Vicky
From CleanPosts
VICKY
The part of Femina Caelestis that had to do with swapping bodies was more or less under total control of the so-called "Bunners", those members who were nothing more than so many perfect clones of Gina's personality. The Bunners (distinguished by the habit of wearing their hair wrapped in a bun at the back of their head over their Plug) were now fully forty percent of Femina Caelestis.
There was a tripartite schism within the FC that so far had not come to the point of an open break but everyone knew it was only a matter of time. The "Band" was the original members of Hunky-Dory, minus Jill (who no longer existed as an individual), but plus Lilith (the Muscle). The Band refused to participate in the Bunner body-swapping program, partly to avoid being diluted like Gina had been, but primarily to avoid having their deepest secrets released into the general body pool.
The Bunners realized what the Band was doing by the 2020s and responded in kind. They created two pools of bodies from the "Fans", who were the main bulk of Femina Caelestis that was neither Band nor Bunners. If a member of the Band died and immediately required a fresh body, as was their right as Seraphim, one of the Ginas released a body from the smaller pool that the Bunners did not use.
After Dory died in the Andrews Air Base raid she found herself reincarnated as the triage nurse at the Black Diamond Clinic in Gonorrhea Gulch, and she felt herself obliged to stay on there for two weeks after giving her notice, even though she was the third-highest ranking member of the Women's Democratic Forum, and the job was far below her station.
Dory had never done this sort of work before, but the residual memories of the woman she possessed were strong enough to allow her to function well in the caregiving part, and of course, as a member of Femina Caelestis she had the healing touch.
Vicky Pritchard walked in that first day looking pretty bruised. She claimed she had tripped on a vacuum cleaner cord and fell flat on her face but Dory knew without a doubt that she was being beat up at home. The other signs were all there and Dory was familiar with the dreary lot of them.
There were no open wounds so there wasn't much the doctor could do for Vicky except prescribe an anti-inflammatory drug as well as a strong analgesic to alleviate her discomfort. Five hundred milligrams of Damitol disconnected her from the pain and made her feel very fuzzy. "I've given you some pretty hefty painkillers," he said, "so I can't let you drive yourself home."
"Then what'll I do?"
He checked her questionnaire. "What about your husband?"
"No! He...can't get off work."
That was a terminological inexactitude, of course. Frank Pritchard was home and chronically unemployed, by choice.
The seas of Earth were literally being drained, opening up huge new territories. People in former coal towns like Black Diamond were being left be- hind as new hydro-electric projects along the coasts brought a cornucopia of cheap energy. Frank's share of the money the United State government authorized to pay everyone dislocated by Robyn's wormhole had already been spent on booze, and of course now with the Second American Civil War still raging, and the formation of the nation of Pacifica yet in the future, the payments were no longer being deposited.
It didn't matter, because for all her adult life Vicky herself received an weekly annuity from her parents that allowed her to pay the bills and the mortgage and there was even some extra "mad money" left over for her. Frank required her to fork it all over every Monday when she went to the bank. "If I ever find out you're holding out on me, Vicky," he told her, "I'll make you wish you had never been born. Don't you ever forget it!"
And sometimes he'd freshen up her memory with a smack to the face.
Into the awkward silent between Vicky and the doctor, Dory spoke up. "I'll tell you what, Vicky. If you can stay in the waiting room for about an hour until I get off work, I'll drive you home myself."
It was an easy wait. The Damitol disconnected Vicky from boredom as well as suffering.
After Vicky gave directions to her house, Dory said, "Look, Vicky, I'd like you to watch which we we go. I want to show you something on the way home and make sure you know how to get there."
"Okay, Dory."
The thing Dory wanted to show Vicky was a gray and red McMansion in the Eastpointe community south of Black Diamond, where the road to Enumclaw climbed up out of the Green River Gorge. "The very next time you think you're about to have another 'accident' and hurt yourself, I want you to go there. It's a Women's Democratic Forum sanctuary. Do you understand what I'm really trying to say to you?"
Vicky was too shy to blurt out her answer, but Dory was satisfied by a nod of Vicky's head.
The opportunity to take Dory up on her offer presented itself immediately after Vicky arrived home. Her husband Frank was there, slouched in front of the TV. Garbage was beginning to pile up around him since it had been hours since Vicky had been here to pick up after him.
