“What the fuck are you talking about?” Gretyl said. But she knew. For the first couple years, the deadheading bodies of those two mercs had been like unwanted family heirlooms, dutifully lugged from one place to another, scans cared for and backed up. Back when she was on the move all the time, the arrangements for their care had been a constant reminder of the terrible thing they’d done in the tunnels of Walkaway U, Tam’s dire warnings, the obligation they’d created for themselves. Once they’d settled in Gary and moved the two bodies, or people, or whatever, into canopic jars in the basement, automatically tended as they slept in endless, blank-faced, brain-dead stasis, she’d managed to put them out of mind – mostly.
“So you kidnapped her and deprived her of clothes and companionship because you had her best interests at heart?”
“Yes. Because I knew the alternative was much worse. Death. As you discovered. That’s why I’m here. Because, whether or not you believe this, I love my daughter. I raised her. I held her when she was born. I told her bedtime stories. I changed her diapers. She is my flesh and blood. I am a part of her, always will be. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want my grandchildren to die.”
“But we can all die?” Limpopo said. “No especial reason to keep us around. Apart from generating income for TransCanada, we’re surplus.”
He shrugged. “Not my department. I’m interested in my family. Your family can look out for you.”
“That’s mighty white of you, Mr Redwater,” Limpopo said.
Gretyl almost asked him how much diaper changing and storytelling he did, how much of it was delegated to au pairs. She couldn’t see the point. Jacob Redwater was exactly what he seemed: a zotta who cared about getting things he wanted, didn’t give a shit about what happened to everyone else. However much diaper changing he’d done, it was enough to reinforce whatever part of him believed kidnapping his daughter was an acceptable alternative to stopping his pals from killing everyone within ten klicks of her.
She stared at his excellent skin tone and the muscular shoulders under his vest. He looked like he was having a day off at the cottage, someone in a stock-art photo advertising a line of fine outdoor/casual clothing. Burnished by his years, not battered. Not like Gretyl, not like her friends. She walked away because she couldn’t be a party to making men like this immortal gods. They didn’t need her help.
“Your daughter doesn’t want to see you.” It was true. She didn’t have to ask Iceweasel – she’d never wavered on that.
“She named her son after me.”
“We named our son after you so she’d never forget what she turned her back on. I didn’t understand at first. She explained that she wanted to make a Jacob Redwater that wouldn’t be remembered as a selfish monster.”
He was impassive.
“Holy shit.” A boy pointed to the screens.
They followed his finger. There, walking up Highway 15, was a big crowd. Hundreds of people. At the front, still in remains of uniforms and body armor, were the cops who had walked away. They split into three smaller groups, walked right into the private cops who tried to stop them from entering the prisons’ inner courtyards, scuffling briefly as they tried to decide how much force they could use against these newcomers. Then they were beyond the cops, between them and the prisons. They linked arms and sat down in front of the buildings, saying nothing. The walkaway ex-cops sat in the middle. Gretyl understood the crowd around the world hadn’t stopped when the feeds went dead.
On cue, new drones buzzed the courtyard, all kinds, including network relay. She saw the massive expansion in bandwidth from her seat, surging over the infographics in a flood of blue that went green as the caches on both sides of the link emptied and the congestion cleared – they were in sync with the world.
Jacob Redwater looked... quizzical. He narrowed his eyes. As the boys waved the feeds to zoom over the whole wall, he gave a minute head-shake, as if to say that’s not right.
What had Nadie said? They don’t want another Akron. They don’t want martyrs. If they bomb the place, it will be with the cameras off. They were into new tactical territory now, on both sides. There had been many assaults on walkaway strongholds by default regimes – religious fundamentalists in America and Saudi Arabia; no-insignia mercs in Ukraine, Moldova and Siberia; storm troopers backed by huge, network-killing information weapons in China. There had been advances and retreats. Never this kind of siege.
Gretyl’s phone rang. She knew from the buzz it was her wife. She whooshed out a sigh.
“We’re okay.” She knew Gretyl would have been quietly freaking after a protracted radio silence.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. The boys love you. Are you okay? We’ve been watching it here. The boys are livid that they didn’t get to stay and help with the drones. They’re not quite clear on the danger. I don’t want to worry them.”
“Don’t.” She was keenly aware of Jacob Redwater straining to hear, wishing she’d learned how to do that subvocalization thing with her interfaces. She’d never had much call for private audio-spaces – too much of a hermit.
“Don’t? Oh, worry them. Are you okay? Can you talk?”
“I can.”
“But not much. Why? Who’s there? What’s going on? Are you safe?”
She sighed. Her wife was good at a lot of things, but covert ops wasn’t one of them.
“Your father is here.”
It was an eerie silence, silence of an over-compressed audio channel discarding background noise. “Is he going to hurt you?” She sounded cold.
“He would have a hard time doing that. He’s locked in with us, in a sub-basement of the boys’ prison, a control center. He wanted to talk to you and since you wouldn’t take his calls, he called me.”
Jacob Redwater was thinking hard about where Iceweasel was. What it meant that she had to have this explained.
“Of course he’d know how to get in touch with you. You going to ransom him?”
She couldn’t stop the smile. Because she was expecting it, she got between Jacob Redwater and the door as he stood suddenly, knocking over his chair. He came at her. She remembered what a fit, gym-toned, personally trained, technologically tuned bad-ass he was. She was about to get slugged. That’s when Troy landed on his back and bore him to the ground, arms locked around his neck. The other boys each took a limb and sat on it.
“Gretyl?” She sounded alarmed.
“No problems. Give me a sec?”
She looked down at Jacob Redwater’s face. He was calm, like he was relaxing with a glass of wine in his den, not lying on a concrete floor with four juvenile delinquents sitting on him. “Jacob, Iceweasel and the boys left before this started. They’re safe. Would you like me to ask Iceweasel if she’d be interested in talking to you?”
“Not if I was starving to death and he was the only drive-through on Earth,” Iceweasel said, making Gretyl snort. It was crueler and more gloat-y than she’d intended. She caught herself before she apologized to the spread-eagled zotta.
“I know the answer. Do I get to leave?”
“Why should we let you? This place is full of handcuffs and cells. We could lock you up, make sure whatever happens to us happens to you. It might not stop them from nuking us. Then again, it might.”
“Probably not. I used up everything I had, stopping things so I could get in here. Giving into me cost them a lot—” He nodded toward the screens, where private cops and the walkaways faced each other beneath a canopy of drones. “The people calling the shots wouldn’t mind losing me. It would destabilize things, but it would also set an example for the next time something like this happens. I’m not the only powerful person related to someone on your side, you know. Object lessons are expensive. It’s wasteful to pass them up when they’re available.”