Chapter 29 – Board of Inquiry

Callee failed to make Sponsor to nobody's great surprise, coming in at a four point eight. Samantha was impressed with her nurturing scores and offered the surprised Irishwoman her sponsorship, which was immediately accepted.

With that, it was felt wise by all concerned if Samantha took possession of her own family pod. There were two available slots in the corridor that her father's pod was in, so after supper that night she and her family moved two doors down. The move didn't take long: her total possessions consisted of two concubines, three dependants, her uniforms, her cat Smokey and her hockey gear. The evening was spent redesigning the pod's interior layout and decoration.

Three days later, Sub-Decurion Samantha Redburn stood in the corridor outside Colonel Deschenes' office, waiting to take her turn in front of the Board of Inquiry. It was an august Board; officials included a pair each of Marine generals and Navy admirals, and a dux – the second-highest rank in the Civil Service, equivalent to a brigadier-general. Their ship, a K'Treel Explorer class, hovered in orbit at that very moment.

Samantha's hair was carefully groomed, her shoes and Sam Browne belt gleaming, her dress uniform spotless. Her wedge cap was perched on her head at precisely the prescribed angle. Under her left arm, her matte white pace stick was wedged firmly and was exactly parallel to the ground. Despite the coolness of the corridor, she felt herself beginning to sweat.

Around her, other high-ranking officers of the Confederacy Navy and Marines likewise tried to pretend that nothing was unusual in standing in a public corridor in your full dress uniform. In the corner, trying and failing to make her two-metre frame inconspicuous, Sergeant-Major Blondell stood stiffly at 'At Ease', right arm straight down, fist clenched, thumb pointing down the seam of her trousers. Like Samantha, her left arm held her pace stick level with the ground, her fingers pointing stiffly forward.

"Sub-Decurion Samantha Redburn!" called out the voice of the NCO the Board had brought with them.

"SIR!" she cried, and winced as her voice squeaked. Her foot slammed down as she came to Attention, and she marched in to face the inevitable.

They had changed the board room: Three tables lined the far wall, behind which the Board sat, generals to her left, admirals to her right, and dux in the middle. Facing the Board, to her left sat the Colonel and his second-in-command Lieutenant-Colonel Chaz Desrochers, both affecting a calm air, and to her right Admiral Vincent Van De Graaf and his second-in-command. Neither managed to muster the same calmness as the Colonel, but they were definitely more successful than Samantha felt.

"Sub-Decurion Samantha Redburn, reporting as ordered, SIR!" The salute was crisp: left arm down, right hand up to the tip of her eyebrow.

"Ah, Sub-Decurion Redburn," the Dux, who apparently was chairing the Board, greeted her. "At ease. We're now about to discuss the actions upon sighting of the Venti. I understand you were in charge of the base?"

"Yes, Sir. I was Acting Governor while the Colonel and the Brigade were away."

"You weren't even a Citizen of the Confederacy at the time, were you, Sub-Decurion?"

"Sir, no, Sir. I was still technically a dependant of my father, Sergeant Robert Redburn. However, I had been operating as an Optio since shortly after arrival on Thule."

The Dux nodded. "I understand you took control of all forces in system at that time."

"Sir, yes Sir. I sent all six available F-105's after the Venti, but they were unable to destroy the target. It managed to survive re-entry."

"Who came up with this battle plan you used on the surface?"

"Sir... well, I did, Sir."

One of the admirals started at that. "Didn't you have any experienced Marine officers to assist you?"

The Dux rolled his eyes. "We've been over this. It was an 'all out' operation – there were no experienced tacticians available in-system."

The questioning went on – and on. They dissected her battle plan, questioned her decision to risk her own neck in the front lines in command of a Rommel, and pondered the suitability of arming 11-year-olds.

At one point, one of the Marine generals asked her, "And just how DO you fuck counter-clockwise?"

His Navy counterparts became quite angered at that – the gibe she'd made at the utterly useless captain apparently stung.

"Athletically, Sir," was her laconic reply. It broke the tension temporarily.

Finally the last moments of the battle were before the Board. "And you say that in the ending moments of the battle you made use of..." the General leaned forward and read from the data pad before him, "...a 1928 fire truck?"

"Sir, yes Sir."

"I find that difficult to believe."

Samantha remained silent. She could see Colonel Deschenes' shoulders silently shaking in laughter. To her right, Admiral Van De Graaf was hiding a tight smile behind his clenched fist.

"Well, we'll deal with that little piece of exaggeration later," the General finally concluded. "Where did you get a fire truck from?"

