Independent Command 4

(Being part three of the memoirs of the Respected Thomas Williams, Imperator and Caesar, as collected by his granddaughter the Lady Jessica Williams-Bagsworth)

Copyright ©2016 By Zen Master

Seeking Enlightenment through Bondage

In my mind, just about anyone could help build and run a town or a factory, but it took a special mindset to crew a warship that could go into combat at any time. Maybe that was just my point of view as someone who had spent most of his life on said warships, but that was where I was. We need shipboard crew for a growing fleet, and we don't need much at all of people who can't be shipboard crew.

We got several small groups of volunteers from various sources. All of the recent pickups that we got had either volunteered for Navy service, or had expressed apathy over his or her service. Fine, they are all going to be Navy and we are going to build as many ships as we could find crews for. As long as we were left alone, my "master plan" was to successively build larger and larger ships that needed fewer and fewer crew until we ran out of materials for ships or people to man them.

However, there was a huge snag in my manning plan: The Ferry pods could hold all of our warship's dependents, or they could hold all of our transferred and new volunteer passengers with their families. They couldn't do both.

We came up with a three-part answer to that. BuPers was giving us complete crews for all of our ships, but all of our newer and larger ships had been built for double crews, to allow for training. These ships had a good amount of unused berthing and other environmental support. Further, there was no requirement that we take all of our people with us immediately. In fact, until we were sure we could stay at Beerat safely, it might be better to leave some of our families behind so that we weren't all killed together.

First, we said that, for the cruisers, destroyers and the four Shiros, the crew could take up to two concubines and up to two dependents with them to Beerat. As soon as absolutely possible, those extras would be landed someplace safe, as they had no business onboard in a firefight. We could not yet predict where or what that safe place might be. They may not have TV, popcorn, and a pool, but they would be safe. That took care of probably a third of our crews right there, the junior personnel who didn't have large families yet.

Second, any sponsor with either more than two concubines or more than two children would have to leave the excess here in Sol system, in a fairly nice housing project attached to one of the moonbases that had been built to house extractees. These stay-behinds would be brought up as soon as we had a place to put them.

We also made these offers to the crews of the couriers and the Explorers, and the fleet staff, meaning me and my assistants, since we were already on the Explorers. I admitted that all of my children would be staying behind as I was not willing to play favorites and choose two, and likewise I would leave two of my four concubines behind as well.

LaRhonda was obvious; she was the best mommy we had and whoever it was would have their hands full. Besides, she was going to be dropping again soon. The second choice (Hannah) was again obvious but I didn't want to make it. The two that would be best to stay behind were also the two that I could depend upon to keep my stress level down when things got tense. Monique might become good for that but not yet, and Joannie would never be someone I could call "restful". An incredibly pleasing fuck, yes, but not restful. I put that off for now. Anyway, those two options freed up the Ferry pods from all the crew families that had started to move in.

For our smaller warships, the Castle variants and Patricians that didn't have enough room for the people they currently had, that first part of the plan wouldn't work. Even if the people involved were willing to accept the crowding, the ships themselves didn't have the environmental plant to handle them. We wanted to give each crewman a single suite on one of the "Ferry Pods", but promptly realized that a 28-man Castle times 14 ships plus the three Patricians was half of the rooms available right there.

On the other hand, saying "none for you" wasn't good either, so we compromised some for them: we set aside one floor in each Ferry pod (a total of 18 floors) and re-partitioned them into 40 very small bedrooms that an adult could live out of, and maybe a second adult could visit if they got along well. That gave us 720 tiny cubicles.

This was more than the total crews of the Castles and Patricians, and allowed each of their crewmen to house a second concubine if they wanted. If they only had one child and they wanted to, they could bring the child with this concubine. It was the best we could do. If they had more than two concubines, or if they had more than one child, or if they didn't want to bring said child, again all the leftovers would have to wait at our "MoonBase Hotel and Resort Spa" until we called for them.

There were only a few takers for this more-limited offer for the corvette crews, maybe a couple hundred. All the rest either didn't have a second concubine, or had families large enough to need the moonbase hotel.

That brought up an option we hadn't thought of. The "rejects" that Tina had brought us generally didn't have families; they were mostly single young hotties with princess entitlement attitudes who had been picked up for their looks, then dumped on the Civil Service when their sponsors couldn't get through to them, as one step short of being recycled.

These ladies were lounging around in the Ferry suites while they decided that this wasn't too bad. They really didn't need suites, and the consensus was that they had a long way to go to earn such nice digs. We had about 500 of those little cubicles left after the Castle/Patrician offer and we could have changed them all back to suites, but.... We stuffed two rejects in each one. If they can attract a sponsor, they can move out. Until then, you ladies are spare baby factories and we'll keep you in standby. Any of them who had children well, we let them stay at the moonbase hotel. We'll get them on our next trip.

Third, none of our colony-building passengers were going to get a better deal than the warship crews who were going to be fighting and possibly dying to protect them. Until we have won this war, the people on the sharp end of the spear are going to have a higher social status than the REMFs who support them from the safety of their homes. Whether transferring from a factory or just picked up from Earth, if you have thirteen concubines and thirty-five children, all but two and two are staying here for now. You only get one of those "Ferry Pod" bedrooms for this first trip.

Even with all the shenanigans surrounding the "rejects", we still had over a thousand of those small family suites, and we filled them with every transferee and freshly extracted Navy volunteer with concubines that we could scrounge. We would process them and their families as quickly as we could, but the trip out was going to be mostly free time as they got used to their new lives.

The night before we left Sol, I finally stopped waffling and faced facts. I wasn't going to leave Hannah behind. I was far less of a man when she wasn't right behind me. I spent the night giving Joannie the best time I could and sent her off to the moonbase hotel to help LaRhonda watch our tribe. I kept Monique to continue our bonding, and I'm sure Hannah filled her ear with dire threats about what would happen if she ever said 'No' to anything I wanted.

After a couple of weeks of fleet exercises in Sol's outer system, a final check that we had stuffed the Ferry pods as full as we could, and another that the Confederacy had not changed their intentions towards the Beerat natives -we were to leave them alone as much as possible- we all went into hyperspace and headed out for Brakat, stopping at every system on the way. This not only verified that every ship and navigation system performed as expected, it also allowed us to practice all arriving at once as a fleet. The first couple of stops demonstrated to the skeptical that this was, in fact, something that had to be done a few times to get right.

At each system we continued our fleet tactical exercises. This also gave us a couple of days to talk between ships, transfer people as needed, and hold the endless conferences we used for planning what we were going to do once we got to Beerat.

I had put a note in Lt. Bogdanovich's record that since she had served as both a Chief Engineer (of the Maiden Castle) and a Commanding Officer (of the liferaft, yeah, that was stretching it, but she kept things together in a bad situation with no help for several weeks) in combat, in both cases performing her duties without fault, I considered her capable of being either a command officer or an engineer, as she preferred, if she didn't want to stay in supply. When we left, she was Chief Engineer on one of our Castles. I'm gonna try to turn her into one of my square pegs, yep!

I also got back a completely informal and off-the-record report that when she heard about my addendum to her file, she told a shipmate that "I still want his kids." I didn't see any reason to pass that on to Hannah. She still gets upset about that stuff. Fucking the hell out of Joannie until we both hurt is fine, she's a co-wife, but fucking someone else outside of our family is cheating.

The two sergeants also came with us, although with requests to not be on my ship as I was nearsighted and ran into things. I think the Lt shared my court-martial record with them. No big deal, it wasn't exactly a secret anyway.

