Hot Time in the City

Extractions were hard to scale, and, as proof that low CAP scores can imply a severe level of idiocy, some of the less desirable candidates for evacuation-- charisma, for instance, has no CAP value at all-- went towards political power. These people eventually ended up working to impede our ability to maintain the regular model of extractions by imposing burdens to our mission that kept adding annoying complications to our work.

But, then, normal human beings excel at complications. My personal AI had a tendency to mutter sotto voce about how complicated it was to deal with people. She'd only been handed to me in the last couple of months and had already accumulated a bunch of idiosyncracies.

Well, I have to admit that her tendency to express sarcasm to me, especially given the ignominious place on my belt where she lived, made her feel a lot more "human" to me... and, contrary to what you might think, made it easier to work with her. Nancy had her own... who had his own set of odd behaviors.

But I digress. Back to the complications that the no-hopers had a tendency to throw at us.

At first the complications weren't really organized, but it became, over time, a model for some people to protest the process of being "left behind". For instance, a lot of the people who would be left on Earth, in nations where it was legal, started to carry guns and knives with which they could try using to pressure the Marines in our extraction teams into including them. You can understand that it only took a couple of incidents where we lost extraction team members for us to decide to add to our intimidation value.

Wearing armor-- at first fitted body armor, and, later, powered battle armor-- does not lend itself to keeping an extraction team covert. So we had to have a "softener" team who could remain covert who could deliver a transport nexus or two to a likely extraction site. That these included covert sensor suites so that we could evaluate the crowd before appearing to collect some of it.

Why did we do that?

Simple. Sure, we're just gropos-- "Ground Pounders"-- but we weren't a limitless resource, and, considering that we're supposed to be bringing the Sa'arm incursion to a halt, the evacuation of people from Earth was just a side-show.

The process of evacuating Earth was not budgeted to require as much time and attention as it was starting to need, and, to top it off, extractions weren't all cut and dried.

Sounds annoying, doesn't it?

Another complication we had to deal with was the rising rate of counterfeit CAP ID cards. Oh, sure, we weren't stupid enough to be taken in by these counterfeits. It was still impossible for people on Earth to duplicate these cards and the authentication within the AIs which stayed in orbit to ensure physical security. Cards were generated by a replicator in the testing center, driven by the AI running the tests, so all cards are made within a "closed loop".

In some ways the counterfeit holders were fucking up the works by pissing people off at the Confederacy, so that just pissed us off.

Originally extractions were simple to figure out... but we were getting more and more wackos who don't want anyone to be able to leave without them along with the original set of morons desperate to leave the planet but who were unwelcome on their own. I think you can see why part of my job is no picnic.

And don't talk to me about picnics. We've picked some nice pleasant Pacific Islands for R and R but my job as G-2 on the extraction mission has not given me much time off.

Yes, I'd gotten a promotion since nipping OrgCrime's first competent try at using a ringer with a valid CAP card, but once we knew to look for it we stopped 'em all, and, with the public executions "by re-entry heating", we were finding that fewer volunteers from being killed in order to get their CAP card. I'd refined some of our techniques and got some new interrogation tools so we were escalating our efforts by tracing relationships and wiping those connected with this kind of trick.

And, yeah, we shouldn't have had to spend time doing that but it sure got the message across. Fucking waste of our time, though, but, hey, what can you do with rats trying to leave a sinking ship? It was probably like the exit of the US from Saigon, back in the early 1970s.

It took several months for someone on a colony world to detect yet another means that would get criminals off of the Earth by the simple expedient of kidnaping and brainwashing an actual volunteer into bringing them. We now knew what kinds of things to look for and the need to re-screen, albeit with an additional species of nanite used during the medical screening, caused us to toss even more people over-board, but, in this case, since any OrgCrime group had a vested interest in keeping a volunteer alive, we kept any news of dumping such bodies quiet.

Mind you, early on we knew we had to do something to protect those with high CAP scores since these were the ones most valuable to a criminal organization because of the number of bodies they could provide a lift ticket for.

People with a CAP score under 7 were safe enough from kidnap because a leader would want to have control of more than two people. Sevens were kind of iffy-- we didn't see more than an occasional snatch-- but eights were gold to organized criminals. Nancy once suggested sending down a body-guard for anyone who scored well, which, when her suggestion went up the food chain, got implemented. I saw the logic of this but the costs-- having a couple of hundred Marines on the line ready to jump at all times-- was just another way the costs of executing our mission kept going up.

At this rate we'd be so bogged down filtering the evacuation that we'd have no forces left over to engage the Sa'arm.

Meanwhile we had to deal with other movements that managed to acquire a patina of legitimacy on the world below us. This became a real thorn in our side, siphoning even more time, effort and manpower away from dealing with the Sa'arm.

