“Better be ready to run,” Tam said. The column drew closer.
[XVI]
DIS WAS IN Gretyl’s ears – all their ears at once – as they suited up and hit the airlocks, grabbing supplies that she’d directed them to gather and stash when the news came on. For obscure reasons Kersplebedeb kept calling her “Tiger Mother,” a private joke between them.
Dis told them to grab spare batteries for Tam and Seth and Gretyl, reminded them to empty their bladders and void their bowels before suiting up, reminded them of the two deadheading mercs that had come all the way from Walkaway U and would need to be packed out, and suggested an arrangement of sledges and bubblewrap and oversaw the production.
Dis chivvied them out the door, was in their ears as they slogged up the ridge while Tam and Seth and Gretyl came down, taking their loads.
Dis said good-bye as they slogged away, pulling their loads and shouldering their packs, clomping away on the space-station’s entire supply of snowshoes, in two ragged columns.
They reached the top of the ridge, crunch of the snowshoes as loud as a mouthful of potato-chips, and realized Dis said good-bye because she couldn’t come.
“I’ve emailed a diff of myself to another instance of me.”
“Not Remote?” Gretyl sounded alarmed. “Because that’s not so stable—”
“Not Remote,” Dis said. “There’s a repo for Dis instances on the walkaway cloud, mirrored forty ways. We can’t all run, of course, but at least we’ll be safe. For now.”
“Shit,” Tam said, with feeling. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I’m leaving you. I’m racing ahead. You can download and run me, soon as you find a cluster. You meat-people be careful.”
Kersplebedeb said, “Tiger Mother, we’ve got our backups. We’re assured an ever-after afterlife in the sweet bye-and-bye. Nothing harder to kill than an idea whose time has come to pass. Takes more than guns to kill a man.”
“Always keep a trash bag in your car.” Dis sounded wryly amused. “Software immortality is nice, but if you can save your fleshy bodies, you should.”
“We’ll watch our butts.”
Seth ticked the privacy box. “I’m worried about you, Dis.”
“I’m worried about all of us. They’re hitting lots of places. Looking at those pics you sent, I think that’s Canadian army, special forces, the ones who do the bad things. Torture squads. Kind of thing you send if you don’t want any survivors.”
“A goose just walked on my grave.” Seth shivered again. He had a new power-pack, but felt awfully cold.
Tam touched his shoulder. She could see he was talking, and he must have looked a fright. He toggled to public.
“Just worried that this feels like something bad and worse.”
They moved slowly. All the stuff they shlepped was bad enough, but snowshoes made it worse.
“They’re gonna get us pretty fucking soon at this rate,” Seth said.
Kersplebedeb snickered. “No, they’re not.”
Seth hadn’t ever heard Kersplebedeb make such a sinister noise.
“Booby trap?”
“Not the sort that goes boom. Just a place under the main road where there was a mining cave-in. We fixed it so we could bring in supplies, but didn’t design it for those big tanks those fuckers have.”
“M.R.A.P.s,” Tam said. “Armored cars. Not tanks. No turrets.”
Kersplebedeb snickered again. “No difference. There’s a half-kilometer of rubble, tunnels, scree and sand, straight down, and they’re about to hit it.” He chucked them the feed from a drone they’d lofted on their way out the door. They stopped while they screened it on their visors. “Any minute now,” he said.
The fan-tail of snow and ice obscured the column, but Seth thought there were six of those things.
“Won’t they have lidar, checking for IEDs?”
“Probably. Don’t know if it’ll be good enough to tell solid civil engineering from our half-assed job, though. Shall we find out?”
Whoomf. The cave-in was both sudden – the ground giving way without warning – and rapid, as the cave-in rippled in concentric rings, almost too fast to follow. It was terrible and terrific, like the earth was swallowing them. The two M.R.A.P.s at the back of the column threw into frantic reverse, and the second-to-last smashed into the last, jolting it skeewhiff. The driver tried to straighten out – Seth couldn’t help but root for him, because the fucking earth was swallowing a giant machine and when it’s humans versus brute physics, only a sociopath roots for physics – but it was too late, especially as panicky Mr Second-To-Last went on to T-bone the wavering vehicle in reverse, and then the ground opened beneath both of them and they disappeared.
“Jesus,” Seth said.
Kersplebedeb muttered something.
“What?”
“Didn’t expect that. Thought they’d get stuck in a pit, not fall into the earth’s molten core.”
“Probably didn’t go that far,” Gretyl said. “I’m no geologist, but I think we’d have seen a splash of lava.” She was audibly shaken, whistling in the dark.
