[xv]
They were halfway to Thetford when the alerts sounded, startling Seth out of a walking reverie. The network came back in earnest when they crested a ridge with a straight shot to three repeaters. Suddenly they were getting traffic that had spooled from way away, in multiple directions. Once their availability back-propagated to other spools, the data rushed in. There were a lot of messages for them.
Gretyl figured it out first: “Storm’s fucked the normal routes, all this stuff’s backed up. We should pound in a repeater. Anyone bring one from the wagon?”
Seth had. He climbed a tree, Gretyl and Tam helping, and drove the spike into the trunk about four meters up. Tam passed him up a hatchet and he hacked the branches around it, feeling twinges of guilt despite the trees around them as far as the eye could see. This one was no nicer than any other.
Tam helped him get the tie-downs into place and unfurled the solar sheet on the north face. Gretyl retreated into antisocial, computerized silence as she parsed the messages.
“Holy shitting fuck,” she said.
“What?” Seth shouted and nearly dropped the hatchet—visions of it embedding itself in Tam’s skull made him grab wildly—then nearly fell out of the goddamned tree.
They found out about Akron, all the other attacks, and hastily spooled messages to everyone they loved, all over the world, and lit out as fast as they could go, for Thetford.
Tam’s interface read to her while she walked and flicked through messages and videos, lagging behind Seth and Gretyl. Seth tried to hurry her, but she told him to fuck off. She had people in Akron and she was figuring out if they were dead.
Seth realized a lot of the B&B crew was in Akron. People he’d known, cooked with, fixed machines with, argued with. Some who’d welcomed him when he was a shlepper. Some he’d de-shlepped, initiating them into walkaway’s mysteries. One he’d briefly fallen in love with, who—he realized now—reminded him of Tam. Who knew he had a type?
He worried. It was all he could do not to ask Tam to look up his people, too. Gretyl wanted to get to Thetford, for all the good they’d do there.
Tam kept gasping and swearing and falling down in the snow and needing rescuing. Her batteries were getting low. So were his. Gretyl kept too far ahead for him to see her infographics, but she couldn’t have been rolling in juice.
“Come on, Tam. Nothing we can do out here. Gotta get back before dark, baby.”
“Fuck baby, the world’s burning.”
“Can’t it burn while we’re indoors with a toilet?”
“Fuck.”
They crested the last ridge and Tam shouted. He was about to give her hell for diving back into her tubes when he saw her pointing. They were the highest ground for klicks. She pointed way out on the horizon. He squinted and Gretyl swore. He dialed up the visor magnification and saw a column of armored cars on caterpillar treads, sending up plumes of fresh powder behind them. They were skinned in snow-camou, but the plumes made it easy to pick out their edges.
“They’re heading to Thetford,” Seth said.
“No shit,” Tam said.
“I’m calling them now,” Gretyl said. They could see the space-station from the ridge, a hamster-run of tubes and domes nestled amid the ruins of the houses.
“They’ve got to get out of there now,” Tam said.
“I’m calling them,” Gretyl said, and her intercom shut down as she went private. They watched the armored column move. Belatedly, Seth scanned the sky for drones, and saw outriders ahead of the column, but flying at conservative distance ahead, maybe to keep the element of surprise intact. Or maybe the long-range outriders were high-altitude, and had receded to invisible pinpricks.
“Kersplebedeb says they were anticipating something like this.” Gretyl pointed down at the space-station, where now, airlocks were bursting open and suited-and-booted walkaways spilled out with packs and sledges in tow. “They got network service an hour ago, understood the Akron situation—”
“Our repeater,” Seth said.
“We bridged them in, they got the word. They’re not stupid. They’re ready to walk away.”
“Better be ready to run,” Tam said. The column drew closer.
[xvi]
Dis was in Gretyl’s ears—all their ears at once—as they suited up and hit the airlocks, grabbing supplies that she’d directed them to gather and stash when the news came on. For obscure reasons Kersplebedeb kept calling her “Tiger Mother,” a private joke between them.
Dis told them to grab spare batteries for Tam and Seth and Gretyl, reminded them to empty their bladders and void their bowels before suiting up, reminded them of the two deadheading mercs that had come all the way from Walkaway U and would need to be packed out, and suggested an arrangement of sledges and bubblewrap and oversaw the production.
Dis chivvied them out the door, was in their ears as they slogged up the ridge while Tam and Seth and Gretyl came down, taking their loads.
Dis said good-bye as they slogged away, pulling their loads and shouldering their packs, clomping away on the space-station’s entire supply of snowshoes, in two ragged columns.
They reached the top of the ridge, crunch of the snowshoes as loud as a mouthful of potato-chips, and realized Dis said good-bye because she couldn’t come.
“I’ve emailed a diff of myself to another instance of me.”
“Not Remote?” Gretyl sounded alarmed. “Because that’s not so stable—”
“Not Remote,” Dis said. “There’s a repo for Dis instances on the walkaway cloud, mirrored forty ways. We can’t all run, of course, but at least we’ll be safe. For now.”
“Shit,” Tam said, with feeling. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I’m leaving you. I’m racing ahead. You can download and run me, soon as you find a cluster. You meat-people be careful.”
Kersplebedeb said, “Tiger Mother, we’ve got our backups. We’re assured an ever-after afterlife in the sweet bye-and-bye. Nothing harder to kill than an idea whose time has come to pass. Takes more than guns to kill a man.”
“Always keep a trash bag in your car.” Dis sounded wryly amused. “Software immortality is nice, but if you can save your fleshy bodies, you should.”
“We’ll watch our butts.”
Seth ticked the privacy box. “I’m worried about you, Dis.”
“I’m worried about all of us. They’re hitting lots of places. Looking at those pics you sent, I think that’s Canadian army, special forces, the ones who do the bad things. Torture squads. Kind of thing you send if you don’t want any survivors.”
“A goose just walked on my grave.” Seth shivered again. He had a new power pack, but felt awfully cold.
Tam touched his shoulder. She could see he was talking, and he must have looked a fright. He toggled to public.
“Just worried that this feels like something bad and worse.”