Her microexpression changed, a glint that made her feel frightened a centimeter below her navel. Like the fear she’d felt once, trekking near the B&B. There’d been a wolf. It looked at her in a way that made her certain it had mapped every possible thing she might do, anticipated countermoves. It effectively owned her. She was only breathing because it suffered her to. She tried to stay calm. The stupid bed-monitor ratted her out, its infographics redlining in her peripheral vision. She expected Nadie to smirk, or micro-smirk, but she held that badass look for another moment.
“I see you understand. Let us talk about the network.”
Iceweasel felt for her bravery. “I don’t think so. I’ve given you knowledge of the network situation. Why should I give you something more?”
She nodded, acknowledging the point. “More coffee?” Subtext How about this black magic; a fair trade, wasn’t it?
“Absolutely.” Black liquid poured in a silky river from carafe to pot. “I’m still not going to tell you more about the network. Not until we have a deal.”
“It’s not a stupid position, though you know that now I can get to the bottom of it myself. My employers have procedures. They’ll pull everything in the building in twelve hours, take it away for forensics while new patched and locked stuff is installed here.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“You’re counting on the fact I’ll get more money from freeing you than I would from helping your father.”
“I’m hoping for that. It helps that my father is an asshole. I’m hoping you find working for him so offensive that the chance to get away and fuck him over and help me and get rich is tempting.”
The micro-smirk returned: touché. “Your father is in a difficult position.”
“My father deserves to swing from a lamppost.”
“A difficult position, I think you’ll agree.”
“You didn’t disagree with my assessment.”
“I’ve seen people swing from lampposts. It’s not nice.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
More coffee. The second caffeine rush wasn’t as good as the first, which she remembered hearing, caffeine adaptation was faster than with coffium’s cocktail of neuroticklers. You had to keep upping the dose to get to the same place, or wait out tedious refractory periods before you could recapture the rush.
“People swinging from lampposts, huh?”
“Twice. I didn’t put them there.”
“Who did?”
“People like me, to tell the truth. People working for rich people, taking money under orders, to send a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“Don’t fuck with my boss or you’ll hang from a lamppost.”
“But you never hung anyone from a lamppost.”
“Never hung anyone from anything. That’s not my kind of work. I’ve been asked to do it.”
“You get to say no to that kind of boss?”
“I’m good at my job. I get to say, ‘Let me explain to you why this will make things worse. Let me explain how this will make people who don’t think you’re the enemy decide they have to kill you before you kill them. Let me explain what I can do to neutralize people who want to harm you.’”
“You mean, infiltrate their networks, kidnap them—”
“Yes-no. Map the social graph, find the leaders, dox them, discredit them. Kidnap if you have to, but that makes martyrs, so not so much. Better to make them busy with fighting fires. I know other contractors who’ll crawl a culture’s chat-channels and boards and model the weak points, find the old fights that still simmer, create strategy for flaring them. So easy to infiltrate. Once they think they’re infiltrated, they point at one another, wondering who is a mole and who is true. It’s neater than bodies swinging from lampposts. Tidier. Not so many flies.”
“Ha ha.”
“You don’t like it. I work for your enemies, destroy what you’re building.” She shrugged. “I don’t do it because I hate you. Sometimes I admire you, even. But I’m good at my job. If you want to succeed, you have to be good at your job. Someone else would do my job if I didn’t, so unless you’re better at your job than people like me are at ours, you’re doomed anyway.”
The infographic pulsed red. “I fucking hate that thing.”
“I don’t mind that you’re upset. I’m saying upsetting things. If I was you, I’d be upset. I understand you don’t do what you do for job, but for love. You want to save the world. Saving the world is good, but I don’t think you will manage. I don’t think anyone can. Human nature. If the world is doomed, I want to be comfortable until it goes up, boom.”
“It sounds like you’re saying you’re interested in my trust fund.”