The "Earth First" group was actually formed from smaller groups of people who felt that, if humans could be evacuated at all, ALL humans should be, arguing that fairness meant that it should be an "all or nothing" deal. I-- and a lot of others I worked with-- felt that it was just another way of trying to bypass the CAP score filtering without paying for it.

The hell of it was that these groups often combined their "legitimate" operations with far more covert terroristic cells, which made increasingly violent efforts to break up an extraction. Given the large numbers of stupid people available on Earth to join these movements, the effort to deny us volunteers by disrupting an extraction, and, once the Marines transported out of a "broken" extraction, of killing any volunteers we couldn't extract, made this a much greater problem.

So we had to start dealing with weapon carriers early on. This drove us to use battle armor almost exclusively and the fact that we'd arrive shooting at those with guns and short CAPs did not help our image at all.

Once we had an effective process that made extractions far simpler again, came the next attack on our infrastructure. Idiots started to destroy the most obvious of Confederacy Properties, our testing centers. By the time this started happening, many of the representative governments were already having their strings pulled by Earth First, so we were courteously told that we had to take the responsibility of protecting "our" property our selves. Anyone remember that line in Blazing Saddles where the Preacher tells the new Sheriff "Well, son... You're on your own!"

Yes, you guessed it, we had another drain on our resources. We were being invited to piss away even more of our limited manpower just to keep up the flow of emigres.

I, personally, had no idea what Earth Firsters were thinking, this seemed to be sheer insanity. It was Nancy who gave us the really bad news: Our most valuable "property" was not the testing centers, but those who carried CAP ID cards with scores over 6.5 still "on the hoof". With a loss of testing centers we would lose the ability to find more of these.

And I had enough knowledge, by now, of logistics and triage that I saw this as a losing proposition, and, one night, I was discussing this with Nancy as I rubbed her pregnant belly, feeling my third child within her while we spooned.

"If we have to protect the high-scorers, we're going to lose this battle... and then the war."

Yes, we did talk about work as "pillow talk", though, in our defense, we talked about us and our relationship first.

She sighed in my arms, before answering me with "Yeah, and it is all an effort to deny us what we really need to get from Earth. Not only have they been harrying extractions and making us use more force to cut our losses and try to intimidate the morons, but, to top it off, they already know it is suicide, since we've been tracking down the killers. That killers and bombers are being shielded by their governments, it is a little harder for us to carry out any sentences for interfering our extractions. I'm starting to think that we should just give up on the whole fucking lot, myself. Pull the fleet out, disable all of the replicators down there, and tell them they're on their own."

I'd been hearing rumors and whispers like that myself and liked the feel, but knew that we had to maximize the resistance of Earth to the Sa'arm. If it wasn't for that need conflicting with my feelings I'd've voted to just let them all fuck themselves. "Hell, just pulling in all of the testing centers and staff off of Earth and announcing that we were giving up on them would come as a bit of a shock, but, right now, the people we're getting the most of are the Chinese. The government there is making sure as many of their people get off the planet as they can... so, at this point, we can't abandon them, and, making it worse, we can't pull out of the other countries unless we can pull all of their teeth. We don't need another night-light like the whole of the middle east-- I think the other countries would just nuke the Chinese."

Nancy sighed, adding, "Yeah, I can see that, and it isn't like we can pull their teeth, right now."

I snuggled in closer. "It's a pity that these Earth Firsters are seen as heros of a Resistance Movement against an invader, y'know?"

She sighed, leaning back against me, saying "Yeah, it's a little hard to be seen as a liberator when everyone labels you as an invader."

I kissed her neck. "Damn straight."

While we were sitting up for breakfast, Corrie, one of my concubines, was taking care of Ellie, Nancy's first-born, when I returned to the whole "perception" argument where we were the invaders and the Earth First thugs were the under-dogs "fighting the occupiers" just like the French Resistance during the Second World War.

Corrie, who I'd chosen because she had a hyper-active maternal streak and a 6.1 CAP score, spoke up, saying, "Now if only you could just turn it around and make them look like the thugs they are..." She sighed, turning back to Ellie and placing her nipple back in the child's mouth.

Nancy and I looked at each other. Our problem was political rather than technical and we needed to be able to sell this, even though it sure looked like we were cherry picking.

But how could we turn it around?

Our break came, oddly enough, when we dealt with one of the Earth First terrorist actions.

Central Park, in New York City, still hosts concerts. This one was pretty big, too, so we paid attention to it and had agents drop sensor webs and teleport gates in useful locations... and, as a roadie, one agent placed a couple on the stage.

It was later that we realized what triggered the attempt to kill so many people: the number of people with CAPs over our magic number was higher than usual, and, even with a lot of the crowd un-tested, given the repeal of mandatory testing laws, this must have inflamed the leadership.

We placed snipers in building around the park.

Yes, you may be laughing, but, with an elaborate sensor net, AIs for target assessment, and, most importantly, both laser and power rifles, the range wasn't much of a problem.