"Where the fuck have you been?"
"At the emergency room."
"For a black eye? Bullshit! What did they do?"
"Nothing. Gave me some pills for the pain."
"Give me the pills, Vicky." It was not a request. Terrified, she handed them over.
"How much did your selfish little splurge at the doctors run me?"
"I didn't have any money. They said the bill would be eight hundred and twenty bucks."
"Well shit, for eight twenty let me give you another shiner and make it worth it."
She let out a yelp and jumped back, screaming, "No!" In terror, she fled from the house and fumbled with her keys to the truck frantically. She locked herself safely inside only seconds before Frank could reach her and kick the side of the door.
"If you don't turn around and get back in the house right now, Vicky, so help me God I'll kill your fucking ass!"
After getting a few blocks away Vicky didn't race anymore. She thought she was safe now. There was only the one vehicle.
Frank went next door and asked his buddy for the keys to his car. "Just for a few minutes. Gotta catch me an errant wife." That was a good enough reason, and Frank caught the keys tossed at him. "Thanks, I owe you a half- rack of beer for this."
It was a quiet night with light traffic. Frank still saw what he hoped was her in the truck, stopped at a light far up the road. In his pursuit of her he would ignore such conventions as the rule of stopping at a red light. Eventually he got up on her rear end an followed her south out of Gonorrhea Gulch to the house Dory had shown her earlier. Pulling off to the side of the street he watched Vicky go inside.
"Prolly one of those lesbian hidey holes the guy on TV was talking about," Frank muttered to himself. Visions of RE-ward money started dancing in his head. He went back to return his car to his neighbor, and thought about the call that would probably result in a shitload of RE-ward money.
When Vicky was welcomed inside the Safe House a lookout was posted by Dory upstairs as a precaution. Sure enough, within the hour a police presence began to materialize on the street below. They weren't advertising them- selves with blazing lights or sirens but the sound of the sheriff's radio dispatcher blaring out into the night from five or six cars sort of gave the game away.
Dory asked Vicky to follow her back downstairs. A closet in the basement was actually the door of a tunnel leading next door to a closet in the basement of the house over there.
Vicky grabbed Dory by the shoulder. "I want to tell you something. I want to admit something. I tried to be careful but I think my husband followed me here. I don't know how. I think he's the one who called the cops!"
"It's all right, we've been at war for, shit, eighty-five years and more. I'll take complete responsibility. The important thing was to get you away from Frank. There's almost no time left, Vicky, so let me give you some plain talk. They hit you because there's rarely any consequences. It's a cycle. The woman gets hit, so her self-esteem plunges. With no self-esteem, she never leaves her abusive husband or boyfriend. He feels rewarded for hitting. That's why when the woman actually does leave, a lot of them snap. They even kill."
Vicky nodded. "That was the last thing Frank screamed at me when I drove away from the house. Exactly!"
"And even if he doesn't kill you physically, your fear of Frank is killing your spirit." Dory placed a slip of paper in Vicky's hand with the address of another safe house in River City. "Here are the keys to a car behind the house next door. Tinted windows. It's yours now. One that Frank won't recognize. I bet he's watching us right now, gloating over his handiwork, but he won't spot you in this car. Take the back alley and get out of here."
"Dory, I want to join your team. I want to make full payment, with my life if I have to, for what you've given me. For what you're about to give for me."
Dory smiled at her. "I'll look you up, Vicky. I may not be in the same body you see me wearing now, but I promise I will look you up."
Vicky evacuated by herself then, walking down the narrow tunnel, and found herself in the empty house next door. Soon a deputy knocked on the front door and told her to gather what she needed and evacuate the house immediately. "No choice. This is mandatory."
And following this, a little piece the Second American Civil War came to Gonorrhea Gulch.
The King County sheriff had already seen the way FCIC agents repeatedly screwed up taking out these Femina Caelestis safe houses and he was deter- mined to prove that local law enforcement could take care of the problem without the feds coming in here and tripping over their own shoelaces.
The six defenders of the house, through gun slits on the top floor, dropped two deputies the instant they set foot in the yard attempting to serve the warrant. Automatic gunfire was returned, pocking every side of the house and shattering glass. Tear gas canisters merely bounced back out the windows, having hit plate steel behind deceptively lit Venetian blinds.
