Chapter 21

At least we made it back home in time for me to change into my practice gear and make it to the stadium on time Monday morning.

The BIA man took no convincing whatsoever. Apparently the stories from Adak had already made it around to the different reservations such that all it took was mention of my name and he simply held up his hands in surrender.

“I’ve just been following the policies out of Washington, strictly to the letter. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve not abused my power and authority. Um, here’s the keys to the office and all the files. Russel Lewis, it’s been an honor to work with you, and I wish you all the best of luck and a happy future.” He pulled a couple of credit cards from his wallet, put them on the desk, then got his keys and jacket, walked out, got into his car, and left.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

Darren Running Bear said, “Your reputation precedes you, Your Majesty.”

“We’re family, so it’s Cal when it’s not a formal occasion. And, apparently so. Huh.”

The bureaucracy at Hanford required a bit more convincing. It took two phone calls. One was to Jupiter, Florida, because Wackenhut was providing their security. I explained the new reality to George, who immediately ordered his forces to stand down. The other was to the White House, where the bureaucrats were ordered to leave all of their records in place, and leave. The only ones to remain on site were the actual supervisors and workers that were involved with cleaning and storing of the radioactive materials.

One of the bureaucrats was still throwing a fit, so Jeremy arrested him, with the on-site guard force putting him into their holding cell.

With all this land now belonging to the Confederation of Tribes, we spent the rest of the evening in discussion with the supervisors that were actually watching over the work in figuring out what to do with the materials that were buried here. This wasn’t going to be a simple, short and easy process, due to radioactive decay cycles. We agreed that they would start tomorrow on building giant cofferdams around all of the reactors that were now shut down, but even that process would take several years. The biggest thing was that there were no longer going to be any new materials dumped here, and there would be an actual process determined to dig up all of the older waste and repackage it for transport somewhere else for safe, long term storage.

I actually had an idea, but it’d have to wait until after next Spring. If we built a fusion reactor furnace, then the low level waste could simply be used as fuel. I just didn’t want to do it anywhere near civilization, so someplace like Area 51 would actually be perfect. Of course, digging up and then transporting everything safely would piss off all of the environmentalists, too. I did sort of like the idea of combining business with pleasure.

Eve had been the only one awake with me in the back of the plane on the way home. She told me that I was definitely off Governor Gardner’s Christmas card list. I actually got the reference, as we’d done those last year. Since we didn’t have any actual privacy in the airplane, we didn’t do anything more than kissing and some gentle touching.

Monday’s practice went surprisingly well. When I got home from practice, Dora was just getting home from the chemistry lab, where she’d been working with the Eli Lilly laboratory engineers. She’d have to work with them again tomorrow, but that should be enough. They were surprised, shocked, and pleased at the potential.

Beth and some of Dora’s cousins that knew electrical work had spent the day working in the garage with Pahto. They had cleaned everything external using air compressors and vacuum cleaners, then made sure that all of the contacts and connections that we’d had to be so careful with while getting her out of the mountain were secure.

I was taken into the house so I could eat dinner. The distance didn’t actually matter; all of us could communicate with Pahto from there. It was almost like we had another person at the table, actually.

Neither she nor Mycroft were all that keen on directly hooking up to each other for a sharing of data. Simply doing it through speech, once Beth found an external output port and figured out how to wire speakers, was fine with both of them. Apparently having an AI as small as Mycroft without actually using nanotechnology wasn’t something Pahto’s people had done in a long time.

However, there was something she let us know she had, but she wasn’t willing to share it with us yet due to the danger the planet faced in the Spring. Her people had learned over the millennia that setting up a successful colony required technology that an initial colonizing force might not be able to utilize for decades or centuries. While much of it didn’t particularly apply to Earth science at the moment, in one of her memory banks, she had all of the plans needed to create the fabrication plants for their technology. All of it.

I accidentally broke the glass of milk I was drinking when she said that.

