Chapter 11 - Becoming Domestic (ated?)

Ellen looked good when I helped her out of the tube. She was recognizably slimmer. Not as good as Diana at her worst, and not even as good as Ginger was nowadays, but awfully good just the same. And the AI was right. She seemed self-conscious, but someone had taught her to not cover herself up if she was naked and a man wanted to look at her. "What should I wear?"

"Well, as your supervisor I think you're properly dressed right now, but we've got to get you home again and I can't have you walking around like that. Someone would get hurt." Just about every man who sees her, in the fight that ensues.

I turned to the doctor. "Can this replicator get us some clothes? I want her to have her suit available if she needs it but she shouldn't have to wear it all the time."

The AI jumped in before Dr. Weiss could say anything. <Ellen Reese no longer fits her old suit well enough to wear it safely. It is now too large. It will be several days before her body stabilizes. However, we recommend that she keep her current suit for emergency use only and wears other clothing until then.>

Well, I wasn't planning on having her wear that suit as everyday attire anyway, but keeping it in case of emergency makes sense.

"Yes, we get clothes from it all the time when people no longer fit their old clothes."

Hmmm. What should my personal hooker wear? That can deal with changing sizes? "AI, can you give us a wrap-around skirt in plaid?"

I got a display of varying colors. <Please choose a decorative pattern.>

By now I was holding her to me, groping her not-quite-as-fat ass. Not sure how that happened. I turned her around so that she was in front of me and looking at the display. "Honey, which would you like?"

She pointed at one and said "I'd like that one, please."

<How long should it be from waist to hem?>

I stopped supporting her tits, honestly I have no recollection of moving my hands up to them, and moved them back to her hips. I was measuring them, okay? I have to do that. "I think that a foot is long enough to get her safely home. Can we have one of those?"

<Working.>

When the replicator Ding!ed Ellen said "Thank you for getting me that training. This all makes a lot more sense now." She laughed before she continued. "I had been wondering who this Ay-Ie guy was that everyone talked to but never saw." and she fought her way clear of my hands to go get her skirt. "Should I put it on now?"

"Yes, let's see how it fits."

Wraparound skirts are easy to work with, and they don't have to be exactly the right size to wear them. The way her chest moved as she put it on was absolutely fascinating. Did I ever mention that I'm a breast man?

When she stood up straight again I held my hand out to her and asked "I think you need sandals, too. Do you prefer flat or with a heel?"

She backed into me again and said "I would prefer flat, if you don't mind" while I checked her skirt for fit.

"We can see how it works. AI, can we see a display of available flat sandals?" Her skirt fit fine. It really wasn't very long, and it wasn't stretched tight, and I could easily lift it up and fondle her under it, which was my standard for proper fit on an attractive, submissive woman. She even spread her legs when I reached between them. Someone spent some time teaching her how to please men! I held her tits again while she chose a pair of sandals.

Where did all this stuff come from? I think that Ginger, or someone, must have taken one of those food scanners into a mall and walked around every shoe and clothing store. Ginger. By inclination and profession, she was a shopper. She would have seen this immediately as a better way to shop. Walk through every aisle of every store -something I knew she had done countless times before- and have the pattern for everything in the mall.

Oh, God. That practical joke store. Spencer Gifts? And the electronics toy store that used to be Radio Shack before they went under. We were going to have singing fish on our walls and radio-controlled helicopters dive-bombing us. Not to mention leg-humping robot dogs and realistic plastic dog-poop everywhere up here. Radio-controlled helicopters dive-bombing us with plastic dog-poop.

I had to let go of Ellen again to get her shoes, and watching her chest while she put them on was even more fun than the skirt had been. When she stood up with her sandals on I just stared at her, and she turned red.

"I really don't like it, but I guess you should have a shirt, too. Can you talk the AI through getting you one of those blouses that look like you're wearing a man's shirt and you tied it in front?"

I had to turn away from her to talk to Dr. Weiss or it wouldn't have worked. I asked about Ellen's ongoing changes. About the only issue was that she was really going to be drinking and peeing a lot for the next couple of days. Other things, too, but mostly peeing. I should keep drinks available and not have her doing anything that kept her away from a bathroom.

When Ellen touched my arm to let me know she was done, the doctor told me we'd talk more later but for now we needed to get her home. I looked to see Ellen wearing a white shirt that presented her chest very well. It had buttons down the front but it was fastened by a knot right under her breasts. The knot didn't look tight enough to hold anything, but then if it was any tighter you probably couldn't undo it without tools.

We thanked the doctor for all his help and went home, Ellen holding onto my arm with one hand and holding her old rolled-up suit in the other. On the way, I told her "When we get to our cabin I want you to take all that off again. I need to see how you look, and only part of that is how pretty you are. I also need to keep track of how your body changes. Did you hear the doctor say that you were going to be going to the bathroom a lot?"

"Yes, I heard that, and I believe him. I need to go right now."

Okay, the tour can wait another day. We got home as fast as we could. She never mentioned underwear at all. Being denied panties was probably normal to a woman who had been forced into prostitution and been chained and beaten into obedience.

