Days later
We arrived in the Arizona desert, looking for a staging area where we could plan, scout and regroup. Eveline and I were the only ones for this mission, so we would have to improvise. We’d agreed that I would be the one going in, as they would be less likely to entertain anyone not fully human in their midst, and Eveline simply did not look the part of a slave, pleasure or otherwise; she was too strong, too powerful, too healthy, and anyone with even half a brain could see that her movements were practiced, precise and borne of someone who had a high level of mastery over their own body. If she and I tried to pass off a master-slave arrangement going in, someone would be smart enough to know something wasn’t right about the situation no matter how good we were as actors. Further, out here in the desert, if a slave owner wasn’t treating their slaves as better than themselves, then their slaves should be showing some signs of exhaustion, malnutrition and dehydration.
All of that being said, we chose not to risk being discovered, rather than try and pass Eveline off as a slave. It might need to be considered on future missions, I realised, but I sure as hell hated the idea that it would be Eveline called upon to endure it… Or Amélie… Or Philippe.
Or any of my hybrid associates.
So I was going in alone. And I was going in only minimally-armed, with weapons I could afford to lose. My own nanocloud-upgraded body would have to suffice.
I approached an ostensibly dilapidated building that looked to be far sturdier than met the eye, after scanning it with my improved ocular implants, seeing the telltale signs of alloy reinforcement in the exterior columns surrounding the inner walls. The front entrance was similarly-reinforced, even if it did appear to be a rotting door-frame and rotted wooden door panel for the entrance. There were three guards on the outside, and I picked up the heat signatures of another four immediately inside. This facility was, like the last one in New Salem, deceptively-large.
“Stop and state your business,” one of the guards snapped in a crisp tone. I looked at him and requested a threat assessment from my nanocloud.
Threat assessment: Target has the following detected upgrades
Titanium-plated aluminium skeleton
Torso-mounted lithium-polymer power storage
Bioreactor of indeterminate capability
Musculature of increased density.
More information will require contact with subject to make a deeper assessment.
I suppose I couldn’t get more than that without initiating a confrontation, but there was also a risk that the guard would be able to assess my own abilities as well, and I didn’t want to give anything away. I decided to play along for now.
“I’m looking to buy,” I told them.
“Buy what?” the same guard asked me, looking at me with a frown. I knew they wouldn’t advertise the fact that they had hybrids to sell on to slave owners, so it stood to reason they also wanted plausible deniability, even if there was no official law enforcement to hold them accountable. “We look like a market vendor to you?”
“If I wanted to buy from a market stall, I’d have gone and found a marketplace, genius,” I replied, my tone dripping with scorn. “I’m looking to buy, you know what I mean?”
“No,” the guard replied. “Now fuck off!”
Alright, now this guy was pissing me off. I slowly approached him, and he stepped back as I spoke. “If I have to come back later, I’m going to be very unhappy,” I whispered, my tone edged with anger. “You won’t like the consequence of pissing me off.”
Within an instant, the guard leapt forward and was on me, grabbing me by the shirt and attempting to lift me off of the ground. He tried to make it look casual, but I could see the strain around his eyes and the intensity of the energy flowing through his muscles in the form of electrical and thermal output through my enhanced eyesight. He wanted to look like a tough guy.
“One last time, fuckstick,” he seethed, pulling me closer so he could intimidate me. “Get… The fuck… Away.”
Pausing for a moment, I simply stared at him. I knew that what I was about to do would make them even more determined not to let me anywhere near the place, so my attempt to carry out a personal infiltration was already a bust. I still wanted to get some intel on what kind of capabilities these guys had, and how it might be easier to get inside next time someone tries it. After a moment, deliberately slowly, I grabbed one of his hands and started to squeeze, gently at first. Over the next few seconds, the pressure increased until I heard the creak and strain of his skeletal framework. His muscles may have been enhanced, but his skeleton was heavier than my own, and not very strong compared to carbon nanotube lattice. Slowly but surely, I was warping his bones, and he must have been in agony, and trying to cover it in front of the others.
While squeezing his hands into uselessness, my nanocloud got to work, already aware of what I wanted. Soon, the additional data came back in.
Updated threat assessment:
Biopolymer musculature enhancements: Level One. Max tensile strength: 370kg
Titanium-coated Aluminium lattice skeletal framework: Baseline
Note: Lattice structure easily compromised by current capabilities.
Torso-mounted Lithium-Polymer storage: 450Wh. Vulnerable to piercing and thermal extremes
Sugar-to-electrical biopolymer reactor: Bidirectional: 45Wh capability.
Titanium-coated skull armour. Level One.Estimate blunt force of 750kg will be sufficient to breach this protection.
