Dark AU where a subversive organization caused a Second American Civil War, then pushed through laws sentencing POWs from the other sides to chattel slavery. The war has now ended, but a new war against Canada is brewing to try to keep the truth from coming out. Isabella ended up on the opposite side from Phineas and Ferb; while they were busy researching new weapons, she was turned into a biomechanically-augmented supersoldier, then captured and sold to Phineas just before the war ended. The three of them escaped to Canada, where she was freed, and have been working to help Canada defend against the expected attack.
This completes the trilogy begun back in Nothing Civil About War. There is one more side-story planned in this setting, which I've begun working on - the story of Buford and Ginger and how they got together.
Many, many thanks to Sabrina06 for beta, and to twistedingenue and shinykari for help with Chicago. Any mistakes in the depiction of Chicago are my fault, or due to changes in the city after having been a national capital for 16 years.
Trigger warnings: war, politics, slavery, loss of autonomy, death, threats of rape, more death, violence, death by gunshot, death by bombing, death by bludgeoning, death by cruise missile, death by burning/melting. Lots of people die in war. Some of them do so on-screen here. Some are killed in cold blood by our protagonists.
The cruise missile skimmed the waters of Lake Ontario, telemetry data streaming behind it through the ether. Colonel Gilbert watched its status on the big screen; the rest of the people in NOREASCRUCOM watched it as well while doing their other duties. As the first cruise missile that would reach its target in the Northeast Cruise Missile Command's area, it was the bellwether of their success. As the first missile targeted at metro Toronto, the largest city in Canada, its impact would be even more important.
They hadn't been expecting this. Everyone knew that the war of words between Ottawa and the American government in Chicago was tense. Accusations of kidnapping and nefarious Canadian plots had been all over the news. Official reports were that it was all the Canadians' fault, but Colonel Gilbert had seen what passed for objective news after the government censors got their hands on it.
Regardless, nobody had expected it to escalate to open warfare so quickly. Allegedly, Canadian forces had attacked Fort Harrison in Montana and abducted American citizens. Colonel Gilbert suspected that the recent rumors that the entire Second American Civil War had been a plot by a conspiracy called the Council of Sanford may have been related, and that this was a way to make sure that wartime media controls could stay in place.
That wasn't his problem. He'd received an order from General Michaels to launch cruise missiles with tumbler warheads at Canadian military targets. The targets, as expected, were military bases and research centers in highly-populated areas. The hope was that a sudden strike would demoralize the Canadian populace and lead to, as the saying went, a short, victorious war.
Half his tumbler warheads had gone out, and he'd been told not to expect replacements. The technology to replace them had been lost when the Fletcher-Flynn Research computers had encrypted themselves shortly after Fletcher and Flynn had defected.
"Two minutes, Colonel," the sergeant monitoring the lead missile said. He nodded to her as he watched the screen.
One corner of the screen showed the grainy video coming from the missile's nose camera. The top half projected the locations of all the missiles on the Canadian-American border onto a map. The remainder gave the lead missile's telemetry data - airspeed, ground speed, GPS location, and estimated time to arrival.
A light sparkle appeared on the video feed as the missile flashed toward DRDC Toronto, a defense research center in the city. The sparkle filled the camera's view, and then the feed cut out entirely. The telemetry data froze briefly, then was replaced by the words, 'NO SIGNAL'.
"What happened?" Colonel Gilbert said, leaning forward. "What was that sparkle?"
"Checking, sir," the sergeant said, pulling up data on her computer.
"How long until the next impact?" the colonel said.
"One minute, Montreal," a corporal to one side said.
"On the main screen," the colonel said.
"Interesting," the sergeant said. "Sir, if this is correct, the tumbler core activated for some reason."
"So, the missile will reappear?"
"No, sir. It didn't activate properly. It just shifted the missile into another dimension with no return trigger."
