First Recruits

by Marilyn Foxworthy

  Bailey laughed again and said, “Yeah, we have force fields and whatnot.”

  I said, “Good. Get some.”

  Bailey said, “Check, plenty of shields and armor.”

  She smiled and I knew that she was teasing me by saying “plenty”.

  I said, “We’ll talk over what we want and discuss any problems later. So, guns and shields. Battles are fought by fleets, right? We don’t have a fleet. We have a ship. And it needs to be the baddest battleship ever. But it should look good and be sneaky. Eevona needs to look as sexy as the rest of you. People need to gasp at her beauty when we roll into port.”

  Michelle said cheerfully, “And what function does that serve?”

  I said, “I asked myself the same question when I saw your boobs for the first time,” and I winked at her.

  She said, “Ah, I see. The function is immediately apparent. OK, we’ll make sure that Ee is as sexy on the outside as she is on the inside.”

  Eevona said, “I want boobs.”

  I said, “You know what? She might be joking, but I don’t think she really is, but yeah, make Ee feminine. Curvy. Thighs and breasts and buns. Don’t make her look like a human but make her look like a what a spaceship would be if it were a beautiful sexy Eevona-ship. Bailey, do you think you can do that?”

  Bailey frowned in thought and said, “I think that I can, now that you give me a vision for it. Um, the breasts though, Ee, how do you feel about some nice B-cups? Nice and smooth and round, but not too big. I think that would look nice and fit the overall form. How many do you want?”

  Ee laughed and said, “Just two, Silly. But nipples. Give me a reason for nipples.”

  Allie said, “Ee, we’re sitting in your nipple right now.”

  Ee said, “Oh, perfect. Yeah, we’ll need new observation chambers, won’t we? Give me two of them.”

  Michelle said, “How far do you want this to go?”

  Bailey said, “What do you mean?”

  Michelle said, “Well, does Eevona get analogies for a mouth, tongue, teeth, and lady bits?”

  Eevona laughed and said, I don’t think I’ll need a mouth, and the possibilities for a docking bay in my lady part is intriguing, but more as a funny idea than a real expression of ship’s design. I’d say no, I get plenty of sex as it is and don’t need to muddy the waters with a physical analogy. You rascal.”

  I said, “But speaking of that, our next function is transportation. You say that you’ll add extra engines to handle the extra mass. Will Ee still be able to navigate non-space and all of that?”

  I was assured that she would and said, “But we need the ability to go where Ee can’t go. I assume she can’t land on planets. Or dock at space stations. We have a shuttle, but…oh, wait. Bailey, can we afford all this dream-gear?”

  Bailey said, “Yes. We can. No problem.”

  I said, “OK. Then we want several shuttles. If Ee is wearing a battle hull, the shuttle we have won’t be available, will it?”

  Bailey said, “As a matter of fact, no. That space will have to be turned into a doorway to the rest of the ship. Unless we cut new access passages.”

  I said, “So, new shuttles. At least four of them. And they should be armed in some way, just in case. Good? OK. The next function I guess is cargo.”

  Bailey said, “Yeah. Lots of cargo space for mules and spare parts and treasures that we happen to find.”

  There was a bit more discussion, and Bailey had enough info to work with. We would repurpose some of the existing crew quarters and corridors for combat training areas for me and the girls.

  I broached one more subject before we left the chamber, now nicknamed “the Nipple”.

  I said, “Girls, I’m kind of tired of seeing you all in jumpsuits all the time.”

  Bailey and Michelle glanced at each other, unsure of what I was saying, but Allie got it immediately.

  She squealed, “Costuming! Of course! We need costuming! To match out functions.”

  Bailey and Michelle looked at Allie for explanation and Allie said, “Just like how Ee needs new clothes to be the sexy killer battle destroyer bringer of life and death to the outer parts of this galaxy and beyond.”

