Announcements eight through ten played on the parapet speakers, before the cops brought out mortars – mortars! – to attack the walls, bringing them down in piles of rubble amidst mushrooming dust clouds. TransCanada’s stocks plummeted. The contagion spread to all those other places where walkaways were holed up – universities, research outfits, all those refugee detention centers. When the market saw what it was going to take to get those facilities back to default ship-shape, investors panic-sold. They always panic-sold, every time one of these fights broke out. Even the true believers in zotta superiority sold. The root of credit was credo: belief. Watching rent-a-cops bring out their big guns to wipe out speakers had an enormous impact on the market’s animal sentiments: their belief system was crashing, just as it had every other time.
More drones: with speakers, crowd-control drones that came stock with the prison, so big they needed extra avionics to course-correct them from the vibrations of their own speakers.
The drones homed in on the men and women they’d targeted, turned them into spectacles as their squad-mates stared at armored cops haloed by circling drones, too close to their bodies to shoot down safely, even with armor. What if their hydrogen cells blew? What if they were booby trapped?
When the order went out to rotate those unlucky bastards, they trudged toward the APCs at the back of the formation, circled by buzzing drones that haunted them like outsized, big-voiced fruit-flies. In one case, a drone managed to slip inside the APC with its target. The big tank-like car rocked on its suspension as cops inside chased it around, freaking like a church-load of parishioners chasing a lost bat. The video from that drone was a tilt-a-whirl confusion of fish-eye claustrophobia. Eventually, motion stopped as the drone was smashed to the APC’s deck. A moment later, the hatch of the APC opened and three more cops walked away, two women and a man. The man and one of the women argued with the other woman, maybe trying to convince her to stay, but they all left their weapons by the roadside as they struck off for Ottawa.
Things settled. The prisoners had damned few ways to make contact with the cops now, which meant that there could be no negotiation. There had been none before.
Gretyl’s phone rang.
“You have to get Natalie out of there. Now.”
Gretyl felt her guts curdle. Maybe it was a zotta trick to flush them out by making them think the big push was coming. Redwater wasn’t above that. But he sounded desperate in an un-Redwater way.
“No one is coming out until we can all come out.” She carefully avoided confirming Iceweasel’s present location. She guessed this meant Nadie wasn’t working for the old man, because otherwise she’d have let him know his precious bloodline was safe.
“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 sub-basement.
The cameras on that wall went dark. They retasked 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 façades, offices and store-rooms 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?”