Coil The Adept

[RVM45]

Chapter Seventeen





I didn’t feel much like engaging the giant cyborgs in witty repartee. They were pretty much mindless and the human parts hadn’t chosen to follow that path.

“Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I shouted.

I swung my jumbo oni-sized kanabo and struck the lead giant’s ankle inward just before he’d put his weight on it. The effect was much like a foot sweep. He wobbled ponderously and then fell with a huge crash.

I’d thought such a huge, slow and ungainly creature would be unsteady on its feet. An octopod built lower to the ground would have been far better tactically.

I crushed its head as it floundered around gracelessly like a tortoise on its back.

As I turned toward the second monster two of Vee’s spawn were hosing it in a crossfire of super hot flaming napalm streams. Just as number-two collapsed inward having been reduced to a smoldering hulk the headless first cyborg climbed drunkenly to its feet.

Yeah, the head had some eyes and high gain microphones but all the human parts and the thing’s silicone brain was housed in the mid-section. It also had a number of heretofore redundant eyes and ears facing both front and back.

One Vee was dry. The other Vee sprayed a desultory stream of napalm at the infernal contraption.

I was supposed to be saving every bit of lightening jutsu possible—but damned nation!

I struck the headless giant robot with one thunderbolt after another. I wasted five lightening bolts where one or at most two would have sufficed simply because the wreck hadn’t had enough time to fall to the ground yet.

*************** ***************** ************************

It was time to do the “Escape and Evade” thingy. There were a number of drawbacks. We had far more people this time. We had farther to transport many of them and we had far less rolling stock.

I mean with three concentration camps almost within Kunai throwing distance of each other folks would catch on if we started stealing school busses in large numbers once more.

We loaded those who couldn’t walk onto open flat-bedded semi trailers. Seeing the loved ones would help stiffen the reserve of the walkers. The trailers also served to carry the refugee’s pitiful belongings. Many of them were loathe to leave their issue blankets for instance and I quite understood. For many, those two military surplus wool blankets were all that they had left.

There were also a few semis carrying food along with more weapons and ammo for the troops.

So within a couple of hours the federal troops were hot on our trail.

Wind jutsu is. I cannot do it, but it is nonetheless. We had some strong wind jutsu practitioners that we’d been force-feeding chi for two or three weeks.

An F-6 tornado formed at the rear of our column. I’m not sure that such a mighty tornado had ever come about naturally in the history of the Earth. Jutsu is one thing but we’d waited for prime tornado season and weather to give our wind Adepts the strongest possible foundation to build on.

A jacked-up super tornado is one thing. A super tornado guided by an intelligent and malevolent hand is something else again—especially with my spawn surfing the gale force peripheral winds on spawned giant ravens raining down lightening bolts on anything the F-6 hadn’t completely trashed.

Once the F-6 had pretty well trashed the pursuit our Adepts kept up a steady procession of F-5 tornados to screen our flanks and our rear. There was no cause for unseemly haste.

************** ****************** ******************************

When we arrived at the closest newly created enclave I saw how the Indians spelled relief to thousands of homeless refugees—teepees. I mean: no excrement Sherlock.

In the old days teepees were made of buffalo skin but even many Indians had switched to canvas before they were all confined to reservations. Tent grade canvas works just about as well and even has some advantages. You need fifteen or sixteen sixteen-foot-long poles and a quantity of canvas. The true teepee was more than a mere conical shell. There was also an inner wall that increased the insulation considerably.

The old traditional teepees had a small fire pit in the center. Each of the Oklahoman teepees had one of those wood stoves made from two 55 gallon barrels stacked one atop the other.

It was a sight well worth seeing—all those mostly white teepees arrayed in row after row. It brought to mind the old Western movies or television shows that were so common at one time. The movies seemed to imply that in the old west, that just over any hill might be an Indian village with a population in the tens of thousands—like South American Army Ants—or Uncles—or some such.

************** ***************** *************************

“Well I think that y’all have things under control here,” I told Crow and Two Rabbits.

“Feel free to send folks to our Adept academy until you have enough Adepts to start your own school. Let me know if you need food, weapons, advice or any other help that I can give you,” I said.

“I want to go with you to study at your Adept academy,” The boy with an extra right arm said.