On the main screen, a missile flew above the forests of southern Quebec. Ahead, buildings started to appear, and the St. Lawrence River curved around them. The slight sparkle appeared again, rapidly filling the screen. Colonel Gilbert held his breath as the video feed vanished and the telemetry data froze.
"Same thing?"
The corporal tapped at the keyboard, then turned to the colonel. "Yes, sir."
"Well, fuck," the colonel said. "I need to tell Chicago."
"How are we doing?" Phineas Flynn asked, leaning over his step-brother Ferb's shoulder. Ferb was keeping an eye on the tumbler shields he had created, which had been deployed around as many cities and defensive sites as they could manage. They were gathered around a monitoring console in the lab that Ferb had been using, along with a few other people who were cleared to know about the tumbler shields.
"One shield failed for unknown reasons," Ferb said quietly. "Four other missiles hit unshielded sites."
Phineas winced. "Any word on casualties?"
"Too many."
"Still, we stopped..."
"Eighty-eight of ninety-three."
"I'll take it," Lieutenant Colonel Scott, the base commander, said. "That's an awful lot of soldiers still alive because of you."
"It just means they'll use conventional warheads next time," Ferb said darkly.
"Right, but tumbler warheads are more frightening to civilians. Being able to stop them is a huge morale boost," Vanessa Doofenshmirtz said from her seat next to Ferb. Vanessa was the head of Doofenshmirtz Biosciences, the defense contractor they'd been working with on Project Obelisk. She had also started dating Ferb several months earlier.
"Any response from Ottawa?" Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, asked from where she stood, next to Phineas. She'd just returned from her rescue mission into America a few hours before, bringing Ferb and Doctor Tjinder back, along with Holly, her friend, and Erik, a former member of the Council of Sanford. Erik had betrayed the hidden conspiracy group that had started the civil war within America, and had tried to help the Southwest faction fend off the other three, which had all instituted slavery for captured soldiers of the other factions.
Phineas had just found out that Erik had also been the man who had killed Isabella's mother in a terrorist bombing that had been one of the triggers of the civil war, and had then been instrumental in creating Project Dewdrop, the biomechanical enhancement project that had turned Isabella into a supersoldier. Isabella wasn't overly fond of him, and Phineas knew she had plans to have a long talk with him after the current crisis passed. If Erik was lucky, he'd come out of it in one piece.
"Nothing so far," Vanessa said. "I'm sure they're letting the Mexican and allied European governments know that the mutual defense treaty is being activated."
"Hopefully none of them buy the American lies," Warrant Officer Colin Park said. Colin had been their primary military liaison on Project Obelisk, an attempt to recreate and enhance Project Dewdrop. Eventually, he had been the first volunteer for the biomechanical implants, and was now ready for a mission. He had been scrubbed from the rescue mission with Isabella at the last minute in an attempt to keep the Americans from attacking Canada; ultimately, it hadn't been enough, and President Sherman had ordered tumbler missiles launched as he requested a declaration of war from the American Congress.
"Hopefully," Phineas agreed. "There's always hope, right?"
Colonel Alexander Archer sat at his desk, staring blankly at the wall. How had it all gone wrong? Just a few months ago, he'd been in charge of Special Research Projects for the American Army, having previously led it for the victorious Central faction in what was now being called the Second American Civil War. He'd been wrapping up the last few loose ends from the war, in particular the Southwest faction's supersoldier research project, Project Dewdrop. His superiors in the Council of Sanford had wanted those biomechanical implants to make themselves superhuman, and to create controllable supersoldiers. Dewdrop implants had a remotely-triggerable neural connection in them, which could be used to cause great pain or even kill them at a distance. The plan was to make implants without kill switches for Council members, and with kill switches for the soldiers.