Our final tally was 43 ships: 2 Raptors, 3 Europas, 6 Asians, 6 Africas, 4 Shiros, 14 Castles/Ainsworths, 3 Patricians, 3 Explorers, and 2 Couriers. Right at 2400 uniformed men and women, all trained and competent sailors united in a common goal. We could add another thousand or so, once we had integrated all of our passengers.

Of course, if Brennan and Norham Castle were still alive when we got there, they would be joining us, so add another hundred or so people. 45 ships sounded like a big fleet until you looked at the actual ships. We didn't have an awful lot of firepower to be duking it out with Sa'arm Conquest Spheres. We were going to have to plan, we were going to have to prepare, we were going to have to work together, and we were going to have to rely on "alternate means of success". We were going to have to cheat.

Stopping at Brakat first wasn't a military requirement for our mission, but it was a political requirement. A Sector Commander, whether Admiral or General, got the credit for everything that went right in his sector whether he knew about it or not, and he also got the blame for everything that went wrong. Not only did I need to know his point of view on my mission, he needed to know my point of view, too, so that he could understand any messages I sent. It was only good manners to stop in Brakat and check in.

Of course he wanted to know all he could about my plans and intentions, and he questioned my choice of flagship. I agreed that it would be nice to have more armor around my lily-white ass, but we didn't have any heavily-armored ships. All we had were light units. Every single ship we had was expendable in the performance of our mission. Given that, it was better for overall fleet direction to be done from one of the few ships we had that weren't supposed to be getting shot at in the first place.

I wasn't happy about becoming a REMF, though. I was just doing it because I didn't see a better way to command the fleet. I asked if he had a spare battleship he could lend me so that I could command my fleet from a warship that actually fought, but he said no, he couldn't spare any of his at the moment.

That told me that he was actually one of the good guys despite his exalted position; the truth was that there was no such thing as a battleship yet. The biggest combatant ships we had built yet were the Heros, and we were busy proving in various raids into Sa'arm space that the Heros weren't big enough to do the job. We were going to have to keep building bigger ships until we came up with a design that could survive going toe-to-toe with anything the Sa'arm had. They, of course, would respond to that by sending three (or nine) of the biggest things they could build. We didn't know what that was yet, but we already knew our enemy well enough to predict that response.

I did come away with something useful, though. He promised that, if and when Sol came up with a viable design for something big and tough enough to be called "Battleship", he would see to it that I got a copy of said design. I noted that this was rather short of being told I could have one of the actual ships, and he agreed with me, pointing out that manning her would be a challenge, so there wasn't any point in making a promise he may not be able to keep.

He also asked about the planet names, since there was some confusion. Lt. Bogdanovich had tracked that down for us before she reported to her new ship. It turns out that the Confederacy had listened to the natives' broadcasts long enough to establish that they called themselves the "Beer", so that name was right, but the other three planetary names (Mead, Pils, and Ale) had simply been filled in when the Nav records for the system were first looked at by a Human cartographer.

In the long run, Kerry wasn't going to get her way about "Webb's World", but for now we could use it. I thought it was important to remember those who sacrificed for the common good, so I was going to support her as long as we weren't in contact with the natives, um, the "Beer".

We had a laugh about that. There were going to be lots of jokes about getting to know the natives once they joined us. "Hey, Joe, let's go down to the planet, find a bar, and become one with the Beer."

Anyway, my command staff got to know the Sector Command staff, told them everything we wanted, got told that most of it wasn't available (which we already knew, so there were no hard feelings), and after a few days of shuffling people around some more we moved on out.

Eventually we came out of hyperspace well clear of the Beerat system and crept in under patrol EmCon, 43 ships and 15,311 souls according to the report I had asked for with the exact population of each ship at the exact instant that it popped out in Beerat space. 383 officers and 2014 enlisted on the warships, 1080 more volunteers as passengers on the explorers who would be Navy once they were trained, 8512 concubines in various places, and 3322 under-14 dependents.

That total kept increasing, of course. Between sponsors and concubines, we had almost 9000 healthy, fertile women. Not all of them were pregnant all the time, but it was normal for our pax list to increase by fifteen or twenty every day, just from all the births. We also normally lost one or two people per day, usually one of the new concubines who couldn't accept the position they had agreed to back on Earth.

I didn't attend any of the birth-day parties, unless they were for my own staff, or for the command teams on ships that were nearby. While we weren't too busy, though, I did attend the "Personnel Loss Review Boards", the hearings set up to investigate each loss, even if only by video conference. I made the CO of the ship involved attend, too. Some of the losses were unavoidable, as when a new concubine attacked a sponsor, but even then we had to look at each other and wonder if there was any way to get through to the morons that this was a Bad Idea.

Probably not; the real solution would be filtering at or before pickup to cull the unstable ones that wouldn't make it. And, of course, if we mentioned that to the AIs, they would come back with:

Well, no. I'd participated in one pickup myself, and I'd viewed the videos from countless others for entertainment. Our average extractee/volunteer selected their concubines purely on the basis of how big their tits were, how fast they stripped, and how wet they were when they got plugged in. This was a good way to select which of your college classmates you should take to Panama City for spring break. It was not, however, a good way to select someone to take with you into combat where her freezing in terror would get you both killed. Take the smart, ugly one who loves to suck, you idiot!

In fact, you could make a pretty good assessment of which volunteers were good officer material simply by choosing all the ones who looked at CAP scores before selecting their mates. That suggestion was from Ens. Sally Goode, a blonde assigned to our system defense planning team who rivaled Joannie for raw fuckability but was far more valuable for her mind.

Sally made that suggestion during one of those loss hearings, and I had to admit that I would have failed her test. That got some laughs. On the one hand, how I chose my four (my wife and three stroller-pushers) was common knowledge. On the other hand, it was also common knowledge that one of those four was now a volunteer in her own right, and a second refused to retest on the grounds that she would become a volunteer, so my method appeared to work, too.

"On the contrary! I certainly did!" I paused to make sure that I had her attention. "I met Hannah at a college party. I went to go talk to the biggest tits in the room. We used to joke about it. We had been married for a year before I found out what color her eyes were. She got something in her eye and asked me to look at it. Until then, all I knew was what color her nipples were."

That got laughs from everyone, and Sally had to cover her face with one hand. "Men!"

"Yes. Men. Most of us stop thinking when, say, you, for instance, walk in the room. One of the reasons I have my concubines is so that I can recover quickly and start listening to what you say instead of just drooling like I want to. Sally, you are on Joey's staff because you are a good planner. Joey and I are both glad to have you. On the other hand, having you around creates your own planning issues."

"Did you know that I have a standing order with my ladies that, if I have to spend more than half an hour alone with you, one of them will give me head immediately before that meeting? They should probably stand by and expect to get fucked as soon as the meeting lets out, too." I looked at my adjutant. "Kevin?"

"It's true. I have to coordinate that with Hannah." He even said it with a straight face.

Now Sally joined in the laughter. After it died down, I wasn't going to cut that short, an honest opportunity to laugh at their commanding Admiral's personal foibles.

"No. We can't. Stand by for a sec...." I asked the ship's AI if it had access to video of the two sergeants' visit a month or two earlier. Yes. It did now. Of course Postie had it available.

"See, I've already gone through this with another female officer. Let's watch a home movie." And we all got to watch the sergeants asking me if Lt Bogdanovich was going to get in trouble, and my answer, including the video from that interview. I got to watch me fondling Hannah, too. I caught my hands twitching. Hannah should be here now, dammit.

