Monarch wasn't a full-time terrorist/god.

She, like billions of others in our woeful gig economy, freelanced online on a regular basis.

For a mere million USDE, she promised to have events transpire according to your preferences, be it a surprisingly high vanadium yield in that asteroid you'd been mining, unusally good weather for an important crop, getting to your job on time in heavy traffic. She offered a whole host of options including easy copays.

From what I knew of her abilities, if we hired her for a job that entailed a specific location and timing, it would likely require her to come out of hiding, for all her strength she couldn't just jerk off butterflies in her submarine and expect that to do anything of consequence.

I stared at the sum in my off-the-books budget, liberated from Midas in exchange for the latest Call of Battlefield: Legion, and decided to put that idea on the backburner, at least unless I could guarantee recovery of the funds.

UNSEEN wasn't all superheroes and their minders, we had a few SpecOps types on the roster, the kind with the thousand yard stares, and a propensity to overreact to simple pranks (don't worry, the Munchkin in question made a full recovery).

I had my pick of the litter for this one, with the relative calm on the precog horizon. (Or rather, the UNSEEN budget couldn't afford a new comprehensive survey after the Lycosan had fucked hundreds or thousands of longterm predictions)

Grim was still having a good week, because I could dimly recall that he'd been in the Israeli SF, and had him come over to recommend a few of his Sayeret Matkal buddies.

The Israelis had always been subtle about their military augmentations, even as they'd always nurtured no compunctions regarding making use of every military advance they could make to keep an edge against their neighbors.

Unfortunately for them, even the notoriously incompetent Arab armies had had their performance floor increased by automation advances and the proliferation of drone warfare. But as always, Mossad was willing to play dirty.

Many of the most classified augments had been removed when these men had been honorably discharged, but they still were incredibly lethal killing machines.

I offloaded a great deal of the planning to a Lithium AGI, and focused on the broad strokes. Getting into Cuba wouldn't be too hard, we could sneak in on any number of ships clamoring to carry Haitian refugees, sneak through the US coastal net etc. I would have considered simply visiting in my role as an UNSEEN agent, but the Director had vetoed that notion. If we succeeded, I could broadcast our credentials from the tallest tower, but if we failed, we'd be thrown aside as rogue actors.

I began to understand the consternation that a generation of CIA agents sent to kill Castro had felt. Was it too late in the game to pivot to explosive cigars?

I puffed on my own, non-explosive one when I heard a knock on my door coincide with a ping. It was Em, she wanted to talk.

"Adat. Can I make a request?" She asked me, settling into my memory foam couch.

"Depends. What's on your mind? Is this about Alia?" I asked her. Easy guess, I had yet to see her get distraught for her own sake. She cared so much about the girl that she'd probably have adopted her if she hadn't already had her own loving family. The two were inseparable.

She nodded, eyes downcast. "She doesn't have the durability to take on neer-peer forces. One bullet to the head, whether she's rolled or not, and she's fucking gone. I didn't say anything in Panama, even if that's still on the risky side for her.."

I stubbed out my cigar. "I understand Em, I really do. This is an infiltration op, you know how handy she can be for those. I'll do my best to keep her out of the line of fire. You know I do that anyway right?"

She shook her head. For all her strength, she looked thin and frail, her powers meant she couldn't lift weights, or at least anything smaller than a house wouldn't tax her at all, and anything larger would just disintegrate when she tried.

"Leave the girl out of this. We just need to kill El Presidente right? We don't even need her, I'll just bulldoze through his mansion and break his neck myself if that's what it takes."

"You know that's a bad idea. He gets a chance to speak to you, and then you're the runaway freight train about to roll over us."

I sighed, and lit another cigar. "Fine. I'll leave her out of this, she can stay back with the intel team. But if it seems we absolutely can't do without her, I reserve the right to bring her out." Truth be told, I was mostly a fan of over preparing, Alia wasn't mission critical.

She tried not to show how utterly relieved she was and failed. We talked a little more, and she asked my advice about her planned pregnancy in the coming year. They'd already selected the embryo, gone through standard gene therapy as well as some experimental ones she had to enlist my help in convincing her husband of. She desperately wanted to bear the baby herself, even against my advice, who knows how her powers might interact with what it considered non-self tissue. The result of a particularly strong uterine contraction by a superstrong mother on a baby is something I wanted to leave to the academics to debate over. But she wouldn't be dissuaded, so what could I do?

