant when you want me to get pregnant." Last, Hannah told her to kiss me, and I pulled her mouth to mine.

When we were done Hannah tried to pull her off me, but she had stopped shaking so I held her in place after she had sat up again. "I used to have four concubines. Do you know what happened to the one I lost?"

"No sir, except that the Civil Service officer who brought me here said that she used to be one of your concubines. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes. When I was picked up four years ago, I took my wife and three young women with me. They all are welcome to stay with me as long as they want. Understand that the Confederacy doesn't much trust us humans. Some of us are apparently okay, but the only way we can get most of us off Earth is as slaves. It's part of the deal. You promise to obey someone who can go, and you become their slave. We call you concubines because that sounds better, but I prefer to speak truth."

"Understand that slavery is a necessary evil here, not a good thing to be celebrated. Throughout most of the Diaspora, and certainly in my home and in every home I have authority over, all slaves will be re-tested at least once a year to see if they meet the requirements to become free. If that happens, you will no longer belong to me. You will not be allowed to return to Earth, but you can go anywhere in the Diaspora and take any job you are suited for."

"The only exceptions are the edge cases you see anywhere humans are, because we're an ornery sort and cannot ever follow the rules. For instance, in our case Hannah refuses to take the test."

Hannah interrupted me: "If I passed it, they would send me somewhere else. I'm not Tom's wife any more, I'm his concubine. I'm sleeping with Tom, and that's that."

"Joannie and LaRhonda keep getting closer..." a little white lie, neither was going to pass the CAP test until pigs grew wings "... and two weeks ago my fourth concubine passed hers. She is no longer my little Cuban slut Tina, she is Signifer Tina Hernandez, a junior officer in the Civil Service. I told her I was having trouble sleeping without her and asked her to find me a replacement. You're it. For our part, we will give you the best home we can. For your part, please try to get along with all of us, plus the children. We aren't always right, but it's a safe assumption that if Hannah says something I will back her up. If she's wrong that's between me and her."

"Anyway, you are a beautiful woman and any man would be happy to find you in his bed. I certainly will be. We'll go slow until you feel comfortable, but you will have an active sex life here, you will have children, and you will obey any order I or Hannah give you. If it's possible for you to find safety and happiness in there somewhere, we will do our best to help you get there."

I stopped fondling her ass and slapped it gently. "Okay, enough background and serious stuff. It's time for dinner." I helped her get up, then turned to Hannah (who was still standing beside us) and roared "WOMAN, FEED ME!"

She bobbed her head a couple of times and hunched over. "Yes, Master, yes. Feed Master, yes." in her best Marty Feldman in "Young Doctor Frankenstein" imitation. We both loved that movie.

Most of that night was great, but the anal sex was just as gross as it always is. I wouldn't have insisted on it, but Hannah set it up and it was going to happen so I dealt with it. I made her do the cleanup afterwards, though. Yuck.

Regular sex with Hannah, putting it where God told us to put it, on the other hand, is always wonderful. Do you know what a Kegel exercise is? I don't either, not really. It always looks to me like Hannah is just playing with a dildo. I like to watch, though, and I like the results a lot. When we got picked up and she found out that after two children her pussy wasn't as good as some others I could name, she found out about these exercises and had the AIs tell her when she was doing it right.

It's not just having the muscles, the med tubes could give her that; it's the control, how to use the muscles, that needs those exercises. I noticed the change within weeks. I want some of that, and I want it every night. And, when I found out why her snatch had become so good, I made her teach the other girls how to do it, too. And had the AIs monitor their exercises so they couldn't cheat.

How did I put it to Jimmy M'beku that one time after he asked how Hannah was so tight only two weeks after dropping a baby? "This fool ain't fucking no loose bitches, dawg"! He just laughed. He can do "poor white trash" a lot better than I can do "pimp hood nigga". It didn't stop him from sending Linda to Hannah for lessons on "how to tighten up that cunt, ho", though.

I spent a lot of time with manning lists and spreadsheets. How many people we needed to call a ship "fully manned", and how many it really needed to fight at full efficiency. All of our ships were overmanned, from the Patricians all the way up to Harpy and Kestrel. Much of that was redundancy; any job that needed doing had three bodies to cover it around the clock, plus an extra in case someone got sick / injured / wounded / killed.

However, we also had a lot of unnecessary bodies, people doing jobs for no better reason than because we had people doing those jobs on Earth's wet-navy ships before the Confederacy showed up. Remembering that the AIs could, and would if asked, do just about everything needed to run the ship was difficult. I liked to keep our smaller ships in mind to help keep me on track when I thought about this.

The Couriers and the Stagecoaches only had one crewman on board, the 'Captain', and he was only there for two reasons: The AIs needed a Confederacy citizen to make decisions like where to go next, and the ships had weapons that only a citizen could use. If the ship was simply delivering a box of widgets to someplace well-enough known that no crew were required to make the trip, then the voyage wouldn't be done by a ship, it would be done by a message drone or torpedo.

The Couriers were used when real-time decisions might be required during the trip, as in "Take this message to the Admiral commanding the Beerat system. He's on his way there now but he could be anywhere between here and there." In such a case, the ship's navigation console needed to be able to make decisions about where to go next every time the ship came out of hyperspace, based upon the info available at this system.