  The others stared at her and she said, “When I’m making the beds, I need to dress for it. When I’m cooking meals, I need to dress for it. Don’t you see? No? OK, when I make beds, just like Ee, I need to be dressed as the sexy best bed maker in the galaxy. I’m thinking a short dress that flares at the hem and a bodice made of a sheer white lace that shows off my observation globes, and when I lean over, my twin moons glow under my skirt. Get it? It follows, right? And if I’m cooking, I need an apron, not a jumpsuit. If I’m facing the counter, what do I want facing Jimmy? I want to give the captain something to appreciate while I prepare the food.”

  Bailey smile and said, “Allie, you do have a really pretty butt. I like it too. Beauty is beauty.”

  Allie grinned and said, “What a nice thing to say.”

  Bailey said, “I get it. Yeah, I see what she’s saying. Michelle, we need to recognize secondary functions.”

  Michelle said, “Oh! Wow! Yeah, I guess I think about that all the time. I just didn't associate what I wanted to do with the way that we cover our bodies. I see. OK, so the captain needs soft shorts with a drawstring for training.”

  I said, “I think you’re on the right track, but explain that.”

  Michelle grinned and said, “Because you need to be able to move freely as a primary function while training and you need to be able to quickly drop them when I want to suck on you as a secondary function. Oh wow! Yeah, Allie would look so sexy making beds. She isn’t just making beds but paying attention to secondary functions as well.”

  Allie said, “Well, if you think about it, sex is my primary function. Beds and laundry and cooking are secondary. You can’t really separate and rank the functions. What’s more important, battle readiness or crew comfort? Sex or exercise or maintenance? They are all essential functions.”

  Michelle said, “You are so right. Bailey, we need new clothes.”

  Bailey smiled and said, “When we wear any at all.”

  Chapter 22 - Training and Trading

  We ended up just relaxing where we were until Eevona announced that we were ready to return to normal space and approach the shipyard. When I asked how the mules could get here in a matter of months instead of years or centuries, I was told that they simply went faster than light and why did I think that would be a problem? No, the mules couldn’t travel non-space, but that didn’t keep them from going faster than light.

  They actually measured speeds in space using the same equation as “Warp Speed”. It was the warp factor cubed times the speed of light. Warp One was the speed of light. Warp Two was two cubed, or eight times the speed of light. Warp Three was three cubed, 27 times the speed of light. That would make Warp Ten, 1000 times the speed of light. There was some amount of acceleration and deceleration involved, but it wasn’t significant.

  In normal space, Eevona could do between Warp 12 and 15. Warp 15 was over 3000 times the speed of light. The mules didn’t go quite that fast. In non-space, Eevona’s “speed” was essentially limitless, the time being taken up getting to and from entry points.

  While we were on the subject, I asked about the propulsion used by the engines and why we never felt any acceleration. Bailey was confused at first but a quick review with Eevona where they went over my expectations, being from a planet without intergalactic travel and relying on rocketry alone, things were cleared up quickly. Space travel didn’t use propulsion. It sounded like science fiction, but our engines used a method of accelerating all of our molecules uniformly. They didn’t push the ship, they accelerated it and all of its contents. When we got to power sources, it was even less comprehensible in terms of anything I had previously understood about energy. As far as I could tell from what Bailey told me, Eevona’s power source was essentially darkness. I could try to describe it, but I wouldn’t
get it right. Space was big. And it was dark. And that lack of light and abundance of dark, or the lack of light, generated an energy that I couldn’t understand. But that didn’t keep it from working nonetheless. And non-space generated a lot of that energy. They tried to explain that non-space didn’t want us and was constantly trying to repel us. Eevona collected that force and stored it for use. None of it made sense to me from anything that I knew of physics, but it seemed to work.

  And then another mystery was solved. How could one of the mules, sized so that a dozen of them fit in our cargo hold, drag a star destroyer many times larger than Eevona herself? Well, it didn’t. These accelerating engines were pretty much self-contained and all the mule did was interface with them and coordinate them while attached to the hull of what it was ferrying. The mule did have an engine of its own, but it used the other ship’s engines if they were viable. And even though these hulks had been abandoned thousands of years ago, the technology was the same. I got the impression that things had evolved to a certain point technologically and no one saw any profit in working on problems that had already been solved to improve them further. Technological exploration wasn’t a high priority anymore.

