"About a thousand acres," Jerilynn said, looking a bit flushed.
The looks on the rest of their faces told me that they were having a difficult time with what I had just done to them. Apparently, they have a system of speaking, and I had just upset that system. They were all green around the gills and looked as if they were about to puke. Nothing was said for a little while, but when they were able to speak again, I made no attempt to change how they spoke from that point forward.
"The nanites have already started to build our underground compound," Braylynn continued.
"We'll have several portable buildings in place in a couple of days," Melody then said.
"The nanites won't take that long, but we can't risk being seen going in and out on the ground," Angelica said, speaking next.
I started to feel like I had just watched twenty consecutive matches of tennis, so I called it a night at eleven pm. I went to the galley and got a beer from the replicator, then went and sat on the stern of Illi, and the next thing I knew I was being shaken awake by Bailey. I scootched over as much as I could in my lounge chair, and she climbed in with me, snuggling up to me as we both fell asleep. My dreams had taken me back to the time when my daughters and I had first met and how it felt to be in their presence for the first time. The nanites had robbed me of being a daddy to them, and I hated the nanites for that. The nanites had also protected my daughters from Erik's consciousness that he placed in mine and Liv's heads, so I loved them for that, and I think the nanites knew it.
I woke up to the morning sun starting to shine in my eyes and to Jerilynn and Angelica stretching in my lap. I pulled the two into a hug and got groans out of them both. They each kissed a cheek, then got off my lap and pulled me to my feet. We went to the galley for breakfast and found it filled with the rest of my ladies stuffing their faces. Once we got our food, Jerilynn and Angelica went and joined their sisters with Jasiri and Hallie, and I went to sit with the moms. I was given a little grief about where I slept last night, but not too much.
We ate, and then I and the ladies hopped on a Chinook to check out the new property. When we landed, my ladies surrounded me again, like I was the president. I just let it go, since it wasn't an argument, I was going to win. We walked around the area to get the lay of the land, then got back into the helicopter and took a tour of the lake we were on. It was a beautiful place. San Carlos de Bariloche and Patagonia were places right off a Swiss postcard. The architecture, the roads, everything screamed Eastern Europe, but here, they were one hundred thirty-four miles, or so, off the west coast of South America.
We flew over to Brazil, to the town of Candido Godoi, where Josef Mengele had reportedly continued his experiments from World War II. We landed just outside of town and walked the streets, and immediately it was clear to us that things had been done here. Everywhere you looked there were twins, which was one of Mengele's fortes. Now I was curious as to why there were 'Erik' clones in San Carlos de Bariloche and Patagonia but none here, and just as curious as to how many clones there were in San Carlos de Bariloche and Patagonia. Another thing about Candido Godoi was most of the people who lived here were either of German or Polish descent.
I thought that maybe Heather, Lanette, Bambi, and Layla would get crazy looks from people because they were Black, but they didn't. On our way back to the helicopter, we chatted about how we were going to have our work cut out for us here in South America. The ride back to the boats was uneventful and a little bumpy, but we landed just in time to be hit by a massive storm. Good thing we could submerge. We submerged to three hundred feet and prepared to ride out the storm.
The storm lasted for three days straight, so I spent time with my ladies, letting them use my body for any gratification and pleasure they needed from me. When we surfaced on the fourth day, the sun was out, and the sea was calm and almost flat. Needing to check on the current state of our land and the buildings that were to be placed on it, we loaded up in a Chinook and made our way over to the property. Several of the buildings were already in place when we arrived, so we were now able to access the underground portion of the compound without being seen by anyone.
The underground portion of the compound was enormous, as it was acres of square feet. The nanites had built a replica of the main house in Oregon and even added a racetrack for my daughters to race each other on. A path led to a dock with several underwater craft to traverse the lake to San Carlos de Bariloche and Patagonia. We walked around and explored our underground sanctum and decided to stay the night. Our plans weren't at a hundred percent yet, but we were getting there. We needed to make zero mistakes, or as close to zero as we possibly could.
I had become accustomed to sleeping on a boat, the gentle rocking, and the sounds of the water against the hull, which the underground compound had none of. The compound was devoid of sound altogether--no crickets or birds, no wind, nothing. It was just a soundless space, except for the light breathing sounds coming from the sleeping beauties next to me. I hadn't been asleep long when the artificial sun rose in our underground bastion. With just over five hundred women, the silence was quickly silenced as the 'girl talk' started. I sat and tried to keep up with the conversations at my table, but I'm not into all the latest 'girl' fads, so most of it was above my pay grade.
We spent the next few days doing planning, recon, and anything else that would make our job easier. The nanites were having trouble getting through a barrier that we had never encountered; the nanites called it an 'Atomizer' barrier. The barrier would atomize anything that went into it, so we were going to have to find a safe way through the barrier before we could advance our recon into the areas that had the barrier around them. There were several spots around San Carlos de Bariloche and Patagonia that had the barrier around them, so that made us wonder what was going on for such a barrier to be needed.
