The Feminist Queendom 23 Charlie’s War © 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 23.

After zeroing the sniper’s rifle that Chloe had bought under the pretence of protecting herself because she lived alone, Charlie motioned to Chloe to take cover behind the earth embankment while he took aim at one of his anti-gravity spheres some five hundred metres away.

“Is it really that dangerous?” Chloe asked.

“I just want to demonstrate to you what sort of power is tied up in these things darling.”

“That’s a huge bullet, where did you get it?”

“One of the guys in the mine workshops culls wild camels as a side-line. You need something like this to make sure of stopping the beasts without endangering yourself. He’s shown me what sort of damage ensues from a clear hit. This thing can break a two metre long slab of rock a foot thick. Cover your ears please darling.”

Chloe did as requested and secured the ear protectors over her ears as she lay down on the earth embankment and peeped at the target through her binoculars. Even though Charlie had painted the sphere bright orange, Chloe could only just make it out set into a small cave in the rockface.

There was a deafening crash and an instant later the orange dot erupted into a tremendous explosion that actually knocked several thick branches off a nearby tree. Chloe shook her head after the percussion from the exploding sphere thumped over her head then she finally stood up. Charlie was already stepping towards the smoke filled cave.

“Come on, we need to see if any identifiable fragments remain that might give a scientist any clues about anti-grav.”

Chloe understood Charlie’s genuine concerns so she followed him across the firing range until they stood at the entrance of the cave.

“We need to look for any part larger than your little fingernail.” Charlie explained.

“The search took the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon until Chloe had to collect Charlotte from the weekend creche that they used very occasionally if they wanted Charlotte out of harm’s way. As Chloe left to collect their daughter, Charlie continued searching but eventually he had to concede that his endeavours had proven successful. Not a single, identifiable, functional part bigger than five millimetres had been found. He was so pleased that he prepared a little treat for Chloe and Charlotte when they returned.

“Oh this is lovely!” Chloe exclaimed as Charlotte’s grin encompassed the treats on the table. “What’s this for?”

“To celebrate the success of my self-destruction device. Any thief or cheat who tries to open up an anti-gravity sphere will receive a very painful and quite probably fatal surprise. While all evidence of the contents will have been virtually atomised. Even if they break one open in a bomb-proof cupboard, all they’ll have left will be a couple of handfuls of metal filings.”

“Seems like a bit of overkill to me.” Chloe mused.

“No way darling. Those bastards owe me for what they’ve taken from me already, they’ll take no more!”

Chloe could sense the determined malice in Charlie’s words but she felt forced to go some way towards agreeing with him. Charlie sensed that Chloe was not entirely happy with the ‘booby-trap’ scenario so he explained.

“Don’t worry, each ball will be engraved with clear warnings in several pertinent languages so if anybody tries to tamper with them, they’ll know that they’re risking certain suicide.”

After having proved the ‘antitampering’ protections worked on his spheres, Charlie now had to consider his future. The biggest problem was working out how to ‘come out’ to the Australian authorities without inviting incarceration. To do this he was forced to go through - Reluctantly a third party; the only problem being ‘whom to trust’., the only one he felt able to trust was his beloved Chloe but he was afraid to involve her too deeply, especially when she was carrying their unborn children.

Events would have to be put off until after the birth but in the meantime he would occupy the time upgrading Dawn the spacecraft by installing a couple of radios suitable for commercial transport communications. It might also suit both his and Chloe’s purposes to apply for a radio licence. That night he put the idea to her.

“Well I was wondering when my overly taciturn and somewhat insular husband was thinking of reaching out to other people.” Chloe chuckled.

“Are you sure it’s a sound idea?” Charlie sought reassurance. “Radio communications are very public and open to tracing.”

“Well; if and when we start bargaining, how else do you intend to keep track of negotiations? It’s all very well being out of reach up in space, but it’s no good being out of touch.”

