Gabriel thanked her again as he reached for the first file. Then he paused as a thought occurred to him. He looked her up and down, assessing her very conservative dull green dress that kept her upper arms covered and went down to cover everything, including her feet. “Grace, you’re from here in the Theocracy, right?”
“Umm, yessir.” She gulped, a flash of fear in her eyes.
“Relax, you’re not in trouble or anything, but I am wondering — is every girl around here nowadays taught that they should not speak up against a man? And, if she does, it is that something that typically warrants a trial?”
“Oh, no, sir!” Grace exclaimed, eyes wide at her outburst. She immediately corrected herself into a more subdued posture. “No, sir. Usually if a woman has to bear witness, we just tell our men and then they decide if they are going to sponsor us… that’s uh… granting us permission to speak and taking any blame should something go wrong…. Or, they testify on their woman’s behalf.” She shrugged. “Usually, if a lady talks out of turn like Miss Spence did, then it’s just a slap on the wrist, forbidding them to go out into public, or something of the like by their men.”
“But bringing them to trial?”
Grace gave another shrug. “Unusual, maybe, but not totally unheard of... especially at the end of the month close to auction time.” She frowned and cocked her head. “Shouldn’t you know all this, being a lawyer and all?”
“I usually handle the bigger, high profile cases for capital offenses. Something like this is normally considered so small that it flies under my radar. But, now it has me thinking,” Gabriel admitted. “You heard about Miss Spence’s trial?”
She looked abashed and even darted her eyes around to make sure no one else was listening. “Sir, everyone heard about that one,” she whispered. “A noblewoman in trouble for speaking up? My own father used that as an example for me to keep quiet.” She then blushed. “I-I’m sorry, sir, I-I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He waved her off. “Don’t worry about it. Your secret is safe with me. After all, I did ask.” Another thought occurred to him. “Why does your father allow you to work?”
She looked embarrassed by that question. “Because it’s not like we’re a big noble family, sir, with lotsa money. We have mouths to feed at home and we all need to work.”
Gabriel released a huff of air as he reached for a stylus and a sheaf of paper to start taking notes. “You wives be beholden to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives…,” he grumbled, quoting directly from the One Book that the Theocracy of Dixie used as the basis for all their laws. Gabriel wondered what Saint Peter would’ve thought about his words being used in such a way or Paul knowing that this reference, in accordance to his own letter to the city of Corinth, would’ve been used years after his own death. Probably would’ve cheered the fact and declared these people to be good, wholesome, men…, Gabriel thought ruefully as he started to pour over the court records.
The hours dragged on and the more he looked at the records, the grimmer a picture was being painted. Takacy normally stayed up in the Kentucky Providence where he reigned supreme as far as Theocracy judges were concerned. He was the ultimate authority in terms of both rank and seniority.
“So, why did they pull you all the way down here into the Georgia Providence for this one trial?” Gabriel wondered out loud as he reviewed, line by line, the synopsis of every trial Takacy ever tried. The majority were the Theocracy versus some poor woman with no representation, and the outcome was the same each time — guilty with sentencing to Taylorsville where that overseer was located.
Glancing up at the golden-brown map of the continent on the far wall, Gabriel did some mental calculations. Taylorsville was a good way up in the Appalachian Mountains right on the border of the Kentucky and Carolina Providences. It was nestled on a peak approximately halfway between the respective providence capitols of Lexington and Charlotte. Aside from the women’s prison, there was an abundance of lumber and mining camps in the area.
“Why ship women and entertainment in when you can have it right there in the middle of it all?” Gabriel mused.
He imagined morale was high in those work camps. That thought nagged at him and he asked Grace to also have the clerks pull up the prison records from Taylorsville. She regarded him with a funny look but went to do his bidding regardless.
“Call it a hunch,” Gabriel said as he dove back into Takacy’s trial history.
This… was going to take a while. He got up and got some coffee with enough caffeine to keep an airship crew going indefinitely.