Heat exchange nodes located in the hands.
Assessment: Threat level negligible.
As I thought. This was not a serious problem for me, except I would not be getting in today. I’d have to look for an alternative strategy.
“Like I said,” I whispered. “You’re not going to like this.”
Before I could say or do anything else, the two other guards were trying other pull me off of the first. They must have had some form of communication with the others, because the door flew open and the other four guards I detected earlier were swarming out to intercept. Two of them grabbed me, and before I could think of a tactic to address this new threat, they grabbed me by the shoulders and propelled me backwards by at least twenty metres.
“Fuck off,” another of the guards told me as the remaining guards pulled out pistols and assault weapons. I might be able to resist them, but I didn’t want to take the risk just yet, given I still needed to upgrade my protection. “Unless you want us to turn you into a sieve.”
My nanocloud had run an assessment on all of them at the same time as I’d been thrown back. The two that had grabbed me had given me an in-depth analysis that confirmed they were no better equipped than the first guard whose hand I had now crushed, and the rest of them had very similar readings when measured at a distance. None of them were much for me to handle, but if I tried to get past them now, the base would go into a hard lockdown, if it hadn’t already.
“Got it,” I told them. “But if this is how you treat all of your customers, you won’t sell-”
“FUCK OFF!” the injured guard screamed. One of the guards by his side took aim with his pistol and snapped off a shot in my direction. It impacted the ground near my feet and let me know I was being warned.
So I stepped backwards, keeping them in sight, not letting them get the drop on me. Only when I was out of their view did I turn and run, maintaining a pace that I suspected they wouldn’t be able to match no matter how hard they pushed themselves.
Fuck sake, I thought to myself. This was going to be a nightmare to investigate, now. I’d have to let the others know the bad news once I’d found a place to hole up for the night.
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I finally had the opportunity to call in to report to Rosalie when I set up in a motel-like operation a couple of miles away from the site of the breeding facility. This was going to be unpleasant, I thought to myself, as the call connected.
“Report,” she ordered. Having not been a member of the services, I had to remind myself that I was part of an organised unit that now had a chain of command to report to, so I kept my thoughts to myself about how rude it would be to bark orders at your friends.
“The scouting mission was a failure,” I told her without preamble. Rosalie was military in her previous life, and her personality somewhat resembled this attitude, so I already knew without having experienced it, that she was averse to garrulous speech and wanted a concise report without evasion or delay. “I attempted to gain entry through an open approach and by offering to buy from them,” I stopped, letting out a sigh of frustration. “But they point-blank refused me entry. Kept telling me to fuck off.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line for a few minutes.
“Understood,” Rosalie replied brusquely after a moment. “Let me check in with- hang on a sec.” A moment passed with dead air over the line, before Rosalie reconnected. “That was Cam. He’s being refused access as well. Looks like they’re getting wise to just anyone presuming to buy from them and are now refusing access to anyone they haven’t personally vetted.”
“Great,” I sighed. “Any other way we can get in to scout?”
“Let me discuss with the Foundation leadership,” she replied. “Go find a place to hole up. I’ll contact you in about an hour.”
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We disconnected at that point, and I was left feeling frustrated at this change in access to the Harvester facilities, further exacerbated by the realisation that it had taken so long for them to get to this point.
Within maybe ten minutes, Eveline was calling. I frowned as I answered, and I felt her frustration through our bond as I picked up her call.
“Hey,” she said softly. “I wanted to see how you were.”
I was sure she could feel my own frustration through our bond. “I suspected we’d have to find another way to get in to the breeding facility once word got around about our last job,” I groaned. “But I was hoping I’d at least get this one done first.”
Eveline said nothing, yet I could feel her empathy through our link as she tried to soothe my frustration, despite being frustrated herself. “We might need to abort this one and consider a head-on assault instead,” she finally said.
“Maybe,” I hedged, not liking the idea, even if ultimately it would be Rosalie’s decision. “I can’t help thinking that doing so will get a lot of cubs killed.”
“I’m worried that they’ll already be targeted soon, anyway.”
For a time, neither of us could speak. There were many vulnerable cubs in the facilities. Cubs like Talon, like Cinnamon, like young Sammy, who I met back in Eindhoven, and like Eveline herself used to be. Their fate could have been so different, and had we not intervened in New Salem, Talon and Cinnamon would be dead now. It was always at the forefront of my mind that any independent thought and resistance from the cubs in these facilities was actively discouraged, often by torture, and to the extent that if those methods fail, the Harvesters running these breeding facilities will simply kill them off and breed a replacement.
My nanocloud was the only reason I didn’t wake up every night from nightmares at what I saw in New Salem. I didn’t like to think of what my mental state would be like without its assistance.