Those decisions required a Captain. We were pretty sure that this was a political requirement enforced by the Confederacy. After all, the ship's AI made far more complicated decisions every time we asked it to do a readiness check on the port missile launcher. There was no real reason the AI couldn't make its own decisions about what system to go to next, unless it was programmed to require a Confederacy citizen to make some decisions like this.

Anyway, the only significant differences between these one-man ships and our warships were size and weapons, which in turn implied that the warships didn't need all those people either. Since all of our ships were staffed to the official manning levels before we left, just about all of them were grossly overmanned by any reasonable measure, and that meant that when we got where we were going we would have some 'extra' people available to do other things.

LaRhonda was my 'token black'. I was a white boy raised on the outskirts of a white neighborhood in a mostly white suburb of a large city in the old south. The nearest black families when I was a kid were in several sharecropper shacks down in the valley. One of them had a girl a few years younger than me who was absolutely gorgeous, but I never got to know her very well. I never had any real social contact with blacks until I got to college.

My mother had filled my head with shit about blacks, and I took a long time learning how to separate the truth from the prejudice. Niggers stink, that's a good example. Well, actually, Mom, we all do when we've been working hard. Yes, if someone walks up behind you in the gym, you can tell from the aroma whether they are black or white, but to say that blacks stink is to imply that whites don't and that's not true. You can tell the difference, yes, but a black guy's BO isn't any more offensive than a white guy's BO. Unless you are just looking for excuses, of course. In that case, Mom, yes, you're right. Niggers stink.

Between college and the service, I'd lost most of the prejudices I was raised with. There's no meaningful difference between a hardworking honest black guy and the hardworking honest white guy next to him, just like there's not much difference between poor white trash and poor black trash. I still despise dishonesty, but I don't call that a prejudice. That's more of a learned value. And that crosses all ethnic boundaries anyway.

When I got picked up at Little Creek Mall and I got to choose three more companions after Hannah, I asked the first three young ladies with strollers that I came up to, and all three agreed to come with me. The fact that two of them weren't White Anglo-Saxon Protestants didn't even occur to me. I did kinda wonder about their husbands or boyfriends, though, if volunteering to be a stranger's slave was a step up.

LaRhonda had been heavyset when we got picked up. Maybe it was a temporary side-effect of pregnancy, maybe she was working on being a Sumo wrestler, but she had a really big ass and that stoop you often see in black chicks, where they can't stand up straight. Maybe they get taught from birth to bend over and stick their ass out. LaRhonda didn't need help sticking her ass out; that thing was going to stick out no matter what she did. I didn't care, I had been assured that they would all look like supermodels in a week if I wanted.

I didn't want to share a bed with someone who looked like they were starving, though, like Tina. A little bit of padding is good. Personally, I'd rather do Oprah Winfrey than Tyra Banks. Granted, from what I could see on TV they were both insufferable bitches, but just on looks I'd take Oprah. And then gag her for a month or so, until she'd learned to shut the fuck up!

LaRhonda hadn't needed much training to be a concubine. She and Joannie had been long-term hookers. Professional girlfriends, if you want. As is common around Navy ports, they would hook up with guys who needed girls, and in return for being taken care of they took care of their men. When the guys went out to sea and stopped paying their way, they would go get new boyfriends. Eventually, if they were lucky, they'd find a guy who would marry them and they'd be set for life, along with all the rugrats they'd popped out along the way.

I made them a better offer for long-term security than they had, and they took me on as their latest boyfriend. It was purely mercenary -on both sides- at first, but we learned to love each other. I took better care of them than they were used to, and their children were all healthy, happy, and safe.

I also believed in foreplay, so LaRhonda thought I was better in bed, too. Yes, the med tubes improved me, too. I had an inch or so added and made it a little thicker, but a lot of sex is in your mind. I was willing to try to please her in bed, and she liked that.

She already knew how to please men, and I liked that. We were still in the Mall when I told Hannah that LaRhonda was going to teach her how to give head. And, she knew how to squeeze down so that both anal and vaginal sex was good. She made them both fun, too. She wanted me to be happy with her, and I was.

Time with LaRhonda was always good. After I had the med tubes straighten her back, lift her tits some and melt off about half of her ass, she was just about perfect. She and Hannah were the only ones I could really sleep with. After I fattened Tina and Joannie up some they weren't too bad, but with their new padding they complained about being hot and they both tossed too much in their sleep for me to get any good rest. Hannah and LaRhonda both slept when they closed their eyes, and that meant that I could get my rocks off, roll over, spoon behind them, grab a big fat tittie, and sleep soundly as long as I had time for.

Is this a good time to talk about racism in the Diaspora? Throughout the "Western Civilization" part, we have done everything we could to stomp that out. We are all out here to do a job, and what color your skin is makes no difference at all next to whether I can trust you or not. Hell, you can change your skin color if you want. Or, if your sponsor wants, if you're a concubine.

We still have elitism causing trouble -I think we'd all be better off if that Chandler guy in DECO got his ass beat once a week by whoever is handy- and chauvinism is alive and well (would you want your daughter to marry a Marine?), but racism is nothing more than a bad memory that we are forgetting as fast as we can.