“I am very interested in your trust fund, Natalie. Iceweasel. I believe there are structural challenges to getting my hands on it, but I also think there are people in my orbit who know how to make structural challenges go away. They will need paying, of course, but—”
“But you’ll be able to afford it.”
“I can afford it now. I am good at my job. I get well paid. My contacts would do it for commission, but that would be much more. I prefer to pay cash, even if that risks my money.”
She poured herself more coffee, brought it to her lips, didn’t drink, looked over the black mirror of its surface. Her hand was rock steady, her eyes cool as glacial ice. “You know I can find you. No matter where you go, what you do, I can find you.”
“I know you can.” I know you think you can.
“You may think, ‘My comrades have better opsec than this Russian muscle-head, see how they cut through the network perimeter, got inside her decision loop.’ You may think, ‘We can outsmart her now.’ Is that what you think?”
Red, red, red. Stupid infographic. “I don’t think that, but I wonder if it’s true.”
She sipped, put down the cup. “It might be true. I don’t think so. Defense is a harder game than offense. Defense, you have to be perfect. Offense, you just need to find one imperfection. Here I am defender. When I hunt you, you are the defender. You will make mistakes. Your philosophy isn’t about perfect, it’s not about discipline.”
It takes mental discipline not to delude yourself.
“It doesn’t matter. If you understand anything about me, you understand I don’t give a shit about money. If I could put it in a pile and set fire to it, that’d be the only day I wouldn’t piss on it. I’m not going to outsmart you. If nothing else, having no money and none coming would alienate my father so deeply that he might stop trying to induct me into his cult of a family. Maybe he’ll adopt you.”
“I don’t think I’d let him.” Her microexpression was impossible to read. “I’m going to talk to the kind of people who do things with trusts and finances, so your father couldn’t undo them. You know if I say no, and you talk to your father about this, I can make your situation worse, in significant ways. You know I was able to track you, to solve your patterns. I took you without fuss. We know you don’t care for these people, but we also both know certain other people matter to you, such as your Gretyl—” The name made the infographics lose their shit. “I can find her as easily as I found you. The fact you were not hurt was a choice on my part. Do you understand these things?”
She was crying, and just hating herself for it. So foolish! To give this person such leverage over her, to be such a Pavlovian slave, just mention Gretyl’s name and the waterworks started.
She snuffled snot, savagely wiped her eyes, glared. The merc looked a little embarrassed.
“I don’t like to threaten. But it helps if you know I’m serious. That way we don’t have misunderstandings about balance of power. I am someone who pays attention to the balance of power. It’s my professional competence.”
“If you know anything about me, you know I just want to get the fuck out. I have no urge to screw up your job with my sociopathic family. If you think about it for one fucking second, Ms. Balance of Power, you’d understand I
don’t play games. I voluntarily told you I had pwned the network. I could have kept that a secret forever. I voluntarily handed over that power.”
“Of course, you’ve left me wondering what other secrets you have, which is why we’re having this discussion.”
“I don’t have any more secrets.” Oh, that fucking infographic.
She laughed. She was pretty when she laughed. Not scary at all. It was like the teenaged girl trapped inside her—before all the crazy-ass martial arts and BFG training—was shining through. “Of course you have secrets. We all have secrets, Iceweasel.”
[xv]
They were halfway to Thetford when the alerts sounded, startling Seth out of a walking reverie. The network came back in earnest when they crested a ridge with a straight shot to three repeaters. Suddenly they were getting traffic that had spooled from way away, in multiple directions. Once their availability back-propagated to other spools, the data rushed in. There were a lot of messages for them.
Gretyl figured it out first: “Storm’s fucked the normal routes, all this stuff’s backed up. We should pound in a repeater. Anyone bring one from the wagon?”
Seth had. He climbed a tree, Gretyl and Tam helping, and drove the spike into the trunk about four meters up. Tam passed him up a hatchet and he hacked the branches around it, feeling twinges of guilt despite the trees around them as far as the eye could see. This one was no nicer than any other.