“Don’t you want to stay and try to get rid of that extra right arm first?” I asked him.

“Why? The extra arm works and it is all that I have left of my brother. I want to try to fit an advanced prosthetic on this,” he said.

He pulled up the smock that they’d given him. He had more remaining on the left side than I’d thought at first glance. There was the entire upper arm and a good four-inch stump below the elbow.

“They will long rue the day that they strengthened my hand to be used against them,” he said.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“They call me ‘Lefty’,” he said.

*************** ****************** ***************************

Chi pills continued to sell well but the market was becoming semi-saturated and we couldn’t continue to sell them at the same price per carat as gem quality emeralds. Our farmers continued to sell impossibly high quality foodstuffs to the outsiders in our area. Our artists and craftsmen did a booming trade.

When the government outlawed virtually all firearms it opened a large market for our small arms factories.

One must understand something about the arms trade. Weapons that are well maintained and fired a judicious number of rounds can last for a century or two. One isn’t likely to fire many hundreds of rounds per week in the face of black market ammunition prices.

Ammunition is both consumable and perishable—though stored in a cool and dry place it can be perfectly good after fifty years or more.

Lead bullets are easy to cast. Even swaged and jacketed bullets aren’t beyond the determined home armorer. Hand jacked or hydraulically driven presses can swage brass cartridge cases. Failing that, cases can be laboriously turned by hand on a lathe.

Powder is an order of magnitude harder to manufacture but a man can make a modest amount of black powder for his family and for himself. Nitrocellulose can even be extruded into gun cotton—though this results in the less desirable “Single Base” gunpowder. Double base powder requires nitroglycerine—something most prudent folks would sooner avoid fooling with.

Primers are the bottleneck. Priming compound—well I don’t like to say that something is flat out “Impossible”—but safe manufacture of priming compound in a small home workshop is exceedingly difficult. I’ve never seen a recipe that looked good enough to risk my eyes and fingers to experiment with.

Someone is thinking: “Yeah but…”

Sure places like DuPont and Remington turn out primers by the million. Yeah and they have invested millions of dollars to build factories that turn primer manufacture into something sane people are willing to labor at.

We not only had millions of dollars to invest in a primer-manufacturing factory and we could employ spawn to do anything risky.

High quality primers packed a thousand rounds per brick didn’t sell for an equal weight of gold but they did sell for almost an equivalent weight of silver.

There were other requirements. We produced and sold high quality reloading equipment at a very modest profit to create a market for our primers. We created and sold bullet molds and sizers along with swaging equipment.

We sold brass cases and loaded ammunition. We sold books that showed how to manufacture black powder and nitrocellulose/gun cotton. We sold books showing how to draw brass into cartridge cases. We even sold books on primer manufacture thinking that would cause many to throw up their hands and resolve to buy our primers ahead of all other expenditures.

If someone used our forbidden techniques to go into competition with us—hey, that was cool too. The most important desideratum was that men be armed. Earning an honest profit by helping men achieve that virtuous objective was secondary.

That’s not to say that we didn’t make guns…

We made beaucoup very fine guns.

Long before the government had decided to limit most of their ammunition use to 9mm, .40 S&W, .223 and 12 Gauge. There was some special use of .22 LR—mostly for silenced weapons, and something like the 7mm Magnum for snipers/sharpshooters…

Chitinous body armor was. It would stop any and all pistol rounds except for the hard-kicking and special purpose modern armor-piercing rounds. The armor would also stop many rifle rounds. Laws went into battle with almost as much body coverage as knights of old. Meanwhile the chitin body armor was forbidden to “civilians.”

Even the local laws went about their business with a breastplate, backplate and football uniform sized thigh-protectors. The thigh protectors didn’t give the thigh one hundred percent coverage but it made shooting for the thighs a very uncertain method of dropping a law.

Past experience had shown that laws on patrol simply wouldn’t wear a protective helmet day in and day out. So the higher-ups compromised by making the helmet available when the law felt he was going into harm’s way. When the hypothetical law may or may not be wearing a chitin helmet practicing headshots becomes less than a cure all.

