“Why aren’t you talking to—” She almost said, Iceweasel, then Natalie, settled for, “your daughter?”
“She won’t answer. It wasn’t easy to get this address for you, but I needed to get a message to her. I know you wouldn’t sacrifice your children for ideology.”
Fuck it. “You think Iceweasel would?”
“I think my daughter is justifiably angry at me. This means that I can’t explain certain … facts to her. We can’t even have this discussion.”
“They’re moving in on us, Mr. Redwater. We can’t have this discussion if I’m under attack.”
“I can’t call them off.”
She didn’t say anything. Iceweasel paid enough attention to know Jacob Redwater’s branch of the family assumed control over the main dynastic fortune, making him the primary family power broker. Gretyl would be surprised if they didn’t own a major stake in TransCanada, not to mention outsource cops.
“It’s not my call. Honestly.”
“I don’t think we have anything to talk about.” She disconnected. Limpopo stared thoughtfully.
“My in-laws are seriously fucked up.”
Etcetera laughed, a weird noise through the speaker. There was always something weird about sim laughter. Some sharp-defined edge to it, enforced by the sims’ bumpers. Gretyl had been scanned. Maybe this was how she’d laugh at her sons’ antics in the future.
Time ran out. The outsource cops’ drones plummeted in controlled dives, signaling impending attack. The boys in the data center made giddy, frightened noises as they landed their skeleton fleet, chasing the cops’ drones down, just as the first volley of bullets stitched the sky, tracking the drones, killing more than half before they landed. The hard-line fiber links went dead, except the ones that had been covertly dug up and spliced into direct-link microwave repeaters, far from the prison, out in farmers’ fields.
Gretyl and Limpopo’s fingers collided as they jabbed the same spots on the infographics, cutting service over to those links, tuning the caches and load-balancers to accommodate a sudden two-order-of-magnitude drop in throughput. Traffic in and out of the prisons was now queuing deeply in repeaters’ caches. Out in the world, other caches were doing the same. The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, Gretyl thought, and grinned at the ancient, pre-walkaway slogan. It had been true for a while, then a metaphor, then wishful thinking, and now it was a design specification.
She was in the zone, a human coprocessor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart. The part of her that railed and wept when she sent her wife and children away and stayed behind woke briefly and noted that this was the real reason she’d done it. This incredible feeling of strength and connection to something larger. It had been years since Gretyl felt this. Now she felt it again, she realized how much she’d missed it. Living in a better nation was preferable to living in a worse one—but living in the nation’s first days was the difference between falling in love and being in love. She was cheating on her wife. Carrying on an affair with armed insurrection.
The prisons had defenses. The oncoming forces knew exactly what they were. The crowd had ideas about this. As the mechas with the battering rams stepped into position before each gate, the prison’s own anti-camera dazzlers came to life, lancing beams of powerful, broad-spectrum light directly into the mechas’ sensors. They were shielded against this, but imperfectly, meaning the mechas had to slow down and rely on ultrasonic sensing to guide their passage. The defenders triggered the prison’s sonic antipersonnel weapons, relocated from the cell blocks to the outside walls. The mechas slowed more. Then defenders opened up with the water cannon.
Under normal circumstances, the water jets wouldn’t bother the mechas. They had excellent gyros. In a pinch they could assume three-point stances for stability. But they were attached to each other by the rams they held in two-by-two grids. The jets hit them from different angles, so the front ones’ corrective shuffling further unbalanced the rear ones, and vice versa. The water-cannoneers set up a rhythm that pushed them further off balance. Within minutes, two of the mecha teams were sprawling. The third retreated in unsteady steps.
Gretyl heard cheers, saw jubilation in the chats. She knew this was only a skirmish. They were hugely, physically overmatched. The private cops withdrew behind their armor, and a volley of RPGs streaked through the air, bullseyeing each water cannon and the apertures for the anti-photo beams. They’d expected it, but it was terrifying nevertheless, even as the channels filled up with damage manifests, estimating the total cost to TransCanada’s physical plant, watching the company’s share price slide down, as default analysts reading over their shoulders changed their bets on whether TransCanada was going to end up with usable plant or smoking rubble at the end of the day.
Her phone rang again.
“Hello.”
There was latency-lag, then Jacob Redwater’s voice, flanged and compressed. “I want to speak to my daughter.”
“You’ve made that clear to her on more than one occasion.”
There was a long pause. “Her mother died last year.”
“You have my condolences.”
“I couldn’t find a way to tell her.”
“I’ll make sure she knows.”
The boys in the data center lofted a swarm of drones, including some they’d hidden in the woods, behind the enemy lines. The drones’ feed showed the enemy forces, disciplined and still, poised for their next assault. The damaged mechas limped to the back. The enemy opened fire on their drones. The boys kicked them into automated high-intensity evasive maneuvers that would lop their batteries’ duty-cycles in half. Nearly all survived the first round, though their video feeds turned to a scramble of nauseating roller-coaster footage. The boys’ hadn’t sent them in random patterns—each one ended up in proximity to an enemy surveillance drone, riding its tail. When the ground forces opened up with HERF weapons that fried the drones and knocked them out of the sky, they also took out their own aircraft.
“Good work!” Gretyl shouted over her shoulder at the boys, who didn’t need anyone to tell them—they were dancing with victory. Meanwhile, the drones’ brief flights had managed to clear 75 percent of the network backlogs, massively relieving the congestion on their surviving fiber.
Jacob Redwater said, “Your supply of drones is limited. We can get resupplies.”