Back to Sally when the movie ended. "Ensign Goode, you are, at the same time, a human being, a very desirable female, and an officer in the Confederacy Navy. You have to keep track of the pros and cons of each of those three at all times, and that's a delicate balancing act. Part of that is being aware of how you affect those around you. You are here because we value your mind. I'm never going to ask you to ugly it down some 'cause I have a solution to the problems you cause, but dear God I hope you never find a way to become more desirable. If you do, I'll transfer you somewhere with no men around so that we can continue to get some use from your mind. I try to be honest when I can, and as long as I've got Hannah to go home to, your mind is more important to me than your body. On the other hand, if anything ever happens to Hannah I make no promises about my value system."

Sally was quiet for some time, and everyone else at the review board gave us the space she needed. I had no idea if she was extracted looking like this or if her appearance came from a med-tube. It didn't matter. What mattered was that, in this society, she got to choose her appearance. If she wanted to look like this, she needed to face the fact that it would color her relationship with every male volunteer she met, men who were used to thinking of women as obedient property and who even had two female slaves at home. Eventually she looked up with a sparkle in her eye and asked "So, have you nailed her yet?"

"Lt Bogdanovich. No. And, I probably won't. All requests for my children must go through my breeding coordinator, a lady named Hannah Williams, and she already shares my limited availability with three other women. She probably wouldn't take kindly to a request to, ah, spread me thinner." I'd never made it that plain before, but I still considered Hannah my 'first wife' and I had no need to go around her back. I was not going to fuck any of my subordinates without her prior approval. I was getting all I needed from her and Monique anyway. Since we were picked up going on five years before, Hannah had never said 'No' to me. She said 'Can I just suck you tonight?' sometimes, meaning 'Please go bother one of the other girls, my back hurts, I have morning sickness, and I have a headache', but she had never said 'No'.

"'Breeding Coordinator'? Is that another staff position on the ToO that I have to fill?" Kevin.

"No. It's one of the tasks that get dumped on the SLJPO. That used to be Hannah, although come to think of it that's you, now, isn't it, Kevin?"

No response beyond crossed eyes while the British leftenant asked the AIs what the bloody hell 'SLJPO' meant. Chuckles from everyone else, some after they also consulted the AIs. Anyone who had come from the USN knew the term, though.

"Hmmm. Well. Hmmm. Well, as long as Hannah is doing such a fine job there's no need to rock the boat, now is there? I'll leave that task in her capable hands for now."

All in all a rather more productive PLRB than most. We hadn't come any closer to solving the various problems that caused the losses, but I'd found a lighthearted way to get my staff on board with my values. I didn't like the concubine system -even though I was a direct beneficiary- but we had to work with it until we had a better one. At the same time, any female who could fight her way clear of the system and make her way on her brains instead of her back deserved to be given all the support we could give her, both as her due as a human being and as incentive to all the marginal ones to keep trying.

After we broke up Ensign Goode came by and asked "Hannah is really that important to you?"

That one was easy, even with a dozen people listening. "Hannah is just a slut I fuck whenever I want." I waited a couple of breaths.

"Hannah is my better half, the woman I married. She is my conscience. I define 'Right' by asking myself 'If Hannah understood all sides of this question, which choice would she tell me I should take?' I'm told I should retest for CAP; my expected score is well over 8 and I could have another two concubines. Ensign Goode, if anything ever happened to Hannah I expect my CAP to be well under 4."

I looked around at everyone. "You people protect me as your commander. You need to protect Hannah as the true source of everything good that I do. I'm only a good person because I want her to think well of me. Without her I would be a monster."

I had no doubt that Hannah's new title would make its way across the fleet within hours. I guess I'd better make sure she hears it from me, first. ("AI, verbal message to Hannah Williams on Postman: Please review the video from the latest personnel loss review board. You don't have a new job, but you did get a new title. And, I had to work with Sally again. There's no point in you two wearing anything when I get home tonight. Love, Tom.")

Similarly, with all those kids it was normal for five or ten to reach their magical 14th birthday each day, too, and about a quarter of them tested good enough to be sponsors. That was a huge increase over the typical ratio back on Earth, but then many of these kids had been out here for several years now, and they weren't dumb. The recent pickups had the same CAP score curve as on Earth, but the kids who had been with us for years did much better, over half of them on some days getting a 6.5 or higher on their first test.

The "navy brats" could SEE the difference between how sponsors and concubines were treated, and they wanted to be sponsors. Similarly, they saw, every day, the difference in the way sponsors and concubines acted. They did everything they could to act like sponsors, and some of it affected their value system enough that the AIs liked the results. We could only hope that eventually we would get to where they all would be accepted, and we could end the concubine system.

Many of the kids already knew what they wanted to do when they grew up -I was never going to wean Hector away from his Marine uniform- but they all deserved an interview with someone who could talk intelligently about their options. Add that to the collateral duties for the officers on that ship, another thing to take time away from running their division, department, or ship. It had to be done, though, if we wanted quality recruits. I quietly pointed out that even those children who weren't quite fourteen yet should be able to talk to their parent's officers about career options.

Anyway, I was saying that we crept in, with an occasional IFF pulse to alert friendlies, if there were any. We kept the two task forces bunched but sent the patrol force out. We were eventually met by Brennan, which appeared to have some damage.

"Well, yeah, but we had some trouble a couple of days ago with some tourists. Daddy, I got a boo-boo."

Postie announced <Imagery being received. It appears to be an after-action report>.

An AAR is a mass of commentary and addenda surrounding a tactical plot replay. This one showed the relative positions of five ships, including insets with actual damage for our ships and calculated damage for theirs, and live commentary from the two skippers.

The TPR showed....exactly what I had been making my two task forces practice. A Sa'arm Vacuna scout triad had come in-system while they were hanging around waiting for us, and a quick conference between skippers had established their roles.

Norham Castle: "Larry, I'd much rather be the Anal Bandit if you're okay with being the Blundering Idiot."

Brennan: "I'll try to give you three. Go as slow as you need. Hans, you cannot get detected."

The TPR showed Brennan and Normie-C separating, both moving as quietly as they could at Patrol EmCon. Three hours later, Brennan had lit her shields, gone to full power and started firing everything she had from well outside of effective range. The triad oriented on Brennan and, once they were close enough, started slowly but methodically shooting her up.

Even though Brennan had more firepower than all three of her opponents put together, it wasn't a fair fight since a Castle could really only shoot effectively at one enemy at a time. She had disabled one Vacuna and was working on a second but would not have won when Normie-C showed up behind them. What would otherwise have eventually ended badly for Brennan ended quite abruptly with three expanding clouds of debris.

That last probably wasn't properly part of the AAR, but no one had the heart to take it out. Most of us chuckled when we first heard it. Hannah made a face. Yes, that face. We've done it, but privately I agree with her. That's nasty and disgusting.

That was a lesson we had learned at Tulakat; if you focus their attention in front to begin with, they don't seem to notice the ass-bandit until he starts butt-fucking them. By then it's too late, of course. And, as per my OPF standing instructions, a long-range scan during and immediately after the action made it clear that from the time of initial detection, none of the three ships had launched anything in any direction except weapons, and those were all aimed at Brennan. Whoever had sent the triad would never learn what happened to it.

I ordered the full AAR forwarded to all ships for all hands to view -as entertainment, for many of them, but as training "THIS is how you do it" for the various command teams- and we went on with the rest of Larry's report. They had two dead -a gunner and his conk- when one turret got hit, but all others would recover. Other than the casualty list and their survey info, nothing was important.

"Larry, we have three mobile repair ships and will get your scrapes cleaned up for you. Do you need to transfer any of your wounded?"

"No, not necessary. It's been a couple of days. By the time the ship is all patched up they will be good again. However, we could use some replacements, three good men if you can. Two if they come with good concubines. And a new turret. Some bastard broke one of mine."

