Plutocracy

Stage 19- Exodus, Prelude

"Where's mommy?"

A little girl stood, frightened and alone, in a crowd of millions. People who'd left their homes, their towns, their cities. Not in search of a better life, but to escape from certain death at the hands of Arksiane. Most of them stood, some lay on the ground, almost none had a place to stay. Ushuaia was only prepared to store about a hundred thousand people; not the millions upon millions that had suddenly appeared on its doorstep. Hillsides were being dug out and forests were being leveled so that more people would have a place to stay; shelter from the elements for their estimated week on the docks.

"Mommy!"

The girl was one of those who had lost their loved ones in the escape. Arksiane had dropped Replicators into the masses of escaping civilians; the invisible spiders only killed a few, but served as an excellent intimidation element as friends and family members were ripped to shreds and eaten by giant spiders. The girl's father had been able to escape with his daughter, but she had been yelling for her mother ever since. She was, of course, just one voice in a mass too large to count. It was estimated that, by the end of the mass emigration, there would be 300,000,000 people in total fleeing the continent. However, deaths due to diseases both manmade and natural would skim that number by a large margin. There was also no telling the kind of horrors Arksiane would unleash on a group as vulnerable as this. As Carlos Montoya watched the civilians from the mountain base high above the city, the possibilities flickered before his eyes.

Cropdusters dispersing bioweapons.
Antimatter charges from submarines outside the coast.
A biological monstrosity too horrifying to even imagine.
Sabotaging the boats and locking the people in until they ran out of supplies.

There were simply too many things Arksiane could do and not enough ways to counter them. The only thing to do was pray.

Carlos, of course, did not know that Archaianity was bullshit. That was something kept between Arnold, Max, and the other higher-ups in Berlin.  A few of the commanders in Moscow, Tokyo, and even one or two in Rio also had their suspicions, but they kept these to themselves.

"I want mommy!"

Her hand loosened from her father's, who, despite his own extreme fatigue, gripped her hand harder and prevented her from escaping and searching for a woman who could never be brought back.

"Odessa, mommy isn't here."

"Where's mommy!?" the girl was irate and on the verge of tears. Where had her mother gone?

"She's up in the sky, sweetie."

"I want to go see mommy!"

"You can't, sweetie. She's gone and she's not coming back."

Odessa began crying, forcing her father to pick her off the ground and hold her. However, his daughter's sobs of rejection were inaudible in the clamor of the millions.

"Make way, coming through, 'scuse me ma'am, heavy load here."

Several men wearing overalls and carrying large wooden crates made their way through the crowd and to the docks, where they began loading the ships for the coming journey to Africa. The new plan was that they would go from Ushuaia to the Falkland islands, where they would receive supplies via drop. They would then move to the south Georgian islands, and then to the South Sandwich islands, and so on and so forth. Essentially, they would island-hop their way to Africa, with constant stops for resupply. As long as Arksiane didn't manage to evade the sea-to-air missiles on each of the ships, they would be fine.

On the ships, the crates were moved to the lower decks and in some cases unpacked. On the surface of the boats, a few people were working on setting up the defensive systems. The largest boat in the center had several group-defense mechanisms in place, including a salvaged piece of Gestalt technology, delivered from Berlin with love. The device was called a 'tandem shield' and what it supposedly did was form a dome of energy that would rest on top of the water, preventing attacks of any kind from the air. The device had to siphon energy from each of the ships around it in order to function, and if the ship with the device was separated, it was useless. A few of the larger boats were equipped with Screamer missile silos (you remember those, right?) that were salvaged from the ruins of the Knight capital city. Gatling guns as well were being added, and every conceivable form of frequency jammer was onboard, and they could be activated instantly if a signal that was not recognized was broadcasted. Worst case scenario, only one antimatter charge would detonate out of one hundred.

Some people were being moved onto the boats as temporary sleeping quarters while the rest slept in tents and run-down buildings, but most of the boats were still under construction or repairs. Although most of the workers were free outlanders, there were several Technicians, Outlanders, and slaves mixed in. The slaves were all convicted criminals; because when you commit a crime in Outland, you pay back your debt to society by working. Some crimes, like petty theft, required only a few years of labor, whereas murder indentured you to the state for the rest of your life. There was no death penalty except in extreme cases, and their death penalty was rather odd: you would have to work in some of the most extreme positions that almost always lead to death. Deep mining, as a test dummy for weapons and medicines, and even with a bomb strapped to your chest in an Arksiane factory (They didn't know it was a bomb at the time, of course). Some viewed the system as immoral, but they were largely ignored. Never suppressed, just ignored. Freedom of speech was a fundamental right in Outland. The Outlanders bound their rules around an old copy of the Declaration of Human Rights they'd found. They removed the part about slavery and edited a few other bits, but for the most part it served as a basis for Outland's laws.

"Why can't mommy come back?"

"She's with God now."