Covered by a hail of suppressing fire, more deputies in body armor made their way to the front door with a battering ram and began trying to bash their way in through a thick metal door deceptively painted like oak and reinforced with carbon steel jambs. They worked until they were exhausted and put nary a dent in the door. So much for the sheriff's idea of doing things his way.
When the FCIC arrived on the scene they got into the usual argument over jurisdiction which ended with the sheriff telling them to go to hell. He pulled all of his boys out of the area, defying the scene leader's demand that he provide support.
After the county mounties left, Dory didn't give the FCIC team any time to get set up. She led a surprise attack out of the house right away. And since the women of Femina Caelestis could never truly die, they were the most fierce warriors who ever lived.
Additionally, it was girls and young women who were pouring out of the house, which made men instinctively hesitate to fight them.
The weapons of the federal agents were a nasty piece of business the size and shape of the butt of any normal handgun. It was a miniature railgun, a portable mass-driver powered by a gigantic charge circulating in a room- temperature superconductor loop. It fired needles at a muzzle velocity of four thousand feet per second. These needles expanded when they hit and became ugly tearing pieces of hot shrapnel. One electrically-ejected needle didn't usually kill, but a single magazine held two hundred of them.
Aurelia bought it right away in a three-shot burst from Agent Castle. Then Agent Johnson picked off Jo, a nineteen year-old still in training. By this time, a volley of knives went up from the Femina Caelestis side.
These were not ordinary knives. They had an arming switch. Immediately after leaving the throwers hand a sensor detected free fall and ignited a small solid rocket in the handle. An infrared detector in the hilt zoomed in on body heat. It was basically a model rocket with a bayonet fixed to it, deliberately blunted to prevent the thing from passing clean through the victim.
And they were much nastier than the FCIC Gauss pistols. After burying itself in the victim, the rocket motor burned right up inside the magnesium alloy blade, starting an unquenchable metal fire right inside the person's body. Only after the entire blade burned would the fire go out. Water only made it burn hotter, and the flame ripped it's required oxygen from the guy's own body tissues.
One blade closed in on Agent Castle in tightening spirals and another was distracted from its intended target to follow the more attractive engine heat of the first one. Two class Delta fires for Agent Castle then. The pain was vast, like being scraped under the foot of a giant with blue-hot soles. He could only scream "God help me!" and his prayers were answered, because the twin burning blades finished him with great haste.
Dory was the one who flung that first blade. Her next blade went out and found Agent Johnson.
Sondra was a two-fisted knife thrower. The left hand took out Agent Hervey, the right hand blade sailed out toward a cocksure rookie. Hervey saw the deadly thing snaking toward him and tried to shoot it down, but all he achieved was a burst of stray needles tearing into Sondra.
As she died, Sondra's final memories were uploaded to the Grid via a neutrino link. As a Principality would be back in another body two years lat- er.
Agent Atkins died under a more regular blade from Olivia. His actual cause of death, she later reported, whas six quarts of missing blood due to her famous "Filipina Haircut" which was an incision that started at one ear and crossed to the other one under the chin.
A few men who had wavered in retreat now joined the others in fleeing for their lives.
The surviving defenders, Dory and Olivia, ran in different directions through nearby alleys and the backyards of neighboring houses, making good their escape.
About a month after fleeing her husband, Vicky was awakened at by Dory at three AM in one of the many River City safe houses. So Dory made good on her promise to look Vicky up. She couldn't really prepare Vicky very well for the experience she was about to undergo, although the other girls in the safe house had done their best. What came next was basic training, or "boot camp".
They didn't have to go far. It was about three hours south of Seattle, out- side Fort Vancouver, Washington, in the new nation of Pacifica.
When Vancouver BC was made the capital of Pacifica, the country found it- self in possession of two cities named Vancouver. The other Vancouver was the second largest city in Washington, and it was that portion of Portland, Oregon that happened to bleed over the state line. To avoid confusion, the smaller Vancouver returned to its original mid-19th Century name of Fort Vancouver.
