The silence stretched. The private cop beside Gordy put a tentative hand on his shoulder. Gordy shook it off violently, shoving him away.
The moment stretched. Then Gordy shucked his gauntlets with a flick of his wrists, sending them to clatter in the road. His bare fingers worked the catches of his visor, until it yawned open. His face was an indistinct moving blur, brown with camera-corrected streaks of white where his teeth and eyes were. He took his helmet off, shucked his weapons, let them fall around his feet.
The cops around him stared, body language telegraphing the open mouths behind their visors. He walked off, orthogonal to the jails and the cops’ lines, up 15 toward Ottawa, toward the dairies and dells of eastern Ontario.
He walked away.
The silence was something holy, church silence. It was a miracle, battlefield conversion.
“Akin!” the voice was amplified, from behind cop lines, loud enough to rattle the glass. “Get back into line, Akin!” It was a command voice, an asshole-tightening order-giving voice. Gordy’s shoulders stiffened. Gordy kept walking, divesting himself of more body armor, dropping the jacket into the road behind him as he walked. His head was high, but his shoulders shook like he was crying.
One of the cops in the front line raised his gun, muzzle big as a cannon, built to send focused, bowel-shredding ultrasonic at its target; the prolapsizer, they called it. The man whose hand had been flung off Gordy’s shoulder tackled the man with the gun before he could aim. They writhed on the ground until they were pulled apart by more cops, and stood, facing one another, held by the arms, chests heaving.
Gordy disappeared over a hill.
Jacob Redwater’s breath was noisy on Gretyl’s phone.
“We can’t win this with force.” She hung up as the next announcement started playing through the prisons’ outward-facing speakers.
* * *
In the middle of the third announcement, the cops opened fire on the speakers, more RPGs. The prisoners switched to backups, out of sight behind the roofline. When the cops’ drones went up for a look, they were harried by more walkaway drones, which chased them around the sky and even suicided on two cop drones. While the air battle raged, they got four more announcements out. They got five walkouts from seven announcements. The crowd was going fucking bananas on the boards. They doxxed the cops on the lines as fast as they could, running their graphs, finding more people to record messages.
Gretyl shook her head in amazement as the recordings came in. In the men’s prison, someone was playing D.J., queuing them up. In the women’s prison, someone else was doing the same. One of the boys in the control room did for the cops out front of their institution. She had been skeptical of the plan.
It turned on graph theory: once you hit a critical mass of walkaways, the six-degrees thing meant every single rent-a-cop on the line was no more than two handshakes—or family Christmas dinners—away from a walkaway who would shame and sweet-talk them into putting down their weapons.
Announcements eight through ten played on the parapet speakers, before the cops brought out mortars—mortars!—to attack the walls, bringing them down in piles of rubble amidst mushrooming dust clouds. TransCanada’s stocks plummeted. The contagion spread to all those other places where walkaways were holed up—universities, research outfits, all those refugee detention centers. When the market saw what it was going to take to get those facilities back to default shipshape, investors panic-sold. They always panic-sold, every time one of these fights broke out. Even the true believers in zotta superiority sold. The root of credit was credo: belief. Watching rent-a-cops bring out their big guns to wipe out speakers had an enormous impact on the market’s animal sentiments: their belief system was crashing, just as it had every other time.
More drones: with speakers, crowd-control drones that came stock with the prison, so big they needed extra avionics to course-correct them from the vibrations of their own speakers.
The drones homed in on the men and women they’d targeted, turned them into spectacles as their squad-mates stared at armored cops haloed by circling drones, too close to their bodies to shoot down safely, even with armor. What if their hydrogen cells blew? What if they were booby-trapped?
When the order went out to rotate those unlucky bastards, they trudged toward the APCs at the back of the formation, circled by buzzing drones that haunted them like outsized, big-voiced fruit flies. In one case, a drone managed to slip inside the APC with its target. The big tank-like car rocked on its suspension as cops inside chased it around, freaking like a church-load of parishioners chasing a lost bat. The video from that drone was a tilt-a-whirl confusion of fish-eye claustrophobia. Eventually, motion stopped as the drone was smashed to the APC’s deck. A moment later, the hatch of the APC opened and three more cops walked away, two women and a man. The man and one of the women argued with the other woman, maybe trying to convince her to stay, but they all left their weapons by the roadside as they struck off for Ottawa.
