First Recruits

by Marilyn Foxworthy

  As the zipper came down, Allie’s perfect body came into view. It really was strange the way that in this room, the only thing clearly visible, except for the blackness, was Allie. The twin moons of her breasts and the polar nipples at their center, the rippling plains of her stomach, the cascading slopes of her vulva falling into the cleft of her slit, and the sculpted columns of her thighs and calves, all rising out of her jumpsuit as if the sun rose on the beauty of planet Alison.

  When she was naked, she tossed the clothing that she’d shed down the stairs and approach me, undressing me as well.

  She said, “Ee, can you do ten percent? Are we safe for that right now?”

  Ee said, “No problem at all.”

  A hatch slid into place over the stairs and closed us into the little room.

  Allie said, “This will feel a little funny at first. Ee, take it slow.”

  Ee interrupted and said, “Um, guys, not to kill your buzz, but we can’t afford any hanky-panky right now.”

  Allie snapped her head up and said, “What? Why not?”

  Ee said, “We’re in non-space. No stars, get it?”

  Allie said sadly, “Oh. That’s no fun.”

  Ee asked, “Do you want me to take the artificial gravity down to ten percent anyway?”

  Allie said, “No,” and pouted.

  Chapter 20 - Mules

  We’d slept twice by the time Ee announced that we were approaching the debris field in normal space.

  Part of this was Bailey’s specialty and part of it belonged to Michelle. Bailey knew the engineering and technical stuff and Michelle knew how to keep us safe in this hazardous environment. I was assured that it was hazardous and that I needed to do what I was told, when I was told. Allie was told to stay on the ship. She’d be an extra pair of eyes, watching from the bridge while Eevona kept an eye on the sensors that she had for scanning the wreckage ahead of us.

  I’d expected that she would “detect life signs” and stuff like that, but her scanning was limited to thermal imaging, detecting differences in temperature, and movement and spectrum analysis that would indicate the presence of various gases and minerals. The girls were confident that any life that we were going to find would be Units or crew in storage, not alien predators looking to lay eggs in our chest cavities. Our equipment included hand-held energy weapons but they were really meant to either cut or weld material, depending on the need. They could be used for lethal defense if necessary, but that wasn’t why we had them.

  I half expected Michelle to suggest that I stay on the ship and let her and Bailey handle the extra-vehicular exploration but she didn’t at all. I was the captain, and as far as she and Bailey were concerned, I had to be a critical part of the decision making.

  The three of us entered the shuttle and headed toward the debris. Ee followed us at a safe distance, not wanting to get too close to the occasional erratic collisions of the hulks of a long-forgotten space war.

  Michelle took the controls and Bailey said, “Head for a big one. The biggest we can find.”

  Ee was in contact with us the whole time and said, “You have something big, well, several things, but the biggest one, if that’s really what you want, is near the far end of the field, about two hours away. You could come back and let me circle around to get you closer.”

  Bailey said, “No, we’ll take our time and survey the field as we go. Eevona, you can see what we see, right? Make a map for us. Chart movement and keep an updated prediction of where everything is at all times. And for goodness sake, let us know if something is headed for us that might trap us or squash us.”

  Ee said, “Will do.”

  Eevona circled the edge of the field while shuttle cut through the center. The densest part of the field was near where we had entered and it thinned out at the far end. The estimate was that the war that had left all of this wreckage had probably occurred at least two to three thousand years ago. If we had been near a planet or a star, it would probably have formed into an orbiting ring, but out here it just clumped together based on the weak gravitational forces caused by the most massive hulks. And that made it dangerous. The pieces were moving, or at least movable.

  I said, “Girls, what are the chances that there are viable units or crew in storage among the wreckage after all this time?”

  Bailey said, “It’s unlikely, but possible.”

  I said, “If it’s possible, I want this treated as a rescue mission first, and a salvage mission second.”

  Michelle said, “Oh, I should have thought of that. I’m so sorry. I hate to say it, but I guess I was stuck in my conditioning.”

