She rolled on, steering the trike through the woods, the train of cargo-carts bumping along behind her.
* * *
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 crewmates, 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 crewmates, 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.
The second round airbursted a hundred meters behind them. The woods roared with flames, the sound almost masking the screams. The drones shot past again, headed for another impossible turn at the horizon’s edge.
The drones were nearly upon them when, out of the iron sky, five missiles came directly at them, seemingly from nowhere. Three hit, fireballs and then thunderclaps, a few seconds later. The other two missed and disappea
red from view. Gretyl and Iceweasel craned their necks, and then they saw it: a huge, silent, cigar-shaped zepp, one of the bumblers from the golden age, the sort Etcetera heaved nostalgic sighs for. Its emergency impellers keened as it held its position, tracking the drones as they passed, and then, as they circled, it neatly shot them out of the sky with another volley of counterdrone missiles.
The zepp dipped and spiraled toward the pathway. Once it was ten meters off the ground, it dropped ladders and ziplines and people poured out, clutching first-aid gear and spine-boards, wearing fireproof suits. They ran for the woods and Iceweasel and Gretyl ran with them, without discussion, hot knowledge of salvation coursing through them, firing new reserves of energy.
They labored in the woods for hours, searching, getting the wounded and the dead onto stretchers and into the sky. More people joined them, then more, and when Iceweasel ventured back to the path with a stretcher crew, there were dozens of B&B vehicles on site, from mechas to cargo-bikes, running in relays to bring the wounded back.
She helped load an unconscious person—she saw with a shock it was CC, rainbow hair charred, face and chest a mass of burns—and stood. The other stretcher-bearer turned to her and took her hands, looked into her eyes.
“Iceweasel, hey, Iceweasel?”
It was Tam, sooty and exhausted, and worried. Iceweasel wanted to put her at ease, didn’t want to be a burden, so she tried to say, It’s okay, let’s go help some more—but nothing came. She was alarmed to feel tears slipping down her cheeks. She tried to shake off the feeling, but it wouldn’t shake. Some part of her she could not dial down by pinch-zooming an infographic had been shattered and was floating jagged-edged in her mind’s soup.
“Why don’t we take a break, huh?” Using pressure on her shoulder—pain flared and she gasped—Tam sat her on the ground and hunkered down. “You’re in shock,” she said. “You’ll be okay. I think you should get evacced, get warm and clear, get some liquids.”
“Gretyl—” she said.
“Yeah, Gretyl. That old girl’s probably crashing through the woods like an angry rhino. Nothing’ll stop her. But she’ll worry about you, huh?”
Iceweasel nodded. She didn’t want Gretyl to worry. But she also just wanted Gretyl there, a solidity to rest her head upon, touch of her fingers in Iceweasel’s hair. The rumble of her voice, heard through the pillow of her breasts. She didn’t want to go without Gretyl. She shook her head.
“I’ll wait for Gretyl,” she said.
“I hear you, buddy, but that’s not an option. Not a smart one. Come on, Iceweasel, you know the deal with shock. Warmth, rest, elevated feet. You’re covered in sweat and panting like a chihuahua.”
Iceweasel knew she was right, felt cold sweat on her face, but still—
“Gretyl.”
“Come on, girl, no one’s got time for this. There’s enough casualties out there. We don’t need another.” She looked around, didn’t see Gretyl, uttered a heartfelt “Shit.” She straightened up, waved at someone. “Hey! Come here, okay? Yes! Come here, will you?”
“You okay?” said a familiar voice. She looked at men’s legs in purplish tights, split-toed boots like martial-arts shoes. The toes were armored with beaded, overlapping layers of something moisture-shedding, like dragon scales.
“I’m okay, but she’s in shock. She won’t evac because she’s worried about her friend. I could probably drag her, but I should find her friend and let her know what’s happened, or she’ll go crazy.”
“Well, she always was loyal to her friends.” The person belonging to the legs squatted down and peered into her face.
“Hey there, Natty,” Etcetera said.
“Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza,” she said. She’d made a game out of memorizing it, their first weeks as walkaways, reveling in its extravagance. It came out in a singsong.
“That’s not your name,” Tam said.
“Call me Etcetera,” he said.
“And call me Iceweasel,” Iceweasel said. “Natty’s long gone.”
“And good riddance.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“Let’s go, Icy,” he said, and helped her to her feet. Her leg had gone to sleep, her injuries had stiffened. She leaned on him.
“Gretyl,” she said, over her shoulder, to Tam.
“I’ll tell her,” Tam said.
“Thank you.”
“Want to ride in my zeppelin?” Etcetera said.
“That thing is fucking insane,” she said.
