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 cellblocks to the outside walls. The mechas slowed more. Then the 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.”
“Yes. We can’t win this with force.”
The external speakers clicked on. A voice spoke: “Gordy, this is Tracey. Your sister Tracey, Gordy. I know we haven’t spoken since I walked away, but I want you to know that I love you. I’m safe and happy. I think about you every day. You have a niece now, we called her Eva, for Mom. The way we live here is better than I ever thought. People are nice to each other, Gordy, the way it was when we were kids. I trust my neighbors. They look out for me. I look out for them. We’re not terrorists, Gordy. We’re people default had no use for. We’ve found a use for each other. Gordy, you don’t have to do this. There are other ways to live. I love you, Gordy.” Another voice, a baby, crying. “That’s Eva, Gordy. She loves you, too. She wants to see her uncle.”
The feeds zoomed in on one of the front-liners, a man, whose shoulders shook. This had to be Gordy. The crowd had identified him through gait analysis, doxxed him, walked his social graph, found a hit in a walkaway town in Wyoming, gotten Tracey out of bed, recorded the message.
The silence stretched. The private cop beside Gordy put a tentative hand on his shoulder. Gordy shook it off violently, shoving him away.
The moment stretched. Then Gordy shucked his gauntlets with a flick of his wrists, sending them to clatter in the road. His bare fingers worked the catches of his visor, until it yawned open. His face was an indistinct moving blur, brown with camera-corrected streaks of white where his teeth and eyes were. He took his helmet off, shucked his weapons, let them fall around his feet.
The cops around him stared, body-language telegraphing the open mouths behind their visors. He walked off, orthogonal to the jails and the cops’ lines, up 15 toward Ottawa, toward the dairies and dells of eastern Ontario.
He walked away.
The silence was something holy, church silence. It was a miracle, battlefield conversion.
“Akin!” the voice was amplified, from behind cop lines, loud enough to rattle the glass. “Get back into line, Akin!” It was a command voice, an asshole-tightening order-giving voice. Gordy’s shoulders stiffened. Gordy kept walking, divesting himself of more body armor, dropping the jacket into the road behind him as he walked. His head was high, but his shoulders shook like he was crying.
One of the cops in the front line raised his gun, muzzle big as a cannon, built to send focused, bowel-shredding ultrasonic at its target: the prolapsizer, they called it. The man whose hand had been flung off Gordy’s shoulder tackled the man with the gun before he could aim. They writhed on the ground until they were pulled apart by more cops, and stood, facing one another, held by the arms, chests heaving.
Gordy disappeared over a hill.
Jacob Redwater’s breath was noisy on Gretyl’s phone.
“We can’t win this with force.” She hung up as the next announcement started playing through the prisons’ outward-facing speakers.
In the middle of the third announcement, the cops opened fire on the speakers, more RPGs. The prisoners switched to backups, out of sight behind the roof line. When the cops’ drones went up for a look, they were harried by more walkaway drones, which chased them around the sky and even suicided on two cop drones. While the air battle raged, they got four more announcements out. They got five walkouts from seven announcements. The crowd was going fucking bananas on the boards. They doxxed the cops on the lines as fast as they could, running their graphs, finding more people to record messages.
Gretyl shook her head in amazement as the recordings came in. In the men’s prison, someone was playing D.J., queuing them up. In the women’s prison, someone else was doing the same. One of the boys in the control room did for the cops out front of their institution. She had been skeptical of the plan.
It turned on graph theory: once you hit a critical mass of walkaways, the six-degrees thing meant every single rent-a-cop on the line was no more than two handshakes – or family Christmas dinners – away from a walkaway who would shame and sweet-talk them into putting down their weapons.