  Bailey said, “Oh, yeah. Me too. Any Units or crew in storage would be considered lost and disposed of by anyone else. They’d have no value, so why bother. Wait! Don’t be mad. I’m just thinking through how Michelle and I viewed it, not justifying it. No, I get it. They have intrinsic value as persons, not commodities. Ee, the mules have sensor arrays similar to your own. Connect to all eleven of them and send them out in a systematic search pattern. Look for energy fields and light emissions that would indicate the possibility that storage bays might still be operational.”

  I said, “And pay attention to how strong they are. Prioritize the weakest ones first.”

  Michelle looked at me puzzled and I said, “The weakest ones might be viable but failing. Check the ones that might not last, first. Then move on to those that seem more stable and less vulnerable.”

  She smiled and said, “Aye aye, Captain. This is a rescue mission first.”

  Ee said, “The mules will be deployed in a few minutes. A full survey will take um, let’s call it three months.”

  I said, “And we need to stay here the whole time. If we find something suspicious, we need to be here to move on it immediately.”

  Bailey said, “Ee, hold two of the mules back. I want to have them available to haul interesting things out to the edges where we can have some room to work on them safely. Keep those two near us and have them scan along our flanks.”

  We were out on the edge of nowhere here. Space is big. And this debris field was old. And we might have been the first ones to visit it ever.

  I said, “Hey, if this was a big battle or something, isn’t there going to be a lot of dead bodies and stuff? Floating around frozen or something?”

  Bailey said, “Possibly. Or, the crews could have been evacuated as the war progressed. There must have been survivors. It’s unlikely that the last two ships destroyed each other at the same moment. Diplomatically, there was probably a negotiated end to the war and a bit of cleanup. Michelle, if this is over a thousand years old, let's say 3000, would there have been Units involved?”

  Michelle said, “I don’t know. That’s a good question. They are common now, but I don’t know how common they were when this happened. I guess we’ll find out.”

  We worked our way carefully toward the largest hulks and after about four hours, we were looking at something truly massive. Michelle and Bailey weren’t trained for war on this scale, so neither of them knew much about what we were looking at. It was pointy and long. Maybe twenty miles long. And eight miles wide and three miles tall. If I had my orientation right. There was a lot of peripheral parasitic debris all around the thing. I decided to call it a “star destroyer”. It looked a lot like one.

  Michelle and Bailey insisted that we not get too close because of the trash surrounding it and the two mules were dispatched with orders to pull the thing clear of the field for later inspection. We kept going, looking for another target. We continued to map the area and two hours later we found something else that interested Bailey.

  This one was clearly a different design. We’d identified at least five distinct forms of ship architecture, probably indicating five different civilizations that had taken part in this conflict. Why they were way out here, I couldn’t guess. Bailey pointed out that the conflict hadn’t really taken place here. It had happened wherever this stuff was thousands of years ago. It
had moved here over time.

  Bailey thought that our chances of finding something rare were better if we grabbed things from each of the different cultures, not just a single design pattern. The drives and weapons and sensors would vary and we wanted the best of the best, in addition to the raw metal and other materials.

  More mules were dispatched and told to haul it out and we moved on. We went for another hour and then Eevona met up with us and we went back to the ship to rest.

  Before going to bed for the night, we met in the dining room and discussed the plan. Bailey felt confident that we would take the hulks that we had captured so far and that we might as well have them get started toward the salvage factory. A mule would head out and accelerate as best it could toward the destination. It would take several months to arrive and Eevona could easily catch up and we would explore our catch along the way. Our job now was to find eleven pieces of salvage and get them started.

  There had been an expectation that we would collect several small pieces and weld them together until we had a large bundle, but it turned out that it wasn’t necessary. We had plenty of intact, but badly damaged ships and we didn’t need to fiddle with the small stuff.