Unfortunately, the bunker holding the Project Dewdrop researchers had been hit by a tumbler bomb two weeks before the end of the war, killing all but one of the Dewdrop-enhanced soldiers. Even worse, all the records of Dewdrop had been completely deleted from the Southwest computer systems by the time his team got access. Archer had picked his top researchers, Ferb Fletcher and Phineas Flynn of Fletcher-Flynn Industries, to track down the last known Dewdrop soldier, the man who'd killed their father, codenamed Echo Three. They could use his implants to reverse-engineer the details and create new ones, as part of Project Sledgehammer, the project attempting to reproduce the Dewdrop implants for the reunited American government.
And then everything had blown up in his face. As it turned out, Echo Three was a woman, and that asshole Flynn had bought her as a slave the day before the war ended. She'd hidden there until Fletcher had figured out who she was, and then she and Flynn had tried to flee to Canada. Despite her and Flynn's best efforts, Archer's men would have caught the fugitive couple...if Fletcher hadn't turned traitor. The three of them had escaped into Canadian custody, and Archer's first attempt to retrieve them had caused an international incident and gotten him busted down from head of Special Research Projects. SRP had been his domain, and suddenly it was given to that idiot General Riggins. Archer was left in charge of just one project - Project Sledgehammer. They'd sent him here, to Fort Harrison in Montana, and put him in charge of Sanford West, the secret facility for Council business. The researchers they'd given him had been mostly failures, but they'd had one clever idea - in case they captured Echo Three, they'd made a special collar that would activate the pain switch in her Dewdrop implants. That bastard Flynn had disconnected the antenna, but the implant that controlled the pain switch was also the one that kept the remaining implants from turning to jelly and killing her, so a powerful-enough broadcast from close enough should be able to activate it.
Archer had set intelligence assets to watch Fletcher, Flynn, Echo Three, and a Canadian researcher that they worked with named Tjinder. He'd hoped to kidnap some or all of them and bring them here to replace the Council's researchers.
And then, not even two weeks ago, his life had hit another shipwreck. On Shatter Day, the annual holiday commemorating the terrorist attacks that had destroyed Washington and begun the civil war, he'd gotten drunk with Dutch Abercrombie, Mayor of Danville, in the mayoral office. They'd talked about, among other things, how they had carried out the bombing in Danville on that day, nineteen years earlier. And Dutch's assistant, a woman named Holly, had recorded the whole thing and sent it off to anti-slavery activists.
Holly had been sent to Sanford West as a slave research subject, joining Erik Bailey, a former Council member who had led the Southwest faction and betrayed the Council. And just as they caught Holly, things finally went right for Archer. Fletcher and Tjinder had fallen into his traps, and were brought to Sanford West to recreate the Dewdrop implants. And, even better, he'd expected that Echo Three would come to rescue them, and had trapped her as well. With two of the top researchers in the world, and the last Dewdrop soldier, surely he could make them recreate the implants.
And then Dutch had arrived. The Council wanted him hidden so that nobody could ask him about the recording. He'd had his eye on Echo Three ever since he'd first seen her, and now he had his chance. He got set up in the Black Hole, the room in Sanford West that was shielded against all electromagnetic waves, and had her brought in, handcuffed and helpless.
And that was when they learned that Flynn had upgraded her implants, and the special collar did absolutely fuck-all to stop her. She'd beaten the shit out of Dutch, breaking his knee in the process, and then proceeded to take over the base computers, knock out Lieutenant Knox in the monitoring station, and escape with all four of the other prisoners. Fighter intercepts had tried to stop them, but they'd made it across the border and ejected from the stealth hovercar she'd arrived in just before a missile destroyed it.
Between the very public incident, and the increasing unrest brewing because of the leaked recording of his conversation with Dutch, Archer was pretty much persona non grata with the government in Chicago these days. The President had been forced to declare war to try to force the leaked recording back underground. And Archer had been told to await further instructions.
He could only hope they'd let him live at this point. He suspected Dutch would not be so lucky. That'd be a shame, because he and Dutch had been friends all the way back to their days in ROTC in college. But if it came down to it, if it was him or Dutch...sorry, Dutch.