I have how many children now? I guess that depends upon how you count Tina's brood. I had adopted Hector when we got picked up, since she was just a concubine, but that was cancelled now, wasn't it? Was Hector my son or not? He was in my mind, so I guess if he thought so too, he was. Count him. With little George, Tina had three more since, so four for her. LaRhonda brought three and had given me another two more since, for five. Joannie brought two, and had two more with me for four. Hannah had given me two children back on Earth, and another three since. That's eighteen, my God. There wouldn't be any more for awhile. Since Hannah and LaRhonda had just dropped, none of them were pregnant.

Of course, they aren't all really mine. Shirley, for example, came compliments of Jimmy M'beku, back on Exeter. A couple of years ago someone in Central Command with no fucking sense at all had convinced the Council that we should regularize the service's ranks. Us ship-commanders who were one step below "Admiral" would no longer have "Captain" as a rank; we would be "Colonels".

Jimmy hadn't taken it any better than I had. So, when he got his formal personnel action letter informing him that he was no longer a "Captain"; he was now a "Colonel", I sent Hannah to him for the night as a consolation prize and she came back pregnant. So, I guess Jimmy could claim Shirley (Joannie suggested that name, since Jimmy would always reply to 'surely <this>' or 'surely <that>' with "Of course <that>, and don't call me Shirley") as his, but no, she's my daughter. I know I have some of my own out there, too.

Anyway, about a third of our kids are mixed race. My and LaRhonda's two, Joannie's Johnny, Tina's Hector and Hannah's little Shirley each had one white and one black parent. None of them seemed to care or even notice, which meant that we were doing something right. Now, the Chinese colonies are continuing their racism, but the rest of the Diaspora left that racism shit on Earth, buried in the dirt next to the dog shit where it belongs.

Some of our passengers were honest-to-God immigrants, people who had been doing various jobs in Sol system until they decided it was time for a new neighborhood, or whatever. Some were sent by their supervisors, some asked to go with us, and some I shanghaied from their previous work places with my "Reassign as needed for the war effort" authority as a system commander, after checking with the CNO to make sure he would back me up.

A few of our passengers were specific requests filled by TEG, like a field anthropologist (that was the label they assigned when I said I wanted someone who went into the jungle to study aborigines, in case we had to deal directly with the Beer) and an industrial process efficiency expert (I told them I wanted someone who had experience adjusting factory output levels, because we probably couldn't afford any mistakes in our industrialization effort). I never did get anyone I could call an "urban planner", though. What I did get were several engineers and a couple middle-managers from Sol's immense industrialization effort.

The vast majority of our passengers, however, were recent pickups who had volunteered for the Navy but did not have any training or enhancements; they were to get that during their transport. Hmmm. Well, training, yes, we can do that, but the Explorers aren't going to be able to do much enhancement for that many people.

I was wrong about that, I was told. The Explorers each had two med tubes, and they were perfectly capable of doing everything needed to start enhancement, as long as the enhance-ee was willing to let the nanites make the changes gradually. Done this way, we only needed the recruit to be in the med tubes for half an hour to get the nanites programmed and injected. They would fix liver problems, add five inches of cock, straighten out scoliosis, whatever, over the next few weeks, and meanwhile we could run everyone else through the tubes, too.

The numbers still didn't look good, though, so we turned one of the apartments in each of our passenger pods into a med station with two tubes. That gave each Explorer a total of fourteen tubes, and that was more than enough to keep ahead of demand, since our passengers trickled in as we built our fleet. It also let us use the Explorers as emergency field hospitals if needed.

Always try to be doing two or three things at once; it makes you two or three times more effective than people who only do one thing at a time. Okay, that didn't come out right. Don't try to do two or three things at once; that leads to none of them getting done right. Try to do one thing that accomplishes two or three goals for you. The Explorers weren't warships and never would be. However, they were free and we were turning them into marginal passenger ferries and acceptable mobile factories and field hospitals as well as the exploration ships they were excellent at and the freighters they were lousy at.

What can I say about Joannie? If we still were on Earth, I would have stayed far, far away from her. That's a crazy person. She was fanatically -maybe 'insanely' is a better word- loyal to her lover, and she expected the same kind of loyalty from him. Men have trouble being that faithful.

I think the psychologists would have said she had 'poor impulse control'. She was the kind of woman who would 'help' her husband practice fidelity with a .38 special. If she ever caught her man with another woman she wouldn't go to the police or a lawyer, she would move to another city with her children and the two lovers would be found in bed together, with holes in important places.

The rules were different out here, though. Joannie knew that going in and accepted that. I promised that I would never abandon her, her children were my children, and she for her part accepted that she had three co-wives. And converted her drive to avoid betrayal and protect her children into a drive to please me, which I guess was the best way to protect her children out here. She did a good job. Dear GOD she was obedient!

And as eager to please as a puppy. She seemed to define her place in the universe by her man's opinion of her. She let the others have their turn, but she never asked about helping out in supply, or the mess, or with my work. Joannie's focus was making sure I stayed happy.

She cried from the pain that first time I tried her ass, but she didn't pull away. After that, I felt guilty and the next time she went to the med tubes I had them give her enough pleasure centers back there that she started asking for it. Okay, maybe I went overboard there because I didn't think of it as a good thing to do, but when we did, she enjoyed it.