Actually, there was one other important item hidden deep in all the data the AAR held: the approach vector of the triad before they noticed Brennan. The reverse vector should closely approach their home system, and it would be prudent to have more of our scouts on that side of the system than elsewhere. This wasn't a guarantee, because they might be poor navigators, or have been diverted, or possibly even just getting smart about this.

It was also a good idea to send a scout to the nearest system in that direction. A couple of centuries ago, a budding rebellion was very well served by having a horseman galloping down the post road screaming "The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!". Yes, Kevin, I'm an American. Deal with it.

After that we settled in and went to work. Ale, the farthest-out planet, was a huge gas giant, just barely substellar, with an unusually high Deuterium concentration (a Confederacy ship stopping by for a quick fuel fillup was what had started this whole mess) and had a whole system of satellites of its own, from planet-sized moons all the way down to dust rings. Okay, they will make a good industrial base, but it's too obvious. I'm not putting my children there.

We sent two of our Explorers, Beebe and Barton, to Ale to start working on infrastructure there with Taffy-2 (Kestrel's group) as escort. I moved into the third Explorer, Hillary, and took her to Ale's forward Trojan point with Taffy-1 (Harpy's group) and had a Factory-sized digester start boring into the biggest metallic asteroid we could find in the center of the cluster. I had Brennan go with Taffy-2 to provide oversight, if needed, and we told Beebe to make her a turret so Larry would stop whining.

What's a digester? That's the back end of a replicator, the part that takes the feedstock apart and makes all the atoms and molecules ready for the front end to rapidly assemble into your hot coffee, your laser rifle, or your automated missile launcher.

We sent Postman back to Brakat and Sol with everything we knew so far and our latest list of requested additional personnel, and kept Pony Express for emergencies. PE could make the next trip.

I also had Athens send the corvette of her choice to the nearest three systems in line with the Sa'arm triad's return vector, stopping if they found Sa'arm and continuing if not. She sent Cartwright, one of our ex-Castle Ainsworths. If, after those three systems, Cartwright had found no sign of Sa'arm, they had a list of systems not too far off the track to check at their discretion on their way back, but to try to be back within a month. Since information was more valuable to us than a meaningless battle, her CO was ordered to, if at all possible, avoid contact with the Sa'arm and to return with as much info as possible as quickly as possible if he found any inhabited systems whether Sa'arm or not.

I don't think it took a whole day before our base got its name. What do you call a deep dark hole that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and provides a safe place for your children to grow? The "Womb", of course. I'm sure I could have gotten the AIs to review all their records and tell me who said it first, but I decided that it was better off as an "anonymous suggestion". The "Womb" it is.

While the digester was digging out the "Vagina", yes, the entrance to the "Womb", get your minds out of the gutter, children, we had a set of remote-control yard tenders start placing an array of sensor stations on about eighty of the smaller, outer Trojans. We gave the stations wide-band receiver arrays on the outside, a whisker-laser transceiver on the inside, a set of small chemical thrusters to keep the asteroids from tumbling, fiber-optics to connect them so that there was no possibility of any emissions on the "outside" of each asteroid, and tied them all together with the stupidest computers we could build. These were sensor stations only, and we wanted to make sure that no one could detect them.

While we were messing with those defense-system sensor stations, we set up an extra sensor station that was focused on Webb's World and turned the take from that one over to Dr. Rasmussen, our field anthropologist. Eventually he would get a pair of pods, one for his family and one for his office, but for now all he got was a sensor/comm tech and a couple of our youngsters that we thought were pretty bright. They were there partly to help, partly to learn how to be helpful, and partly because their young minds were still capable of thinking outside the box.

I didn't give them any demands at first beyond "learn what you can". The first order of business, of course, would be to duplicate Maiden Castle's translator. After that they should concentrate on capabilities and values. Why had they never come out here into space? Sooner or later we were going to need the answer to that question. We had other questions too, but they weren't as important yet. How much of their visitors had they noticed? Did they care?

Next, we set a couple more of the medium replicators to converting one of the smaller asteroids into weapon systems: missile launchers, particle beam generators, the Confederacy's version of CIWS gatling guns, anything that might help chop the heads off of anyone unfriendly who stuck their noses into our hiding place. Those we mounted on asteroids inside the L4 cluster where they couldn't get detected from outside the cluster. They couldn't see out, either, but that wasn't their job. We had sensor stations to tell us if anyone was approaching Ale's L4 position. Their job was simply to destroy anything that entered the cluster, before it could report anything. Before it could learn anything, if they could.

I didn't get too involved with them beyond rough planning about what they should do; this was Bill's specialty and he knew far more about defending turf than I did. I worried about ship vs ship warfare and overall system defense. Defending the Womb itself, if necessary, was Bill's headache.

We also set up some small building frames near the womb, just so that we could have some personnel shuttles to get around with.

The AIs will tell us whatever we ask about probably a million different systems, but it's just facts unless you are actually there. With only 4 planets, this system was far simpler than the only other system that Humans had spent centuries studying, and that simplicity showed here. All of Sol's Trojans (the asteroids in the L4 -leading Jupiter- position) and Greeks (the same thing, only on the L5 -trailing- position) were relatively new. Those Lagrange positions were stable now, but that hadn't always been true.

Lagrange Points are local areas of stability in a two-body system. If there were any other bodies in the system, Lagrange Points were not stable. At best they are "meta-stable" which means kinda-sorta-maybe stable. Sol system had started with three gas giants that were fairly close to each other. Some of the models only worked if there was a fourth one, too. Early in our solar system's development, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune (and maybe the unknown 4th one) had affected each other's orbits until their bickering had pushed Jupiter inward some and the other two out some until they stopped disturbing each other. While this was happening, none of their L4 and L5 points were stable.

It was only after this separation -and this was long after the planets formed and swept their orbits clear- that Jupiter's L4 and L5 became stable enough to collect things. As it happened, Earth and the Moon were also close enough and closely matched enough that the Moon also had asteroid collections at its L4 and L5 positions, but they weren't called Trojans as that term was only used for Jupiter's stepchildren.

Beerat had Mead, a small rocky planet akin to Mercury although it was almost out at Mars' orbit, then Webb's World, a terrestrial planet akin to Earth or Venus but out where Sol's asteroid belt was, then Pils, a larger rocky planet that was too big for us out near Jupiter's orbit, and last Ale, a super-Jovian gas giant out where Saturn would be.

Only four planets, and they were all pushed out farther than their equivalents back home. The star Beerat didn't just sit and spin in the middle, it orbited the center of mass for the whole system, and Ale was large enough that the system's center of mass was almost outside of the central star. The central star didn't spin so much as wobble. Okay, that explained the "pushed out" part; anything farther in than Mead probably never got a chance to accrete into a planet; the wobble and everything else kept it stirred up until there was nothing left.

To the best of our knowledge, there was nothing further out except the Oort Cloud. There were no additional large masses like Saturn to disrupt orbits. That meant that Beerat and Ale had formed a stable two-body system with something like 99.9999% of the system's total mass very early on, and Ale's L4 and L5 points had huge collections of asteroids, some of which approached planetoid size.

Actually, calling Ale "super-Jovian" is misleading. It was far more massive than Jupiter. In fact, it was right on the border between superjovian planet and failed protostar. A little over on the "star" side of that border, to tell the truth. Ale was far warmer than it should be, about the same distance from Beerat as Saturn was from Sol. That heat had to come from somewhere, and it wasn't from accretion. That process ended billions of years ago.