When we got back to the corridor outside my crew's two pods Ellen asked me to hold her suit, and when I took it she started undoing her top. She handed that to me as we walked through the hatch to our pod and was working on her skirt as we walked past the guys hanging out in the commons. By the time I opened our cabin door all she had to do was step out of her sandals and run for the bathroom.

Yes, we had gotten the guys' attention. What should I say? "The med-tubes are taking some of that weight off, and she really had to go. Don't worry about us. We'll be fine."

I got some answers along the line of "I bet she makes you FEEL fine!" but I just waved and closed the door. There were enough women to go around.

When Ellen came out of the bathroom I was sitting at my desk. I had her stand in front of me while my eyes and my hands got to know her. As the protagonist in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" put it, all women are beautiful. Some are just more beautiful than others. Ellen had come to us with ample curves. I prefer my women a bit more slender, but what I saw here should make any man happy. The way she reacted as I played with her would make any man happy.

"Honey, I promised that you could have tonight off and I wouldn't put you to work until tomorrow night, but I won't get any sleep at all that way and tomorrow is a big day. Let's see if I can get to sleep with just some head, okay?"

She said "Okay" and knelt down, but I was still wearing my suit. These things are going to need some changes! I had to take it completely off before she had enough room to work, and by that time we had moved to the bed.

Ellen definitely knew what she was doing! I slept just fine after that. I know she got up a couple of times to visit the bathroom, but I just rolled over when she got back and held a big fat titty and went back to sleep, poking her rear with my erection. I guess she got tired of that because she blew me again sometime in the middle of the night, and after that I didn't notice if she got up or not.

When I woke up in the morning I had another erection, but this time it was for the normal morning needs. While I was in the bathroom I thought of something that had been an annoyance for some time, and I realized how I could illustrate the problem in a fun way.

I waited until Ellen was in the bathroom and asked the AI how to go about making a video presentation. I told it what angle I wanted the presentation to be recorded from, and when she came out I had my suit on and was ready.

"Honey, can you help me with something?"

"Sure. What do you need?"

"I need you to put your clothes on and then be still for a minute while I make a short video. Can you do that?"

"Sure. Just a second."

Watching Ellen dress is NOT as much fun as watching her undress, but that outfit still looks pretty good. She had clearly lost a layer or two just about everywhere, but her chest still looked great. With her loss of weight, they were beginning to look absurdly large, like maybe porn cartoon sized. I don't have a problem with that.

Once she had everything on, I had her kneel on the bed with her feet and ankles hanging off, then bend over until her head was on the bed. That left her ass sticking up and nowhere near covered by that short skirt. I had her move her legs apart to make enough room for me to work in, then told her to freeze right there and not move until I told her to. I promised it would only be a minute or two.

Then I played with her twat, learning what made her twitch until she was nice and wet. I also coached her on the correct answer to "When can I use this?", which was "Whenever you want. It's yours."

With her knowing her part in the movie, I could start filming. I moved to one side to make sure that any men seeing the video could see me, but would be watching Ellen's naked rear end instead, and told the AI "Okay, I'm ready to start recording."

I looked at the pretend camera and started my spiel. "I'd like to propose a modification to our suits", gesturing at what I was wearing. "They have proven themselves useful, but we can make them better. To start with, it's easy enough to pee in them, the opening goes down far enough for that, but we have to almost completely remove them if we need to defecate. That is awkward at best and dangerous at worst. Also, the ladies can't even pee in them."

I moved over to Ellen but stayed to one side, and flipped her skirt up. Not that it was really covering anything in that pose, but it seemed dramatic to me. Then I slid my hand between her legs and touched the middle of her bush.

"If this lady was wearing her suit, the current opening would only go down to about here. The girls can't even pee without taking their suits off. That's not convenient, and it's not safe. And, there are other practical factors to consider."

I stopped stroking her bush and moved to tickle her lips. "Honey, when can I use this?"

She seemed a bit...anxious...when she answered "Whenever you want to. It's yours." but I still thanked her.

I pulled my finger out, shiny with juice, and slid it up past her perineum to her anus, gently pushing on it with my finger. "How about this, honey? When can I use it?"

She lowered her head a bit before saying a good deal more softly "Whenever you want to. It's yours, too."

Finally I turned back to face the "camera" while I slid my finger the rest of the way up her crack all the way to the small of her back. "We should be able to extend these suits' openings farther. If Ellen's suit opening extended all the way around to about here, she would be able to do everything she needs to do while still wearing it. Except shower, I guess. Still, I would be a lot more likely to want her to wear it all the time for safety. Thank you for watching my proposal." And I added "We're done. Can we view it before we send it out?"

<It will be displayed on the wall when you are ready.>

I told Ellen we were done and she could move, and had her turn around to sit on the bed in front of me while we watched our movie. Her nipples stayed hard the whole time she watched herself being shown surrendering her pussy and her ass to me. I thought that the video showed my idea in an entertaining way, so I told the AI it was good, and asked that it be sent to whoever was working on improving our suits.

I kissed Ellen's neck and told her she had done a great job. She asked if she could take her top off, so of course I said "Sure!" I went back to supporting her tits for a few minutes while I licked her neck. She liked one or the other, not sure. Maybe both.

