Brides of War -

Chapter 2 of Brides of War

The underground facility had self-detonated an hour ago and ever since we had been moving northward once more. There was a knock at my cabin door.

"Come in." I called out.

The door opened and an attractive woman in her early 40s stepped in. Standing up I addressed her, "Dr. Susan Albright I believe it is?"

She smiled and quickly nodded. I indicated a chair and she sat down.

I'd only seen her a handful of times as she'd been transferred to the ship at virtually the last moment before we'd taken flight ahead of the chaos of a few days ago. Still, it was no excuse for not having had a consultation with my chief medical officer until now.

I was glad she'd come, even though I'd been about to crash and get a few hours of sleep. I could see that while she was possessed of a very bright and positive disposition that her own face had the symptoms of the same haggard weariness that I felt hounding myself.

Empathetically I reached out my hand and squeezed hers briefly as I said, "I can only imagine how stressful, it's been for you and your staff having to not only deal with your own emotions of loss, but seeing to the needs of all the crew that have been coming to you for help."

She nodded her head emotionally and a few tears slipped down from her eyes, but she wiped at them quickly and said, "Yes, it's been hard but we've been managing."

I nodded, liking the woman more and more. She had steel in her and a part of me relaxed in the knowledge of what capable hands my crew was in when it came to medical matters.

"What is it that I can do for you? Do you need more staff assigned to you, and oh by the way I appreciate greatly that you've been refusing to hand out opioids or anything like that which could affect the ability of the crew to do their jobs."

Softly she said, "We're at war. We can't have everyone high as a kite now can we. That said, I do well understand the need to escape the reality that we all find ourselves in. We are literally it. There are no more of us. There is no place to go home to. As hard as that reality is we all have to face it head on and deal with it and to that end Sir, I just want to say that you have my full allegiance and I appreciate so much how you given everyone hope along with a mission of sorts. A mission to survive. A hope of a future. I.... this crew couldn't ask for a finer leader."

I looked down at my clasped hands on the desk. Maybe it was wrong to share my emotions, but I spoke anyway, "I am not unaffected by everything. I'm barely hanging on. The only thing keeping me together is the responsibility to keep this crew alive. To be honest our chances of survival are one in a million, maybe even worse odds than that, I simply don't know. The crew may have hope, but I.... I really don't have much. I'm sorry if I'm disappointing you Doctor, but......"

Her hand squeezed warmly down upon mine this time. I looked up.

Her gaze was intense, "First off its Susan, for you to use when we're in private and I want you to know that if you need to talk about anything I am always here for you. I can well see the back breaking pressure that you are under."

Somehow her words and touch were offering me comfort and I latched on to them as if I was a drowning man.

"Captain Lee..."

"Morgan." I interjected softly.

"Morgan, we will survive. God has not spared us this far to abandon us now."

"I have my doubts about that." I confessed.

"Well, I do not."

I nodded, letting the woman's strong faith bolster my own as I went through a weak moment.

"Now Morgan I think your plan is a good one. I too agree that while justice is needed, we simply have to find a place of sanctuary first and regroup and go on as a people."

I nodded, being encouraged by her support, but her next words shocked me, "However, there is a problem with your plan."

Her face had blushed a little and hanging on her every word as I waited to see how I may have miscalculated the future I waited to see what she would point out.

"Are you aware of the disparity of men to women on board this ship."

I blinked. It was rather large come to think of it, but in truth, I hadn't really given it much thought.

"There's more men I know that."

"No, it's a lot more significant than that. Counting both of us there are 472 personnel on this ship. Of those personnel 425 are all men. Of the 47 women on board only 14 of them are what I would call of prime childbearing age. While, for example, I may still have the ability to bear a child, it's an uncertain thing at best given my age. Also complicating the matter is that four of the 14 women are already married to men on this ship. That leaves just 10 women of prime childbearing age for the remaining 425 men to fight over. Do you see the problem that we're faced with Morgan?"

I'd had no idea that the numbers were that skewed. How were we going to move on as a people with just a handful of women capable of having babies?

My plan of retreating to a sanctuary to rebuild and lick our wounds would fall apart at the seams. The doctor was right. There was a huge problem with my plan.

I looked up from my clenched together hands to her knowing eyes and said, "We need more women."

It was the undeniable truth of the moment. In order for our civilization to continue we needed women, but we simply didn't have any more.

The doctor's next words were slow and measurably given, "In order for us to survive and have the best possible chance to succeed as a people in the coming days we not only need young fertile women, but we need a lot of them. I'm talking more than one woman per a man."

Now she had truly shocked me. It was now my turn to blush hotly. "You want to have men, the crew, to have more than just one woman each?"

"Yes, instead of relying on just one girl to bring forth offspring, if there were more, all in differing stages of pregnancy all gained off of one man it would go a long way towards better survivability outcomes not to mention genetic diversity. This ship has vast resources held within it. It's been designed and provisioned to take on a much larger number of people than just the current crew."

"What exactly are you saying Doctor? Please speak plainly."

Not backing down, she looked me in the eye and said, "I'm saying that before we enter the magnetic isles in search of a sanctuary that it is vital that we procure young, disease-free women to populate our people forward into the future with."

"Exactly how many women are you wanting to pick up?"

"The ship has a maximum ability to take on approximately 2100 more people so that roughly breaks down to five women for every man on board."

I stood up, "You can't be serious!"

"I'm dead serious Capt. and so should you be."

I stared down at her in denial, but I had nothing to offer in response or I would've said it.