No, down in the core there was just enough pressure for occasional fusion. Call it one-thousandth of Beerat's energy output, if you want to assign a number. Ale didn't glow in our vision range so we didn't think of it as a star, but infrared sensors showed it almost as bright as Beerat. This is a binary star system.

This made us take a closer look at the other planets, and, yeah, they were all locked in resonance with Ale. Pils, for instance, was stuck in a 3:2 orbital period with Ale. For every two trips around the primary that Ale made, Pils made exactly three. Beer was more complicated. It looked like it was trying to be in a 5:2 ratio with Ale, but something was interfering. Probably Pils, maybe its moon. Something for the smart people to figure out.

Hey, look, they have "Hildas", too, a few at least. They have to be captured comets. My old Astronomy professor should be out here. He wouldn't even need a concubine. He loved asteroids; he would probably mess his pants every time he looked in a telescope here. One thing to notice was that the system was remarkably clean. There was no "asteroid belt", all the loose stuff had been swept up long ago, perturbed until it ran into something.

So why, you ask, do we care about all this stuff? Simple: Human warriors are paranoid. If you know a system well enough, you can recognize that an asteroid isn't where any right-thinking asteroid should be. In fact, if it is an odd orbit that penetrates the inner system, it probably isn't really an asteroid; it's probably an attacker trying to sneak in by pretending to be an asteroid. Just kill it.

Anyway, every system had its quirks. The survivor in this fight would be the side that best used its advantages. The spread-out nature of the system meant that anyone who wished could stay in hyperspace almost all the way to any planet, which was good for attackers. The fact that there was almost no system dust meant that shields weren't a constant necessity, and that was good for defenders.

The Womb wasn't the absolute largest asteroid, or even the largest metallic one. It was the largest metallic one in the center of the cloud, though. It was large enough to have compacted into a ball by gravity, and was about 500 km across, or roughly 300 miles if you are a backwards American like me. Hey, we used the metric system without complaint out here, it is a better system, but some of us still thought in feet and pounds.

We were talking about it on Hillary's bridge -the Explorers did not have a separate CIC- and someone mentioned that if you cut it in half, each flat would be about the same size as Washington State. I said "So, both halves would be Washington and Oregon, and we haven't even started on the outside surface or the internal volume. This place might be bigger than Texas."

That got a laugh. "Cain't be. Ain't nuthin bigger than Texas." That was Hillary's lead weapons tech, SSgt Johnson. He was a big black farmer from Mississippi and had a very pronounced drawl. Apparently -I wasn't there at the time and missed most of the jokes- he had had some language issues with a volunteer from India. Those guys may not have liked the British Raj when he was there, but they still prided themselves on their "correct" English, and they didn't deal well with Appalachian English. Somehow he got the nickname "Tex" hung on him, and he still played it up sometimes.

The next few weeks were fairly quiet, excitement-wise, as we had to wait for our base to become usable. Of course we had all kinds of fun with how that was said. "I'm sorry honey, I cannot put any babies in your Womb until I have bored out your Vagina some more. I just don't fit yet" and so on.

We had talked this over quite a lot on the trip out, and I had finally decided to go with my gut feeling to only have one central shaft entering into the Womb. I didn't want anything except communications and defense systems in the Vagina for 20 miles (okay, 30 klicks) or so, so the first digester was single-mindedly boring a 15 meter wide hole straight in. Once it was out of the way we had other digesters start widening the hole with the intention of eventually being 100 meters across, but that wasn't a requirement to actually put the base to use.

We also talked about the wisdom of putting one or more kinks in the tunnel the way medieval castles used to for their main gates, "to make things difficult for the chaps with the rams" I think I read once, but decided that if we ever had Sa'arm shooting straight down the Vagina we had already lost, and having any kinks would make everyday life harder for us so we didn't.

We set up our first "factory" replicator outside the opening and had it start putting together a huge hatch that could slide across that eventual 100 meter opening. To start with, the hatch was made by carving out the right size slab from a nearby asteroid, and we had some more autonomous equipment start building the tracks it needed to move into place if we ever needed to hide. No, this was by no means the next critical step, but until we had more infrastructure and people, there wasn't much else for those huge replicators to do.

While the Vagina was getting bored out, we started popping out all the "pod seeds" we had created back in Sol system. We built a temporary grav grid on the Womb's surface near the Vagina, and as soon as that was ready we started placing pods on it, as close together as we could, gave them pressure-tight access tunnels with transporter pads so that inhabitants could leave the pods as desired, and finally added a power plant to run the grav grid. That also helped the pods develop as quickly as they could.

As pods became available for use, we started emptying the passengers out of the ferry-pods on the Explorers, and all the families got their own homes. We basically gave all the passengers a vacation to get used to their homes and, often, their new families, then gradually recalled them all to work as we came up with jobs for them to do. The plan was for -eventually- every crewman in the fleet to have his or her own home, but they already had a place to sleep on their ship and they could see their families whenever they were free. Those guys were a distant third priority, after the sponsors we had crammed in our ferries with their families and all of the unattached concubines we still had a seemingly unlimited supply of.

This gave me an excuse for giving Hannah and Monique jobs. Tina needed help. She had taken two abused women in as her concubines, which led me to wonder a few things about her preferences in bed, but really that was just her personality. Hannah was a manager, LaRhonda was a nurturer, and Tina was a healer. If we had lived in a suburb in the midwest she would have had all the neighborhood kids bringing her abandoned kittens, birds with broken wings, hamsters with skin problems. She should have been a vet or a doctor. A nurse at least.

Anyway, Tina needed help; she always needed to be in five places at once and her two concubines weren't up to telling men anything they didn't want to hear. I told her to set up a want-ad for assistants that would go on every living space's entertainment console.

Meanwhile, I had Hannah and Monique start spending their days trying to help Tina keep everyone calm. Mostly, that was just having a real human being tell people the same thing the AIs had been telling them: We have arrived and are building infrastructure and will have better homes for them all as fast as we can. None of the three could reasonably refuse to talk to anyone with a question, but there are a lot of people with questions, and some people just can't resist a helpless target.

The vast majority of the people who called with a question were good with their answer; they knew what was going on and had gotten some face time so they knew they hadn't been forgotten. A few of them, though, needed reassurance every day. That was where Hannah was really able to help Tina. She had learned how to verbally smack people up side the head when she was just a corvette's Head Bitch, and it came in handy here.

"We have a lot of people who need homes. We are building a lot of homes. People who ask when their turn is will get put in the back of the line. Asking once is okay, everyone wants to know. But, people who take my time to ask the same question a second time are going to get their homes after everyone who only asked once."

"Some people have real problems, and I stopped helping them to talk to you. If you ask the same question three times then you've established that you're a slow learner, probably too stupid to be a volunteer, and we'll check that next time we review your record for any reason. Yes, I'm just a concubine and I can't give you any orders like shut up and stop whining, but no I'm not YOUR concubine and I don't have to listen to your orders, either. Sure, go tell my owner I was rude to you. I'll tell him, too."

Of course I can get the AIs to give me a recording of every call. If Hannah's being a bitch for no good reason, well, I'll handle that. If she is just doing her job, though, which is to be the Bitch who keeps idiots under control, then I'm completely on her side. We are building a bunch of sensor stations that will get placed out in the middle of nowhere. Right now, they can be unmanned. They will be run by AIs. Eventually they will have missiles, and we will need someone to man them, someone who can authorize weapon use. Maybe that's a good place to put an abusive personality.

Monique wasn't that good at facing down obnoxious people, though. I didn't have her personality pigeonholed yet, but I got the idea that she was more of a nurse, like Tina should have been. We were talking about what she wanted to do over dinner one evening and she asked why we didn't have a news service that you didn't have to have an AI interface in your head to use.

