The Feminist Queendom Charlie’s War 70

© 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 spaceship.
Colonel Wilson Vindictive misanthropist doctor.
Margaret Thomas ‘Failed’ police security guard.
Sally. 1st Oz Special forces trooper
Jacky 2nd Oz Special forces trooper.
Juliet Charlie’s Mal engineering assistant.
Laura The second mate of the Second Dawn
Kate (Katherine Bergson) The Australian defence minister.
Lieutenant Engadine Asi Charlie’s second prisoner.
Charlotte Charlie and Chloe’s older daughter
Michael, Jessica & Lucy Charlie and Chloe’s younger triplets

Chapter 70.

As the sun was setting over Woomera, Dawn 1 and the two space-fighters entered space then streaked silently north to loiter several hundred kilometres over Singapore. There in the blackness of space, they waited until a cryptic, coded message came over Dawn 1’s radio.
Charlie smiled as he heard the word ‘Sandy’ crackle softly from the radio as the computer de-crypted the single word. The giant Chinese satellite was blinded, for the lens had become permanently ‘smoked’ and abraded by meteoric sand, dust and rock granules.

Dawn 2’s sand-blaster attack had worked to perfection.

After successfully completing her task, Dawn 2 continued to the Moon to discharge a load of prefabricated building parts before returning to Earth. This voyage was to serve as a cover for her first task and she maintained complete radio silence after that first single encrypted word ‘Sandy.’

Elsewhere in the moonless skies of South Asia, a second devastating attack was being prepared by descending from space to hide from radar in the top of a tropical thunderhead at about twenty thousand metres altitude. Then without warning, Engie and Laura erupted from the cloud and commenced shooting up the aircraft parked on the aprons of the Riau airbase. The aircraft were defenceless because the radar station was still not repaired and the armoured hangars were not yet rebuilt.

The final insult was the total destruction of the thousands of hectares of concrete hardstanding and runways by a devastating bomb attack.

The attack was so sudden and overwhelming that all forms of communication were disabled except for private mobile phones in the pockets of the survivors. The Chinese government in Beijing knew nothing of the attack until daybreak when private phone calls filtered through to the families of the survivors, who then bombarded the authorities for news of their relatives.

Unlike the first attack, where there had been no casualties, this second assault had included the deaths of hundreds of base staff and the message was now loud and clear.

‘DO NOT MESS WITH US’!

For the first time in several decades, an ambitious and aggressive Chinese communist party found itself confronted by an unknown, but equally aggressive and more advanced but anonymous foe.

In Beijing, the smell of fear started to seep through the corridors.

After their attack, the three spacers separated. Charlie slipped back to his private workshop hidden in his hideout called Coach. There he started making more antigrav engines while Engie and Laura flew to Lunar base Alpha and started assembling section three from the prefabricated parts left there by Dawn 2.

Back at the Woomera research base and building yard, Juliet continued with the training of pilots to convert to the new antigravity space-fighters.

When the date of the inquiry came around Charlie had delivered only four engines to Woomera so that meant only two space-fighters were available to be leased the Singaporean air-force. These, however, were more than enough for Oz to demonstrate support for the Singaporeans in the face of a very angry but noticeably subdued Chinese delegation.

Gone was the arrogant and hectoring attitude, for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) had yet to discover the identity of the attackers who had wiped out Riau.
ooo000ooo

The government inquiry in Singapore, commenced on schedule on January 13th and Charlie and Chloe where, of course the key witnesses. His evidence and Chloe’s, coupled with the security staff who had fought back was deemed proof enough that China had been the instigators of the attempt. The guards had captured the armed waiter who had tried to force the couple into the sniper’s killing zone but they had failed to capture the sniper.

Fortunately, the sniper had been forced to abandon his rifle at the bottom of the tree and forensics had confirmed it as the gun that fired the bullets into the injured guards.
The gun was also traced to a batch of Chinese rifles destined to be air-freighted via Singapore to a Muslim country in the Persian Gulf that was notorious for supplying weapons to terrorists.

This information had seriously embarrassed the Singapore government for it was prima-facia evidence that a lot of shady, illegal deals were transacted through Singapore’s trading houses.

To that date Oz had not been troubled with terrorism. The indigenous aboriginal peoples of Australia had won substantive compensation and land returns that enabled a peaceful settlement across the negotiating tables and without recourse to violence. Singapore’s position as a crossroads of illegal trading had not seriously impacted Australia except for drugs trafficking.

Drugs however were endemic to the whole planet for they were used by the feminista as part of the control mechanism to subdue the men trapped in the ‘rookeries.’

Singapore was by no means the worst supplier of drugs to Oz.

However since the political changes in Oz, the Australian government was now moving to crack down again on drugs trafficking in their endeavours to try and recover the male population from an almost universal dependency of various drugs. The road to recovery was going to be a hard one.

Fortunately, there were now many more sophisticated therapies and medicines to alleviate the addictions. The most successful treatment being a deep, long-term abdominal implant that caused extreme reaction to narcotics and left the drug user feeling violently sick for days while suffering from extensive, excruciating joint and muscle pains for the same prolonged period. Fortunately, the same treatment also alleviated the periodic cravings.

ooo000ooo

After the assassination hearings, the Singaporean government felt empowered enough to go ahead with the trial and on the first morning of the trial, Charlie and Chloe were escorted to their separated bullet-proof booths erected next to the normal witness box.

Naturally, the trial caused a huge international interest not least because the rest of the world wanted to see the reputed inventor of the antigravity engine. The secretive individual who tended to shun publicity and avoided all media platforms like the plague. Charlie had never given a televised public interview. Even though politicians and company executives had met him in private meetings.

