Chapter 1

We were sitting in one of those franchise diners that does breakfast all day, and it was just a touch after three in the afternoon, and I was holding my throat and making gargling noises. "Settle down," grunted Bet.

The waitress showed up with the coffee pot, which was the point of the exercise; she'd promised to refill my cup when she'd finally delivered my breakfast, twenty minutes before. "Coffee?" she asked, pseudo-brightly.

I said pseudo because there was nothing bright about her. She'd taken my order in which I specified that I wanted all bacon with my eggs and dry toast, and there I sat with two greasy-looking links of sausage and drippy buttered toast. "You're a mind reader," I grunted, "but don't quit your day job."

"What?" She ogled me blankly.

I looked back, sighing. She was a cookie-cutter copy of probably a zillion other women; thin mouse-brown hair, looking greasy largely because it was pulled back in a tight bun that emphasized that it was both thin and possibly receding on her forehead, heavy, sweaty, slightly florid with absolutely vacuous light blue eyes that were currently staring at me blankly. Actually, the Xerox machine that had turned her out was probably low on toner -- we'd already established that she was constitutionally unable to get a food order correct with years of experience and a pad and pencil in her hands. Her uniform was too tight and it helped an all but useless bra give her a pleasant puffy cleavage at the expense of making her tits look like a couple of bags of flour. Undoubtedly they sagged, but they were substantial and probably looked better unencumbered. I'd seen a lot of that in the last couple of years; things were slowly changing, but there were bastions of the old thought patterns that still survived the changes, and this was one of them. She was doughy-looking all over, from her pink cheeks to the feet she'd packed into those ridiculous earth shoes. She had this weak smile that said, "Please don't abuse me -- I'm doing the best I can and today has been AWFUL!" -- but I was pretty sure it was a permanent feature. Besides, the place wasn't THAT crowded... The only thing she'd done right in my opinion was wear a skirt -- although the OTHER waitress, a tall, swarthy Italian-looking number, managed to look good in stretch-pants; she had a nice ass for a chick who was probably pushing six feet and looked to be fairly efficient at what she was doing. If I'd gotten HER for a waitress, I might not have snapped.

Okay, so, I was on the warpath. I'm usually an easygoing guy, but I'd been on pickup duty for three months -- and spent two of them on a Darjee freighter acting as a liaison between human passengers and the Darjee crew. Confederacy Fleet warships had human crews, but freighters towing pods to the colonies were crewed by Darjee -- and you had to be nice and unthreatening around them, or they freaked. AIs ran this hypnosis program on the human support personnel who got to run back and forth between the selectees and their new 'families' and the Darjee captain and crew that had you switch modes at the link bulkhead to be able to translate "Two of Stanford's bitches got in a cat-fight over who was top concubine and one ended up gutted -- can I borrow a medkit?" to "I'm afraid that there has been a minor accident during a political discussion in Pod Three -- could I borrow a medkit?" And then, of course, you had to pretend someone slipped and fell and listen while the Darjee crewman pooh-poohed inflammatory discussion subjects like politics...

That kind of crap happened for the entire month outbound to the colonies with fifty pods full of selectees and their grafted-on 'families.' Most colonies took a lot less than a month to get to under normal boost, but the ships slowed down to allow teams to work on medical augmentation of the selectees and their staffs, orientations on colony equipment and housing pods, and other basic training deemed necessary before the selectee and his/her 'family' of concubines or studs were put down on the colony with two weeks to get their pods up and running and a routine established before the selectee headed off to perform his or her REAL function -- some vital mission in support of the defense of the Confederacy from the Swarm. Okay, so, their true designation is Sa'arm, but we had no idea what they call themselves, anyway, since they didn't communicate using any method that Confederacy member races did, so we bastardized it to match their behavior -- I didn't do it, but I approved of it. So what?

You'd have thought things would settle down in the pods after a pecking order was established, but there were too many changes going on at differing rates and you had three, five, eight, fourteen, or whatever number of people crammed into a cabin like a sardine can under conditions physical and mental that they'd never experienced before. The stresses could be incredible -- and frankly, the selectees were important; their quick-pick families were disposable individually at will.

The upshot of this was that I'd been operating under a LOT of stress masked by the AI's hypnotic program for some time -- and when you got out of sight of the Darjee and the whole thing let up, reaction set in and you got REALLY bitchy while you let it all out. We'd been on the ground for almost twenty hours and I was peaking. Colonial Recruiting Command had decided that having extraction teams feel a bit aggressive actually helped -- you didn't start feeling sorry for some sad sack and do something stupid. We were immune from normal law enforcement, too, although we had to respond to higher authority for any excesses; sometimes, the cattle got stupid and a couple of them had to be roughed up -- or even killed -- before things settled down, and we couldn't be hanging out for a murder investigation just because some moron made a dive for the transport field and hit his head on the way down after a stinger put him out. Yeah, sometimes it isn't that cut and dried, either -- things have gotten a bit Wild West in the twenty-one months since the general public on Earth was told about the Swarm.

