“Don’t joke.”
The Meta had done for Sita, and she sauntered to a table of younger women and a couple of men and introduced Iceweasel. Most of the table had straight names like Sita, but there was one guy called Lamplighter, the only name she remembered ten seconds later. They gave her a cup of coffium while rounding up more porters for the work gang. Someone stomped in wearing a little mecha exo, and there were a pair of burros, too, high-stepping and swaying from side-to-side as their firmware solved and re-solved the terrain, never trusting the ground not to give way. Burros were slow, but they got the job done.
“Let’s go.” Sita pulled on her mask. Sighing, Iceweasel pulled hers down. She wished she’d said yes to food—not just because she was hungry, but because she wanted to sit and find out what the hell had happened.
They went through the swinging boulder and went single file through the thick woods to the trike and its cargo-pods. She had half-believed it would be melted to slag by another drone strike, but it was intact. The pods sighed open as the masked porters formed a bucket brigade into the woods.
Bucket brigades embodied walkaway philosophy, more emblematic than the consensus wrangle in a circle-of-chairs. Iceweasel’d participated in some default brigades, moving feedstock around for Communist parties, but never any with the gusto of walkabout brigades. Bucket brigades only ask you to work as hard as you want—rush forward to get a new load and back to pass it off, or amble between them, or vary your speed. It didn’t matter—if you went faster, it meant the people on either side of you didn’t have to walk as far, but it didn’t require them to go faster or slower. If you slowed, everyone else stayed at the same speed. Bucket brigades were a system through which everyone could do whatever they wanted—within the system—however fast you wanted to go; everything you did helped and none of it slowed down anyone else.
Back at the Banana and Bongo, she’d briefly joined the load-in bucket brigade. Limpopo had wanted to give her more safety tips and triple-check her gear and emergency kits. She’d submitted to it with grace because it was nice that someone was looking out for her ass, making sure she didn’t get into too much trouble even as she ran towards it as fast as she could. This had become her modus operandi during the B&B’s construction, first on the scene when drones spotted salvage, forging further afield with fewer supplies than anyone, counting on absolute minimum of gear and kindness of strangers and serendipity to stay alive. She’d gone from being the world’s biggest shlepper to someone who turned her nose up at taking spare underwear (that’s what hydrophobic silver-doped dirt-shedding fabrics were for).
Limpopo had expertly reviewed her kit, and pressed an extra six liters of water on her and a light-duty wet-printer that could dispense field medicines. She knew better than to object, but she did, relenting when Limpopo laid hands on her and lashed down the weight with such expertise she hardly noticed it. “You know that with all this water, I’m going to end up drinking constantly and stopping all the time to piss.”
“Piss clear.” It was a walkaway benediction, especially in nomadic mode. It was polite to offer unsolicited opinions on your neighbor’s urine. Clear was the goal. Anything darker than a daffodil was grounds for having water forced upon you. If your piss was orange or brown, you’d be passively and aggressively made to drink a tonic of rehydration salts, and endure your peers’ condescension for letting your endocrinology get the best of you. You could fab underwear that you pissed through while on the move—it wicked everything in seconds, and neutralized anything unpleasant or dangerous. It had the side benefit of noting and processing your hydration and dissolved solids, but almost no one wore them because a) pissing in your pants was gross and b) (see a).
Limpopo sent her off with a kiss that was only partly motherly. The grin it gave her lasted for an hour on the trike. She and Seth and Etcetera were like electrons orbiting around Limpopo’s nucleus, all trying to jump to higher-energy orbits. There was something gravitic about her.
This kind of reverie was easy in a bucket brigade, even wearing a mask and goggles with cremated tire-taste in your mouth. It was the combination of brainless work and efficiency, and as she worked up a sweat, the rhythms of the line settled.
The best part of a bucket brigade is that when the load finished, it naturally brought everyone together at the head-end, because you walked upstream until you got a load, and if there were no loads, everyone walked all the way. They gathered at the trike and caucused over it.
“There’s no reason to camou it,” Sita said. “Anything that flies over and spots it will figure it’s a relief vehicle, that’s natural. It’s not leaking info about the underground.”
“But a relief vehicle implies people to give relief to.” This was a guy with crazy hair, blue-green with Einsteinian frizz on the sides, and bald on top. He was maybe sixty, with an unexpectedly beautiful face, like a wood-elf. Now Iceweasel thought about it, these walkaways were a couple sigmas older than the median age walkaways. The part of her brain that tried to figure out why someone in reality would want to bomb them filed this away.
“Anything we do to it will be useless,” said another older woman, short and hippy, with the kind of hourglass figure and giant boobs that all the women Iceweasel had drawn as a child came with. “A camouflaged trike won’t look like the forest to decent image-processing. It’ll look like something hidden.”
“That settles it,” Sita said. To Iceweasel: “Gretyl’s the university’s top computational optimization person, if she says it, it’s true.”
“Argument by authority,” the other guy said good-naturedly.
“The longer we stand here, the greater chance we’ll get spotted,” Sita said.
“Self-serving bullshit.”
“There’s whisky at the mess hall,” she said.
“Now you’re talking.” They set out.
*
They took good care of her. There was a fresh crew who’d been asleep for the unloading who salted away all the supplies they’d brought in. The people she’d been out with adopted her, punching out a chair and assembling it for her and insisting she sit while they brought breakfast—yogurt studded with pistachios and tailored culture they assured her would moderate her stress, which explained why they were so fucking laid-back, despite being firebombed.
They gave her a glass of something sweet and bubbly, rattling with ice. She thought it might be booze, but couldn’t say. “What exactly were you people doing that caused you to be nuked from orbit?”