Chapter 9 - This Isn't Stable

After I'd been out at Jupiter for long enough that the days were beginning to run together, Doc Sorenson came out with his team of implant-adjusters. Diana and I were sending emails back and forth, sometimes two or three times a day. In one of them she asked me to see if I and a couple of trusted buddies could be at the station to meet them. Sure, I can bring several of the guys I work with. Why? Do they need porters for their equipment?

She wouldn't say, and I never found out why until the shuttle showed up. We had been getting more people out here every day, with the shuttles dumping 10, 15, or even 20 out before, so the crowd that popped out in the transporter room wasn't any big surprise, but one particular person was.

That shuttle had the becoming-normal dozen or so new recruits, people to run miners and build structures and learn ships. Doc Sorenson brought a second doctor, one from the Air Force. Colonel Weiss had specialized in controlled-environment medicine like our space stations and some of the Air Force's classified programs that no one admitted existed, and he should be very helpful out here. Doc also brought out a half-dozen rather competent-looking men for security, since his mission out here was likely to cause some trouble.

I didn't hear any of the introductions, though. One of the last people to step off the pad was Diana, wearing that form-fitting pink suit and looking better than she ever had, even when I first met her. I didn't pay any attention to anyone else for a while.

There was an old Rock singer named Joe Cocker who recorded a song about a woman doing a strip tease, named "You Can Leave Your Hat On." Every time I saw Diana I thought of the refrain from that song. "You give me reason to live!"

When I started noticing my surroundings again, a dozen or so men were all saying the obvious: We need women up here. Well, yeah. Duh. I'd dealt with that all my married life. Anywhere we went, the men wanted their own Diana.

Guys drooling in Diana's general direction weren't a serious problem in Norfolk or Bremerton, or even Kings Bay or Groton, because anyone who wanted could go off-base and conduct their own talent search in their free time. Here, though, that wasn't an option. I let Diana go a little, and asked "What have the guys been doing, back down at Freighter 2?"

Diana was still working for Admiral Kennedy, and since she was dead like me she had to stay up there on the freighter along with most of the crew. "The ones who can are going home every night. The ones who can't are getting cranky. And I've been propositioned more times than I can count. That's why I'm here now, so I don't have to deal with questions about why I sleep alone."

I stated the obvious. It's what I do as an engineer and safety inspector. I point out problems that people are ignoring, hoping they'll go away. "This isn't stable. Men need women. You and Ginger and the Admiral are going to have to do something to get women up here."

"We're trying, but your test is making it almost impossible. Any women who pass your test are happily married like me, or they have a good reason not to be like Ginger."

I stiffened. The test was still a secret, up here. Everyone who had been sent up after me knew, as they had had to pass the test and convince the Admiral and the AIs that they could be trusted just to get here, but the 80 or 90 men who arrived before me still knew nothing about it.

"We'll talk about that after Doc has done his job, okay? We've got to do something, though. This isn't stable." Which is engineer-speak for "That machine is about to start throwing pieces out. Why aren't you hiding behind something solid?"

"Ginger has a bad solution for the problem, and she's trying to get the Admiral and the AIs to authorize it once as a test. Since this is a UN operation, she wants to have someone from their headquarters up in New York go out and hire about twenty ladies for a weekend party. There has to be someone up there who knows how to do that, and we all know there are women who make their living doing that."

She continued "If we hire twenty 'escorts' for the weekend, we can send them up to Freighter Number Two. They'll get screened for medical issues and asked to find someone on the ship that they'd like to spend the weekend with. We don't know how it would work after that, but if some want to stay we should be able to allow it. Any of them who want to go home can go back in the med-tubes and forget all about where they've been."

I could see all kinds of ways that that experiment could go wrong, but things were going to go wrong anyway, if we didn't start getting women up here somehow. "Bad solution is right, but that's the traditional way of handling servicemen far from home, you hire a bunch of local hookers to keep them happy. Has the Admiral pointed out to the AIs that this is the normal method we use, for dealing with this problem?"

