American Gate

Chapter 17: The United States Part 2

Chapter 17: The United States Part 2

July 9th, 2053

Southeast Duremar Plains

The 4th Deep Recon Team managed to rescue three more captured civilians yesterday. Aside from a few individual slave owners, no one else from the villages made any attempt to resist. Ethan was recovering from the mana burn pretty well. Once Elmot removed the residual mana from the wound, it was much less severe. Having a mage around was pretty useful.

After packing up camp this morning, they were driving towards their next village. They were going east, with some hills on their left rising out of the flat green plains. It was still cloudy, but the rain from yesterday had mostly stopped.

Suddenly, Major William's voice came through on the radio. "Lieutenant Ramirez, come in."

"Ramirez here, sir. Go ahead," Daniel replied.

"One of our teams just got a tip about a town close to your position. We think there may be as many as ten of our people there. I'm diverting your team to investigate."

"Understood, sir. If our people are there, we'll find them," Daniel replied.

"Good. I'm sending you the intel. Good luck, Ramirez. Williams out."

Liv pulled up the information on her display. "I've got it. Give me a sec..."

Benny brought the Rhino to a stop while Liv figured out which direction to go.

"Which way are we going, Liv?" Benny asked.

Liv finished looking over the information packet sent by the major. "It's about... 40 minutes south of us," she said, as she pulled up an aerial map on one of the display screens and highlighted the location. She relayed the new orders to the rest of the convoy while Benny turned sharply to the right and brought the Rhino back up to speed.

It was large for a village, but small for a city. Based on its size relative to the other villages they've encountered so far, the AI estimated it had a population of about 3,000. From the map, they could see that it had a partially built wood and dirt wall. The town was surrounded by a large area of farmland.

The intel retrieved by the other rescue team said that a landowning farmer sold a cart of slaves he had bought from Rontak's Reach to the town. The reason they suspected the slaves might have been American citizens was because the landowner sold them on account of them being weak and worthless in the fields. They were 'utterly incompetent at even simple farm work' and he was trying to recoup the cost of buying them.

"Sir," Liv began, "What are we going to do if there are more than just Americans enslaved there?"

Daniel hadn't thought of that until now. They hadn't encountered Americans being held with other slaves yet. They couldn't just turn a blind eye, but did they have the manpower or authority to do anything about it?

"I guess that depends," he replied.

"On what?" Liv asked.

"On a lot of things," Daniel replied. "For example, how many slaves there are, or how many of the townspeople would have a problem with us freeing their slaves."

"We'll do something though, right?" Liv asked. "We can't be complicit to slavery."

"I agree completely. But short of gunning down civilians who don't share that sentiment, there's not much we can do about it."

"And that's not an option either..." Liv said.

"No, it's not," Daniel agreed. "Our first priority is the safe extraction of US citizens. After that... Well, we'll do what we can. Ultimately, this decision is a bit above our pay grade."