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Thanks to the Thinking Horndog for editorial review. Any errors that remain are my own.
Nicholas was having a bit of a rough time. He had followed the advice given him by the other men as best he could, but he had no way of gauging his progress. Without a wife, the specter of his upcoming meeting with the Holy Father affected him in much the same way as looking down the barrel of a loaded cannon would have.
He and Michela seemed to get along well, and he liked her a lot, but he couldn�t tell whether she might be interested in a longer-term commitment, like marriage. With no prospect of solving the problem on his own, he did the only thing he could think of - he went to see Joe.
For her part, Michela was also frustrated. As an old-school Italian girl, she�d done everything she could think of to appropriately encourage Nicholas to move the relationship forward, but he hadn�t responded. He hadn�t even tried to kiss her, for goodness sakes! At her wits� end, she decided to talk to her niece about it.
The house was unusually quiet when Joe arrived. Usually, three rambunctious children had at least twelve different, noisy entertainment devices going, all at once, but there was no sign of either the children or his wives. Tossing his attaché into his favorite chair, he went in search of his family.
He found Maria in the kitchen, apparently preparing an evening meal for twenty-five people - at least the amount of food seemed to indicate that. Her back was toward him, so he quietly walked up behind her and put his arms around her waist.
�And which of my lovers are you?� she teased.
�I�m the tall, dark handsome one,� he teased back, kissing her neck several times.
�Well, you can�t stay long,� she said, giggling. �My husband is due home any moment now!�
�I�m sure he won�t mind me,� he replied, moving his hands up to her breasts and teasing her nipples. �By the way, where is everyone else?�
She let go a sigh and leaned back into him. �Oh, Luisa took the kids on a jaunt down to the seaside. They�ll be back in time for supper. Did you have a good day?� she asked.
�Not bad,� he said. �Just the usual. Read progress reports. Listened to harebrained schemes. Kicked some ass, every so often. Plead for reason. You know the drill. I meet with people and we talk.�
�Yeah? Who�d you talk to?�
�Well, there was Marco and Frank, of course. I�m working their asses off on this expansion plan. Then there are the guys at the manufacturing facilities. They wanted to complain about capacity. Oh, and the trainers at the pilot school are complaining about not having enough available students to meet our strategic goals.�
�Anybody else? Maybe I should say, anybody more interesting?�
�Well, the only odd one today was Father Nicholas. He seems to be in over his head with Michela��
�That�s a coincidence� Michela came to see me today,� she said, noncommittally.
Joe pulled her around to face him, and looked into her eyes. It would be easy to get lost in them, but he recognized a certain urgency in her manner. �Do we have a problem here?�
She nodded. �Yes, I think we do.�
�Aunt Michela, has it ever occurred to you that the man might not know how to kiss a woman?� Maria asked in exasperation.
�What kind of man wouldn�t know how to kiss?� Michela demanded.
�A priest, maybe? He�s been isolated from women, from very early boyhood, maybe as young as ten years. He�s never dated, never made out, never done more than shake a woman�s hand until he met you. Why would he have ever learned how to kiss?�
�I didn�t think of that,� Michela admitted. �So what should I do?�
�Well, after hearing from Luisa, how she finally got Joe to propose, I think she might be better qualified to answer that than I am. Go talk to her.�
�You know, Father Nicholas, there�s an old rule that applies here.�
�What�s that, Joe?�
�You can�t win if you don�t play the game.�
�What if you don�t know how to play the game?�
�You get a good teacher - or you just go for broke.�
�I thought you were my teacher.�
�No. You need a girl to teach you what you should be doing. A guy, and most specifically me, wouldn�t let you do what you need to be doing!�
�So what is this �go for broke� option?�
�It�s just a decision you make. You decide to do something, even if it�s wrong.�
That actually sounded less risky to the priest. Both men fell silent, alone with their thoughts.
Nicholas nervously adjusted his tie. He�d finally screwed his courage up to the point that he could go through with his plan. He knocked on the door and waited.
Michela answered the door, smiling, as radiant as she�d always been. �Hi, Nick. Come on in. I have a few more little things to do before we can go,� she said before disappearing into the rear of the house.
He waited on the sofa, and after a short time, she returned with a purse hanging on her shoulder. He hadn�t specified what kind of date it would be, so she assumed they�d be visiting one or another set of friends.
He stood to meet her and took both her hands in his, asking earnestly, �Michela, before we go, can we talk a little?�
�Well sure, Nick. What�s on your mind?� she responded, showing some worry.
�Please let�s sit down for a minute,� he asked, pulling her to the sofa. When they were both seated, he began speaking again.
�I know that I haven�t been the most impressive date, over the past weeks. My problem is ignorance. I don�t really know what I�m supposed to be doing. Even if I did, I probably wouldn�t know how to do it.
�I know nothing about women, or how to please them. I don�t have the kind of charm that it would take to convince a woman that she should overlook my faults while I try to become the focus of her life.
�I�m expected to find a woman to love and marry, and with whom I will have babies. I know where the babies come from, and how they get there, but only in an academic sense. I�ve never even seen a film demonstrating that process. I don�t know what that�s supposed to feel like, or how my wife can be expected to react to what I do.
