The Feminist Queendom Charlie’s War 22 © Beverly Taff

List of Characters.

Charlie Sage Maths and electronics genius.
Shirley Sage Charlies elderly mother
Chloe Charlie’s one time early school friend.
Josephine Flint Surgeon and associate of Chloe’s.
Mrs Jane Anston Director of Anston Aerospace.
Ronnie Garage mechanic at top of lane
Pauline Garage owner, Ronnie’s sister.
Briony Pauline’s teenaged daughter.
Billy Pauline’s middle son.
Abigail (Abby) Pauline’s youngest daughter.
‘Poppy’ Charlie’s little micro-runabout.
‘Doris’ The armoured mobile home.
‘Lady’ Chloe’s Sports Car.
Dawn Charlie’s armoured space ship.
Colonel Wilson Vindictive misanthropist doctor.

Chapter 22.
“Good Morning Doctor Evans. Usual order?”

“Yes please, but I’ll be adding an extra half litre of milk permanently to the list.”

Chloe Sage was known by her maiden name of Evans in the mining camp. The subterfuge was not illegal. A woman did not have to change her name upon marriage. At the mention of ordering extra milk, the store lady glanced at Charlotte who was outside on the store-front porch.

“Oh, is little Charlotte growing that quickly.”

The store owner asked as she watched Charlotte admiring a kindle of kittens.

“Not exactly, it’s mainly for me, Charlotte’s going to have a sibling.”

“Oh! That’s wonderful news. Not many children here in the mining camp They’re mostly at the town.”

“I don’t live in the mining camp; I live outside of town so shopping here is convenient when I’m coming from work.”

“Who looks after Charlotte?”

“There’s a creche at the mining hospital. Half a dozen doctors have infants there.”

“So you’ll be on your way home now?”

“Yes, Friday’s always a good day. Weekends and all that.”

“See you Monday then.”

“More likely Tuesday, I’ve got meetings all next week.”

As part of their subterfuge, Chloe was always quite open about her daily life in the hospital and her activities around the town. The shutters only descended when it came to ‘going home’ but this was quite normal if a woman lived out of town. In the town, people presumed she lived alone because Charlie had never visited the town. He only visited the materials stockists and engineering shops at the mine when he and Chloe bought materials and equipment. Chloe handled all domestic purchases either in the town or at the mining camp store.

As long as governments didn’t publicise their secret searches for the inventor of ‘Anti-grav’, Charlie was relatively safe. Their arrangements worked for Charlie only purchased stuff about once a month and always under the auspices of a common ‘handyman’ doing building work or repair work for Doctor Evans.

Sadly however, these arrangements were to become compromised when complications occurred with Chloe’s second pregnancy.

ooo000ooo

“Aah!. Doctor Evans, I’m glad I caught you, the tests for your pregnancy came back this morning, have you got a moment?”

“Sure,” Chloe replied, - “everything okay?”

“Uhm, well I believe congratulations are in order.”

“Oh! How come?”

“It seems you’re going to have triplets.”

“Oh my god!” Chloe almost squealed. “Triplets! And that’ll mean? _”

“Extra prenatal care. Do multiple births run in your family?”

“Uuuhm, - not to my knowledge.”

“What about the sperm donor’s family?”

Chloe had to do some quick thinking.

“Oh come on doc! I can’t remember who the sperm donor was. It was a couple of months ago during a somewhat drunken night out in Sydney.”

“What? You can’t remember?”

“Oh I can remember all right and a thoroughly enjoyable night it was. He was handsome, tall, - you name it. I presumed he was just another anonymous vasectomy.”

“Well, as you know, multiple births are always a concern to the government what with so many girls choosing not to have families.”

“I’m a geneticist Doctor I know all about the eugenics policies and the flaws therein.”

“Flaws?”

“Yes. Flaws. That’s why I went slumming for my kicks, I just wasn’t expecting to meet a fertile stud. Most are invariably elective freemartins.”

“Would you be prepared to have your triplet’s genome samples examined after they are born, just to help with the researches regarding population expansion and economic stabilisation.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I disapprove of endeavours to turn the human population into a multiple birth species like cats or dogs, just to satisfy bankers and economists. If you want to encourage intelligent women to breed, make motherhood more attractive.”