***
In the following weeks, the more that Gabriel delved into his investigation, the uglier things became. Prominent families were conducting virtual witch hunts to gain assets that the others controlled, middle-class women and noblewomen were forced into breeder camps to drop bride prices in a region down, and then there was the simple fact that under Theocracy law, a man could just knock a girl up and force them into wedlock. After all, why pay a high price for a virginal wife when you can just go get one used down at the local prison for a quarter amount of the gold?
Gabriel turned in his chair to add another piece of evidence to his wall that was slowly becoming covered with information. There was a map of the Theocracy with arrows going back and forth from Atlanta up to Taylorsville. Then, another arrow from Taylorsville to the Wastelands with a big question mark.
According to the most recent prison records, some iSlaves that were sent up north to Taylorsville were unaccounted for, and there had been increased raider and pirate activity in the area up there. It was a pretty steady stream of attacks that always seemed to just miss a Dixie Air Corps patrol or a Jaeger being in the area. What was worse was that the missing iSlaves weren’t reported missing until days after the fact.
On a hunch, Gabriel got on the phone and called one of his closest friends within the Consortium, Lincoln Powell, Jaeger Emancipator.
“Y’ello?” Lincoln’s deep voice came in from the other end.
“Hey, it’s Messenger down in Atlanta. Ya got a minute?” Gabriel asked, thankful that Lincoln was back in the country and not out in the Wastelands where he normally liked to operate.
“Always, man. What can I do ya for?”
“iSlaves that go missing from Taylorsville Penitentiary… have you ever recovered any of them?”
There was hesitation on the other end followed by an irritated huff of air. “No. By the time the attacks happen from out of the Wastelands by Auctor Frost and his little trio fleet of ramshackle airships, it’s too late to get up there. No one reports their initial sightings because they fly up the Ohio River Valley, practically skimming the water, and hang a sharp right just before they get to the ruins of Louisville,” Lincoln explained. “The Corporate States think they’re going for Dixie and Dixie thinks they’re going for the Corporate States.”
“Interesting…,” Gabriel commented, taking notes on his pad as Lincoln talked. “But, what about their transponders that are in their collars?”
“They’re not activated,” Lincoln replied. “By the time Taylorsville reports the missing iSlaves, its days after the fact and they report that they’ve already turned the control batons in to the Consortium Offices here in Lexington. It’s like bureaucracy at its worst up there… I’ve been trying to combat it for years now.” He paused on the other end. “You got a line on something else happening here?”
“Right now, I have a growing theory about what’s going on since I have a judge down here in Atlanta constantly funneling girls off the street up there toward you,” Gabriel said. “And, a lot of them have then conveniently gone missing from Taylorsville, provided they’re not just bought up by the local populace.”
“Yeah, the locals here love ‘em,” Lincoln admitted. “Why try to woo and marry a girl when you can just buy one’s contract, knock ‘em up, and — boom — instant wife. I
t’s been keeping the bride price down all over the Theocracy, especially those who couldn’t afford one otherwise.”
“Yeah… I was just thinking the same thing,” Gabriel said. “Alright, thanks for your time, Emancipator. Can you give me a ring the next time the raiders hit up there? I’m trying to get a timeline down.”
“Not a problem so long as you come up here and help with them,” Lincoln agreed at once. “I figure that Frosty is due to attack any day now as it’s been a couple of months since his last attack.”
“Will do, thanks.” Gabriel hung up the phone and then furrowed his brow as he wrote down the timetable. He then compared it to when Takacy was down in Atlanta to hear cases and when Anderson was down to collect girls from him. All of the attacks seemed to run a few days to a week from when Anderson had a good gaggle of girls to take back with him, also in the middle of Takacy’s month of sitting on the bench in Atlanta. It gave Takacy plausible deniability, but painted Anderson in a really suspicious light.