Anyway, that was no empty threat Joannie made. She said she was going to do it, I didn't immediately countermand it with an order not to, and when I went 'home' that third evening to the flag quarters on Postman, she was kneeling in front of the hatch, naked in front of several spectators.

Monique was standing beside her, leaning against the bulkhead and holding Joannie's coveralls in case something went wrong, like another Dickhead ship that Exeter had to help stop. She was dressed as a ships-crew concubine, a crew-conk, like she was supposed to be. That would have been Hannah. We were safe in Sol system on Postman, a ship that didn't even have any offensive weapons, but Hannah would have insisted anyway. If you always do it right.....

I didn't doubt that Joannie left her coveralls inside the hatch as proof that she was doing what she said she'd do, and having Monique out there "to watch" while she carried Joannie's coveralls was a good compromise that avoided a catfight. Hopefully they came up with that compromise before the fight. Joannie certainly didn't look all scratched up. I'd have to check Hannah, though. After Joannie let me in, of course.

When I talk about "flag quarters" please remember that we didn't yet have the kind of palace that the established commands had in places like Sol and Truman. I'm really just talking about the three pods that Postman carried. When we got all my people off Postman and onto the Explorers, we converted their two pods into flag office space, keeping minimal room in each for "overnight" bunking.

That let me start assembling a real staff with various assistants to officially do all the things I had been dumping on Hannah all these years. Hannah just had too much on her plate with all the added responsibilities that my promotion and new position brought us. So, I 'replaced' her as my adjutant with several people who each took over part of her duties and could concentrate on their small part.

What this means here is that whenever I say "I went...." you can go ahead and translate that to "I and two or three of my staff went...", and recognize that anything we did at home was pretty much public knowledge unless it happened in a bedroom, and that included silly promises from the girls.

The first staff position I filled was "Comm Lieutenant" (who could actually be any rank; the second word in the job title used the "assistant" meaning of the word, not the "junior officer" meaning) who could make sure that everything got sent where it should and that I got everything I needed to see. I got Major George Wo, an American of east Asian ancestry, and used him as an email program who could provide the judgement that the AIs could not. He seemed competent, but we didn't 'click'.

Maybe background, maybe personality, but I was having trouble trusting him to make my decisions for me. We'd have to work on that. Any of my staff should be able to act in my name if I was busy, with full expectation that I would back them up once I knew all the facts. The whole reason for having a Comm LT was so that he could act as needed on incoming message traffic, then give me summaries later. If I had to second-guess everything he did, he wasn't saving me any time.

Second was a schedule manager who knew our priorities and could focus on one thing for more than three minutes. Hannah really had her hands full keeping the other three women and all the children in line. The professional side of my life needed a manager who could spend fifteen minutes, if necessary, considering conflicting priorities and allocating meeting slots -adding in transport time when needed- and kicking back to other staff those items that really didn't need Admiral Williams' direct attention.

Maybe not a full time job, but definitely one that needed attention at odd times around the clock. I got Lt Colonel Kevin Bagsworth, a fine young officer from Kent who had spent some time on various small ships, working his way up to command a Patrician for a while, and who needed some time in a staff position for his 'professional development'. When Kevin left my staff he should have the background understanding and experience he would need to be stationed anywhere he might be called upon to coordinate the efforts of more than one ship at a time.

We, meaning the Confederacy Navy, were doing everything we could to establish the stable officer training pipeline that the USN and RN had used in the years leading up to WW2 that allowed both organizations to both expand explosively when the war finally started and competently man all of those new ships. In the lean years of the 1920s and early 1930s, promotions were few and far between, and every officer was overqualified for their current assignment. When world-wide war came in the late 1930s, that meant that both services had enough officers to provide a core of experienced people to each ship who could provide the training that all the raw wartime volunteers needed.

In our case, we were drawing from the retired and discharged veterans of the USN, RN, and others, giving them the orientation they needed to contribute in this service, and putting them back to work with our own raw wartime volunteers. And, when a junior officer showed promise, we tried the same training and experience pipeline that had worked so well back then.

Kevin talked like the Royal Navy Leftenant he had been and I found that pretty annoying, but other than that I was good with him. He was the sort of man I would send out to make sure something critical got done, no matter what the cost. The problem with that was you ended up with people like that leading "famous last stands" like I did in Avery. If he lived, though, you could expect to eventually hear about Admiral Bagsworth.

I wasn't so sure about Major Wo. Managing my email may be as much responsibility as we want to give him. We'll see.

Anyway, the Couriers, like the Stagecoaches they were derived from, had a central corridor that gave access to all of the ship's isolable spaces from the bridge at one end to the engineroom at the other end, with all the pods and other compartments in the middle between them. On the second evening after we got Monique, when I got back to Postman after a typical day of endless meetings and conferences and entered the corridor there was a small crowd, maybe a half-dozen guys, pretty much blocking the hatch to our living quarters pod. They were keeping a lookout and they gave me all the space I could want, but it was clear that they were there for the show.

Joannie hadn't looked like this when we got picked up, but she knew how she wanted to look, if she ever married, say, a millionaire and could afford plastic surgery. I allowed all the girls to choose their appearance within reason, and Joannie knew my idea of the perfect woman. The unkind would call Joannie 'poor white trash', and my idea of perfect matched that of probably every other man she had ever been with.

