Pussy Pirates
Chapter 15
Month 98—February on Anouilh
“WE CAN’T SELL this module to the Confederacy,” I said firmly.
“That wasn’t our agreement,” Andrea Jackson, Confederacy trade negotiator said just as firmly. “You agreed to give us rights to any Earth-based weaponry you develop.”
“Well, there’s where we have a problem.” I was feeling pretty cocky. It was amazing what getting laid on a regular basis could do for a man. Once that bridge had been crossed, my other enhancements had been sped up. I’d dropped more weight and gained more muscle. And once that started happening, other starlets decided to approach my door at night. KC was actively recruiting bedmates for me—and sometimes her—and often joined me in welcoming them to my bed. Yeah. I was confident. “You see, this module is not Earth-based. It is strictly out of the atmosphere.”
“Your ship?” Thom asked. “We could help speed up the building process, you know. It’s a win-win.”
“Here’s the problem, Major. We believe this tech could confuse or damage Confederacy personnel.”
“What? You promised not to use your tech against the Confederacy!” Andrea yelled.
“Exactly what I’m trying to say, Andrea. We don’t want to give this to Confederacy personnel because it could damage them.” I walked the two over to the bar for drinks and then we found a table where we had a clear view of the naked beauties around the pool. I tried to figure out a way to explain and still not give away all our secrets.
“Our AI is basically incompatible with Confederacy AIs. The interface we use to communicate with the Confederacy AIs is a restricted bud from Ubie so he remains insulated from contact and contamination. When you connect from your transporter to ours, you go through a major phase shift in transit as the transport is handed off from one system to the other. You’ve commented on feeling queasy when you step through our transporter. That’s the reason.”
“I suspected there was a different operating system in use. That was the only explanation,” Thom said. “But it’s safe, right?”
“Transport is okay because we don’t really touch you. It’s more like a bend in the wormhole but you just follow the path. But it illustrates the problem. If we shared the fighter plans with you, we’d risk contaminating Marine or Navy personnel with Anouilh nanites. Ours could work counter to Confederacy nanites already embedded. It’s hard to know how that might affect your people.”
“Sorry to break this to you, Teddy, but pretty much everyone on Earth has Confederacy nanites in them. We’ve released general health nanites everywhere. You even had nanites injected during your testing to prevent memories of the test from surfacing afterward,” Thom said.
“Yeah. About that. When someone immigrates to Anouilh, they get a ride in a med tube. The first thing our med tube does is flush all Confederacy tech from the system. Then our own nanites are injected. Ours work more gradually than what you are used to. People don’t lie down in a med tube and wake up with a different body. This tube was custom designed specifically for human physiology. We couldn’t put a Darjee in it—or even a dog. Our bodies evolve more naturally, giving them time to adjust and accept.”
“So, that’s why you are more buff than you were when we met two years ago. Each time we meet, you are a little stronger and in condition. But your overall body looks the same,” Andrea said.
“It’s a hell of a workout schedule. Really burns the fat,” I laughed.
“So, can you at least give us something that says what you’ve developed and why it is not compatible with our systems?” Thom asked. “We’ve had a good working relationship up until now. All I want to do is preserve that.”
“Okay. Let me see if I can put this in the right words.” I put my drink to my lips but didn’t actually sip as I considered how much to give away. “The St. Jeanne d’Arc is not a battleship. It’s a station. It will hold a stationary position, periodically boosting so it can stay over the pole. That’s not an orbit position. It doesn’t revolve around the planet and it doesn’t move with the planet. From its position, we’ll have sight of the entire northern hemisphere. If we’re really successful out there, we’ll build a second and position it over the south pole. For now, our resources are at maximum capacity to get St. Jeanne operational—hopefully in the next twelve to fourteen months.”
“That sounds like an observation position.”
“Exactly. Or to be more accurate, a command position. It will look pretty passive to most sensors, including the Swarm, I hope. But it is the control room for our own swarm of fighters. The difference we have from the Darjee AIs is that they would bud off a separate AI for each of the fighters, specialized for use on that ship. Ultimately, we might not have an advantage, but we are trying to mimic what has been observed among the Sa’arm. Our Hawks are run by a single mind that coordinates all of them as easily as we coordinate two hands. It’s fundamentally incompatible with the way Darjee AIs work,” I said.
“You have a multi-nodal distributed intelligence? How can you pilot such a thing? Can we see a demonstration?” Thom asked. Andrea had zoned out a little as soon as she figured out it wasn’t for sale but she perked up at the idea of a demo.