"Sir, during the incident with Private Al Ghamdi, there was an explosion in a de Gaulle that rendered the vehicle temporarily unserviceable. The standard fire suppression system would not function adequately in the dome, so a supplementary system was designed by the base engineering staff."

"This, I've got to see," the General snorted.

"Well," the Dux advised them, "we're at the point where we can take a break for lunch. We can swing by and see this miracle of modern mechanics."

"By God, it IS a fire truck," breathed the self-same General who had expressed doubts as to its existence. He turned to the Colonel. "I thought you were pulling my leg."

"Do I look like Whitefeather?" Michael asked, feigning emotional hurt. "He'd pull your leg. Not I – not a superior officer's leg."

"Yes. Yes, you would, if you thought you could get away with it. I remember that water fountain."

Samantha didn't dare ask, but merely filed 'water fountain' away for future enquiries.

"And it's nuclear powered?"

One of the crew manning the machine happily popped the hood to give the officer a look-see at the fusion reactor powering the reproduction antique. The General could do little more than shake his head at the sight.

He shook his head a little more as a platoon of red-coated 11- and 12-year-old female cadets marched down the road, as sharp as any body of battle-hardened Confederacy Marines. Loud and proud rang the cadence song, their feminine voices in perfect harmony:

The Colonel remained silent as to the true nature of the Beauty Saloon. He merely directed the five members of the Board and the dozen support staff they brought with them into the decadent, sumptuous Art Deco establishment and onward to the private room in the back. Samantha brought up the rear, nervous and hoping that her staff were on their game today. She needn't have worried.

"Is this the Officer's Mess?" asked the General.

"No, Sir," responded Michael and Samantha simultaneously. The General glanced at the Sub-Decurion and cocked an eyebrow at her.

"The Sergeants' Mess? Surely not the Other Ranks' Mess?"

"Begging the General's pardon, Sir, this is the Beauty Saloon." Samantha felt her face flush.

"The what?"

"The base brothel. Sir."

"The base WHAT?" The General stared at her in frank amazement.

"Brothel, Sir."

His attention shifted repeatedly between Michael and Samantha in disbelief. "This is the base brothel? On most colonies they're this utilitarian bar, especially where Marines are concerned. This place looks like a high-end Manhattan nightclub right out of the 1930's. I half expect to see Myrna Loy, William Powell and Asta to walk through the main doors." Samantha beamed at the praise.

The Grand Inquisition, as many in the Camp Shackleton Officers' Mess had come to refer to it, had yet to wrap up. Ships' Captains and Company Commanders were being driven around the bend by the questions they'd received, the tours they'd been forced to give, the drills they'd been forced to put their men and women through. For the moment, Samantha was advised they were finished with her. The warning, however, was that she could expect a return visit to the podium. She would have to explain how she, a mere slip of a girl, managed to deal with all the issues of the concubines and dependants of the five thousand Marines and a like number of Navy and Fleet Auxiliary types.

Each officer and NCO who had been before the Board, Samantha learnt, had had to answer one ticklish question: "Based on what you knew then, is there anything you would have done differently? What, if anything, would you have done differently if you knew then what you know now?"

For the moment, she felt she could relax and do her real job. Halloween was coming, and so was the Halloween Party at the Beauty Saloon, and ancillary celebrations at the Dependants' Schools at both Camp Shackleton and Base Scott. Apparently, the concubines were planning some sort of surprise entertainment.

Dressing up for the event was a highlight of the colony's activities. Kids, concubines and sponsors were vying for most imaginative costume, and with an AI with a powerful replicator assisting, the sky was the limit.

Samantha's father dressed up as a Highland laird, with his concubines as two comely Scottish lasses. All three were "regimental" under their kilts, or in other words without underpants of any description. His platoon likewise dressed in the same Scottish tartan.

Another platoon came dressed as Union cavalry from the American Civil War, Captain John Butler and the crew of the Halibut arrived in sou'wester (with nothing on underneath), another group of soldiers came as Roman Centurions, and there were plenty of witches, mummies, vampires and ghouls. The Colonel himself arrived dressed in a Hugh Hefner housecoat, Turkish slippers and pipe.

Sergeant Peale and his fellow pilots wore flight suits from the 1950's, with patches from an RAF Vampire fighter squadron of the era. Their thinking was that Vampire pilots were a most suitable theme for Halloween.