If you've ever seen the centerfold from a Hustler you have a good idea of how Joannie looked, kneeling in front of the hatch. Bleached blonde hair with dark roots to prove she was blonde by choice, beautiful face with bright blue eyes, soft lips with permanent lipstick, breasts that were too large to be that firm or maybe too firm to be that large, soft curves, a tight belly to tell a man's instincts that she wasn't pregnant yet, a 'landing strip' of dark silky hair that told the senile where their attention was supposed to go, an "I need cock now" expression on her face, and unable to stay still because her snatch was twitching. It had been a month or so since I got her back from her temporary sponsor on Exeter where she got her fill every night, and she had been forced to wait her turn with the other girls. Tonight was her turn again, and her cock was on its way....

Her body existed to make men jerk off. Okay, most of it came from the med tubes with my full approval, but the expression and the twitching were all her and her hormones. The only way to avoid an erection around her when she was 'on' like this was to go ahead and give her my cock. Afterwards, I didn't have an erection for a while and could eat dinner, talk to people, or direct a fleet.

The audience gave us plenty of room, but we didn't need much. Joannie opened her mouth and leaned forward as I got near, and all I had to do was open the flap and let little Tommy come out and play. Joannie grabbed the edges of the flap and pulled me in to impale her throat. I mean, all the way. Now. And her throat isn't that big.

I didn't come. I'm a mature man and I have complete control over my body. Right, lemme tell you another joke, okay? Actually, I really didn't come until I tried to pull out and she licked her tongue around the back of little Tommy's head. Then I came, filling her mouth until she pulled back and I painted her face and chest.

Total time from initial contact until I lost my mind? I dunno, ask the AIs to analyze their recording if you want to know. Probably only five or six seconds, as long as it took for me to realize that she wasn't moving and my cock was staying down her throat until I pulled it out.

When I was done squirting she took Tommy back in to milk him, and I had a few seconds of peaceful happiness before I rejoined the universe. I stroked her head and looked around. "Um, sorry about that, guys. I'm sure Joannie promised you a show. Hopefully she didn't make any promises about how long the show would be."

"Actually, Admiral, she said she was going for the land speed record for head and it shouldn't take very long, even for an old man like you." That was one of the comm techs that Major Wo had brought in to man the comm console around the clock, trying to talk around a big smile. He, like several others, had a major tent in his skinsuit. Another added "It's what she said, sir!"

"Oh. In that case, if she didn't get the record it's my fault. I was supposed to fuck her throat and I forgot. I was just sitting there all happy in a nice tight place and I remembered that she wasn't going to move and I had to do all the work. Joannie is serious about this being all about me, and she was going to stay there and let me do what I want as long as I want."

I turned my head to Monique, standing there looking terrorized. Or maybe horrified. "Monique, honey, the lesson you're supposed to get from that is that I didn't do that. Joannie did it herself, of her own free will. She did it because she wanted to, as a gift to me. I didn't force my cock down her throat and choke her. I was innocently standing around minding my own business when Joannie grabbed my cock and shoved it down her throat. All I did was enjoy her gift. Quite a bit." I added quietly, stroking Joannie's hair.

"I'll never demand that from you, I'll never ask that from you. I will demand that you learn how to give good head if you don't know how yet, but that doesn't involve choking unless you want it to. We will learn how you fit into our family as we go, but your primary task at first is going to be to grow the absolutely best, most healthy baby you can, and having you terrified all the time won't help that. So, tomorrow night when it's your turn I don't want you trying to do what Joannie just did."

I pulled away from Joannie, who was still trying to nurse from Tommy, and put him away. "Awright, the show's over. Monique, please go tell Hannah that Joannie is still outrageous and I like it and that dinner will be whenever she wants. Joannie, please take a bow and accept the audience's applause..." I clapped and so did the spectators "...and go take a shower. No, you will upset Monique even more if you come to dinner looking like that." She was pouting and playing in the pearl necklace I had just given her. "No clothes, though. I've got you all night, and I like you the way you are."

I pulled her up and pushed them both through the hatch, then stayed out to talk some more with the audience. That ended with "Okay, I don't think I need any staff support at the moment. Why don't you all go home and find something fun to do with whoever you find waiting for you there? Kevin, George, please be ready to continue this circus in a couple of hours. That should be long enough to get your rocks off, have dinner, and be ready for the next crisis to come up."

Joannie did get pregnant; the AIs verified that for me in the morning.

If I spend a lot of time talking about ships here, don't think that the fleet was my primary concern. It wasn't; it was merely the largest tool in my toolbox if -when- things went wrong. I wasn't going out to command a fleet. I was going out to defend a system, and the fleet was merely the mobile part of the system's resources, the part I could bring with me. We would end up with a lot of other resources, but they would all have to be built on-site.

One staff member that I probably won't talk too much about is Bill, Brigadier General William Atsuke. Bill was another Brit like Kevin, but of Japanese ancestry. With his standard Marine package when he walked down a passageway I could see a Sumo wrestler.

