Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 27

Itsuki was beyond excited himself, overjoyed to meet Danielle and Roger again. He knew the rest of the team by face and name already and had the pleasure of introducing his little sister.

Michio was more restrained until Danielle's hug put him at his ease. He and Danielle had never met before but they were already good friends, having spent hundreds of hours talking business over the hyperspace comms link.

Even so, Michio hesitated again when he met Ezra. Both men paused a moment. They offered their hands at the same time and shook with a strong grip and a genuine smile.

Danielle viewed the interaction of the two men and correctly interpreted the emotional undercurrents. The two men shared Yumi - not in the sense of ownership but in the sense of loving her and wanting the best for her. The question for Ezra was whether Michio was good enough for Yumi. The question for Michio was how to treat the man whom Yumi had seduced and then come to love after Michio had abandoned her on Capella.

An inveterate admirer of masculinity, Danielle was pleased to see how the men quickly judged each other and silently showed their approval, dispelling any fear of jealousy or recrimination.

Annela stood next to Danielle. She also understood the scene.

"I know what you're thinking," Annela said.

"You always do," Danielle agreed.

"You're thinking that the men have solved a problem with a handshake and a smile that it would have taken two women hours of talking to solve."

"Yes. I admire the manly way of doing things, but, on the whole, I prefer our womanly ways."

"So do I. We might not settle things so quickly but we are certainly more thorough."

******

Tatiana returned from her prospecting trip. After meeting the new visitors from Samothea, and reporting the progress of their mining venture to Ezra, she found the girls doing their morning exercises on a frozen day in the park.

"Welcome me!" she said.

Yael ran to hug her, enthusing: "Tatiana! I'm glad you're back!"

Hazel and Wildchild were less demonstrative, affecting the studied nonchalance of seasoned prospectors. They kissed her on the lips in the Woodlander style.

"Ay, pretty girls," she said addressing them in turn: "Golden angel, English rose, and you, Sam, you Cossack girl. I get you fur hat. You look like Rooshian woman. We go to breakfast, da? I have question for crew."

The question Tatiana had for Hazel and Wildchild was whether they wanted to go prospecting during their winter holiday in a few weeks' time. Needless to say, they jumped at the chance. All nonchalance forgotten, they hugged Tatiana.

Yael's automatic complaint at being left out was only half-hearted. Ryan was due back from Ocean City Medical School later that month and he would be hornier than ever, which suited her perfectly.

"Is paying job," Tatiana explained at breakfast. "Viktor negodyay, wants us go to asteroid belt around star and prospect minerals. Also take scientific readings."

"What kind of readings?" Wildchild asked.

"I do not know, but he gave instruments. Three cases."

This was intriguing and it was hard for the girls to contain their excitement for the next few weeks until the university semester finished and Tatiana was ready to leave.

******

The shuttlecraft, CSS Petticoat II, landed near the Cloner City on Samothea. Yumi was there with Hayate to greet the passengers. She was laughing and crying to see her brother and sister again, giving them huge hugs and showing off Hayate to them.

Michio came out a minute later, hesitant and subdued, but there was no hesitation or restraint by Yumi. She ran up to him and held him tightly.

Hayate was as excited as he had been in his life. He danced with joy at meeting his uncle and aunt. He danced again when his mother called him over to meet Michio.

"Hayate," Yumi said, as Michio knelt down with his arms open. "This is your dad."

Now Michio was overwhelmed. His cheeks were wet as he lifted up his son to carry him around, holding him tightly and kissing him whenever the urge took him. If anything reconciled Yumi to her decision it was the sight of Michio and Hayate, the joy and love on their faces. When she had kissed her sister and brother enough, she took Michio's hand and led him to the Council Chamber.

As Madam Scientist, she was expected to introduce her family at a celebratory meal and not to flinch or roll her eyes when the women of Samothea asked intrusive questions or made embarrassing remarks.

During the feast, Yumi had a moment to talk alone to her little sister.

"Shinju, I'm sorry I missed watching you grow up. You were a gawky teenager when I left."

"I'm still a gawky teenager."

"You're a beautiful young woman. Do you forgive me for leaving you behind?"