There were at least 50,000 people in the meadow, waiting for the concert to begin. Our sensor web detected and followed the thirty seven people dropping their special packages into various trash bins... and who ambled out. We traced 'em all.

One thing we had decided to do for the organizers was to handle the trash... even though they didn't know it was us. After all, this concert was to benefit Earth First, after all... and the monies from tickets were already in the pockets of that organization, so they didn't mind staging this to look like a Confederacy move.

The fifty-three men and women who were organized to have automatic weapons along with gas masks and atropine for the nerve gas that was about to be released were located and traced.

The two hundred police officers were also carefully tagged, as were the sixty-five hundred citizens who carried guns.

As we staged our forces, ready to pop in while wearing full combat armor with heavy weapons, we quietly removed the nerve-gas bombs from the trash bins via the trash-trans net we'd established and kept an eye on the prepared folks while inserting a harmless nano-tech based sleep agent that had to be inhaled. We wanted the wolves to show themselve.

All of the people who were ready for the mass gassing pulled out their shot of atropine, hit themselves with it, and then, at the stroke of 7PM, whipped out their gas masks and put them on. We detected the detonation of the nerve gas canisters-- on the moon-- and set off our packages.

The Central Park extraction went off without a hitch.

What, you wanted details?

It was a warm August evening in Central Park when the gas bombs went off. The cloud of our replacements for the nerve gas spread quickly and easily and people couldn't avoid inhaling them, causing people to quickly fall asleep.

The cops tried to herd people away from the stage-- which also got hit with the cloud-- but soon were falling like flies.

The fifty three who stood up to open fire on the crowd were shot with laser fire from roof-top snipers, just before the interdiction field went up.

We televised everything we saw, live, as it was happening.

We showed the trick with the trash-bins to get the nerve gas away from the crowd, invited news people and police forensic experts to come and investigate the site, and, all told, took three days to sort out the people who were adamant in the opportunity to leave earth.

Out of a crowd of fifty seven thousand people on that lawn, only fifteen hundred were saying "No way!". Oddly enough, none of those left, after CAP screening of the ones without cards, were completely un-qualified for colonization.

We brought in a GTU, General Tranport Unit, the "Do It My Way", to Earth, and, instead of loading Marines, we put in a bunch of these folks. We managed to fill the three thousand-pod transports that were already in Earth Orbit, too, and were debating over whether to put our passengers on ice-- a nano-induced hibernation-- or to carry them to one or more of the colony worlds directly.

I was glad when the "Do It My Way" and three GMUs-- General Manufacturing Units-- were dispatched to establish a brand new colony. The GMUs were going to build the pods needed for the population before the passengers would awaken.

While people were being sorted out "upstairs" we lucked out due to the age-range of most of our passengers since few of them were old enough to have children needing extraction.

Given that one of my team had stumbled over this plot, I got the unenviable task of seeing if we could pull something of this kind off again.

Being interviewed by Larry King is weird, did you know that? And he wasn't about to let me see his CAP card, either, but, despite having a Marine in full combat armor at my back, I got plenty of pleading from the staff in Atlanta leave with me.

And, the hell of it, I wasn't the one who had worked out all of the Central Park Extraction Plan, but, when you come down to it, my team was deeply involved in helping put the plan together.

Between the time of the extraction and my interview as the so-called architect there had been plenty of news reports by people suspicious of the Confederacy that had come down as neutral. Heck, the FOX network had merely toned down their anti-Confederacy rhetoric, which helped.

I also laughed when questioned about the performers at the concert, who had all declined transport, telling him "Well, they didn't like the limits on how many men or women they could have with 'em, they like the huge pool of groupies they can have. I carefully told them that they should be thanking the Confederacy for providing the current crop of contraceptives... and I don't think they knew how to be very grateful."

"So," Larry asked me, "were any of them eligible?"

I laughed again, saying "Three of the seven could have left with us as volunteers. The others declined to become the property of any of their groupies... which I thought of as insanely funny!"

I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of the little islands in the Pacific that are considered polynesian are, for the most part, depopulated. We brought in more GTUs and dispatched GMUs to establish new colonies and shipped people from the islands, lock, stock and barrel. We didn't take any who refused to leave... but we had few refusals.

That was the start of the new pattern.

We couldn't keep testing facilities open on Earth-- except for countries that felt they needed the advantage, like China-- so we went for mass lifts and in-orbit sortation.

I got to watch as someone realized that we had to give the earthers more resources since we'd be letting them deal with the dickheads on their own, so someone got the idea of having the GMUs, already eating the moon to make us more GTUs, make a huge fleet of non-hyper-capable ships for the remaining humans to use.

We sure didn't have crews for those ships, hell, we didn't even have enough crews for the GTUs, much less GMUs, that were "rolling" off the automated assembly plant on the moon and put into various solar orbits until needed.