The best protection that most “civilians” could come up with would be a level IIIA vest—perhaps with trauma plate and side panels. IIIA armor is bulky and uncomfortable as well as expensive. Few “civilians” even had IIIA armor—though the lighter level IIA and level II vests were somewhat more common.

The hypothetical insurgent would be going up against opposition that was largely immune to small arms fire at the torso. There was just enough armor on head and thighs to rule out that being the stand-up go-to point of aim.

Some hard core activists went into street-level confrontations armed with medieval type armor-busters—bearded axes, war hammers with a long spike on the backside, maces even kanabo. Meanwhile the government—that could have simply stayed back and used nerve gas or called in an airstrike—felt for some reason that it was necessary to engage the protestors man-to-man.

Be all that as it may. Laws were well enough armored that it wasn’t worth the trouble to worry if they might be “Out-Gunned.”

We turned out quite a few Enfield-style bolt-action rifles with under-folding stocks. No, the Enfield’s lock-up was somewhat weak. It was the stock that was two-piece like the old Enfield. With a folding stock and a fourteen-inch barrel the rifle was reasonably concealable under a jacket or carried in a briefcase or whatever.

The under-folding stock was reasonably fast to open and it locked up tight enough for reasonable accuracy. Chambered in our proprietary 7mm-08 Caliber Armor-Buster ammo it was a reliable vest penetrator.

The government wasn’t the only opposition that folks faced. Urban gangs and roving rural brigands were an increasing problem and for whatever reason the state didn’t expend much effort targeting the gangs. For one thing, they were far more interested in rooting out dissidents and people trying to practice tradecraft. It also seemed that the actions of the gangs generally aided the state’s aims The gangs gave the state more excuse to crank down and made the victims more complaisant.

Some folks didn’t groove on being victims though. Some folk’s resolve to avoid becoming helpless victims approaches being a mania.

Hey dude! If you got a craving for weapons let me help you scratch your itch!

So we also did a brisk trade in “gang-busting” firearms. We had a couple of submachine-guns in .30 Carbine. There was a fairly good copy of the Sten fitted with our 32-round .30 Carbine magazines. The other gun was a PPSh-41. The PPSh used the same 32-round magazines as the Sten but it could also accept an 88 round drum.

Our proprietary .30 Carbine rounds were nickel-plated, used large primers and were loudly advertised as unsafe for the old .30 M1 Carbines that might still be around—though no one had produced a .30 M1 in over 120 years.

Our loads got a wee-bit more velocity from the 13” barrels of the sub-guns than the old .30 Carbine loads obtained from an 18” barrel—and they screamed out of the muzzle like a Banshee being raped by a Sasquatch.

We also produced any number of semi-automatic pistols as well as beaucoup single and double-action revolvers in myriad calibers and myriad styles.

Standardize calibers and actions? Why? For many folks, collecting beautiful firearms is what makes life worthwhile. Who wants to go into his secret gunroom and look at three-score parkerized 9mm as well as two-score .40 S&Ws—all with exactly the same action, barrel length, black plastic stocks etcetera?

As Castaneda had Don Juan say once:

“Your resolutions injure the spirit.”

Where we really made money though was selling drugs.

Get your mind out of the gutter. Some street drugs can have some beneficial effects and it is annoying to have to have to search for them on the street when and if you feel the urge. If you get right down to it—much of the undesirable effects of chronic drug use is caused by the black-market culture rather than drug use per se…

Nonetheless drugs in combination with the black-market subculture ruin many folk’s life and I didn’t feel comfortable contributing.

But Yippie-Ki-Ay dudes!

Can you say: “Socialized Medicine”?

Can you say: “Rationed Health Care”?

Can you say: “Black-Market Health Care”?

My enclave produced Penicillin, Amoxicillan, Streptomycin, Tetracycline and several Sulfonamides. We produced Aspirin, Dextropropoxyphene (the old Darvon), Pethidine (Demerol). We manufactured Procaine (Novacaine) and Lidocaine (Xylocain). We also made Ketamine, Benzedrine and Valium.

We turned out beautiful surgery kits with the old style reusable scalpels. We made autoclaves and dozens of other gadgets that would come in handy for the black-market physician or surgeon to set up a secondary—or primary—place of practice that was off-the-record.