As with Seattle, the Cascade Mountain front loomed to the east of Fort Vancouver, where snuggled in the foothills was an old US Army installation called Camp Bonneville, long since abandoned. For many years, the army performed live-fire artillery exercises at Camp Bonneville, and the whole area was littered with hidden unexploded shells.
When the Cold War came to an end the army sold the land to Clark County and said, "See ya!" Thus wiggling out of paying for cleanup. And the county tried to convert the land into a regional park with hiking trails for all who went on two or four feet, but that worked for about five minutes, maybe, before some children found a grenade and pulled the pin.
So Camp Bonneville remained a huge undeveloped green hole on the Cascade front even as million dollar trophy view homes began to appear on the slopes all around it. Eventually Femina Caelestis offered to take the land off the county's hands to build something they called Shangri-La, and the county was glad to be rid of it. At least the FC would be paying property taxes on it.
Shangri-La was hemmed all around by a tall concertina wire fence. The private Ring Road, miles of gravel along the perimeter, was patrolled night and day by a pair of FC angels in a truck. Other angels ranged through the interior woods on trails known well to them, ever alert for trespassers.
The Ring Road provided access to hundreds of large homes on one acre sub- plots, all of them estates owned by senior members of Femina Caelestis. Robyn and Lilith owned one, Hunky and Dory owned another one. Most of the rest were owned by this or that Gina. They were nice but their location wasn't ideal for the construction of home sites by any stretch of the imagination. From the entrance at the west end on Fifth Plain, Shangri-La rose steeply to some 1,900 feet on one part of its eastern border.
The purpose of building the houses where they were was to guard their great common backyard. Dory and Vicky stopped at the locked gate, which bore a sign saying "Shangri-Law Covenant Community". There they waited a few minutes for the perimeter guard truck to come around from the other side and pull up.
Access to the boot camp facilities was to be through Dory's house, out her back patio door, and into the woods.
Two other girls were waiting in Dory's home. They were Geraldine Sanchelli and a girl named "Stephanie", no last name, who was a daughter of one of the Ginas and even wore her hair in a classic Gina bun like her mother. Stephanie was pretty and blond, looking very much like a porcelain doll. She had already spent some time here in boot camp and had advanced from recruit to angel.
Conscious of Vicky staring at her, Geraldine pushed black hair away from the dark eyes on her oval face. She was a mixture of Mexican and Irish. Later, Geraldine would reveal to Vicky how much she despised her parents, and smile when she thought of how their lives would be complicated beyond belief by her sudden disappearance.
Vicky herself loved and missed her parents, who lived somewhere in England, and had very little contact with her since she married Frank.
Both Stephanie and Geraldine were already wearing the new Girl Guard uni- forms and they were at least twenty years younger than Vicky. Dory explained to Vicky that most Femina Caelestus recruits were fourteen but that everyone entering the Women's Democratic Forum had to go through the ordeal of boot camp no matter what their age, and Vicky would understand why that was so when it was all over.
"Do we call you Vicky, or something else?" Stephanie asked her. Vicky knew it was a Femina Caelestis tradition to use only a single name, and often this would be a completely new name, as long as no one else had already bagged it. She said, "I've already done my research and decided to use a variation of her own given name of Victoria. I'd like to go by Vic now."
"You're real name is Victoria?" Dory asked her. "May I ask what your maiden name is?"
"Millet."
"Oh ho ho HO! Really? Shit! You're that Victoria Millet?"
"Is there a problem, Dory?"
"I don't know. I need to talk to Lilith. In the meantime I don't see a problem letting you go ahead and go to boot."
Geraldine for her part chose "Jeri".
Vic knew Stephanie would eventually just become another Gina, and then her hair bun would have something to hide.
Vic looked at Jeri and Stephanie's cute uniforms and knew they were a re- cent development. Some of the Jills had attacked Andrews Air Force Base last September, and they wore civilian clothes at the time, as the WDF always did. Jeri had been involved in that action in a peripheral way. She in fact had been recruited from the base housing there, and her father was the commanding officer.
As casualties began to mount in the ongoing operations against Femina Caelestis safe houses, the armed forces of the New Confederate States of America actually began to summarily execute captured members of Femina Caelestis as wartime spies if they were apprehended in civilian clothing, this by an executive war order from President Eugene Sundquist. So Lilith ordered all Femina Caelestis members active in the NCSA to don uniforms.