His secure phone, sitting on the desk for just this call, buzzed. Taking a deep breath, he flipped it open and answered it with his Council codename. "Acid Test," he said.
"Scenic Harvest," the voice on the other end said. Scenic Harvest was a Senator from Michigan, and (more importantly) his Council superior. "You are ordered to report to Chicago immediately for reassignment. Talk to General Sumner of the Joint Chiefs."
"Thank you, sir," Archer said. "May I request information on the assignment?"
"No," Scenic Harvest said curtly. "Your boy fucked up pretty bad, Acid Test."
"Yes, he did, sir," Archer said. "Should I have him come to Chicago as well after he gets out of surgery?" The medical staff said that Dutch might walk again someday, but it was going to take some time.
"No. He's to stay at Sanford West until we send for him. We're still deciding what level of sanction is appropriate."
"Understood, sir. I'll be there as soon as I can."
"Do that. Scenic Harvest out." The line went dead.
Archer looked at it for a long moment before setting it on the desk again. So. I'm still alive. They wouldn't bring me to Chicago just to kill me.
I hope.
Adyson heard the familiar voice as she entered the police station.
"My daughter has been missing for a week now," Mrs. Washington was saying, "and you are telling me that you cannot open a missing persons report on her?"
"What's wrong?" Adyson asked, stepping up to her, limping only slightly on her prosthetic leg. The original had been lost to an IED when she had been driving trucks for the Central military during the civil war.
"Adyson, how nice to see you," Mrs. Washington said, a smile crossing her face as she turned. She'd dressed up, clearly, in an orange dress that shone against her dark skin, with matching hat, shoes, and purse. "Have you seen Holly recently?"
"Not since last week. That was why I came - to file a missing persons report."
The desk sergeant looked up at her and sighed. "I'll tell you the same thing I told her," he said, nodding toward Mrs. Washington. "The file for Holly Washington is marked as closed and I am not permitted to reopen it."
"Who marked it closed?" Mrs. Washington asked.
"I'm not aware. I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do for you, ma'am." The sergeant looked very uncomfortable.
"Who can?" Adyson asked.
"Nobody in Danville," the sergeant said. "Maybe somebody in Chicago."
Mrs. Washington stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. "I see. Adyson, let's go." She turned and stalked out, Adyson following as quickly as she could.
Once they were outside, Adyson said quietly, "I think I know what happened."
"Oh, I'm quite aware what happened," Mrs. Washington said. "She was clearly the person who leaked the recording of Mayor Abercrombie, so this...Council...probably vanished her. I'm just trying to make them," she nodded her head back toward the police station, "understand what the government they defend is doing."
"Bastards," Adyson muttered, then looked up, embarrassed. "Sorry."
Mrs. Washington gave her a wry smile. "No apology needed. Come with me, I have some people I want you to meet."
Erik Bailey watched the Canadians rush about, tracking the war situation. It wasn't as bad as he'd feared, at least partly because the Fletcher boy had created shields to stop the tumbler bombs.
He'd seen this drill too many times to be excited about it again. Eighteen years of civil war does that to you, especially when you're one of the people who instigated it.
"You. Bailey," Isabella said, bursting into the room. He looked up at her and sighed.
"Are you here to finally kill me?" he asked. He deserved it. Whatever she did to him, he deserved it at least twice over. He'd killed her family, almost killed her. He'd left her an orphan as the country shattered. Then one of his last-ditch projects had taken her from the orphanage and turned her into a weapon. A weapon with a built-in self-destruct.
She'd come out of it in better shape than anyone could have expected, and even found love, it seemed. The inventor boy, Flynn, had replaced the self-destructing implants with newer ones, better ones.
"No. They want you upstairs. They want you to send a broadcast to the Americans." She gave him a thin smile.
"Then you'll kill me?" he asked hopefully as he stood up.
Her smile broadened, becoming more vicious. "No. You don't get off that easily, you son of a bitch."
He sighed again, nodding. He deserved that, too.
