I write this in a secret code, an extinct language that hardly anyone knows. I don't know who will ever read it, so I will explain some background.
My people have ancient traditions. There was once a time when we had tremendous power. We had oceans of water, and one large moon that sloshed the water around, rather than the two small moons we have now. We burned that power until the oceans went dry. Now we get by with the dregs.
We studied our genes and changed ourselves. Here are the most important things about that. First, we do not age. At least not in the first ten thousand years. But we found that very old people became tremendously clever and sneaky, and they left no opportunities for younger ones. So after a thousand years we send them off on a mysterious journey from which none return. Still, old people own the world and rule the world, and there's little scope for young ones.
Second, we fixed pregnancy. The old way was atrocious. Now a pregnant woman lays a small, comfortable egg. The egg is exposed to light and it photosynthesizes, and grows, until after some years it hatches into a small child.
Third, we have "telepathy". People can sense each other's thoughts. A skilled person can read an unskilled person's thought without hindrance. With decades of training a person can learn to make their thoughts almost impenetrable even to skilled readers. But when people want to, they can communicate with such clarity! Spoken language is reserved mostly for insincerity. Telepathy starts early, and babies in their eggs learn a lot about the world.
We are not very hypocritical. We have learned to accept each other as we are.
Oh, also there are the Greens. They changed themselves more. They grow up to 20 feet tall and have four arms, and they are literally green. We don't get along very well with them.
So here I am, a princess of City Two. The Crown Princess. I fly on an expedition above the ancient sea bottoms. Twenty ships, over 1000 men, and I rule it. My name is Dayja Thurus. It means Already Traveling. I am only 93 years old.
Chapter 1: My Own Personal Fleet
It was late morning and I went to check on my admiral. He had the learning tools out, good. He looked like he was trying to learn the job. Good! I smiled at him, and jiggled my breasts a little. This language is not very expressive. I had learned 64 variations of expressive smiles, and 81 varieties of subtle moves to emphasize the breast. I am a careful student. My mental shield is excellent. My study of sexual technique is also excellent. Also my training in government, how to rule. His eyes widened and he breathed quicker. I said, "I hope your studies go well. We all depend on you."
"Yes, sir."
"Try to learn the most important parts first."
"They're all important, sir. It said so at the beginning."
"Then try to start with the parts you'll need first."
"Yes, sir."
I moved in a way that gave him a subliminal whiff of musk, and moved on to the captain.
My captain stared into space, despondent. I made some little gasping sounds like a woman approaching orgasm, too softly for him to consciously hear. I could feel his mind start to adjust. "My captain."
"Yes, sir." He stood and saluted. I saluted back.
I thought to him, 'What can I do to assist your studies?'
'I -- it's all so overwhelming.'
'Try to squeeze two hundred years of training into a few days? You don't have to be good at everything. Start with the things it takes to keep the ship in the air, and then move on to attacks.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Do you have any questions?'
His mind was open to me. His shield was not good at all. 'Do we really have a chance?'
I projected confidence and determination. 'Yes! Our ships are old but well-maintained. We have sufficient supplies. The Greens do not expect any attack. With one documented victory we can return home as heroes. I have seen the records, it has happened six times in the last century. With our leadership we can be lucky seven.'
'How did you become the boss?' He yearned both for me and for my position. He wanted to be the boss and to have me.
'I took the initiative. No one else did that. And we needed somebody.' Also I was the only woman in the fleet. I didn't project that.
'Why did you choose me?'
'I saw you take initiative. You. Now follow up and learn the job. We all depend on you. Learn enough so we can have our victory and go home.' He had fantasies about obedient sex and I encouraged that. I don't particularly enjoy that mode myself, but I needed to motivate him. He had the attitude that I was a stupid woman who couldn't understand the complexity of warships. It was easier to work with that than to fix it. I let him know that I depended on him to learn. It didn't really matter whether he thought I could do it myself. It was easier to get a thousand sexist men to follow the officers I chose for them, than to get them to follow my own orders when I wasn't there to hint at sex.