Back to Puffy. No, maybe I'd better say a bit more about me, first. My name is Pete, for future reference, and I'm a Confederacy Space Marine. I wanted to be a fighter jock, but we're doing more on the ground on occupied planets right now than we are in space. I've been promised a bird when manufacturing is in full swing, though, and I'm impatiently waiting -- if you're designing or building strike-fighters and you're reading this, hurry the fuck up! I have one cute little bitch I snagged when I was extracted eighteen months ago tending the home fires on a colony world (okay, it's a moon around a gas giant, about three-quarters of the size of Mother Terra) that doesn't have a name that I'm aware of, just the numeric designation XD-3183. I had two -- my CAP score is six point nine and I'm actually authorized two concubines on basic scores, one additional for a collection of sub-scores that claim I'm a decent and responsible sort who will take proper care of a family, and I'm earning one more for pulling this godawful detail -- but when we were outbound to the colony, the other one developed a mutual thing with some other selectee and I let him have her, basically in return for a future draft pick from his crop of late teeners. He needed her to ride herd on them, anyway. Given that I'm not around a whole lot right now -- less now than when I was a shock troop, since we tended to spend less than twenty-four hours on an occupied planet -- I've got the guy keeping an eye on Betsy, too -- AND the bun she has in the oven whose genome is half mine. I see her daily via hyperwave, but it isn't like we're currently touchy-feelie; I get more sex from Bet right now. More on that later, I guess.

In any case, my first trip, where I subbed under LT Trumble, took fourteen pickups to collect fifty selectees; the LT was a careful sort, and averaged three a pickup -- usually from some small venue where the pickings were slim for everybody, including selectees. I'd been doing better on this, my first trip as a team lead -- I had thirteen selectees bagged and this -- drop number four for this trip and my eighteenth, total -- promised the biggest numbers yet.

Back to Puffy. Okay, her name tag said 'Heather'; funny, I always associated that name with thin, wispy brunettes. Anyway, I was REALLY feeling nasty and the look at the chunk of hard vacuum behind her eyeballs I got lit me off... "Are you married, Honey?" I asked.

"Well, yes..." She looked vaguely pleased with herself.

I'd kill THAT! "Do you have kids?"

She looked troubled -- I wasn't flirting? "Yes, two."

"Tell me, did Darwin throw snake-eyes in their case?" I asked, mock-gently.

"I don't understand..."

"Is your old man as big a loser as you are? What's your CAP score, zero point two? Are the poor little fucks doomed?" I lowered the boom.

"Pete..." Bet said calmly. We were beginning to draw attention.

"It'll be all right," I waved Bet off. "Are we on track?"

She looked at what looked like a Pocket PC that she'd been playing games on -- but was really a tracking unit. "Looks like all five -- and maybe a bonus. Ten minutes."

"This will soften the place up, then," I replied. Bet sighed and said nothing.

It was a testament to Puffy's capabilities -- or lack thereof -- that we had this conversation while she was clouding up at my insult, but before the storm broke -- and that the nature of the side conversation didn't penetrate. Angry, she rasped, "I don't have to take that!"

I snagged a handful of her uniform blouse -- there was plenty of open cleavage at the neckline -- and pulled her down to me. "I don't have to wait for twenty minutes for coffee -- AFTER I've been delivered a breakfast I didn't order!"

Some guy at the next table started looking chivalrous; Bet stood up and said, "Sit." He sat.

Why? A discussion of Bet's personal traits is in order, I think. Alpha Bet, as she now liked to be called, was one of my first pickups. At the time, she wasn't likely to turn many heads -- except perhaps in the other direction. She'd been six feet two, three feet wide, a similar amount thick, and had a face sort of like Puffy's and sort of like a bulldog's. She had glandular problems and carried considerable rolls here and there, including a monster that covered her pudenda. I don't think she'd actually SEEN her pussy in years. Her legs were undoubtedly awful -- I never saw them.

She was doing the same job as the current sorry specimen -- and doing it a LOT better, despite her physical issues. She had a CAP score equal to mine, too, and a propensity for motherhood (or something like that -- basically, she could mother ANYBODY, apparently; I'm not a psych major -- don't ask me for specifics). Still, if we hadn't been picking up four guys at the hole in the wall where she worked, she'd have never had a shot. We offered her pickup and she hit the transporter field without a backward glance.