Tam helped him get the tie-downs into place and unfurled the solar sheet on the north face. Gretyl retreated into antisocial, computerized silence as she parsed the messages.
“Holy shitting fuck,” she said.
“What?” Seth shouted and nearly dropped the hatchet—visions of it embedding itself in Tam’s skull made him grab wildly—then nearly fell out of the goddamned tree.
They found out about Akron, all the other attacks, and hastily spooled messages to everyone they loved, all over the world, and lit out as fast as they could go, for Thetford.
Tam’s interface read to her while she walked and flicked through messages and videos, lagging behind Seth and Gretyl. Seth tried to hurry her, but she told him to fuck off. She had people in Akron and she was figuring out if they were dead.
Seth realized a lot of the B&B crew was in Akron. People he’d known, cooked with, fixed machines with, argued with. Some who’d welcomed him when he was a shlepper. Some he’d de-shlepped, initiating them into walkaway’s mysteries. One he’d briefly fallen in love with, who—he realized now—reminded him of Tam. Who knew he had a type?
He worried. It was all he could do not to ask Tam to look up his people, too. Gretyl wanted to get to Thetford, for all the good they’d do there.
Tam kept gasping and swearing and falling down in the snow and needing rescuing. Her batteries were getting low. So were his. Gretyl kept too far ahead for him to see her infographics, but she couldn’t have been rolling in juice.
“Come on, Tam. Nothing we can do out here. Gotta get back before dark, baby.”
“Fuck baby, the world’s burning.”
“Can’t it burn while we’re indoors with a toilet?”
“Fuck.”
They crested the last ridge and Tam shouted. He was about to give her hell for diving back into her tubes when he saw her pointing. They were the highest ground for klicks. She pointed way out on the horizon. He squinted and Gretyl swore. He dialed up the visor magnification and saw a column of armored cars on caterpillar treads, sending up plumes of fresh powder behind them. They were skinned in snow-camou, but the plumes made it easy to pick out their edges.
“They’re heading to Thetford,” Seth said.
“No shit,” Tam said.
“I’m calling them now,” Gretyl said. They could see the space-station from the ridge, a hamster-run of tubes and domes nestled amid the ruins of the houses.
“They’ve got to get out of there now,” Tam said.
“I’m calling them,” Gretyl said, and her intercom shut down as she went private. They watched the armored column move. Belatedly, Seth scanned the sky for drones, and saw outriders ahead of the column, but flying at conservative distance ahead, maybe to keep the element of surprise intact. Or maybe the long-range outriders were high-altitude, and had receded to invisible pinpricks.
“Kersplebedeb says they were anticipating something like this.” Gretyl pointed down at the space-station, where now, airlocks were bursting open and suited-and-booted walkaways spilled out with packs and sledges in tow. “They got network service an hour ago, understood the Akron situation—”
“Our repeater,” Seth said.
“We bridged them in, they got the word. They’re not stupid. They’re ready to walk away.”
“Better be ready to run,” Tam said. The column drew closer.
[xvi]
Dis was in Gretyl’s ears—all their ears at once—as they suited up and hit the airlocks, grabbing supplies that she’d directed them to gather and stash when the news came on. For obscure reasons Kersplebedeb kept calling her “Tiger Mother,” a private joke between them.
Dis told them to grab spare batteries for Tam and Seth and Gretyl, reminded them to empty their bladders and void their bowels before suiting up, reminded them of the two deadheading mercs that had come all the way from Walkaway U and would need to be packed out, and suggested an arrangement of sledges and bubblewrap and oversaw the production.
Dis chivvied them out the door, was in their ears as they slogged up the ridge while Tam and Seth and Gretyl came down, taking their loads.
Dis said good-bye as they slogged away, pulling their loads and shouldering their packs, clomping away on the space-station’s entire supply of snowshoes, in two ragged columns.
They reached the top of the ridge, crunch of the snowshoes as loud as a mouthful of potato-chips, and realized Dis said good-bye because she couldn’t come.