“Saved your ass,” he said. He guided her to a stretcher and she let him wrap her in a blanket and strap her in. He buckled into a harness and grabbed one of the stretcher’s guy-lines and gave it a sharp tug and they rose into the air.
* * *
The cold wind on her face as they ascended snapped her into lucidity, but the ascent was slow and rocking, and it lulled her back into a doze that she barely broke when they brought her into the zepp’s belly and Etcetera transferred her to a spot on the floor of the gondola. She rocked her head lazily and saw that there were many others, including CC, lying motionless. He had an IV drip in his arm and sensors dotted over his burned body. She felt bile rise in her throat and turned her face to the other side in time to retch the sparse contents of her stomach.
Her feet were elevated, so the puke rolled over her face and into her hair. She’d squeezed her eyes shut when she vomited, and the lower one was now slicked with bile. Someone daubed at her with a towel, and she felt ashamed. The hands were sure, and she cracked her upper eye and confirmed it was Etcetera.
“We’ve missed you,” he said. “Seth’s been moping like crazy.”
She smiled, but it came out as a grimace. “I missed you, too,” she said, but in truth she hadn’t. The realization startled her through her shocky daze. Why hadn’t she missed them? It was getting clear of who she’d been and the last threads tying her to default and her father and her zotta-ness. Though she hadn’t made any secret of her background on campus, they hadn’t seen the nest she’d inhabited with her father, ridden in his armored car, experienced his mighty influence.
“Where did you get this insane gasbag?”
He looked around. “Dream come true, isn’t it? After the zepp bubble popped, there were a couple hundred bumblers that were more-or-less sky-worthy, rotting in hangars. Someone got the idea of throwing Communist parties in the hangars, and then there was a whole airworthy fleet. Aviation authorities are going crazy, a bunch have been grounded, but the ones that made it to walkaway seem safe for now. This one showed up at the B&B a couple weeks ago, craziest crew you ever met, walkaway freaks who lived through the bubble, same as me, and can’t believe that they’ve finally got a zepp. They call this one The First Days of a Better Nation.”
She groaned. Such a walkaway cliché—she could imagine the crew, studied air of walkaway purity. She found that hard to be around because it reminded her so much of herself, back in the days when she’d been the token foofie of her Communist party crew.
He had a damp cloth, and he wiped the puke best as he could. Gentle ministrations from a familiar hand were overwhelming in so many ways, a sad-happy-lonely-homecoming feeling like the touch of the mother she’d hardly known. “What if they send more drones?” she said.
He shrugged. “We’re just about out of countermeasures. Certain death?” He looked at her searchingly. “But not for long, right?” He looked away. “Is it real?”
“Uploading?” She coughed. Her mouth tasted sour, her throat burned. “Depends on what you mean by real. I have a friend who’s done it, you’ll meet her if we survive. She can explain better than me.”
“First days of a better nation,” he said, with oversaturated irony.
“Or a weirder one,” she said. She felt for his hand and he squeezed hers.
“We’ll be okay,” he said. “Weird or not, we’re clearly scaring the shit ou
t of your dad and his people, so we’re doing something right.”
“Fuck my dad. And his people.”
“Well, yeah.” There was a jolt and he nearly lost his footing. The whine of the impellers, felt through the decking, changed. “We’re going home.” He squeezed her hand. “Jiggity jig.”
[viii]
Gretyl found her in the onsen, sitting in the hottest pool with Limpopo, who had diagnosed her need for a lot of water. Gretyl was with Tam, who radiated body-shame and discomfort with nudity. Iceweasel realized how little thought she’d given to the special problems of being a woman with a penis, and how smugly she’d assumed that walkaways were so bohemian that it would all be simple.
She teetered on the precipice of self-doubt and her certainty that she was slumming and no one should take her seriously. The hot water felt claustrophobic and painful as her concentration slipped away and her stupid body wanted her to pay attention to it. Her face sheened with sweat.
She got out of the water and went to Gretyl. Her hair was scorched and one of her arms was covered in gauze dressing. As Iceweasel stood, her bad hip and shoulder came free of the water and the cool air made them throb with a suddenness that made her stumble. Gretyl caught one of her arms and Tam caught the other.
“Hi,” she said, weakly. Limpopo exhaled, closed her eyes, put her head back and sank in to her ears. Gretyl drew Iceweasel close, and when Tam moved away, she slung a big, muscular, freckled arm around her and brought her into the embrace.
Despite all the skin, there was something chaste about the onsen, or so Iceweasel told herself, as she remembered the kiss, the dry-humping she and Gretyl had done in the underground campus, and made herself pretend her stomach muscles weren’t jumping at the feeling of Gretyl’s breasts on hers. Then there were Tam’s breasts on her side, her face in the crook made by Gretyl and Iceweasel’s faces, her penis brushing against her thigh and making her stomach muscles jump again.