I had a lot of trouble putting him in one of my mental pigeon-holes. He was a Marine, bad. His record made it clear that he was a troublemaker just like me, good. He had been jumped a couple of times in rank just to justify getting rid of him, bad. He had been decorated for heroism, good. He didn't seem to think the Navy was very well run. In truth, he seemed an awful lot like me, maybe a twin brother who joined the Marines by mistake one night when drunk.

He did seem pretty intelligent, and I had to respect his integrity. At least, I never heard him badmouth the Navy to his men. In that area, I had to admit he was probably a better man than me. We were talking about something once, just the two of us, and he said something derogatory about something our people (of course Navy) had done, and I said "I hope you didn't tell them that".

His answer? "Of course not. Those are your people. Trying to straighten them out is your problem. Besides, have you ever seen that movie "Saving Private Ryan?" Of course I have. Several times. Except for the opening scene, the one where they land on the beach. I can't watch that. I knew men who had been there and survived that. "Well, there you are. Gripes go up the chain, not down. You're the only one I can gripe to here, so you get to hear it all".

For better or worse, Bill was my most senior officer and my second in command for "colony" and "system defense" matters, what the civilians would call our "fixed assets". The only time that the chain of command I had set up should give him and his people orders was when we were moving ships around and they needed to be on one. Okay, right now ships were all we had and so he had nothing to do, but that would change when we got there, and Bill would become much more important as our "System Defense Coordinator", where his rank would help him get our ship-handlers past his Marine uniform.

We had probably about 15 or 20 marines all told, mostly specialists in one field or another. We got probably a hundred people earmarked for the Fleet Auxiliary, which meant that the AIs considered them reliable enough to be volunteers but not aggressive enough to be warriors. Tina was our only Civil Service rep, and I'm positive we wouldn't even have had her if I didn't have a personal in with her career choices.

All the rest of us in this Navy expedition were Navy, and that meant that they were going to view any orders Bill gave them with a good deal of mistrust, since the Marines had a reputation for making the simple choices instead of the correct ones. A well-deserved reputation, in our minds. If we could work through it, having Bill in command of a bunch of sailors would be good for all of them. That didn't mean any of them were going to like it.

Anyway, Bill and our planning committee spent a lot of time talking to Sol's defense planners about non-mobile assets, both armed and unarmed. If we ever got in good communications with the Beer we might consider orbital fortresses, but until then we were ordered to stay well clear of the planet as much as possible. Okay, orbital fortresses for anywhere else we wanted to defend were good. The shell of automated missile-armed stations that Sol was building looked to be a good idea for the long term, but even the guys building them agreed that the shell would never be finished in time. Besides, they were so far out that anyone with a hyperdrive could simply jump past them. Like everything else, we made sure we had a copy of their plans anyway.

We also took a look at manned and unmanned scanner stations. These would be out as far as we could communicate with them, which was pretty far out. If we were willing to use hyper-capable message torpedos to maintain contact, they could be REALLY far out. We decided that those would give us the best return for our limited construction plant at first, and since we had no way to know what directions that attacks might come from we decided to start with twelve of them at the "points" of a regular icosahedron (a 20-sided die for you gamers out there) centered on the star itself. If you could see them from the center, they should look like a triangular grid covering the entire sky.

If we started with simple AI-run unmanned scanner stations, we could get them built and placed fairly quickly, then have them expand on their own to include living quarters, command facilities, and weapons. Deciding their exact distance from the primary could wait until we got there, and may well change as our presence grew.

Once we had built and placed the original stations, we could upgrade them easily by adding a living pod and the resources to allow it to build its own improvements as it had time. The hab-pod would also add a second power supply for redundancy and a second AI to make the whole system smarter. I blessed that plan as The Way and we moved on to other problems.

Monique and I needed to get to know each other. She needed to see me as a human with foibles, not just a monster with appetites. I started her night that morning, right after Joannie's night ended, by having her accompany me on my rounds everywhere I went. A typical day started with wakeup at 0600, do whatever needed to be done before letting my playmate get up, coffee, and shower. Dress and get a five minute brief on the current crises from Kevin and George, then breakfast with the family at 0700 if there were no true crises.

By 0730 I would be in my office, getting a more in-depth review of the night's issues and resolutions. At least once a month, no matter what we did, somewhere in the Diaspora, someone got out of a training sim without realizing it and actually fired a live weapon at something that we would prefer not get shot up. As long as it wasn't our people, it wasn't a crisis for us, just info to laugh over.

If it was my people -and it was, once- I never made it to breakfast. What I wanted to hear in the brief was that Captain so-and-so had been able to get the accidentally-launched missile shut down and a tug was going out to get it for analysis. I did not want to hear what I actually heard in our particular case: the missile took out Belvedere Castle's shield but did not strike the hull itself; B-C was able to shift enough that the missile passed beside the hull, only a few feet away. Yes, they were going out to get what was left of the missile.

The only damage was to B-C's shield generator, the launching cruiser's reputation, and the flayed skin off the asses of the Fire Control tech who launched the missile, the CIC watch who was there specifically to ensure that the sim did not become reality and who was really at fault, and the CO who apparently did not spend sufficient time supervising his training program.