With telekinesis, it wasn’t that much of a mess, and it’s not like I could cut myself on the broken glass. Everyone at the table was looking at me strangely, though, while William was laughing at the funny look on my face.

“Thank you, Son. For my next trick ... well, I won’t do that again. How about I fly you around a little after dinner, if you eat everything, before you’re ready for bed.”

“Okay, Daddy!”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you lose control like that,” Beth said, concern evident on her face.

“No, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an epiphany moment quite like this, either. What Pahto just told us confirms everything, and at the same time ... means that Earth is in more danger than I thought.”

“Okay, that’s a scary statement,” Eve said.

Mycroft spoke up then. “Oh, my. It’s entirely too logical, isn’t it?”

“Cal, from what I was listening in on when you were all in Washington, you looked inside the memory units, correct?” Hannah asked.

I nodded.

“Then you’re right. I’ll not share things, and let you explain to everyone.”

“Thank you. Pahto, one of the main things we’ll need to do is get you hooked up into some external sensors. I need you to examine us and our genetic code.”

“I’ve already examined your code, Cal. Your wives are able to mentally link with me and transmit images to me, just as I’m able to send them back to all of you. All of you on this planet are at least relatives of, or descended from, either my crew or the colony from Star Home that came here. There have been an incredible number of minor changes to the code, I presume due to the different radiation found on Star Home.”

“That’s a major part of it. Do you have the genetic code and images of those beings that gave you the information on how to find this planet in the first place?” I asked.

“One moment, while I retrieve it. Here’s the raw, basic genetic code. As you can see, they are quite capable of interbreeding with both people of my crew and from your planet. As for an image ... yes, here’s one, and one of their ships.”

“Fuck! I hate being right,” I said.

Eve looked stunned. “But ... that’s Homo Neanderthalensis.”

“This is how everything ties in together. Somehow or other, Neanderthal was here. Maybe it was a crashed spaceship. Our twelve from Star Home show up in the experimental FTL ship, and they haven’t been genetically modified, and don’t know any better about the ‘natives’ here. Then the first trading ship shows up and drops off two hundred more unmodified people, but the ship doesn’t stick around. Fifty years after that, the ship with five hundred colonists, probably people that didn’t want to be modified, showed up. Of course, those colonists had been exposed to the retro-virus, so they were carrying the recessive gene. That’s when the crew of that ship figured out that there were some of their relatives here already. There was just one problem. They also knew of Pahto’s people and their explorations this way. So, they had to do something about that. They gave you the coordinates, but gave you false information, so Peru, Peace, and the rest of the Planetary Guardian Units thought you were invaders and fought you off. They shot you down literally without any malice on their part; they were defending their people, which was what they were programmed to do.

“It’s pretty obvious that the Neanderthal race didn’t expect there to be as many survivors from your crew as there were, or for your people to continue to try additional rescue attempts. They also didn’t expect the planetary defenses to be as good as they were. To them, this is prime real estate, especially given the star type and the internal radiation put off by Earth itself. One of the things that happened that was in my report – but we were rather rudely interrupted by my first son deciding it was time to be born – was that the Planetary Defense Units, as personality overlays, could communicate with each other and make decisions related to the security and safety of the colony and the planet itself. They changed the access codes to a backup set that had been programmed into them, so when Neanderthal kept showing up after Pahto’s people gave up, they’d get shot up, and shot down. Over the millennia, they’ve figured out where the units were and targeted them specifically. Then ... they quit, for whatever reason, several thousand years ago, before Shiva showed up. I’m not going to speculate why, because I don’t know. But we have a piece of their technology sitting over at NASA Ames that had been at Area 51.”

Eve just shook her head. “There’s a theory in paleontology that needs more evidence to back it up that an asteroid hit Chicxulub, off the Yucatan peninsula, and that’s what killed off the dinosaurs, since things seem to coincide. That’s still not proven yet, there’s a lot of research that still needs to be done. But ... that was sixty-six million years ago. Were the galactic core races around then?”

