Chapter 18

Month 126—June on Anouilh

“WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!” Dakota screamed at me. I had no idea what the fuck was going on or what I was supposed to do something about. Dakota’s wife, Cali, was crying and being held up between Dakota and Miss Molly. There were a few other women in the hall. I hit my knees in front of the distraught woman and took her hand in mine.

“Cali, are you hurt? Did someone attack you?” I knew she was making another California pickup. Women were disappearing from LA every day and we were still getting half a dozen calls for help a week.

“No. Yes. Not exactly.”

“She could have been killed. She saw them kidnap a woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter,” Dakota said.

“Fuck!” I hated what was happening in California now more than ever. The kidnappings were continuing and the California police seemed impotent to do anything. I thought they might even be complicit. The collection of ‘harem ranches’ was growing. Earth First could operate freely in California without threat of the Confederacy interfering. “Were you hurt?” I repeated.

“N-no. I was on my way to pick her up and I saw them take her and her daughter in an unmarked van,” Cali gasped. “I followed them.”

“Damn! That’s risky. What if they’d spotted you?”

“I didn’t care. I had to find out where they were taking her.”

“Okay. Did you?”

“Yes. They hit I-10 out of LA toward Palm Springs. About 5 miles west of Desert Hot Springs is a road that goes up to Morongo. They turned off about five miles north of the interstate onto a road that became gravel. I stopped following when I saw a sign that said ‘Dead End.’ I checked the GPS and there’s only one ranch house out there at the end of the road. We need to go get them. Something terrible will happen to them.”

“I agree,” I said. “Ubie, can you get any surveillance on those coordinates?”

“Yes, boss, though I’m just getting general satellite images. If someone transports over there with a drone, I could get better.”

“I’m on it!” one of the women in the hall called and went running down the hall.

“How about Confederacy resources? I know they still monitor California even though they don’t operate there.”

“I will have my communications unit contact them.” Ubie didn’t have direct contact with the Confederacy AIs. He had too many secrets to risk an intrusion. Instead, he’d budded an interface unit that was limited and only handled communications and transport between the moon base and Anouilh.

“Does anyone have a recommendation that goes beyond ‘We have to do something?’ I think we all agree that California is our pet project and we should protect the women. What do we do?” I asked. This was not something I was prepared to handle now any more than when I handed the Earth First cell on Tortola over to the Confederacy. There was a whole world of legal, emotional, and ethical traps waiting for us if we decided protecting Earth included protecting people from these radical elements. On the other hand, I could see in the faces before me that our people believed it.

“Can’t we report this to the Confederacy? Don’t they have people who deal with it?” Molly asked.

“Yeah. As soon as Ubie gives me a contact, I’ll loop them in. But remember, California is Confederacy free. As stupid as it is, the Confederacy AIs won’t let their people violate the agreement they made with the California Republic. US authorities pulled out of all but established military bases when they declared their independence. Up until now, California has been following its bliss. Now there’s no one to call on. Even if they know about it and care,” I said. I saw that as the real problem. We didn’t know how embedded the radicals were in the California infrastructure. No matter the issue, California’s stance always seemed to be ‘do nothing’.

“Then we need to go in and rescue them.” Molly stood firm. “We have trained combat troops. We’ve worked scenarios where civilians were threatened by the Swarm, and we rescued them. We should be able to take on a few assholes.”

“There’s one fault with your thinking. You can pretty easily identify a Sa’arm unit. It’s a lot harder to identify an asshole and make sure it’s not a victim.”

“We can do it.”

“Start putting together a plan and find the volunteers who’ll go. But one requirement I’ll insist on: Everyone who volunteers must understand that she will be expected to kill a human. We responded automatically to the invasion and eighteen people were killed. We dealt with psychological trauma in our squads for months, even though they all knew it was self-defense. This will be premeditated. If we go into an Earth First bunker, our commitment must be that no Earth First asshole comes out of it alive. Find out who has that level of commitment.”

I saw some of the women crowded around my door blanch and they turned to talk to each other. I could see Molly and Dakota were firm in their resolve. The women left and I collapsed in my chair.

Fuck!

I had a videoconference with a guy from some department that doesn’t exist. He didn’t identify himself and I didn’t ask. Officially, they didn’t know anything about a pending operation by one sovereign country against another. But they had information.

“We’ve used different emissaries to the California Republic to inform them of Earth First activity and violation of human rights. They’ve been deaf to our information. They insist the activities are isolated incidents and they have active investigations. Our monitoring of the investigations has indicated they are in the hands of local law enforcement. Local law enforcement seems to be just as riddled with sympathizers and people who have been intimidated or bribed into inaction. The Los Angeles police bury the kidnappings in paperwork that never gets completed. There is a black market in sex trafficking and those who could do something about it have their hands tied.”

“We don’t, but I’m not interested in a war with the California Republic.”

“Some of the women you have picked up there are listed among the kidnapping victims.”

“We always make sure the women we rescue make contact with their families and friends to tell them where they’ve gone,” I said.

“Media paints you as being among the kidnappers.”

“Media is always going for any conspiracy theory that hides what’s really going on.”

“True, but you should understand you are already suspect there.”

“So, there’s nothing you can do to help us?”

“I didn’t say that. We have surveillance on the ranch you’ve identified. We estimate there may be as many as three hundred women held captive there.”

“Three hundred! How can an enclave like that even exist? How do they feed them? How many people are guards? How do they pay for it?” Three hundred women? There had to be at least half that many guards or they’d just be walking away.

“All good questions. There are regular auctions at which buyers cart away women in truckloads. Each truck that arrives with food leaves filled with women. Where possible, we’ve been targeting buyers in other parts of the US and overseas. But we’re often too late to save all the women. Those we do rescue are often too emotionally damaged to safely bring to the Confederacy. You have sufficient resources to face down the traffickers at the holding site. The question is whether your porn stars have the skill to do an extraction.”

“And whether the victims would be any happier here than in a Confederacy brothel,” I said.

“There are some safe houses where we’ve transferred the most damaged. We put them through a med tube to heal them physically, but even our resources are limited when it comes to good counselors. And you can imagine how the AIs feel about us wasting resources on people who aren’t useful to the Confederacy.”

“Is there any way you can help us?”

“If your Pussy Pirates are committed, we have intel. We also have some strategies we can share. I hate to sound like Mission Impossible, but if you fail or if any of your people are captured, we would deny any knowledge of you. You’re on your own.”