"Yes. We have a tentative agreement to run it as a one-time experiment and then analyze the results. If it doesn't cause too much trouble we'll see if we can get more on a longer-term agreement and send them up here for you men. That's the real reason I'm here on this trip, to make sure you don't forget about me when all those paid dates show up."

I pulled her tight again. "There's no chance of that, honey."

"I hope not. I'm pregnant again. It's not nice to get a girl pregnant and then leave her."

My wife is pregnant again! I ignored everyone else for awhile again. When we came up for air again I told her the truth. "It's what sailors do, honey. We get women pregnant and then leave. It's okay if you track me down, though. Thanks for coming."

Doc Sorenson and Doctor Weiss got everyone else organized. The new recruits who came out with them could help, since they knew the whole story about the UN vs NATO issue. There were a couple of people we expected to have trouble with, starting with the man in charge out here, Rear Admiral Andrews. I stayed out of that. I was just another officer sent out here to learn about alien ships. I know nothing about political shenanigans, nope, not me! Only.... "Honey, what's your job out here?"

"I don't have one. I'm here to make sure you remember me when all those sluts with their new 24-year-old bodies come up here looking for husbands. Officially, if anyone asks, it's a fact-finding junket. I need to know what-all you people are doing up here so I can send you who you really need instead of who we think you need."

Hmmmm.... "Oh. Well, in that case, I need to give you a tour of the facilities so you know what-all we are doing. You'll have to stay by my side the whole time you're up here to make sure you get everything I'm trying to show you."

"Dear, I've already had everything you're going to show me, but I'll happily let you give it to me again."

That was great. While the doctors were dealing with all the panic over implant malfunctions, I was in my little cubby helping my wife with her exercise program and verifying that I was still healthy. I don't think Diana really saw much of Jupiter Station, or even Freighter #12 for that matter. She got a pretty good view of the overhead in my berthing cubby, though.

Col. Weiss stayed with us to finish the "implant job", with a couple of men for security. The next morning, though, Diana got on the next shuttle with Doc Sorenson and the rest of the security guys for the long trip back to Earth. Col. Weiss would find something else to work on when the implant job was done.

I don't think that Admiral Andrews was pleased to find out about his remote-control implant, but I was off his radar for this. I was just a Captain, one of several learning how to run alien ships, and he was too professional to vent to his subordinates about any issues he had about his superiors. I bet Admiral Kennedy got an earful, though. Admiral Andrews did start pushing NATO solidarity instead of UN leadership.

When I got back to my little cabin after seeing Diana off I almost had a heart attack. All the walls were a bright yellow, with pretty flowers painted every few inches like some kind of wallpaper. I knew the walls could change, we had messed with that a little when we were back on F2, but I hadn't bothered doing anything up here yet. It wasn't important to me. Diana admitted in her next email that she had set it up with the AIs several days before, but she waited until she got there and saw for herself that I hadn't done anything to decorate my cabin before she authorized it.

Okay, okay, I'll do something, but not THAT! I ended up with everything back to the basic off-white, and a 'window' on one wall that looked like it was in a cabin, showing a mountainside meadow in the Smokey Mountains. You could see birds and rabbits, occasionally a deer. I don't think it was live, but I don't know. Did the Confederacy buy some land and put a camera on it, just so I could have that view?

I asked if I could have an underwater view of a Darjee ocean but the AIs refused. They wouldn't even tell me if the Darjee home world had oceans or not. Well, I tried.

A week or so later, we started getting women out there at Jupiter. Here was where I saw some leadership from Admiral Andrews. He had clearly been doing some thinking on top of all the talks with the AIs and Admiral Kennedy back at Freighter #2. What he did was post a note in the mess-decks of each ship or facility:

- The ladies are here to both help us and make a better life for themselves.

- The ladies will make their own choices. Discussion is encouraged. Threats and/or force are not acceptable.

- The ladies will not return to any particular partner until ALL of the men have had an opportunity to impress them.

- The ladies can take every other night off. If they choose to do so, they will not be bothered in any way.

- Absolutely no permanent or long-term relationships will be permitted until the ratio of women to men at Jupiter Station is at least 4:5.

