The enemy forces formed a perimeter around the prison complex. The cameras tracked the drones’ overflight patterns, millimeter-wave, infrared, and backscatter.
The formalities: “All persons on these premises are subject to arrest. You will not be harmed if you come out with your hands in plain sight. You will have access to counsel. Human rights observers are on hand to ensure the rule of law is respected. You have ten minutes.” The sound came from the prisons’ many speakers as well as bullhorns built into the front lines’ battle suits. The fact they could still transmit audio to the internal speakers made every walkaway’s heart quail. It meant all the work walkaways had done to secure their nets and root out the back-doors left by TransCanada was insufficient. It implied the enemy had access to their cameras, could trigger the gas, seal the bulkheads—
The network ops boys scrambled, thundering fingers over their interfaces. Gretyl called up everything she’d learned about the network ops for TransCanada, things she’d tweaked when called on to help with something gnarly. Limpopo grabbed her arm, brought up infographics, started analytics on recent traffic to the audio servers. Etcetera got what she was looking at faster than Gretyl. He shouted at the boys, feeding them suggestions for ports to block, network traffic fingerprints to look for in the packet-inspectors.
Gretyl found calm in the knowledge they were inside one another’s decision loops. She handled diagnostics from walkaways watching the network, wordlessly updating models underpinning Limpopo’s infographics, noting as Limpopo integrated new data into her analysis.
In four minutes, they’d found four back-doors. Three were trivial, access accounts that should have been removed everywhere, but had been removed almost everywhere. The fourth was harder to de-fang, because it would require a whole-system reboot to catch. They solved it by building a big dumb filter rule that looked for anything that might be trying to log into it, dumping those packets on the floor. Just as they were finishing this hackwork, someone in Redmond messaged Gretyl urgently with one they’d missed, that maybe even defaults had missed, built in by the manufacturer for license-repossession for deadbeat customers who missed payments, which would let them put the whole system into minimal operation mode. In theory, you could only invoke this mode if you had Siemens’ signing key, but it would be na?ve to assume that the Canadian spooks running this show didn’t have that.
“No way to know if that’s all of them,” Etcetera said, speaking the thought they were all thinking with machine bluntness.
“Nope,” Limpopo said.
Gretyl said, “Everyone off-site is looking. If there are more vulns, they’ll find them.”
“Eventually,” Etcetera said.
“You’ve got a backup,” Gretyl said. “What are you worrying about?”
“You.” That shut her up.
“You can be a total asshole,” Limpopo said, but without real rancor. The boys were tweaking their fixes, building in fallbacks, but they snickered at “asshole.”
“You have two minutes,” the voice said. This time it came only from the loudhailers outside, picked up by cameras aimed at the invaders. Some of their cameras were being blinded by pulsed light weapons, but that attack was designed for civilian institutions, not fortified prisons. TransCanada spent real money on redundant vision systems. Must have galled their shareholders to see all that money that could have been paid as dividends be diverted—
Gretyl’s phone rang, deep in her ear. She tapped it on, assuming it would be Iceweasel calling to make sure she was all right, which she appreciated and resented—I’m a little busy, babe—but it was a man’s voice.
“Is this Gretyl Jonsdottir?”
“Yes.” The call came on her friends-and-family-only ID. It wasn’t known to anyone who sounded like that.
“Where is Natalie Redwater?”
“Who is this?” Of course she knew.
“This is Jacob Redwater. Her father.”
Gretyl’s game-theory spun up, playing different gambits, trying different theories for what Jacob Redwater wanted. Undoubtedly he knew about her relationship with Iceweasel, must have known about the boys, known there was a Jacob Redwater II out there. He’d kidnapped Iceweasel, determined to make her into a zotta, into a Redwater. She’d hurt him where he was weakest, in the money, and he must have been furious.
He must feel some strange version of love for her. She’d known zottas at Cornell, patrons of her lab. She’d had to do dinners with them, fund-raisers, spent hundreds of hours engaged in high-stakes small talk, under her department head’s watchful eye. They weren’t unpleasant to talk to—many were witty conversationalists. But there was something … off about them. It wasn’t until she’d had her crisis of conscience and walked away from Cornell that she’d been able to name it: they had no impostor syndrome. There wasn’t a hint of doubt that every privilege they enjoyed was deserved. The world was correctly stacked. The important people were at the top. The unimportant were at the bottom.
If she told Jacob Redwater that Iceweasel had gotten away, would he use his influence to make the attack on the prisons more violent? Or would he (could he?) pull forces off the prisons to chase down Iceweasel? More chilling: was Jacob Redwater working with Nadie? Had Nadie kidnapped Iceweasel perhaps to forge some alliance with the rest of the Redwater fortune?
She was spooking herself. She went for straightforward: “What do you want?”
“I would like to speak with my daughter.”
“That’s not possible.” She stuck to the truth, if not all of it.
“Ms. Jonsdottir, I know you love my daughter.”
“That’s very true.”
“Hard as you find this to believe, I love her, too.”
You’re right, I do find that hard to believe. “I’m sure you do, in your way.” She didn’t mean to micro-agress him, but it slipped out. How could she let that pass?
He pretended he didn’t notice, though she was sure he had. “I don’t want—” He was overcome by some emotion, or a very good actor. Or both, she reminded herself. The zottas she knew were good at compartmentalizing, sociopath style, understanding other peoples’ emotions well enough to manipulate them, without experiencing actual empathy. “There are children,” he said. “Her children.”
“Mine, too,” Gretyl said.
“Yes.”
“Whatever is about to happen, it doesn’t have to happen to my daughter, or my grandchildren. Your children.”
“Where are you, Mr. Redwater? Are you at the prison?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
She’d thought so—the background noise was an echo of the sounds she’d heard through the prisons’ outward cams.
“You knew they were coming.”
“I knew. That’s why I came. To keep Natalie safe.” There was a moment. “I could get you out.”