I finally pushed her to get up and told her "I have another erection. This time, I'll let you decide where it goes" while I was taking my goddamned suit off again. We really needed that longer opening.

When I was free of the suit, I turned around to see Ellen also naked, laying on the bed with her legs apart and reaching for me. I hope it was as good for her as it was for me.

We finally made it out of our cabin just before 0800. I had Ellen grab the tray from last night and put all the trash on it, and showed her where to recycle it before we ordered breakfast. This time she knew what she was doing and we both ate decent meals. We ate in our cabin, though, as she said that she'd rather be naked in the cabin than half-naked in the commons, and I approved that message.

After breakfast I showered real quick and got a fresh suit and went to the office for the day. We had absolutely nothing useful to do, so after swapping sea-stories all morning we all broke early on my authority to get a good night's sleep. I said that with a smile on my face and I got quite a few smiles back.

On Earth, having multiple people with no clothes on sit at the same place would eventually lead to some unpleasant health problems. Wearing clothes was a sanitation thing as much as a social more. I had no idea if this would be an issue up here with the AI's medical care, but I didn't want to start something that could come back to literally bite us in the ass. This time I had the replicator make Ellen a longer skirt, almost down to her knees, and I went out and got it before I took her out to eat, back to Jupiter Station at the main mess room where she could see some other people.

We did the small-talk thing while we ate and she got used to me talking to her breasts all the time. We also passed the time with others who came and went. We may all be about to die, but there's no point in being depressed about it.

Since we were just filling time, I gave her the full tour and she seemed interested in it all. Both F12 and Jupiter Station had large picture windows that you could look out of, but it was hard to identify things that were more than a few miles away. We had flashing lights on all our craft, ships and shuttles and miners and barges, but with the Sun blocked by the entire bulk of Jupiter there wasn't much light to see anything else.

There were the stars, of course, and they were glorious even if we couldn't recognize any of the constellations. Earth's atmosphere absorbed a lot of the light passing through it, and that meant that only the brightest stars were seen. Here, there was nothing to block that light and every direction had too many stars to identify any kind of pattern in the brightest ones.

We could also see a couple of Jupiter's moons. Couldn't see the rings, though. Jupiter has rings like Saturn but they are much thinner and can only be seen if you are close enough and almost on the plane with the rings.

One neat thing was that we were approached several times by men interested in trying Ellen out for a night, if I was done with her. The first time I told them that we were trying a long-term relationship but we appreciated the interest. After that Ellen told them herself. As long as she wants to stay with me I'll be happy to have her.

I also got her to talk about herself some, by pointing out that she was beautiful and, with the alien's medical help, becoming more so. Conversation with her had shown me she was intelligent and educated and had a pleasant personality. Any man would enjoy her company.

She told me about her family and how happy they were before the wreck. She was fixing dinner and ran out of something, she didn't even remember what it was any more. She sent her husband to go get it so she could stay and watch dinner, and made the kids go with him to get them out from under foot. She never got her family back from that errand. Instead she got a policeman asking her to identify their bodies after someone ran a red light.

Her husband was crushed when the other car hit his side. Her daughter had died at the scene. Her son had been dead when they found his body, thrown through a window by the impact.

The only living witness was the other driver, who insisted that her husband had run the red light. Her husband had once been an aggressive driver, but had become much safer since they got married and he was driving his wife and children around. He hadn't even gotten a speeding ticket since she first got pregnant. The other driver had a history of traffic citations but because there were no other witnesses he was never charged with anything for this incident. The blame for all three deaths was placed on her deceased husband.

"Did you tell Ginger all that?"

"No. She was looking for prostitutes who wanted to quit doing that. I told her if she got me out of that halfway house I'd do whatever she wanted. She showed the staff a piece of paper signed by the President that said she was working on a UN project with ramifications for the whole world, and she was authorized to assume custody of and responsibility for any inmate under United States Justice Department jurisdiction."

"She told me that she needed someone to take care of a great man who would be good to me, but needed a woman to keep him on track. She said that I should think of myself as your wife. She didn't tell me that you were already married!"

"She also didn't tell you about the aliens, or the war, or the ships, or the fact that she was sending you to Jupiter, either, did she?"

"No. I assumed you were somewhere around Pittsburgh."

"Right. The UN is afraid of panic if word gets around that there are aliens coming to eat us, so it's all secret. Now, anyone with a lick of sense will see that we can't keep it a secret if we are going to get all the people we'll need to build a fleet and an army that can stop them, but I don't think that the UN has anyone with a lick of sense."

Again, that wasn't completely true either. The UN had quite a few people with common sense and leadership ability. They just didn't consider humanity's future to be as important as personal power was. And that was an even bigger secret. The public disorder surrounding an announcement that aliens were coming would be as nothing compared to what happened if the public found out that not only are the aliens coming, but the UN and the governments were concentrating on turning us all into slaves instead of preparing for the invasion. We would never get the support we would need.

"I don't know what we're going to do. As we get this ramped up we're going to need hundreds and thousands of people every day. Diana and Ginger tell me that we can't grow much faster as long as they have to operate in secrecy."