She seemed somewhat happier when she left, and that was that.

Getting the team over to the Caribbean wasn't too much of an issue, there were enough UNHCR aid ships in the region that we had our pick of the litter, and when it came to the actual insertion, we had border security's biggest nightmare, a teleporter.

It was an uneventful flight, while the worst of Mona Lisa was long gone, the region was still overcast and dull. We passed close enough to the Dominican Republic that I could see the barrage of rockets taking off from Boca Chica, laiden with eager colonists headed for the Moon, Mars and beyond. The sky had a constant pink tinge from the sheer number of launches, lighting up the clouds from beneath long after the sun had set.

Our target was the UNS Mother of Mercy, a squat unassuming thing swarming with refugees that just barely managed to squeeze us onto their helipad. I set the others to lending a hand, and went over our plans one last time.

The Caribbean had a great deal of submersible traffic, giant cargo and passenger subs alike diving below the shallow water to where the freshly constructed underwater cities lay. We would board a SDV, an old British minisub meant to carry frogmen, but perfectly serviceable for our needs. It brought us right up to the edge of Cuban waters, where their outdated coastal sonar net had minimal odds of picking us up. There, we clambered out into the lukewarm water, beneath a moon blazing with city lights, and had Alan TP us over one by one.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The beach near the sleepy little village of Pilon was still littered with debris from the storm, making the chance of ground radar picking us up minuscule, and I doubted the Cubans even had any in the first place. El Presidente had banned any remotely advanced AI, with even the standard Watchers observing traffic from the US end. Barring a few fishing boats venturing out into the choppy waters, we didn't run into anyone as we made our way into the treeline.

I dispatched the SDV, which went into loitering mode and settled down next to some old Spanish galleon long picked clean by decades of divers.

We settled into a logging camp that was likely abandoned during the rains, and I scoped out the situation.

Heading east was inadvisable, that way lay Gitmo, as close to a blackhole as it gets for those who got on the wrong side of the American Hegemony, at least in the list of places I had clearance to know about. A massive droneship hovered menacingly above the bay, agrav engines turning the water into more of a shallow cup. Hundreds of smaller drones swarmed around beneath it, accompanied by a couple figures in flight who I assumed to be the metahuman jailors. Closer, we'd risk running into the myriad layers of security, from insect bots, laser tripwires, and right at the actual fence, landmines.

I saw what had gotten their bee into a bonnet a little bit later, it seemed that a cruise ship had been the unwary carriers of a bunch of protestors. They shone massive beams of light into the sky, shouting the usual unimaginative slogans. I wondered where they had gotten projectors from, but then noticed that they had a supe of their own, a light projector who made massive figures act out plays portraying the downfall of imperialism.

Marines patrolled the bay, half in military exoskeletons and the other half in what might better be described as mechs. Nothing too massive, but days where I didn't have to fight a 12' tall mech with a rotary autocannon and pumped lasers were good ones.

My black budget didn't extend to hiring any serious precog time, but I had still wheedled my way into getting another heat map of both Monarch and EP. It seems Monarch was laying low, hanging out in a few smaller towns, and the dictator was content to stick to his palace in Santa Clara, with no planned appearances in Havana for the foreseeable future.

The non-supes, barring Grim who had no issues with implant rejection, gathered around our little base and began the unpleasant process of hiding our faces from any background facial recognition programs.

It involved subdermal plates that could morph to change our facial outlines, just enough to confuse the system. IR fluorescent pigments were tattooed into our skin, to baffle cameras tuned to said spectra. They'd output patterns known to be adversarial attacks against known facial recognition programs, while being imperceptible to the naked eye.

I had burned a significant chunk of my budget on buying zero-days for the Cuban surveillance net, though their use of Chinese hardware made it likely that we could get by with known exploits.

Once changed into civilian clothes, Grim and the Sayeret Matkal goons split off, their augments would make them stand out, and getting forged licenses for either the USMC or any of the mercenary companies operating on the island was a bigger headache than it was worth. They'd move on foot for the most part, their augmented legs letting them blitz through the jungle while using our satlink to avoid traffic. Alan would jump ahead to planned vantage points and keep an eye out for anything that wasn't obvious to aerial surveillance.