- The AIs have been authorized to monitor this. Don't be possessive. Don't be rude.

The bottom of the notice had a couple of numbers: Jupiter Station currently has 216 men and 26 women.

Something that Diana had NOT bothered to tell me was that they had a guide with them, to make sure they were taken care of. The shuttle brought us 25 beautiful women all wearing white spacesuits that showed off their figures. The 26th woman was Ginger, looking just as good as any of the others but in a pink suit like Diana's.

Ginger had come along to help with any confusion. These were the second group of "escorts" hired in New York City for us by the UN headquarters. They were all exceptionally good-looking, but there are a lot of hookers in New York City and the UN headquarters probably only hires the best. Besides, it turned out that they had all had 'makeovers', courtesy of Freighter #2's medtubes. Or maybe it was LTI's medtubes. I knew that LTI had an office in New York City, and they were working on opening some in other cities, too.

The first group had been a short-term test; it was only a dozen or so women and none of the ladies had gotten any farther than Freighter #2. Most of those hookers had elected to stay up there, away from the pimps and the drugs and the diseases and the abuse and the cops. If they had to keep a couple of men happy, that was still a far better deal than what they had on the street. If you were grading, that test was a success.

Some of the women, however, didn't want to stay. There wasn't much we could do about that. Those who had a good reason, like "I have to go take care of my children" got put on Ginger's recall list for later, when we were organized enough to deal with children and whatever other issues they had.

The ladies who were going back were first given memories of a fun party with a bunch of businessmen who were in town for a big deal and had been very easy to please. After that, they were sent back to LTI's New York office -where their "scheduling managers" had delivered them in the first place- with $2000 in cash for each one as payment for their services during the weekend-long party. LTI had a video of every woman, either saying they wanted to stay or that they wanted to go home. It was none of our business how long they managed to hold on to that two grand.

This second group, after hearing about that 'weekend party', was all willing to go work for the UN for a couple of weeks. Actually, the group had started out even larger but Diana had diverted some of them to Freighter 2, to try to make sure that she didn't get bothered at night.

Ginger had come out with these ladies to make sure we understood that if there was any mistreatment, the ladies would go back home early and there would not be any further shipments. When coupled with the deep understanding we already had of how well we were monitored by the AIs, that kept the enthusiasm under control. There were still some fights, but as long as they were between men we could understand that.

The women had been offered free plastic surgery as a side-benefit if they would do this. With Ginger making the offer, it was easy to accept. All of her requested changes were complete and she looked stunningly good. The women may not have been up to doing navigational math in their heads, but they knew what men liked. If the company was willing to pay to have them look as good as Ginger it was a good deal for them even if they didn't get paid a bonus for good behavior at the end.

Ginger's people in New York had given the ladies the trustworthiness test under the guise of a new massage treatment that toned skin and muscles. As expected, none of them were the kind of people the AIs wanted to work with, but as long as they were contract laborers with a limited-time contract and failure-to-perform payment penalties, the AIs could accept them.

Some of the women seemed unhappy that they had been tricked into going on ships, but a good many of them weren't what you would call rocket scientists. I heard that one of them had asked, seriously, why the ship didn't rock. I heard a lot of complaints about having to wear that suit. By the time they got out to us, after 20+ hours in the shuttle, they were all pretty cranky.

Ginger spent the night with me, saying that I had to get her pregnant before she could leave. She and Eric had never had any children and she wanted some. Her age was no longer a problem, and it didn't appear as if supporting a family would be, either. I had gotten my senior wife pregnant, and it was time to get my junior wife pregnant, too.

I did the best I could. It had been a week or so since Diana had left, and in my restored health I was going crazy. There was no doubt about it; I could tell the AIs truthfully that without women we men weren't very stable at all. We needed women, if we were going to be any use to them.

And having Diana and Ginger tag-team me was probably a good idea. With my restored health I wanted to act like a fifteen-year-old, screwing everything in sight at least once an hour. Ginger got her chance to get pregnant probably three or four times that night.