The aim was to sell the medical drugs and equipment for minimal profit. I stuck by my rule that if there was no profit to be made then there was a minimal need for that product or service.

The way that medical gear and drugs flew off our proverbial shelves convinced me that there was a booming demand for those products.

There is no equitable distribution system that cannot be abused. However throughout history the best equitable distribution system that has ever been conceived of is the Free Market. It may seem cold and cruel to sell life-saving drugs to the highest bidder. On the other hand, why give them to the lowest bidder?

At least with the Free Market, high prices alert potential investors that there is a profit to be made.

An investor may be a thoroughly rotten human being, but if he makes Penicillin and sells it cheaply enough to outsell the competition then he benefits many Penicillin users. Eventually Penicillin becomes cheap enough that most people in need can obtain it at a price that they can afford.

No, nothing is ever one hundred percent efficient. But social utility isn’t the main justification for Capitalism. The best justification is moral:

A man owns himself and the products of his labor.

Thou shalt not Steal.

Thou shalt not Covet.

If God choses to bless a man abundantly and that man choses to be a miser and hoard his wealth rather than being a good steward, then that is between him and God. Anyway, the Bible says that the evil rich man is industriously laying up treasures that will eventually be inherited by the righteous.

Sometimes it takes a few generations and since history is an ongoing process there will always be some rotten greed-heads laying up treasures. You simply must leave some things up to God. We weren’t put on this Earth to play Robin Hood or to be flyswatters.

Having said all that, even though we increased our production of medical equipment and drugs dramatically, the street level price continued to grow precipitously as word got around.

And yes, I did donate some quantities of healthcare supplies to folks that I felt were poor but deserving. No, that isn’t a violation of my Capitalistic principles. I can do anything that I want to with my property. If I choose to flush one hundred dollar bills down the toilet—that too is my prerogative.

I just earnestly felt that the best thing that I could do was to sell at least ninety-five percent of my output on the open market. Certainly I couldn’t have afforded to double and triple our drug output year after year without the generous funds provided via the free market.

************* ***************** ****************************

Things had settled in for the long haul. I received several requests to create more enclaves.

Some Adepts or even mundane freedom fighters raided a few more concentration camps. Our enclave as well as the Oklahoma group sent along tornado creating Adepts. Adept created tornadoes lack a certain “Oomph!” outside of Tornado Alley and/or out of season. Nonetheless even comparatively feeble F-4s or even F-3s were more than enough to thoroughly discourage pursuit by forces that weren’t dedicated enough to risk life and limb to apprehend fugitives.

Then the government tumbled wise. They fitted the detention centers with suicide switches that could flood the camps with neurotoxins on short notice. There is no point in rescuing corpses.

I read once that back in the 1800s the British started executing ten Irish civilians for every British soldier slain by the IRA. The IRA replied by proclaiming that for every civilian executed in retaliation that one hundred British civilians would be executed. I’m not sure, but I think that halted the retaliation against civilians before it ever got started. If not, it quickly brought it to a halt.

My people weren’t involved but a number of aggrieved Adepts and even non-Adepts retaliated against the extended family of detention center guards all the way down to second cousins for the mass executions.

We had become almost totally self-sufficient in our enclave and I had hopes that our enclave and most of the other enclaves could largely set this wave of repression out on the sidelines much like Switzerland sat out WWI and WWII.

Maybe we could have…

Except that folks set up a busy underground railroad to move dissidents to the nearest enclave. Yeah, and supplying the guerillas with weapons, ammunition, explosives and how-to manuals didn’t set well with them.

They already had a few government-sponsored Adepts and a rudimentary ability to find and breach enclaves. The ongoing hostilities led them to take their enclave busting to a whole other level.






.....RVM45

[RVM45]

Friends,

It has become fairly easy to rip out one of these 3000+ word chapters—except when I can't envision what comes next. That is the current delay.

Here is a picture of a folding stock Enfield.

I HATE saw-handle grips and slab-sided pistols—especially Revolvers. {The 1911A1 is rounded on the top of the slide and has some interesting contours at the Muzzle—compare to the SIGS or Gag! Glock…}

Anyway, the Enfield Could have kept the Pistol Grip from the Original Wood…


…..RVM45

[Texican]

RVM,
Thanks for the new long chapter....
There will not be peace....
Until the would be masters are no more....
Texican....