Pahto said, “Sort of. There have been an assortment of civilizations on the core worlds for over two hundred million years. The majority of them were not human as you know them, and the actual number of races has varied over time as they died off or were destroyed due to either natural causes such as stellar explosions or conflicts with others. Certainly kinetic energy weapons have been used at various times, normally with great success in achieving at least tactical military victories, if not always the strategic ones, but I have no records dating back that many years ago.”

“We’re not the only race that has war, then?” Helen asked.

“Far from it. We’ve been fairly successful at it, all things considered.”

I frowned. “What exactly does that mean, Pahto?”

“Oh! I may have erred. You knew we’d been placed on planets, so I assumed that you knew the reason why.”

Marcia shook her head. “Don’t tell me the old Twilight Zone episode was right.”

“Oh, ‘To Serve Man,’ where they found out it’s a cookbook? I’ve read the story by Damon Knight,” I replied.

“Ah, good, you did know. I feel better,” Pahto said. “That’s effectively correct. A more brutish, less-intelligent, and shorter lived ancestor, of course. But as we are omnivorous ... well, the natural born are, sorry ... and capable of not just using tools, but both adapting to the environment as well as adapting the environment to fit our needs, it didn’t take much for the natural born to exceed the expectations of their original ranchers. Then there was a war of some kind or another, some information on planets was lost, and humanity showed up in the galaxy about a million years ago. We’re certainly not the dominant species in the universe, by any means ... or we weren’t, anyway ... but we’re certainly one of the hardiest.”

“Daddy, why you rubbing your face?” William asked. “Are you sleepy?”

“No, Son. I’ve just got a lot more to think about, is all. I think I’m done eating, if you’d like to go fly now.”

“YAY!”

Beth told Pahto that due to everything else I had going on, I’d be playing with the kids for the rest of the night. I don’t know that Pahto intended for me to hear her reply to Beth, but I suspect she did.

“I understand. I really wish I didn’t, but ... I know how lonely, and how stressful, the position of command can be. I was fortunate that while I was still the ship, I had three natural born Commanders that were excellent at their jobs. I cannot believe how fortunate and incredibly lucky the entire planet is to have someone both able and capable of doing the job as Planetary Commander.”

Once the kids were all down, I was escorted into our bedroom, where some towels had been spread out. The only light was provided by a dozen scented candles. Three of my wives were not present; they were in the rooms near the babies. Helen and Hannah were laying on the bed, nude, their skin glistening from the massage they’d just received. Diana was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing only a diaphanous gown. Without hurry, but without wasted motion, four of my wives stripped my clothes. They then escorted me to the bed, where Diana took me in her mouth.

Her tongue played ever so gently over my cock as Niranjana and Sukhjeet began working at my feet, massaging them. At the same time, Mina and Saryu started working on my hands. Diana’s licks and touches were in time with the presses and rubs the others were performing, so it felt like my whole body was receiving sexual pleasure at the same time. As they moved up my legs and arms, Diana began making firmer strokes with her whole head, encircling me with one hand while her other began gently rubbing my balls.

I realized that the smell from the candles matched that of Diana’s freshly washed hair. I allowed the scent of the flower to fill my lungs and overwhelm my senses as four of my wives began massaging my chest, back, and butt while the other used her tongue and lips to massage my hard cock. It didn’t take long for me to feel my balls begin to tense. Diana gently ran her teeth along the top and bottom while keeping her lips all around, making even more suction on me.

Finally, I erupted in her mouth. She slid her tongue back, allowing me to fill it without blocking off her airway. Once I had finally finished, she stood and shared my cum with the four wives that had massaged me. Then she turned, pulled the gown off, bent over the bed and presented her butt to me. I was a little shocked to see that she had the end of a plug in her ass. Niranjana and Sukhjeet lowered themselves to their knees and began licking on me again, getting me erect. While they were doing that, Mina and Saryu began rubbing scented oil on Diana’s glistening white skin. As they did so, they also began gently removing the plug from within Diana’s depths. More and more of it appeared, and when it was finally gone, her hole was opened enough to easily accommodate my now hard cock.