"Can't the UN tell the countries to send soldiers and sailors? Don't they have to go where they are told?"

"Well, yes, but it's not that simple. The younger sailors have mothers who want to know what their baby boy is doing today. The older ones have wives, and eventually children who what to know where hubby and daddy went. My own two children have been told that their parents both drowned in a fishing accident. It works, sorta, for individuals, but once we start taking complete crews of a hundred men the public will know something's going on. In the US, it would be best to just tell them. The average man on the street wouldn't care. We've fought everyone else and won, aliens would be no big deal. We see movies about it all the time."

"Europe and most of our allies would also be fine. The rest of the world, though, wouldn't do as well. There are ethnic groups all over the world who only leave their neighbors alone because Big Brother is watching them. Hell, even in the US the KKK waylays blacks and the black supremacy groups waylay whites whenever they think they can get away with it. They don't bother with whether their victim has done anything; it's enough that they are the wrong color or talk funny. Let them think that we're too busy looking up to watch them, and there will be vicious little ethnic 'cleansing' wars all over the world."

"That's horrible."

"And that's why we are putting up with this secrecy while they try to figure out what to do. Thankfully, it's not my problem. My problem is getting the ship underway, training my crew, and taking care of you."

<Captain Edelmann, your wife has sent you a video message.>

"Oops. Is there a priority or importance assigned to it?"

<No.>

"Very well, we will view it in our cabin. Ellen, we'd better go."

"Okay."

We sat on the bed, the way we had to review our home video. Ellen asked if I wanted to view it in privacy but I said no.

Diana was sitting behind a table, wearing her pink suit and trying to avoid laughing. "Dear, I just got shown the most amazing little video by one of our researchers. I think he wanted me to see proof that you were cheating on me so that I would be willing to cheat on you. So, first off, I want you to tell me that the lady you were using as a demonstration model was Ellen Reese, the one Ginger sent to you. If so, hi Ellen! We hope you are doing fine and Roger is taking care of you."

"Second, why did you never tell me you wanted to do that? I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it, but you have never hurt me on purpose. We could have tried it. Although, I don't know how we could make it safe to put anywhere else afterwards. Maybe soaking it in bleach for a few hours would do."

"Ginger and I love you! We hear that your ships are arriving soon. Please tell us before-hand if they make you do anything dangerous, okay? Love you!"

I asked the AI if we could send a reply. Yes. Can we set a priority of 'normal'? Yes. Good. Ellen and I talked it over again, and she put her short skirt back on for this one. I was thinking of that and her tied-shirt top as her 'naughty schoolgirl' outfit. This time we were standing in front of the bed, side by side.

I was going to be the whiner, complaining about how hard everything was out here without her. Ellen was going to be cheerful, happy, and delighted at how simple her job was. I wanted her to exaggerate about how easy it was to take care of me. It was okay to insult my dignity, as long as she didn't out-and-out lie.

I started. "Hi, honey. You seem to have given us conflicting instructions. For my part, I'm supposed to take care of Ellen, keep her safe, and give her a good home. Did I get that right, or did I miss something?"

Next was Ellen's turn. "Hi Mrs. Edelmann! I'm Ellen Reese, and yes I was the model in that video. I'm having a great time. I have a very easy job. Ginger Davidson hired me to take care of an important man who needed a woman to keep him focused, and then she brought me to you for an interview. Neither of you bothered to tell me that you were talking about your own husband!"

"At any rate, Mr. Edelmann is very easy to take care of. I wiggle these..." she shrugged her shoulders, making her chest heave "...and wag that..." she turned away from me and wiggled her rear "...and he comes running."

"It's no trouble at all. He gets a couple minutes of exercise, and I'm done. He's asleep. What am I supposed to do for the rest of the night? In the morning, I bend over while I'm putting my shoes on. It doesn't seem to matter whether I'm facing him or not, as long as I'm naked and I put my shoes on first. He looks at me, I point out that he's married and we shouldn't be doing anything, and BAM! another minute or two of exercise and I'm done for the day. It's no trouble at all. This is a GREAT job!"

My turn again. "But, I am much healthier again, and there's no telling when during the day she's going to come tell me that it's time to exercise again." While I was talking Ellen was climbing back on the bed facing away from us. "And, that's a problem. She has to wear her emergency spacesuit to be safe, but if she's wearing it she can't do her job." Ellen had gotten on her knees and elbows again with her legs apart, like the previous video.

"That's about it. Something is going to have to give. Either my instructions to keep her safe have to change, or her instructions to keep me happy have to change, or the suit has to change so that she's safe while she's working. For that matter we're having trouble when I wear my suit, too. Okay, I hear someone calling me. I have errands to run. Gotta go! Love you! Say hi to Ginger for me!"

I told the AI that we were done, then pulled my suit off and plugged in. I would never choose Ellen over Diana or even Ginger, but you can't argue with the facts that she's very attractive, she's very pleasant company, she's very skilled in bed, and she's very here. Ellen had a good point. A couple of minutes of exercise and I was done for the night.

