Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 19

Catching up with Thalassa was a special delight. The calm beautiful girl, so intelligent and so self-assured, had her daughter in the sea, where the water gave buoyancy, helping her squat. It was painful but she was supported from behind by her bedmates, Kalyndra and Devon. A new-born child will instinctively hold its breath underwater, so there was no danger of drowning; and saltwater has antiseptic properties. Calliope - nurse, Chief and mother to Thalassa - had the joy of delivering a tiny, red and healthy granddaughter.

For the next three months, Thalassa moved in with her mother, sharing her boat-house and her bed. At night, the two women snuggled the baby warmly between them. Distracted by her responsibilities as chief of the tribe, Calliope had forgotten how much she missed sleeping with her daughter.

Most mornings, Calliope woke early and lay contentedly as she watched the first shaft of sunlight from the high porthole creep slowly across the bed, to light the chestnut hair of her sleeping daughter and the precious lump in the bed between them. Sometimes she would stroke Thalassa's hair, who would snuggle the pillow as gentle dreams played behind her eyelids.

Thalassa took to motherhood naturally, snatching sleep when she could, accepting every bit of help anyone offered; bathing with her daughter in the sea every day; suckling her, burping her, washing her and sleeping with her, skin-to-skin, holding her daughter's head on her chest, so the infant could hear her heartbeat and feel protected and loved.

Ezra fitted naturally back into Thalassa's life, sharing her pride and joy in their daughter, taking on his baby-duties as a pleasure, not a burden, and above all, telling Thalassa how proud and happy she made him feel.

Life was good by the seashore and the only hint of sadness was the fact that Kalyndra remained barren. She hid her disappointment well and never showed any envy or resentment of her sisters, who were all pregnant or already mothers; but Ezra understood her well. Every moment he could spare, he tied her up tightly and fucked her hard; he ordered her to kneel and suck his cock; he flogged her and spanked her and took away all her self-will, satisfying her need to submit to him, giving her something else to think about.

******

While Ezra stayed with the Mariners, Hazel and Wildchild made a decision and requested a meeting with Mirselene.

When they were seated in her hut, Hazel began:

"Madam, I'd like to go home and visit my mother and friends."

"I understand, child," Mirselene replied. "It's always right for a daughter to honour her mother. How long will you stay with the Farmers?"

"I can't say, Madam. I miss my mother and friends and I want my tribe to prosper. I want to know that I'm not letting them down."

This was ominous. Mirselene was worried that Hazel would stay with the Farmers, who were rich and happy, farming in the foothills of the White Mountains.

"You know I'm not the only one who wants you to come back?" Mirselene said, with what the blunt woman thought was a subtle hint to Wildchild, who winked at Hazel before replying:

"I hope you won't object, Madam, if I go to visit the Farmers with Hazel."

"Oh, I thought you liked it here in the forest."

"I love being a Woodlander, Madam," Wildchild assured her chief. "I don't want to leave the tribe but I want to meet Hazel's mother and friends. I would like to know what it's like to live with the Farmers."

Mirselene nodded. She understood their motivation, though she couldn't see why her tribe should be deprived of two more hard workers.

"It's not a good time, you understand," Mirselene said, "what with Carlin going away for a year ..."

Mirselene let that accusatory statement hang in the air, but Wildchild was unashamed about having taken Carlin's side when the girl decided to become a Junior.

"... However, I understand why you want to go. It is part of your education, isn't it?"

"Yes, Madam," Wildchild said.

"I don't want either of you to go," Mirselene said, "but I suppose I can't stop you. ... Very well, girls. I will miss you both. You've done marvels this year. I'm very pleased with the new huts and the smoking room. Your little friends will miss you."

"I know, Madam," Hazel said. "We will miss them, too."

"I'm not sure how we'll cope without your work. I wonder what state the camp will be in when you return."

Mirselene said this with a straight face but she was incapable of emotionally blackmailing someone like Wildchild, who laughed out loud.