I worked my persuasion down the list of officers and a sample of the men. The one bright spot was the weapons master. He had actually been in the navy for three years until he had an affair with his captain's wife. He presented an idea. 'Well you see sir, about 95% of what we do is shoot other ships out of the air. City Two has the best navy in the world. But here's the best way to go after Greens on the ground. See, they have nothing in the air and no big guns, only their sniper rifles that are good to about 10,000 meters. So what we do, is we approach them hull down. The hull isn't really down, it's tilted to face them so that's all they have to shoot at. And we bomb them. The bomb mechanism almost runs itself, I can get the men to use it with hardly any training. So catch them on the march, they'll be strung out in a line. Approach them hull down and bomb them before they can spread out much. I reckon five or six bombs should do it. Kill ten thousand of them easy, and then we can go home.' The images in his mind were graphic and easy to follow.
'I see. So we don't need to train to fight other ships.'
'Yes sir. It ain't just that we don't know how, they didn't even give us the weapons. That's why we can't go home until they let us.'
'So show me more about this attack.'
'Everybody on deck has to be strapped in so they don't fall off, sir. It's the simplest possible attack and we can learn it. Practice the hull-down trick and find the Greens on the march, and it'll be over quicker than horses fuck. If you pardon the expression, sir.' I recoiled slightly from the projected image of eight-legged horses in their quick fuck. I agreed to his strategy. We arranged to prepare the crews, and run the first test of the hull down technique in three days.
Three days later the admiral's ship practiced the hull down technique. It worked. Three men fell off. I investigated. Two of them were busy fighting each other. The third was too depressed to strap in. We held a ceremony for them, since I thought that would be good for morale. I pointed out that we need to work together, to follow orders so we can get our victory and go home. Later when I sampled crew minds I was concerned to find that many of them thought that the dead men had "gone home". After another three days we repeated the test with all the ships. There were twenty one casualties. Two of the crews did not succeed at the maneuver. A third took several hours to undo it. I had to accept this as a success of sorts. Under ideal conditions, one ship could bomb sufficiently for victory, and the others could "draw enemy fire".
I spent two hours a day learning the ship myself. I started with food preparation, because our cooks were atrocious. I learned the basics quickly and taught the cooks myself. Morale improved somewhat. Next gunnery.
You might wonder how I wound up in command of this fleet. Here is how it happened.
Chapter 2: My Papa The King
Our culture is ruled by tradition. The children of important people resent them deeply. The children want to be important too, but before they inherit their parents' positions they must wait, often as long as eight hundred years. So the tradition is that they attempt to kill a parent, and when they fail there is a ceremony. Their feelings are acknowledged, everyone recognizes their love for each other, they hug and discuss the sadness of existence, and then it's over until the next time. If the attempt succeeds, then there is a victory party where the child describes how sad it is that the parent didn't live his full thousand years, and how sad that it cannot be otherwise in this life.
Commoners don't bother. Their parents have nothing worth inheriting. They typically don't bother to marry either.
My father has the most important position in the city. He runs the sewer system. Without it we have no water to drink and the city must be abandoned. Tradition demands that he be the crown prince, and someday he will rule the city unless he has a child that kills him first.
I learned the work perfectly, but I did not really want to replace him. I loved him, and I was happy to wait. I enjoyed the life I had. But people started to dismiss me for not doing it. I was losing status. And I realized, what if I instead attempt to kill my grandfather? That would show them. They said I didn't take enough initiative. But if I went for the whole thing and failed.... He was a lovable old rogue himself. Papa was over seven hundred years old, and on holidays he used to gather me with his other grandchildren. He told us stories and had us play games that encouraged us to be ruthless.
I came up with a truly excellent plan. It used six of my followers -- enough to get results, not enough to attract attention for being mine. It would look like random little things until the sudden end. I couldn't expect it to work. He had so much experience! Nothing anybody had tried before had worked. But it was definitely not a plan to be ashamed of.
Skipping the details, of course it didn't work. His guards extended no courtesy when they disarmed me. They took my gloves and sandals, my hair ornaments and all my jewels except the one that showed I was my father's daughter, and the one that showed I was the crown princess. They removed all chemicals from my skin and rinsed all from my body cavities. I don't want to describe that. I'll say that the most undignified was the nasal sinuses. I cried and my sinuses refilled with mucus, and then they got flushed a second time. The most painful were the tear ducts. The guards dragged me to Papa. I would have preferred to walk, but they didn't let me. He was in an empty room with bare stone walls.
Papa looked noncommittal. He didn't give anything away. He was about nine inches taller than me, so I looked up at him. He looked me in the eyes and after a time, said "Your shields are excellent."
