Otherworld Exports, Holdings and Properties;
Acquisition Report: Harris Nurseries
Harris Nurseries produce and manage the design, conception, and upkeep of the Spiderweb Children. They begin without parents, pieced together from records of the Bretonia, chosen and then designed for very specific functions. Tape taught and tube fed, they can be produced in as little time as 14 months, and the facility can handle numbers up to seven thousand children at any time. The Harris Nurseries are the perfect legacy of the Queen's Spider, Winnifred Plantagenet. Currently, Spiderweb Children are serving in such positions as the Queen's Guard, Carina's Intelligence, and form the backbone of the New London Media Censureship.
...
File End.
Juno stared at an image of a girl, barely 3 years old. Poor thing, really. She was such a beautiful woman, aged to just past her Libertonian maturity, with images of an undercity upbringing flowing across her eyes. Perfect for mussing with Ageria's supply lines. Her, and 127 others, who were being slipped into wreckages from homes that never existed all across Libertonian space, with a grudge against everything official. This one was the capstone, the flying ace, formed with corsair reflexes, and Samantha's face.
It stank. The whole thing, every inch, every litre of air, reeked of the bloody mess..and it was alive...Somewhat.
"What in the nine hells happened here?" Juno managed to gag out
"Ma'am, we recommend you put your rebreather back on, it may not be safe" Her escort crackled through her headset, not daring to take his helmet off, then turning to her bodyguard, "Sirs, tell her, this air could be contaminated, there's no way to be sure.."
Mazakishi, currently paired with Mikazuko Kureshiwa, who had become her constant shadow since the attempt, deliberately opened the vents on his atmospherically sealed force-feedback combat armour, not deigning to grant the words any other response.
"What happened here?" Juno repeated, ire beginning to show through the shock.
"Ma'am, some sort of organism, quick grown for the current Harris environment..Must have gotten into the breeding tanks...you could call it parasitism, or mutation...anyway, they've overgrown, and the feeding tubes all clogged up...they're designed to seem like a fine capillary network, so it doesn't take much...well, its dieing out right now, but not fast enough, and its evolving to take advantage of all the rot...300 children, in varying stages of development...excuse me" The man trailed off, quite stricken.
"How long till its operational again?"
"You want to..dear lord...well, you would have to clear all this out somehow...scrubbing it will take months, and then rebuild the delicate systems...could be years."
"How long would it take to get 30 tanks back online, after its cleaned out, if the materials are supplied?"
"A week, three at the outside...but where are you going to get that much cloning materials? This project is not at all legal...its disgusting, ma'am." He wasn't talking about the smell, anymore.
"Fastest way to clean this? If I didn't mean to preserve much of the fragile structures?"
"Oh, ah, well, a quickburning fire, probably...an engine plume?" Juno looked at him, looked around, looked at her escort, standing in a pair of military grade combat armours, the type used in urban combat when no one was interested in minimizing the collateral damage...
"You two, torch the place. Him too."
"Oh my God....Oh...oh my god..."
Sara Lee Aramant had just come back from vacation, spent her last night in a cheap hotel and sped home in her hoversloop. She had walked up the stairs with a bounce in her step, smiled and held the door for her elderly neighbor, unlocked her door, and slipped in back first, her hands full of luggage.
The rooms were destroyed. Everything pulled out, the floors torn up, the walls torn down...her family album was on the floor, the remaining pages blackened and crisp. Her screens had been cleanly taken apart, the plastic films carefully removed and the diodes cautherized...her identity essentially gone. Pillow stuffings drifted in the slight breeze of the fans, through the gaping holes in her walls...
Her arms limp and her mouth agape, luggage dropped to the floor, she sank to her knees, and sobbed.
"WHAT?!?" Sara Lee stood at the securities office, trying to explain her position. The desk clerk shook his head apologetically.
"I'm sorry ma'am, your records aren't coming up. You'll have to try another kiosk..that is, unless you've another identity to try?"
"No..no, of course not...what do I look like to you?" She was more than a bit scandalized..multiple identities like some sort of criminal or whore...
Wandering the streets, she could not wrap her mind around the last few days...they'd become this thing..this edifices..The Last Few Days...she didn't understand...*thump*...she was on the ground. everything hurt. had she been asleep? where was she?whatsgoingon? Someone leered at her, said...something.
"Excuse me?"