Charlie nodded agreement, thankful that he and Chloe were of one mind. A month later, while she visited the hospital for her prenatal checks, Chloe also purchased a suite of suitable two-way radios for Coach, Dawn, Doris and Lady. The supplier also suggested voice scramblers when she learned that Chloe lived alone a few miles out of town.

“It’s best if anybody eves-dropping cannot recognise a female voice.” She advised as Chloe made the purchase. “These beauties also distort the sound to disguise the gender of the voice. How far out are you living?”

“Just a few miles out past the bluffs on the Macintyre road towards the mine.” Chloe described her official home and official address.

Coach; their secret homestead, hundreds of miles deep in the outback, was known to nobody and now very well hidden as no wheel tracks or footpaths led to it. All access being made by night with antigravity flights.

“Yes, you’re sensible to get a radio living out there, there’s a lot of men using that mining road.” She gave a shudder as she continued. “Uugh! Horrible creatures, living like pigs amongst all that mineral ore and dust.”

Chloe kept her counsel and smiled neutrally as she gathered her purchases and left. She found the vast bulk of miners who turned up at the casualty department of the mining hospital with injuries were just ordinary guys. All they wanted was treatment for their breaks and cuts and glad for few brief hours of female tenderness while they were mended.

Yes; they were dusty and dirty and covered in sweat but that was the nature of mining. None of them ever exuded any aura of threat!

When she returned to Coach with her purchases, Charlie wasted no time installing each radio set and the following day Chloe had her first opportunity to use hers. There had been an accident out in the diggings and when she ‘ear-wigged’ the radio chatter, she was able to attend quickly on site before they moved the injured men to the casualty unit. The gratitude on the filthy faces of the men gathered around was palpable as she treated and despatched each case. Her timely intervention had saved the men’s lives.

Normally a work-mate would have driven the injured man the several miles from workings to the casualty unit with all the inevitable delay, distress and danger. Chloe got to see first-hand how bad the men’s working conditions were. Unskilled labourers were a ‘dime-a-dozen’ and their lives were counted cheap.

ooo000ooo

Eventually, as Chloe’s pregnancy developed, Charlie had turned his space-craft Dawn into an exceptionally sophisticated and stealthy device. Chloe had purchased, at Charlie’s request, a sophisticated yacht radar that Charlie had promptly modified and extended to detect target hundreds of miles distant. For Charlie, the science and engineering had been easy, obtaining the components was the hard part. Chloe got some strange looks when she visited the local electronics shop to collect some sophisticated apparatus or components that Charlie had ordered on-line.

Despite these hurdles, Charlie eventually upgraded Dawn’s detection and defence hardware to equal any craft belonging to the planet Earth. By the eighth month of Chloe’s pregnancy the space-craft Dawn had become almost impregnable. A month before Chloe’s full term delivery date Charlie completed his final test flight and returned to Coach. Dawn was ‘garaged’ safely for the night and Charlotte played eagerly with her father while Chloe rested on the settee. Eventually Charlotte fell asleep and Charlie chatted at length with Chloe about strategy.

“Dawn is stored and equipped for a veritable siege so the day the authorities learn of our new born children’s parentage via their DNA; I’ll already be loitering in space and inaccessible.”

“That means you’ll be absent when I need the most help.” Chloe observed.

“I’m sorry darling. You know the moment you reveal the facts, you’re going to be hard pressed with negotiations and stonewalling. Unless we can get a rock-solid agreement from the Australian government, I’ll never be free to live with you again. We can only negotiate from a position of strength while I am free, inaccessible and the secrets of antigravity remain with me; here, - safe in my skull.”

Chloe nodded despondently. Right when she would be at her most emotionally vulnerable, she would have to take up her cudgels to fight on Charlie’s behalf. Charlie reached out and carefully hugged her as they contemplated the weeks ahead.

ooo000ooo

Chloe’s parturition of her three babies proved to be a safe, and relatively painless delivery compared to her previous delivery of Charlotte. The triplets proved to be a pair of identical twin daughters plus a single son and they caused a considerable stir locally because no fertility treatments had been used. The whole pregnancy had been a completely natural procedure.