“I can show you the simulator, just not put you in the driver’s seat. But it’s a hell of a good show to watch. Ubie? Please ask the Captain to put her best team in the simulators for a show.”
“Captain says they’ll be ready in ten minutes, Boss.”
“Great. I want a good representation of what we can fight. Don’t go overboard with impossible odds at this time.” I turned to my guests. “Refresh your drinks before we go?”
“This is the bridge of your fighters? They’re so compact!” Major said. “Why are they facing each other?”
“The arrangement of the three trainers was to get the pilots used to depending on what is on their VR display and not get distracted by the other pilots. You have them in visual on your display but not in physical line of sight. We’re mostly two-dimensional beings,” I explained. “We walk around on a generally flat surface with forward, back, and lateral movement but very restricted vertical. Even when we fly, we level off. I’m sure your pilots have had the same experience of learning to maneuver in the n dimensions of space. It’s different when there is no gravity.”
“That’s true. It’s why we use artificial gravity and gravitational cues on most of the ships.” A klaxon rang and three naked girls ran into the simulator room, slamming their helmets onto their heads.
“Take a seat behind one of the girls and watch the show,” I said. When they’d moved, I took up position behind Rainbow. I knew I’d get a good show. The launch sequence started and the girls ‘took off’ from the mother ship. I watched as they reached for the controls as if they were one person. It looked like a choreographed ballet. In reality, it was more like martial arts katas that allowed the moves to come together in full combat.
They streaked toward the first target from three directions, accelerating as they went. Feedback showed the enemy ship spinning up weapons. Three hands triggered weapons at once and then both projectiles and ships blinked. That’s all you could call it. They blinked. In the next instant a different bogey was in the sights of the three Hawks and just as we saw hands triggering weapons again, an explosion lit one corner of their screen. They blinked again.
The staged battle went on for fifteen minutes and the three Hawks spit out four barrages, obliterating four enemy ships. The fourth ship got a shot away but the missile was still some distance away when the Hawks blinked out again. They came out way above the ecliptic plane, slowed and re-oriented. Ubie sounded the all-clear and the girls stretched luxuriously, pulling off their helmets. They spun in their chairs, showing off their breasts and flashing their pussies at the visitors.
“Fighting the dickheads always makes me so horny,” Rainbow said as she stroked through her glistening pussy. Each of the girls was putting on a similar show, facing three different directions. On their simulator screen, now behind them, their images appeared. Cameras swept down their bodies getting good closeups of their goodies. “Wouldn’t you love to slip your big hard dick in my little cunny? It’s a swamp, it’s so wet. Slip it in, Commander.” Rainbow pulled a dildo from a pocket in the seat and began pressing it into her sloppy pussy. “You’re gonna do it. You’re gonna make me… come!” And she did. I’d seen it enough times to know the orgasms the girls got right after a battle were real. Enough so that I was stretching out my shorts as I watched. “Anybody want to come with me for some private time? One on one. Five thousand tokens. I see you, Peterbilt.” Musical chimes rang as the tokens were deposited. “Let’s go to my bunk and make like bunnies.”
The girls headed for the exits, pausing only long enough for a quick kiss and stroke of their observers. Rainbow gave my cock a little squeeze and whispered, “Later.”
“What the fuck was that all about?” Andrea asked, completely skipping over the battle and going straight for the conclusion. Dakota joined me.
“These are working girls. Their whole battle was online for their fans who were helping them. After a successful battle, they get a little reward. If someone will pay for it, they get a private show,” Dakota said.
“Captain,” Thom said, getting back to the demonstration, “each time the girls… er… pilots fired, there was a blink and they showed up in a different position. What’s going on there?”
“Micro hops. Our short-range hyperdrives can move us up to a thousand kilometers as many as five times in a row. That’s why the last hop took them away from the engagement. At the moment it takes approximately fifteen minutes to recharge and rejoin the battle. Ubie is working on getting that refractory period down. We did compress things a little for the demonstration. Typically, they’d be moving to positions farther from each other and be under sub-light acceleration for longer.”
“And you were literally seeing the positions of the enemy ships from three sides at once, hitting them from all three,” Thom said. “That’s what the distributed intelligence can do that separate AIs can’t. I get it.”
“We’ll keep this under our hats for now,” Andrea said. “If there is anything about this tech we might be able to use, we’re depending on you.”
Month 100—April at DECO
“SO, HOW BIG are these Hawks? Commodore Riley asked. “What was the size of the projectile they used?”