  The next day, we found three more enormous battleships, a huge supply station, and two cargo carriers. That gave us eight in tow. The day after that, we focused on finding higher end but smaller, command ships. Something sleek that an admiral would use as an outpost. We found two. We decided to leave the last mule to survey the field until we came back for another run. There were ten mules hauling our treasures and we headed out after the one farthest along.

  At breakfast, I asked about our expected financial status based on what we’d found.

  Bailey said, “We’ll be rich.”

  I said, “Like really rich?”

  She said, “Pretty rich.”

  I said, “So, how about we build our own salvage factory out here instead of hauling the hulks back to someone else?”

  Bailey and Michelle both looked shocked. Ee laughed and Allie just smiled and rubbed my shoulder.

  I said, “What? What’s wrong? Why not?”

  Bailey said, “Because! I thought you understood. No way! I’m not having any part of it. I’ll go rogue. I swear I will. I love you, but maybe I don’t.”

  I said, “Wait. What? Why? I don’t understand.”

  Ee laughed again and said, “Bailey, Michelle, calm down. He doesn’t understand. It’s funny. You two just sit tight and remember that you trust and love him more than anything. If it sounds bad, it’s a misunderstanding. I think I know what’s going on, but I want Jimmy to explain it to you. Trust him.”

  Bailey glared at me and said, “OK. I’ll try.”

  Michelle said, “I’ll stay with him. It’s just how things work. We can’t change everything at once. But I’m not in favor of it at all. But let’s hear the plan.”

  I said, “I don’t understand. I didn’t mean to upset you. And Bailey, please don’t leave. We don’t have to do it at all. If it’s a problem, we’ll forget the whole idea. I swear.”

  Ee said, “Captain, explain your idea. I want Bailey to hear it. Bailey, stay calm. Michelle, it’s all going to be fine. Allie, are you OK?”

  Allie smiled and said, “I’m fine. It’s a nice idea. It won’t work, but it would be pretty cool if it did. Eevona could just have babies and we make our own salvage factory. Easy as pie. Except that we can’t. Go ahead Jimmy, tell us the plan.”

  I said, “I really don’t know what the problem is. We just get a bunch of bots, or droids, or whatever and we send them out here and they use the scrap to build a factory out of spare parts. Then they go to work salvaging stuff and we don’t have to haul it anywhere until it has already been processed. And the factory makes more bots and expands. That’s all I meant.”

  Bailey frowned and said, “Bots? Or droids?”

  Ee said, “Picture things like me but with mechanical bodies.”

  Bailey said, “Like maintenance bots? Cleaners and such.”

  I said, “But bigger. And with arms and tools.”

  Allie laughed and said, “I thought so. See, Jimmy didn’t mean what you thought. That’s why we love him. Watch. Jimmy, where do we get the bots?”

  I said, “I don’t know. The bot store?”

  She said, “Babe, what you are thinking about is what Units do.”

  I gasped and said, “Units? No. Oh no. Did you think…”

  Bailey said, “That you were going to build a factory and buy hundreds of Units and send them out into the debris field in hard suits where ten percent would die every month and be replaced by new ones? Yeah. That’s exactly what we thought.”

  I said, “Hold on! No way! No way in hell.”

  Bailey said, “Well, you can’t make copies of Eevona to work the way you suggested, so what else could we think? Your concept of bots is what are called Units.”

  I said, “No, they aren’t. And they aren’t sentient like Eevona either. They are special-purpose machines that do work.”

  Ee laughed and said, “He thought that I could stick him in a closet and de-molecularize him and send him across space to another closet where it puts him back together, too! It’s from what his people call fiction. They have all sorts of ideas about what things are like out here.”

  Bailey said, “Bots? Machines that do the work of Units?”

  I said, “Yeah. I’d never buy a bunch of Units like that, you know I wouldn’t. But hey, we have automated factories that build stuff all the time. I just assumed that you would have something even better. I mean, look at Ee.”