�I know you haven�t been happy with my performance, but I guess what I�m saying is, I don�t expect to get any better. Will you marry me anyway? And then maybe you can teach me what I need to know� �
Michela raised her hand, indicating he should stop, and said �Maybe.�
�Maybe?� he queried.
�Yes, maybe.� she confirmed. �There is one thing I have to teach you before I can decide. You have to know how to kiss. Now the first thing you do��
Fred re-read the vows he had prepared. Even though they were intended for a pair, they had to be open-ended enough to accommodate expansion of the relationship at a later time. The Pope had insisted on that. Satisfied, he signaled that the ceremony should begin.
Joe stood as best man, at times providing physical as well as moral support for the nervous groom.
Nicholas fidgeted as the bridal march began. It seemed to last forever, before the vision that was his bride-to-be made her appearance. Her son, Frank, escorted her down the aisle, and would give her away.
For the second time that year, Michael filled the role of ring bearer. He was actually getting a little bored with the job. He wished that cousin Frank had already married and had kids. It would have been his son�s responsibility then.
Since there were fewer actual participants, the ceremony was somewhat shorter than that which had been held for Joe, Maria, and Luisa. In what seemed an instant, the pair went from being single to being married. When they were given permission for their first public kiss, Nicholas took his new wife in his arms, and demonstrated all he had learned about kissing, for everyone to see.
Somewhat dazed, Michela pulled back, and said, �You�re getting pretty good at this!� before returning to his embrace and showing him how much more he needed to learn.
Six months after the meeting of the full cosca, on Catania, Marco was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things were going too well. Nobody�s plans ever worked without a hitch, but so far, the program that he and Frank had developed seemed to be proceeding apace.
Marco had commandeered all of the uncommitted resources of CareerPath Placements, Inc., a headhunter firm in which Catania Enterprises had held a majority equity position. In order to make this possible, Joe had agreed to transfer some alternate assets to the other stockholders, in exchange for their equity interest in the company, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary.
After the acquisition, CareerPath was forbidden to accept new contracts, or renew expiring ones. The reason given was that, although they were equipped and staffed to evaluate and recruit large numbers of people, the parent company was undertaking a project so vast, that they expected to consume all of their recruiting capability, for some time to come.
The biggest bump in the road came when their management asked for the job specification for the people they were to recruit. Rather than being told to look for specific professional skills, they were told to find adult pairs, of Italian or Sicilian extraction, who were raising or had raised large, stable families.
Preference was to be given to skilled craftsmen and blue-collar laborers, especially in the building trades, but the most important criteria were to be the intangibles: Catholic faith, loyalty to family and friends, and most of all, the desire and ability to provide a nurturing environment for raising children.
The headhunters were uncomfortable with the listed criteria, because they seemed to be promoting a kind of discrimination that appeared on the surface to be illegal. They were told, point blank, that the criteria were not going to be changed. The recruitment was being done to staff a large initiative in support of the Catholic Church, and as a voluntary religious activity, it wasn�t subject to labor laws. At that point, the headhunters caved, and set about doing exactly as they were asked. Unwittingly, their focus was directed entirely to meeting the expansion needs of the cosca�s colonies.
In a way, the Confederacy made the job easier, because of the requirement for universal CAP testing. CareerPath had managed to obtain the technology to read and interpret CAP sub-scores, and in combination with other analytical techniques, were able to develop and implement a successful recruitment campaign. One surprise was the number of very high CAP scores who had refused to emigrate, because of the impact it would have had on their families. These were fertile grounds for the kind of people the cosca wanted.
By the time the first two hundred families were ready to transport the cosca had a pretty good start on providing the extra housing on Catania. As soon as the cosca had adopted the plan, practically all of their industrial replicator capacity had been diverted to the manufacture of transport ships, housing, and supporting infrastructure. Those first families were ready and waiting to receive their new adopted children, weeks before the first of the children would arrive.
�� and so, as I understand it, you are to provide for transportation of the children to their new facilities��
�Yes, Father,� Marco replied, �and as I understand it, you will be following them, to serve with Patriarch Nicholas, in a few weeks��
�Yes, yes, quite so,� the nervous clergyman confirmed, �I have my bishop�s approval for that now. He was loath to allow it, but he had orders from higher still� I don�t quite know why, though��
�Perhaps it was a direct request by the Patriarch?�
�I suppose that�s possible, but I am still at a loss� I mean, I don�t think I�ve ever met him�Tell me again how this is supposed to work��
�Okay, you know that the Church has been making press releases for weeks now, citing the need to consolidate facilities for financial reasons. The closure of this orphanage is listed as part of that consolidation. The official line is, the kids will be redistributed to other, Church-supported facilities, and in a way, it�s true.
�You were transferred into this facility to provide a cover for your own disappearance. Obviously, when the orphanage closes here, your job here will be no more. You will be expected to move elsewhere. You will. In fact, the official line for you is true - you will be following the children to their new home, to continue providing them, along with others, spiritual guidance.