We don't have enough news for a live reporter and talking head, but we could put together a website that gave current news. Can you build a website? No, but can't the AIs manage that? I can tell them what to put on it, and they can figure out how to make it happen. Sure. "Make it so, Number Two." And Monique had her baby to nurse, nurture and defend. Monique became Tina's "public information assistant."

That snowballed quickly. The Beerat Information Website didn't have anything that you couldn't ask the AIs for directly, but it had stuff that you hadn't thought of asking the AIs for. A drawing of the Beerat system. A 3D display of the L4 cluster, showing all the different bodies and what we were installing there.

A similar 3D display of the Womb and the Vagina, showing what had been done already, what was in progress, what was planned, and what was there but temporary, going away as soon as it was no longer needed. That right there, along with Hannah's promise about putting people at the end of the list, ended the constant "When are we getting our home?" interruptions.

The AIs made it honest, reliable, and secure. Monique made it pretty, interesting, and fun to use. One big thing she put up early was a list of things that people wanted on the website. Whatever the most people asked for, went up first. The Womb's construction schedule was, by far, the first request.

We also made each entry commentable, with the comments hidden until reviewed. That turned into a suggestion source that harnessed all of our unused minds. Not all of our concubines were stupid. Some of them were, but then some of our volunteers were too. The rest of the concubines, the children, and all of the still-unemployed volunteers took to the suggestion system like a new video game.

When you ask open-ended questions like "How should we arrange the Womb?", "How can we most quickly expand our fleet?" and "How can we most easily make our ships more survivable and our weapons more powerful?" you get a lot of answers from roughly 15000 people who want to help. Some are stupid, some are already being looked at, and some are completely off the wall and insane but should be looked at anyway.

Okay, there's the next job we need filled, we need a public information office to give out info and take in suggestions. Hmmm, that goes in the very front of one of the 2nd-level tunnels. Let's see, the office needs a Navy guy, a Marine, and a Civil Service guy so that they can look at any question from all sides, but all we have are Navy guys. Maybe a Navy guy, a Marine concubine, and someone with Head Bitch experience until we get organized?

When I suggested that over dinner, Hannah proved that, as usual, she was way ahead of me on people matters. We had 45 ships, and the apartment complex outside the Womb currently housed seven different women who had worn gold coveralls but were too close to giving birth to be on ship. Those women needed something to do.

I had to laugh. Any yammerhead who wanted to argue with THOSE women deserved what they got. And, this would give them a sense of ownership over the whole colony, not just the ship their man was on.

I called Tina on the spot. She looked exhausted, which was becoming usual for her, and I said so. "Honey, are you getting any sleep at all?"

"Tom, this job is impossible! Many of the people cause their own problems and then call me at all hours with their 'emergency'."

"Hannah is wonderful, you knew that before you sent her to help, but she is only one person. I need twenty more just like her."

Hannah interrupted. "Only four. Three of them are people I would not willingly give authority to."

Has Hannah ever been wrong about someone? I didn't blink. "Okay, would four more Hannahs help?"

"Hi, Tina! Um, you need people who can be bitches when needed, but aren't bitches when it's not needed. Frankly, you aren't bitchy enough to do your job well. Now, I happen to know that those closet-sized apartments that hold those second concubines for the fleet have a bunch of concubines that are too pregnant to be on their ships, and seven of them normally wear gold coveralls."

"Three of them really are bitches so I wouldn't recommend that you use them any more than you have to, but the other four would love to have something to do. Tom suggested setting up a 'Public Information Office' and staffing it with those women, and having all calls for you routed through them first. If you man it around the clock and set rules about emergencies, you should be able to sleep whenever you want." Hey, why am I getting blamed for this?

We got to see a slow smile spread across Tina's face as she realized that this would work, and what having THOSE women answering the calls would do to the call volume. And her own mental health.

I prodded her some. "These are normally video calls, right? I thought that maybe they could wear their gold coveralls while they were working for you. I mean, they earned them, and they are still doing the job, right?"

Hannah: "And, if they get too abusive, we can always blame their pregnancy, right?"

Tina had a much bigger smile than I had seen on her in a very long time. Maybe when she held her newborn children for the first time. I'll clear it with the skippers.

"Hillary, please pass a message, routine priority, to all ship COs. Request authorization for any concubine with "Head Bitch" experience who is currently not onboard a ship to help the Civil Service office to the extent that they are medically able. If they have any questions, give them as much background as they need. Although, just attaching the record of this conference will probably answer them all."

(Note from the author: This section is a somewhat 'darker' substory about Tina's special needs. If you don't get off on violence, forced sex, and the disgusting things that perverts do to each other, you might want to just move on to Part 5. -ZM)Next Chapter

I was fine with having Hannah and Monique in my bed every night. We tried the two-beds-and-take-turns thing, but whoever was left out didn't like it. It was better to all sleep together even if it took some getting used to.

The very first pod to be permanently placed in the Womb and put in service was assigned to the Womb's Public Information Office and staffed around the clock by seven pregnant Bitches. However, nothing good lasts. There's always someone who doesn't like the apple cart and has to turn it over. Two days after the PIO opened, when Hannah came back to Hillary for the evening from helping Tina, she brought a friend for dinner. Specifically, she brought Tina Hernandez.

"Allison is a very good cook. However, I need something that she cannot give me."

Of course I smirked. "Well, you knew your girls were missing important parts when you chose them, right? Sure. However, have you cleared this with my Breeding Coordinator? I'm not waking up with my balls cut off because I cheated on her."

"Yes, yanqui, I have cleared it with your Breeding Coordinator. I don't want your balls cut off either. At least not until I'm pregnant again. She can cut them off after that if she wants."

Gee, thanks! And, shit. She has a hundred pet cocks to play with, so she wants something else, something that a male concubine cannot give her. She wants another D&S session. This is gonna get ugly.

Dinner conversation was all about Tina's job, how the Bitches were handling all the stupid stuff for her, and Monique's website. A suggestion was made, not by me, to add a YouTube-type funny video collection. It was further suggested, not by me, that it could be initially populated with videos of all the stupid stuff I had done and said.

I agreed that the womenfolk would love that series. My suggestion was that we could also add, for the men's entertainment, a series of videos of sluts being spanked until they stopped trying to cause trouble. I further offered to help make the videos if they didn't have any handy.

It was pointed out that one of the sluts at the table no longer counted as property and as such was no longer available as an actress for those videos, but that of course the other two sluts at the table would be delighted to star in those videos. There was some argument about the level of delight that said sluts had with the concept of starring in some spanking videos.

It was further pointed out, by one of the sluts who were supposedly so delighted to star in a spanking video, that one of the sluts had as her new job helping all the other sluts in the whole system learn how to accept their position, and that a video of that slut getting spanked would thus probably count, in the AI's view, as a useful training aid to all the other sluts. It was in the end decided, regretfully, that perhaps the funny video concept had not been completely thought through and might be better shelved pending further analysis.

It was so much fun having Tina back in our home. Monique was horrified, of course, at how casually we could discuss beating women into submission, but Tina came to my rescue.

"It's all a matter of perspective. I'm here so that Tom can use his club to beat a particular part of my body into submission, right? Besides, Tom spends all day worrying how all of us -and the Beer too- could be killed and eaten, and how to prevent that. That's a lot more important than getting spanked or not. If letting him work some aggravation out on us helps him do his job, we need to accept that."

She turned to me. "Tom, you've had Monique for two months now. How many times have you spanked her?"