“You seem to have found it attractive. Do you want a big family?”

“Unless I choose to selectively abort one or two of my foetuses, I’ve no choice but to accept a big family. I have no wish or intentions to become an infanticidal idealist, so it looks like I’m going to have triplets.”

“Can you afford it?”

“That’s no business of yours doctor, I’ve got a good and reasonably secure job.”

“Have you got any support network around you? – You know, family, mother, sisters and stuff?”

“There’s support enough provided for our Creche at work. I’ll simply have to pay extra funding but not triple the amount. There’s a tapered sliding scale of fees. It works out better for multiple births than twins.”

“Well nevertheless, I will have to request that you provide genetic DNA samples of your triplets purely for the government research.”

“If the sperm donor isn’t registered, then that won’t help the research programme except to isolate fertility genes. Anyway, I’ll certainly provide DNA samples of my babies after they arrive. Then you can go around testing all the known studs in Sydney. I’m not sure I would even recognise him; I was that drunk that afternoon. He was pretty handsome though, fair got me going he did.”

“The GP grinned

“Really Doctor Evans, I’d never have had you down for a good time girl.”

“Hey! There’s no law against it or having babies. I’d have thought Australia would be glad for me to have four children what with the falling population rates.”
ooo000ooo

That evening when she arrived home slightly earlier after having broken the news to Charlie on a scrambler call earlier; she was confronted by a distraught husband.

“You promised them our children’s DNA?!”

“Well, yes. But it won’t be traced to the sperm donor’s register… nobody knows you’re the donor.”

“Oh! Do you think so? You do realise of course that my genome and my DNA is on Anston Aerospace’s Computers. Even though I refused to become a donor, they took my DNA and Genome by force of law. I could not refuse because in that fucking shitty queendom, men have less rights than fucking laboratory rats! I was registered as a reserved asset that could not be plundered or removed from Anston’s legal authority. I was virtually a slave in all but name! Do you honestly think that any digital connection to my DNA and Genome won’t find it’s way back to Anston’s computers within days if not hours of your handing it over?”

Chloe fell silent as the truth ripped into her mind. She simply had not known that being registered involuntarily as a reserved asset had turned Charlie into just that, an asset, a piece of legal property, or, as Charlie had put it; - a slave in all but name. She swallowed hard as her mind struggled to find a solution but she was grasping at straws. Tears began to blur her vision as she realised the seriousness of their situation.

“There’s got to be a way out of this.”

“Oh there several ways out of this but none of them are easy.” Charlie cursed.

“Go on,” Chloe prompted.

“Well; the first way is that I fuck off to McMurdo and stay there for eternity. Trouble is, they’ll try blackmailing me by threatening you and / or our kids.

Second way is for me to top myself. That’s the easiest way out but earth loses the secret of Anti-grav. Should I care about that, I wonder? My kids also grow up fatherless but then, every child in femidom endures that.

The third way is that I go to war. Dawn is a veritable flying tank and she would do enormous damage before anybody ever got to her. No plane could shoot her down and I could literally ram any plane that tries to knock me out of the air. Anti-aircraft missiles are not armour piercing and guns are too small a calibre to penetrate ten centimetres of hardened steel. On top of that, Dawn is capable of tens of thousands of knots, you saw that when we chased the space station, they’d never catch her. In truth I don’t know what her maximum speed is but it’s got to be over a hundred thousand knots. – In space that is. No air friction.”

The fourth way is for you to renege on your promise and refuse to give up our children’s DNA. That means you’ll always be watching them to make sure nobody steals their DNA. That’ll be almost impossible to stop. All it takes is a swab or a blood smear.”

As she recovered her wits Chloe suggested a fifth option, namely Charlie’s coming out and going public.

“I could go to the Australian authorities and bargain your freedom for your antigrav; - not the secret mind; just the enjoyment of the benefits.”

Charlie paused thoughtfully,

“You could try, but not before I’m well and truly out of reach. I could loiter around the International Space Stations while you’re bargaining so they can see where I am but they cannot reach me.”

“And if they agree?”

“We dip our toe very carefully into the water. – Very, very carefully!”

Chloe gave long sigh.

“Yeeah! You’re right to be cautious. There’s no law to cover this.”

Charlie snorted derisively.