[ted]

Thank you RVM.

[stjwelding]

Thank you RVM, looking forward to more when you can.
Wayne

[RVM45]

Chapter Eighteen





The man’s name was “Chester Overton.” He was young and tall and blond. Apparently he ran around clad in a three-piece suit most of his waking hours. He had what looked like a three carat diamond ring on his left ring finger and a Masonic ring with a more modest diamond on his right ring finger. He also wore a Rolex watch with a gold colored case and band.

His minions had sniffed all around our enclave and left enough “messages in bottles” that I’d agreed to meet him.

“This country is going to Hell in a hand-basket,” Overton began.

That is an old rhetorical technique: start out with something the listener will almost certainly agree to. That gets a speech or an interview off on a positive note. I wasn’t playing so I just sat and looked at him waiting for him to go on.

“There has got to be a drastic change,” he continued.

That is a dubious statement. There is no metaphysical necessity for things to change for the better. They were just as likely to continue on in the same vein or start deteriorating even faster.

“I have started my own political party. I’m running for president. We have a number of candidates for Governor, Senate and The House as well as many local candidates for state senates, mayoral offices, city council and sheriff,” He said.

“I’m happy for you,” I said.

“What do you think of my platform?” he asked.

“Politics is a wacked game. There are numerous homeostatic mechanisms that work against reform and the natural progression is always toward more control. In the modern world there is a sharp dichotomy between the character traits needed to be elected to office and the character traits needed to do a creditable job in office,” I said.

“Also, the public has been force-fed so much socialist nonsense that one doesn’t even know where to begin to reason with them. Additionally most people today ‘reason’ by quoting short snappy slogans. Given all that, your platform is largely beside the point,” I said.

“Are you saying that I shouldn’t even try?” Overton asked.

“So far as I’m concerned, you’re free to do whatever you wish—including slitting your belly and committing seppuku. I’ll even lend you a wakizashi but please do it outside to keep down the mess and clutter in my office,” I said.

“I—in contrast—am not going to make any campaign contributions to your party. That would amount to flushing paper fiat currency down the toilet,” I said.

“I’m not here soliciting contributions. I want to contract with you for bodyguards for key personnel and folks who are at high risk and to provide security at some of our rallies. I may also want to hire some of your people as investigators. I don’t plan to start by flinging mud, but I want to have my own stack of slush-balls on hand if this turns into a snowball fight,” Overton said.

Executive protection, security and espionage were supposed to be some of our fortes. In addition we could always use more funds and our Adepts needed to try their skills in the outside world occasionally. There didn’t seem any reason to turn Overton down—even though I thought his proposed reforms had almost no chance of coming to fruition and wouldn’t restrain the beast much—or even a little—even if he somehow got them passed in law.

**************** ********************** ***************************

Jealousy and Envy were identical twins. They were seventeen years old and they’d graduated from the Adept academy a little over a year earlier.

They were both five foot-nine and weighed a bit over one seventy. They had long very straight black hair that reached past their belts when they let it hang freely.

Usually they braided their hair and pinned it into a bun when training or a mission. Their complexion was just a bit swarthy and their cobalt blue eyes glowed with an eerie inner light when they weren’t consciously suppressing the glow.

Now you have to understand Adept training—and don’t judge by my early training or lack thereof—I was highly atypical.

As the chakra tree and the chi meridians are developed, usually dramatic physical skills and abilities are the first to come into being. The skills are just on the edge of what is possible in terms of biology and ordinary physics.

Chi stimulates the muscles to perform a bit beyond what they could do via ordinary stimulation. Then chi helps the Adept recover and prosper from the grueling workouts far faster and fully than a mundane could recover even if somehow he could spur his body to such efforts.

In time the muscles, nerves and bone—not to mention connective tissue—are rewoven.

Mundane muscles move via actin and myosin fibers working kinda like rack and pinions. Adept’s muscle works via a different mechanism and it is stronger pound-for-pound. The nerves carry more messages faster than mundane nerves. The bones are denser and stronger.

Some Adept abilities appear to violate the laws of physics but even before an Adept can get into the gray spooky realm filled with “Woo”, the physical ability explodes in all directions.