Irving duBois sat in the main computer center for the Anti-Slavery Front, watching the monitors. The wartime footing made it tricky to get into the government's computer systems, and he needed to be careful not to get caught.
A message pinged to one side of his main monitor, and he brought it up.
Stalker -
Canadian TV is showing this and feeding it worldwide. Claims to be Senator Bailey from Southwest, talking about how he was part of the Council and set off the Santa Fe bomb. No way in hell Chicago will let it go public. Can you fix that?
He pulled up the attached video, of a pale, middle-aged man with thinning brown hair, sitting in a comfortable chair and facing the camera. He recognized the Senator, who had been one of the leading anti-slavery advocates in the Southwest government for the past ten years. He'd vanished when the Southwest had surrendered, and it had been whispered that the Central government in Chicago had had him killed.
"I am Senator Erik Bailey, formerly of the Southwestern Senate," the video began. "This confession is long, long overdue, and I can only apologize for that. The delay is due to my own cowardice."
He straightened out his shirt and cleared his throat. "I was a member of the Council of Sanford. We were - they are - a group of individuals who thought that America was going down the wrong path into the new millennium. Nineteen years ago, in 2005, we used a domestic terrorist group called Nathan Hale's Liberators as a patsy as we set off bombs across the country, including two thermonuclear devices that leveled Washington, DC. I personally set off the bomb in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I do not know the names of all of the bombers, but I know that the bombs in Danville, in the Tri-State Area, were set by Alexander Archer and Jason Abercrombie, now a general in the American military and the mayor of Danville. My understanding is that the bomb in Cleveland, Ohio was set by Philip Sherman, now President of America. The thermonuclear devices were set by two martyrs to the cause, still celebrated by the Council, named Grant Hodgkins and Nicole Marr. There are more names, which will be in the data dump at this address."
A website name appeared at the bottom of the video, as Senator Bailey took a sip of water from a glass on the end table next to his chair. Irving pulled up the site as he continued to watch the video. The site was sluggish, but had a link to a WideData stream of the data file. Peer-to-peer for the win, Irving thought as he started the download. WideData was an enhanced version of the old BitTorrent protocol, which provided nearly-untraceable peer-to-peer distribution of data.
Senator Bailey cleared his throat again. "As I said, I was a member of the Council. Once we had shattered the government, we took control of the four factions, not letting them join together because we had not yet achieved our actual goal of enslaving American citizens." He chuckled ruefully. "It seems so simple to say that. And yet our goal was truly that - take those people we felt were unworthy and turn them into property of their alleged betters. It took six years before the Central faction was able to get the first slavery law through. Two of the other three factions followed quickly, and I was pushing the final faction, my home of Southwest, to make it unanimous."
He gave the camera an embarrassed smile. "And then I had a moment of revelation. I was in Chicago, allegedly negotiating a peace treaty that we knew would never happen, and I saw someone I knew. He had been a member of my protective detail. He was a good man, a good father, a good husband. And there he was, collared and treated like an animal."
His smile had turned to a bitter frown. "I realized then that my whole outlook was built on a lie - that anyone wearing a collar was not less than human. That this whole idea of enslaving my fellow man was one of the most monstrous ideas I'd ever had."
Irving took a sip of his soda and kept watching, enthralled, as he started typing the commands to share this video around to ASF sites nationwide.
Senator Bailey sat up and continued. "When I returned to Southwest, I withdrew my support for the SLAVE Act, as I had cleverly titled it. More - I got in contact with some soldiers who opposed slavery, and arranged for accidents for the other Council members in the Senate. The SLAVE Act died in committee, and good riddance."
He took another sip of water and cleared his throat. "I began to work toward keeping Southwest free. It worked for a time, until the Council decided to end the war. They caused the three remaining factions they controlled to merge together, with President Sherman's Central faction victorious. Then they turned on Southwest together. We might have still won, even with that." He sighed deeply. "We might have still won," he said quietly, looking into the distance for a moment.