"I forgave you ages ago, though I didn't understand then. I do now. Michio explained it to me. It was his fault."

"It wasn't completely his fault. I had a romantic notion of running away to escape his family's pressure, without realising how powerful his family could be. If I hadn't made him try to leave, his father wouldn't have forced him to marry Sakura."

"But if you hadn't left, maybe Michio would never have stood up to his father."

"Maybe not."

"And it's all right now, isn't? You'll be happy together now, forever."

"I think we ... I think we should rescue our brother. It looks like the Cloner women have their claws in him. Come on."

After the feast, the women demanded that Michio and Itsuki dance with them. There was a lot of pushing and shoving to monopolise the men, besides the inevitably embarrassing questions about their personal lives and their attitudes toward staying on Samothea to impregnate all the women of the Cloner, Farmer and Miner Tribes.

Itsuki looked a little unnerved by the hungry looks of the women crowding him. Yumi went to claim him for herself. However reluctantly, a request from Madam Scientist would be respected.

Yumi left Michio to fend for himself, though she glanced over at him occasionally. He seemed happy, being a gentleman, dancing with all the women in turn, taking an interest in what his partners said, playing his part in the conversation.

Yumi smiled at the happy looks of the women he was charming and made up her mind.

******

Most students and staff at the Celetaris Institute for Science had a month-long break for the winter. Kelly Mayfield's school was shut and her brother, Ryan, came home from the Ocean City Medical School to help relieve the amazing frustration that Yael had built up in the last few months (not to mention his own frustration).

It was time to enjoy the season of snow and ice, with long evenings in front of an open fire, cuddling under blankets.

Yael wanted to go back to Samothea with Ryan, to see her two mothers and be with their mutual bedmate, Carlin, and her tribe, but Michio had snapped up the last three seats on the shuttlecraft. Although Yael took her disappointment well (three days locked in her bedroom with Ryan helped), Danielle had a task for the girl, to occupy her during the winter holiday.

"You made a computer model of a robot whale," Danielle said. "Now I want you to make a working prototype. Some of my students are staying on Celetaris for the winter. I'll get them to collaborate with you. It can be an engineering project."

Yael was keen to start. She wanted to do everything immediately: meet her collaborators; buy the components (an engine, solar collectors, mechanical depth gauges and timers); and print up the parts of the casing on the holoprinter using plastisteel resin. Smiling, Danielle treated Yael like a self-powered toy: she pointed her in the right direction and let her go.

Now whenever Yael was not having sex with Ryan, she was absorbed in her robot whale project, getting on well with the two senior students, whose experience and knowledge moderated the enthusiastic girl's desire to do everything at once.

******

Hazel and Wildchild prepared for their prospecting trip with Tatiana by having as much sex with Ed and Rod that they could in the weeks before they left, culminating in a weekend spent in bed in Student House, giving their boyfriends the kind of lusty goodbyes they hoped would last them a month.

The girls were alone in the house because Joan Mayfield invited Yael to stay with them over the holiday. This meant Hazel could be even noisier than usual, especially one time when Ed fucked her up against the wall that joined the two bedrooms. She lent face-forward against the wall, her hands flat, her back arched steeply to push out her bottom, legs apart. Ed rutted her with long hard strokes as she wailed. She cried with a new high note when he reached between her legs and rubbed her clitoris, pushing her over the edge again.

On the other side of the wall, despite its insulation, they clearly heard Hazel's screaming joy. Wildchild was just as happy, though not as noisy. She lay on her back, her legs spread, her back arched. Rod's mouth was on her pussy, as it had been for the last hour, bringing her to one stunning crisis after another.

With the boys sexually satisfied, the girls met Tatiana for the next excitement of their young lives.

They took a shuttle to the spaceship 'Sunrise' at the engineering station in a 3,000-mile orbit of Celetaris, where its hydrogen fuel cells and batteries were charged. They brought food, water and full oxygen tanks for the life-support system.

When the girls saw Viktor's instrument cases, which were small black boxes, two feet square and six inches deep, with glass apertures and shallow receiving dishes, Hazel said:

"What do you think, Sam? Some kind of radiation detector."

