“The children—”
“There are many children in here. Why does it matter if they’re related to you?”
He made a puppy noise, between a bark and a whimper. “You evil bitch.”
“I’m not the one with all the guns. Are you here, Mr. Redwater? Can you see what’s going on?”
“I can see it. It’s good theater. I’m sure your friends are excited by it, Gretyl. But it won’t matter in five minutes.”
“If I’ve only got five minutes left, I’d better savor them.” She hung up on him again.
“Why don’t you block him?” Limpopo said.
“Because so long as she keeps talking to him, she might be able to convince him not to let his buddies blow our asses up,” Etcetera said.
Gretyl shook her head. “That’s not it.” She looked at the infographics, watched network traffic flow, wondered if it was true that Jacob Redwater could be their savior, whether he was the reason their network links were up at all, so he could call her. “Maybe that’s part of it. But this is the asshole who took my wife away, fucking kidnapped her. It’s not nice, but I’m enjoying making him squirm.”
Limpopo shrugged. “Your last minutes on Earth, and you’re spending them exacting petty revenge? It’s your life, I guess.”
It cut. It was true. Limpopo had always been better at big picture and living the moment. Prison had made her even more stoic. Gretyl tried to imagine what she had endured over the years.
The network links went abruptly dead, their drones shot out of the sky at the same time as the fiber lines cut off.
“Guess I won’t get a chance to apologize to the old bastard.” She groped for Limpopo’s hand. Her grip was dry and her hand felt frail, but it was warm, and it squeezed back.
“I love you, Limpopo.”
“I love you, too.”
“Me too,” said Etcetera.
“Thank you.”
They squeezed their hands tight.
*
The boys chattered like monkeys in a tree. Some asked impatient questions of the two old ladies holding hands and staring at infographics, but Gretyl and Limpopo had nothing to tell them.
The cameras still brought feeds from outside, because the local net still ran, still spooled its footage for exfiltration to the rest of the world. The police lines tightened. There were no more identifiable humans in them. They were all inside the mechas and the APCs, or pulled way back behind the police buses and the administrative trailers that came in on flatbeds. The strategists on the other side wouldn’t risk more psy ops from the prisoners, even if it meant fighting from behind armor. The tactics of mechas and APCs were primarily lethal, everyone knew it. You couldn’t arrest someone from inside a huge semi-tank or killer robot suit. You could stun them or kill them, but you couldn’t read them their rights or handcuff them.
The mechas stepped forward smartly and planted charges around the surviving perimeter walls, scampered back on three legs, flattening for the explosion that shook the walls down, making the foundations shake, even in their subbasement.
The cameras on that wall went dark. They re-tasked cams from the interior courtyard to their infographic feeds, watched the exercise repeated. The APCs rolled, forming an armored wall; the mechas stepped over them, planted fresh charges, retreated. Gretyl reflexively checked to see what the markets were doing, but of course, there was no external feed. It didn’t matter for them. The ending was coming. First days of a better nation. Last moments of the worn-out, fragile physical bodies of some stupid, imperfect walkaways. Gretyl didn’t let herself dissociate, made herself look at the screens, watch the wall come down, the cameras go dark. She squeezed Limpopo’s hand harder.
Her phone rang.
She looked at the infographics, saw, somehow, the networks were back online. The networks, which the cops had physically seized, pwned with actual wire-cutters, were online again. Her phone rang.
“Please.” He was crying.
“Mr. Redwater?”
“Please. I can’t—”
She almost relented. Go ahead, kill us, your daughter and grandsons are far from here. It was a reflexive thought, common mercy for an old man whose voice cracked with sorrow.
“If you can’t, you shouldn’t. Everyone here has someone who will weep for their deaths. If you have power to stop things—” He clearly did, how else to explain the network link, the mechas and the APCs now still in the courtyards, facing the ruined fa?ades, offices and storerooms sitting naked to the air, fourth walls removed, looking like sets for dramas. “If you can do anything to stop this, you could save their lives.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You won’t.”
“Can I— Will you come speak with me about it?”
“Mr. Redwater, with all due respect, I am not a fucking idiot, you kidnapping, evil fuck.” She said it evenly, but her pulse raced. Limpopo gave her a silent cheer.
“Can I come in, then? Alone?”
She thought. It wasn’t likely a zotta would turn suicide bomber—blackmail or brainwash someone else to be a suicide bomber, sure, but not risk their own skin. At the rate things were going, they were all going to die in hours, possibly minutes.
“I don’t think anyone here would object to that. As to what happens out there, with all those weapons and tanks and killer robots—”
“That’s my lookout.” He sounded in control of his emotions now.
“Leave our feeds up. No safe conduct if we can’t reach the outside world.”
There was a long pause. She thought he might have disconnected, but when he spoke, she heard a single clipped plosive as he unmuted his mic. He’d been talking to someone else.
“Out of my hands. But I’ve made a request.”
She shrugged. “It’s the boys’ prison. The southernmost one.”
Quickly, she tapped out a message to the rest of the walkaways, the ones in the jails and in the crowd, explaining Jacob Redwater had asked for safe passage so that he could talk to his daughter’s wife. She implied, but didn’t state, that Iceweasel and the boys were in the building. As the crowd voraciously doxxed Iceweasel’s dad and parceled up tremendous quantities of information on the sprawling Redwater empires, Limpopo and Gretyl whispered to one another about what would happen next.
“It sounds like he’s snapped,” Limpopo said. “Some kind of shear between Jacob Redwater, zotta, and Jacob Redwater, human. Deathbed conversion or something. You said his wife died?”
“Yeah, but from what Iceweasel said, they were basically divorced for most of her life, in all but name. She had a sister, don’t know what became of her. I’m sure he’s got access to as much company as he wants.”