Suffice to say that the public gallery and press gallery in the courtroom were virtual ‘no-go’ areas to all but the luckiest few. Public television cameras were banned; there had been too many instances of high-profile cases being crashed by cameras being used to disguise guns aimed at witnesses. The only single camera being used to record the trial was a carefully guarded one placed to the side of the judges and focused only on the accused waiter and the witnesses.

The trial was quick. The evidence against the waiter was overwhelming and eventually he crumpled under cross examination. Chinese interests were also implicated by the rifle the sniper had abandoned and the waiter’s eventual confession. He and his family were promptly moved to a witness protection scheme.

The conviction of the ‘waiter’ via his exposed connections to the CCP government was then used as evidence enough for Singapore to curtail much of the illicit trading that enabled the CCP to hide so much of it’s trafficking with terrorist groups in Asia and Africa.

The CCP and particularly its politburo membership, was beginning to feel the pain, for much of this traffic provided secret and illicit revenue to fill the pockets of corrupt CCP politicians.

Naturally, the CCP was pulling out all the stops to discover who attacked Riau, but because only a very few people knew for certain the exact who, how. and when concerning the attack, nobody could offer the Chinese any certainty. The most satisfactory outcome of the attack was that Indonesia became emboldened enough to cancel the treaty legally.
China had been proven to have exceeded the stipulated forces on the island and was thus forced to abandon Riau and pull back to it’s artificial bases in the south China sea.

All the countries encircling the South China Sea had cause to find relief in the outcome of the attack and most extended tentative feelers to Australia. For despite the lack of hard evidence, most countries were convinced that either Australia, or Singapore, or both countries were somehow involved.

Two months after the assassination trial was wrapped up, four unusual craft were delivered to the Singapore air-force. Like many Asian people, the Singaporeans like to give their own names and identities to their possessions and they called the new acquisitions ‘Black-craft.’

A name that the Australians were rather enamoured of and who consequently followed suit.

“When communicating during joint exercises, the eavesdropping Chinese were bemused to hear messages such as ;-

“Blacraft 6’ this is Blacraft 1’ I’m angels two hundred kay.’

A vernacular hung over from their old jet-pilot days, to mean a Singaporean spacefighter was hailing an Australian spacefighter and advising her that she was two hundred kilometres above her.

The numbering served to perhaps illustrate that the Singaporean aircraft was an earlier marque and that Singapore must have somehow been the inventors of these undetectable aircraft. This left the Chinese even more confused.

Even after months of searching the tiny island, their spies had never located any factory capable of manufacturing such creations.

During those months, Charlie had been busy. After supplying forty-eight antigrav engines sufficient for a couple of squadrons of spacefighters, Charlie had next contracted to supply engines for several high-altitude Australian detection stations that could fix their position at any altitude and any location indefinitely, above and beyond Australia.

After having shared the benefits of Charlie’s science with the Singaporeans, Australia was also in a position to offer a similar sophisticated monitoring station to Singapore.

Using antigravity engines, the station could be legitimately located directly above Singapore at any distance from the Earth that the Singaporeans wished, then used to detect any undeclared attack coming from any direction.

The attacks were not to be long in coming for the CCP spies on the ground in Singapore had not been idle. After diligently searching, they had determining that the four ‘Black-craft’ were definitely Singaporean; so the CCP decided they would have to launch a hypersonic missile attack by ‘swarming’ the air-force base with dozens of missiles.

Any civilian targets damaged by inaccurate missiles, were to be counted as ‘collateral damage.’

In line with well-defined strategy, the hypersonic missiles were to be subsequently launched into a ‘sub-space’ high altitude orbit around the earth and then attack the Singapore airbase from any direction at hypersonic speeds.

The strategy would have been supremely successful had but the CCP not been faced with spacecraft that were more than capable of catching a hypersonic missile lumbering along at five thousand knots. Furthermore, the Australian detection stations were now well established in a huge radius girdle covering most of the east Indian Ocean, southeast Asia, the southwest Pacific and of course Antarctica. The final addition of a station directly above Singapore also brought extra protection from attack while providing eyes deep into China.

“Belt and braces,” as Katie explained to the Singaporean prime minister when they met to jointly activate the Singaporean shield.

“Well I must admit Miss Bergson, we in Singapore certainly have a lot to thank you for. We can feel safe again after decades of intimidation.”

“Oh call me Katie, Prime Minister, everybody in Oz does including our best weapon Charlie Sage.”

“Yes indeed, we have a lot to thank him for as well.”

“You don’t need to tell us in Australia.”

“Is he still building those gravity engines?”

“Only as and when he deems it necessary. He’s not really happy to see antigravity weaponised but reality dictates.”

“Is it true he can reach the outer planets with those craft.”

“Yes.”

“Even with those little space fighters? I mean they are just one seater things.”

“Well the spacefighters have the range to reach Pluto because they get their gravity energy from the sun; but the human occupants need to eat, sleep, breathe and defaceate. I wouldn’t like to have to sit in the same cockpit seat for a month,” Katie grinned vicariously, “but technically the spacefighter can make Pluto and back.”

“That’s frightening. So Dawn 1, the ‘flying pastie’ as our people call it; that can reach Pluto?”

“Easily. It’s even got a cabin and a bed.”

“I’ve heard talk of quarrying the solar system. Is that true.”

“Yes. That’s Charlie’s main ambition now. His political aims are pretty much completed on Oz. People have equal rights. Men will obviously take time to play ‘catch-up’ but a generation or two should do it.”

“Is that why he was quite happy to help us Singaporeans face down China?”

“Yes. He noticed that you in Singapore have always been fairly liberal and equal;- you know, universal franchise and all that.

Then, when the CCP tried to assassinate him, that was the last straw.”

“Well, when you next see him, give him my sincere thanks and the thanks of everybody in Singapore.”

“He knows that already and takes it as a given.”

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