They were nearly at the B&B when everyone’s interfaces buzzed and let them know that they’d safely uploaded all five scans to walkaway net, and they were being seeded all over the world, as unkillably immortal as data could be. Everyone relaxed. Their knowledge that immortality was real was only hours old, but they were already terrified at the thought of permadeath. They joked nervously about how quickly everyone could get scanned when they’d unpacked at the B&B.
They went into hyper-vigilance – some took stemmies to help – and unspoken fear spread. Death came in two flavors: realdeath, and “death.” But until they got to the B&B, the only flavor they’d get was permadeath. Fear became terror. They spooked at shadows. CC and Gretyl both broke out less-lethals they’d taken with them. They hadn’t told anyone they were doing it, and there’d have been a fearsome debate if they had. No one raised an eyebrow now.
They were so close. Iceweasel knew this territory, had walked this train on scavenging runs for the new B&B as its drones identified new matériel to speed it into existence.
Watching the new B&B conjure itself had been a conversion experience, a proof of the miraculous on Earth. They’d walked away from the old B&B when those assholes had shown up, and pulled a new one from the realm of pure information. That was their destiny. Things could be walked away from and made anew, no one would ever have to fight. Not yet – they couldn’t scan people at volume, couldn’t decant them into flesh. But there would come a day that Gretyl had spoken of, when there would be no reason to fear death. That would be the end of physical coercion. So long as someone, somewhere believed in putting you back into a body, there would be no reason not to walk into an oppressor’s machine-gun fire, no reason not to beat your brains out on the bars of your prison cell, no reason not to –
The drone overhead made a welcoming sound. The B&B had sent its outriders for them. She looked at it and waved. It dipped a wing at her and circled back.
“Getting close,” she called out, and then the enemy charged out of the bush with a machine roar.
There were eight mechas, the sort that they’d built to manage the B&B’s trickiest assembly tasks. These might have been the same ones. They stood three meters tall, holding their pilots in cruciform cocoons, faces peering out of the mechas’ chest cavities, eyes shrouded in panorama screens that timed refreshes with the pilot’s saccades and load-stresses of the body to provide just-in-time views of wherever the suit’s action was. Each one could lift a couple tons, but had fail-safes in place to stop them from hurting humans. Turning that shit off was only a firmware update. There were plenty of places in walkaway where mecha-wrestling was a sport with big fan bases.
They went for the cargo containers first, upending them and methodically bending their wheels so they would never roll again. Iceweasel leapt clear as the front-most pod upended, taking the A.T.V. with it, and hurt her shoulder and ankle when she sprawled to the forest floor.
Gretyl hauled her to her feet, her face a mask of terror. Gretyl grabbed her by her sore shoulder, making her shout. That attracted the attention of the nearest mech-pilot. The huge body turned toward them. Mechas could turn quickly and their arms were fast enough to drive a shovel into frozen ground with pinpoint accuracy, but they couldn’t run, because their gyros needed time to stabilize after each step, so that they walked in a bowlegged stagger. The mecha took one step toward them, the pilot rocking in his cradle. He – she saw a russet beard poking around the head-brace, teeth behind the peeled-back lips – rolled with the mecha, and something about how he did it made her think that he didn’t have a lot of experience.
Gretyl let go of Iceweasel’s shoulder and wrestled a shitblaster. Iceweasel stepped quickly out of her way as she prodded its back panel, struggling to keep the array of coin-sized bowls pointed in the right direction as they shaped a pulse of infrasound, tuning it up and down through a range of resonant frequencies, hunting for the one that would –
The driver tried to pitch forward, but the mecha couldn’t bend that far without keeling over, so it locked him in a thirty-degree bow, like a sulky kid after a forced performance. The bottom half of his face – beard, lips, square teeth – twisted. The shitblaster didn’t just make your bowels loosen, they did so with cramps that were between childbirth and cholera.
Gretyl panted. Iceweasel hauled her out of the mêlée’s center. Three mechas were converging on them, having wrecked the wagon. Iceweasel and Gretyl were nearly knocked over by people running away from them, people she recognized but not quite. They ran, colliding with more people. It was panic.
“I’ve got to—” Gretyl said. The rest was lost, but Iceweasel knew what it was. She and CC were the only ones who could fight – she looked around, saw CC aiming his weapon at a mecha, watched the owner lose consciousness, saw two of their own nearby drop to their knees, clutching their heads and screaming. The pain-ray made your skin feel like it was on fire, and the shaped infrasound rattled your skull and caused deafness and near-blindness.
Half the mechas were incapacitated, the rest waded through the crowd, and Iceweasel watched in horror as they stomped through her crew-mates, flinching as their arms swung to counterbalance their drunken stagger, expecting at any moment that those arms would cave in skulls or pick people up and hurl them into the treetops.
But no, Iceweasel saw, the mechas were... escaping. Running for the bush, right past people, and that meant –
“Shit, we have to go,” she said to Gretyl. “Now!”
The drone was back, and for a moment her panic morphed it into a big, missile-carrying craft like she’d seen in the videos of the destruction of WU. But it was only the familiar B&B drone. She blew a plume of stale stress and limped for the trees. “Come on, everyone, come on!” She dragged Gretyl, sneaking glances at the drone, thinking of her B&B crew-mates, watching and chewing their nails, retransmitting to the rest of walkaway, even to default, where the spectacle of an unprovoked attack on a column of scientific refugees might shock the conscience of the public beyond the ability of spin-doctors –
The B&B drone nosedived. Her interface surfaces died. Three more drones – sleek, with low-slung missiles and dishes for high-energy electromagnetic pulses – screamed past, a supersonic boom following them. They disappeared over the horizon and there were screams in their wake, panic redoubled as the crew headed into the trees, running in blind panic. They’d seen the missiles.
Iceweasel and Gretyl hovered at the woods’ edge, tracing the contrails in mute horror as the white streaks bent into Ls that became Us as the drones executed precise rolls in formation, corkscrewing upright and doubling back.
Iceweasel squeezed Gretyl’s hand. Gretyl squeezed back. Cool detachment settled over her, like she was being tucked in fever bed by a lover’s hand.
“It was worth it,” she said, thinking of the people who would never die again, of Dis, who would shortly be conscious, who would remember her as someone who had helped cure the most terminal disease of all.
“It was,” Gretyl said. “I love you, darling.”
“I love you, too,” Iceweasel said. “Thank you for letting me help.”
They watched the drones draw closer.
[VII]
THE MISSILES WENT over their heads into the woods where the mass of the crew hid. Iceweasel understood with her detachment that the drone operators would use thermal and millimeter wave to choose targets. Hiding in the woods was about as effective as pulling up the blanket to escape the bogeyman.