He checked his notes on Anderson’s whereabouts. According to the recent report he’d gotten from the Ghost Jaeger that was tailing the man, Anderson skipped town shortly after the open auction. That was another thing that stuck out in Gabriel’s mind as he consulted a book on the auctions for the past year — Anderson was present at every single one at the end of the month and made a few purchases. Those women were then taken up to Taylorsville and some of those were among the missing.
“How the hell did you fly under the radar for so long?” Gabriel muttered as he wrote down even more damning notes. He was missing the piece of the puzzle that tied this back to Takacy. He shifted tactics and started following the paper trail again on Takacy’s court cases, going through each one that came up in no particular order. I’m going to have to have a word with the clerks, he thought as he picked up a five-year old case, and then another that was seven, and then another that was merely a year old. These go back at least ten years and are just scattered about…
Gabriel picked up the next file in his seemingly unending stack. His blood ran cold and his hand shook hard when he saw the names: Theocracy of Dixie vs Connor, Abigail, Gabriel and Adeline McKibben.
“Holy shit…,” he gasped, blinking as he read the case notes. He, his parents, and his sister were all named as litigants when the Spences ruined them. He didn’t know much about the case as he’d been hiding out with the Michaelsons at the time before skipping out of the country to Elysium to join the Consortium.
His eyes darted over the words on the papers as he read the absurd charges ranging from breaking faith with God all the way to more hefty allegations of delinquency on multiple accounts, bankruptcy, and treason due to allowing their little slice of the Theocracy to be underdefended.
“That’s when I transferred the assets to Deak to keep them out of the Spence’s hands…,” Gabriel Said, seething. He had no idea all this had gone down. The Consortium expunged his record as they often do in refugee cases, and when he returned to his home country as a Jaeger, the Theocracy couldn’t touch him.
Grabbing a book that held the full Taylorsville roster, Gabriel furiously flipped through it to compare the numbers that the court had assigned his family with those of the inmates. He found all three of them with no problem. His sister had been the only one to be considered for iSlave status after getting there, but she was listed as deceased due to suicide. That, he knew. What got him was that his father had died doing hard labor on a chain gang while his mother eventually just wasted away after he passed by refusing to eat. He’d known that they’d died while imprisoned, but he never knew the circumstances.
Pain ached in his heart as he closed his eyes and winced at the memories. It just hardened his resolve to break up this little ring that Takacy, Anderson, and now this Auctor Frost fellow seemed to have going on.
“Are you okay, sir?” Grace’s meek voice came from the doorway.
Gabriel opened his eyes and blinked the tears away that had started welling up from the painful past. “Yeah, Grace,” he croaked in a hollow voice as he made a show of checking the time. “It’s just late… that’s all. Why don’t you check out and get back to your family?”
“I still have an hour, sir.”
He waved her off. “Go… I’ll authorize it as adminis-trative leave. Give your family my best.”
“O… okay. Thank you!” Grace responded, suddenly happy.
Gabriel gave her a brave smile as he watched her go. At least someone here can still enjoy a family… he mused as his eyes drifted back down to the court documents. Part of him wanted to be upset with himself for not doing anything about his own family’s untimely demise, but the other part of him remembered his father’s words: Our fates are sealed, but you still have a chance. Go to the Consortium and make sure this doesn’t happen to good people ever again.
“I will, dad…,” Gabriel muttered to his father’s ghost as he dove back into his investigation.
CHAPTER 10
Two days later, Gabriel received word that a raider airship was steaming its way up the Ohio River. Now that word was out about what Auctor Frost’s trio was up to, they were relatively easy to spot. With the help of Coleton Muller and Jaeger Intruder, in his new Bell-Carmichael Devastator II, Gabriel got a quick ride up north by hanging underneath the right-wing bomb rack. As they circled high above the Ohio River just west of the Theocracy border town of Paducah, Emancipator joined them by flying up with his armor’s flight pack. He locked into place on the bomb rack underneath the left wing and cut his engines.
“Fancy meeting you ladies here,” he quipped with a quick salute of his brass gauntlet.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Gabriel responded through the radio. “So, where’s our boy?”