"Yes, which makes the destination very interesting. Tatiana, did Viktor say how to use the instruments?"

"We take them to asteroids, turn them on, leave them outside an hour, bring them back in. Do again every day. Nothing else. The villain was very secret."

It was a five-day journey to the asteroid belt using a standard hyperdrive: plenty of time to speculate on what information Viktor was collecting and why.

They emerged from hyperspace about a light-year from their target, a young hot blue star, which they approached by microjumps. The asteroid belt orbited the star at about 200 million miles and was 20 million miles thick.

It was a bit of a mystery. It was a very thick asteroid belt with more than enough mass to make a planet, but they could not tell if the belt was the remnants of the original dust cloud from which the star formed (matter which, for some reason, never coalesced into a planet or moons), or whether a planet had once existed but was smashed to smithereens by a violent impact. There were no other planets or asteroids: just a large cloud of dust and comets further out.

Some of the asteroids had crazy shapes with wild jagged edges, as if they had been smashed when they were molten and quickly frozen; but most were smooth pebbles, which indicated a slow and gradual formation under gravitation. It was something to puzzle about as they investigated the belt and took the radiation readings that Viktor wanted.

Sunrise had radiation detectors of its own. They showed that the star was very active, giving strong readings across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, especially strong in the ultraviolet region and x-rays, which they had to be careful about, limiting their outside exposure in spacesuits.

******

Yael's engineering partners were two long-haired lads from smaller Outworld settlements who could not afford to return home for the short winter break, so they normally took on some seasonal work. This holiday the Institute employed them on the project.

By the time the engine they ordered was delivered, they had holoprinted the first prototype whale, which was shaped like a football six feet in diameter. Its shell had 32 panels, 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, making an approximate sphere. The panels had thick edges that projected out from the sphere, making dips in the surface. The edges were glued together with a sticky kind of sealant. The dips would catch the water to drag it along with the robot whale as it sank and rose.

There were solar panels on the top half of the sphere. The engine sat in the middle of the sphere, its outlet tube at top dead centre, the inlet in the opposite position on the bottom. The instruments to turn the engine on or off depending on its depth were tested as well as they could be in the laboratory. Now it was time to launch the prototype into the Central Ocean to see how it performed.

The oceanographic department of the Institute owned a survey boat with a hoist and a flat platform. Yael, Ryan and her partners wrapped up warmly and took the boat onto the ocean on an icy-cold day.

They released the whale and it sank until only the top six panels were above the surface. The engineers checked the readings: they did not expect the solar panels to charge the batteries on such a dull cloudy day, but there was a tiny trickle of juice from the panels.

It was time to turn on the motor.

A big spurt of water was pumped out of the outlet tube and the whale began to sink, gaining speed, leaving a frothing chaos on the surface as it descended to 100 feet, where the engine turned off as it was programmed to and the whale gently bobbed back up to the surface. After a few minutes, the engine was triggered to start again and the whale descended.

This happened another ten times in the two hours of the test before something went wrong inside the whale and it failed to reappear. As it was lighter than water, any problem with the engine or batteries would cause it to float, not sink, so the sad conclusion was that a seal had failed and the whale sprang a leak, filling with water.

They waited another hour but it did not reappear, so they noted the location to let the oceanographic department know of a possible hazard, should the whale resurface sometime, and went back to the institute to report the failure.

"It's not a failure," Danielle told the deflated team, not letting them dwell on the problem. "In the spring, we'll send divers down to recover the whale and learn the cause. In the meantime, I'm authorising the purchase of another engine. Go ahead and make the parts for the prototype mark II. Also, buy yourselves stronger sealant, one designed to work at low temperatures."

6Buying Samothea

Danielle, Eva and Ezra, co-directors of the Samothea Company, hosted a meeting for the shareholders with the company lawyer, Paul Kessler, and other interested parties, to discuss the plan to buy the planet.