I don't care if she wants the left or the right side as long as she chooses a side and I'm behind her, holding onto something good. I woke up to another blowjob sometime, but that was it until the AI woke me up to let me know my ship was in the system and headed for Jupiter. It was finally time to go earn my paycheck. I kissed Ellen and got up, telling her that she was on vacation until we got back.

That last interview with Admiral Sykes was just a formality. I hadn't completely gotten my way; we were divided into several separate crews, but I had at least partly won. My crew had been loaded with the cream of the people.

My XO was RAN Commander Richard "Dickie" Wilson. He was also slotted as my Weapons Officer. He had been skipper of an Australian boat before he lost a couple of limbs in an accident on his boat and retired. The med-tubes had no problem with that; he just had to stay in the tank overnight and he was fine. He had far more time thinking about tactics and weapons use than I did. I had no question but that he was going to be an outstanding starship captain.

My Chief Engineer was Lieutenant Commander William Littles, still active duty RN, and his previous posting had been as ChEng of one of their Astutes. I could count on both Billy and Dickie to be properly paranoid as good boat sailors should.

Billy's senior engineering tech was a US Navy mechanic, Chief Petty Officer Gaillard, and you could easily get confused by asking for "the Chief" in their presence. In the US Navy, department heads were referred to by their position, as in "The Navigator" who ran the Navigation Department, or "The Weapons Officer" who ran the Weapons Department. Those were often shortened to just 'Nav' or 'Weps'.

"The Chief Engineer" was normally shortened to "ChEng", pronounced like the Chinese name "Chang". Everyone else was addressed by rank, as in Seaman A, Fireman B, Petty Officer C, or Chief Petty Officer D or simply 'Chief' D. However, all of the Commonwealth navies shortened the title "Chief Engineer" to simply 'Chief'. so if I went back to the engineering spaces and asked for the Chief I was likely to get both men.

Almost everyone in my crew wore dolphins. Admiral Kennedy didn't, but he understood my point about experience and had concentrated his recruiting on active and retired submariners. The only important slot in my crew who didn't wear the pin was my Navigator. He had never been in any military service but he had a doctorate in Cosmology and we hoped he could lead us home if we got lost.

My Ship's Doctor was a US Army research guy named Edmund Ellison Ortega; because of his initials people called him "Doc Smith". I couldn't see Doc staying with us after we became operational. Before we went out on patrol we'd lose him and get an IDC, an Independent Duty Corpsman, in his place.

Any ship needed a general practitioner to deal with colds and warts and hangnails and the clap. A warship also needed a fully-qualified trauma surgeon for the accidents and wounds that shipboard life and combat would provide. There were never enough doctors to put even one on each ship, much less two. The surface community solved that by putting a hospital on each large ship; the small boys could transfer their serious cases to the carrier. That solution didn't work for ships that worked alone, like small patrol craft or submarines.

To fill the gap the Navy took the best of its enlisted medical staff and ran them through a "doctor lite" school pipeline that gave them the basics of everything, with just enough actual time in a hospital trauma unit to be able to look at a sucking chest wound and say "Yeah, I saw that once. I think I remember what to do". They called the graduates Independent Duty Corpsmen, or IDCs.

If the ship had any choice at all, any seriously injured or wounded would be evacuated to a hospital with doctors AND nurses, but that was the whole point. Submarines were usually on independent duty with no help available at all, but at the same time they were major warships that needed to stay on station no matter what happened, and so we got the best medical support the Navy could provide. That was an IDC.

If they had a doctor to defer to, they would. If there was no doctor around, they had the authority, with the Captain's permission, to perform any operation and prescribe any medication. If you had appendicitis they were supposed to be able to remove your appendix and save your life. Making the incision neat so the scar healed cleanly was something for you to take up with the specialists later.

Anyway, Doc Smith was far too valuable to the overall war effort as a REMF researcher learning about how space and humans got along together for us to keep him in the long run. For now, though, during this early time when we were learning everything at once, we had him and, to quote Bill Cosby, "we were thankful".

Still, with the sleep-trainers I bet just about anyone could get his education. Maybe not all the skills he spent decades learning, but the raw knowledge was probably available to anyone who wanted to be a corpsman. And between the AIs and the med-tubes, getting the correct diagnosis the first time would probably become the norm, too. Doc's profession might become obsolete!

For my Pilot and Lead Helmsman I had been able to get Miguel Hernandez from my shuttle trip out here. Any of the bus drivers probably would have been fine, but I knew and trusted him. The rest of my people were the same sort of solid, the kind of men I wanted at my back, but they couldn't be called experts in their field until they got a chance to actually work in it. None of us could.

We all got annoyed when it became clear that we weren't going to get to see any more aliens, or even get to see the ships arrive. There wasn't much we could do about it, though. It was just another gentle reminder that we weren't getting the latest and best technology these guys had, just the bare minimum they thought they could get away with sending us.

We were all waiting to see some great ship sliding in to a parking spot a few miles away from the Station, maybe followed soon by a couple more. What we got was an announcement that eight of the ships had been delivered and were available for our use. Where were they? Behind Ganymede.

