Unwilling to Back Down (Survival of the Fittest Book 2) Read online

  Unwilling

  to

  Back Down

  Shawn Keys

  For more information about the Author

  Visit:

  https://authorshawnkeys.wixsite.com/website

  Cover Art by:

  Christina Patricia Myrvold

  Freelance Concept Artist/Illustrator

  To view her portfolio, visit:

  https://www.artstation.com/christinapm

  See Discussion on this title and others on Facebook:

  Harem Lit Facebook Discussion Group

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  Originally Published by Shawn Keys

  Copyright © March 2020

  ISBN: 978-1-9992853-9-5

  Quick Links to Chapters:

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The old-fashioned intercom on Bruce’s desk buzzed. It was a relic, but it still worked. Hence why it was still there. When you worked for the government, things only got replaced when they got broken. His secretary spoke over the line in her nasal tone, “Agent Moraker to see you, Sir.”

  Bruce Atimosa, Director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Departmental Accountability, paused in the collation of his budget figures. He wasn’t in a terrible mood, despite the fact he was working on finances. Money was always tight on paper, but added funds were always there if an emergency arose. When he was a less experienced administrator, he had nightmares about blasting through his operations budget too quickly. After five years in the job, he knew that his supervisor would frown at him if he asked for more cash, read him the riot act about not doing it again in the future, then release the money anyway.

  Even though he had learned to take the constraints of his budget in stride, it still had to be done. It was still mind-numbing. This might be a welcome break, he thought. Moraker was one of his better agents; stable and thoughtful in her research, but willing to take a bold risk and go with her gut when needed. It was a rare blend, and she was a talent worth cultivating. He tapped the intercom button. “Send her in, Candace.”

  He set aside his keyboard and spreadsheets, leaning back in his chair to wait for her to come in.

  ODA Agent Jacqueline “Jackie” Moraker pushed open the door and gave a polite knock on the inside of the door. “I’m not interrupting, Sir?”

  He waved her in. “Nothing that can’t wait for a few minutes. Come in. Have a seat.” He waited while she made her way across the tightly woven carpet. “I read your report on the Department of Commerce. Excellent sample size. Well-chosen demographic. Well spread across the whole Department. Under time and under budget. I’m impressed.”

  Clad in a business suit carefully styled to be professional yet emphasize her quiet confidence, the dark-grey material hugging her curves, Jackie folded herself into one of the seats directly in front of his desk. Her smile was genuine, obviously proud of her work. “I don’t suppose this has bought me enough good will that I can take a bit more of a risk with my next assignment?”

  Intrigued by the odd segue, Bruce replied, “You know I’ll always support you and the other agents when you go fishing. Just don’t tell me you want to investigate Homeland. The paperwork to get us past the door is a nightmare. It’s mandatory once a year, and we’ve already been through that torture back in July.”

  “I hate to say it, but this might be one step worse.”

  Bruce made the logical jump easily enough, “The FDPC?”

  She nodded.

  That made him groan. The Federal Department of Population Continuity had been established to meet the challenges of Persterim when the virus erupted onto the world stage a little over ten years prior. The name of the disease was derived from its effect: Persistent Sterility in Men. While the Center for Disease Control continued in a quest for a cure, the FDPC had been charged with minimizing population loss, ensuring genetic diversity, and preventing sexual criminality. This included championing new legal precedents, finding the 0.5% of males that were immune to the disease and thus still fertile, monitoring the health of the general population and doing all they could to safeguard the lives of anyone of working age that could benefit to the economy. It was a broad mandate, and the consequences of failure would be dire.

  So far, the FDPC seemed to be succeeding. Which meant, they were pretty much everyone’s heroes. Even when the occasional scandal crept up, it never seemed to break their reputation. Bruce remembered when they had been at their worst. Word had crept out a few years back that the FDPC had developed a policy for deliberate sterilization of any fertile male with a destructive genetic disorder. They had created a drug for it specifically. As they put it, it was to humanely stop that disorder from spreading through an already unstable population.

  Human rights activists had exploded. There had been demonstrations. Even a few riots. That fervor had lasted for several months. During that time, the FDPC had continued to help law enforcement hunt down sex offenders. They had founded the most effective, government-run adoption service ever known to humankind, uniting thousands of children with parents victimized by sterility. They had introduced the phone app that connected women with fertile males, which had hugely boosted pregnancies.

  The list went on.

  Of course, population numbers began to dwindle. Nothing could have prevented that. The pressure to give the FDPC the room to maneuver only grew. Outrage diminished, especially given how few people the sterilizations affected. An edge of panic was hovering around everything to do with population levels. Pensions were no longer certain if there wasn’t enough work-force to generate tax revenue. The powerful American economy could no longer survive if there wasn’t a steady stream of highly educated people joining the workforce to innovate and create new ideas.