Danielle chaired the meeting, with Joan Mayfield, Vice-Chancellor of the Institute, Rosa, Annela, Kalyndra, Herman and Roger as witnesses or advisors. Elspeth Bereded and Stephen Oakshott on Earth took part in the meeting over the comms link. Ezra also represented Edgar Fanshaw but Hestia, Michio and Viktor Bogdanov agreed that Danielle could speak for them.

"I'm pleased to say that The Samothea Company has 5.5 million galactic pounds in the bank," Danielle said, "which is only half-a-million short of what Outworld Ventures informally asked. However, we need a lot of working capital, at least a million pounds, so we must either try to get the settler company to take less money, or we must seek more funds."

She looked around the table, including the holoprojections of the remote shareholders.

"From the looks on your faces, I can see that no more funds are available; so we need to consider what compromise we can offer to the settler company."

"Outworld Ventures is in an impossible position," Paul said. "Earthside politicians are breathing down their necks, using the scandal of Ezra's bedmates to push the company to accept many more settlers than the million they've already promised. We'll help them by taking the planet off their hands, putting them at arm's length from the problem and reducing the purchase Earthside authorities have over them."

"True," Danielle agreed, "but if our maximum offer is 4.5 million, then they'll need an extra sweetener to reduce the price further. The obvious answer, I think, is something like the deal they reached with New Exeter, which is a 50-year contract to provide services to the planet. Then Outworld Ventures can say they're merely a service-provider to Samothea and cannot be held responsible if members of the colony have multiple bedmates."

"The services we want from Outworld Ventures is security, technology, medical treatments, domestic mammals, other fauna and flora, and friction-free trade-routes," Ezra added. "The only service we don't want is vetting new settlers. The Samothea Company and the women of Samothea will do the vetting. This means we can set the limit to the number of settlers and properly assess a potential settler's moral character."

"And we can choose the sex of the applicants as well," said Eva, exercising the bee in her bonnet.

"It sounds like a mostly good plan," Joan said with a cool look at Eva, "and I can see how it may induce Outworld Ventures to reduce their price further because the income from the service contract will be pure profit for them. The problem is that your company will run out of money if you don't have a solid income yourself."

"Is there any chance we could get them to accept four millions?" Roger asked.

"I will try on behalf of the Women's Business Initiative." Elspeth said.

"Our best card is that the settler company will want the service contract to last as long as possible," Ezra said, "so they won't ask too much from us in case we go bankrupt."

"There's another problem," Paul said. "Outworld Ventures agreed to honour the family claims of the original lost settlers and about 1,500 relatives have applied."

"Yes," agreed Danielle. "The problem is that the settler company was going to transport them at its own expense, but we don't have enough money to do that. It would be bad publicity for us not to honour their promise, but what other answer is there? Even if we could afford it, what about our promise to the women of Samothea that they would have a say over all candidates for settlement?"

"Can we assume half the settlers are men?" Gloria asked.

"Perhaps slightly more than half."

"As you know, I'm not opposed to men coming to Samothea but the numbers will be a problem for us, though we're not in a position to make demands."

"We're buying the planet in order to protect your way of life, Gloria, or at least control the inevitable changes as much as possible. But I may have an answer. We all liked Andrew Claydon's idea of making the inhabited part of Samothea into a National Park, where settlement would be in the gift of the women of Samothea. We could forbid more settlement in the National Park, at least temporarily, until the consequences of renewed colonisation are properly understood."

"I discussed the plan in detail with Andrew," Gloria said. "We like it very much. There'll have to be transfers of properties inside and outside the National Park. Though we live communally now, we have a Family Name Book that records who owns what portions of land. For example, Galatea, Chief of the Herders, owns the plain between the Cloner City and the Southern Mountains, whereas my family owns a parcel of land, one-hundred square miles, north-east of the white mountains, where no-one has been in 100 years."

"We'll take prior ownership into account," Danielle agreed, "and make sure neither Samothean natives nor the descendents of the settlers lose out."

"I propose a woman-only National Park," Eva said.

"What do you mean, Eva," Gloria asked.

"I mean that men could not live there permanently, though they could visit."

"I doubt many of us would want that ..."

There were a chorus of women in the background of Gloria's comms link saying 'Not me'. Annela and Kalyndra also spoke up, saying: "Nor me."