Enter Confederacy genetic correction technology and nanobot medical miracles. By the time we hit the colonies, Bet was a different woman, physically. She STILL stood over six feet (two meters exactly, I think, in boots) and she STILL weighed quite a lot -- but muscle weighs more than fat and she didn't have a lot of fat left, unless you count those re-mastered tits on her chest -- which were probably 'C' cups, but fit nicely under her body armor, anyway, given the size of the girl they were mounted on. She could bench press two regular guys now, but still looked like somebody took a hot babe and sized her up to XXL. The face only took more hair around it and the removal of some excess fat to make it something with character, rather than something out of Mary Shelley; I was pleased that she didn't try for baby-doll, personally. She'd been my squad-mate for a couple of months, and I was well-pleased with the situation -- especially since she'd passed on bringing any pet studs with her, preferring to offer herself to selectees as a temporary mate -- and she'd offered me the right of first impregnation, once she racked up enough time to be able to take a maternity leave.

In any case, the guy decided that discretion was the better part of valor -- I think his tablemate helped by validating my complaints. I told Puffy, "Why don't you sit for a moment and we'll discuss it?" and basically manhandled her into the chair to my left. She sat, because she had to, puffing and blowing in surprise. "Pour me some coffee," I directed, and she did just that, automatically; I think, given the time to think about it, she might have gotten around to pouring it on me -- but then, she wasn't a particularly brave soul, so maybe not.

The other waitress was watching us worriedly, and I didn't want any trouble with the local yokels, so I scratched "Tell the manager to sit tight -- nobody is gonna get hurt. I wouldn't leave, either, for obvious reasons," on a napkin and poked it with my signet ring -- the one with the CRC sigil on it and an inking pad for it under the plain cover. I crooked a finger and she approached cautiously and carefully plucked the napkin out of my fingers, read it, blinked and said, "I'll take care of this right away, Sir," after which she headed for the register at the fastest rate she could manage without setting off a panic. She even managed to fill a couple of coffee cups on the way, which told me she was a REALLY smart gal... Bet was watching the whole place without appearing to, and I knew she was going to cuss me out later for this because I'd endangered the mission, but it was a done deal and we were going to have to live with it.

I returned my attention to Puffy, who was sweating now and emulating a scared rabbit pretty closely -- apparently she DID have a couple of brain cells to rub together, after all. "So, Honey, how long have you been a waitress?"

"T-two years."

"What's your CAP score, really?"

"Three point eight." She ducked her head, miserably. "I've got good sub-scores for..."

"I bet you do," I cut her off. "Tell me about your hubby -- what's his CAP score?"

"Six," she husked. "Why?" she added, raising her head.

The answer was simple: He wasn't going anywhere, unless he got VERY lucky. This pair -- AND their bambinos -- were going to be manning the ramparts in seven years when the Swarm landed ground troops. And if the Swarm got serious about dealing with a certain thorn in their side and developed something effective in the way of tactics, they'd be hamburger a week later. That timeline wandered here and there from the baseline from week to week, but we hadn't made enough of an impact on them for it to change radically, yet.

I ignored the question. "So, do you love him?"

She started to give me the pro-forma "Of course!" but she stopped herself; my questions made no sense to her, and she'd learned at some point in her life to be VERY careful when that kind of thing happened. "He takes good care of me and the children."

"But you're working," I pointed out.

"Everybody has to," she replied. "I get benefits."

I was starting to feel sorry for her, but irritation still had the upper hand. "I'm glad, but I'm here to tell you that you really should look into a new career."

"Why?" she asked.

"Because you suck at this," I replied enigmatically. "Speaking of sucking, do you? Suck, I mean."

Puffy turned cherry red. "That's none of your business."

She made to get up and I put my hand on her forearm -- and pinned her to the table. "I'll take that as a yes. Are you any good? What if it IS my business?"

"I do okay, I guess," she said, looking around for a means of escape. "Why would it be your business?"

"I'm a talent scout," I replied. "Do you fuck? Has anybody besides your old man sampled your wares?"

Her eyes shifted back to mine. "That's REALLY personal! I can't believe that you're asking that!" At this point, both of us were being quietly conversational. The usual clatter of crockery and rumble of conversation covered us, although things WERE quieter in the immediate vicinity. The guys at the next table had gone, for instance, and no one had been re-seated, even though the table had been bussed.

Bet, who was watching the door, mumbled, "I think women are being held up at checkout."

"What about guys?" I asked.

"No problem. It's smooth. Mixed groups are hitting the door, and so are guys, but women are re-seating themselves." Bet's voice displayed some admiration.

