The Feminine Queendom 16 ©Copyright to 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.
Colonel Wilson Vindictive misanthropist doctor.

Chapter16.

As always when arriving by anti-grav, Charlie and Chloe landed at a preferred secretive spot in the necessary cloudy night to ensure virtual invisibility. No moon or stars and no street-lighting in the dense woodland lane where they silently descended.

By now they had acquired infra-red cameras that enabled them to determine if anybody was below them when they landed and it was a simple exercise to silently float to an uninhabited location to complete their descent. Thus they continued to avoid detection, especially when flying in Chloe’s modified luxury sports car.

Having finished their meal at the restaurant they arrived home in a lighter mood than usual and indulged their pleasures with abandon. The following morning though, their plans began in earnest. While Chloe continued to work, Charlie set about preparations to make their ‘great escape’.

From the reservoir of materials in his barn he converted ‘Poppy’ his micro-car, to a simple flatbed trailer and reinforced it to carry the mini-digger. Little modification was required to carry such a weight but Charlie necessarily designed it with many more solar cells to recharge the batteries whenever daylight allowed. To casual observer, both Doris the Mobile home and Poppy the flatbed looked just like a jobbing contract builder hiring out his equipment to building sites.

After three weeks, the conversion and camouflage were complete and one night Charlie demonstrated his project to Chloe. They landed both van and trailer in a dense bit of woodland and by covering the arrangement with a carefully prepared camouflage netting, both van and trailer were virtually invisible from the air.
ooo000ooo

One morning as she watched Charlie making final preparations, Chloe studied the van and trailer with the digger .

“Do you intend to haul that digger behind you through the skies all the way to Australia?”

“By stages, yes.” Charlie replied. “Once we reach the Australian outback, the digger can dig a trench in a wholly uninhabited part of the outback and Doris will be virtually buried under the camouflage netting. We’ll also dig a trench for Lady and no matter where we stay, we’ll be invisible from the air.”

“Is that your intention? That we hole up for eternity?”

“There’s no need. By day, Lady is a normal car while by night we leave and enter our camp by anti-grav, so nobody can trace us.”

“What if some copper asks for our identity?”

“Once I’ve sounded out the culture in Australia; if it’s better than the crazy lunacy in the UQ., I check out living there legally.”

“And if it’s not?” Chloe persisted.
“Frankly, I don’t know.”

“Well at least you’re honest,” Chloe shrugged, “but I’ve got an ace in the hole to play.”

“What’s that?” Charlie’s brow wrinkled.

“I’m pregnant. If we have our baby in Australia, he or she automatically gains Australian citizenship. He or she will have dual nationality.”

For moment Charlie just gaped at his wife before letting off a squeal of delight. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight until she giggled.

“You’ll squeeze him to death if you keep doing that.”

“How long have you known?”

“I’m not certain yet, I’ll have to see the clinic but this gives us an extra arrow to our bow.”

“How?” Charlie wondered.

“I get twelve months maternity leave from my job. One of the perks of being a health worker. That will give me plenty of time to prepare to hide.”

“I don’t get any maternity leave. I don’t get pregnant do I! So I’m stuck here in the Queendom while you tour around Australia looking for a place to make a home.”

“What you’ll have to do is return to work and stall any progress on Anti-grav. Oh and the other thing is to make a few modifications to Doris so that she becomes fully airtight and capable of going into space. That way she can travel to Australia in less than half an hour.”

“I’m not sure about reaching orbital velocity but what we will be able to do is manoeuvre out in space. The earth’s gravity can be utilised as a deflection force to move Doris up, down, forward, back and sideways. She’ll be able to do what no other space-craft can do, at least no earth-built ones.”

“Do you think there are alien craft out there?”

“I dunno, and frankly I’m not interested, - provided they don’t interfere with Doris.”

“That’s a remarkably pragmatic view for somebody who’s invented anti-grav and is about to become a spaceman.”

“Needs must I suppose. If you consider all the dangers out there including getting there; pragmatism comes next to resignation. Anyway, first build your airtight, radiation proof, space-ship.”

“Can you do it?”

“Best way is to build a smaller air-tight, control capsule, inside Doris. Not in the driver’s seat but behind where it’s not so obvious. The best way would be to replace the shower and lavatory cubicle or remove the wardrobe space. A heavy thick steel box with a lead lining should suffice. It’s a good job that weight is not an issue with anti-grav.

The armoured, airtight box would be the main control centre and the normal driving seat would simply be a slave terminal for driving like a car on earth.”

Chloe grinned.

“I can just see the faces on the international space station as they watch a mobile home lazily slip by; - with nobody at the wheel.”

“I would go nowhere near the orbital, equatorial, traffic jam! There’s too much junk up there already.” Charlie protested. “There’s no need anyway, with anti-grav. Junk-yard rocketry is for Guy Fawkes.
Come to think of it, there’s an awful lot of scrap metal up there that would serve very well to make a proper spaceship; later on I mean, once we’re settled somewhere safe.”

“So, what’s your plan then?” Chloe asked.

“You carry on working as normal until your time comes so that you can take most of your maternal leave after the baby’s born. If you choose to hop across to Australia and have our baby there, the Queendom will be hard put to demand you back. Meanwhile, I carry on seemingly working as normal; provided Colonel Wilson’s goons are warned off by the government.