“Those tanks are super-armored,” Kersplebedeb said. “They’ll all be strapped in. There’ll be airbags.”
Tam put her arm around his shoulders. “Kersplebedeb, if they’re dead, they’re dead. You didn’t set a trap. They fucked up by bringing their giant macho-mobiles to the bush. Fuck, you know they’d have croaked us if they caught us.”
Kersplebedeb didn’t say anything. The radio let them hear his ragged breath.
“Come on,” Tam said. The refugees had stopped and news of the cave-in and the link for the recap spread. They were talking in clusters, looking at the sky as if vengeance might rain down. “As they say in the historical dramas, ‘shit just got real.’ If they get out of that hole, they’re coming for us. If they don’t get out of that hole, someone else is coming for us. We need to be gone.”
Winter dark was coming on.
“Where’s the cargo train?”
“Shit,” Tam said. “We haven’t even been able to tell you about that.”
Once they had, everyone decided that they should head to the cargo train. It had supplies and could carry the tired. Walkaways tried to travel light, but they weren’t masochists. If there was a machine that could be used to carry their load, so much the better.
“I miss the B&B,” Limpopo said, and Seth felt deep unease, because Limpopo was the gold standard in rolling with the punches. “The mechas, the onsen. The toilets. I think that when we get out of this, we should build another one.”
“Hell yeah,” Etcetera said. Seth realized how long it had been since they’d had a real sit-down, all-night, boozy chat, the kind they’d had so often as kids, as defaults. They both had girlfriends, but that wasn’t all. Etcetera was now serious in a good way, smart about stuff the way Limpopo was. Seth felt uncomfortable clowning with his old friend. But his old friend was a better person, energetic and not so self-doubting. He wore it well.
“Hell yeah!” Seth pumped his fist. Etcetera and he locked eyes and the bond of friendship crackled between them and Tam reached for his hand, still keeping an arm around Kersplebedeb. In that moment Seth thought they could eat the world for breakfast and call for seconds. “Let’s go.”
“Where, though?” Pocahontas had broken away from her group of younger people, standing before them and radiating confidence and youthfulness in a way that made Seth feel old and protective.
“To the wagon,” he said.
“And then?”
He shrugged.
Limpopo said, “I think we’ll figure it from there. Once we’ve got the wagon we’ll be more mobile. I’ve been checking other walkaways around and there’s plenty who might take us in, but everyone’s also worried they’ll be next.”
“They should be,” Pocahontas said. “We’ve seen this playbook before. It’s Idle No More all over again.” The old First Nations protest movement gained momentum over a period of years, banking down to embers for months at a time, then exploding in fiery gouts of smart, savvy events that were so well-turned that even the totally pwned default media couldn’t ignore ’em. Idle became an international shorthand for effective revolt and street protesters from Warsaw to Port-au-Prince to Caracas declared solidarity with it and used its iconography.
Until, in a series of coordinated swoops, the RCMP, Canadian army, FBI, and CSIS simply scraped Idle off the planet. Every significant leader taken away in chains, except for the ones who died in gory shootouts, choreographed violence framed by slick logos and sinister arpeggios to accompany the tense standoff coverage that led the feeds. The trials that followed revealed a network of informants and double-dealers inside the movement. That left the sidelined supporters feeling like patsies for supporting a group that had, apparently, been led by double agents.
In walkaway circles, Idle were still heroes. There were plenty of veterans living in walkaway. In the rest of the world, Idle had come to stand for the danger of discontent, an object lesson in how people who fought back couldn’t offer any alternative, were riddled with traitors and useful idiots, always and forever doomed before they started.
“Sure feels like it,” Limpopo said. She’d been there when Idle and early walkaways were on the verge of merging. “Now you mention it.”
Pocahontas said, “I think we should go to Dead Lake.”
“Why? They don’t need more trouble.”
Her snort of derision was epic. “They live in the bush, surrounded by air so toxic it can’t be breathed. Their neighbors are about to get napalmed. It doesn’t get worse.”
Limpopo nodded. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be smart. They know the area in a way that none of us do. They’re likely to be in the cops’ cross-hairs, because they’re Idle vets and they hang out with us and they’re inconvenient witnesses. No one who mattered would give one single fuck if they were purged. They’re our friends and allies. We need those.”
“I’m sold.” Kersplebedeb sounded more energetic, but he was still shaken. A chorus of voices on the short-range radio joined him.
“Let’s go,” Pocahontas said, and Gretyl pointed her toward the cargo wagon.