“Coming up from the Memphis Ruins at the north end of the Bay,” Lincoln said, checking a display on his left wrist. “I figure that we have a few minutes before they come around the bend,” he said and pointed off toward the west.
“Well, we can wait,” Coleton added from the cockpit. “I charge by the minute, anyway.”
They all shared a laugh which helped loosen them up in the otherwise tense moments leading up to an engagement. Five minutes later, Coleton called out the contact.
“Tallyho! One fugly looking airship at nine o’clock low! Is that y’all’s buddy?”
Lincoln looked in that direction, a reticle coming down over his helmet where his right eye would be. It telescoped out as he studied the ship. “Yup. The Airship Henosis. The blue-white starburst emblem on the back tailfin is the dead giveaway. Many people confuse it with the Corporates State’s ice and refrigeration company, Polar Ice, but the difference is that Frost puts it against a sandy background with flecks of red mixed in to represent the sand and blood of the Wastelands,” he explained.
“If you know so much about this guy, how come you haven’t bagged him yet?” Gabriel asked jokingly, knowing full well that catching Consortium’s most wanted was easier said than done.
“Remind me — how long has Deliverer gone after Cheyenne and how long did Shadow go after Vyner?” Lincoln countered, holding his armor-encased middle finger toward Gabriel.
“Eh… good point,” Gabriel conceded.
“If you two are done gabbing down there,” Coleton interjected, “how you wanna play this?”
“We could always ask them to land,” Gabriel snickered.
“Oh, hey, yeah, then we can have tea and fuckin’ crumpets while we’re at it!” Lincoln replied sarcastically. “You think they’re gonna just heave to and let us board ‘em?”
“We could ask.”
“Oh sure, we could ask.”
Gabriel could hear the eyeroll and sigh in Lincoln’s voice.
Lincoln chimed in the broadband radio. “Airship Henosis, this is Jaeger Emancipator of the Consortium. Land immediately and stand by to be boarded at once.”
Below them, the airship seemed to pause as its old-fashioned propeller engines cut off and it drifted forward on inertia
. Then it slowly and laboriously turned in place. Three white lights in the aft of the ship then lit off as the airship engaged its Tesla engines and tried to make a dart to the northwest.
“Well… so much for that idea.”
“Fine… we do this the hard way,” Gabriel said.
“Good, I like the hard way,” Coleton replied, pulling the Devastator around and into a screaming dive for the top of the airship. “I’ll buzz the bow of the ship and drop you two off on the way by. You should be able to find a window to bust through while I have their attention.”
“I like it,” Gabriel said, checking his arm cannon and making sure that it was charged and ready to shoot.
Like their beamer sidearms, the arm cannons shaved off pieces of a metal block, formed it into a small metal ball, charged it, and shot it out at high velocity. It was a fuck you, fuck your cover, fuck the five guys behind you, and fuck whatever the hell you all were standing in front of kind of weapon. It turned men into goo and could take care of most aerial vehicles. In small groups, they’d been known to bring down low-flying airships.
As they closed in, the Henosis started things off by firing at them from a ball turret on the back end of the ship where the massive rudder met the horizontal stabilizers. Coleton responded in kind, blowing the turret away.
“Solves that problem of worrying if they were really aggressors or not,” he quipped as he pulled up and flew along the spine of the airship.
“You fucking doubted me?” Lincoln snorted.
“Just a little…,” Coleton snickered. “Here’s your stop!” He pulled a lever on the side of his seat to release the bomb clamps that held the other two Jaegers under his wings. “Thank you for flying Intruder Air!”
“Screw you!” Gabriel called back as he unfurled his suit’s wings while he dropped in the air. He banked left, flying down alongside of the Henosis and following the bulbous tisigen tanks around. He spied a portside window, aimed his arm, and clenched his fist, firing a single shot into the side of the ship. The window blew inward and there was a rush of air out as the pressurized air escaped in a whoosh. It wasn’t as forceful as he’d expected and he figured that Lincoln was already doing the same on the starboard side of the airship.
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