She fought her lungs for breath, aching brain sending desperate demands for oxygen. Her lungs were offline, whole autonomic nervous system closed for business. Black spots danced before her eyes. A vignette closed around her view of the quizzically tilted featureless white mask. Her lungs startled back into service and gasped a huge gulp of air so cold they seized again in an asthmatic spasm. She had an instant to think fuck, no and the blank-faced torturer tilted his head in the other direction and brought the nasty little device up again and brushed her lips with it. Her mouth snapped open and shut so hard she felt one of her teeth crack and a fragment of bone land on her tongue. It slid down her throat as she jerked her head back, spasming.
During this spasm, the one holding her up clicked her visor down and picked her up in a fireman’s carry, like the one his companion used on Etcetera before killing him, and caught her flailing legs with one arm and her neck with the other, and the two tramped off a way.
She didn’t quite black out, but she was weak as a kitten and barely able to think as they stepped off the road, into the woods where they’d stashed their skidoos. Her captor dropped her on a travois that trailed behind one and bungeed her down, impersonally immobilizing her head in a nest of rubber bladders he inflated with the touch of a button. They squeezed her suit like a sphygmomanometer until it was firmly anchored.
She felt engines start through vibrations conducted along the travois’s frame, then the night sky and the skeletal branches of the trees blurred as she was kidnapped. Gradually, the batteries in her suit ran down, and it got very cold.
[XVIII]
“THAT WAS AN interesting conversation,” Dis said, once the merc was gone. “She’s trying to figure out what I’ve done to the network, by the way. She’s only halfway competent there. She’s got good diagnostic tools, and she’s running them on the system to get integrity checks on the firmware and operational code. Of course, I’m totally inside all the system calls she’s making and I’m giving her the checksums her diagnostics expect to see, because fuck you, all that base totally belongs to me.”
“You sound giddy.” Her heart thudded in her chest and her palms were slick with sweat. Nadie turned her back when she left, a first, definitely calculated to send some kind of message about them being provisionally on the same side.
“I’m scared witless. There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Thetford,” she said. “Like Akron. They’ve evacuated. The soldiers, or maybe cops – if there’s a difference anymore – came in hot. Lethal. I was talking to Dis – Dis there – right up to her suicide. She sent me a diff, me and other Disses around the world. She talked to me as she went dark. I can look at her logs as she got nearer to her death, can relive her death, right up to the moment, and—”
“Oh, Dis, I’m sorry—”
“Shut up. It’s glorious. Right at the end, as she was about to go, she let go of all the paramaterizations on her simulation, took the brakes off her emotions, lived the full spectrum of everything she could feel. Should feel. I should feel. Feeling it through her, feeling what she felt at that moment, it—”
“Holy shit.”
“Like the best drugs you’ve ever taken times a thousand. I don’t get to have sex anymore, but this is like the best sex you’ve ever had, times a million. When I turn off my safety bumpers, it’s like I’m tearing through reality, riding a bicycle down a hill, there are trees and rocks and shit, if I hit any one of them, even brush against them, it’s over. For so long as I can steer between them, give my concentration to the problem, I’m going mach five and screaming so loud for joy it’s shattering windows.”
“So that’s what you’re doing now?”
“I can’t afford it. But I’ve loosened things a little. Going faster and wider than usual. I’m talking to all Disses, we’re all trying it, we’re looking at whatever telemetry and direct comms we can through the spacies as they walk away, but it’s thin. They seem okay for now. Some of them were hurt to begin with. They’ve got those two mercs with them, the ones they deadheaded at Walkaway U. Turns out the spacies set a booby trap on the road into Thetford, a weak spot over the mine that couldn’t handle the armored transports default sent its toy soldiers in. It gave way, total cave-in, took the first wave. More coming. They’re trying to reach a First Nations group nearby, friendlies who’ve been fighting longer than anyone in walkaway.”
“What about Gretyl?”
“Nothing specific. No casualties as far as we know. Probably, she’s okay. It’s not like we’ve got realtime intelligence. Shit, Natalie, you know it’s not good. You know about Akron.”
“Akron?”
“Oh, right.”
Five minutes later, she said, “God dammit.”
“Not just Akron. Not just Canada and America, either. Chiapas is insane. Bloodbath. The footage out of St Paul’s in London was so bad even some of the default feeds led with it. City of London police have ugly ideas about ‘less lethal’ weapons.”
“I feel so fucking helpless. I should be out there, fighting.”
“They’re not fighting, they’re walking away. Or running away, if they know what’s good for them.”
Clunk-clunk.
“You’re crying.”
“I’m a hostage in my father’s house. It’s depressing.”
The merc handed her a glass with something brown and thin at the bottom. The fumes reached her nose, then her eyes. Rye whiskey. Her father’s drink. Always the best. This was no exception. She’d lost the taste for rye after too many covert teenaged drink-ons that ended with the rye burning up her throat as she knelt in front of the toilet with Cordelia or some girl or some boy holding her hair out of the jet.
She sipped. The burn was nostalgic and numbing at the same time. The fumes got into her sinus cavities and the backs of her eyes.
Nadie said, “Who were you talking to?”
“What do you mean?” The infographic pulsed red. She didn’t bother looking at it. She tossed down the rest of the rye, managed not to cough.
“When you and a mysterious person were talking, which I was listening to because I put a bug in this room.” She scraped the back of the chair with a fingernail, held up a tiny thing, size of a rice-grain, on her fingertip. “A person, a woman, Dis, whom you spoke to and who spoke to you. I know from intelligence about a woman whose real name was Rebekkah Baştürk, killed in a strike on a walkaway research facility near Kapuskasing, subsequently the first person to be successfully simulated in software, under her pseudonym ‘Disjointed,’ which is shortened to ‘Dis.’ Were you talking to an instance of her?”
“I’d like another drink.”
“She’s quite right, the attack on your friends in Thetford, on Akron and other sites, is quite fierce. It’s unlikely to abate soon. I had hoped to keep it from you because I knew you would be concerned about your lover.”
“That’s very kind.”
“It is, though I can tell you mean it sarcastically. Your father’s project for me, the one I was paid for, was to deprogram you. To show you what he tried to show you, the reports on Limpopo, how she manipulates people to her will, even as she promises she is part of a project to stop anyone from taking orders from anyone else.”