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Despite the well-known measures in place to stop runaways, the freeze branding, the microchipping, the collaring, there are always a few who try to slip away.
There are also a few Lords, Masters, and ordinary free people who try to spirit slaves out of the Empire.
And perhaps a few escape, there's bound to be a bit of leakage in a system this large. Just as the IRS can't audit every tax return, Commerce and the GAO simply can't audit and track every slave, every contract, all the time.
So, a few slip across the Empire's border.
But for the rest who try?
One way or another, their only freedom is death.
~oo(0)oo~
Josh sighs and checks his watch yet again.
It's an abolitionist conference, and he's sitting in the first row, with orders to attend the cocktail party after. He's here to make sure that everybody knows that Commerce is watching; and perhaps having the Big Bad Wolf in their midst will spook a few of the flightier sheeple into doing something foolish and maybe the BIS will pick up a few leads.
Except ... really, the sort of people who attend events like this are rarely the sort that have direct contacts in the trafficking world. They're also the sort whose slaves are well enough cared for that they know its not in their best interests to attempt a run for it. And when these Lords and Masters die, they'll have made arrangements to have their slaves' contracts sold to like minded individuals, or should they know they're dying, shortly before death, these slaveholders will have happened to take a handful of "their" favorite slaves on vacation to a nation which does not recognize slavery and leave them there, and unless there's a deeply compelling reason, Commerce will not pay a recovery fee to bounty hunters for their return.
He's wasting his time here. But his superiors and his superiors' superiors have ignored his advice, and Josh's going to do what Damian suggested, he's going to eat the food, drink the wine, spend his per-diem, and do his damn job.
Do his damn job.
Commerce should be sending Agents into the underground, the radical fringes, the back alleys, organized crime, and then, and only then, will they shut down the trafficking rings.
He wants to seize the podium and tell everybody in this room that they did no favors to anybody by keeping their mouths shut when they had reason to believe that someone had slipped a slave into an "underground railroad", or if they had slipped a slave into the network, or helped slip a slave into such a network.
Because, yeah, that railroad's underground, alright. Straight underground to a shallow grave, the crematorium, or to a body farm. And if the slaves are lucky, it's a short journey.
Most of all, Josh wants to tell them about his first case as a BIS Agent.
He wishes he could show them the pictures of an air-tight train car parked on a remote siding not far from the Salton Sea one hot July afternoon, during the peak of the monsoon season.
He wishes there were some way to make them smell the contents of that car, once it had been opened. He wants them to know what it's like to vomit and vomit and vomit and then, when there's nothing left, to keep on heaving and drooling to the point of needing medical attention.
He wants them to have recurring nightmares about what the contents of that car looked like, after, since the car was more or less a giant dutch oven for at least a week.
And then perhaps, they'd understand about the mules and traffickers who don't care because they've been paid cash upfront, and know they are nigh untouchable because the good intentioned fools who condemned those 47 slaves to a slow death in the suffocating blackness had no way to follow up on them through official or unofficial channels.
It was the kinder traffickers who simply put a bullet in the brain.
And not all traffickers killed their cargoes. Some sold them. And from what Josh had seen in continental desert southwest, being bought by La eMe, or MS 13, or a biker gang, or anybody else who wanted slave labor off the books to make meth or do any kind of dirty, degrading, and dangerous job? You'd wish that a kind trafficker had dispatched you without ceremony.
Josh sighs once again and rolls his eyes at one of the tuxedo clad gentlemen seated on the dais, the one that has glared at him with undisguised loathing all afternoon, and wishes he could tell this Lord or Master that there were far, far worse monsters than the Big Bad Wolf.
And he knows, because he hunts them.