Samantha dressed up as a slutty Catholic schoolgirl, with a shirt that left her breasts completely and delightfully exposed and a skirt that ended just above the bottom turn of her buttocks. She hadn't a clue yet what Mickey was dressing up as; the eight-year-old explained she was arriving with some classmates and would get dressed with them. Allison wore a hockey jersey and helmet and carried a hockey stick – she was into deep hero-worship of her sponsor and expressed a desire to learn the game. The youngster's aunt wore a costume that consisted of cat ears, cat tail and leopard spots over her otherwise bare body.

The newest concubine in Samantha's family wore a gingham "country girl" outfit, very low-cut in the bosom and very high-cut in the hemline. Callee was very embarrassed – apparently her former sponsor didn't let her out of the pod at all, so she wasn't used to the high level of concubine nudity of most colonies, and especially that of the Thuleat system. She was about to see a great deal more.

At about 20:00 hours, art teacher Mirelle clapped her hands together and called out, "Bunnykins! All Bunnykins to the dance floor please! Please make way for Thule's dance troupe, the Bunnykins!"

The Bunnykins were not dressed up as Playboy bunnies. The girls of the infamous gentlemen's clubs used to dress far more conservatively than that. The girls of the Bunnykins, all of them eight years old, were wearing bunny ears, a powder-puff tail secured by nanites to the small of their backs, gloves, and shoes that made them look like they had rabbit paws, and bow ties. And that was it.

"Oh, God," moaned Vickie in amused horror at her essentially-nude daughter as Mickey joined the other two dozen or so cute little eight-year-olds on the dance floor, a happy smile on her face.

Samantha gave her dependant a thumbs-up as the music started. She whispered to Vickie and Callee, "Aren't they adorable?"

"Yes," Vickie agreed, rolling her eyes. "Very."

The dance routine itself was fairly tame by Diaspora standards, consisting of much energetic bunny-hopping and kid-friendly dance steps. It was utterly charming and quite innocent. It was also, to the mothers of several of the girls involved, somewhat disconcerting to see so much of their daughters on display. Vickie pondered what her own mother would think, if she knew that her eight-year-old granddaughter was dancing naked in a brothel, not twenty feet from where Samantha had lost her virginity so publicly not a week before. She sternly overrode that thought and concentrated on the amusing, virginal entertainment Mickey and her classmates were providing to one and all.

The next morning saw Vickie awakening in the second floor Party Room. She looked around for her little dancer and spotted her, still in costume (if the abbreviated scraps of fabric could be so considered), unconscious and lying on her stomach. A classmate, likewise still wearing powder-puff tail and bunny ears, was lying on the bed next to her where her parent had laid her at the end of a tiring but quite fun night, one leg dangling dangerously off the narrow bed.

Vickie realized she was leaking. Voice cracking from the excesses of the previous evening, she dared ask the AI, "How many men did I have sex with last night?" She crossed her fingers that this AI was one that her sponsor had instructed to respond to Samantha's concubines' and dependants' questions.

"Concubine Victoria Redburn, you had sex with six male sponsors last night."

Seeing as it said her entire name, that meant that her sister concubine, Callee, must be in the room somewhere. Vickie glanced around and saw the young mother, breast-feeding in the nude and blushing intently. "Have you seen the toilets in action?" Vickie quizzed the girl.

Callee shook her head, mystified.

"You're in for a treat," Vickie advised her, feeling somewhat cynical. She shuffled over to the nearest toilet, of white vitreous china like the others in the line, and settled her bottom down. As she expected, the toilet turned clear as glass.

Callee looked on in horror. "What?" she whispered, not wanting to awaken any of the sleeping bodies scattered through the Play Room.

"It's to help us concubines get over any shyness," Vickie explained. "In order for humanity to beat the Swarm, we need to out-fight them and out-reproduce them, and that means we concubines need to be kept pregnant. So, they're trying to keep us uninhibited so we'll be happy to breed more and thereby we'll get pregnant sooner and more often."

"Do we have this in our pod?" Callee demanded nervously.

"At the moment, they're normal. Be careful what you suggest. If Sam hears you ask that, she might just go ahead and change them."

Vickie had the reward of watching Callee's face display shock as Samantha's voice announced from behind the younger concubine, "That sounds like a great idea! AI, please change my home pods' toilets to work the same as the Party Room ones!"

"See what I mean?" asked Vickie resignedly as Callee stared back in horror. Behind Samantha and her two concubines, the bunnykin who was lying half out of bed rolled over and fell onto the thickly-carpeted floor, not waking in the process. Callee was far too stunned to even react to the noise.