Chapter 2: The St Petersburgh Extraction External Views

Jonathan Harms and his wife Amanda were enjoying breakfast in bed as usual when suddenly Eddy, one of the bodyguards, rushed into the bedroom.

“Boss, you won’t believe this, but we are surrounded by an interdiction field!” Eddy said with a mild tone of panic.

Amanda, sitting naked in her bed as usual, raised an eyebrow. No servant except for Anita the maid was allowed to enter the bedroom when she was still inside. And even she of course had to knock and lower her eyes. In her early days a lot of men had seen her naked, but now she was the wife of Jonathan Harms, a relation that granted some privileges.

Eddy’s behavior irked both Amanda and Jonathan. However, Jonathan quickly understood the urgency of the message. “Eddy, next time you knock or I’ll have to shoot you,” he said. “Now what’s this about an interdiction field surrounding us?”

Eddy’s face visibly lost some of his natural southern color. “Boss, it’s true. An interdiction field surrounds our plot on all four sides. We also lost all our communications. Telephone, both conventional and mobile, radio, internet, even TV. Walkie-talkie works within the plot but that’s all.

Jonathan got up and opened the light curtain of one of the windows. “Impressive. I’ve never seen one of these for real.” He turned around and quickly put on a pair of shorts and a dressing gown. “Sorry my love, I have to go downstairs before one of my men starts something foolish.”

“You are forgiven,” Amanda replied with a thin smile. “Please send in Anita while you leave.”

Jonathan left the bedroom on the second floor of the mansion with Eddy following him. A nervous Anita was already waiting outside the door. Downstairs, Jonathan found several of his men in front of the control room where two men were constantly observing all the security cams of the estate and were also managing the communication with the outside world. The men grew silent when Jonathan arrived.

“Any signs of intruders? Maybe drones?” Jonathan asked the operators.

“No boss, nothing. The field showed up five minutes ago. We checked communications and then sent Eddy to inform you.”

Jonathan tried to figure what was going on. The security system of his headquarter was a very advanced one. It not only used cameras that were able to operate with infrared light. It also used radar and sonic sensors to detect intruders, including drones. The system had proved more than once that it even was able to detect Confederacy drones. So if Curtis, the operator said that there was nothing, then there was nothing.

Suddenly Jonathan turned around, facing his men. “Gentlemen, this is the time of truth. Who of you was not informed by the Confederacy AI on your CAP test that you are excluded from leaving Earth because of your criminal behavior?”

There was an uneasy murmur among his men. One of them, Jonny the Mouth, replied, “Boss, you once said that you will never ask about a CAP test result, as long as we got tested. You even forbid talking about it among ourselves.”

“You are right about that, but this is a different situation. I think this is a Confederacy extraction and we are on the outside,” Jonathan said.

“What did you just say?” Amanda asked from the staircase over the growing noise of the surprised men. The men went silent again.

“This is an extraction, my dear. There are no FBI agents, no Confederacy Marines, not even drones. The only reason for this is that we are excluded. I already expected this. What I didn’t expect is that there would be an extraction all around us,” Jonathan explained. “This brings me to my previous question again. Who is not classified a criminal by the Confederacy? You know that I hope that my daughters make it into an extraction. I’m willing to let everybody go who might have a chance in an extraction. We’ll see if we can get someone through these force fields. If you aren’t able to leave Earth, I expect you return here with some excellent insight information of a real extraction.”

Slowly, Anita, who was standing on the stairs behind Amanda, was raising her hand.

“Ah that’s one,” Jonathan said with a smile. “Anybody else?”

Another two people raised their hands. One was Kenny the courier boy, the other one was Curtis, one of the security operators. The other five men looked a little unsure at each other.

Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “Curtis, you are surprising me,” he noted.

“I was surprised myself when I just got my CAP card at the test center without any comment. I had heard from Earl about the notification of the AI, and that he was a little scared that the Confederacy might inform the FBI or the local police. Maybe I’m just a good, loyal mercenary. However, I’m not leaving. I don’t see me wearing a banana skirt, playing the human dildo for a sponsor,” Curtis stated.

They all laughed about that image.

“Boss, I have more bad news for you,” Curtis continued. “Your daughters left early this morning with Miles. They went for a test run of their ark. If the interdiction field doesn’t include a good part of the gulf, they are not inside.”

“Shit!” was all Jonathan said. Everybody understood that he was really pissed.

Farnham Mayhurst was forty-two years old and a trained mercenary, but he had seen better days. With the United States drawing back from almost every hot spot in the third world after Average Joe’s and the president’s speech, the mercenary business had become more dangerous and less profitable. Three years ago, Farnham accepted the job offer from Mr. Harms, knowing that he was a local criminal. Without Curtis, an old friend from better days, he would have turned down the offer.