The Luna government was an associate member of ONE, originally sponsored by the Caribbean island nation of Barbuda as a territory of that state but now after reunification with Antigua the FC was represented by Pacifica. Femina Caelestis members now carried Pacifica passports. This forced the NCSA to treat them as Prisoners of War when they were captured, and that in turn gave the Girl Guards enough time and opportunity to state a rescue attempt.
Many feared that wearing uniforms would permit the NCSA to quickly round all of them up, but as Robyn predicted, the public came to the rescue. Sympathy for Femina Caelestis flourished, especially when stories about their public service were made widely known. A backlash against the Administration developed. Ersatz Girl Guard threads were all the rage. The prim uni- form of a gray and white smock dress, red tights, and black knee boots became hot fashion for good girls who wanted to look bad, and bad girls who wanted to turn heads.
So for a sweet season that would certainly be brief, genuine angels could walk undetected anywhere in the South among a million Femina Caelestis wan- nabes trying to cash in on FC chic.
Dory told them, "Remember, when you join Femina Caelesis there's no going back, there's no getting out, and there's no end to the ride."
"Not even suicide, Ma'am?" Jeri asked.
"We take suicidal personalities and give them bodies of girls who are happier. Bad attitudes are bred out. Eventually there is nothing but warm fuzzies all the way around. What's your dress size, Vic?"
"Eight, Ma'am," Vic said, following Jeri's lead in calling Dory that. Dory was, after all, the third ranking member of the WDF, one of Round Robyn's oldest and closest friends, someone who could actually remember the decade of the 1930s.
Dory gave her a long sleeve half gray and half white thick cotton dress with an elaborate decorative pattern embroidered in black thread on the left, or gray side. "What's your shoe size?"
"Eight, Ma'am. I'm a dress size eight and shoe size eight."
Pink wook socks went over the feet of her tights, then she was zipped up in a pair of shiny patent leather boots that ended just below her knees.
Dory faced the three of them. "We're not interested in keeping you busy just for the sake of keeping you busy, like they do in guys' boot camps. That's why, for example, your boots are already as shiny as they can be. Now one or two of you will eventually be in the WDF Girl Guard, and maybe one or two of you will just become civilians. So Vic, Jeri, I don't want word to get back to me that you deliberately screwed up to be civilians. That will adversely affect Stephanie's chances of being picked up for Arch- angel. You are a team!"
"Yes, Ma'am!"
"We don't treat our recruits as the scum of the earth, like other armies do. Still, the Girl Guard is the most formidable fighting force in the world. That means you will be toughened up, big time. You're the elite! They'll throw a lot of mind games at you when you get in there. Just remember, that's all they are: mind games. I promise you will understand what is being done to you before you graduate."
Dory issued a Vic and Jeri a supply of red nail polish, pre-moistened towelettes, a lighted makeup mirror, ruby earrings, and a host of other girly accessories that seemed strange to be called "army" issue.
"Okay Jeri, Vic, let me take a good look at you. This is for the guards here at Shangri-La. They will call up on the Grid this very memory of mine being taken now and just know who you are. The Girl Guard doesn't issue ID cards."
Then Dory kissed all of them in turn, opened up her patio door, and ushered them out to basic training with a little farewell wave. It wasn't very often that Dory did her own recruiting, but Vic was a special case, and she would follow her career with interest, especially now that she knew who she really was. And Dory also had a connection to Jeri from the Andrews thing.
The rule for the architecture in Femina Caelestis boot camp was no straight lines. Most of the buildings looked like fat commas in their top view, irregular with trees and ferns planted on their roofs. The walkways were gravel and dirt. No airborne photography would capture the existence of a training facility here.
In boot camp, every minute of every hour was accounted for, and a typical day's schedule ran like this:
At 0600 the girls would be rudely awaken, take a shower, and get dressed.
At 0700 was morning formation, when their triad Archangel would do a personnel inspection and make any announcements.
At 0730 was a hearty breakfast, which Vic thought was quite good.
At 0800 they worked to make their barracks spotless, for the room inspection at 0900.