I didn’t know if Eveline’s own nanocloud had dome something similar for her, but all I felt was compassion from her. Having lived through and escaped one of these places, she knew better than most others what it was like to be a captive in one of these “facilities”. She had grown strong, powerful, incredibly self-sufficient-
It hit me, just as Eveline spoke her own mind. “What if they captured me?”
Her question didn’t sound concerned or fearful. In fact, she sounded a little excited. The chance for a little payback, even if it was tangential to those who really abused her, seemed tempting, and I was all for it if she wanted to give it a shot.
Maybe I should be concerned for her safety, but in the time I had known her, she had saved my life many times, allowed herself to be critically injured protecting me, and had come back stronger and more determined than ever.
“That would be our way in to their facility,” I said, echoing her thoughts. “At the least, you could be our ears inside, and you might hopefully get a chance to talk to the cubs.”
Eveline’s excitement picked up in intensity, and I could feel a determination coming through our bond. “Rick, I hope you don’t think I’m dismissing your concerns over my safety and our bond,” she began, but needn’t have worried. She had my full support anyway. “But I’m doing this.” Her statement was final.
She wasn’t asking permission, and I wasn’t going to do a damn thing to stop her.
“What do you need?” I asked, my tone firm.
----------------------------------------
Another hour passed before I got a call back from Rosalie, and she sounded tense when we connected our call.
“Tell me you’re joking?” was all she said when I announced myself.
“Afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied, though I suspected she might know something about what Eveline and I had planned.
“Eveline just called,” Rosalie replied in a clipped tone. “She-”
“Say no more,” I cut her off, hoping it would not come across as rude. “She thinks it’ll work. We have to get in there somehow. Allowing herself to become their captive will allow her some access to the facility and let us coordinate a plan of attack. Since they’re no longer accepting walk-ins for buyers of the cubs they’re keeping captive, we needed to get creative, and a straight-up assault with no insider information seemed like a bad idea.”
“Yeah, that would get everyone inside killed,” Rosalie sighed as she absorbed what I’d told her. “Alright, I’d have us take a step back and re-evaluate, but by the time we find out about these ops, they’ve usually been running for years.”
“And who knows if and when they’ve already sold any of their cubs to buyers?”
“Right,” Rosalie paused for a moment. “Looks like we don’t have much of a choice at the moment. You two are the only ones close to the facility. Come up with a plan to get her inside, but run it by me first! Got it?”
“Got it,” I replied. I wanted to call Eveline and let her know we were cleared to go. “Anyway, I’d better call Eveline back.”
“Understood. Let me know what your plan is when you’re ready to move.”
With that, Rosalie disconnected the call.
Rather than get hung up about the terse dismissal of a soldier who had little time for pleasantries while on duty, I dialed Eveline’s number almost as quickly, waiting for her to pick up the call.
“Rick?” She answered the call.
“Rosalie knows. Wasn’t happy, but I explained our options and she’s OK with them. We’ll need to clear our final plan with her before we go in.”
“Yeah, of course,” Eveline replied. “I’ve managed to set up a bunk at an inn nearby. Once you get here, we can start planning our entry.
“I’ll be there soon,” I told her.
She gave me the address and hung up the call shortly after that.
I wasted no time in getting to the New World Inn, a pop-up that had been built on the old ruins of some shopping complex on the edge of Tuscon. The building, like many things in the USA these days, was more like a shack, with the appearance of barely holding itself together, but my enhanced eyesight showed me the millions of nanites permeating the structure of every panel that was lining the building.
This place was stronger than it looked by many orders of magnitude. Whoever built this place knew what they had access to, and what they were doing. I wondered if this is why Eveline chose it?
Inside the shack, the decor was somewhat spartan, the walls bare of any furnishings and the ceiling consisting of corrugated sections of iron, but it was sealed off from any weather, and the furnishings, while basic, were sufficient for the task of sitting down for a little while as I waited for the desk clerk to come back from whatever they were doing.
Eveline arrived first, approaching me the second she spotted me. As usual with others around, she maintained a reserved demeanor, her expression typically aloof. I could feel her pleasure at seeing me through our bond, though I deliberately maintained a neutral expression in order not to make her feel uncomfortable.
“Let’s get a room so we can talk,” she stated flatly, gesturing toward the desk that was still deserted. “That’s if anyone is around to see to us.”
I shrugged. “Who knows? There might only be one member of staff.”
As we approached the desk, I noticed the bell, and hit it once.
While the desk might have been deserted, the bell was not ignored, and a youthful looking man approached from a room out the back, nodding to us. “Need a room for the night?” He asked, apparently assuming that we would be sharing. Eveline’s brief jolt of irritation hit me, but I was prepared for it.