Farnham was not only one of four bodyguards for the Harms’ daughters. He also had to teach them the legal way of life as well as possible. Farnham’s respect for Mr. Harms had raised a lot when he finally got his job description.

Farnham had just returned home from his night shift at the Harms mansion. The sisters had been visiting a student’s birthday party. There hadn’t been anything excessive, so he had an easy job. They had returned to the Harms’ mansion at two o’clock in the morning. Farnham had spent the rest of the night playing poker with some of the other men working for Mr. Harms. At six o’clock, Miles, another of the sisters’ bodyguards, took over his shift early, since the sisters wanted to join a test run of their ark. Farnham didn’t know where the young women were getting all that energy. He was definitely spent.

The usual routine after a night shift for Farnham was eating a light meal and drinking a glass of good single malt whiskey while listening to the morning TV show and watching the people on the street. The next step would have been to go to bed, but the routine was interrupted. The TV program changed and a new voice announced, “This is a Confederacy extraction. Please stay calm and leave the buildings. We have the whole day for this event.”

Farnham hurried to the window and looked along the street. There were interdiction fields at both crossings he could see. The people on the street looked confused and unsure what to do. When Farnham just drew back, he noticed his neighbors across the street were active. Since the day he had moved in, they had annoyed him with their Earth First propaganda bullshit. His sixth sense tingled. If they were more than just loud-mouthed, there would soon be trouble approaching.

Farnham waited no longer. His little apartment offered a perfect view on the other house’s entrance. Farnham pushed the refrigerator out of the way and opened the secret weapon locker where he stored his treasures. This day would see his Bohica Arms FAR-50 in action. It was a little overpowered for this distance but Farnham didn’t care. He moved the table and a chair to a comfortable position in the middle of the room, loaded the rifle and waited.

People started to follow the Confederacy’s orders and filled the street. Only five minutes later, two men left the building across the street, carrying a MAC-11 machine pistol in each hand and a lot of magazines in their belts. The first man dropped to the floor dead, with a big hole between his eyes and his brain sprayed all over the entry. The second one was shocked, which gave Farnham the time to reload. When the second man turned around and lifted his hand to blindly fire at the people in the street, Farnham pulled the trigger for the second time. The man was dead before he could hurt anybody.

Farnham was satisfied and relaxed a little. He didn’t notice the tiny drone that appeared in the corner of the window until he was stunned by the stinger the drone was carrying.

The flat roof of depot number 4 had become very popular for those soldiers that were currently not on duty at MacDill Airforce Base, Tampa, Florida. It was one of the spots where people with binoculars could easily watch the other side of the bay where St. Petersburg was located. At nine o’clock, the whole town had vanished behind an interdiction field. Although they weren’t able to see anything except for the interdiction field, the crowd had grown up to two-hundred men before eleven o’clock. Most of them had relatives on the other side of the bay.

The interdiction field had appeared in front of Maggie May when she just was leaving the parking lot in front of her parent’s house. She was still living with her father although it was considered uncool by all her friends and co-workers. Maggie had graduated a year ago. She was now working as a secretary at the local radio station, which meant she had to handle just anything that her bosses tossed at her. Sometimes it was annoying, but sometimes it was just cool. Today her job would have been to welcome Tom Jones at the airport and entertain him for two hours. At noon there would have been a live broadcast with the audience asking questions to him at the studio. She wasn’t sure if she should laugh or cry.

Maggie left her car and looked around. She spotted the Confederacy Marines who had started to organize the extraction, so she was obviously within the area. The house was within the area too, so she re-entered it. She knew that Andrew, her dad, was at home and this was definitely the last chance to convince him to leave Earth, maybe as her concubine. The thought alone made her wet her pants. Her mother Connie had died long ago and so her dad had been the most important person in her life. He had given her a hard time during her university time and forced her to learn just everything she could. It had started after Average Joes’ and the president’s speech.

A few days after the president made it public that an alien invasion force was on the way towards Earth and that the Darjee, another alien race, was trying to help, her father and Maggie had visited a CAP test center. Maggie had reached a CAP score of 6.3 but her father had been very angry when he had shown her his card with a 4.8 printed on it in big digits. However, after a week he started to tease her that she could reach sponsor level instead of leaving Earth as a sex toy. He forced her to visit more lessons than before at the university and he introduced her to various martial arts teachers. The last thing she really didn’t like in the beginning. Those teachers weren’t really the type of men she wanted to come across in a dark alley. Her dad insisted that she at least trained with each of them for a month before she was allowed to drop it. The first time she understood that this training was useful was at a student party when a drunk fellow student tried to rape her. He wasn’t really happy with the result, since Maggie crushed his testicles with her knee and almost drowned him in the strawberry punch bowl. She then searched a martial arts studio on her own to learn Kung Fu instead of the street fighting styles of her dad’s friends.

Two years later she managed to reach 6.6 in another CAP test at her birthday.