"But two brilliant scientists from the Central faction invented the tumbler bomb, and in its first test, it destroyed the Southwest military's high command. It took time for the Southwest military to get its bearings back, and that was time we did not have. The Southwest surrendered eighteen months later.
"I've been told that I was allegedly killed in the fighting around Portland. The fact that I'm alive should tell you how true that statement was. They'll tell you that I'm lying, that I was forced to say everything I've said today. Trust that statement as much as you trust the stories of my death. In actuality, I was kidnapped by them and taken to a military base in Montana as an experimental subject. I am here and free because an American soldier went to retrieve a Canadian scientist and an exiled American researcher who had been kidnapped from Toronto. The American government - in the persons of General Archer and Mayor Abercrombie - wanted these scientists to perform experimentation on unwilling human subjects like myself, with the goal of creating so-called 'supersoldier' biomechanical implants. The plan was that the Council could, indeed, be better than those they consider cattle."
Irving shook his head. This is dynamite. How can we get this on national TV? He started pondering the network's security systems.
"They have made up stories about the need to attack Canada for one reason and one reason only - the Council is scared right now. Their lies are starting to fall apart due to the courageous efforts of Holly Washington, who leaked a recording of Archer and Abercrombie admitting to the Council's existence and the Danville bombing. Holly was also in Montana with me as an experimental subject. She's safe with me in Canada now."
Behind him, a tall black woman walked in and stood behind the chair. "It's true. I made the recording. I gave it to the ASF. Somehow, the Council found out about it and caught me. I was sentenced to slavery without a trial, because the Council considers themselves above mere laws. Were it not for the efforts of this valiant soldier, I would still be there, being raped and abused by the Council's thugs for their sport."
Senator Bailey cleared his throat. "We can't give the name or details of the soldier for her safety. I am sorry for that. I hope that, someday, she can get the acclaim she deserves for her efforts in the name of freedom.
"Freedom. It's a word that the American government likes to throw around. How they need to protect freedom by censoring your speech. By forbidding free assembly. By enslaving people for the crime of being drafted by another faction's army. It's all a lie. They only want freedom for themselves. The freedom to do whatever they want to everybody else with no repercussions.
"Every one of your Supreme Court justices is in on it now, and most of the members of Congress. The President has been in since the beginning.
"So now, they have problems. They need a new source of slaves. The downside of ending the civil war was that they couldn't enslave American soldiers. Look for them to add slavery as a punishment for more crimes. Expect the upcoming Supreme Court case to rule that Central POWs were lawfully sentenced by the Dixie and Columbia factions, and that they must all be collared again. Their goal is a world with three levels - on top, them. Protecting them, a layer of slave overseers and soldiers. And everybody else in chains. And the second level only stays there as long as they're useful.
"More importantly, they're realizing that that second level has more in common with the third than with them. They're going to war against Canada - a country that has never provoked them - for two reasons. First, expect a law shortly that says that Canadian POWs can be enslaved. It's a violation of the Geneva Convention, but they don't care. They're already international pariahs.
"Second, they can say that investigation of what they've done can't possibly happen now. There's a war on, after all." His voice dropped to a sarcastic tone. "Don't you support the war? What sort of traitor are you? Traitors get collars."
He paused and drank a bit more water. "America has always liked to call itself the Land of the Free. It is my hope that it can be that again one day. But for that to happen, it will first have to be the Home of the Brave. Stand up against them. If you're a soldier, don't defend these people. They created the war. Your comrades who were killed or enslaved - their blood is on the hands of the Council. They'll put a collar on you as soon as they can.
"I can't do much from here. I will accept punishment for my crimes, but not from those for whom I committed them. Not from those who have committed far, far worse.
"My fellow Americans, I call upon you. Take back your - our - country from those who have stolen it. The time is now."
The video ended, and Irving sat back with a smile for a moment. Then he shook his head and pulled up his research on breaking into the national television feeds