Back to Monique. "That's because you behave, right? You do know that he can if he wants to, don't you? He can do a lot worse if he wants to."

"And that's what you want, isn't it, a man to be good to you and protect you and take care of you?"

"Mostly, yes, but some people also need to be put in their place. I don't think that Tom really understands that. The best sex we ever had was one time when I angered him so much he took me anally."

Say what? You're right, Tom really DIDN'T understand that! I butted in. "You mean the 'Exit Only' thing?"

"Yes. I had a real hard time understanding my feelings about that. It hurt, but it made me feel wanted and needed, too. It made me feel so important to you that you would do anything to make me behave and serve you. It made me feel like a desirable and valuable woman that you would fight to own. And, that brings us to tonight."

She looked up. It's stupid, but we all do when talking to the AIs. "Hillary, I need good sex, and that means a man who makes me submit to him. Tonight I am going to anger Tom so much that he loses his temper and beats me into submission, and then he is going to use me as his sex slave in any way he wants. This is not a volunteer injuring another volunteer. It is just a man establishing that his bitch is going to do whatever he tells her to do. As long as I'm alive when it's over, you should not interfere in any way to protect me. Alive and pregnant, I mean. When he's done beating me any way he wants, he has to get me pregnant."

I looked at her. I looked at Hannah and Monique. Hannah said "I told you Joannie wasn't the craziest woman you owned."

"You two may want to leave after dinner. Maybe you can deal with some of Tina's problem children. While I deal with one of my problem children. Meanwhile, all three of you strip. That bitch..." pointing at Tina "...isn't going to wear clothes in my home, and if a volunteer can't wear clothes then you two concubines aren't either."

Monique just stared at me. Hannah got up and started taking her coveralls off. Tina just smiled and said "You can't make me."

Okay, we could have had a pleasant dinner first, but she wants to play NOW. Fine. I used my implant to ask Hillary if she could prevent Tina's chair from moving. Then, I got up and walked around the table to where Tina was trying to push her chair back. While I was doing that I considered what I wanted to do. I was going to ask Hillary to make some things for us, but I decided that it would be better if Tina asked for them. She would be using them, after all.

When I got to Tina's chair I grabbed her by her hair and pulled her out of it. That got a scream. That's funny, I don't remember her being this light, she's lost a lot of weight since she was with us. That's something I can punish her for, if she wants to be in trouble. She flailed around, trying to get me to let go and also trying to punch, scratch, and kick me.

She almost got my 'nads once, so I punched her in the gut. No, she's moving around too much, I got one of her boobs. She screeched again and covered that boob, so I told her to shut up and punched the other one. She screamed yet again, so this time I got a good punch in her gut. That knocked her breath out and she stopped screaming. Good. I hate screaming, it hurts my ears. I also heard a low voice saying, "Strip, you idiot, unless you want to join her." Hannah to Monique, of course.

I took that opportunity to pull Tina's hands behind her where I could hold them both with one of my hands. That's easy, you have the leverage and they don't. Then I reached around and squeezed one of her breasts. "Why don't you ask Hillary if she can replicate you a ping-pong paddle?"

I squeezed it harder, then reached inside her top and pinched one of her nipples. "Of course you want one. And you are going to keep wanting one more and more until you get one."

So she asked Hillary if she could have a ping-pong paddle replicated for her, and I looked up and asked Hannah and Monique if one of them could go get it for us. I was gratified to see that they were both seated at the table, nude. Very good. Very good indeed. I love Hannah, and Monique is just beautiful.

Hannah nodded to Monique, who went and got the paddle for us. I marched Tina back to my seat and put her across my lap, then took the paddle with a "Thank you, honey".

"Actually, it looks like we are going to need a few other things, too. I'm going to give you a quick list of things we need. If you can get them from Hillary, we'll be fine. However, if you can't get the list straight, I'll help you with it, okay?" And I gave her ass a good swat with the paddle.

She yelled. I said "Please don't yell, I hate that." and paddled her again. She yelled again, and I gave her another lick. We can go on a long time doing this. She stopped before long, though, so I asked her "Are you done yelling?" She nodded. "I'm going to check, okay?" And I gave her a couple more good swats. I bet her ass really hurts. She didn't yell, though.

"Okay, since you're done yelling, we can move on. I want you to get the replicator to make you a soft rubber ball gag that fits in your mouth but is large enough to hurt your jaw, a nylon cock gag that uses my erect cock as a model, I guess three sets of handcuffs, and a dog collar with an eight-foot leash, okay?" Now I need to distract her so she screws it up...

I looked back up at the girls. "Hannah, Monique, I apologize for ruining our dinner like this. And, before we are done here, Tina will be apologizing, too. She really shouldn't have put her needs in front of yours like this, and she's going to be very, very sorry that she did."

"Meanwhile, there is no need for the two of you to stay here and watch this. Why don't you go out for a night on the town? If there is anyone y'all have a hankering for, I can't very well object to you spending the night with them if I'm ignoring you to concentrate on Tina. Or, maybe you can go check out some of those hundred dicks Tina got us."

Hannah made her pro-forma denial. "Tom, I don't want to be with anyone but you."

"And I love you very much and don't want you with anyone else, but I'm going to be busy with this project all night and won't be able to give you the attention you deserve, so I cannot get upset with you if you get it someplace else. If you don't want to get laid you don't have to, but Monique needs to get out of the house tonight. She's already seen too much ugly stuff and it's only going to get worse."

Once the girls were gone I could get back to my current project, teaching Tina to obey. Every man has a little bit of 'Master' in them. Hell, every woman, too. Every man and woman has a little bit of submissive in them, also. Just like everything else involving humans it's a sliding scale. I liked being in charge but I didn't get off on beating women. Tina was right, in order for me to give her what she wanted she had to get me angry first. Well, she'd done that by terrifying Monique again, dammit!

Tina needed the caveman approach. She wanted to be dominated, to have proven to her that I wanted her so much I would do whatever it took to make her my property. On the other hand, Hannah and Monique just wanted to be loved, respected, protected. Okay, Hannah wanted more respect and Monique wanted more protection, but they were far closer to each other than they were to Tina, if you just considered their relationship needs.

I could stay mad at Tina all night by just thinking about how this was going to affect Monique. I had Hillary send a message to Hannah asking her to, as convenient, talk with Monique about the differences between different people and what they needed, and to point out that this wasn't my idea. I was just scratching one of Tina's itches.

Okay, back to scratching. I swatted Tina's ass again with the paddle. "Is your order ready yet?"

No problem. I counted to 20, then repeated the cycle. A swat, and "Is your order ready yet?"

I counted to 20 again, and when I swatted her again she said "IT'S ON ITS WAY!" followed almost immediately by a ding from the replicator.

"We'll see. I'm going to start with simple stuff, then work my way up to harder and harder things until you refuse. When you do that, I'm going to paddle you again until you do what I said, and we're going to keep going like that until you will do anything I say, or my arm falls off. Get on your hands and knees."

Our standard shipboard uniform footwear was as comfortable as a good pair of cushioned bathroom slippers, but we had to call them "boots" just to keep from cracking up when we said it.

Our "boots" may have been comfortable and they sealed onto the bottoms of our uniform suit with something akin to velcro but they were definitely space-rated protective combat or engineering boots. No one would have thought twice about wearing them around an Earth-style construction site with various hazards trying to impale or burn your feet or smash your toes. They were very easy to put on or take off. Tina didn't seem to have any trouble with that instruction, either.

"Very good. Now, using nothing except your tongue, wash both of my feet. You can stop any time you want to be paddled some more."

