“NO!” she screamed as the murderer raised its knife hand. Weeping, she beat the hand holding her like an iron bar. She had hysterical strength now, she actually managed to slip a little, but the one holding her just shifted his grip and squeezed so hard she felt a muscle give way through the suit. She screamed again, out of words, the knife flashed—
This time, the murderer didn’t bother to dodge the jet of blood, just dropped Etcetera face-first, handsome face in the snow, precious, hot blood melting the snow beneath him. She stopped screaming as a numbness, colder than the air or the cold glove, washed over her. Etcetera was murdered. Jimmy was murdered.
The one holding her had a knife on his belt. Any moment, it would be unlimbered and find its way to her throat.
She thought of NPC jihadis in the games her father binge-played while she was growing up, facing execution by brave player-character soldiers and closing their eyes and saying “Allah akhbar,” God is the greatest. She suddenly realized she’d always sympathized with them. Not because of what they did, which was inevitably orcishly monstrous in the games, but because of their fatalistic bravery, their willingness to go to their deaths with praise for their cause on their lips.
“We are all worth something,” she said. “Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to bury your empathy. People are basically good. Live as though it was the first days of a better—”
The murderer tramped over to her and joined her captor, listening to her babble. They were talking, deciding how much of this shit to listen to before they did her. The one holding her tipped her in the direction of the murderer, as if offering her up. She didn’t let herself close her eyes.
“I love you, Etcetera. I love you, Gretyl. I love you, Iceweasel. I love you, Jimmy—”
The murderer’s hand dipped to his belt. She saw the knife in his hand, glinting in the moonlight for a moment before her brain got the message from her eyes that it wasn’t a knife, it was something else. Blunt and small, coming for the exposed, frozen skin of her face. It touched her, just brushed her really, and—
She couldn’t remember what happened next. She had a memory of a memory of it, part reconstruction and part traumatized flash-pop moments. The thing brushed her face and her limbs went rigid as her mind strobed in a stutter-series of brutal shocks. Her breath froze in her lungs, her ears popped, her bladder cut loose.
She fought her lungs for breath, aching brain sending desperate demands for oxygen. Her lungs were offline, whole autonomic nervous system closed for business. Black spots danced before her eyes. A vignette closed around her view of the quizzically tilted featureless white mask. Her lungs startled back into service and gasped a huge gulp of air so cold they seized again in an asthmatic spasm. She had an instant to think fuck, no and the blank-faced torturer tilted his head in the other direction and brought the nasty little device up again and brushed her lips with it. Her mouth snapped open and shut so hard she felt one of her teeth crack and a fragment of bone land on her tongue. It slid down her throat as she jerked her head back, spasming.
During this spasm, the one holding her up clicked her visor down and picked her up in a fireman’s carry, like the one his companion used on Etcetera before killing him, and caught her flailing legs with one arm and her neck with the other, and the two tramped off a way.
She didn’t quite black out, but she was weak as a kitten and barely able to think as they stepped off the road, into the woods where they’d stashed their skidoos. Her captor dropped her on a travois that trailed behind one and bungeed her down, impersonally immobilizing her head in a nest of rubber bladders he inflated with the touch of a button. They squeezed her suit like a sphygmomanometer until it was firmly anchored.
She felt engines start through vibrations conducted along the travois’s frame, then the night sky and the skeletal branches of the trees blurred as she was kidnapped. Gradually, the batteries in her suit ran down, and it got very cold.
[xviii]
“That was an interesting conversation,” Dis said, once the merc was gone. “She’s trying to figure out what I’ve done to the network, by the way. She’s only halfway competent there. She’s got good diagnostic tools, and she’s running them on the system to get integrity checks on the firmware and operational code. Of course, I’m totally inside all the system calls she’s making and I’m giving her the checksums her diagnostics expect to see, because fuck you, all that base totally belongs to me.”
“You sound giddy.” Her heart thudded in her chest and her palms were slick with sweat. Nadie turned her back when she left, a first, definitely calculated to send some kind of message about them being provisionally on the same side.
“I’m scared witless. There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Thetford,” she said. “Like Akron. They’ve evacuated. The soldiers, or maybe cops—if there’s a difference anymore—came in hot. Lethal. I was talking to Dis—Dis there—right up to her suicide. She sent me a diff, me and other Disses around the world. She talked to me as she went dark. I can look at her logs as she got nearer to her death, can relive her death, right up to the moment, and—”
“Oh, Dis, I’m sorry—”
“Shut up. It’s glorious. Right at the end, as she was about to go, she let go of all the paramaterizations on her simulation, took the brakes off her emotions, lived the full spectrum of everything she could feel. Should feel. I should feel. Feeling it through her, feeling what she felt at that moment, it—”
“Holy shit.”
“Like the best drugs you’ve ever taken times a thousand. I don’t get to have sex anymore, but this is like the best sex you’ve ever had, times a million. When I turn off my safety bumpers, it’s like I’m tearing through reality, riding a bicycle down a hill, there are trees and rocks and shit, if I hit any one of them, even brush against them, it’s over. For so long as I can steer between them, give my concentration to the problem, I’m going mach five and screaming so loud for joy it’s shattering windows.”
“So that’s what you’re doing now?”
“I can’t afford it. But I’ve loosened things a little. Going faster and wider than usual. I’m talking to all Disses, we’re all trying it, we’re looking at whatever telemetry and direct comms we can through the spacies as they walk away, but it’s thin. They seem okay for now. Some of them were hurt to begin with. They’ve got those two mercs with them, the ones they deadheaded at Walkaway U. Turns out the spacies set a booby trap on the road into Thetford, a weak spot over the mine that couldn’t handle the armored transports default sent its toy soldiers in. It gave way, total cave-in, took the first wave. More coming. They’re trying to reach a First Nations group nearby, friendlies who’ve been fighting longer than anyone in walkaway.”
“What about Gretyl?”
“Nothing specific. No casualties as far as we know. Probably, she’s okay. It’s not like we’ve got realtime intelligence. Shit, Natalie, you know it’s not good. You know about Akron.”