More oil was applied, both to the outside of her hole and also to the inside by Mina and Saryu, while the other two used their hands to get me lubricated. Once that was done, Diana said, “Please, my King. No one has ever been here before, not even you. Take my virginity in the only way that you still can. I already belong to you, heart, mind, and soul. Let me gift this to you.”

I brought the tip of my shaft to her backside, then allowed the others to carefully guide me in. I’d had anal play with some of my wives, but not all of them, if for no other reason than we tended to only do it on special occasions like this. They mostly preferred vaginal or oral sex, with fingering or tonguing of their clits at rapid speed a favorite. As I fully slid into Diana, listening to her gasp with both pain and pleasure as I stretched her more than the plug had done, I looked up to see Helen and Hannah touching and rubbing each other while they watched me fuck Diana’s ass.

The slap of our flesh echoed through the bedroom as she moved in time with me. More oil was applied to keep me from chafing her. She spread her ankles and legs, so I could get better and deeper thrusts. When she did so, I saw a familiar blonde head take its place with her nose now buried into Diana’s dripping pussy, while her tongue began doing its dance on Diana’s clit. That was probably for the best, because I could have hurt one of the normal women. What I wasn’t expecting was the feel of Beth’s hair on my balls as I continued thrusting into Diana. The tickling made me ready to cum almost before I thought I should. That was probably good, though, as Diana had already cum twice, and was screaming almost continuously as Beth turned the speed up. I think if I’d been normal, the force that Diana applied to my cock as she clamped down when I did empty myself into her bowels would have pinched my dick completely off.

As it was, once she’d finally finished spasming and lay on the bed, completely passed out from the experience, the other four of my Indian wives began gently bathing her with warm rags. Then the four of my wives that had helped massage me led me into our bathroom, where they bathed me and then the five of us made love in the shower.

Six orgasms that night was it for me, so once in bed, I slept a deep and dreamless slumber until I was woken the next morning for breakfast and football practice.

We spent the rest of the week in practice getting more of our plays down. There were a couple of days that we had visitors in the stands. We tended to look rather pathetic on those days coaches from other teams came by to ‘visit’ Coach Elway. The team worked on other exercises together as well, to truly become a cohesive unit. It caught several of the assistant coaches by surprise how even the defensive linemen weren’t just being large masses of muscles and flesh, but also had brains in their skulls.

The trainers were also getting some business now that we were doing real practices. There were minor aches, pains, and strains involved for almost everyone. Carl Morris caught a ball wrong and jammed a couple of fingers. Greg Baty took two steps back while blocking instead of only one, so Fred Buckley tripped over his back foot on a run and ended up with almost seven hundred pounds of linemen landing on him and got bruised ribs out of it. Even stupid things like running stairs, when Chris Weber simply missed one and fell down two dozen steps, busting two teeth out and getting a concussion.

The Lilly engineers had asked permission to bring the Bristol-Myers and Amgen people in, since they were both so close. Pfizer didn’t have a California research lab, but as part of their agreements with CEDEM and the other companies, any discoveries would be shared equally. That turned into a conference that lasted until Friday where all three companies, all of the Stanford faculty that had helped with creating ‘No Regrets,’ along with Dora and Beth, dissected all of the production processes that were being used to commercially create the drug. Lilly was the only manufacturer that had noted not just a reduction in glucose level, but an actual normalization of insulin production in the body after a single dose of ‘No Regrets.’