"Inbound?" I asked.

"Not a problem -- but they're seating on the far side."

"How are we looking?"

"Less than five minutes," Bet replied softly.

I returned my attention to Puffy. "You didn't answer my question."

She swallowed. "What was it again?" By now, despite the fact that she had little idea exactly what was up, she knew that she was a mouse and I was a VERY long-fanged cat.

"Well, there were a series, actually, Honey, and you haven't been any too responsive," I replied. "I think the most recent was, basically, do you fuck? That would be, you know, more than just for procreation, although that's important, too."

"Pro..."

"Babies." I sighed and looked exasperated. "Do you fuck for fun, Honey? Are you any good at it?"

"I... Well, with my husband..." she hedged.

"Anyone else, before or since?" I pressed. "Don't worry, I won't tell." I smiled winningly.

"Well, before, of course..." she replied. 'Why am I telling this guy?' was written plainly on her face.

"A lot?"

"No." She looked pained.

"And after?"

She looked away. "Maybe... once or twice."

I pounced. "Why?"

"To keep my job," came the strangled response.

I nodded. "That supports my original thesis, doesn't it? You suck at this. And that brings me back to the other question -- do you suck?"

"I told you..." She could barely speak.

"Show me."

"Here?" she looked up, aghast. "Now?"

"That's a no?" I retorted.

"I... couldn't..." She looked around the room. Several people were ignoring us deliberately, and a lot more had no idea there was a problem. And of course, several were watching avidly.

"Okay, Honey," I told her. "In about..."

"Two minutes." Bet filled in.

"Two minutes," I took it up, "you're going to be facing a life-changing decision. You can decide to do one of two things, either one of which will seal your fate and the fates of your husband and your children. You're fortunate, because for no good reason, I'm warning you about this in advance -- you CERTAINLY didn't earn it! Now run along and do whatever it is you do, since it isn't being a waitress. I'm going to give you your tip now, however -- you need to get a new job, one better suited to your talents. Git!" I let go of her arm and chivvied her away.

"So much for your breakfast," Bet muttered. "Ninety seconds."

"We can let them eat," I replied. "We just don't want them to leave." I started sopping up my eggs with my buttered toast.

Thirty seconds later, Puffy was back -- with a plate. "You wanted dry toast," she muttered.

"You're batting five hundred," I approved, "but you're still not a waitress. Let me see your ID."

"I have to get it." She was so used to weird demands from me that she wasn't even thinking about it -- either that, or the other waitress was coaching her. I could see HER bird-bright eyes behind the counter.

"Why are you bothering?" Bet asked.

"Even money says some of her scores match yours," I replied. "The ones related to child rearing, in particular. Somebody is going to want to know."

Bet snorted. "You?"

"YOU, maybe!" I shot back. "You're gonna need a babysitter after I knock you up!"

Bet snorted again, "The way you're headed, you can forget THAT! I'm gonna outrank you so far that they won't allow fraternization!" Then she went bird-dog on me. "They're in."

I didn't look around. The full catch was the data center manager, two research scientists, a LAN Administrator and one particularly gifted tech from a very solid commercial firm that did communications infrastructure analysis. "Let's see what happens," I directed. "I want 'em all; lock things down as soon as it looks like we might lose one."

"I'm on it," Bet replied.

"Here..."

I jumped a foot; we'd been focused on the other side of the room and Puffy damned near got killed when she shoved her ID in my face. I sat down carefully, and so did Bet; Puffy never knew how close she came to oblivion. I asked Bet, "You got that?" She nodded, indicating that she was watching our prey, and I took the card. The big number was as ugly as she said it was; a three point eight said she had problems with fractions -- but she didn't. She had several remarkable qualities, but she was a sheep from a great long line of sheep -- absolutely spineless, except... That exception, combined with a couple of other things, just might save her life.

I looked up at her. "Uh huh. It's all right here -- including the basis for my belief that you're in the wrong business -- at least part time. The only reason your boss is keeping you is to keep his knob wet, isn't it?" I leered. "How many times a week do you put out to keep your kids and your old man in health insurance?"

She turned beet red. "Four or five," she croaked. "How can you tell from that?"

"It's all in the fine print, Honey," I replied. "It also says here that you love your babies more than life itself. You remember your priorities when the time comes." I cocked my head. "How many of those kids are your old man's? Does he know?"

That put her over the top. "You're evil! And a liar! It's been more than two minutes!"

I pursed my lips. "So it has." I nodded at Bet and she pushed a button on her pad. Outside the windows, the world went black and white as the interdiction field activated. "So it has."