“Just asking.”
She crossed the room, cupped Iceweasel’s chin, tilted her face, moved the chin from side to side. “We’ll get clothes for you, things I have that can alter your appearance. I don’t imagine you have physical stamina after captivity, so we’ll need a vehicle quickly.” She released Iceweasel’s chin. Her skin was warm where the strong fingers had been. Iceweasel realized how long it had been since anyone had touched her without it being medical, or violent. She’d missed it – welcomed it. It scared her. She was starved of something she needed as surely as air or water.
“Forty-five minutes.” She left the room.
“That woman,” Dis said, “is tightly wound.”
“I hope so.” Iceweasel tried for bravery, came close. “Someone has to be the adult supervision and it sure as shit isn’t me.”
“Me either.”
“What are you going to do when we go?”
Pause. “Iceweasel—”
“Oh.”
“So long as I email my diffs before I take off the brakes, it won’t be dying. It’s like taking every awesome drug at once, annihilating your mind, then being able to undo it.”
“You’re making me jealous.”
“You’ll get a chance someday. Someday it’ll be everyone we know, all server-side, simmed up. We’ll be able to walk away from anything.”
“Do you think she’s got the room bugged still?”
“I am certain she does.”
“Have you got her bugged?”
“She’s out of the suite. I’ve got a few cameras, but they’re seeing the empty house or occasional downtrodden servant-types. How many of those has your father got working for him, anyway?”
“None of them work for him. He uses a service that sources them on an as-needed basis, using realtime bids. There are a few who show up every day because the bidding algorithm recognizes their performance metrics, but the occasionals are one-timers. I did a senior commerce thesis project on the system. Got an A−. I did these ethnographies on the workers and a couple of them got demoted by the prioritization algorithm for wasting time on the job.”
“Zottas are fucking Martians.”
“Yup.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“We’ll be together again soon enough.”
“Fuckin’ a.”
[XIX]
GRETYL FOUND THE bodies. She’d insisted on going back for Limpopo and Etcetera, even as the rest set out for Dead Lake. The starlight and moonlight turned the snowy way eldritch blue. She’d broken out an aerostat and a flock of smaller drones from the tractor’s supplies, giving her a network bridge to the walkaway refugee column, and good surveillance of the territory. The suits’ insulation was too efficient for infra red, but the drones had other telemetry, lidar and millimeter-wave, E.M.-sniffers that homed in on the radio emissions from the suits as they networked to one another.
They flew a pattern ahead of her, sometimes swooping under the canopy where the naked branches were too thick to be penetrated by their sensors. She trudged on her snowshoes, thighs burning with exhaustion, sucking at coffium sweets that provided her with glucose and stimulants, watching the map projected on her visor grow more detailed, going from a desaturated pallet to a more saturated one as the drones filled in details, confirming every inch.
She kept pinging their radios, trying to reach them, getting nothing. She ignored her lurking terror, even when the drones found her two motionless bodies, photographed them in blurrycam, then less-blurrycam, then hovered and got stills, illuminated with LED-bright flashes that revealed the pink snow, the inert bodies. She wouldn’t let herself cry. She walked.
The men were frozen stiff, blood-melted snow now refrozen. Their faces were pale and bluish, the wounds in their throats washed incongruously clean by melted snow, giving the incisions the look of medical textbooks or pickled demonstration cadavers. Not comrades she’d loved and laughed with. She wouldn’t let herself cry.
Limpopo was nowhere to be seen. Snowmobile tracks pointed the way. They disappeared into the woods. The drones were clever enough that they were already on their trail. They’d sent status updates helpfully informing her that if she could get more computing power for an inference engine to make better guesses about likely trail-ways, they would be more efficient. As it was, they were cycling through various coverage algorithms, trying to make allowances for trees and terrain without spending too much time thinking.
Gretyl watched their progress on her visor and called Kersplebedeb, who came on the line after a delay; a soft buzz in her ear piece warned her the network link was unreliable and there would be buffering delays at both ends.
“Everything okay?”
“They killed” – she sucked air – “Etcetera and the other one, Johnny or whatever his name was. Throats cut, face down in the snow. Bled out.” Again, breath catching in her chest. She flicked her gaze at the “OVER” button. Waited.
“Oh, Gretyl.”
“Limpopo is gone, into the woods. On a snowmobile. I think they dragged her on a travois or stretcher.” OVER. Pause.
“Fuck.”
“I want to go after her, but...” OVER. Long pause.
“Not a good idea. You’ll get killed, too. Have you got drones up?”
She tossed him their telemetry and feeds, waited. Saw him login to a shared space. Waited.
“I think you should come home.”
“Home?” OVER.
“Dead Lake. There’s food, power, network access. People who love you. I’ll put the word out about Limpopo. We can send someone to get you. I saw a skidoo on the way in, and I’m betting the Dead Lakers keep it charged. They’re organized.”
She was so cold. Her back and neck ached. Her suit chafed the backs of her knees and the undersides of her arms raw.
“Send someone.” She sent him a location beacon.
“On the way. I’ll make loud noises about Limpopo. Lots of people love that woman.”
“I think they’re counting on that. I think they took her to demoralize us.” OVER.
“You’re more paranoid than I am.”
“I know more than you do.”
“Let me find you a snowmobile and a rescue party. There’s no booze here, but sending some hot cocoa, with marshmallows.”
“You’re a good man.”
“And an excellent post-human.” He was gone.
The pin-drop clarity of the outside soundscape returned. Wind, branches, pinging noises of frozen water crystals sliding over one another. The two bodies stared at her in the false light of her visor. She sat down in the snow and sank in. She was so tired. Shattered.
She missed Iceweasel. It ached inside her. A voice she hated, always louder when she was sad, reminded her she’d once taught at a university, had a house, a name, and an address. Once she’d been able to buy things when she needed them – even if she had to go into debt – could pretend there was a future. Now she had none of those things, least of all a future. She was living as though it was the first days of a better nation, but that nation was nowhere in sight. Instead, she had a no-man’s-land of drone-strikes and slit throats.
Holy shit, she missed Iceweasel so much.
[XX]
WHEN ICEWEASEL WAS a little girl called Natalie, she and Cordelia played in the ravine, under the watchful eye of the house drones, or, if there was some incomprehensible violence-weather in the city – an uptick of kidnappings – a private security person who’d fit them with ankle cuffs she couldn’t loosen, no matter how many tools she tried. Cordelia never understood her impatience with these minor indignities, insisting they were for their safety. For Natalie, it was symbolic battle. If she’d ever gotten the cuff off, she’d have stuck it in her pocket. Ditching it in the Don River would bring the security goon down the hill. But it was designed to defeat a kidnapper with a hacksaw – anything that could brute-force it would take her foot with it.