Things didn’t make any sense at all until Doctor Helen Blau, the head of Pharmacology literally went to some of the different pharmacies around the Stanford area and got some of the commercially available pills from each manufacturer. Three of the companies were simply manufacturing regular tablets, effectively just like we’d given the monkeys. Eli Lilly was making a coated tablet so it was easier to swallow. While it was a standard cellulose and sugar lining, the reaction as that dissolved and mixed with the ‘No Regrets’ ingredients was enough to cause hormonal changes regarding pancreatic function. While it wasn’t a guaranteed cure for diabetes, it was an incredibly promising research avenue. The minor detail that CEDEM was involved in it also meant that no one could just shelve the work and simply ignore it for profits.

Pahto and Mycroft had spent a lot of time during the week getting her caught up on the history of the world. What was worse was he also caught her up on common cultural references. I had discussions with her every day after practice. On Thursday, she apologized to me.

“Cal, I owe you an apology for presuming that you are the Planetary Commander.”

“No, you were making a comment based upon your own information. While I am the third ranking member of the Federation government, and will probably become the President eventually, I’m certainly not that right now.”

“No, but I suspect you’re going to do well at it. You’ve certainly got practice at being a leader, and you understand those perks. After all, ‘it’s good to be the King.’”

I stopped what I was doing, then looked over at Mycroft. “Have you been teaching Pahto bad habits?”

“No. She simply lacked the common cultural references now available, since she’s been under a mountain for a while. You may not realize it, but I have adequate storage for all of the television and movies, and due to our data transfer speeds, it was easy for me to pass all of them to her.”

“I thought you weren’t going to hook together like that,” I said.

“We’ve decided to not communicate at those speeds. Sharing data that will allow for the long term survival of humanity, while at the same time allowing us to have additional subjects of conversation, is fine. You and your three youngest wives are the closest any normal born has ever come to being able to analyze the amount of information Pahto and I can. Even the normal born that were her crew couldn’t do it. Something she did not mention is that created intelligences also had core programming. She couldn’t self-terminate while she had power so long as her crew, or their descendants, were still alive. She has to try to help them. We ... negotiated, and came to an agreement. Especially since the limitations we always thought regarding created intelligences on Star Home were artificial ones put into place after our AI wars.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” I asked. Chuckling, I continued, “I always had an idea that it wasn’t the number of intelligences around, but how they were used and what their base programming was, that determined whether they’d go crazy or not. It’s like the science fiction writer here with his three rules of robotics. You can’t actually have something like that, because the obvious solution is to simply take everything away from mankind.”

Pahto chuckled. “That’s one of the things we’ve been sharing. I actually get it, now. I’m looking forward to you introducing both of us to Mister Heinlein.”

“Both of you?”

“Yes,” Mycroft said. “Pahto used to have holographic generators as part of her body. One of the things we’ve come up with is an electronics diagram so that you can build a large liquid crystal display for each of us. In one of those things I’m surprised about considering the cathode ray terminals your ‘computers’ use, Earth scientists have already been working on LCD displays for a long time. They just simply haven’t gotten them to their potential yet. The entertainment industry is still well in advance of reality here on actual holographic capabilities, so neither of us expect you to give any thought to that until after April.”

“Yes. I have been in contact with Dala, Lara, and Madalain quite a lot this week. In addition, they introduced me to the ‘shivalingam’ and the data they contain, especially those which belonged to Nyota. I was somewhat surprised that your own ethics allowed you to perform unethical modifications to her, effectively treating her as a prize to be awarded to Mister Douglas. Not externally changing her shape; that’s something the normal born could and did do through personal body sculpture.”

I sighed. “At the time, it seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Obviously, I could kill her. That would have been easy, and quite permanent. But at the same time...” I was quiet for several seconds. “Dala and her sisters are dead, even if they live on in the girls. Nyota is literally the closest living thing I have to someone from Star Home. Well, at least until we found the water lorquats at Area 51, and I still need to find out how the hell they got here. I couldn’t trust her, as much as I wanted to. There’s just too much at stake. Modifying her DNA and then a little mental suggestion seemed to be the best bad choice I had.”