Mars, if you haven't looked lately, is, for the most part, gone, as a collection GMUs are taking it apart and new GOU-- General Offensive Units-- are being manufactured, even given our shortage of people to staff them.

Automated factories can be wonderful things, especially since the Mars-fabricated ships are being disguised as large asteroids and placed in the asteroid belt. We already knew the dickheads didn't deal with spaceborne resources well.

I was in charge of a mass extraction from a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, another place in New York City. I had to admit that it gave us interesting ethnic mixes when we were able to pull from such a place.

Nancy agreed with me when I told the planning team I pulled together "We can't interrupt the game. It has to be at either the end of the game or as people are leaving the stadium."

Alec-- the smart-Alec, an Aussie, commented "Are you yanks as crazy as some of the football fans?"

Ellie, from the EU, commented "You mean real football. They call their crap football, you know!"

I laughed, adding, "Yeah, sports fans, even for the more passive sports, like baseball, are getting more... ummmm... aggressive as the Sa'arm get closer. I've heard it said to be a distraction from the future."

Nancy asked "So how do we do it? Announce it?"

I shook my head. "No announcements. It'll be a mass extraction, we need sensor webs and transit portals for all of the exits, we deliver anyone carrying a weapon on Pitcairn to sort 'em separately. We'll need two of the new GTUs and four GMUs for the colonies we'll plant.

Nancy leaned back and laughed. "I knew you were going to say that! But what about dependants?"

Vijaya commented "That will be difficult. Doing a pick-up of dependants has become very... difficult."

Alec spoke up "Yeah, we need a lot more force... and we don't have the manpower to handle it."

Ming, a delicate asian, commented on this "Can't we have the covert arms drop a transport nexus on each doorstep? So we get anyone who enters or leaves their residence picked up directly? And silently?"

And, now you know how we got the people out.

Unfortunately, when that plan was a success, I got both a promotion and a transfer. I managed to keep Nancy with me as I took command of the GTU "Methuselah's Children" and left with my charges.

Given that my two GMUs were sent ahead-- with crews of only four citizens and their "families" aboard each-- Fleet Central advised me to run slowly and have my people trained while en-route so that we'd have a cadre on-board when we got to our destination.

With all of our passengers put into cryptobiostatic hibernation via nanotechnic means we could pick and choose who we awakened, a few at a time, to be trained as part of the Navy or Fleet Auxilliary. We'd get their bodies brought up to speed as they absorbed the technical knowledge they needed, and then put through practical exercises to work the various kinks out of their new bodies. We also brought up their concubines, one at a time, and got them all settled down into quarters.

Even though a GTU is a full 20 kilometres in diameter, we still have tight quarters when carrying over fifty thousand people.

Well, until they become crew, instead of passengers. As we graduated people to crew the ship and integrated them into my chain of command, they got crew quarters, which were much more suited to longer-term occupation.

As a ship's captain I was learning more of my job, just as the trainees were learning theirs. I was less enthusiastic, however, since it didn't seem to fit me very well.

Nancy, of course, had a different opinion. As my exec, she kept a closer eye on the inhabitants of the ship, as well as keeping tabs on the engineering crew.

Meanwhile I spent most of my on-duty time floating in the sensory observing our progress and learning what I needed to know about the full capabilities of a GTU.

How did I know? I wanted to be a more active participant in this "war", if war it be, and I didn't know then where I was going to end up.

It took us two years to arrive at the new colony world.

We'd concentrated on staffing the ship for the first year. We not only had five hundred new citizens as crew but also had almost two thousand concubines backing them up. With my original crew of five hundred, citizen and concubines together, we had an almost full crew for a GTU.

With five civil service families trained up before the first year was done, we started on the next phase, making Marines.

On arrival at the new Colony world we had five thousand Marines trained and another three thousand new citizens still in hibernation.

Nancy and I parted company. I was going to miss her, and the children we'd made together, but she got a completely un-wanted promotion, to Governor of the planet the newbies chose to name "Yank", meaning their sun would be named... damnit-- Yankat.

We did have time together since it took over six months to unload the people we'd loaded in a matter of a day, since we had to bring 'em out of hibernation and then send get them all oriented.

This didn't seem as efficient as podding, but, then, a pod ship could not have made as many runs as we could.

The best surprise of all was sitting in orbit, shortly after we arrived. It was a GOU, the "Hot Time In The City", and, when my orders arrived, I found out it had been sent out under AI control as my new command. I hadn't realized that I'd been given training in GOU operation, as had my crew.

Turning over "Methuselah's Children" to Nancy's command, where the GMUs would have robots remove the guts and rebuild it as a GOU, I brought my crew over to the Hot Time and we got underway.

We had full magazines, up-to-date status reports and a great interest in showing the Dickheads a hot time.