Chapter 6

The girls insisted that I take them out to dinner in one of the restaurants aboard the Tomkit Station. I was surprised when they wanted the ten slaves to accompany us. At least they had Terran clothing for the women, not that I minded the view the Karkallian clothing provided. Still, aboard the station, their usual exhibition of skin would be disruptive.

The girls knew exactly what they wanted to order, showing that they had been out to dinner with my family, and that they were quick studies. Tiyya ordered four of each of the four spiciest meals, and a large bowl of Persean paste.

I was about to warn her about what she was ordering when Marile and Penola mmmmmed their approval of her choices. “You do know what you just ordered, don’t you?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, we love the Perseus peppers,” Penola said enthusiastically.

I hoped they did because Perseus peppers are the hottest pepper known to Terrans. Discovered on Terra Perseus, a planet in the center of the Perseus constellation, most people who love hot food limit themselves to a small dab of Perseus paste.

I was surprised yet again when Tiyya ordered milk for each of them. I ordered myself a mixture of fruit juices, what I had assumed Tiyya would have ordered.

“We went to a different restaurant every night, and tried one of every dish on their menu,” Tiyya explained. “Your mother took us to the market where we bought one of every fruit and vegetable. After tasting your spices, we bought a sample of every spice available in the store your mother took us to. We have a list of fruits and spices that you should take on this trip,” she explained.

“We want you to take dairy cows back to start producing milk. We found someone selling his entire operation, including the more than three thousand Sagittarian Jersey cows he has. He can have the entire dairy broken down ready to go in two days. His price includes the cows, the dairy, and all the androids that run the dairy. We had it appraised, and it’s worth nearly double what he’s asking. Evidently, three large companies have begun selling their milk cheap enough that smaller dairies can’t survive,” she explained.

“We want horses, too,” Marile added excitedly. “Your grandfather took us horseback riding one day and we loved it. We found someone willing to sell us ten trained Terran Saddlebred horses for riding and all the tack we will need for them. He’ll include an android that knows how to care for them.”

“Anything else?” I asked amusedly. I figured that the girls would explore and find things they liked. A dairy and riding horses weren’t anything that even remotely crossed my mind, though.

“Nothing for us, but Mette finished the search you started and narrowed the results even more. She sent us a list of eleven organic compounds that most closely resemble the male aphrodisiac. We bought a sample of each compound to take back,” Penola said.

After the women all moaned with pleasure over the vanilla ice cream that Tiyya ordered for dessert, we headed back to the Phaunos. As soon as we arrived, Jaya smugly told me that someone had tried to hack into her while we were gone. They were unsuccessful, even though they used five merged Terran AIs, something they had done before, hacking into a merchant ship’s AI right after they sold a valuable cargo. By taking over the ship’s AI, they could access the bank accounts and drain them.

The Terran AIs had no idea how to deal with Karkallian, Dubanian, or Gorokian AIs, however, and were unsuccessful. My AIs managed to take over the hacker’s AI, draining his accounts. Next, they transferred ownership of his two small cargo ships and one large cargo ship to me, along with seventeen cargo shuttles. They even transferred ownership of the 382 androids he used to operate everything and all of his other property. Jaya sent androids to pack everything from his office and home aboard his two small cargo ships and brought it to us to sort through.

The hacker was bound, gagged, and under guard in one of the cargo holds. Five minutes of interrogating him let me know the kid was a lying, cheating, scheming, thief, and con artist. If I turned him over to Terran authorities, I’d be stuck here for a year waiting for his trial. Instead, I had one of the slave collars put on him. He’d help on Planet Alpha. Since I wouldn’t have the necessary official government documentation that he was a slave, I wouldn’t be able to sell him.

With that nasty bit of business settled, I returned to my stateroom where three horny girls awaited me.

My new-to-me ships (the hacker’s old ships) arrived during the night after my androids sorted through everything from the hacker’s business and home. Fortunately, he didn’t have a wife. His records were reviewed overnight by the AIs and they found nothing important. With that, I had his records destroyed, and many of his belongings donated to a government orphanage.

I sent the two cargo ships to the Mir-11 shipyard with instructions for Warner to install jump drives and the new shielding for me. I intended to use them to transport timber and ore from my new planets back to Terra, but not until I made another trip to Karkalla and got more weapons and AIs to complete the upgrades.

Warner sent the androids back aboard another ship, along with the special project I asked him to start when I first returned. The ship was an older freighter that was being retired. He reinstalled the engines, and installed merged shields for me. My androids installed a merged AI. With a second empty freighter nearly the size of the Phaunos, I ordered all the Perseus peppers I could get and lots of the spices Tiyya suggested. I also ordered ten stasis cargo containers full of ice-cold bottled milk.

