“We need to try and see over that wall and get a feel for the compound’s lay out; maybe we can figure our where they’re keeping Blossom. That back door is a good entry point. Gauging by the roofs, it looks like there’s just a narrow path between the two nearest houses, which means we don’t have to worry about getting rushed, but we’ll be like commuters in a transport; easy pickings. That means we have to get in and hidden before they know we’re there. Once we’re in, we can blow their munitions station and they’ll likely rally the troops and head out the gate.” Jake and I nodded our agreement and got ready to rise, but she raised her hand to stop us. “Before we do that, we have to figure out the layout inside, as best we can. Pip, do you have any reliable scan information?”
“Family member Cedar, it is difficult to get solid data using my reserve battery, but the compound is not large, maybe twenty houses. I cannot account for all the residents, but there seems to be fifteen that are within scan range. None of them are Family Member Blossom. I extrapolate that she is in the centre of the compound, where my scanners cannot penetrate all the layers of stone and brick.”
“Can you render us a map of what you can see?” Jake asked the little bot.
“I will do my utmost to provide you with something suitable, Family Member Jake.”
“Great Pip, but for now, can you find us a building that’s high enough to look in to the compound, but not so obvious that it would be on their watch list?” added Cedar.
The whir of his scanners and processors fired up, but seemed a little more strained than usual. His ear was looking markedly better each time I remembered to look at it, but it was still a day or so away from being completely repaired.
“Head two blocks north and one east, there is a two story home with an attic. The attic window is well situated to see in to the compound, Family Member Cedar.” We didn’t need any further prodding and wound our way through the scattering of buildings outside the gated community until we’d come to the house with the opportune attic window.
Chapter 19 - Stake Out
The perspiration poured off of us as we waited in the scorching hot attic, eyes glued to the small window, overlooking the compound. The sun slowly sank down and the temperature eased off just enough so that we didn’t poach in our own sweat. It was boring, and I had to nudge Jake a couple of times to keep him from drifting off. The combination of stillness and heat was dragging at me and I peeled myself out of the flak jacket and Sunskin. We even dared to crack the window a little to let the cooler night air give us a reprieve. There wasn’t a lot of movement in the compound, but we tried to tally the number or residents as best we could. Like most of the Sand Walker settlements we counted more women than men, but we really couldn’t get past more than a meagre twelve people.
The compound itself was showing signs of wear; some of the homes little more than skeletons or piles of rubble. The centre of the village held what seemed to be a common area and we guessed that was likely where they were keeping Blossom. We hadn’t seen any sign of her, but food was being brought in for someone and the four men we’d seen had gone in to the building multiple times. At closer inspection the surrounding wall was a fairly recent addition. I could make out irregularities in the construction, but someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the enclosure look like part of the community it encircled. I guessed that the scraps from the torn down buildings outside the wall were the main source of construction materials. I didn’t get to ponder the idea for long.
“So why don’t they have patrols?” asked Jake, flicking his bangs and wiping his forehead in an exaggerated manner, like he was the only one of us sweltering and wanted us to appreciate his suffering.
“Lack of man power?” I offered hesitantly. I couldn’t help but have the feeling that there were more of them out there, just waiting for us to slip up, but maybe I was being paranoid.
“More like lack of threat,” replied Cedar. “There probably isn’t another settlement any closer than a day away and the Outcasts tend to stick really close to the cities. If you’re out here long enough you learn to stay away from places like this.”
We settled back in to silence for a moment, while Cedar scanned the enclosure with her night vision goggles.
“Look, see to the right of the communal building, there’s someone patrolling.” We all raised our goggles and focused on the indicated area. Sure enough, there was someone, presumably a man, based on height, slowly touring between the main gates and the centre of the compound. I tried to figure out if it was one of the guys we’d counted before, but it was impossible to tell in the darkness.
“Pipkin, can you scan for heat signatures?” I asked, noting that the bot had placed itself to one side of the open window, trying to catch a breeze to help him recharge. His ear was about 75% corrected, but I could tell that the nanobots were slowing, as his energy drained.
“I will try Owner Dax.” The gentle whir told me he was processing, but before he could answer, a blood curdling shriek cut through the air. It was disconcerting to hear it from where we had concealed ourselves.
“That’s Blossom!” shouted Jake, sitting upright and knocking his head on a truss.
“Shhh!” hissed Cedar, even though we hadn’t seen any movement in the outlying buildings. Jake was halfway to the ceiling hatch when Cedar made a wild grab for his foot to stop him from running out in to the night and attacking the compound single handed. “She’s probably just coming too; remember she was unconscious when they transported her here.” It was a guess at best, but it seemed to pacify Jake, at least for the moment. “Look, they aren’t going to hurt her, at least not right away. They’ll want to wait until all the birth control drugs have left her systems; which means waiting at least a month or so.” She shot me a glance filled with doubt and I quirked up the side of my mouth hoping it looked comforting. In that moment Jake’s brain started up and he asked a question I wasn’t prepared to answer.
“But why won’t they just rape her anyway?” pressed Jake, the whole thing coming down to that one succinct point.