As for us, we played the part of clueless foreigners and stepped out onto a rural road at dawn and hailed a cab.

It was novel to ride a manned taxi, the driver was a chubby man with a gorgeous moustache that I envied, since Anjana always threatened to divorce me every time I grew mine out. Like most Cubans, he didn't have a lace, but given that ours let us speak fluent Spanish, we easily made do.

We passed ourselves off as Texan tourists, with Emily posing as my wife and Alia as our recalcitrant teenage daughter. Given my Indian appearance, she could pass off her Iranian looks as half-Indian with ease.

It was a bumpy ride, I'd heard stories about Cubans mostly driving lovingly maintained antique cars because of import restrictions, and while this one was likely just an affectation for tourists like us, its suspension had seen better days.

Our chatty driver was content to talk our ears off with tales about his family and the odd goings-on in Guantanamo. He speculated excitedly about all the anal probings going on in there, and declared confidently that he'd seen genuine Greys in there, producing blurry pictures taken with the 100x zoom of his smartphone. I didn't want to deflate his tale by telling him that you were more likely to be anally probed as a human denizen than an alien, plus there weren't actually any Centaurs held at Gitmo, at least as far as I knew.

What did however halt both the conversation and the car in their tracks was my casual question about El Presidente.

"Senór, I would advise you to not mention the Leader's name any more than you already have. You never know who might be listening.." He told me, squinting about ill at ease. He slowed down the car as we approached a checkpoint, and pointed at one of the guards stood at attention, so flawlessly that my own drill instructor would have shed a tear.

"That's Ricardo, he's a good boy, a cousin on my wife's side. He has some mental problem called uh, ADHD? So his supervisor had him attend a program by the President. Look at him now, he's afraid to even breathe." He whispered as we rolled up.

I used some of my stupid tourist allowance to point some of the surveillance equipment disguised as a vintage DSLR at his face and it gave me pause.

Even as he stood ramrod straight in the heat, rivers of sweat trickled down his face, and his eyes twitched, desperate to find something remotely interesting to look at. He was probably down to counting the numbers on license plates, the poor bastard.

We were passing by the city of Camaguey when I spotted more signs of El Presidente's work. A dozen or so men and women were working on the road, contributing little next to the actual machinery operating next to them. Their skin was long past tanned and into severe sunburn territory, with open blisters weeping blood and flies buzzing around their sores they seemed powerless to ward off.

Each dug away mindlessly, observed by a bored teenage soldier leaning on his rifle. They were covered in cuts and bruises, and I saw severe infections that had gone untreated. One of them lay on the baking asphalt comatose, swarming with flies.

When the soldier noticed a tourist vehicle approaching, he waved to one of the excavator robots, which positioned itself to block our view.

I asked our driver who those unfortunates were.

"Resistance fighters, poor idiots. They're serving the Leader's favorite punishment, a full week of hard labor with barely any food or water. They're not allowed to stop no matter what, and that dead woman was among the lucky ones." He said, keeping his voice low even when we were well clear of the guard.

"What about those that serve their sentence?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "They usually get made into servants for the elite, it's a trend. I know some are sold to the Americans but I have no idea what they do with them. Maybe food for the aliens?".

Indentured servitude had long become economically obsolete, but I suppose there was always a market for servants who wouldn't give lip and would work till they dropped.

We passed through parts of Cuba that were more explicitly touristy, multiple tobacco plantations swarming with Chinese tourists, a few spectacular resorts. I wondered how many of the workers just happened to be ideally suited at customer service, and how many of their fake smiles were plastered on under a geass.

We bid the man farewell, with a fat tip for the help, and settled into a villa at Sancti Spiritus, where we spent the rest of the day waiting for the grunts to catch up.

Alan apparated over just ahead of them, alarming a rooster and dog, and we ushered him in to grab some drinks while we scoped the way to Santa Clara.

Monarch was no longer in Cuba, her heatmap showed her heading across the Atlantic, likely to somewhere in Africa. But truth be told, she'd never been our primary target, and we'd have to get her some other time.

El Presidente seemed content to stay put, his casa better described as an outright castle. I looked longingly at where Alia lounged, playing with the dog and doing her best bored teenager act, which was hardly an act, and sighed thinking of my promise to Emily.

The pieces were in place, and it was time to prepare for the coup d'etat .