“Ha! There’s plenty of law, - trouble is, there’s no justice.”

Chloe had no answer but she was relieved that they were not going to bed on an argument.

ooo000ooo

By now Chloe was nearly two months pregnant and that gave Charlie over seven months to prepare. Coach, their subterranean home in the remote outback range of nondescript hills, was now very spacious and invisible from space. The spoil heap had blended into the ground and a few judiciously planted saplings had given the area a typical outback appearance of recently having endured a brief, heavy localised rain shower.

On several occasions Charlie had slipped away by night and collected a few thousand gallons of water in Dawn’s tanks to sprinkle on the surrounding area and very slightly increase the patch of flora that masked the entrance to Coach. Additionally, the excavated cisterns that supplied Coach with water had been expanded for a third time on their learning of Chloe’s second pregnancy.

It now remained for Charlie to ensure that the secrets of his anti-gravity devices remained secret. To this end, he now expanded his subterranean workshops but used Dawn to carry the spoil hundreds of miles away to dump in an equally remote area of similar geology.

By cautiously dribbling and scattering several cubic metres of rock every night at widespread locations, including the oceans; Charlie soon had enough space to set up the equipment that he had brought with him from the Queendom when he had absconded.

With a well-equipped workshop, he then set about manufacturing a secure device that could be fitted to any form of transport and lift it into space. For this he created a spherical containment vessel that once assembled, could not be disassembled without constraining it in a very powerful and directional gravitational field. The ‘ball’ would have to be supported and yet similarly ‘suspended’ in the specialised disassembly jig before any attempt to split the ball could commence.

If anybody tried to disassemble it with a view to stealing and ‘reverse engineering’ the secrets, the sphere would explode violently and kill the thief or thieves with a scatter of white-hot molten particles leaving no evidence of the contents of the ball.

The antigravity spheres that took Dawn and any subsequent craft into space was a different force from the simple ‘energy-discs’ that reacted directly with the Earth’s gravity to provide the limited lift of the now ubiquitous hover-cars.
These low-skimming craft were now available to anybody wealthy enough to afford them, and Anston aerospace had made a killing from Charlie’s earlier, primitive invention. Chloe had at least benefited from the patent rights and she shared these fees willingly with her beloved Charlie.

The problem with the ‘antigravity discs’ was that they were ‘one-dimensional’ and only provided thrust in direct reaction to the earth’s gravitational field. ‘Flat-earthers’ as Charlie had once humorously described them to Chloe in happier times.

The drive that enabled Dawn to flip and twist and accelerate in space was an infinitely more sophisticated force that could harness the ‘dark-matter’ elements of antigravity in space and concentrate them. This liberated immensely powerful and far-reaching sources of energy. Dawn might not be able to exceed the speed of light but she could certainly get close in the total vacuum of space. The ball shaped drives clearly demonstrated that Charlie’s new inventions were multi-directional as opposed to the older ‘gravity-discs’ being linear.

“Things move on darling,” he grinned disarmingly at Chloe one afternoon when she scolded him about the mess of different sized spheres in his workshop.

“What’s this Archimedes?” She scolded him affectionately, “Do not disturb my circles?” She continued by alluding to Archimedes’ last words before his violent death during the siege of Syracuse.

“I don’t get you,” Charlie confessed. “What’s Archimedes?”

“Archimedes was a ‘he’ not an ‘it’. He was butchered by a Roman soldier during the Roman siege of Syracuse in Sicily.”

“And?” Charlie just gaped askance.”
“He was a famous mathematician who determined how to calculate the surface area of a sphere. These spheres on your bench just remined me of him, - oh forget it.” She finished lamely as Charlie’s incomprehension remained painfully apparent in his puzzled frown.

It hurt her to realise yet again how brutally inhumane was the denial of even the most basic elements of any education to boys after aged thirteen. Charlie knew almost nothing of classical Greek history; nor indeed any other histories. There were thousands and thousands of amusing anecdotes, historical references and famous sayings that could have added infinite enjoyment to a boy’s early life before they became men destined for the drudgery of the Feminista.

Watching her genius husband even yet exploring a science far beyond the wit of anybody else on the planet served only to compound the bile that burned in Chloe’s viscera. The unfairness became physically painful in her gut.

ooo000ooo