“I know it sounds crazy, but the girls they bring in are exactly what they call them: Breeders. The other women in the compound are the wives and they don’t like it if their men stray, except for procreating. If you stay out in the Bee Zee long enough, chances are that the radiation will speed up menopause, especially if you don’t have the benefit of good protection. You wouldn’t catch me living out here if my life depended on it. What you want is a building with a nice deep basement and several floors above you, preferably with a large footprint, so you can stay in the centre and avoid as much exposure as possible.”
“But don’t the men, er,” Jake paused, most likely blushing a little, “have the same problem?”
“A lot of them do, that’s why they have their ridiculous ‘welcoming’ ceremonies. That way no one guy gets singled out as impotent, which would seriously damage his cred, even though at least half of them actually are.” I resisted the urge to grab my crotch in a vain attempt to protect it from harm and returned my gaze to the compound, trying not to imagine all of my swimmers dying a slow pitiful death. I had to remind myself that even I was still under the affects of birth control treatments that were mandatory in the domes, so my sperm count was of little consequence at this point.
Except for the one outburst the gated community was peaceful. No one had come running at the sound, so I had to assume that there was already a sufficient amount of people in the common area to address the problem. That was bad news for us.
“Okay, so what’s the plan?” I finally asked. We’d exhausted ourselves trying to figure out the body count inside the gates and our vantage point really helped us get a general layout of the quaint little lane ways lined with houses.
“We need to watch their routine for another day or two to see if there are any weak spots in their guard rotation. If we can, we want to get in and out with as few of them noticing as possible.”
“There aren’t a lot o
f them, why can’t we just go in shooting?” This came from Jake, his eyes bright with anxiousness. “We can’t leave Blossom in there for days on end; she’ll think that we abandoned her.” I had kind of expected a romance to develop between the two, but they acted more like brother and sister than anything, but Jake’s concern was real and I silently agreed with him.
“That might be for the best, if she’s given up hope, then maybe the captors will also believe we left the area. You said it before, our only advantage is surprise and maybe Pip will be repaired by then, we could use the extra fire power.” Cedar pressed her lips together in a stubborn line, indicating that that was the end of the discussion. Jake rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to say something, but the metal squeal of the front gates opening drew his attention. We could make out the forms of nine people as they slipped through the opening and headed off to the opposite side of the town.
“What the hell is that?” asked Jake pointing to a spot on the horizon. We all strained our eyes, the night vision goggles useless at such a distance. The shape really wasn’t anything more than a black blotch that blanked out the stars as it passed, but it grew larger as it drew nearer and we could eventually make out the shape of a strange type of airplane. It definitely wasn’t a drone, just based on its size and it showed every indication of coming to land on the outskirts of whatever town we were at.
“Let’s go,” said Cedar quietly but with an urgency that made me follow after her immediately. We were through the ceiling hatch and running down the road, before I realized that we weren’t hiding from the thing, we were going towards it.
“Wait!” I gasped, having run Commando style from building wall to building wall for the past five minutes. “What are you doing?” I wheezed, “Don’t we want to go the opposite way?”
“No,” replied Cedar in a hushed growl, “we need to find out what that thing is and why it’s here. Sand Walkers don’t usually fraternize with people from the cities, unless they’re trying to rob them. This might be important.” Important to whom, I thought? Pipkin gave a little buzz from my shoulder before speaking.
“It is not a government transport, Owner Dax. It seems to be of foreign derivation, I would propose that it is a Triad plane. It does not make any sense that it is here.”
Cedar put a finger up to her lips, indicating quiet and then waved her hand for us to follow her through an open doorway, “I hear someone coming.” We slipped through the entry, as silently as we could and sure enough a few moments later two of the people from the compound came around the corner of a nearby building, apparently heading back the way they came. They carried a large trunk between them and it must have weighed a lot, as we could hear the occasional grunt of effort. “It’s a weapons crate,” whispered Cedar rather needlessly, as even I could have sussed that particular piece of information out. The crate had a large reflective picture of some sort of bazooka and a yellow hazard symbol showing an explosion painted next to it; the Chinese characters were a clear indication of its origin. It didn’t take long for her to be out the doorway and heading even closer to where the Chinese plane had landed. I followed, but more out of a desire to protect her than wanting to see anything else. I wasn’t enjoying all of this cloak and dagger stuff; the huge box of weaponry had been enough to put a crimp in the fun, but apparently it didn’t have the same affect on Cedar, or Jake for that matter.
We crept closer to the landing sight and we could just make out the Sand Walkers unloading a couple more boxes from the airplane and we could hear the rumble of voices, but couldn’t make out what they were saying, probably because they were speaking some muddle form of Chin-glish, which I’d never bothered to learn. There seemed to be some sort of heated disagreement between the flight crew and the survivalists and I dove behind the nearest wall when all the guns came out, almost crushing the bot in my urgency. It soothed my ego to see that Jake and Cedar had followed my lead, and huddled beside me, waiting for the sound of rapid gun fire, but it never came. The only sound that cut through the night, after a tense three minute standoff, was the growl of the rotors firing up and the drone of the plane lifting in to the air. It shot off to the north and we lost sight of it so quickly that I wondered if I’d hallucinated the whole thing. We kept to our hiding spot while the Sand Walkers toted their loot back to the compound.