"Yugrta rutala some castl?"
"Wah?" She collapsed.
Juno stared at the complex walls. Maza had cleansed this place with fire, just before disappearing. It had been left by the queen's spider, and she'd taken over. Now, the rooms were empty. She'd never rebuilt, after Maza left and Marz died. The children grown here had been hunted down, executed, all except for Anne, and the other. The other one, the brain-dead body, the golden child, that beautiful useless lass. Her muscles worked, and carried no disease. Her reflexes were normal, but she'd live. When Mariko's body would no longer work, there was the girl, in the basement of a hidden complex in contested territory, where Juno's daughter might survive. That child had to survive.
Months passed. Sarah spent time in small town lockups, got beat up by street gangs. She sold herself, and she murdered. She stole. She didn't exist. Her fingerprints didn't show up on any records, her retinas had never been scanned. All in all, she was the perfect ghost, and she sank into darker and darker careers. She smoked synth, breathed cardamine, ran drugs and killed for more. She robbed banks, and lived in seedy back -alley hotels.
She drove getaway cars exceptionally well, and eventually moved up to small time criminal, dragging space freighter heaps into port and collecting shipments of whatever...Eventually, she dropped a note in a xeno underground recruitment box
"My name is Sara Lee Aramant.
On day, I came home, and my appartment had been raided. The walls torn out, my things destroyed. I stumbled outside, and the building exploded. They say I don't exist. They claim I never existed. The banks forgot who I was, and I cannot get a job. Because I do not exist.
I'm tired of running. I've been running for years.
Today, I want to hurt them."
The shipments will soon arrive. Harris nurseries will reactivate, no longer black ops, or shadow ops, or under any sort of sanction. The only oversight, here, was hers. The Harris Nurseries were registered lost, lost to the Harris growth. So much had been lost, and Planetform was willing to overlook their oversight. Planetform would overlook anything. Nomads were being shipped in, and bits of alien wonders from the Newcastle Edifice. Test subjects, girls her age, and rapidly grown clones, were beginning to arrive. Girls lined the halls, ate nanites in their meals, such devices as a Samura slaver could only dream of, Little things that ran scans, set off metal detectors...set you spasming, running pain down your spine and up your legs, little, tiny, horrid things, to make you scream and writhe.
There were rooms, here, where we didn't bother cleaning the mess. Where we just cut them open and checked them, sometimes sewing them back up, sometimes not.
Harris nurseries. So many of Bretonian's finest had been engineered here. Now her dregs came here to die.
"My daughter has a terminal illness. It will be incredibly painful, debilitating, and leave her struggling to breath, to eat, in the end. So, Mr. Tarrant, when I say I am deadly serious, understand. My daughter is the most important thing in the world, and I'm more than willin, I'm eager, to do whatever it might take." Juno was livid, and her tone, which had begun calm, was now furious.
"Ma'am, as a multinational supercorporation, Planetform cannot allow you to carry out unsupervised medical research on one of our project worlds. We are horribly sorry about your daughter, of course...Miss Kietan, I'm horribly sorry, I'll have to go now."
And, for months, nothing changed. Not a sinle door opened, and she was stonewalled on equipment, real-estate, security. Everything she looked for, wherever she was, was denied. So Juno did what she did best: greased palms.
And even with palms sloppy and dripping, backs rubbed raw and pockets overflowing, nothing changed. One day, though, an old box of hers delivered a message. A box based off of Arranmore, encrypted and proxied. She couldn't land herself, and hired a man to find a man who could. When she finaly got the message, printed on synth-paper in an outdated font, reasonably untracable, it took another week to decode.
It was a planetform entrance code, a security override, and an Interspace Commerce Banking and Loan untracable account. Addressed to 'The Duchess of Harris.'
There are red lines, now, painted across the hallways. They stretch up the walls, and connect across the ceiling. Mechas patrol on one side, and on the other, youths live.
They only ever tried crossing the line once. Three girls, holding hands, stepped across, daring the mechas to shoot them down. Instead, they shrieked. Their veins lit up, glowing under their skin. They quivered, danced, shuddered, and collapsed. Blood poured from their nostrils, and they clawed at their own skin. They tore at their flesh, biting and clawing, till blood pooled on the tile beneath them. Eventually, they suffocated, air locked in their veins, the tissues around cauterized shut.