We met with the man selling the dairy. He was an older widower, now looking forward to retirement. He knew several others who were trying to sell off their dairies and we bought four additional complete dairies. Aware of previous difficulties Karkallians had growing Terran crops so that they tasted like ones grown on Terran planets, I also bought feed for the cows, not sure if we’d be able to find anything for them to eat in their new home that would allow them to continue producing milk.

All the dairy equipment, the feed, and the cows were loaded aboard the new ship that I decided to name the Demeter, after the Greek Goddess of the harvest. When we bought the horses, they joined the cows aboard the Demeter. The animals were all in stasis containers so we didn’t have to worry about milking the cows or cleaning up cow and horse shit.

Using the lower docking port so both ships could use their engines, I attached the Demeter to the Phaunos and headed to Terra Centauri. While my AIs and androids supervised the loading of the usual cargo intended for Toolondo, I spent the rest of the day with my family.

Felicia brought her husband, Nathan, in to talk to me. They agreed to work for me. Since Nathan had twenty years of experience in the Terran Navy, I suggested that he operate the cargo ships I would use for trips back and forth to my new planets. Having served as a junior officer aboard a battleship, he was a bit put out about being the captain of a freighter and was even more upset when I started laughing at him.

“Nathan, when I’m done outfitting them, each of the two ships will be powerful enough to defeat any Terran warship, and will be faster in system than a planetary cutter,” I said. “The four ships I have in orbit right now could easily defeat the entire Terran navy if I were so inclined.”

“How?” he gasped.

“I combined technology from four races. When I got back this time, I sold the government designs for two shields that will withstand anything that Terran ships can throw at them. They easily withstood an ambush in Karkalla. I also sold them designs for jump drives. That’s how I make the round trip to Karkalla in less than two weeks instead of four years,” I explained.

“Holy crap,” he exclaimed, “Where do I sign up?”

“You just did. Do you two want to make this trip with me?” I asked. They did, and I left several of the androids I got from the hacker to help with the family farm in his and Felicia’s stead.

I was surprised when Felicia joined us in bed tonight. “Nathan is being entertained by the ten slaves you had aboard. He agreed that it was a fair trade for the night,” she laughed. The night became a blur as partners changed frequently. The women were still going strong when I finally fell asleep to their continuing cries of passion.

Felicia woke up early enough for us to enjoy each other, then gave me an emotional kiss and went to find her husband.

She was laughing when she came to breakfast alone. “He’s still unconscious. Those women wore him out despite the increased energy and stamina he’s shown lately,” she chuckled.

After breakfast, I told my immediate family about the nanites, asking them to keep the information to themselves. Not yet wanting to spread the nanites across Terra, I had changed the nanites’ programming so that any nanites the slaves transferred to my family couldn’t be passed on. My three siblings and their spouses voted on which one of the slaves had been the best and most enthusiastic sex partner; they chose Sheringa.

I adjusted the programming of Sheringa’s nanites so they could be transferred to one person beyond her. That person couldn’t transfer them, though. I tasked Sheringa with assuring that each member of my family was inoculated with nanites. I did allow the nanites in my pregnant female relatives to be passed on in utero to their unborn children.

I left my brothers in charge of the 597 slaves. I decided against taking them to Planet Alpha, preferring to use androids for all the work. They could use or sell the slaves. If they sold them, they were to be treated the same as the Lochnagari slaves. If they kept them to use, they were not to be hurt or harmed, but could be used in a brothel, or something similar. I warned my brothers not to give the women chocolate, and why. If they sold any of the women, their new owners needed to understand that the women reacted violently to chocolate.

Nathan finally woke up long after breakfast was done. He looked sheepish when he joined the rest of the family, and we all laughed at him. The way Nathan hugged Felicia when she sat on his lap, I could tell that he was fine with her joining me in bed last night.

Mid-morning, we told everyone goodbye and boarded the Phaunos. I left one of the corvettes and two hundred troops there to protect my family and the slaves.

With so much mass, it took longer to reach jump speed, but we reached jump speed shortly after we were beyond the gravitational effects of the solar system.

Our first stop was Iota. I left Ramina and Simpta aboard the Phaunos with instructions to load all the five-hundred-foot trees that were ready, and then to go to Planet Alpha and finish filling the ship with timber. Nathan and Felicia stayed aboard the Phaunos.

I took the Cornucopia and visited the remaining planets, picking up ingots from the mining sites, and more diamonds from Nu. I kept enough androids and shuttles for the Demeter, and split the rest between the other planets, distributing what I got from the hacker. I got to Planet Alpha before the Phaunos, and loaded one twenty-foot cube each of the black, the reddish, and the greenish obsidian before topping off the ship with timber.