Things settled. The prisoners had damned few ways to make contact with the cops now, which meant that there could be no negotiation. There had been none before.
Gretyl’s phone rang.
“You have to get Natalie out of there. Now.”
Gretyl felt her guts curdle. Maybe it was a zotta trick to flush them out by making them think the big push was coming. Redwater wasn’t above that. But he sounded desperate in an un-Redwater way.
“No one is coming out until we can all come out.” She carefully avoided confirming Iceweasel’s present location. She guessed this meant Nadie wasn’t working for the old man, because otherwise she’d have let him know his precious bloodline was safe.
“The children—”
“There are many children in here. Why does it matter if they’re related to you?”
He made a puppy noise, between a bark and a whimper. “You evil bitch.”
“I’m not the one with all the guns. Are you here, Mr. Redwater? Can you see what’s going on?”
“I can see it. It’s good theater. I’m sure your friends are excited by it, Gretyl. But it won’t matter in five minutes.”
“If I’ve only got five minutes left, I’d better savor them.” She hung up on him again.
“Why don’t you block him?” Limpopo said.
“Because so long as she keeps talking to him, she might be able to convince him not to let his buddies blow our asses up,” Etcetera said.
Gretyl shook her head. “That’s not it.” She looked at the infographics, watched network traffic flow, wondered if it was true that Jacob Redwater could be their savior, whether he was the reason their network links were up at all, so he could call her. “Maybe that’s part of it. But this is the asshole who took my wife away, fucking kidnapped her. It’s not nice, but I’m enjoying making him squirm.”
Limpopo shrugged. “Your last minutes on Earth, and you’re spending them exacting petty revenge? It’s your life, I guess.”
It cut. It was true. Limpopo had always been better at big picture and living the moment. Prison had made her even more stoic. Gretyl tried to imagine what she had endured over the years.
The network links went abruptly dead, their drones shot out of the sky at the same time as the fiber lines cut off.
“Guess I won’t get a chance to apologize to the old bastard.” She groped for Limpopo’s hand. Her grip was dry and her hand felt frail, but it was warm, and it squeezed back.
“I love you, Limpopo.”
“I love you, too.”
“Me too,” said Etcetera.
“Thank you.”
They squeezed their hands tight.
* * *
The boys chattered like monkeys in a tree. Some asked impatient questions of the two old ladies holding hands and staring at infographics, but Gretyl and Limpopo had nothing to tell them.
The cameras still brought feeds from outside, because the local net still ran, still spooled its footage for exfiltration to the rest of the world. T
he police lines tightened. There were no more identifiable humans in them. They were all inside the mechas and the APCs, or pulled way back behind the police buses and the administrative trailers that came in on flatbeds. The strategists on the other side wouldn’t risk more psy ops from the prisoners, even if it meant fighting from behind armor. The tactics of mechas and APCs were primarily lethal, everyone knew it. You couldn’t arrest someone from inside a huge semi-tank or killer robot suit. You could stun them or kill them, but you couldn’t read them their rights or handcuff them.
The mechas stepped forward smartly and planted charges around the surviving perimeter walls, scampered back on three legs, flattening for the explosion that shook the walls down, making the foundations shake, even in their subbasement.
The cameras on that wall went dark. They re-tasked cams from the interior courtyard to their infographic feeds, watched the exercise repeated. The APCs rolled, forming an armored wall; the mechas stepped over them, planted fresh charges, retreated. Gretyl reflexively checked to see what the markets were doing, but of course, there was no external feed. It didn’t matter for them. The ending was coming. First days of a better nation. Last moments of the worn-out, fragile physical bodies of some stupid, imperfect walkaways. Gretyl didn’t let herself dissociate, made herself look at the screens, watch the wall come down, the cameras go dark. She squeezed Limpopo’s hand harder.