I asked the AIs once if any of the races in their Confederacy needed companionship the way we did; if splitting them up caused trouble. They didn't go as far as telling us that anyone in the Confederacy was like us that way, but they admitted that it was a social issue that they were familiar with. They accepted that our men could not be sent out without women for too long.

They were aware that it was a very loose variable. Some men could go without for years. Others became irritable within days. And, if we were going to create actual colonies, we would need both men and women for them. Whole families, once we got really going. And if they thought that these women were trouble they were in for a rude awakening when they started dealing with children.

During one of the times when we were just lying in bed talking, I told her about what Diana had done to my cabin and asked if she had any practical jokes like that. She admitted that they had talked about it, and then she asked the AI to give us "Roger's Dots". That was a black and white polka-dot pattern on the walls that gave me a headache.

She said they both understood that I was happier with a boring paint job, but they wanted to poke fun at me sometimes for being such a stick-in-the-mud. Besides, the AIs made this sort of redecorating easy. After she was done laughing at me she changed it back to what I had before, but she added a couple more small windows to my 'mountain cabin', with flower-pots on the sills.

The next morning when Ginger got back on the shuttle, there were 26 happy men out at Jupiter Station, and just over 200 who weren't. I was one of the happy ones.

Ginger promised us that as soon as she got back she'd arrange for daily deliveries until we had all we needed. She told me that when she was younger she had a friend who ended up as a prostitute and died all alone of an overdose in a nasty hotel, abandoned by her last customer and her pimp as well. She was going to use this opportunity to get every prostitute she could find off the streets and into our bunks.

The women's counter went down to 25 for two days before we got another group. And I didn't notice for several days that everything in my cabin now looked like it had been crudely put together with logs and twine. It was all still solid, but it looked rickety as hell. When did that happen?

We all went out in the freighters for some of the survey trips. I was on the one to Kruger 60, a binary system with two class M red dwarf stars. That's about 12 or 13 lightyears away, and it took us the better part of two days to get there. Time in hyperspace is even more boring than time in a shuttle.

Red dwarfs don't put out much light. There's no way a human eye can see them more than a few light-months out. I'd never even heard of the Kruger pair until we listed all the places we were going in our initial survey of our neighborhood. The two stars orbit each other about 10 AU apart, although it's not that simple. Their orbits aren't round, and the smaller one is an unstable flare star.

There's nothing there we could call a planet. There's no way anything smaller than another star could have a stable orbit; it would get jerked around until it either broke up or fell into one or the other. There are still some rocks floating around, though. Maybe they joined the system late. We marked one as the recommended location for the monitoring station.

Since the Darjee were all in their protected habitat ball in the middle of the ship, we humans could take over the forward observation room. We called it the bridge, but it was really just a relaxation point with big picture windows that also had some backup or emergency control stations. They had it set up as a sort of lounge, with all the furniture you would expect. Couches, easy chairs, end tables. Replicators and bathrooms, too.

If something went wrong in the ball, the ship could be run from here. The controls were all disabled until then, of course, but the crew left all the displays and readouts up so that we could see what was going on. Watching the navigation display as we traveled made a lot more sense out of our training.

We had started naming these ships after things we didn't understand, kind of as a joke. The first one named was "Aurora", and once we had other kinds of ships that became what we called all the freighters, the "Aurora Class". We had named the one I was on "Southern Lights", but before too long that naming system fell apart due to there being just too many ships. Most of them got named for ocean-going luxury liners, again for pretty much the same reason that the ancient Norse sea-rovers had named an ice-covered subcontinent "Greenland". There were a lot of "[whatever] Princess" names.

We could treat the ships as small-scale cruise ships, and if we wanted a tennis court or a shuffleboard lane we would have it the next day. However, we were asked to stop requesting swimming pools. Apparently the whole concept disturbed the Darjee. They let us have a hot-tub but that was it.

The head of the first human party to travel on each ship, whether it was testing something, going out to survey a system, or going out to deliver a monitoring station, got to name the ship. The Darjee didn't seem to care. They couldn't pronounce our names, we couldn't pronounce theirs, and the AIs did all the translating anyway.