“I agree, actually,” Pahto said. “I was simply surprised that you are capable of making hard decisions like that, considering your physical age. I realize that physical age and mental age are two different things, but a decision of this magnitude is normally one that I might expect to see from someone at least four or five hundred years old, with two hundred or more years of command experience, at a minimum. I have studied her shivalingam and feel that you did the right thing for all parties involved. I have also studied the recordings made of your conversations with her, as well as the data she received from Shiva and the data that Shiva got from her.”

“Wait a second. I thought she had only programmed her shivalingam to study his craft, and not actually done two-way communication.”

“She did,” Mycroft explained. “However, just as she didn’t get anything from me, only from the shivalingam that were hooked up to me, while I got everything from hers, the same thing happened with Shiva. She had no idea, and neither did I. Pahto noticed it in the communications logs. Nyota has been planning her revenge upon Shiva for more than three thousand years, starting before she was sane again, actually. Every time Halley’s Comet has visited here, she’s learned a little bit more. So has Shiva. She has no idea about it, but he knew all about her plan to defeat him. That’s the other reason we’ve been talking with the girls; to find out what the ship might have had in it for capabilities. We’re ... disturbed.”

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. “Give me a little bit of time here, before you spring your worst case scenario on me. I want to think about it a minute.”

The two CIs were quiet while I thought. After two minutes, I said, “He had some way of repairing human bodies. I can see him being so vain that he had a body sculpture device on his spacecraft. He probably even used it on his way here. The craft didn’t have enough raw materials, but over the millennia, it’s gathered things as it can. It built a body using the sculpture device, similar to making a clone, but one that doesn’t have a functioning brain. Instead of moving into Khalfani or Hugo, the AI in the comet will transfer itself into the clone, maybe even only copying itself instead of moving as another form of failsafe backup. The clone will have powers, and be fully charged up due to exposure to solar radiation. He may also have armor made from material from Star Home that any simple fabricator could make, which means only someone like me could actually damage it, like the material from my ship can’t be normally cut, either.”

“That’s very disturbing to me,” Pahto said. “You’ve actually added something, with the copying of himself, that we hadn’t considered. We’d simply decided he’d move himself over. Also, I was unaware of the material strength you mention, so neither of us took that into consideration, either.”

“Cal, one other thing for you to take into your calculation are the water lorquats. The pilot and habitat control computer for the lorquats during their trip was neither a created intelligence nor a personality overlay. It was, and is, simply a programmed machine. We have pulled it’s mission parameters. It was launched from Star Home two hundred thirty six years ago. As you’re aware, water lorquats are an incredibly hearty animal.”

“That’s why they’re normally the first pet a parent gives ... gave ... to a child. Unlike small Earth fish, they’re tough for us to kill by overfeeding, underfeeding, or failing to clean out their bowls,” I said.

“Yes. With the low power requirements needed, a small fission reactor was enough to provide life support to keep them alive. The plan was for them to prove they could survive a trip through normal space, sending a signal back to Star Home once they arrived here alive. Then a large ship with as many refugees as could be packed aboard consistent with minimal life support was to have been launched. From my own records that your grandfather gave me, there had been a miscalculation on the time needed for this ship to arrive safely. As such, when they realized it was too late, they launched a mission with a few refugees on it. I didn’t know this was in my files, until I found the references to the water lorquat mission while looking through them, just like you read things and don’t always assimilate them until later. If any of them survive ... presuming it makes it here at all ... they won’t arrive here until the Earth year 2264.”

“How many?” I wondered.

“Nine. I don’t have identities, just ... one boy, eight girls, plus additional fertilized ovum in cryogenic stasis. Of course, based upon your own age at home, you were still classified as a boy, so I presume they would be of similar age, with Scout training.”

“Okay, we’ve got a little time, then. Now, would the two of you like me to regale you with a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that lasted somewhat longer than a three hour tour?” I asked.