At 0915 (assuming they passed the inspection and weren't being punished for flunking it) they changed into their running gear and ran on the hard dirt and gravel trails in the woods, by rooms or sometimes by triads.
At 1030 they showered and dressed again. Lunch was at 1130, and then they went out to the shooting range until 1400.
Following that were three hours of day classes and supper, followed by four house of night classes.
Every day at 2130 the girls had exactly one half-hour of free time, fol- lowed by lights out at 2200.
On Uniform Issue Day Vicky and Jeri got three more complete sets of cloth- ing, running shoes, and another pair of boots which they were told to wear only for inspections. They each got one raincoat, which was used frequently at Shangri-La, four red FC t-shirts, four pairs of red shorts, eight pairs of gray panties, and four gray bras.
The Archangel of Charlie triad showed them how to fold their clothes. She said, "There's the right way, the wrong way, and the FC way..."
Overhead they heard a rumbling that went on for along time. Room Bravo Two was being "cycled" or exercised intensely as punishment for not doing things the FC way. Vic and Jeri would learn all about that soon enough.
The next day featured a full physical and dental examination by real doc- tors who were Femina Caelestis members. The doctors also administered a hearing and visual acuity test. The women of the FC tended to neglect their health, knowing there will always be fresh bodies to occupy. Here was the first look at two new such bodies coming in, and it was the beginning of Vic's downfall.
For Vic was a jen, with one set of male genitalia and one set of female genitalia. And the Bunners were extremely close-minded about that.
The afternoon of May 8 was their first day to shoot real laser rifles at the range. The next day was when classes actually began. Stephanie, Vic, and Jeri were in room Charlie Two. Rooms Alfa One and Bravo Three also began classes that week, nine girls in all. The archangels of the three triads alternated giving the classes.
The training often went something along these lines: "Two Angels and an Archangel form a squad, the smallest fighting unit. There are 2,187 squads in the Girl Guard.
"Three squads form a nine-woman platoon, headed by a Principality. There are 729 squads in the Girl Guard.
"Three platoons form a 27-woman company, headed by a Power. There are 243 companies in the Girl Guard.
"Three companies form a 81-woman battalion, headed by a Virtue. There are 81 battalions in the Girl Guard.
"Three battalions form a 243-woman regiment, headed by a Dominion. There are 27 regiments in the Girl Guard.
"Three regiments form a 729-woman brigade, headed by an Ophanim. There are nine brigades in the Girl Guard.
"Three brigades form a 2187 division, headed by a Cherubim. There are three divisions in the Girl Guard, for a total of 6,561 women, and they answer directly to Bravo, who is a Seraphim.
"Of you eighteen recruits, nine will be selected to advance to the rank of Angel and nine will be discharged to civilian life, some to serve at our WDF safe houses, and some even working in space. Everyone at least will go up to Midway to receive the Change."
Everyone, that is, except Vic.
Midway, Vic learned, was a tiny asteroid thousands of miles above the Earth, where the Artifact was kept. The Artifact was the agent of the Change. The origin of the Artifact, as told in the Holy Buron, was not a secret for those willing to believe the account, but neither was it widely known.
After a month of training, the nine who were selected to be Angels, having officially joined the Girl Guard, were to meet two new recruits each and bring them to Shangri-La to begin training.
Three of those Angels in turn would be selected to advance to Archangel and become triad leaders. Finally, one of those triad leaders would be selected as an officer candidate, advance to Principality, and would move on to more training, equivalent to four years of college, destined to make her a Pow- er.
There was a lot of information for the first week but Private Stephanie had been through this whole cycle before. She was there to help them, because it would help herself. Her chances on advancing to Archangel depended on how well she motivated Vic and Jeri.
Then "Work Week" rolled around. Their first two days were spent in the laundry room doing the wash of every girl then in training, thirty sets of sweaty uniforms every day. Four days were spent on "KP" or Kitchen Patrol, mess cranking with the outgoing Bravo Three room for two days and training up the incoming Alfa Two room for the next two days.
The room leaders acted as waitresses. The rest of them were grill cooks. Vic wasn't happy flipping hamburgers in Femina Caelestis, but she knew things would get better.