Our second group of ladies was from Atlanta. Word had gotten passed around, and this time everyone knew that more women were arriving. This time the shuttle was stuffed full, thirty ladies in white skinsuits with two of Ginger's security people in dark blue skinsuits along in case there was a problem. The guards didn't really have to do anything, the women had all been conditioned by their pimps to obey any man who appeared to be in charge, but they still had to be escorted as they tended to squabble and act up if there were no men around.

They got a brief talk about what they were here for, told the rules, and told that it was THEIR decision who they were with each night, as long as it was a different man each night. We didn't have enough women yet for them to choose favorites. Once that orientation session was out of the way, they were shown their rooms.

Their rooms? Jupiter Station proper wasn't finished yet; it would probably always have something being added to it, until the end of the war, but it was working as a headquarters and central management space. Once we heard that women were coming, though, all other construction on Jupiter Station had halted until the place had a hundred-some-odd small cabins for women, with four bunks in each.

Each lady was assigned a room and her own bed. If they wanted a bed to themselves every other night, that was theirs, and no one else should be bothering them. They needed to be somewhere else on their 'working' nights, though, so as to let the other ladies in their room get some sleep. Us men were warned that the ladies' apartments were off limits to customers. The ladies would come to us.

I also got a warning of my own. One of the security guys who had come up with the ladies found me and passed on a pair of verbal messages. He didn't know Diana but he certainly knew Ginger as the lady in charge of hiring people like him, and both ladies had asked him to pass on to me that I shouldn't be greedy. I had two women and that should be enough for anyone. One or the other would come up when they could.

The counters changed to 55 and almost 300.

Every shuttle for the next couple weeks brought more women. Every one was a professional 'escort' willing to accept a two-week position with the UN. Denver, Montreal, Moscow, London, San Antonio, Manila, Perth, Berlin, Dallas, Miami, Gdansk, LA, Mumbai, Paris, Belfast, Montevideo, Tokyo, we got working girls from all over the world. We got companionship, they got free medical services and a chance to get away from their old life if they wanted. Ginger came back up with one set, when we had almost as many women as men, to talk to the first set we had received.

Their two weeks was almost up, and she wanted to know how many wanted to go home to New York City again. She and Admiral Andrews talked to the whole set about what they wanted to do. We wanted them all to stay, but we had to send back any who wanted to go. We had an agreement and the AIs were immovable on that. We got the idea that they would push negotiations while they were going on, but they were inflexible after the agreement was made.

I got roped into that, as the AIs wanted my opinion on some of the options. Thankfully, I was alone in my cubby talking with the AI so Admiral Andrews didn't know that the AIs were also getting my views. Most of the ladies wanted to stay. They had free room and board, excellent health care, every day and every other night off, and no one was beating them to make more money. There were a few, though, that wanted to go home and we had to allow it.

There were also a few women we wanted to get rid of, some who seemed to enjoy getting the men to fight over them. We blamed the men for not having any common sense, but the AI's recordings made it clear that, in at least a couple of cases, the women were actively involved in instigating the trouble. Those women were gone, on the same shuttle as the ones who wanted to go, and they weren't getting their bonus, either.

Ginger and the Admiral gathered all the women up into a room that had been set up as an auditorium and held a dog-and-pony show, complete with videos from the AIs. In each case, they could show the woman talking to one man, telling him that he was the only one she wanted to be with and asking him for protection. They also showed the woman later telling another man the same thing but pointing out the first man as someone she was afraid of. If those two men got into a fight later, the woman was out. She was going back on the next shuttle to Earth, and we'd find someone else who could play nicely with others.

A large part of the presentation was to try to avoid the same thing happening in the future. The ladies were told that as of that latest delivery, any who wanted to choose a regular partner could do so, but they needed to be serious about that because the men would certainly take them seriously. Or, if they didn't want to stay with just one man they could restrict their activities to a small number of favorites.

Either way, though, they needed to BE with their man or men. That "every other night off" policy was for the ladies who didn't have regular partners, and who would continue to be available for any men who didn't have a regular partner. The ladies weren't being asked to marry anyone, but it was hoped that most of them would at least try a long-term relationship. From our point of view, they were here for the sole purpose of keeping the men calm but motivated. Men work best when they have a reason to go home every night.

