“My grandmother— We’re at war.”
Elián’s grandmother—Wilma Armenteros. I had accepted a formal declaration of war. I had no authority to do any such thing. “I should be sure Armenteros knows I’m not a plenipotentiary.”
“Oh, sure,” said Elián. “’Cause I’ll bet she’s worried about that.”
“And look at the corn,” I said. “This is worse than the food fight.”
“They sent a shock ship,” Grego explained. “It doesn’t decelerate until it’s nearly on top of you. The troops have to ride sideways to survive the g-forces. They have compression gear, special harnesses. It is the sonic boom that did this damage to the crops.”
“Yes, great, thank you, Gregori,” said Elián.
And Xie said, “Greta, the corn doesn’t matter.”
“How can you say that?” Suddenly I found myself weeping. “How can you say that?” We needed the corn; we needed all this food. “Don’t you want to live? I want to live.”
I was so surprised to hear myself say it that I woke up.
I woke up with tears on my cheeks. It had been real—it held together, as much as I could piece it. The Cumberlanders had sent a shock ship and knocked out the Precepture’s defenses and communications with an electromagnetic pulse, an EMP. The Abbot had had some bare warning of it, and had used that warning to pull me out of dreamlock.
There are shielded places we can go, the Abbot had said. He could have saved himself—and he did need to save himself. AIs had died in EMP attacks. It was part of what EMPs had been designed to do, once upon a time, in a less appropriate-tech age—take out enemy artificial intelligences. (Oh yeah, said the Utterances, I’m totally banning those.)
But the Abbot had not tried to save himself. He’d tried to save me.
And he had succeeded. Probably. More or less. It was Grego who had finished disconnecting the net of dreamlock magnets—his interest in blinking lights paying off at last—but it was the Abbot’s sacrifice that had saved me. My head was throbbing, and my vision was too sharp, rainbow-edged, but that hard word that Grego had used—“damage”—I didn’t think there was any.
But before I could say so, Elián, always too agitated, stood up. “We should get her to a neuromapper,” he said. “A doctor. Somebody.”
Da-Xia looked at him as a goddess looks at a mortal who has just given her a spoiled orange. “Elián, I don’t think any of us are going anywhere. And particularly not Greta.”
I turned to her. “Why’s that?”
Xie looked at me and knew at once that I was awake again. She glanced by habit toward the Panopticon.
It was gone.
The Panopticon—gone. It must have been knocked down by the sonic boom. It lay across the clumped prairie grass in chunks and shards.
Nothing was watching us. Nothing. I felt—cut adrift.
I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes and tried to sort out our situation logically. “Cumberland has attacked the Precepture directly, in advance of a declaration of war.”
Even with my eyes covered I could hear Da-Xia’s scholarly nod. “So far as I know.”
“Greta?” said Elián, delicately. “Are you all right?”
I ignored him and blinked the spots away. “Help me work it out, Xie. To attack the Precepture— It is audacious and illegal. But it may make strategic sense. The Cumberlanders cannot win against the Pan Polar Confederacy under the rules of war. But wage a different kind of war, take hostages against the PanPols, take hostages to prevent the UN’s action—that has some hope.”
Grego bit his lip. He has of course little pigmentation in his lips, and I could see the blood rising to the pressure of his teeth. “This has been tried,” he said, his accent thickening. “When the Kush states struck against Precepture Seven.”
We all knew what had happened there. Not for nothing is Talis called the Butcher of Kandahar.
“You don’t think that Talis will . . .” Elián’s voice was suddenly thin. He was thinking of—Nashville, perhaps? Cleveland? Indianapolis itself?
There was no reason to think it would be only one.
“Talis holds that the Precepture system stops wars,” said Da-Xia. “He will do whatever he must to save our Precepture. The entire Cumberland is expendable, next to that.”
City goes boom, said the Utterances, commenting on the destruction of the last people to attack a Precepture. It’s really not meant to be subtle.
It was not subtle, but Elián was struggling, truly struggling, to keep up. I had just spent three days having my thoughts professionally scrambled, but I was doing better than he was. He looked small inside his fatigues, like a child playing dress-up.
“The next question,” I told him, “is, why hasn’t Talis struck already?”
“And the answer,” said Da-Xia, “is that the Cumberlanders have us. The hostages,” she said, “are now hostages.”