“I’ve emailed a diff of myself to another instance of me.”
“Not Remote?” Gretyl sounded alarmed. “Because that’s not so stable—”
“Not Remote,” Dis said. “There’s a repo for Dis instances on the walkaway cloud, mirrored forty ways. We can’t all run, of course, but at least we’ll be safe. For now.”
“Shit,” Tam said, with feeling. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I’m leaving you. I’m racing ahead. You can download and run me, soon as you find a cluster. You meat-people be careful.”
Kersplebedeb said, “Tiger Mother, we’ve got our backups. We’re assured an ever-after afterlife in the sweet bye-and-bye. Nothing harder to kill than an idea whose time has come to pass. Takes more than guns to kill a man.”
“Always keep a trash bag in your car.” Dis sounded wryly amused. “Software immortality is nice, but if you can save your fleshy bodies, you should.”
“We’ll watch our butts.”
Seth ticked the privacy box. “I’m worried about you, Dis.”
“I’m worried about all of us. They’re hitting lots of places. Looking at those pics you sent, I think that’s Canadian army, special forces, the ones who do the bad things. Torture squads. Kind of thing you send if you don’t want any survivors.”
“A goose just walked on my grave.” Seth shivered again. He had a new power pack, but felt awfully cold.
Tam touched his shoulder. She could see he was talking, and he must have looked a fright. He toggled to public.
“Just worried that this feels like something bad and worse.”
They moved slowly. All the stuff they shlepped was bad enough, but snowshoes made it worse.
“They’re gonna get us pretty fucking soon at this rate,” Seth said.
Kersplebedeb snickered. “No, they’re not.”
Seth hadn’t ever heard Kersplebedeb make such a sinister noise.
“Booby trap?”
“Not the sort that goes boom. Just a place under the main road where there was a mining cave-in. We fixed it so we could bring in supplies, but didn’t design it for those
big tanks those fuckers have.”
“M.R.A.P.s,” Tam said. “Armored cars. Not tanks. No turrets.”
Kersplebedeb snickered again. “No difference. There’s a half-kilometer of rubble, tunnels, scree, and sand, straight down, and they’re about to hit it.” He chucked them the feed from a drone they’d lofted on their way out the door. They stopped while they screened it on their visors. “Any minute now,” he said.
The fan-tail of snow and ice obscured the column, but Seth thought there were six of those things.
“Won’t they have lidar, checking for IEDs?”
“Probably. Don’t know if it’ll be good enough to tell solid civil engineering from our half-assed job, though. Shall we find out?”
Whoomf. The cave-in was both sudden—the ground giving way without warning—and rapid, as the cave-in rippled in concentric rings, almost too fast to follow. It was terrible and terrific, like the earth was swallowing them. The two M.R.A.P.s at the back of the column threw into frantic reverse, and the second-to-last smashed into the last, jolting it skeewhiff. The driver tried to straighten out—Seth couldn’t help but root for him, because the fucking earth was swallowing a giant machine and when it’s humans versus brute physics, only a sociopath roots for physics—but it was too late, especially as panicky Mr. Second-to-Last went on to T-bone the wavering vehicle in reverse, and then the ground opened beneath both of them and they disappeared.
“Jesus,” Seth said.
Kersplebedeb muttered something.
“What?”
“Didn’t expect that. Thought they’d get stuck in a pit, not fall into the earth’s molten core.”
“Probably didn’t go that far,” Gretyl said. “I’m no geologist, but I think we’d have seen a splash of lava.” She was audibly shaken, whistling in the dark.
“Those tanks are super-armored,” Kersplebedeb said. “They’ll all be strapped in. There’ll be airbags.”
Tam put her arm around his shoulders. “Kersplebedeb, if they’re dead, they’re dead. You didn’t set a trap. They fucked up by bringing their giant macho-mobiles to the bush. Fuck, you know they’d have croaked us if they caught us.”
Kersplebedeb didn’t say anything. The radio let them hear his ragged breath.
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