Now, the Station and all the freighters were just inside of Amalthea's orbit and a bit south of the rings. In fact, we were mining both the rings and the inner moons for materials to build the Station and other things from.

Before anyone complains about us destroying these moons, you have to understand that they weren't going to be around much longer anyway whether we mined them or not. And there was no way we could eliminate the rings, since they were continually maintained by dust created by meteorite impacts on the moons. That's where the rings came from. They were just dust which drifted off the inner moons since they were too small to have significant gravity.

The inner moons were all in the slow process of being drawn into Jupiter itself. The Astrophysicists said that the two innermost were already inside Jupiter's 'liquid Roche limit', where anything liquid would fall apart due to tidal stresses, meaning the difference in Jupiter's pull between the nearest part of the satellite and the farthest part. If the satellite was so close to Jupiter that the nearest edge was pulled towards Jupiter more strongly than everything holding the satellite together, the satellite would disintegrate.

Liquids didn't have any structural strength, just gravity and the ionic and covalent chemical bonds, what we saw on our scale as water's surface tension. These satellites were already inside the range at which if they were made of liquid they would have come apart and been gone. The 'solid Roche limit' depended upon the strength of the solid, and for these concretions of ice, rocks, and dust, they had to be pretty close to that limit, too.

So, the innermost two moons were going to be coming apart on their own anyway. We were taking everything we could, first. Not that we really needed several cubic miles of pure ice, but the miners produced that as a waste product while going through those moons looking for the minerals that they actually wanted.

I expect that, once those two innermost moons were gone, the miners would move to the next inner moon and keep going. I also heard discussions about this just being a training center. Once the miners knew what they were doing, they would go somewhere else with better resources but farther from help. They were just on Jupiter's innermost moons because they were the closest to help if they needed it while they learned how to mine.

Anyway, the first eight ships had been 'delivered' to the other side of Ganymede, one of the four Galilean moons. Those were the four moons that were so huge that Galileo saw them when he first looked at Jupiter in his new telescope. I had this mental image of a container ship on the Miami-London run being told to swing by Bermuda, pick up eight containers, and deliver them to the Azores. The ship had gotten near the islands, slowed down, dumped the eight boxes in the ocean, said "here they are", and ran for London, trying to make up the lost time.

When I bitched about that to the AIs, they replied that if I added that the containers had been dumped on the other side of an uninhabited island because the nearby inhabited islands held cannibals, my analogy was remarkably close to the truth. Further, the next set would not be delivered until we had moved this set over to our facilities.

Was this evidence that the delivery people were even more afraid of us than the Darjee? Were they a particularly paranoid group of Darjee, or were they a different species? The AIs refused to answer any speculation so all we could do was entertain each other with ever more outrageous theories. My favorite involved little green men who had been performing proctological exams on unsuspecting farmers for centuries, and were afraid that we would be doing the same things to them now that we had our own ships. Hey, turnabout is fair play.

Great. We had already decided to go get them and bring them closer, since Ganymede was outside of transporter range. We'd have to take shuttles to get there, get them started up, and move them closer before we could use transporters to come and go. This last twist, that we would get no more until these had been moved, was surprising, though. If we wanted deliveries to continue as fast as possible, we would have to go get them before we could take the time to learn what we were doing. Did I say 'Great', yet?

We were staging out of Jupiter Station for this, since it was the most important thing we'd done since we got here and everyone wanted to watch, help, and kibitz. Certainly, we had plenty of room for a final briefing before we loaded up the shuttles and took off. I took the time to call our people together and let them know the latest orders, as in "I had a final conference with Admiral Sykes last night, and we negotiated a mutually acceptable compromise about some of his ideas. He told me what he wanted, and I stood there and said 'Yes, sir' a bunch of times."

I let the chuckles die down before continuing. "One thing he put his foot down about was our companions. We know very little about the ships we are getting, beyond the fact that they were mothballed before our own species even arose on Earth. The AIs have been incredibly helpful, but they know nothing about these ships so we are going in almost blind."

"Anyone who has worked with salvage, turnover, or recommissioning mothballed ships knows that the first priority is making sure the ship is safe for the workers and crew. Until the ship has been certified as habitable, no one except the crew will be allowed onboard. No research people, no tourists, no personal companions. Sorry guys, we are all going to have to go back to sleeping alone for a couple of days. Think of it as incentive."

They all laughed for a minute. "Next, I'm the Captain. I get all the credit for everything you guys do right, and I get all the blame for everything you guys do wrong. We're going to have to move slowly on the environmental systems, and the Admiral wants to make sure I'm around to take the heat if anyone dies. To that end, I get to be the first man to set foot in the ship, but I don't get to be the first man to take his helmet off. I, the ChEng, and Doc Smith will be the last three to break suit integrity. No one will break integrity until Doc Smith has reported to me that it's safe, and I have authorized it."

"Once we've boarded the ship, if everything seems right we'll have three guinea pigs try it. If they seem okay after an hour, we'll authorize half the crew to take their helmets off. An hour after that, we'll have the three guinea pigs suit up again, and the rest of the crew can take their helmets off once the first three are back on their canned air."

