Pussy Pirates
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.”
“We have a situation that we would like your help with,” I said to the council on Papillon. I’d requested a meeting with the elders, and as their ‘national governor’, they were always willing to listen. I’d kept my hands strictly off the local governance of the island, restricting myself to matters of international trade and tourism. And protection. There were still Cuban patrol boats circling the islands but less than half of what there were in the aftermath of the invasion. Instead, Molly now had our own version of Border Patrol that patrolled on land and Ubie had set up a good number of monitoring stations just watching for invaders.
“You have our ears, Boss,” the oldest woman said. She was Papillon’s own version of Tatts. Her body was pretty much covered with them. “Our island has prospered since you arrived four years ago. Our education system has been rejuvenated. Our tourist trade has increased. We even have export markets for goods we produce. And we feel secure. We have always assumed there would come a time when we had to pay.”
“I will try to not bring difficulty to the islands. We came here as a safe haven to produce our games and protect women who are refugees from difficult areas. We find now that we must act to rescue as many as three hundred women and children who are being held captive for human trafficking. We do not have the resources to house and care for that many refugees. I don’t want to overtax the resources of our islands but we feel morally obligated to rescue these women.”
“Our two islands now have over 6,500 residents. When you arrived, there were scarcely 5,000. I don’t see a problem with absorbing another 300,” one of the old men said. “You have brought us prosperity and technology we did not previously have access to. We cannot do less than care for others less fortunate than we are.” There was a lot of head nodding going on among the five council members. The other man, youngest of the five, raised his hand politely to speak. The old woman nodded to him.
“At one time, many years ago, there was a Cuban army installation here. It was abandoned during the Cuban revolution when we got our independence. No one ever goes there. With a bit of scrubbing and the addition of replicators, I’m sure it would house as many women as you can bring.” One of the old men had passed away a little over a year ago and this man was elected to fill his place on the council. He seemed like a good choice. “It is where we have transported those who wish to be extracted so the Confederacy has a safe place to do pickups without disrupting the island. We have not had people there for several months. No one wants to leave anymore.”
“That may change when the Sa’arm actually arrive on Earth,” I said. “But for now, I see no problem with the location. We have women who have volunteered to help with the refugees in any way they can. I’m sure getting the base ready for refugees would be acceptable to them.”
“We also have men and women who have helped with previous refugees who do not wish to join your business. They will help.”
“Then let us agree to cooperate in this endeavor.”
Month 126—June at Morongo, CA
MOLLY AND GRETEL left my old car off the road to the ranch and concealed it as well as they could. They shouldered their packs and confirmed with Ubie that the car was ready for disposal. It was the sedan’s final trip. As soon as they had their rifles in hand, nanites began devouring the old rust bucket.
“We’re headed cross-country,” Molly said softly. In the control room we could hear her clearly through Ubie’s relay system.
“Guidance is programmed into your helmet,” Ubie said. “You have a three kilometer walk through sand and sagebrush. Your camouflage has been set to adjust to the surroundings.”
“I love the new outfits, Ubie, but it’s hot out here and I’d rather be naked,” Molly said. She and Gretel set off on the route displayed on their headsets. There wasn’t much any of the rest of us could do until they’d trudged across the Mohave. About two hundred meters from the compound, they hid behind a ridge and set up their transport pad. Thirty silent and similarly armed Pussy Pirates stepped through into the California heat. The captive women were held in a complex of pole barns behind the ranch house and other outbuildings. There was no sign of air conditioning and in the late afternoon sun, it had to be a hundred degrees inside the sheet metal buildings. Once they were all assembled, Molly took one squad of fifteen and set out to move in from the north. Gretel’s squad settled down south of the ranch to wait for sundown. We were sending thirty-two porn stars up against a hundred thugs. It was crazy.
One of the biggest advantages of the ‘girlie guns,’ as the Space Marines called them, was they were silent. We didn’t know if the Sa’arm could hear gunfire. According to the intel we had scraped off the surface of Confederacy AIs, Sa’arm units seemed to have an uncanny ability to immediately focus on where shots came from. Ubie speculated that there were some AIs who were passively helping our efforts by simply not concealing certain things. Of course, we never asked.
We were also testing some of our other tech in this live operation. Drones lifted off as soon as the sky darkened and took up positions over each of the outbuildings we’d determined had EF personnel in them. Each drone carried a transport nexus pointed straight down. We planned to bomb the buildings by launching incendiaries through a nexus on Anouilh. The biggest thing we needed to determine was whether they were alone or if there were women with them.
By ten p.m. local, one in the morning on Anouilh, everyone was in place. The first task was to silently dispatch the guards in the pole barns. We’d watched remotely for three days and it didn’t look like there were actually locks on the doors. The men seemed to step inside the only exit and cluster together so the women couldn’t gang up on one. They were attentive and disciplined, not at all what we expected of EF thugs. Above them, however, a drone had slipped through the air vents and waited with stingers. Four barns filled with women. We got our first clear picture of the inside.
The women were in cages. That meant only six men stood at the entrance, secure in the idea the women couldn’t reach them. Dakota scanned through all the feeds once again and confirmed with Ubie that the men were in for their two-hour shift. A dozen women in the control room responded to her command and dropped all twenty-four guards with stingers. A soft muttering spread through each of the barns as women who saw the guards drop passed the word among the others. Aware that something was afoot, they hushed each other and we could see them waiting attentively. They weren’t expecting a team of two camouflaged women to come through the door.
“Do they take any women into the barracks or is everyone left here in the barn?” Risqué Reader asked quietly as she moved down the row of cages. “We need to know.”
“They don’t take us out at all until they back a truck up to the door and load people,” one finally said. “Most of us were raped on the way here. We’ve been here with no food and little water for days.”
“We’re going to get you out and get you fed. But first we need to take care of the rest of the guards,” Risqué said. “No women are known to be in the bunkhouses,” she added, speaking in her helmet. The assessment was confirmed by each of the other commandos in the barns.
“Fire the bombs,” Dakota commanded. In a different part of the resort where the ground troops trained, four women began firing rocket launchers into transporter nexuses. At the ranch, no sound was heard before the buildings exploded into flames.
“Fire at will,” Molly commanded as men poured out the doors of the buildings. None heard the sound of the shot that killed him.
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