  At the same time, every country in the world was suffering similar effects. Countries like Russia, China and other autocracies with more rigid government control had taken far more draconian measures. The FDPC’s unpopular decisions were overlooked in light of the gains they were making for far less cost than the autocratic use of open purges and forced breeding programs.

  Most people see them as the thin, dark line between civilization and total fucking disaster. This isn’t the bear whose nose I want to poke. Bruce scowled at her. “Really, Jackie? You have never chosen to tilt at windmills.”

  “It isn’t my intention to start now.” She was being visibly careful, selecting her words precisely. Bruce got the idea that she was protecting someone or trying not to sound too insane with her plans. Maybe both. “The best way to describe what I want to do is a fact-finding mission. A quiet one.”

  Bruce smiled. “That sounds like the very best kind.”

  With a knowing smirk, Jackie answered, “I figured you would appreciate that. I’m going to make contact with a source who claims to have information regarding the FDPC.”

  “Compelling?”

  “Enough that it can’t be ignored.”

  “Where would you have to go?”

  “The northwest.”

  Bruce pursed his lips, tapping them with steepled fingers in thought. “We don’t want to legitimize a crackpot.”

  Jackie agre
ed. “The source isn’t going to stop in what they are doing. They are searching for a sympathetic ear. My estimate is that they will continue to get more desperate and experimental the longer they are ignored. How many public outcries have we seen from people who say they don’t have a voice? This person is motivated. If I can disprove the facts they are seeing and silence them here and now, I can save us all a lot of pain.”

  Bruce huffed. He knew she was selling him on this. That was fine with him. All the agents did when pushing their pet projects. He also noticed how she used vague locations and indefinite-plural pronouns to cloak her source’s identity, right down to their gender. Yeah, she’s being careful. Not just for herself and her source, either. She’s trying to shield me by keeping me in the dark. Plausible deniability. “What’s the scope of support you need?”

  “Almost zero, Sir. I’ll absorb all travel costs on my preapproved budget. I’ll be deactivating my implant for periods of time, but I’ll log them appropriately. The only thing this will cost the office is my absence. If necessary, I’ll take a bit of vacation leave to cover it.”

  Bruce scowled again, shaking his head. “That won’t be necessary. After all the solid work you’ve put in, I can hardly begrudge you a small side-quest.” He cleared his throat, buying himself a couple of seconds of thought. “Alright, the assignment is approved. I’ll treat it like an undercover assignment. It’ll be in my records alone, and your expenditures will be off the books until it is over. Updates once a week as a minimum. Try to send me an encrypted email whenever you have the chance. That’ll keep my mind at ease. Keep me up to speed as best you can. Hopefully, when you find out the whole thing is nonsense, we can flush it down the electronic toilet and the FDPC will never know we were interested.”

  Jackie smiled. “My hope exactly, Sir.”

  “Good. Anything else?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “Good. Dismissed.” He said it politely, making sure she knew she was free to go. The office didn’t run on strict military-style discipline, but he ran a decently tight ship as a whole.

  Taking the chance while she had it and before he could think better of his decision, Jackie slipped from her seat and exited to the outer office.

  Bruce unlocked his computer but didn’t return immediately to the budget sheets. He didn’t want to forget the few details he had. He opened his encrypted folder, began a new file, and entered what little information he had. He labelled it as pending an update a week in the future, then sealed it behind the cipher generated by his personal key card.

  With that done, he silently wished her well on her adventure and got back to the budget.

  * * *

  Unfortunately for both Bruce and Jackie, the Director’s personal cipher codes were no longer a barrier to Sondra Latimer. She had nibbled away at the edges of his security protocols for a full month before she had managed to hitchhike the right software onto his computer. Once done, she could record his keystrokes and resolve his pass-codes. That was over a year ago. By now, she had taken over the password reset protocol, demanding with some regularity that he change his codes periodically and thus ensuring she was always ready to capture the new data when he made the change.

  The addition of the new file in his secure archive flashed an alert to her. On command, his computer fed her all the relevant details. It didn’t take long for Sondra to realize this was more important than routine business. This report mattered.

  It was frustratingly short on details, and Sondra had to link a few different facts together before she understood exactly how important this report was. That didn’t annoy her. It was one of the reasons her supervisors had hired her. Not just for hacking, but for her analysis of what she found.

  She kept herself well abreast of all traffic on the hidden Task Mail website that connected the members of the Ouophiic auyn. The name was a loose translation of ‘Soldiers of the Rising Sun’ in the ancient, Aeolic-Grecian dialect they were all taught and which they all used on the secret email website as a final layer of encryption. That translation had been further condensed into ‘Soldiers of Dawn’, and the whole organization became known simply as ‘The Dawn’. Since it suited the image that the central council was trying to create, stylizing themselves as powerful warriors waiting to break through the darkness of mediocrity, the nickname had stuck. Some of the organization’s leaders thought it was a tad dramatic, but it inspired the imaginations of the younger men and women who joined.

