Bluffing and posturing our way through her stonewalling, we finally managed to make her cave. "Fine! You think you're so tough. huh!? Then capturing some 'borgs or the criminals for us to interrogate won't be hard for you. We can use a few punching bags here at HQ." she said. "We'll be back by the end of the day." Paul said confidently as he sat across from her. She only rolled her eyes and went to the door. Just as she was going to leave, she turned her head to look back at us. "If you die or get caught we never had this conversation." was what she left us with. That was a given. We were not part of the structure of the western quadrant's military response. She had no obligation to help us if we were in trouble. It was not even our obligation to help them out at all. We were just doing this for fun. This was their lives at stake. I could see why she was so dismissive towards us. It did not make it any less annoying though. Our objective was set. We had to bring in 1 AEP unit, 2 PEA units, or 5 PEP units. It would fulfil her quota for cyborgs. She wanted 10 syndicate members or 15 criminals.
Now that we had our task, it was time to go out there and do it. Catching syndicate members and other criminals would not be hard. The city was crawling with them. We just had to go where they were and capture them. There was a contingent of 4 PEA units in the area. They must have saw us first because they were coming directly towards us. Moving at a very brisk pace, they tried to arrest the 3 of us with thin plastic zip-ties. "You tortured and killed 07-004 after tampering with him. We're taking you in." one of them said. He must have sent a message out to the rest of his clan before we executed him. I wonder what he had actually told them. He had made it seem like he was going to keep everything to himself due to his pride. The sly bastard had got us. We had no clue what information he had given to them. There were 2 major points of failure for the Conqueror faction. Those were the secret back door in their AEPs' asses and the mini-EMP. Knowing about it did not negate the fact that they had no countermeasures against them. However, the element of surprise was now gone.
Going forward, we would have to ensure that we acted as if they knew about both until we had further information on their intelligence gathering. Taking out these PEAs had nothing to do with that. We had a quota. It would not be good to use a blast from the mini-EMP now. They would all die instantly. We wanted them alive. At least, we wanted to bring in 2 of them alive. The secret back door was discovered in an AEP unit, not a PEA unit. There was no reason to assume that it was the same for them. In fact, it was extremely unlikely to be the case knowing that they were naturally born from 2 PEP units. Paul, Brett and I beat the shit out of all 4 of them. Since they were incapacitated, we decided to bring them all in. That way we would be seen as going above and beyond what was asked of us. We technically had doubles the quota of cyborgs assigned to us. Once they were locked up, we all took the time to brag and gloat about it. This was something the military stationed here would not be able to do in a thousand years. The captain just shooed us away. "I want my criminals too. Go!"
