The Homelander Captives
Chapter 1: The Hamptons Are Not A Defensible Position
“It’s times like this I hate those fucking Homelanders so much,” said Misti Schoonhed as she sat on the deck of the Bruckner “cottage” on Shelter Island in the Hamptons. It was a small cottage by Hamptons standards, just 20 rooms and two pools and a pier.
“Why now in particular?” asked Anya Katchatourian. She was sitting next to Misti along with Steffi Hotch. They were all drinking, Anya and Misti were having wine coolers and Steffi was downing a fortified brandy. The cottage was owned by a media magnate, and he’d invited Anya, Misti and Steffi, among others, to a weekend-long stay that was in fact a weekend-long party.
Misti drank in the atmosphere, the warm midsummer night, the gentle breezes coming in from the ocean, the lights of the city’s skyscrapers glittering as they reached up into the sky. It wasn’t what she lived for, but it was a VERY nice experience, drinking on this porch and talking to some very sharp minds.
“Every time I’ve partied at the Hamptons there’s been local crab dips,” said Misti. “But with the war the fishermen won’t go out and fish, they’re afraid they’ll get droned. It’s all imported crap from the Pacific Coast. King crab, tiger prawns. I mean it tastes all right but it’s long frozen. Not like the local stuff.”
“Awww, the local fishermen won’t risk their lives to make your tastebuds happy,” said Steffi. “Such a bummer!”
“I’m not mad at the fishermen, I’m mad at the Homelanders,” said Misti. “They’ve turned life here into one long festival of stupidity and cruelty with all their fucking drones and bot attacks.”
“I blame Drump,” said Anya. “If he’d had half a brain and been able to accept when he lost back in ‘28, this war would never have happened.”
I blame the old Democrats,” said Misti. “They let this happen. It’s like they thought Project 2025 was a Democratic proposal or something.”
“What do you mean by that?” Anya asked.
“You know, the Democrats never quite managed to enact the things they campaigned on once they get into office, no matter what,” said Misti. “All I can figure is that even though everyone knew that Drump is an idiot who’ll sign anything his advisors give him to sign, and that he loves anything that increases his power and prestige, and that Project 2025 does exactly that, the Democrats thought it was just a bluff to get elected. Very stupid of them.”
“Well it’s not like any of them are going to get re-elected, kid,” said Steffi.
“Yeah, if we ever have elections again,” Misti said.
“Oh, we will have elections again when we beat those Homelanders,” said Steffi. “The Homelanders won’t get to vote in them, but we will.”
A blur moved through the air just outside the circle of light cast by the porch lights and the fountain lights.
“What was that?” Misti asked, startled. She was a bit sleepy-eyed in appearance, but was in fact very observant.
“Probably an owl,” said Steffi.
“I thought it might be a drone,” said Misti.
“If it was a kill drone we’d know, because we’d all be dead,” said Steffi.
“Probably a watcher drone,” said Anya. “All the places here have them now.”
“AAAA…” Misti started to scream as she saw a doglike killbot ease out of the shadows. Laser guides lanced out from the weapons cluster that was the killbot’s “head.” As each laser touched the three women they collapsed in their chairs. The lasers were just targeting lasers, but they were linked to stunguns that knocked out the targeted people instantly.
The killbot ran into the house, followed by half a dozen other killbots and they ran through the rest of the “cottage” and knocked out the twenty or so people inside.
“No warnings I could detect,” said a man sitting in a room several hundred miles away, looking at several screens showing the feeds of several killbots. “Caught ‘em sleeping and put ‘em to sleep.”
“Push on then, let’s fill the boat if we can,” said another man. “Collectors are almost there.”
“Right,” said the first man.
The killbots ran out of house, leaving the unconscious humans there, as they headed to raid another “cottage.”
A few moments later four humanoid bots ran into the house at high speed. They ran through the mansion and made sure all was secure, then one of them went to the mansion’s security room. It jacked into an input port with a wire it pulled from its torso and took over the cottage’s security system. Now the feed from the cameras in the cottage would not show any disturbing images of people being stolen.
Then the robots began methodically stripping the people in the cottage of their clothes and binding their wrists and ankles and putting heavy steel collars around their necks. They also wrote identifying numbers on the people’s chests with special magic markers. The same number was attached to bags containing the clothing they had stripped off the people, and the contacts of their purses and pockets as well.
While that was happening a large vehicle made its way to the cottage’s front yard. It looked like a pontoon boat with wheels, about the size of a five meter rental truck, but much lower to the ground. The humanoid bots began picking up and carrying the naked unconscious people to the “truck” and laying them inside it. They moved with inhuman speed and sureness but they were also very careful with their charges, laying them delicately into the truck and securing them to chains attached to rings set in its floor via the collars fastened around their necks.
Once the house was emptied, and it didn’t take long at all, the truck trundled back to the beach and drove into the water. Once it was floating the wheels turned up and a propeller lowered into the water. The “truck” moved several hundred meters from the beach until it reached the relative depths of the Shelter Island Sound. There it stopped until a conning tower rose from the Sound. The submarine the tower was attached to stayed beneath the surface, its black surface hidden by the black surface of the water at night.