"Until further notice, that's going to be our policy. We don't know what we're doing yet, and if there are any humans on the ship at all, we will maintain a safety team completely suited up at all times. That team will not break integrity until their reliefs have been suited up for five minutes. If we push the wrong button, or an ancient hull plate gives out, our only chance to survive will be those safety guys who are already suited up and can take actions to save the rest of us. Are there any questions about that?"

Some murmuring, but again none of this was new. "Last, we've got four shuttles available for our use and we're using all of them. Unless they are swapping out, one of them will remain docked at all times. That shuttle will be our safe zone until we have the ship under control. All meals will come from the shuttles. All drinks will come from the shuttles. All sleeping will be done on the shuttles. I'm hoping this will only take a couple of days, but if necessary we will rotate the shuttles back here to refuel and resupply. Are there any questions about any of this? Any relevant questions at all? Okay, if not let's load up and move out."

I spent a minute giving Ellen a good hug and promised to be back as soon as I could. Meanwhile, she was on vacation. She should be resting and recuperating from her weight loss, and talking to the AIs about what else she could be doing to help us out. I told her, if she had any problems, to get with Diana or Ginger. Looking back, I don't think she did any of that. All she wanted to do was be a housewife, raising her children and taking care of hubby.

Since we didn't know what we would be doing, we had four shuttles assigned to this operation, and between all the crews we had about twenty pilots available for them. All four shuttles had several med-tubes set up in the cargo bay. The shuttle's AI wasn't smart enough to do brain surgery, but if nothing else it could seal the tube and put the occupant in stasis for transport.

I had some say in the last-minute decision-making. We only had 54 people total assigned to my crew. Each shuttle could carry three crew and 32 passengers, so we ended up putting everyone in two of the shuttles and we kept the other two empty for emergencies. Once that was decided, it was just a minute to load everyone by the shuttles' normal transporter pads, and we could get underway.

We had been warned that the ships were empty, with no crew. There would be no one to welcome us aboard or formally transfer ownership or even command. With that said, the AIs recommended that each ship be boarded first by the assigned commanding officer, who would assume command and then authorize others to board.

That meant that I had to board first, all by myself. Do you have any idea how many times that plot element has been used in bad science fiction movies? The intrepid explorer slowly edges into the open hatch on the derelict ship.....

Our shuttle's AI was linked to the ship's AI and got clearance for a close approach while the other three shuttles hung back about 10 klicks. Unless we had an emergency, they would not approach until our first shuttle had undocked and was well clear, and even then only one would approach at a time.

The bus driver took us in to 100 meters and did a couple of loops around the ship to give us a good look and let the shuttle's sensors build a complete model of the ship's outside.

The ship was a rough flattened cylinder about twice the length of our shuttle with a rounded end and a flared end, something less than 100 yards long. Okay, the shuttle's AI drew us a holographic diagram with dimensions, about 80 meters long and about 18 meters across at the widest. The flared end held the nozzles of a reaction propulsion system, one that ejected something in one direction so that the reaction pushed the ship in the opposite direction.

The rounded end and the sides of the cylinder had equipment, bulges, and projections that we had no way to identify yet. Just about the only thing we could recognize for sure was a personnel hatch on one side that looked about right to mate with ours.

If you've ever seen concept drawings for NASA's original design for the space shuttle -the one that was a lifting body with no wings- before they got told to scale it back to something cheaper, you've got a good idea of what the ship looked like. It had a gun turret on each side and several other protrusions that made it clear that this was not intended for atmospheric flight, but other than that it looked like a lifting body.

Once we were done with our eyeball inspection and assured that the shuttle's sensors had recorded everything possible about the ship's outside, we stopped relative to the ship to look the imagery over.

The shuttle's AI could help with that, and it was in communication with the AIs on the other ships for increased brainpower. The clear space in the front of the passenger compartment was filled with a hologram of the ship. The AI was able to identify quite a few of the external features, and the ship's AI itself identified everything else.

Propulsion support, attitude control, sensors, weapon systems. Our shuttle's AI was not willing to get any deeper into analysis of that last category than identifying three different items, but it agreed that the ship's AI could do that for us when we were aboard. One of them was an ominous-looking hole in the very bow, sort of like the air scoop on a Formula One racing car. There were also two windows up towards the bow, and I thought it funny that the hologram listed them as "passive sensor systems".

Our shuttle's AI said that the ship's AI had verified that there was only one external access, the personnel hatch we had already found. Huh? Even our tiny shuttles had three hatches. If there's only one hatch, how do you get out if the hatch gets damaged? For that matter, how do you replace machinery larger than the hatch?

Eventually there wasn't anything else to do but try to dock. Squadron was staying in contact through the AIs so I checked with Admiral Sykes but he had no further guidance; it was still my show. Our driver got clearance from the ship to dock before we moved in. The ship held steady while we approached, and the bus driver maneuvered to use the shuttle's forward hatch.

The shuttles had three hatches. The cockpit or control station was on the upper level and looked somewhat like the cockpit of a passenger jet. Continuing the analogy, where most jets had a passenger door on each side right behind the cockpit, our shuttles had a single personnel hatch on the starboard side.