“Wow, I can’t believe their getting their gear from the White Suns,” whispered Jake.
“Who?” asked Cedar and I in unison.
“The Triads or more to the point the Triad,” he lifted his shoulder, like that was something everyone knew.
“Nobody knows which Triad took over control, Jake,” explained Cedar like she was talking to a mentally unstable person holding an ion bomb.
“Pft, that’s what you know!” Jake crossed his arms across his chest in a how-dumb-can-you-be stance that would have even pissed me off. I saw the red crawling up Cedar’s neck and decided to intervene.
“Now, let’s just take a moment to remember that we’re all friends here,” I soothed. “Pip, any data on this sort of thing?”
“While the secret of the successful regime was largely kept quiet in the past, there has been a recent surge of information through underground channels, Owner Dax.” The whirr told me he was searching for any additional updates. “It would seem that enough time has passed to allow the information out, usually via the medium of Manga comics and graphic novels, in hopes that the truth will quell any ideas of rebellion in Asia or with collaborating governments.”
“How do you know that? You’ve been turned off for at least a century!” I couldn’t believe that a gangly teen and prehistoric robot knew more about this stuff than I did. What had I been doing all this time? Right, I’d been sitting behind a desk, getting soft and letting life pass me by.
“Not off, Owner Dax, just on standby, and illicitly connected in to the government systems.” I could have sworn that the bot was smirking which didn’t add to my overall sense of well being. I turned on Jake, glowering and pulling myself up to my full height.
“Okay, so what other things do you know about all this, Smart Alec?”
“I dunno, what don’t you know?” He was being belligerent and it was all I could do not to grab him by his shirt and shake him until his teeth rattled. He must have seen the violence brewing in my eyes, because he quickly tacked on, “How about the rumours that our government is part of the whole White Sun shake down?”
“Wait, you’re telling me that our government…the Canadian government, is working with the triads?” Jake quirked his head to the side with a ‘believe-it-or-not’ gesture and gave me a quick nod. “I suppose our neighbours to the South are also participating in this little bit of treachery.” I’d said it half jokingly, but the truth was that there was a very fine line between the two administrations’ policies; some might even call the line invisible. Jake was saved from answering as Cedar let out a muffled snort.
“Are you two idiots finished talking about stuff that isn’t important? Do you think we could get back to our look out?” I must have looked surprised at her indifference. “Well, for God’s sake Dax, it’s not like what the government does really matters out here. It’s survival of the fittest.” With that she slunk off, back in the direction of the house that promised a good attic view.
“Yeah and the fittest seem to have a little arrangement with the Asians and apparently, our government as well,” I muttered. “But what would the government get out of cooperating with the triads and arming the Sand Walkers?” I looked at Jake, expecting him to have some sort of brilliant insight, but he only shrugged and followed Cedar.
“That is a very good question, Owner Dax,” replied Pipkin. I’d almost forgotten him in the heat of the moment, but was glad that someone, or thing, didn’t think I was a complete idiot.
We spent the rest of the night scoping out the compound, but gained little further intel. The group seemed to stick pretty close to the gated community and there was no sign of Blossom at all
. We could only guess that she was safe and sound and being held in the community centre. Before dawn cracked the skyline, we dragged ourselves back to our hidey hole in the abandoned garage and slept most of the day away. I was grateful for the cool of the subterranean oil slip and barely swallowed my insta-meal before tumbling into dreams.
It didn’t seem like I’d been asleep all that long when Cedar prodded me with the toe of her boot.
“Get up Sleeping Beauty, time to reconnoitre.” I’d noticed that the more time we spent on our little rescue mission, the more militaristic Cedar’s speech got. It was interesting and I wondered if she’d been a raging military movie fiend before she was Outcast.
I didn’t give her the satisfaction of groaning, but sat up, stretched and gave my hair a good scrub with both hands. I grimaced a little at the oily texture, but buried my expression before being accused of girly-ness. I sucked back an insta-meal and went to the defunct bathroom to empty my bladder. At least the insta-meals and water tablets reduced waste. That’s what they were designed for; making the human body as efficient as possible. Whenever we’d had packaged water or the water from the extractor, we’d had to pee a lot more. Isn’t science grand?
We spent our second day of reconnaissance, pretty much like the first day. We sweltered up in the attic, popped water tablets like they were going out of style and were rewarded with our first look at Blossom. She didn’t seem much the worse for wear and appeared to be taxing her captors’ patience as they tried to march her across the yard to another building. She socked one guard in the eye and while his companion was laughing she gave him a good swift kick to the groin. I’m not sure what would have happened after that, but there was a sharp command, which came from a nearby building and the two straightened themselves up as best they could and insistently escorted Blossom in to the house.
It only took a few minutes before she showed up again, this time dressed in a teal coloured gown that was actually quite becoming with her dark hair and golden skin, but I could tell, even from a distance, that she was none too pleased with the new wardrobe. Jake passed me the binoculars and I had a good look at her get up.
Last Farmer: Last Farmer Series - Book 1 Page 18