The bounciest NFL football players and NBA basketballers have a standing vertical leap of about four feet. The girls were jumping over six feet straight up midway through their second year of Adept training. The record for standing broad jump is about twelve feet. The girls could do close to seventeen feet.

Mundane ninjas in Japan work up to leaping from five-story scaffolding—usually without serious injury. The girls could have added a story or two to that with far less need to suck-up the pain to stand again after landing.

Strength? Take the weight that was the world record for a man in their weight class—with super-squat suit, reinforced bench press shirt and lots of skill practice on the Olympic lifts. You should take the record these men set on their very best day ever.

The girls could add eighty to one hundred pounds and lift that weight five to eight repetitions. That is “Raw”—without any specialized lifting paraphernalia. The girls could do that on any given day and given an hour or two to rest between sessions, they could do those lifts two or three times in one day—and the next day and the next.

The girls decided early on that they wanted to specialize in stealth, tracking, stalking and surreptitious entry and exfiltration. They would have had crazy skills even without any true jutsu. They had numerous Adept abilities—including multiplying their physical strength by seven or eight hundred percent for twenty or thirty minutes at a time with no damage or backlash except the need to rest for a few hours and probably eat a big meal before they were able to do it again.

*************** ******************** ****************************

Jealousy, Envy, Lefty and two other Adepts named “McIntosh” and “Beagle” were summoned to the dispatcher’s office. The dispatcher introduced them to Overton and left them to confer with the potential client alone.

“The government is doing all sorts of genetic and cybernetic experimentation that is illegal even today,” Overton said.

“I find that hard to believe,” Lefty said.

Lefty had two right arms of course. He had one of the silver prostheses that Adepts used replacing the stump where his second left arm had been.

Lefty could cast a glamor to pass among the mundane without too much scrutiny He’d never be a low profile stealth fighter though.

There was more to his alteration than simply grafting his twin brother’s arms onto his ribcage. Without a scapula and clavicle for leverage the extra limbs would have been feeble. Then there was a crying need for something like pectorals—major and minor—and so forth and so on.

The cracked-pots had lengthened Lefty’s torso, given him extra ribs and a sternum long, wide and robust enough to serve as attachment site for two sets of pectorals and hinged in the middle for greater torso flexibility.

The end result was that Lefty was seven-foot six. He had huge lungs and two hearts to support all the extra tissue.

Somewhere along he way he’d developed a lump on his forehead that split open to reveal an oversized third eye.

People speak of parallax as the means of perceiving depth. There are about thirty-eight ways that the eye can perceive depth and only about eleven make use of parallax.

Someone used to having only one eye does a good job of perceiving depth. What they really miss is peripheral vision on the blind side.

At any rate, parallax only works out to about eighteen feet—beyond that the two views are virtually identical.

Be all that as it may. What parallax that exits is horizontal. Estimating the distance to vertical posts or trees should—hypothetically—be simple. Figuring the distance to a horizontal figure—like a crocodile—not so simple.

Lefty’s new eye came online fully functional and now he had vertical parallax as well as horizontal. Never mind that his new eye was bigger than the other two and had far more data gathering power than both of his “regular” eyes added together.



There really seemed to be no useful purpose to Lefty’s conversion—except perhaps to learn techniques that might prove useful in less ambitious transformations. Lefty really seemed to be the result of some mad scientist’s febrile tinkering.

He would have been a fierce fighter—for a few moments. Even with extra lungs and two hearts Lefty got winded rather quickly. He really wasn’t twice as effective as two regular soldiers. He ate more than two soldiers and needed beaucoup special gear.

Apparently the experimenters had cloned Lefty and his brother and had used large amounts of undifferentiated embryonic tissue to knit their patchwork creation together. Since Lefty had no memory of any life outside of the laboratory it was quite probable that he and his brother were clones themselves.

Lefty had become an adept though. His muscles and bones had been rewoven and supercharged. Since he could only pass himself off as normal with the greatest difficulty anyway he’d packed his frame with heavy-duty Adept bone and frame.

A seven and a half foot man with four arms who only weighed four hundred and sixty pounds was only a semi-sumo—like Jason. There was nothing “Semi” about Lefty’s strength or jutsu though.