That ensured that she would keep doing it for awhile, and gave me a chance to think. It also felt pretty good.

After a few minutes I told her "You can stop that and rest, as long as you keep your lips on my feet."

I gave her a couple of minutes, then "Now, without taking your lips off my foot, I want you to undress. Completely. I want to see how red your ass is."

This was a bit more difficult than my last few instructions, but she managed to do it with a good amount of very entertaining wiggling. Her tunic went up around her neck, her boots came off, her suit came off, her panties came off, and last she puddled her tunic around her head on my feet. When did she start wearing panties? She never took her lips off my right foot. I enjoyed watching her undress quite a lot. And, her ass was pinking up nicely. It was clear, though, that she was losing weight, and I wasn't going to accept that without a fight.

"Put your hands behind your head." She did that. "Until I say otherwise, keep your hands there. Now, stand up." Standing up without using her hands was almost as awkward as undressing with her face stuck to my foot, but she did it without argument. We're getting good practice here. And, trained as she had been as a concubine, she stood with legs and mouth open.

"Here, hold this" and stood up and shoved the handle to the paddle in her mouth. These were all baby steps, establishing our relationship. I give orders, and she obeys. I do whatever I want with her, and she does whatever I want, period.

I told her "Stand still" as I walked around behind her, cupping one breast as I did. Her nipple hardened immediately, but her whole breast was smaller than I remembered. When I could reach around and fondle her other breast it was smaller, too.

Tina stood still while I fondled her titties, then slid my hands down her sides to her ass, which wasn't floppy but it wasn't as soft as I remembered and it certainly wasn't as big.

"I'm sorry, how much is that in American pounds?" Strictly speaking, 'kilogram' is a metric-system unit of mass, whereas 'pound' is an English-traditional unit of weight, or downward force due to gravity, but as long as you were in a 1-G inertial frame of reference you could get away with thinking of pounds as mass. Don't EVER use the term 'pound' if the gravity-equivalent isn't known to be a constant 1-G, or everyone who's ever taken a 10th grade science class will look at you like an idiot. And you'll deserve that look, and the comments that follow, too.

"And, how much did she mass when she entered that sleep trainer for her CAP test?"

<Approximately 78 Kilograms.> I started to speak, but Hillary beat me to it. <172 pounds.>

"Thank you, Hillary. Tina, honey, you used to look beautiful. Now, you look like you are trying to be a boy. I don't find boys attractive. I don't have sex with boys. I have sex with beautiful women, and I try to make it as good for them as it is for me. If you want to be a boy, we can have sex the way I would with a boy, but I'm going to try to change your mind about how nice it is to be a beautiful woman. To start with, I'm going to paddle your boy's butt for every kilo you have lost. That should help you remember who you are and what you want to be."

Tina started whining around the paddle. I asked "Would you prefer that we do this in pounds?" Which would, of course, give her 2.2 times as many swats. She shut up.

She should enjoy getting paddled by her owner, enough to look forward to it whenever he wants to do it. I went over to the replicator and pulled all of her toys out, putting them on the table among all the dinner stuff. I took the paddle back from her, wiping the handle on a napkin, and put the ball-gag in her mouth and fastened it behind her head. I also put her collar on, and used the leash to tie her hands together right behind her head.

Then, while she was standing there with her legs apart and her hands behind her head waiting to be paddled, I took the cock-gag and masturbated her with it while I played with her titties until she started having trouble keeping her knees still.

"Do you enjoy that?" She nodded. "Do you want me to finish that?" She nodded again.

"Okay, I'll do that, but not until we've taken care of a couple of other things. First I'm going to give you those nine licks for losing so much weight. When I'm done, you're going to walk over in front of the sofa and bend over. You're going to reach back and spread your little-boy butt as wide as you can, and I'm going to shove the handle to this paddle all the way up your ass."

"After that, I'm going to sit down and take that gag out, and you are going to give me the best head you can. After that, I'll finish this job with the rubber dick. Oh, yeah, you need to keep this rubber dick in your twat the whole time. If it falls out, I'm going to conclude that you've let your twat get all loose and sloppy, and I'm going to be unhappy enough about that that I paddle you some more and we start over again. Are you good with all that?"

I was still playing with her pussy, so I'm not sure she really understood that she was going to suck my cock with a paddle shoved up her ass, but she nodded so I moved on.

She stood still for the nine swats, or as still as she could with my other hand toying with her clit, but she grunted for each one.

Did you ever notice that a ping-pong paddle has a kind of widening at the end, probably to keep your sweaty hand from sliding off? Not the cheap ones from Walmart -those are straight cylinders- but the nice ones? Getting that shoved up Tina's ass took a good bit more effort than I had expected, and she was bleeding by the time I was done. She was also covered in sweat, and may have damaged her vocal cords. I'm sure I would have been deafened, if I hadn't plugged her with that ball-gag first.

By the time I had the paddle all the way in to the smooth part, Tina had pretty much given up the fight. There was no resistance to anything I wanted after that, but I still used the leash again to tie her hands together at the small of her back. I had her kneel in front of the couch and give me head, and then when she was done I played with her titties and pussy and fucked her with the rubber dick until she came. After that I pulled her onto me and laid back to take a nap, her paddle waving in the air above us whenever she moved.

When we woke up, I had recovered enough for the next step in Tina's degradation. First I told her it was time to have sex the way a man would with a boy. I took her gag out and tossed it on the table where it made an even bigger mess in the dishes, then had her get up so I could have her crouch on the sofa with me behind her. Then I worked her rubber dick again until she was squirming, yanked the paddle out of her ass, and, while she was screaming, I put it in her mouth and put my cock where the paddle had been.

I told her to keep the paddle in her mouth until it was clean, and went on about my business of wasting my seed. She still had that "Exit Only" tattoo, but I never taught little Tommy to read so he didn't care. When I was done I held the paddle for her until she had licked it clean to my satisfaction, then I unplugged and had her lick little Tommy clean, too. Only when she was done with that did I use the rubber dick to give her her second orgasm. We took another nap after that, too.

The second time we woke up I took all the toys away and led Tina to bed. Really, this was the same thing we always did with Hannah's "Affirmation Ceremony", just a good deal more violent. And, I spent the rest of the night making Tina happy that she'd come.

When we woke up the next morning I had Tina lick me until I was hard -completely unnecessary but I had to have her put some kind of service-oriented effort into this- and then climb on and ride me one more time. That way, I could play with her titties while we fucked. I also coached her on exactly what I wanted her to say while she bounced on me and I played with her titties:

"I am very happy to be my man's sex toy. I love that my man fucks me whenever he wants. I love that my man plays with my titties whenever he wants. I wish I had bigger titties for my man to play with so he would play with them and fuck me more often. I wish I had a bigger ass so no one would think I was a boy and want to butt-fuck me."

When we were done I took her into the bath and took a shower with her. Her ass had pretty much stopped bleeding, but she was going to need to spend some time with a med-tube to make sure she was okay. After that I let her get a new uniform from the replicator, but I sent her on her way without breakfast. We both had too much to do to dally any longer.

On her way out I told her "I want you to come back once a week for a weighing. As long as you are underweight you're getting paddled and sent on your way after you blow me. We aren't even going to talk about fucking again until your weight is back where it belongs."

I gave the handcuffs back to the replicator to be recycled. I'd never gotten around to using them. Tina didn't really want to be beaten and abused; she just wanted to be so desired that a man would be willing to beat and abuse her if that was what it took to possess her.

(This concludes "Part 4A", a detour about Tina's required periodic episode of D&S. We now return you to your regularly scheduled science fiction story that happens to have some sex in it. -ZM)

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