Her phone rang.
She looked at the infographics, saw, somehow, the networks were back online. The networks, which the cops had physically seized, pwned with actual wire-cutters, were online again. Her phone rang.
“Please.” He was crying.
“Mr. Redwater?”
“Please. I can’t—”
She almost relented. Go ahead, kill us, your daughter and grandsons are far from here. It was a reflexive thought, common mercy for an old man whose voice cracked with sorrow.
“If you can’t, you shouldn’t. Everyone here has someone who will weep for their deaths. If you have power to stop things—” He clearly did, how else to explain the network link, the mechas and the APCs now still in the courtyards, facing the ruined façades, offices and storerooms sitting naked to the air, fourth walls removed, looking like sets for dramas. “If you can do anything to stop this, you could save their lives.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You won’t.”
“Can I— Will you come speak with me about it?”
“Mr. Redwater, with all due respect, I am not a fucking idiot, you kidnapping, evil fuck.” She said it evenly, but her pulse raced. Limpopo gave her a silent cheer.
“Can I come in, then? Alone?”
She thought. It wasn’t likely a zotta would turn suicide bomber—blackmail or brainwash someone else to be a suicide bomber, sure, but not risk their own skin. At the rate things were going, they were all going to die in hours, possibly minutes.
“I don’t think anyone here would object to that. As to what happens out there, with all those weapons and tanks and killer robots—”
“That’s my lookout.” He sounded in control of his emotions now.
“Leave our feeds up. No safe conduct if we can’t reach the outside world.”
There was a long pause. She thought he might have disconnected, but when he spoke, she heard a single clipped plosive as he unmuted his mic. He’d been talking to someone else.
“Out of my hands. But I’ve made a request.”
She shrugged. “It’s the boys’ prison. The southernmost one.”
Quickly, she tapped out a message to the rest of the walkaways, the ones in the jails and in the crowd, explaining Jacob Redwater had asked for safe passage so that he could talk to his daughter’s wife. She implied, but didn’t state, that Iceweasel and the boys were in the building. As the crowd voraciously doxxed Iceweasel’s dad and parceled up tremendous quantities of information on the sprawling Redwater empires, Limpopo and Gretyl whispered to one another about what would happen next.
“It sounds like he’s snapped,” Limpopo said. “Some kind of shear between Jacob Redwater, zotta, and Jacob Redwater, human. Deathbed conversion or something. You said his wife died?”
“Yeah, but from what Iceweasel said, they were basically divorced for most of her life, in all but name. She had a sister, don’t know what became of her. I’m sure he’s got access to as much company as he wants.”
“Whatever else he was, he was charming,” Etcetera said. “In that smart, sociopathic way. Fun to argue with, if you weren’t his daughter.”
“There he is,” Limpopo said. The boys gathered around their screen as they zoomed and error-corrected the feed from the remaining cams in the inner courtyard. He was dressed in bottle-green cords and a down vest over a long-sleeved shirt. His hair was white, but his face was smooth, his posture erect. He walked slowly and purposefully. He was old, but he didn’t look frail.
“Can one of you get him, please?” Gretyl said to the boys. “I don’t want to go up in case he’s planning to snatch me.”
The boys argued over who would do it. A kid named Troy, sixteen, with a short afro, an easygoing smile, and smart, fast eyes, won. He raced away. A moment later, they watched him on the screen, talking with Jacob Redwater, leading him.
“This oughta be good,” Etcetera said.
Gretyl wondered where Iceweasel was, whether she was seeing this. There was a lot of clamor from the crowd to livecast her talk with Redwater. She said no, firmly, while agreeing to record and release it later, depending on whether there was a later.
Jacob Redwater came into the control room, preceded by a bow-wave of understated cologne. Gretyl stood and looked him up and down, looking for bulges indicating guns or other surprises. Not that they had to bulge much these days, and not that she knew much about what kind of bulges they made.
His face was impassive. He’d been crying, minutes ago, broken and lost. Now he wore the zotta mask, two parts charming sophisticate, one part dead-eyed predator. A man who could make entertaining conversation over dinner, then go home and bankrupt your employer and put you on the street.