"You'll get on fine without us, Madam," Wildchild said. "With their daughters growing up, Urulla, Dagma, Dipti and Sharne can easily do everything that Hazel, Carlin and I do."

"All right. I admit that. But the Camp won't be the same without you."

"Thank you, Madam," Wildchild said. "We'll leave tomorrow."

Mirselene allowed herself a sigh as she watched the girls leave her hut. It wasn't self-pity. There was much to celebrate when everyone had food to eat and clothes to wear, but it was hard work keeping everyone happy when things kept changing. She hoped this would be the last big change for a good while.

******

After training every day for a month, Brad was as ready as he would ever be.

For the final stage of preparing the mission, Jonathan Wright and Li Qu Yuan came out from Earth to configure the Samothea Project's hyperspace beacon in an orbit around Celetaris' sun, where it fed on sunlight to fill its fuel cells.

Because she now owned a small percentage of the Samothea Project's profits, Hestia was keenly interested in its progress and came to watch the launch. Brad wanted to say a physical goodbye to her but she couldn't approach him, due to an even stricter quarantine than on Capella Spaceport.

It was a tense and nervous time. Due to politics, finance and a host of bad auspices that had afflicted the Samothea Project from the start, they really had one shot at this. Anyone who had a spare moment checked and re-checked the hyperspace route, the corrections for anomalies, the fuel-load, the mechanics of the spaceship, the efficacy of the x-ray shielding. Computers hummed day and night and grew hot from running the calculations over and again.

At last the day came. Brad was buckled into the seat and manoeuvred the spaceship under rocket power to the beginning of his approach run, fifty miles from the beacon. He checked his instruments a final time and received the 'all clear'.

The beacon was activated. Gold light sparked around its edges. A nebulous purple lens grew in its ring and became an opaque plume.

Brad heard a voice in his ear-piece. It was a woman. He breathed out and focussed. It was Rosa, telling him he could launch when ready.

There was no backing out now. He was about to embark on the fastest and furthest hyperspace jump in human history. Brad engaged the hyperspace drive.

"Here goes nothing!" he said and punched the launch button to drive the ship into the beacon. The acceleration pushed him into the back of his seat.

There was a flash. There was plume entry, a precise eighteen-second countdown and plume-collapse with no significant overshoot or undershoot. If he wasn't dead, or stranded in empty space, slowly freezing or suffocating to death, then Brad might well be somewhere near Samothea.

******

At the next monthly trade-meeting, Ezra left the Mariners to go to the Northern Camp with the Herders, where he spent his whole first day fucking Solange's bedmate, Ash.

Ash had gone to the Cloner City with Solange and her daughter, Tahney, while Solange attended meetings of the Currency Committee.

However, despite Ezra's best efforts, Ash was still not pregnant. So, while Ezra was staying with the Herders once more, Solange sent Ash to join him.

Galatea left them in the Northern Camp and went on with the trading party to the Cloner City, taking the Mariner and Woodlander goods they'd just traded to the weekly market there.

Ash kept Ezra in the hut all day. It happened to be the most auspicious time in her monthly cycle. For an entirely submissive girl, Ash could be quite assertive, in a sweetly enticing way. She seduced Ezra well, sucking him hard and riding him until he could hold off no longer; then she lay on her back, spread her legs and got him to fuck her to the finish. She crossed her legs over his back as he came and held him tightly in place, the spasm of her vagina milking the fullness of his cock, as it twitched, unloading his seed deep inside her.

Ash sighed and, with her eyes tightly shut, made a wish that Ezra's sperm at last would be as successful with her as it had been with a dozen members of the Herder tribe.

******

Brad jumped to Samothea about four years after Ezra crash-landed there.

His ship bounced out of hyperspace about fifty-thousand miles from Samothea. Travelling at eighteen-thousand miles-an-hour, it soon reached Samothea. Brad settled the ship into a circular orbit, a few hundred miles above the equator, girding the planet every four hours.