“The actual ships are still under construction. The Boss says they’re being manufactured in the asteroid belt with their com ship. For the effect and damage they were simulating, it had to be a fifty to eighty meter railgun. For a ship to handle that kind of device, we’re talking a hundred meters long. They’re damn near Shiro size. Add the fact they have hyperdrive and impulse engines. That’s going to put weight at close to four kilotons,” Major Thom answered. He hated these report sessions. It felt like spying on the Pussy Pirates. He guessed it was. It was only him and Commodore Riley in the briefing room but he knew others would be watching with all the action relayed by the AI.
“And you saw only the pilot. Our estimates, updated almost daily, show they have no more than three hundred bodies on Anouilh. A ship that size would take forty people—let’s assume their AI is really in control of everything—twenty people to maintain the engines, plot the courses, load the weapons. The most they could have and maintain the bridge of any viable station is ten of these Hawks,” Riley muttered. “It’s not worth our time to investigate further. I know you like these kids, but you’re wasting your time. Look at what they’ve delivered so far. A lady-size impulse rifle. A fucking light saber that has a range of a hundred meters. A miniature grenade launcher that has no room for a damaging payload and hasn’t had any ammunition specified for it. And an attack craft that has to consume incredible resources in order to launch at all. And how much ammunition for a fifty-meter railgun can they even pack into that ship? You’re telling me a bunch of porn star girls without even a qualifying CAP score among them can load and operate this whole thing? Forget it. It’s a game for them. There’s no real materiel.”
Commodore Riley scooped up his tablet and headed toward the door yelling “Dismissed!” as an afterthought. Major Thom shook his head. He’d definitely missed something in his most recent encounter with the Pussy Pirates. That guy—Teddy, the Boss—and his so-called Captain were definitely up to something bigger than a video game.
Month 102—June on Anouilh
“BUG REPORT. Pri 0 Sev 1. What do we have?” Our team had grown over the past thirty months since we started on Anouilh. Of 350 residents on Anouilh, they’d attracted more developers with core tech experience from the gaming world. Even some guys. And everyone was surprised to find three of the porn starlets had masters’ degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. They’d brought an interesting perspective to the table. As well as tits, which they steadfastly refused to cover.
“We’re down to seven, total,” Hammer said. He was one of the new guys who stepped into a badly needed role of program manager for the game. I’d been spread too thin trying to manage the game concept as well as the production and the governance of our little nation. “One is a show stopper if we’re ever going to get off this rock where we can put the bits in play.”
“What have you got?”
“Powering up to fire makes St. Jeanne visible as an active threat. And St. Jeanne herself has no defenses.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
One of the things I’d ‘failed’ to explain to Major and Andrea was that the Hawks were quite small and limber. They were, in fact, less than forty meters long and consisted entirely of an impulse engine, a hyperdrive, and a newly designed high-capacity transport pad. The pilots they’d seen in the simulators would never actually board the Hawks themselves. The simulator was, in fact, their ship. The real Hawk was a drone. The eighty-meter railgun was supposed to be inside the St. Jeanne d’Arc, fired directly at a transporter nexus. The entire front of each Hawk was a paired locus. A bolt in the railgun would be fired into one locus and immediately out of the Hawk’s locus, close to the target. Boom.
But if the St. Jeanne showed an active weapons signature, it would become a target. And it had no defenses.
“Possible solutions?” I asked.
“We think we can shield the railgun array but it could still leak a signature,” Red Star said. “Alternatively, we could put the railguns here. On Earth. We have room on the island. And there is no way the Swarm or anyone else would identify a power build-up here as associated with the sudden appearance of a bolt of death from a previously inert Hawk.”
“I don’t like the idea of exposing the island to enemy fire. Where else can we put the guns?” I asked. If we drew fire on the resort, we were effectively killing ourselves.
“I believe I have a solution,” Ubie said. He now had a holographic avatar at the conference table. It was distracting, however to have his naked body-builder form with a ten-inch erection sitting with the rest of us.
“Give it, Ubie.”
“Underwater. We can choose a location in deep water to fire the weapons. Since they fire into a transporter, it makes no difference where they are located and all reports indicate the Sa’arm actively avoid bodies of water.” Ubie’s avatar nodded to the other engineers and he waggled an eyebrow suggestively at the three new females in the room.
“What resources do we have? Can anybody design, build, and crew that installation?” I sighed.
“I believe that’s why we’re here,” Peaches said. She was working full time on development and still had her own team of players from her cam site. “Slut Magic, June Bug, and I can put together a proposal for an underwater staging station for the missiles. That frees St. Jeanne up from the aftershocks of launches as fast as we’ll be making them, too.”
“I like the way you think,” I said. And the way she looked. “Assign the bug to Peaches and we’ll review the plan on Tuesday. What’s next?”
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