One afternoon Stephanie took Vic and Jeri on a shopping trip in downtown Seattle and treated them to a dinner of skewered steak and shrimp, her way of telling them thanks. She thought their composite score was very high, which bode well for advancement. Jeri's individual score was troublesome, however.
Indeed, when the transition day came around Jeri was not selected to remain in the Girl Guard. She had placed moderately high, but was still in the lower half of the class. She was to be mustered out and put to work as an assistant to a full member while she went through the Change.
"I outrank Bravo now," Jeri said, trying to cheer herself up. "I'm a civilian."
After a trip to Midway in orbit for the Change, Jeri would be sent to a safe house somewhere back here on Earth. Vic didn't worry for her, they really were safe now. After that botched raid on the house at the edge of Gonorrhea Gulch where Dory took Vic, it was quite clear that trying to seize a Femina Caelestis safe house was certain death for the attackers.
Over the last few weeks the FCIC and local police came to an unspoken truce with the WDF. They watched, but they didn't move in anymore. And a few weeks after that it wouldn't matter, because that's when Pacifica broke off from the US anyway.
Dory, who had taken a special interest in Vic, took the time to speak to Jeri, since she had been recruited with Vic. "Even though you are no long- er in the Girl Guard," Dory told her in a congratulatory vidphone call from the Moon, "you must wear your uniform at all times. Stay out of trouble for now. If you die before your connector blooms, we can't save any of your memories. You'll be dead and you'll stay dead. This has happened to dozens of girls already."
Stephanie moved up to Charlie triad Archangel, and Vic advanced from low- life recruit to Angel and went out to pick up her new girls, Vera and Annette. Vic retained residence in room C2.
Now that she was partly in charge of their training, Vic used much of their free time making Vera and Annette run up Little Baldy on the two mile winding course, which brought intense grumbling. But she said, "Your minimum time on this course is thirty minutes in the final. Any time less than that is extra points toward our composite score."
Work Week came again, but Vic wasn't behind the grill this time. She worked out in the chow hall, keeping it clean, setting out milk, and serving the table reserved for the triad Archangels. It felt a little strange serving young Stephanie when she herself was thirty-six years old.
For room inspection on June 25, Vic's recruits Vera and Annette had missed a spot. Vicky found it at the last minute and wiped the dust with her hands. They passed the room inspection but she herself flunked the person- nel inspection with her filthy paws, and her explanation wasn't accepted.
But they were supposed to be a team. When she learned the truth, Stephanie punished all of them with a half hour of being cycled. Vera and Annette were deeply ashamed, and made it up to Vic with a good score on the range, throwing live rocket blades.
If a girl became a triad Archangel, it was partly luck of the draw. She may be a great leader, but have a pair of recruits who didn't want to be in the Girl Guard no matter what. Or she may be a lousy leader, but get two new fish who have their heart set on being Powers in the Guard themselves.
Boot camp was basically just two platoons, so from the nine triad Archangels only three were picked to be Principalities. The rest were trained as specialists. Vic, to her delight, was chosen to be one of the three new Archangels.
Vera and Annette both advanced to Angel, and became room leaders under Vic. She also added Private Eve under her from another room, and six new recruits took up residence in Charlie squad. So the finely-tuned machine which Bravo set into motion in 2002 continued to crank out nine new Femina Caelestis Girl Guards every month, and also nine limited partners. A similar operation was running at Hybla-Dia for the nephilim.
After a period of two years in oblivion as their body was used by a Femina Caelestis full member, they would become themselves full members, with the right to wear new bodies on a time-share basis.
As an Archangel in Bravo triad Vic started giving classes for the new girls. She taught them to kill and how to listen to pain as a defense mechanism and not an enemy to be vanquished.
She didn't have to crank this time during Work Week, having already done so twice. "RHIP" she said. "Rank Hath It's Privileges." And when a room messed up an inspection it was her turn to cycle them.
Vic herself was required to attend leadership classes deep into the night. She was being groomed for great things, and being selected for Power candidate school on was another step in that direction.
From a battered wife, Vic had reached the pinnacle of FC basic training with no special favors from Dory or anyone else. She did it. No one could take that core achievement away from her no matter what happened after. She had been translated from little Vicky, a housewife with no self-esteem to Vic, a Principality in the Girl Guard. And she was selected to become a Power and go on to bigger and better things.