Overton passed out purple plastic folders to everyone. The bound paper within was over an inch thick.

“These folders mustn’t leave this room. You will return here for several days until you’ve committed the important points to memory and then they will be burned in the thermite can,” Overton said.

Lefty flipped through his folder casually as Overton spoke and drew diagrams on the chalkboard. Marker boards had replaced chalkboards almost everywhere except the enclaves. Overton’s hesitant draftsmanship betrayed his lack of familiarity with the medium.

“What do you expect to accomplish by documenting the experiments being carried out in this covert laboratory?” Envy asked.

“If the people knew what the government was doing behind the veil of secrecy they would rise up in righteous moral outrage,” Overton opined.

Jealousy snorted in derision. Beagle broke off a short chuckle. Lefty continued to leaf through his folder as if he were reading a Spiderman comic book.

“I think that you give the proletariat too much credit,” Envy said.

“I wish that you’d pay attention to me. You can read the folder’s contents later,” Overton said to Lefty in a tone of barely suppressed pique.

Lefty handed the folder back to Overton.

“You can burn mine. I’ve already committed all of it to memory,” Lefty said.

“Give the rest of us five minutes to catch up and you can burn ours too,” Envy said.

“What do you think?” Overton asked Lefty. “Do you think bringing all the secret and immoral and illegal experiments done at this facility to light will accomplish anything?”

“Don’t care,” Lefty said. “The sage acts solely for the sake of action without regard for consequences. I hate the type of dirty knob-gobblers who do things like this to people.”

Lefty did a quadruple front bicep pose for emphasis.

“If you tell me that I may have a chance to kill dark crafters that is enough for me,” Lefty said. “Count me in.”

Beagle and McIntosh said that they were in as well.

Envy and Jealousy looked at each other momentarily then Jealousy said:

“We are in.”

Overton had guaranteed them twenty five hundred dollars each with several generous bonuses for either partial or fully successful completion. The twins could be very selective indeed about what—if any—future missions they accepted with that kind of money put by.

**************** ********************* ****************************

Envy caught Lefty outside the dispatch building.

“Jealousy and I are twins,” Envy said. “I know that you had a twin and I know what became of him. I sympathize—but nonetheless you can’t expect Jealousy and I to tiptoe around the fact that we’re twins while we’re around you.”

“I wouldn’t expect that,” Lefty said. “But please allow me to intrude in your business just a wee bit. You may not always have your sister. Cherish your time together.”

“That is quite okay. I take no offence and you’re absolutely right,” Envy said.

“What did you think of the photos of the site?” Envy then asked Lefty.

There were more than enough satellites with high-powered optics turned toward Earth to give one a very close-up photo of allmost anything he might crave to examine. Except that views of certain areas were redacted.

So one had to engage a hacker, corrupt a civil master or corrupt civil masters from other countries.

There were other ways. There were drones that could pass as a bumblebee or a butterfly. There were drones that looked just like vultures or red-tailed hawks. They could soar far overhead for hours taking digital snapshots all the while.

“He seems to have used many sources of data and incorporated all of them into creating a virtual 3-D model and then used 2-D stills of his virtual model from multiple viewpoints. At least his photos don’t quite look real and that’s how I’d have handled the problem,” Lefty said.

“Could you have written the software?” Envy asked.

“Yeah, but I’d have labored at it…

“Wait a minute! You want to know if I’m more than just a pretty face sitting atop an iconic body don’t you?” Lefty asked.

“Envy, do you have black out?” Lefty asked.

“No, Jealousy and I have blue out. It’s even less of a power than red out although it beats having nothing,” Envy said.

“I have never had any eye jutsu previously. Watch this,” Lefty said.

His big eye turned black and he brought Envy into his black out. Lefty’s super black out extended well over a hundred yards in every direction.

“There is something about this mission that doesn’t make sense. Public opinion just isn’t that big a factor in the modern world. I know that you only care about fighting the dark crafters, but all else being equal wouldn’t you prefer to survive to fight them again, and again?” Envy asked.

“Lets keep your black out a secret between you and me and Jealousy. It’ll be an ace up our sleeve,” Envy said.