  Ee said, “But Jimmy, you didn’t take into account that out here, we have a cheap labor force and therefore no need for what you call bots, except in my case where I have cleaning bots that I control because I run without a crew for long periods of time.”

  Bailey said, “Wow. OK, I’m sorry I got hostile. So, on your planet, you don’t have the same cheap labor that they do out here. So, you developed machines to do the work of Units. That makes sense. Ee’s right. It was a misunderstanding. Form follows function. They have Units, so they don’t have the kind of machines that you have. That makes sense.”

  I said, “This whole discussion is kind of upsetting, so I’d like to move on. You’re saying that we can’t do it. None of us is going to commission a large number of Units and subject them to the working conditions out here or relegate them to being Units, not persons. We won’t do that. Bailey, are we cool? Can you forgive me for the misunderstanding?”

  Bailey said, “I can. It will take a few minutes. I see that you didn’t mean it, but I’ll have to settle down.”

  I said, “OK. I love you. I would never do that. So, we haul stuff out of the field as we can and send it to a factory. But if that’s the case, should we drop the plan altogether? Are we taking advantage of Units simply by providing work for the factory?”

  Bailey said, “I have to think about that. Listen, I’ve woken up. The same way we all have. The same way Eevona has. She has new capabilities that no ship has ever had. Allie and Michelle and I have names and love and we do what we want. A Unit is not a mule.”

  I said, “Exactly! Bailey, believe me, I just thought that we would have mechanical mules that would run the factory. No air, no food, no supervisors. You set the mules to a task and they do it. I just thought that you must have workers, not Units, that do other things.”

  She said, “I guess we do. But not like you are talking about. Now that you have told me what it is, I think that I could probably build something like that. A specialized salvage bot. It’s an interesting problem.”

  I said, “But it isn’t how we want to spend our time, is it? Nope, we are explorers in so many ways. All of us. Exploring life, relationships, existence, love, and all the rest.”

  Michelle said, “We are a unique family, aren’t we? There has never been anything like any one of us. Jimmy is the only Earther to do what he’s doing. Allie is the only…”


  Allie smiled and said, “…Freak who ever found love and happiness.”

  Michelle said, “Well, yeah. And Bailey and I are unique too. Um, so what’s next?”

  Bailey said, “I spend some alone time with the captain and then we explore our first catch. Hey, first, let’s…no, we’ll do that later. I need to talk to the captain.”

  Allie started clearing the dishes and Michelle gave me a kiss and headed off to do something or other and Bailey told me to follow her out the door, into the hallway.

  I said quietly, “Bailey, Sweetie, there’s this observation deck place and…”

  Bailey said, “Oh, that’s a nice idea. Ee, lead the way.”

  Lights in the floor guided us to the stairs that went up to the clear-domed room and we climbed, Bailey in front of me.

  Inside, Bailey said, “Eevona, lock the door for us. And add sound masking if necessary. I want to have a very private conversation with the captain. In fact, would it be OK if you gave us complete privacy and don’t listen in yourself? Would you do that for us?”

  Ee said happily, “Of course. I will seal the room and make sure that it is soundproof, and I won’t listen in. I’ll still be monitoring your bodies though.”

  Bailey said, “Perfect. I hope you enjoy it. I want you to have a good time. Just give us as much privacy as you can. Thank you. Eevona, I love you. Thank you for taking care of us. You really are one of us. Don’t ever think that you are different. And Babe, I’ll be sure to have a big orgasm before we’re done so you can enjoy it with us. Just keep your eyes closed until I manually unlock the hatch, or it goes on so long that we’re about to miss dinner.”

  Ee said, “You got it, Bailey.”

  At that, I heard the hatch lock and the room went more quiet than normal.

  Bailey took a deep breath and then started undressing. She pulled the zipper at the neck of her jumpsuit and let the clothing fall to the floor. Wadding them up in a ball, she tossed them aside on top of the hatch. I gave her a look and she nodded, indicating that I should do the same if I wanted to.