He detached the beacon for his return journey, which automatically unfurled its vast solar panels, pointed them at Samothea's sun and began to power up.

From his orbit, Brad kept an eye out for lights at night and large settlements by day, but his main interest was a radio distress signal he picked up, apparently from an emergency escape pod on the planet's surface. There was a message coded into the signal: a reply to Danielle's message from almost two years ago, saying that Ezra and Yumi were safe, that human life survived on Samothea and that whoever comes to rescue them should be careful of quarantine.

Brad traced the source of the radio signal to a location on the coast in the tropical region of a large kidney-shaped continent. He manoeuvred his craft to include the source in his orbit and recognised the escape pod's laser guidance beam. There seemed to be no other life or habitation around the escape pod, so Brad surveyed the planet at other latitudes.

After a couple of night-time fly-overs to spy for camp-fires with a telescope, then an early-morning pass, when even small structures could be picked out from space by their long shadows, Brad had his target: a group of buildings near the mouth of a large river, about seventy miles north of the beacon.

He put on his helmet and secured the tube from his oxygen tank with a click. When there was a satisfactory flow of breathing air, he turned on the pump to suck the air out of the capsule. The gauge dropped quickly to zero. Brad opened the capsule doors, pushed himself out into space and began his descent to the planet, slowing his orbit with a retro-rocket on his back.

Brad turned on the air-suit when he breached the atmosphere. The microwaves captured the air around him to form a thin blanket, which gradually thickened as the atmospheric pressure increased, forming a solid shield to absorb the buffeting and heat from the friction. The air around him glowed orange as he slowed rapidly to only a few hundred miles an hour.

Brad spread his arms a little and the compressed air formed into wings. There was a kick like a parachute opening.

"Woo hoo!" he yelled as the g-force shocked him, spinning him around and tumbling him over. Soon the air-wings straightened him up and steadied his fall.

As he slowed, the air cleared around him and he had a good view of the kidney-shaped continent and the blue ocean that washed up against its western edge. He saw the wide green plain bordered by a large forest to the east, itself bounded by a massive mountain-range forming the central spine of the continent. There were yellow, brown and grey volcanoes with white peaks and slopes, some of them smoking. Clouds hung over the ocean and over the mountains but the air over the plain and forest was crisp and clear.

Brad's descent slowed to a hundred-and-twenty miles an hour and he began to steer, taking a westerly course across the ocean, slightly north of the equator. He shallowed his dive and slowed well below free-fall velocity. Now it was safe to unplug his helmet from the oxygen tank and fill his tanks with fresh air.

Brad breathed the air of Samothea. It was good. He flew on, losing altitude, levelling off at two-thousand feet, making for the large settlement he had spied from space.

******

It was business as usual in the Cloner City. Women from the Cloner, Farmer and Herder tribes milled around the market-place in front of the Council Hall on a bright warm day, trading, weighing goods and haggling noisily over prices.

Something passed overhead with a whistling sound making everyone look up. At first they though it was a large bird, but it wheeled around and hovered high over the square. It was a man in an odd grey suit, shimmering like a mirage, emitting a strange hiss of compressed air like a distant wind. He slowly descended into the market-place, making the crowd part in wonder.

Brad landed in a flurry of dust and a last wheezing sigh from his air-suit as the jets turned off. He squinted in the bright sunlight as the dust settled down around him. He took off his helmet and reached into an inner pocket for his sunglasses. The crowd kept its distance, waiting for someone in authority to come and tell them what to do. They looked peaceful. Brad was curious to see that they were all women. He didn't notice that some of them went to fetch spears and bows and arrows, which they kept ready at the back of the crowd.

He put on his sunglasses and brushed the dust from his sleeves. A woman pushed her way through the crowd. It was Madam Lawspeaker, who had been near the market when Brad arrived, though it was the unnatural silence of the women that alerted her, rather than the noise of the air-suit.

She came boldly up to him and waited, arms folded.

Brad made a polite bow to the venerable-looking lady and addressed her:

"Er, ... take me to your leader?"