***************** ******************** ****************************

The facilities weren’t any artificial wombs filled with glowing cyan fluid with monsters gestating inside. The research was in weaving gene sequences to order and getting neurons to form lasting bonds with computer chips and other electronic gear.

Almost all the things had already been done. This lab was simply searching ways to do it faster, cheaper and better.

That was just one of the reasons the Adepts were dubious. Nonetheless the money was good and the mission seemed doable.

Beagle controlled a number of Beagle Dogs. He sent a cadre of small dogs around the outside of the compound as scouts and as an early warning system should reinforcements be sent from unknown quarters.

Lefty did a black out. The twins already knew that Left had black out but both the others glanced at him in surprise. None of the others had their own black out but they’d trained while being piggybacked on someone else’s black out many times. They could tell that Lefty’s black out was especially powerful for the same reason.

McIntosh could levitate. He wrapped one arm around each twin as he lifted them over the electric fence. Lefty and Beagle used a concealment jutsu that hid them better than well-crafted ghille suits and waited outside.

Once inside, McIntosh who wasn’t as skilled at surreptitious movement hunkered down to wait on the twins.

Envy and Jealousy split up. Each of them had directions to get to a different stand-alone computer terminals to download all the data. The girls were comparatively strong hackers but with limited time they were relying on code words and canned programs that Overton had obtained somehow. They didn’t need to know.

************* *************** *******************************

Envy’s download finished a minute or two earlier than they’d planned. She stepped out of the building and eluded a walking guard…

At that moment sirens started screaming. Multiple high-powered lights lit the compound up brighter than noon on a sunny summer day.
McIntosh had the bad luck to be silhouetted when he was between some very bright lights and the guards. They hosed him with multiple rounds before he had a chance to react.

Some kind of knockout gas flooded the complex of cubicles where Jealousy crouched by a computer anxiously waiting for the data to load into her portable hard drive. She had time to retrieve her hard drive and she made it outside just as her knees started to buckle.

The three remaining team members knew that McIntosh was dead and that Jealousy was down on her knees gasping for air. Envy ran towards her sister. Beagle was sending some of his dogs to ground and using a few others to check for ambushes along their favored lines of retreat.

Lefty was supposed to stay put and provide fire support for the entry team when and if they made it to his position.

Instead Lefty ran to the electric fence. It was charged with enough current to kill a mundane—or a charging elephant or rhinoceros. He grabbed the fence in his hands—all four of them—and he ripped it asunder like the temple veil.

Lefty drew two oversized “Broomhandle Style” semi-automatic pistols made to take advantage of his XXXL physique. The fifty caliber rimless rounds rivaled the .500 S&W Magnum for power. He held a Confederate style Bowie short sword with knuckle-bow and eighteen-inch blade in each of his lower hands. He bared his teeth in a grimace that was part anger and part joy that he could finally strike back at his most hated enemy.

Lefty wrecked a double squad of rifle-toting guards on his way to where Envy was trying frantically to revive her twin.

He threw Jealousy over one shoulder and said one short word to Envy.

“Out,” Left bellowed in a tone that assumed that non-compliance was not even an option in this corner of reality.

As they passed McIntosh’s position Lefty grabbed his bloody body as well.

None of the five had known that there was a considerable back-up team on call. There was no need to share that bit of intel with them. In a few moments most of the guards in the compound had permanently laid aside all Earthly concerns.

“You can put her down Lefty. She’s dead,” Envy said in a monotone.

“She was dead before I picked her up. That is no reason to leave her body for the dark crafters to analyze,” Lefty said.

“You hate them, don’t you?” Envy said.

“I wouldn’t spit on them if they were ablaze. I’d go considerably out of my way to spit on their shadows though,” Lefty said.

“Things will be very different for you now. I can’t say that I know what you’re going through because each of us is different. I can’t live your grief but I can relate to it. If you need to talk, I’m always available. If there is anything that I can give you that will help…” Lefty started.

“It is no use. Words are scant comfort. You grieve but you aren’t alone,” he said more succinctly.





.....RVM45

[Texican]

Thanks RVM for the chapter....
Texican....

[stjwelding]

RVM45 Thank you for the chapter, always looking for more of your story.
Wayne