Our understanding of their ethos was that they wanted to show that humanity was the equals of their Progenitors. They did not like the idea that Progenitors would try to take over the continent. This meant that they took some hostile actions against every other faction, so they were not popular. Their end goal was to get the Progenitors to fuck off when they saw it would be too much of a hassle to take over. I asked what would happen if the Advocate faction took over. They did not seem to care. "We don't need a middle man to join a galactic empire. Once we have the overwhelming power that they have, we can demand a seat at the table." she said. True. Paul nodded his head and said "We heard that you had an AEP unit held here. How the hell did you swing that? You lure them in with candy of something?" She smirked. "It is well known that the AEP units are the strongest type of cyborg to date. They also have the emotional intelligence of children. We just had to tell one that a Conqueror was attacking and bring them to the forests. They fell for it and then we captured them with androids."
Perfect strategy, I guess. That did raise a big question. "How did you know that he was an Advocate!? If he was a Conqueror, he would have attacked you right away." I asked. She shrugged. "Wind Clan is very active. They have all decided that they should tackle crime. They don't kill humans acting up. All they do is capture the criminals and then wait for the police to show up." That made sense to me. "How did you keep him here?" Brett wanted to know. I did as well. "Well, we have people in very high places. Lots of corpos, soldiers, researchers and rank and file members of gangs feel the same way as us." she said. That did not answer our question. She just rolled her eyes at our silence. "After you guys delivered that big Conqueror AEP to the government, our friends at the lab leaked the findings. Even some of the tech needed to keep that monster under control." she explained. Hunter asked what the technology of theirs was. It was a mini EMP burst. The AEP units were all compound organisms of thousands of nanites. EMP bursts wiped technology and shut them down. Not good.
Locking the outer layer of their bodies by shutting those nanites down made them easier to control. Once that happened, you could do whatever you wanted to them. We obviously were going to tell the Advocates about this. It was an existential threat to them at this point. 06-003 was lucky they just wanted to abuse him. They easily could have killed him. I wondered if it was even possible to counter something like this. Obviously, humans were not supposed be able to take out the AEP units this early in the game. We were just speeding up the tech lines of both sides of the conflict. It truly was amazing. I looked at her and decided to put our cards on the table. "We have been sent to recover 06-003. The military and Wind Clan both want him. We're willing to pay a hefty price for both the mini EMP and his safe return." I told her. She sighed out loud. "I guess it was weird that we noticed some signals leaking out yet no one came knocking on the doors. Let's close this transaction at 1.55 billion credits." she said. Pretty easy. I gave her the money and we were then all led to another room.
06-003