We studied the barrier and had not discovered anything that would help us as to when the barrier would go down, and then we would have to wait for it to go back down again to get anything the nanites had learned back to us, as nothing got through the barrier, not even radio waves. It was only down for five seconds, but that was enough for some of the nanites to enter the areas that were surrounded. What the nanites learned was, well...., not very encouraging. They learned that there was an entire room filled with 'Blanks,' bodies waiting to be implanted with a consciousness, not alive nor dead, just an empty vessel, as it were. The blanks were in a state of suspended animation, so we knew that Erik had somehow gotten his hands on Gpop's Neural Storage Device, or 'NSD,' and had been using it to transfer his consciousness to the clone blanks as he needed them for his worker drones and for his eventual replacements.
The nanites also found documents stating that Liv, Freya, and Eira had all been here at one time or another, but none of them had any memories whatsoever of ever being here at all, though. The biggest shock was that the original Erik was the one that had been here, and the Erik that had been brought over with 'Project Paperclip' and who had been encountered at DAPA by Gpop, and the one who we encountered in Australia, had been the same clone of Erik. Now I wasn't sure how many 'Erik' clones we had to deal with. Knowing how demented and ruthless Erik is, set a fire under me, one that wouldn't go out until he, and all his clones, were no more.
'If the Erik in Australia was a clone, then that means there will be 'Alpha' nanites here as well,' I thought to myself.
Now we needed to come up with another plan to keep everyone safe, since I didn't want any of us, or the populace of the towns, to get hurt, or worse. We went back to the boats and had a meeting with all the maidens, since it was to be an all-or-nothing with our current plan, and that's when it was brought up to have two teams. I would have a team in San Carlos de Bariloche, and Hallie would have the other team in Patagonia. We would hit them at the same time to offset any reinforcements being sent from the other town. I had the maidens from the U.S. as my team, and Hallie had the Aussie maidens as hers. The nanites made a body for Juno, so each team would have one of the 'Star Babes' on it. Jasiri was with me, and Juno was with Hallie.
Illi, Reality, Solstice, Sky, and Breeze would launch the majority of their drones to assist with each of the team's missions. We would also put two EC225 helicopter gunships, with a complement of thirty maidens each, orbiting over the towns as CAP or QRF, if needed. The nanites took control of as many systems, including adversarial drones and bots, as they could without compromising themselves or the mission. We reviewed our game plan, over and over, to weed out any possible flaws or obstacles that we could think of before we put everything into motion.
The nanites that were encountered by my nanites were nothing more than aides to keep the blanks viable and to keep Erik alive, since he was by now over a hundred years old. Erik's nanites had no combat programming at all, which was good news for us. I guess living in total anonymity for all these years had made Erik complacent, or he was afraid they would revolt against him. Either way, it was fortuitous for us.
We wouldn't start our missions until I spent some time with each of my ladies, which took five days in all. Before Hallie left to get on the submersible, she came over to me, kissed me, and looked at me with the look of 'Don't do anything stupid' on her face. I gave her a comforting smile and said, "Back at cha, Babe." It was now or never; we were going radio silent until it was safe for us to communicate again. As I watched Hallie and her team load into their submersibles, I got butterflies in my chest, and as if on cue, Hallie turned and ran back over to me, wrapped me up in a hug, and kissed me again.
As she got back over to the submersible, she turned and yelled back to me, "I love you, we got this," then got in and closed the hatch behind her.
We left fifteen minutes after they did so we would arrive on our missions at the same time. The ride over was very quiet, so, once we were in position, all we had to do was wait for the "Go" time, which was midnight, and that time was almost upon us. When midnight struck, we exited the submersible, and I knew the nanites would have the security barriers down. Unfortunately, that was not true; we lost Libby and Abigail when they walked into a partially charged barrier.
Due to the barrier and radio silence, we had no way of knowing that some of the barriers had to dissipate their charge before it was safe. As soon as they could, the nanites informed me that we had lost Tayla and Joanne on Hallie's team. They had been lost to a partially charged barrier as well. Tayla, Joanne, Abigale, and Libby had paid for my error, by me not waiting for the "all clear" from the nanites, with their lives. I didn't know them well, but that didn't mean it hurt any less to have lost them from my mistake, and I was also glad it wasn't someone that I was more attached to. With more caution and determination, we continued onward.
We went room by room clearing it, taking any information in them, and dispatching any of the clones that we found in them. It was going to be a long night because there had to be hundreds of rooms to clear.
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Hallie and her team were doing the same as me and my team, going room by room and clearing it. Patagonia's underground area was more of an information depository and library. One room in particular caught them all off guard. It was the Amber Room, Amber Room - Wikipedia. It had been stolen from the Russians during World War II and had been thought lost to the world. Yet it was here, right in front of Hallie, in all its majesty.