  By the time we were done talking, it was time to get dressed and head over to the shipyard. We wore our uniforms, and Bailey, Michelle, Allie and I took the shuttle from where Ee parked herself in the visitor area. Allie was excited about new clothing and wanted to come for that reason.

  The place was huge. I’d say ten times the size of the space stations that I’d seen so far. At least. A massive structural core and hundreds of space docs where ships were built, upgraded, or disassembled for parts. There was adequate lodging and visitor accommodations and all the normal supply stores.

  We decided to take care of the tasks that required all of us first. That meant clothing. We docked and disembarked the shuttle and registered with the visitor’s bureau. Then we went straight to the garment district. All we really had to do was to get measured, which was done by eye and camera, and then Allie could handle the design choices by herself. Michelle felt no need for us all to stay together, except for either Bailey or herself to stay with me at all times because I didn’t know any of the customs or laws, and Allie was happy to handle things by herself. She would meet up with us later.

  The next task was to register a mining claim. There was an office on the station and Bailey handled the negotiations. The rules for the claim had to do with the value of the debris field, the volume of salvage expected, and the proximity and therefore the attractiveness of the claim to other interested parties. The volume was immense. The value was proportionate to the volume. The proximity and therefore interest to others was incredibly small. The field was discovered decades ago but the news was just now reaching the inhabited parts of the galaxy. It was far away, and salvage wasn’t an occupation that had a lot of competition. The official was hesitant to let Bailey claim the entire field, but she was very persuasive and in the end, he allowed it. Of course, the claim didn’t do anything except put others on notice that we intended to mine the field and that other salvage efforts would be unwelcome. Piracy was a possibility and defending the claim was entirely up to us. In fact, we could only loosely claim that other salvages teams were pirates even with our claim in place. As I said, all it really did was post a sign that said that trespassers were not welcome. It didn’t give us any legal protections at all. There was a fee though.

  Bailey felt good about the claim even with the conditions that were placed on it. If anyone else was interested in the job, they’d check to see what the competition was before they bothered to expend any resources. And when they did, they’d see that the entire field was claimed by, and under the protection of, the “Eevona Space Command Galactic Salvage Conglomerate”. It sounded official and like something that you didn’t want to go to war with. Yeah, just move on, this one is taken. We probably have the whole thing under control so go find something we don’t care about. And you might want to lay low so that we don’t come after you when we get done with this one.

  I told the girls that in addition to learning to fight, I wanted to learn the language. Bailey said that Eevona would be the best one to start teaching me and that we’d all start using the common language at least part of the time as soon as I had some basics. I thought that a total immersion would be better, but neither of the girls wanted to give up the extra expressiveness of English. A universal language, while more concise and less prone to misunderstanding, was really a least-common-denominator when it came to expression.

  Our next stop was the shipyard offices. Bailey had to do some convincing and show some pictures of our mules hauling the battleships in order to get us a meeting with anyone who could handle the job that we wanted done. After some more persuasive discussion, a project manager was called and we were shown to a conference room where we could discuss our needs. Bailey put down a deposit to show that we were ready to start and not just take up his time.

  She described the battle hull for Ee first. Then she went over the salvage that we were sending, and the project manager did estimates of what our net profit on the first destroyer would be, verifying that it would be enough to get started on the new design. Ee would have to be scanned for measurements and modifications. She would need several new access doors to travel to the new areas that would be added to her configuration. Engines and weapons would be salvaged from what we sent. It was decided that the raw materials would be reprocessed and we would be paid for them and that those funds would be used to purchase new materials. We might be buying back our own stuff, but that was how it worked. The schedule would depend on how quickly we delivered our hulks and how much of a premium we wanted to pay for speedy service. The project manager called an architect and we discussed what we wanted in more detail, now that the project manager was satisfied that we would have the means to pay for the job.