Inevitably, a couple of days after the births, the paediatric department arrived with the government fertility researchers to collect the DNA samples that Chloe had innocently promised. After the samples were collected, they left and Chloe hoped that would be the end of it. The samples had been taken simply for genetic research into ‘multiple births’ not to directly identify the father.

Chloe however knew with a sickening certainty that the information, once logged onto any electronic information bank, would very quickly find its way onto other medical records.

The computers at Anston Aerospace were as advanced and sophisticated as any other world-wide organisations and naturally as well protected against hacking. During the triplet’s pregnancy, Charlie had tried several times to hack the Anston computers and delete his medical genome but he had failed. It was only a matter of time before the feminista sharks working for the Feminist Queendom would learn of Chloe’s children’s genome, connect them to Charlie’s genome and come sniffing around for blood.

Colonel Wilson, the leader of the feminista military intelligence unit in the UQ (United Queendom,) was one of the first to detect the similarities; primarily because she had been searching for Charlie ever since his disappearance and Anston Aerospace was the only organisation that held Charlie’s DNA and full genome. Jane Anston had readily shared their genome information with the Queendom’s government because she was angry that Charlie had deserted Anston Aerospace.

So entrenched was the feminista mentality within Anston Aerospace that nobody could comprehend the idea of a man wanting to be free of the feminista shackles. This view was reinforced because the vast majority of intelligent boys had been feminised in childhood and subsequently, the adult male population was too dumbed down to ever organise itself to seek, and find freedom.

Provided the male dummies had access to sex and food they operated as a functionally co-operative support arm of the feminista oppression.

The few intelligent males like Charlie, who by one accidental event or another, had escaped childhood feminisation, were deemed in the queendom to be subversives. The same feminista view prevailed in the majority of the matriarchal societies but different feminista governments employed different tactics to circumvent the seemingly insoluble genetic conundrum. How to preserve intelligence on the Y chromosome and yet control the testosterone forces associated with that intelligence.

Of all the feminista societies that had emerged from the great transition, Australia had kept the most liberal of governments and this was mainly because Australia had the space for men to pursue their ambitions.
If an intelligent man wanted to find peace and liberty to follow his own dreams, Australia could at least provide the space. As a consequence, Australia had the highest ration of independent intelligent men and consequently, the best sperm-banks containing intelligent testosterone. Indeed, since Chloe’s researches and Charlie’s analysis of the flawed breeding policy in the UQ, (United Queendom,) Australia had a successful export industry in ‘intelligent sperm’.

The process was simple, if any woman wanted an intelligent father for her child, the cheapest and most reliable source was the Australian national sperm bank because Australia had access to the most contented society of intelligent men indulging their chosen lifestyles in the outback. These men lived contented lives simply by turning up at sperm donation centres and selling their sperm to make enough money to return to the bush and continue their lives. Some of these men even had long-term female partners.

Charlie and Chloe had inadvertently become members of this widespread community but such was the looseness of it’s structure, such men rarely bothered to meet up or more importantly, bother get organised.

Inevitable, once Charlie’s genome appeared on the Australian donor list it immediately matched Charlie’s ‘Anston Aerospace genome’. On spotting it Jane Anston and Colonel Wilson immediately signed up to purchase some sperm. To their shock and chagrin the reply came back that the sperm pertinent to the genome was not currently available.

Their first attempt to buy sperm told them immediately that Charlie was hiding. The sperm donor on the genome list was the man they bad been seeking for several years. Colonel Wilson rightly concluded that the best way to locate Charlie was to find him through the woman he had impregnated.

“Bingo! Got you! You cunning bastard!” Colonel Wilson congratulated herself. 'So you chose to hide in Australia, well that’s to be expected.'

ooo000ooo