“Hello, Gretyl.” He stood before Troy like Troy had a gun in his back and he was pretending that it wasn’t there.
“Hello, Mr. Redwater.” She extended her hand.
His hand was warm and firm. “Call me Jacob.”
Limpopo gave him a funny look. Gretyl remembered Jacob Redwater had set her up to be rendered to this prison, ripped from family and everything dear to her. She was used to thinking of him as the man who’d sired and kidnapped her wife, but he was Limpopo’s arch-nemesis. She wondered if Limpopo would shiv the bastard, who surely deserved it. She was about to lunge to take out her frail old friend, frailer alongside this vigorous, unthinkably rich man, but Limpopo held her hand out.
“Limpopo.” He tilted his head, straining to recognize her.
“Hello, Jacob.”
“Nice to see you,” said Etcetera. Redwater’s eyes widened. He started at the speaker between her collarbones. “It’s me, Hubert. I’m dead.”
“I see. Nice to talk to you again, even so.”
Troy brought him a chair. The three sat together, boys clustered at the room’s other end, ostentatiously not listening while ferociously eavesdropping.
Redwater said nothing. Gretyl put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, arching her back to work the creak and ache of sitting and terror out. “What did you want to talk about, Jacob?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“You don’t want your daughter hurt. You’re indifferent to what happens to the old dyke she’s shacked up with.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about your sexuality. My cousin is gay, you know.”
“I know. That’s the reason you’re running the family fortune these days.”
He shook his head. “It’s more complicated. You can believe that if you want. The internal politics of the Redwater family are always and only about one thing.”
&nbs
p; “Money.”
“Power. Money’s just keeping score.”
“Must have really fucked you off when Iceweasel gave her share to that merc.” She wanted him to squirm. She’d expected him to be the weeping man on the phone. She didn’t want to die with the sight of him erect and proud burned into her optic nerve, proof the sun would never set on the zotta empire.
He nodded. “It made things complicated in our family. But it wasn’t fatal. Nadie and I are on good terms these days, believe it or not.”
Gretyl kept her best poker face, willing herself not to give away the fact that Nadie had Iceweasel and the boys with her.
“I would like to see my daughter and my grandsons.”
“I think you gave up that right when you had her kidnapped, Mr. Redwater,” Limpopo said. They looked at her. Her eyes glittered dangerously. “When you had me disappeared.”
“When you had me murdered,” Etcetera said.
Redwater was impassive. Gretyl thought she saw anxious tells, sudden realization by this arrogant princeling that he was three levels underground, surrounded by people who owed him a debt of violence.
He spoke carefully. “I didn’t say I had a right to it. The things that happened were beyond regrettable. They were terrible. I brought Natalie home because I knew there was trouble ahead for you and your friends. The murders of those two security operators tipped things over the edge. There was no way things would be business as usual after that. I wanted her safe. The things that followed, what happened to you, were nothing to do with me.”
She and Limpopo started to speak at once, broke off, looked at each other. Limpopo made a “go ahead” gesture. “He’s your father-in-law.” She smiled sardonically.
Jacob Redwater returned the smile, pretending he didn’t notice its venom.
“What murders, Jacob?”
“The two people that Zyz lost at the ‘university’ complex. Went in, never came out. That was bad enough. But then we discovered that they’d been captured and subsequently executed—euthanized—that their remains had been desecrated—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Gretyl said. But she knew. For the first couple years, the deadheading bodies of those two mercs had been like unwanted family heirlooms, dutifully lugged from one place to another, scans cared for and backed up. Back when she was on the move all the time, the arrangements for their care had been a constant reminder of the terrible thing they’d done in the tunnels of Walkaway U, Tam’s dire warnings, the obligation they’d created for themselves. Once they’d settled in Gary and moved the two bodies, or people, or whatever, into canopic jars in the basement, automatically tended as they slept in endless, blank-faced, brain-dead stasis, she’d managed to put them out of mind—mostly.
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