I drip feed Anston Aerospace a few technological crumbs to make it look as though I’m working hard on gravity but I don’t give them the crown jewels. I can do a lot of that supposed paperwork at home because it’s mostly brainstorming.

Any stuff I reveal to Anston Aerospace gets patented in your name so we get the benefit of it. Then when the time comes to do a moonlit-flit, we’re belted and braced, - spurred and saddled.”

“Chloe leant across the bed and gave him a hug as she, at last, began to see light at the end of the tunnel.”

ooo000ooo

Six whole weeks later, Charlie returned to work after having feigned a mild mental breakdown. Considering the innate feminista view of men as a mentally inferior gender this view easily prevailed and Charlie was consequently allowed special licence to sometimes work from home if he needed peace to think.

During those unsupervised intervals, Charlie continued cautiously modifying Doris with material ‘borrowed’ from his workshop waste bins until eventually he took his beloved Doris for a week-end trial flight to the edge of space over Antarctica where there would be less ‘eyes’ likely to spot them. When he returned safely Chloe let out a huge gasp of relief and they hugged intensely.
“So, you don’t need a space suit then if you remain in your control pod.” Chloe observed.

“That’s about the size of it,” Charlie agreed, “and when the wardrobe pod is completed there’ll be one each for us while we travel into space.”

“So how long where you flying and how long where you in Antarctica?”

“I was an hour flying down there, then I spent a few hours snooping around before looking for a suitable alternative site if Aussie turns out unsuitable.”

“Have you got doubt about Aussie?” Chloe asked.

“Not really but it pays to hedge our bets. I found several locations where we could excavate a cave in the central Antarctic desert where there’s very little snow or ice. That’s definitely a last resort. All we have to do now is get ready to go to Aussie.”

“How do you plan on doing that? – Without being detected that is?”

“We take the southern route. Fly south through space down the Atlantic ocean, over the south pole and come towards Aussie via the great Australian bight. We drop down to sea level a few hundred miles south of the Nullabar Plain then slip north at ground level until we find a totally deserted place in a rocky valley and dig a discreet cave far away from any civilisation.

We can do it at weekends by flying there on Friday nights and returning on Sunday nights. A few week ends with the digger and some tunnelling kit and I’ll have soon excavated a deep cave; - enough to hide Doris, Lady and the trailer remains of Poppy.”

“So you want me and our baby to live in cave?” Chloe expostulated.

“Uuhm, have you seen some of the so-called ‘caves’ that the opal miners live in?”

“No.” Chloe replied uncertainly.

“Well Google it darling, you’ll see they can be very spacious and luxurious. It’s a matter of picking the right spot in the right rock.”

“We’ll see,” Chloe replied still not completely convinced. “So what Can I do in the meantime?”

“Start applying for emigration papers to Australia, - in your maiden name. As a qualified geneticist, you’ll have no difficulty being accepted.”

“Hmm. Good thinking Batman!” Chloe grinned.

ooo000ooo

Their plans went ahead with little problem, so much so that Chloe had her residency papers three months before their pregnancy was due and after finally handing in her notice at her UQ university hospital, she applied for a job in Australia and got it with little complication. Her genetics research work had been partially involved with Charlie’s statistical analysis so she had a published paper that boosted her employment prospects. She was resident in Australia and in full employment, one month before the twins were born. Both babies had dual nationality.

In the hospital under her maiden name no questions arose about the baby’s fatherhood; the feminista culture still prevailed in Australia but by no means as rigidly as in the UQ. Chloe was soon discharged after the twins were found to be healthy and indeed, she found herself being made most welcome in her new situation.

Australian work colleagues welcomed her into their community while she was living as a single mother with two healthy children and nobody even dreamed to ask about their father. Her work colleagues simply presumed she had chosen some sperm from the government sperm banks. She lived in a suburb of a modest town in northern territories near some large iron deposits were the economy was based on ore mining. If anybody appeared with rock dust on their clothes or cars, it was naturally presumed to be from exposure to wind-born ore dust.

Each weekend, Chloe would drive into the outback during the evening then quietly switch on Lady’s antigravity discs and fly thorough the outback bush at night without leaving tracks. There on Friday nights, she would rendezvous with her beloved Charlie who had arrived in Doris with whatever equipment and stores they needed from the UQ.

There first task had been to excavate a remote unknown cave after Chloe had checked that there were no ancient remains or paintings. It had been too small to offer shelter to early indigenous aboriginals because there was no water and mostly rock formations. This terrain however suited the couple as they feverishly burrowed away under a rocky ridge to quickly create a hollow deep enough to hide the digger from airborne eyes.

The rocky tailings were carefully deposited to resemble natural rock formations from the air while also forming blockages to either ends of the canyon that resembled ancient rock-falls. They would prevent easy access to any inadvertent vehicular explorers and casual visitors. It was not a perfect camouflage but it was the best they could manage and with a few carefully located motion cameras they hoped there endeavours would suffice.

Charlie would return to the UQ, (United Queendom) each Sunday night and resume working for Anston Aerospace during week-days Monday to Friday. Chloe worked Monday to Friday at local university hospital then slipped away to their rock-home come Friday night.
For a year or more the system worked and eventually, Chloe and Charlie had to make decisions about their lives going forward toward a permanent solution.

ooo000ooo.