The FC tech may have pushed the button, but he was completely blameless. The sims were SUPPOSED to be realistic. He was SUPPOSED to be launching missiles, in his sim. My blame went to the CIC watch and the ship's command team, the CO and XO. The CIC watch was, bluntly, derelict in his duty. We were out by Neptune, in a secured system with no possibility of an actual Sa'arm attack before the sim ended. All weapon systems accessible from that FC console should have been manually disabled before the sim was started, and left that way until the sim had been completed. That's what the SOP and the manual blocks are there for, dammit.

The OOD's failure to order, supervise, and verify this simple task could have cost us a starship complete with 50-some-odd lives. I grew up in the US Navy's submarine/nuclear power program, and I still have the unyielding demand for integrity that they instill in us. I can forgive an honest mistake, God knows I make enough of them, but that wasn't honest, and it wasn't a mistake.

In my mind, the CO and XO were just as much at fault because the CO has full authority. He gets the credit when the ship does well, and he gets the blame when the ship fucks up. He, with his XO, were personally responsible for ensuring that competent, properly trained, and above all trustworthy personnel were monitoring the simulated FCX (Fire Control Exercise), and they failed to do that.

And, all of my COs and XOs had the same opinions on a CO's authority and responsibility. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have stayed COs any longer than it took for me to find out. BuPers was doing its job, though, and almost all of my senior officers were people I was glad to have.

I didn't get anything else done that day. Because since the accident involved two different ships, I couldn't leave the investigation to the two COs. I couldn't have anyway, since one of the COs was, himself, one of the men in the hotseat. B-C's CO, of course, got an atta-boy for himself, his ship, and especially the alert CIC watch who ordered a course change to commence, not immediately, but right after burnout so that the missile could not make a matching course change and hit anyway.

As usual, the AI's video records of everything on the ship made tracking down the truth very easy. Fuck, that was close. Our missiles have been standardized on 55 cm diameter, or 21" if you are American. Think submarine torpedo or several different surface-launched missiles which are nominally 21". By the time those things have accelerated (to use nice round numbers, assume 100g for 100 seconds) to burnout, they are moving so fast that an explosive warhead is completely redundant. Instead, they have as much of a sensor package and brain as we can fit, as all that kinetic energy is wasted if they miss.

It didn't miss by much. Even with the course change, if B-C had been doing maintenance checks and their port Particle Beam turret had been activated and run out, they probably would have lost that turret. And, much of everything else on that side of the ship as the remnants smashed their way inward. The Castles really don't have much armor; what little volume they have is all filled with important kit.

The end result was a dismissal (for "uncorrectable incompetence" was the wording I used) for the Commander who ignored his training and instructions, a promotion (and transfer to the cruiser's now-open billet) for the Lieutenant who was awake enough and competent enough to give orders in time, and make them the correct orders, to save his ship, and a black mark in the cruiser's record and the personnel records of the CO and XO. And, of course, the public humiliation of not being allowed to run training sims of any kind for the next two weeks unless one of my staff was present to verify that their crew was, in fact, doing what they said they had been trained to do and it was safe to run the sim.

No, that didn't happen the day I had my new cutie following me around, that was just an example of how easily my routine could get disrupted. Thankfully, Monique got to be incredibly bored while I got updated on the fleet-assembly process that morning.

I had a routine, and while I would deviate from it for any good reason with a smile on my face, the routine had a purpose and we kept to it in the absence of said good reason. People are calmer and work better when they have a routine, and that applies from the lowest recruit up to the highest commander. One of the simplest ways to force a nervous breakdown in a subordinate is to erratically pop up, pointing out everything he is fucking up, er, not doing the same way you would.

Note that this is not the same as a supervisor constantly popping up, as that is what you do when you have a new assistant who doesn't know what he is doing yet. Eventually he learns, though, and you move on to other things while he does his job. Once you have your job under control, having your supervisor interrupt you at random times isn't supervision, it's harassment, and everyone can see your productivity drop as you pay more attention to covering your ass than you do to getting the job done.

That's all standard leadership and management philosophy. If your people are doing their job, anything you do to them is a disruption. If you are good with that, then YOU are the one with the fixable problem, not them, and YOUR supervisor needs to step in and fix YOU. If you can't be fixed, well then your supervisor needs to replace you.

As long as the guy at the top -that was me- remembered that and tried to keep his immediate subordinates -that was my flag staff, Commodores, and Captains- calm by giving them a reliable routine, I, and they, all the way down, could easily see which ships/departments/divisions/shops were unstable, and know from the start that the cause was the person at the top of the problem.

If Ghana was consistently slower to get in a particular formation than the other ships in her squadron, if her gunnery performance was off, if her engineering department had more down time than the other ships, that was a command problem manifesting itself throughout the ship, and that CO had to either get fixed or go. Yes, occasionally it was the XO, or the ship's Sergeant Major, or even, rarely, a serious problem with the ship itself, but in all of those cases it was again the CO's job to track that down and fix his command. If he didn't or couldn't, he wasn't fit to command a warship and had to go.

Thankfully I only had to shitcan one CO while we were getting organized. No, it wasn't Ghana, that was just a made-up example. Ask the AIs if it's that important to you. I don't like talking about my failures, and being unable to fix a broken CO definitely counts as an Admiral's failure. One that I corrected before it was too late, but a failure nonetheless.

Can I get back to talking about Monique? Her original sponsor had a good eye, or a good imagination, or something. Her ass was perfect. I was tempted to have her change to a cocktail dress and high heels, just so I could watch her walk. I wasn't going to have any trouble at all keeping her pregnant, as long as she was willing to cooperate.