  Secret organizations depended on covert communications. There were always secrets and levels of classification. Compartmentalization was key to any underground organization’s survival. If one part of it was discovered, the rest could cut them loose and survive. But some data had to flow, especially information that needed to be watched carefully by everyone. In those cases, rapid dissemination without spilling the data to outsiders was key.

  This was true when six Dawn agents had been killed in the Washington area. The official account stated that they were killed in the line of normal FDPC duty. On the Task Mail site, it was correctly reported that they had died while attempting to contain a possible genetic anomaly who had turned violent. The young man and his loyal ring of protectors had refused to be neatly and quietly cut out of the gene pool. The local manhunt had failed to nail down the perpetrators. They had disappeared, despite having linked them to a couple of other murders so they could use the resources of the police to find them.

  Sondra gave a deep yawn, stretched back in her seat, and ruffled a hand through her tight afro-style haircut. She propped her sleek, dark-skinned legs up on a footrest, then sipped at her coffee, trying to keep awake. She looked less like a stereotypical hacker girl and more like an idle, underwear model searching her social media accounts or messaging her agent. Her dancer’s body combined with her agile mind were two indicators that she met the ‘superior’ qualities that the Dawn demanded of its ‘woke’ soldiers. Qualities that were far greater than the ‘baseline’ that fertile males needed to meet to avoid being sterilized or purged.

  Fighting to stay awake long enough to finish her task, Sondra pieced together a message to the Dawn’s Chief of Covert Government Surveillance. She highlighted the connection so he couldn’t miss it, then sent it on its way.

  Her task complete, she knew the coffee was no longer enough. She was at the tail end of a 34-hour marathon coding session. She pushed away from her computer and crawled into her small bed. Her home was a miserable little hole in the middle of Washington D.C.’s downtown core, but it had a blistering internet connection and no-one bothered her.

  For her, it was heaven.

  * * *

  The Chief of the CGS group within the Dawn was a powerful man, by pretty much every measure.

  In his public life, Reginald “Reggie” Fisher was the Head of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, one of the offices reporting to the Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. It was a lot of words blended into very impressive titles. What it all meant was that he had dug himself into a position responsible for the oversight of the very things he was helping destroy. The irony was not lost on him, and the placement was not an accident.

  The Dawn had begun infiltrating the government twenty years prior. At first, they had pierced isolated, critical points that would help them carry out the first phases of their plan. They had replaced key appointments they needed before Persterim was released ten years ago. Their consolidation of power had never ceased. It was careful. Pedantic. They couldn’t afford any questions. Or any suspicions. Then, the more they controlled, the bolder the actions they had begun to take. Nothing was certain, yet. A purge could still destroy all they had built.

  Within the ranks of the Dawn, Reggie was the dark mirror to the Department of Justice’s Office of Departmental Accountability. It was his job to keep tabs on the uncorrupted “sleeping” elements of the government, making sure there weren’t any signs of activity that would be dangerous to the Dawn. He us
ed a variety of methods: bribed officials, inserted loyalists, and those like Sondra – highly skilled investigators, hackers and thieves who skimmed off the information he needed.

  Whenever he received information from any of them, he spent the first fifteen minutes verifying that it fit into his view of the world. Covertly obtained information had an error factor. He needed to guarantee whatever details he could were correct when considered against his own files. That eliminated some of that error. Sondra was good at her job; she had cross-referenced her notes with relevant posts on Task Mail, minimizing the time he spent following up.

  He wasn’t pleased. The last thing they needed was an investigation into the FDPC by a sleeping DOJ agent. There were still reverberations in the media from the FDPC agents’ deaths. People wanted answers. These were their heroes, in the minds of the public, and people wanted the guilty ones brought to justice. If this dragged on much longer, the Dawn might have to feed the reporters a scapegoat. Then, when they could sweep any public scrutiny under the rug, they could find and simply kill the anomaly and make him quietly vanish within the need for a trial.

  Reggie twirled his pen, measuring what was needed. The Dawn Council was getting impatient. They had green-lighted the Washington unit to push a little harder with this anomaly case. The council had hoped to measure if the Dawn had subverted enough of the government so that they could flat-out execute a fertile male and then control the fallout. Revolution was getting closer. Soon enough, a lot more than one male was going to die.

  But the whole thing had backfired. The kid they had hoped to kill was in the wind. Reggie should have kept himself better informed as to what Lark was doing to find him. It had gotten lost amidst a thousand other things that had seemed more important. Lark had never disappointed him before, so he had thought the matter handled. Only now was he realizing that he hadn’t heard an update in quite some time.