Two rebel vehicles outside the administration offices opened fire at the building and were turned into a glowing piles of slag by the Tubingen, which had targeted them from orbit. The hostages, kept in a basement-level wing filled with conference rooms, were dirty and tired but generally unharmed. The entire event took less than thirty minutes, with no casualties on the CDF side.
Their work done, the CDF soldiers asked for and received shore leave in Zhoushan, where they were welcomed enthusiastically, or so it seemed, by the locals, although that might have also been because the Colonial Union was known to pick up the tab for Colonial Defense Forces on shore leave, encouraging the soldiers to spend foolishly and the local shops and vendors to charge exorbitantly. If there were any rebel sympathizers among the burghers of Zhoushan, they kept their mouths shut and took the CDF’s money.
The last thing Lee remembered prior to waking up in the room she was in now, she, Jefferson and Private Kiana Hughes were having dinner in a hofbrauhaus (Zhong Guo, despite its Chinese naming conventions, had mostly middle and southern Europeans, an irony that Lee, with Chinese ancestry on her father’s side, found somewhat amusing). She recalled the three of them getting more than a little drunk, which in retrospect should have been a warning, since thanks to CDF soldiers’ genetically-engineered physiology, it was almost impossible for them to actually get smashed. At the time, however, it just seemed like a pleasant buzz. She remembered piling out of the hofbrauhaus very late local time, wandering toward the hotel at which they had been booked and then nothing else until now.
Lee ruefully revised her assessment of the state of enthusiasm of the locals for the CDF’s work. Clearly, not everyone was pleased.
Her memory checked out, and Lee turned her attention to where she might be now. Her BrainPal’s internal chronometer told her that she had been out for roughly six hours. Given that expanse of time, it was possible that she, the apparently late Jefferson and (she rather strongly suspected) Hughes were now on the other side of the planet from Zhoushan. She doubted that, however. It would have taken at least some time for Two and Six to have gotten her naked and strapped to a chair and otherwise prepped for what they were planning to do to her. Two also mentioned that he (she? Lee decided to go with “he” in her brain for now) had already had enough time to talk to Jefferson and Hughes and to kill Jefferson when he had not cooperated. For these reasons, Lee suspected she was still somewhere in Zhoushan.
She also suspected, since she was still in fact in the hands of Two and Six and not already rescued by her platoon, that wherever she was had shielding that kept her BrainPal from transmitting her whereabouts. She tested this by trying to make a connection to Hughes and then to several other people in the platoon: nothing. She tried pinging the Tubingen: also nothing. Either this room specifically had a signal blocker or she was somewhere that was designed with (or had among its capabilities) the ability to block signals. If it was the latter, that would bring down the number of possible buildings it could be in Zhoushan.
Lee thought again, more deeply, about her situation and realized she was sitting on a clue. She was in a restraint chair of some sort-moreover, a restraint chair designed for someone to sit in for an extended period of time, given that the seat of the chair had a sliding trapdoor to allow waste through. Lee did not fancy herself a connoisseur of restraint systems, but as she was now in her ninth decade of life, she had seen a thing or two. In her experience, restraint chairs showed up in three places: hospitals, prisons and particularly specialized brothels.
Of the three, Lee dismissed the idea of a brothel first. It was possible, but brothels were a place of business and not particularly secure. People lived in them and worked in them, and there were (if the brothel was at all successful) all sorts of new and different clientele coming in and going out at all times of the day. Brothels would ensure some privacy, but probably not so much that a shotgun blast wouldn’t be noticed, not to mention a corpse or two being dragged out of the premises.
In a hospital a corpse would not be a problem, but the shotgun blasts probably would be. An abandoned hospital might solve that issue, but hospitals also generally were not signal-proof-too much medical information was shuttled about electronically to make it a feasible idea.
So, a prison or jail seemed to be the mostly likely location: chairs, signal-blocking structure and easy disposal of dead bodies, as the prison would likely have its own morgue. It also meant that whoever was holding her and Hughes also had the ability to discreetly bring people in and out of a prison setting: someone in the local police, or at least the local government.
Lee had been given a map of Zhoushan as part of the briefing for the mission; she called it up on her BrainPal and then winced slightly as the computer in her head activated the visual cortex. Not actually seeing for several hours made even the illusion of light slightly painful. She let her brain acclimate to the visuals and then started scanning through.
As far as she could see (an expression that at the moment held some irony), there were two buildings in Zhoushan she was likely to be in: the municipal jail, which was in downtown Zhoushan and less than a kilometer away from the hofbrauhaus from which they were nabbed, and the province prison, which was ten klicks out from Zhoushan city center. Lee had no detailed maps of either building-they had those only for the administration and broadcast buildings-but either way, she was comforted by at least the idea that she knew where she might be. It could come in handy.
She now turned her attention to her own situation, which she continued to deem not especially positive. The nakedness did not especially bother her on a personal level, as she’d never been particularly self-conscious about her body, but it did bother her that she was unarmored. Two had been correct that the CDF uniform gave its wearer certain protections and advantages, although its strengths in that regard were more passive than active. The uniform didn’t make Lee stronger; it just made her tougher. Without it she would be more vulnerable to physical assault, which she suspected likely to happen despite assurances. Not to mention being vulnerable to shotgun blasts.
Speaking of which, she was also unarmed as well as unarmored. This was a problem, but one she spent little time concerning herself with. There was no point wishing for her weapons when she didn’t have them.
The part where she was bound was also of concern to her. As discreetly as she could, she flexed against the binds. They felt soft, slick and supple rather than hard and unyielding, which told her that they were of some sort of woven substance rather than straight-up metal cuffs. She strained against the left arm restraint to see if there was any give to it, but there was none. The other restraints were the same. She had all the genetically-engineered superstrength of a CDF soldier, but no leverage to apply it with. If the binds had even the slightest tearing in them, she could work against that, but as far as she could tell, the binds were in excellent condition.
Finally, Lee took stock of her assets, which at the moment consisted of her brain and not much else: She had no eyes, no physical strength and no way to communicate to anyone except possibly to Two, which did her no good, and Six, which likewise did not give her much to go on. And as much as Lee thought she had a reasonably good brain, all things concerned, there was only so much it could do, trapped as it was in her head.