The Phaunos arrived as we were finishing, and loading switched to them. While the ship was being loaded, I shuttled the hacker to the farm and explained why he was there--I had nothing else to do with him and it was this or working as a slave in one of my mines. Everything was already password protected and protected with biometrics, so he couldn’t cause any trouble if he somehow overcame the slave collar. If he did try to cause trouble, the androids could take him up in the shuttle to the edge of the ionosphere and see how well he flew on his way back to the ground. I left seeds for Perseus peppers, hoping they would grow there.

I left the second corvette in orbit around Iota to protect my claims. It carried a full android crew and a hundred military androids. Once I docked with the Phaunos, I checked the string of probes I had between this planet and where I made the jumps and headed out of the system. As heavily loaded as we were, the jump back to Toolondo took eight days.

For those eight days, Nathan and Felicia practiced their Karkallian. By the time we reached Toolondo, they understood more than twenty simple phrases. An hour before the jump ended, I boarded the Cornucopia, and separated from the Phaunos. I made sure that both ships had their weapons ready and that the shields were up.

If anyone attacked when we exited the jump, the Phaunos would be at a disadvantage. Its maneuverability was severely restricted due to being docked with the Demeter. Because of that, I exited the jump first in case there was trouble. There was none, and the reports from the shielded probes I’d left were all negative. Once the Phaunos exited the jump, we headed for Toolondo. I sent messages ahead to Yappari at the marketplace, then to the docks, and to the girls’ families letting them know we were back. The message I sent Jnilo also told him what ores I had aboard and how much of each in case the government wanted any of it.

Then I sent a message to Yuka letting him know that I had another large ship to outfit once it was empty.

There was a huge crowd waiting for us when we landed. Once the girls greeted their families, and I introduced Felicia and Nathan, the customs agent and the government buyer approached. I showed the customs agent the manifests of the three ships and he headed inside with his crew of androids to verify everything. The government buyer excitedly gave me the list of what they wanted, and what the going rate was. I confirmed the deal, and had their ingots unloaded first.

By the time that was done, the timber buyers were here, hoping to get first shot at the timber. They were stunned to silence when they saw the first of the five-hundred-foot tree trunks unloaded. I let the female androids, who were dressed in Karkallian sarongs, deal with the chaos. Since I now had more than a hundred female androids, there were plenty to go around, and my four primary ones kept track of everything. I noticed a lot more Gorokian buyers this time and went out of my way to greet them.

Last visit, there had only been two Gorokian timber buyers. “Back to try again for timber?” I asked one of the two Gorokian men I recognized from last time.

“You remember me?” he asked, astonished.

“You were in the second group, and just missed getting any timber,” I said. I called the closest android over telling to make sure the man got a load of timber before we ran out. I didn’t have a lot of contact with Gorokians outside of the Gorokian marketplace on Toolondo but didn’t see any harm in trying to promote some goodwill with them.

Yappari called me to let me know hundreds of women were already lining up to buy chocolate. He saved the spaces I liked near the center of the marketplace so I sent a shuttle carrying a cargo container of chocolate, a hundred androids, two cargo containers of produce packed for individual sale, and a hundred military androids to guard them.

With that done, I spent time with my future in-laws. In the back of my mind, I was contemplating installing some sort of bidding system here like Terran ports had. After the incident with the hacker, I knew it would need an AI that combined AIs from all four races to run the thing and to minimize the risk of it being hacked.

I gave Jnilo the samples of each compound close to their male aphrodisiac so the government could test them, and then mentioned the online bidding board. He thought it would be a good idea, so I made a mental note to look into it after the craziness of the next few days.

All three families ate dinner with us that night; we had already cleared enough space in the cargo hold to fit everyone. The girls had a Terran catering company make big batches of their four favorite Terran dishes and had ten giant bowls filled with Perseus paste. They kept them in the stasis chambers the catering company had delivered them in, so they were ready to eat right away.

They cut up some sort of Karkallian vegetable that looked like Jicama into finger-size pieces to use for dipping into the two bowls of Perseus paste they put out with dinner. Everyone raved about the four dishes, mainly because the dishes all contained Perseus peppers.

They were still raving about the peppers after dinner when I went out to see how the timber sales were going. I was surprised to find three news crews there reporting on the five-hundred-foot trees. When they saw me, they quickly started shouting questions. I recognized all three of them from one or both of my previous press conferences and gave them a warning look.

When they stopped shouting, I pointed to the reporter who shut up first. “Where did you find these?” he asked.

“I found them growing on an unclaimed planet in Terran territory,” I replied as I pointed to the second reporter.

“How many more are there? It would be a shame to harvest such a majestic tree to extinction,” he commented.

“The trees cover vast areas of four continents. I estimate there are tens of millions of these dead trees I can harvest without adversely affecting the environment. When natural fires burn through an area, it kills the trees, but they remain upright for thousands of years without decaying. New growth springs up beneath the skeletons of the trees. I have instructed the androids cutting them to plant ten new trees for each tree they harvest, even though we are only harvesting dead trees right now.”