Being as we had our own apartment building, we had a place to live while we waited. However, we had no way of working on anything. We certainly had no clue where a vicious enemy like Cold Clan was. Their clan building and their transmission hub was a mystery. This was a major problem. Eastern quadrant was the biggest when it came to the amount of transmission hubs there were. There were 4 here while all the others only had 3 to deal with. Void and Pierce clans were our allies and actively working with the military. Magnetic clan was defeated. Their X-frames were destroyed along with the pilots using them. No more AEP units could be made for their clan. It ended the fight for good. Even if there were more made down the line, they would be Advocates. I seriously doubted the government would allow that though. 12-001 was brought back here to be a prisoner. That was by Brett's design. Paul and I were still not very happy with this. To us, they were just kids. "They are hyper advanced cyborg warriors. Besides, they are NPCs. Get over it." he said. That was so true.
12-002 was to be taken to a large facility for study held in Advocate territory to prevent too many missions to rescue him from firing off. Still, there were many attempts nonetheless. Advocate faction cyborgs had the plausible deniability to just go straight to guards and ask them. Making their big attempts purposefully end in failure was better than outright refusing them from their transmission hubs. The fact that even advocate transmission hubs wanted 12-002 back said something about the priorities of the progenitors. There was clearly something there that they did not want humanity to find out. I pointed this out to Major Watts and he nodded. We were currently in the library. Frederica already knew that the library was the town's safehouse. It made no difference if Major Watts was here. We asked for a quiet corner to talk and not be disturbed. The librarians agreed. "There has to be something we can do to find out." Vinny said in frustration. Nicoletta looked up and down at me. "Are you sure that you don't know? You went off for a month going to all those clans, right?" she asked.
I said "We had been allies with the Advocates and good terms with all the Researchers. We know where they are now. That is it." Major Watts looked around the table. It had us officers of Sixteenth Notes Clan and his 4 captains. They were still pretty wary around cyborgs. I did not mind that. With all the shit that they had pulled, I did not blame them. Now I would not allow them to treat my clanmates. That was a step too far. One of the other captains asked whether we should put boots on the ground and go in. Paul shut that down. "No fucking way man. We'd be walking into a death trap there." he said. The commandos just looked at him. "What do you mean by that?" he said. Brett gave them their answer. "It's a big Catch-22 out there. We have no idea where they are. If we go down when we are well known, it will put us in danger. They'll be there and perfectly blend in until they strike us. On the other hand, we're not safe here either. They can assign more assassinations against us from their hub. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't." Put like that, we were all out of luck.