More softly, then she said, "I know that our society has been a monogamous centered one for the most recent centuries, but it was not always so. Our holy men in the writings passed down to us from the beginning were for the most part all the husbands of more than one wife. Some had many more than the five I'm speaking of. The point is there is nothing immoral with a man having more than one wife and while I know it will and has in your case provoked outrage it is in my opinion as chief medical officer the best thing for us to do."

I sat back down slowly. Looking up I asked the fateful question that told her that I was giving in to her advice, "Where would we find them. I mean we just can't go about stealing away young women from the nations."

She nodded. Looking down at her own clasped together hands, she began to say, "There have been many wars among the nations of the main continent that we have blessedly not had to be a part of. That said, with war comes the reality that the common folk that are displaced by them are often forced into becoming refugees. No one wants them and constantly they are forced to move about between nations and they are taken advantage of at almost every turn. In such refugee families where there is rarely enough food for all it is the girls who suffer the most, even as over the years they are the ones constantly being raped as no governing force is there to protect them. Such women.... well to offer them a chance of being a wife, having steady food and being protected to raise their children in peace well for these women it would be a dream come true. The other reality is that their fathers would sell them to us for literally pennies."

"You would pick women that have become well mixed among all the ethnicities?"

"Absolutely Morgan. Children from such multiracial pairings will be the healthiest of all children."

My mind went instantly to the curly headed vision we had rescued from the underground facility. Children by her would truly be exceptional even as she was already.

Not believing in some ways as to what I was agreeing to I said, "We have no contacts among the other nations now, at least none that I trust. If we're going to do this I can't hover this ship all about the place picking up only a few dozen women at a time."

"We actually do have a contact Capt. We picked her up today from the underground facility. I've spoken with her and she knows of three locations where we should be able to pick up an allotment that will accumulate close to the number of women that we have the maximum capacity of holding on board."

Reaching up I rubbed a shaking hand over my face. It was just too much.

If my self-righteous, pious minded father could just see me now he'd come back from the grave and put a bullet between my eyes. There was just no way around the logic of the moment though.

The doctor was perfectly correct and the Holy Scriptures did offer no censure against what she was suggesting, but rather only instruction in regards to the reality of how to deal with more than one wife. Such frank disclosures of plural marriage in the Holy Scriptures had been looked over for a long time, but that didn't take away from the fact that they had still once existed.

Society may have determined certain practices to be wrong, but the words of the living God did not. In this situation, however society such as it was now rested beneath my command.

Idealistically going forward it was also true that any society of the future should resemble the society as given forth in the original Holy Scriptures and not per se the society as it had drifted down through the ages from those first days to what had been accepted in recent existence. Reverting to the old ways could not be hit any more squarely on the head of the nail than to adjust the relations between men and women in such a fashion as had not been seen in many centuries.

Maybe in the end this could turn out to be a good thing. Meeting her gaze finally I nodded and then said, "You have my permission to continue with the operation of finding the women we need for the men in this command as you've laid it out. I will notify the ship's crew to let them know what we are planning."

She breathed out a sigh of relief and looking me in the eyes, she said, "You're doing the right thing."

"I know, but it doesn't quite feel like it. I'm relying on you an awful lot to make this happen in the best way manageable."

She nodded quickly, "Once the girls are on board they will be put under quarantine and have full medical observation and only after my staff and I are sure that they all check out will we assign any of them to the men of the ship."

"How in the world are you going to go about doing that?"

"Very carefully. In reality, if we do our job right, I don't think it will matter to the men which girls they get if for the most part they're all attractive."

She was wrong about that, at least when it came to me. She stood up and turned to the door.

Seeming to remember something she turned back, "Do I have your permission to assign the eligible women of the crew out to men as well Sir?"

"Permission granted."

She opened the door. "Doctor?" She glanced back.

"The contact, the girl from the facility."

"Yes Sir?"

"I want her to be in my allotment."

"Yes Sir. Would you like to pick out the others as well?"

"No, I will leave that up to you to decide."

She nodded and with a soft smile playing about her lips, she asked, "Petty Officer Sally Arnold, do you know her Sir?"

The imagery of a very curvaceous blonde came to mind instantly. It was no secret onboard that she had her eye on me. The girl was forever bringing me coffee and in some ways I always managed to make a bungled mess of accepting it from her.

"Yes."

"Any objection to her being one of your allotment of wives?"

My cock thickened beneath the table with the promise of being housed tightly in the cute blonde, that I was actually rather endearingly fond of, but as the captain would never have pursued a relationship with normally. Things, however were different now.

"No, I don't."

"That leaves three more Morgan. I think it's very important for you to show the crew the reality of the need not to be prejudiced against others especially simply because of skin color. While you've already picked out a girl of color what would you say to one even darker?"

"I have no issues with it. God made us all."

"That he did Morgan. Thank you for your time Sir, along with everything else you're doing to save our people."

She left then closing the door softly behind her. I sat still for a long moment.

Feeling as if I were moving in a slow motion effect that had become reality, I watched as my finger reached out to engage the intercom button on the wall. I began to speak, "This is the Captain speaking. There has been a development and certain realities have been brought to my attention. There is a need to alter strategy in order to achieve the success we all want of a revived future Lothanian culture. Please listen carefully to what I have to......"

I outlined everything that I and the Doctor had spoken about and when I was done, I signed off and lay down on my bed. It wasn't that large of a bed.

Five women weren't going to fit for sure. Maybe two would.

I already knew two of them as well. My cock rose to massive rigidity and with its carnal rise I put a hand over my eyes. What had I done?