All day long, attend this meeting, watch that exercise, participate in that other planning session, I kept Monique near me, within arm's reach. And, if nothing was actually going on, I kept at least one hand either on her ass or inside her coveralls.

If we were walking, I would hold her hand, but if we stopped I pulled her to me so I could fondle her ass. If we were standing up but talking to someone, I turned her around and let her feel my erection grow against her ass while I bothered her titties.

She had already gotten her briefing on the rules from Hannah. This was her fourth day with us and I had not yet seen her with her side-zippers up. Those things stay down if there's any chance of me being close enough to reach through. I'm a man, I like titties, those titties are as good as God and the med-tubes can make them, they belong to me, and I'm going to play with them. And she is going to feel the immediate result through our suits.

By lunchtime she had calmed down and no longer shook whenever I touched her, which was the whole purpose of the exercise. On the other hand, I was beginning to shake whenever I touched her and little Tommy was getting insistent, so when we left DesRon 19's exercise I asked my staff if they could give us a few minutes of privacy and I took her home for some head. We could have done this on Nice, but I thought that if there was any chance of an issue it would be better to have Hannah with us for support. Sex isn't supposed to be traumatic!

So, while Joannie and LaRhonda got lunch together, I retired to our bedroom with Monique and Hannah. Monique had watched Hannah, LaRhonda, and Joannie all give me head in their turn, and none of them had shown any hesitation. Okay, Joannie's example wasn't exactly what I would have put on the training schedule, but that was her own fault and besides she showed no ill aftereffects from what she did.

It was her turn, I'd been playing with her titties all morning, and little Tommy wanted to meet her. I had them both pull their coveralls down to their waists and lay down on either side of me where Monique could work and Hannah could supervise, help, or take over as needed.

It took longer than it should have and Hannah ended up talking a lot, but she never touched Tommy at all; she just coached Monique through it. If I was being a jerk I could say it was a lousy blowjob, but I'm a guy. She did it, it worked, and there's no such thing as a lousy blowjob. My only objection would be that she wanted to pull off at a time when she should stay put. I stayed out of it, though. This is Hannah's show.

Hannah grabbed Monique's head and put it back where it belonged, and told her for, like, the seventh time, that when I came she needed to keep her mouth in place and swallow. I don't think Hannah let go of Monique's head until I said "Okay, I think I'm done." Hannah let Monique up, but only to show her where I'd spunked on my chest when she had pulled off.

"Child, if you'd done what we told you, we wouldn't have that mess. Now, you have a choice here. You can happily lick that up while Tom plays with your titties some more, or you can do it while you're crying after I beat your ass for disobeying me. I'm happy with your choice, either way."

Monique was shaking again, but she licked my chest clean like she was told to. And, I fondled those beautiful fat titties some more like I was told to. When she was done Hannah took her to wash her face off to get rid of the spurt I was in the middle of when she pulled off, and by the time they were back I was ready to move again. It takes us old folks some time.

I have no idea what we had for lunch.

The afternoon was more of the same, but Monique was far calmer now. I pawed and fondled her just as much, but now she knew what to expect. Yes, she was nothing more than a sex toy at the moment, but she knew she wouldn't be an abused sex toy. I would use her yes, but not abuse her.

She knew I wasn't going to rape her over a table. She knew she could keep me under control, if necessary, by simply pulling her coveralls down to her waist and getting on her knees. And, if I decided to let her practice her head some more in an out-of-the-way place, she knew I wasn't going to choke-fuck her either. She could live with this.

By the end of the day she was coming to me on her own, rubbing her ass on my crotch and putting my hands on her big fat titties where they belonged. And, a lot of the time, her nipples were already hard when I got to them. I didn't see any reason to mention it, but I could also smell something remarkably like hot wet pussy when I slid my hands inside her coveralls. I think we're going to be okay.

Hannah's right, though. Anal sex will hurt, but Monique expects sex to hurt. After we've done that, when I go to do it right, she'll find that vaginal sex doesn't hurt and actually feels pretty good. She will be a lot happier about Tommy going someplace that feels good, and she'll try to make sure that Tommy always goes there in the future. I believe my work here is done, because everything remaining is play.

Actually, Monique told us over dinner that she would be alright. "I need to say something." We all stopped feeding our faces and waited.

"You have all been good to me. I have seen for three nights that you all work to please Tom, but I have also seen that before the night is over he works to please you, too. Tom, I've checked for my hymen probably ten times a day since you took me in, and it's gone. I hope it never comes back. I know that you will make me feel good, and I'm ready to start having your children."

The other girls dropped everything to give her a mass hug. I finished eating first. Hey, none of THEM are going to get called with an emergency at any moment!

Later that night, after I had made her cry in pleasure for maybe the first time ever, she asked if she was going to get pregnant. I told her "Not this time. You are still unsure and we want you and your baby to be calm and happy. Let's put that off for now." There was no way I was going to let her and Joannie be on the same schedule; Monique was going to have to wait at least a couple of months. This was already taken care of; I had had that discussion with the AIs soon after meeting her and realizing how scared she was, and I had told them to not let her be fertile until I asked for it.