  The architect said, “I see what you want, but are you sure? This is a um, big battle cruiser you're talking about. This is a command ship class design.”

  Bailey said, “Exactly. I’m so glad that you understand. This is the flagship of our navy. We may be unknown, and our influence in this part of the galaxy is yet to be felt, but we heard that you are the best in the business and based on our recent discoveries and expansion, we find ourselves in need of a new command ship. The ship we came in is very special and was carefully designed for this purpose. But the battle hull, shuttles, cargo space and things like that we came to you for. And as you work on the design, do take into account our size and the needs that we will have based on that. Access doors, passageways, maintenance spaces, and everything else needs to allow for people like us to handle all functions.”

  The architect shrugged and said, “OK. We can do that. This is a completely unique design. I can’t use off the shelf components.”

  The project manager said, “No, and a lot of the components will come from salvage, so don’t finalize the design until we know what we’re working with.”

  Bailey said, “And when you do see what we’re sending, if you can buy or build something better, do that. We don’t want to be constrained by what we send. We want the newest top-of-the-line everything.”

  The architect looked at the project manager and got the OK and said, “Done. We’ll work out the details. I’ll start designing as I have time and when your parts start to arrive we’ll bump up the priority as we can.”

  Bailey said, “That’s all we’re asking for.”

  He said, “A new command ship. We don’t get jobs for those very often.”

  The manager said, “We’ve never had one as far as I can remember. We need to make this look good. This could be a big deal for us.”

  Bailey said, “On that note, the exterior design aesthetic is critical to our mission. Captain, perhaps I should stay here and work for a while longer while you and the first mate conduct other business.”

  I smiled and Michelle and I left the office and exited the “buil
ding”. It wasn’t a building, but it was a business.

  Everywhere we looked, we saw Units. They seemed to be of two different sizes. About half were only four feet tall. Maybe a little bit less. The rest were the same size as Michelle. A little over six feet. All of them were muscular, gray, bald, and flat-chested. They were definitely female, but bland and indistinguishable from each other. And then I noticed a third type that I had mistaken for non-Units at first glance. I don’t know how I could have missed them, except for the fact that I had little context for what was normal and what was exceptional. This third type was again four feet tall, but had hair and a less-gray skin tone.

  Michelle explained that the gray ones were all factory workers. The others, about one out of fifty, was a personal assistant of some kind. Probably a concubine Unit. The workers wore simple jumpsuits. The others wore simple dresses. Occasionally we’d see a worker whose jumpsuit was torn and in some cases missing altogether. Apparently, jumpsuits were more valuable than a Unit’s modesty or dignity.

  Michelle said, “Your metabolic reaction goes up every time we pass a damaged Unit, even if it’s only the clothing that is damaged.”

  I said, “I think I’m changing my mind about having our own factory. How can they treat people that way?”

  Michelle said, “You mean have them do work that is slowly, or in many cases quickly killing them? Feeding and housing them in the bleakest of surroundings, packing twenty in quarters only big enough for two? Letting them go without proper clothing because they were blamed for damage that wasn’t their fault?”

  I glared at the “people” we saw, the “citizens”, in anger and disdain.

  Michelle said, “I’ve seen some of your historical records. Not from the period where your people condoned slavery, but from more recently when it was supposedly condemned. Even your most civilized and industrialized nations had things like this. And the fact that you didn’t notice them until now shows how we Units are seen throughout the galaxy. Jimmy, I’m not blaming you. I don’t think badly of you at all. It seems like you didn’t knowingly take part, and you didn’t really know how bad it was. But even in your own country, there were classes of castoffs and workers and entertainers and combat Units like me. You have contract workers who picked fruit and vegetables. They didn’t have a legal right to work but had to work below the law in order to survive. Or castoffs with no way to work who begged or stole to get either food or intoxicants.”