A magnetic grapple shot from the conning tower and hit the water truck. The grapple pulled the truck in toward the conning tower until it was just a few meters from the tower. One of the two humanoid robots in the truck rose and shot a magnetic grapple at the conning tower. Another humanoid robot in the conning tower grabbed the grapple and secured the wire it was attached to to a pulley rig bolted to the tower. The wire rattled as it was moved, because there were thick, blunted hooks hanging from it.
The robot ran out a few meters of wire and reattached the magnetic grapple and shot the wire back to the water truck. A robot in the water truck took the wire and connected it the other end of the wire, which was lodged securely in a second pulley mounted to the bow of the water truck.
As soon as this was completed the other robot held up the limp body of one of the people from the water truck. The first robot grabbed the unconscious woman’s wrists and carefully put one of the hooks dangling from the wire under the chain between her cuffs. It carefully lowered the naked unconscious woman who was now dangling by her wrists.
It began hauling on the upper wire, causing the unconscious woman to move out over the water. As soon as the other robot brought up another person, the robot repeated the process, leaving the woman dangling over the water.
When the unconscious bodies reached the conning tower the robot there removed them from the wire and handed them to another robot in the tower, who handed them down to a robot at the base of the tower, which placed it in a cot in the submarine.
In this way every person in the water truck was transferred to the submarine in about 15 minutes, the robots moving with their usual inhuman speed and skilled. The last transfer was a big canvas bag containing the clothes and property of the captives.
As soon as the people were all in the submarine the grapples were detached and the submarine submerged and the water tank headed back to shore for another load.
Inside the submarine the light were low (the bots camera sensors were very adjustable). The five bots that crewed the sub moved silently among the captives as the sub quietly rested on the bottom, waiting for the signal that another load was ready.
The first thing the bots did was go through the captives’ belongings. They wanted to find anything that might contain a GPS transmitter, especially cell phones. They destroyed and then threw any GPS-likely object into a weighted bag. They removed the batteries on all of the phones, but kept the phones. As soon as all the possessions had been checked, the bag of suspect devices was shot out of a torpedo tube, landing hundreds of meters from the sub. All that was visible on the surface was a trail of bubbles.
The bots placed medical sensors on the bodies of their captives and secured them to the cots with leash chains. They also injected the captives with a sedative that would keep them unconscious for the entire voyage.
The sub picked up two more loads and was full, and it was also close to the allotted time for the raid to end. The longer they stayed, the higher the chances they would be discovered.
Then the sub left and made its journey to its sheltered base in the Homeland, staying as deep as possible all the way. If a Union sub found them all the equipment and bots would be lost, along with the captives. There were no Homeland humans on board.
Chapter 2
Hunh?
Misti woke up slowly. Her body ached fiercely. She tried to move her arm to adjust her body to make the pain go away, but there were problems.
The she realized her hands were cuffed behind her back which ran through her like a jolt of adrenalin. The last thing she remembered was sitting on the front porch of the cottage in the Hamptons. There had been a bird. Then nothing.
Misti opened her eyes and gazed as the prison cell she and four other women occupied. It had a generic prison look to it. Except all the women were naked. Including Misti.
“What the hell?” Misti cried.
“Keep it quiet, Misti,” said a voice. Misti looked in the direction of the voice and saw a naked woman with her hands cuffed behind her back. Like Misti’s. Misti recognized her. She was Lisa Slazenger.
“Lisa!” Misti cried. They’d met at a few media events. “What are you doing here? What am I doing here? What are all of us doing here?”
Misti recognized Anya and Steffi in the room.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on here?” Misti asked. “Why are we all naked?”
“Yeah, I pretty much know what’s going on here, I’ve been here a few weeks,” Lisa said. “I hate to have to be the one to tell you, but welcome to sex slavery, Misti.”
“What!?” Misti cried.
“You heard me,” said Lisa. “You’re a sex slave now. As am I. As are we all.”
“Bullshit,” said Misti.
“Well what the hell do YOU think we’re all doing in a cell, naked and cuffed?” Lisa asked. “You think we all got pulled over for DUI in our sleep?”
“Last thing I remember we were on a porch in the Hamptons,” said Steffi. Her low southern voice was almost rumbling. She’d clearly just awakened.
“Yeah, well about that, word is that you were all captured in a raid up North,” said Lisa. They caught a lot of you. Like, a couple of hundred or so.”
“Why the hell would they raid the Hamptons?” Anya asked.
“Just guessing, they were after some big New York fish, bankers or whatever, and you guys were the bycatch,” said Lisa. “Attractive women are always a premium.”
“That’s very nice of you to say,” said Steffi dryly.
“I’m not sure why you’re here,” said Lisa. “You don’t fit the mold.”
“Steffi was with us on a porch at the Bruckner cottage in the Hamptons,” said Anya. “There was a big party, but no local crabmeat.”
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