“I know you can.” I know you think you can.
“You may think, ‘My comrades have better opsec than this Russian muscle-head, see how they cut through the network perimeter, got inside her decision loop.’ You may think, ‘We can outsmart her now.’ Is that what you think?”
Red, red, red. Stupid infographic. “I don’t think that, but I wonder if it’s true.”
She sipped, put down the cup. “It might be true. I don’t think so. Defense is a harder game than offense. Defense, you have to be perfect. Offense, you just need to find one imperfection. Here I am defender. When I hunt you, you are the defender. You will make mistakes. Your philosophy isn’t about perfect, it’s not about discipline.”
It takes mental discipline not to delude yourself.
“It doesn’t matter. If you understand anything about me, you understand I don’t give a shit about money. If I could put it in a pile and set fire to it, that’d be the only day I wouldn’t piss on it. I’m not going to outsmart you. If nothing else, having no money and none coming would alienate my father so deeply that he might stop trying to induct me into his cult of a family. Maybe he’ll adopt you.”
“I don’t think I’d let him.” Her microexpression was impossible to read. “I’m going to talk to the kind of people who do things with trusts and finances, so your father couldn’t undo them. You know if I say no, and you talk to your father about this, I can make your situation worse, in significant ways. You know I was able to track you, to solve your patterns. I took you without fuss. We know you don’t care for these people, but we also both know certain other people matter to you, such as your Gretyl—” The name made the infographics lose their shit. “I can find her as easily as I found you. The fact you were not hurt was a choice on my part. Do you understand these things?”
She was crying, and just hating herself for it. So foolish! To give this person such leverage over her, to be such a Pavlovian slave, just mention Gretyl’s name and the waterworks started.
She snuffled snot, savagely wiped her eyes, glared. The merc looked a little embarrassed.
“I don’t like to threaten. But it helps if you know I’m serious. That way we don’t have misunderstandings about balance of power. I am someone who pays attention to the balance of power. It’s my professional competence.”
“If you know anything about me, you know I just want to get the fuck out. I have no urge to screw up your job with my sociopathic family. If you think about it for one fucking second, Ms Balance of Power, you’d understand I don’t play games. I voluntarily told you I had pwned the network. I could have kept that a secret forever. I voluntarily handed over that power.”
“Of course, you’ve left me wondering what other secrets you have, which is why we’re having this discussion.”
“I don’t have any more secrets.” Oh, that fucking infographic.
She laughed. She was pretty when she laughed. Not scary at all. It was like the teenaged girl trapped inside her – before all the crazy-ass martial arts and BFG training – was shining through. “Of course you have secrets. We all have secrets, Iceweasel.”
[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 on 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.”