On the bottom level, both the front and the back opened up exposing the entire cargo area, but each end also had a small personnel hatch that was the same size as the ones on all the pods. That front small hatch was the one that was right under the pilot's nose, and that's the one he wanted to use. It was the only one of the three that had any kind of airlock chamber.

As previously planned, the bus driver for our shuttle announced that he was standing by for docking and gave the order for all personnel to seal their suits. Then he sat back and did nothing else until the shuttle's AI reported to him that all us personnel had complied with that order.

Yes, we had an airlock, but why take chances? What if something on this relic failed? What if the hatch mechanism didn't quite mate? The AIs had assured us that the mechanisms were compatible, but the AIs weren't the ones who died if anything went wrong. We all put our helmets on and waited. Until we heard the docking mechanism latch, we had nothing to do. If anything went wrong here and our shuttle was disabled, one of our empty shuttles could plug into our ass and take us off.

That status check was fairly automated. When I was proving I could drive the bus I had delivered replacement people to different mining stations a couple times. The control station up front had a life support status board that displayed a rough diagram of the shuttle. There were separate sections for the control station, the passenger area, the cargo area, the area surrounding the shuttle, and the other side of all three hatches.

Right now, the inside of the shuttle should show a soft grey in all sections; everything was normal. All of the outside sections should show a rather painful purple. Don't go there.

Also, for every place a person should be, there was a separate indicator for the occupant's status. Dark grey if the station wasn't occupied, green if the occupant was healthy but not in one of our suits, light grey if the guy was wearing one of our suits, and white if the suit was completely buttoned up. If there was a health problem, the color shaded through pink and red to a deep strobing purple if he was dying. If we actually lost someone, that station was supposed to show grey with a black X across it. I hadn't actually seen that yet, except in training exercises.

For now, everyone should check themselves. If they liked their neighbors, they might look around and make sure they were okay, too. We hadn't gone into too much detail here, as we hoped this would be a one-time thing. If we saw something we didn't like, we should say something. Absent anyone screaming about a suit problem, though, when the environment board showed all white the pilot could assume that everyone was suited up.

We'd talked some about the future. Someday we'd probably have Heinlein's Drop Marines, and their suits would have armor, weapons, flying jets, and a readout on the chest so that Sgt. Rock could see that Pvt Peterbeater was hyperventilating. We didn't have any of that, yet.

Personally, I wanted something that slid on one of my sleeves that would give me a readout on environmental status. Something that might be AI-programmed, but definitely not AI-driven. Something completely independent that would blink red if O2 partial pressure dropped below 190 mb or CO rose past whatever we decided. Something that told me everything that the front panel on a boat's atmospheric analyzer would tell me. Something that engineers on watch would wear. Something else to develop. Again, we didn't have that yet, either. We were in a hurry to get ships moving.

I was sitting in the front row with Billy and two junior officers. Dickie and Doc Smith were in the back row, and Dickie ordered Doc to do a quick check on everyone and report to the pilot if everyone was sealed. That's the XO's job, make sure that all the details are done correctly so that the CO can worry about the big picture.

A few minutes after Doc came back from reporting, the driver said he was going for dock -none of us were astronauts but we had all grown up listening to Houston talk to the NASA shuttles and all, and we had pretty much settled in on the way they talked without any argument- and we could feel a little motion as he took us in the last few meters.

As we had previously established, the docking port was a standard Confederacy setup that had a mating ring on each vehicle, plus enough shock-absorber-equipped guides to ensure that even if you came in a couple feet off-center you got redirected to the correct alignment. That had been one of our major concerns. If the ship hadn't had a matching docking port, we would have had to rig up something like a boarding tube, and at our skill level we just didn't want to go there.

The impressive part, to me, was that the whole setup was hermaphroditic; any docking port could mate with any other docking port. You didn't have male ports on shuttles and pods, and female ports on ships and stations, they were all hermaphroditic. Any docking port could mate with any docking port. If there was any reason to do it, you could dock a shuttle to a pod, or put two pods together, or even put two stations together. About the only limit was that you couldn't do it upside down. It only worked if both sides were the same orientation.

Again, it was clear that these people had been doing this for awhile. You couldn't see it when you were docked, but surrounding the metal-to-metal seal that we walked through was a large rectangular area that contained every other connection that might be needed: data ports, power plugs, ventilation conduits, water pipes, recycling/sewage lines, anything the Confederacy had thought might be useful.

The thing that made it universal was that every connection was paired. If there was a data port socket in the upper left, there was a matching data port plug in the upper right. When you docked with another docking port, your plug on your right got connected to their socket on their left, and their plug on their right got connected to your socket on your left. If there was a water pipe on the right side with a male probe, well, there was another water pipe at the same place on the left side with a female fitting that accepted the matching water pipe probe. And, of course, every connection had positive shutoffs so that if either side released you didn't lose all your air, water, sewage, or for all we knew neutrinos.

Since I'd done this myself with these shuttles on our own mining machines, I knew what I was waiting for. Soon enough, we felt more than we heard the latches lock into each other, and our driver said "Captain? We're docked. It's your turn."