Besides the women we were sending back, a small number of women wanted to go home. If they weren't troublemakers, they got their bonus for good service and an open invitation to come back any time they wanted. Ginger spent the night with me again. She said she was pregnant, but she still wanted to practice in case something went wrong.

When she got on the shuttle she had something like 7 or 8 women with her. All the rest of that first set wanted to stay. The AIs made recordings of them saying so and announced that those recordings would be available for viewing at any LTI office.

After that, the daily shuttle delivered roughly equal numbers of actual recruits for the war effort and "contract laborers" brought in to help keep us under control and productive, and whether or not it was possible to get laid ceased to be a source of stress for everyone. There was still drama, but with a steady supply of fresh faces the ladies couldn't very well cut 'their' man off for poor behavior.

We tried to be nice to the women, but sometimes we had to set an example. A few of the women got sent back to Earth each week. We gave them their bonus, if they weren't too much trouble. Happy or sad, voluntary or carried onto the shuttle, they all got a last 'health check' in the LTI office they had signed up from to make sure they had the memories we wanted them to have.

The first time we had the spectacle of an MP carrying a woman, kicking and screaming, back onto a shuttle the AIs provided our security people with a kind of hand-held cattle-prod that knocked people out. They came to after a few hours with no side effects beyond a combination migraine and hangover. Admiral Andrews made everyone who wanted their own stun-gun go through getting stunned by one first, so they knew what they were doing.

A few days after Ginger came for her second visit, Diana came out again. She said she couldn't stay, things were getting complicated, but she wanted to let me know that she knew I had been a good boy. Her job had expanded to tracking our companionship needs so that Ginger knew how many more hookers were needed, and that had turned up some interesting statistics.

For instance, there were seven men out at Jupiter Station who had never had one of our 'contract laborers' spend a night. It was none of my business who the others were -I had some pretty good guesses if it was important, but it wasn't- but I was certainly one of them.

Diana was looking at the future, and it wouldn't be long before both she and Ginger were too busy to take two days off just to keep me in a good mood. This was likely to be her last conjugal visit until she retired. We were probably going to be separated again. So, since she and Ginger had a choice between me going crazy or cheating on them, they were looking for someone they could send out to me with me full-time.

What? The? Fuck? Honey, I'm okay. I can handle it. You come when you can. Maybe I can come back to Freighter #2 sometime.

I lost that argument the same way I had lost the one about Ginger. This time, though, it was worse. She wasn't sharing something wonderful with her best friend, she was going to turn me over to someone she hadn't even met yet.

A lot of her attitude was from her job. Diana had always been cheerful and upbeat. She had kept me going during some pretty bad times, when work wasn't going well. Now, however, she was the one with the weight of the human race on her shoulders, and it was wearing her down.

We talked for a long time while I held her. She thought that she was doing a good job, but it was so difficult to find good people, people that the AIs would support bringing up there to where we were, and who were able to disappear without too many questions. And more, people that she would want on a ship I was taking to war. She knew that we were supposed to get the first of the warships in just another week or so, and we were thinking that we would need between 30 and 50 crew for each.

We didn't have enough men to crew more than probably five of them, but we were also getting more people every day. If we split the people we had into core personnel for each ship and filled out with new people, we could probably man 15 or so at first. There were arguments for doing it both ways.

My inclination was to do both: Use everyone we had here now to completely man however many we could. Get those ships running, then once we had proven that we had them under control split those crews up to provide the cores for as many as we could. We wouldn't get warships out into space quite as fast, but the ones we sent out would be more likely to come back.

That was the key for me: Lessons learned out the other side of the Pleiades wouldn't help anyone if the learners didn't ever make it back to teach the rest of us what they learned. It was better to properly man five of them with the best we had, then split them up when we had enough competence and experience to pass around.

We didn't talk any more about us. After awhile we stopped talking about anything else and just held each other until morning. "You give me reason to live!"