“To be fair, he was tired, had a tiring run, was old and sore and slow and all he wanted was to be left alone.”
“You didn’t stay?” They were almost at the rise where they’d left the tractor. His limp was worse. He took a few steps, rested for a few breaths, took a few more. The pain must have been incredible, Limpopo knew, but he was lost in his story. She’d seen this on the road: conversation made distance vanish, especially the opportunity to open something difficult and meaningful. Something about talking while staring into the middle distance, created a confessional intimacy to rival post-coital cuddling.
“Kept working on that fab, having these increasingly passive-aggressive talks with my friend, until he made it clear that if I kept on doing what I was doing, everyone would hate my guts. They were working with a local zotta, the guy who technically owned the land, to get permission to stay, a kind of do-gooder gesture from him. They would be tame. Pets.
“So I walked away, found another place in New Hampshire, with enough guns to make that Ithaca bunch look tame. They were old, too—never expected to find so many old walkaways, but it makes sense, nothing left to lose. It’s gotta be clear there’s zilch chance of leveling up in default if you reach sixty-seven and you’ve never been anything but a temp.
“But they were tighter. More radical. They were into gamification, making systems that tracked and advertised performance. It really worked. People busted their asses to get on leaderboards. The tops didn’t get privileges outright, but if you were in the top decile and you thought an idea was right, it carried weight.
“I know you hate this, Limpopo, but one of the reasons I like it is it’s honest. When you talk, people listen, because you kick ass and bust your own ass to get shit done. When we do it your way, things are better than when we don’t. So the fact that no one says, ‘Hey, Limpopo is the big cheese and we do what she says,’ doesn’t make it not true, or even secret. It just makes the supposedly egalitarian basis of our lives bullshit.”
They hadn’t walked in some time. His breath was ragged. There was one more rise to crest, and they’d be at the tractor. He could ride and they could swap batteries. Limpopo’s shoulder ached from where his weight rested. She swallowed her irritability, knowing that it had to do with coldness, stress, and exhaustion, not the offensiveness of what he’d just said. She looked at Etcetera, he looked back, telemetry from his face transmitted to her suit so that she could see his expression in night-vision false-color. He was handsome, her lover and best-ish friend. Compassionate, smart without being judgmental, which is all she’d ever aspired to. He had that inquisitive, quizzical expression at the weirdest times, like when he was coming, or now, in freezing dark.
“Jimmy—” she started and Etcetera lunged at her and slammed her to the ground, taking Jimmy down with her. Etcetera’s whole weight—familiar, yet alarming—was on top of her and he was screaming something, broadcasting through his suit’s speakers as well as through the intercom: “Don’t shoot!”
She craned her neck, saw the pair of white-glowing figures pointing weapons. The guns had flared, bell-like muzzles. They impassively pointed them at her and everything in her suit stopped working at once. There was a stutter of analytic infographics from Etcetera’s suit beside her as it attempted emergency power-on-self-test, and then it stopped.
Inside the suit it was dark, cold, and lonely. There was a scrape as Etcetera moved above her, a suit-on-suit rasp, loud in contrast to the terrible stillness. She fancied she felt or saw a foot in the snow, moving on snowshoes similar to hers.
Then there was another rasp and Etcetera’s weight lifted off with rough sliding motion. She rolled to see him being jerked upright, moving weakly in the grasp of a person who had snapped his wrists together, strapping and bonding a handle to the scruff of his suit, and yanked him upright. Their suits must have had power-assists, which was something the Thetford crew did for work gangs, but never for long walks, because for those you wanted your power for heat, not playing superman.
Her visor failed-safe transparent. Her eyes adjusted to moonlight. She saw the other yank up Jimmy, who thrashed weakly and got a hard shake for his trouble. He was tossed to one side like a rag doll, skidding face-first in snow. She lost track of him as white-gloved hands descended and hauled her up. Her attacker’s suit had no visible faceplate, just a smooth expanse of white.
One hand held her aloft by an armpit, sore and alarming. The other hand probed her head, found the manual release for her visor, tugged it, scrape of suit-on-suit conducting through the helmet, and then a whoosh of cold air as the visor popped open violently (the manual catch was designed to free suffocating people, had a powerful spring in it). The sudden motion startled her captor as much as it did her and he—a he because otherwise her tits were crushed by her armor—fumbled her and nearly dropped her, and she had the presence of mind to squirm and break for it. He casually backhanded her face with his glove—a gauntlet made of something blade-stopping whose external layers had chilled to iciness, so cold it felt like nothing at all, numbing as it made contact, taking away some of her humid skin with it—and she saw stars.
She looked at the blank faceplate, face aching, cold air making her eyes and nose water. She spat and hit it dead center, spit steaming as it froze. The head cocked. She sensed this person was conversing with the other who held thrashing Etcetera.
The other shouldered Etcetera in an easy fireman’s carry and walked to Jimmy, flipped him over, opened the faceplate, considered him, then, calmly, unholstered a knife and slashed Jimmy’s throat, leaning back to avoid the fountain of steaming black moonlit blood, not quick enough. The armored suit steamed, too, as the murderer turned back to the one holding her. There was another moment of inaudible radio chatter.
The murderer swung Etcetera around from the fireman’s carry, grabbed him under the armpit, held him at arm’s length, probed his suit for the visor-release, and Limpopo screamed, the words tumbled out, “No, no, not him, too! Tell me what you want and you can have it, but not him, please—”
The impassive, spit-flecked face cocked its head the other way, listening to more inaudible talk. Etcetera talked, too, being maddeningly calm, the way he could be, trying to explain to the murderer—holding that knife again—this wasn’t necessary, they’d be cooperative prisoners, they had nothing to gain by running now their suits were nearly out of power and—