We would be sharing, but he didn’t know that. “Err… Sure.” I said lamely not wanting to cause a scene, but not wanting Eveline to assume I didn’t take her opinion into account, either.”
“Alright,” the clerk told us. “What do you have in trade?”
I didn’t know if this place accepted data credits. Many places did, even in some US states, but not all, and the farther you got into ungoverned territory, the less likely traders and shopkeepers would be to accept them, since they would only be able to trade those credits with others that accepted them, and that meant traveling where data credits were an accepted currency.
To avoid any issues, I unhooked my backpack and pulled open the secondary compartment, taking out some wolf pelts. “These do?” I asked.
The clerk shook his head in dismissal. “Who’s gonna need thermal wrappings in a desert? No, they won’t do. Got anything else?”
It was worth a shot, I thought to myself. Tuscon may not be subject to freezing temperatures at certain times of the year, but I couldn’t imagine it being like Death Valley. That place was toasty even in December. “Alright,” I replied, putting the wolf pelts back and pulling out one of my older bedrolls. “Does anyone still need to sleep on the floor around here?”
The clerk looked at the bedroll, then back up at me, then at Eveline. “What does she have?” He asked.
Eveline was already ahead of him, having extracted a set of skinning blades. She never needed them, and treated them as a convenience so she didn’t have to get her claws excessively dirty. “Sharpened this morning,” she told the clerk, who accepted the blades, turning back to me.
“Your bedroll, too,” he gestured, so I handed it to him. “That’ll buy you two nights. You need more than that, you’ll have to get something else for me to look at.
“Understood,” I replied, feeling irritated at the clerk. Maybe I should have tried credits after all. I had no shortage of those, and neither did Eveline. Now, I’d need to go out and get a new bedroll, and Eveline a new set of skinning knives, but we got the room for the night. “We need keys?” I asked deliberately, since we hadn’t been given any.
“Wait here,” the clerk told me tersely, stepping out the back with the bedroll and the knives. In less than a minute, he came back with a set of intricate keys that would gain us access to a room somewhere in here. “Up the steps, end of the corridor. Need anything, come on down to the desk. There’s an Inn out back that serves fresh bread with sliced meats, plus your usual ales and spirits. They usually trade in gold nuggets and silver, or if you have the storage, nanite abilities and functions.”
Gold and silver? I wondered what had caused this devolution of currency. It couldn’t be an abundance of metals, given that gold and silver in the region had been mined out long before the collapse of society, and electronic devices containing these compounds will likely have already been stripped of them.
Still, it was good to know I could trade some nanocloud modules and functions for what we needed, and I almost laughed at the idea of trading function code, given I hadn’t had to do that in months; data credits were accepted in Canada, across Europe, in Iceland, and in more than a few places along the East Coast of the USA.
Stupid of me to have forgotten that so easily.
Nonetheless, writing some basic functions would be my next focus after Eveline and I had finished making plans. We would need to trade some more before heading back to Ontario and to our base.
Soon, we were in the room we’d been assigned. It wasn’t much, especially for what we’d had to trade for it, but it would allow us to plan our next steps. I didn’t trust anyone not to listen in on our conversation, though.
Can you monitor for possible listening devices or eavesdropping?
In a limited fashion. Any electrical system within five metres will be detected. Any non-electrical passive system will not be detected except through limited recognition algorithms I will employ.
My nanocloud would do its best, I realised, even if I was dissatisfied with the answer.
Eveline seemed not to care, though. Her face was blank, and I felt nothing untoward through our bond.
“Let’s plan it like this,” she began as she sat on the edge of the room’s bed and stretched out her legs. “We make our decisions on how to get in, then we leave, go straight to action with our plan, and get out before anyone who might listen in any time to report anything they hear to our enemies.”
Her idea was sound, but it didn’t make me feel any less anxious about it. Eveline and I had advanced and highly-capable nanocloud instances within us, which gave us a lot of room for growth in terms of our abilities, but to imagine we were the only ones was ridiculous. Some of our enemies must have come across similar advantages, either on their own, or through co-opting other people’s nanites.
When I travelled the UK some months ago, many organised gangs often killed their quarry in order to steal the nanites they possessed. They were often cold-blooded and brutal. My guess is that it would be just as bad near any harvester operation, but especially here in the US.
Either way, it still left us with a non-zero chance that we would be beaten to the punch on executing our plans. It was unsettling, let me tell you.
“Alright,” I replied. “So what’s the plan?”
“Well,” Eveline began, and then suggested a course of action that chilled me to the bone.