�We use our resources to get the kids where they�re going, and distribute them into their new homes, while you close up shop here. Then we come back for you.
�The public sees an orphanage close, and its staff get reassigned. The other Church-operated facilities are never told that either you or the kids are coming there, so they don�t get concerned, when you don�t show up. Nobody�s the wiser.�
�What if someone comes looking for one of the children? If they can�t be located, won�t that raise some suspicion?�
�It might, except that you�ve already transferred out any child who has a living relative, or the like, to one of the Earth-bound facilities. We want them all, but those are going to be hard to get, without bringing down the house. We�ll be back for them at the last, because when the shit hit�s the fan, we won�t care who gets upset about what we�re doing. Now don�t worry so much. That�s my job. All you have to do is��
The discussion went on for a few more hours before Father Ricci finally decided to give up and put his trust in God� and the man who was trying to get him off Earth.
Joe looked around the room, if you could call it that. It was actually a hangar, housing twenty of the new �bombers,� each of which were designed to deliver two HSIT devices.
The bombers were aligned, ten on either side of the main taxiway. Joe sat in the reviewing stand, behind the Commandant and the faculty. Maria sat on his right, and Luisa sat on his left.
On a signal from the Commandant, a fanfare announced the arrival of the first class of bomber pilots to graduate from flight school. It likely seemed a little silly to some, but Joe knew the value of ceremony. These young men needed to know the value that he, and the rest of the cosca, placed on them and their work.
Those twenty young men lined up ten abreast, facing the podium. The Commandant made a short speech of congratulations, and then turned the ceremony over to Joe.
Before beginning his speech, Joe looked into the eyes of each and every one of the graduates. At length he began to talk.
�Each of you knows why you are here. We had hoped to get some cooperation from the Confederacy, and if we had, we would be loathe to risk any of you on operations as dangerous as what you are about to undertake.
�Until and unless the Confederacy, or others with as much power, takes seriously the need to save the planet of our birth, we have a moral obligation to try to interdict the advance of the Sa�arm.
�There is still time for that to happen. The front line of the Sa�arm expansion is still a few years away from Earth. We cannot wait, however, in the hope that those who have the power will act in time. We must begin now, first to try and slow the advance of our enemies, and second, to demonstrate to those who should be our allies, just how serious we are about it.
�You have been taught, as well as we can teach you, about the important things. How to fly these craft. How to avoid detection. How to evade capture, if you are detected and pursued. Moreover, you know about the weapons you carry. There aren�t many, because you are not intended to engage the enemy in a direct confrontation.
�Our aim is not to take out enemy fighters, but to destroy the enemy�s ability to field fighters. Our aim is not to take out hive ships, but to destroy their ability to build hive ships. In short, we intend to do our level best to treat the cancer represented by the Sa�arm by starving it. If we can destroy its industrial capacity, if we can destroy its source of fresh troops, if we can prevent it from capitalizing on resources behind its front lines, we believe that there is hope for our birth planet.
�We have given you the tools that will enable you to accomplish those objectives. Each of you has been given two HSIT devices, and been assigned primary and secondary targets.
�I am assured that the worlds that you have been told to destroy have no remaining native sentient beings on them. The Sa�arm have already destroyed them. There should be no guilt, no second thoughts concerning what you are about to do. Would you hesitate to shoot rats, if you saw them eating an innocent child? No, you would not. And you should not. The Sa�arm are no different. Yes they are sentient. Yes they are alien. But yes, they are still like those rats, and given the opportunity, they will eat our children!
�If all goes well, each of you will destroy at least one, possibly two Sa�arm-occupied worlds. That, and escape, are your only duties. You will do whatever you have to do to avoid capture - including the use of hyperspace jumps in the vicinity of large masses, if need be. You are not to worry about the consequences of such actions, as there will be no one near enough, other than the Sa�arm, to experience those consequences.
�You know that your bombers are rigged to self-destruct, if breached. I don�t need to tell you why. You already know. We cannot allow the enemy to gain any knowledge of us or our capability. It would be a bad thing if they even learned of our species.
�Each of you has a family. At least one wife, maybe as many as four. Some of you have children. It is our greatest hope that all of you will come home safely to us after every mission, so that you can see your children grow up in a world unthreatened by the Sa�arm, or their like. It is possible that some of you won�t.
�Do not worry about your families. Your wives and children will be cared for. The cosca will see to that. Furthermore, if you do not return alive, the stored gametes that we have taken from your bodies will allow your wives to conceive your children, for as long as their own fertility lasts. They may remarry, for love or companionship, but any children that they bear will be yours, by blood, and those children will bear your name.
�Your place in our hearts is assured. For now, it appears you, and those who will follow you, are the last, best hope for Earth�s future as the home of humanity. You are the Sword of Michael! I know you will do your duty. I hope to greet you again in this life, and I salute you!�
With teary eyes, Joe returned to his seat. The remainder of the ceremony was mercifully short, as the Commandant recognized each pilot individually, and presented him with a diploma. At the conclusion, he said only, �God bless and keep you all.�
With that he dismissed the class.