The sun set over the sea as we swung west with Freeport to our north. Not too close, in case the Secondaries had agents waiting there. We kept watch over the town as we hovered past, but nothing came out but a few small sailboats. And, we also saw no sign of Collective coming up behind us in a stolen hover.
As I watched the green and yellow glow of the horizon give way to the star-speckled black of night, I wished (stupidly, a node pointed out) that the team hover had a retractable roof. I had once read a pre-war essay about “light pollution” over the old, crowded super-cities caused by massive deployment of electric illumination, so bright that very few people in that urbanized world could see the stars. That struck me as incredibly sad. The night sky was like staring out from the top shelf of a tiny bookshelf over the vast, gilded library of the gods.
There was a constant whistle from the hull damage in the rear of the hover. That and an incessant pinging on Sidewinder’s minipad were the only sounds in the air as everyone—except the two driving the hover—prepped for sleep.
“Can you mute that?” Marina said, strapping her bags to the hooks above her bunk. “We all know it’s the Bahamas SecO and you’re ignoring them.”
Sidewinder glanced back with a look that said, How did you know that? But, after a seconds-long stare, he realized it was the only reasonable conclusion. He muted the minipad with an angry finger and, pointlessly, flipped it over on the dash.
“Go back there and stop that noise,” he said to Tran.
“Fuck, come on.” He stared at Sidewinder, whose eyes were locked on the black sea ahead. “I’ll have to go up top.”
“You know how to open the doors. And, you’re the tech op.”
“Come on,” Tran said, standing. He stomped over to the starboard door and slammed his hand against the lever.
“You’re up, Scuttle,” Sidewinder said, nodding at the empty co-pilot chair.
Why me? Marina was a better pilot. But, he was probably less afraid of me than her. Whatever, I’d be co-pilot. How hard could that be?
I took Tran’s seat. There was lingering body heat in the chair. Gross, my tactile node said.
Tran grabbed a toolbox and disappeared out the door. The noise from the spray ironically drowned out the whistle from the busted hull. Marina nodded at the family settling into their bunks and closed the padded metal accordion door to the common room. She stepped over to the starboard hatch, wiped spray from her face with an annoyed look, and slapped the lever. The door started cranking closed.
“Come on!” came Tran’s voice from outside.
Marina leaned over her minipad on the table, tapped her intercom app, and said: “Just ping us to be let back inside.”
“Fuck all of you,” Tran said, obviously into his collar mike.
Marina put her hands on the backs of the two pilot chairs.
“Collective won’t just give up the chase.”
“He can’t catch us in a PH,” Sidewinder said.
“He’ll steal a TH,” I said.
“None of them in Nassau are going to be armed like his,” Sidewinder said. “And, he can only fire one rifle. He might catch up, but he’ll be massively outgunned.”
“He won’t expect us to be going to Augusta without Highlighter,” Marina said. “He’ll think we were ordered north to protect Varta at—”
She glanced at me. She’s wondering if you’re cleared to know the loc, one of my tactical nodes said. If we’re cleared, I corrected. My nodes hated when they did that, lumped them all into the first person plural. And, to be fair, it did undermine the Practice that kept them nodular.
What Marina had said did tell me one thing, whether I was cleared to know or not: Varta had not yet been assassinated. Marina would be in on that datum.
“At the Burgaw black site,” she finished it.
My nodes went crazy at that. Burgaw? I could be heading home. I should be heading home. My cred was technically over, and I had failed it. Sure, I had new intel on the Secondaries, on Oldfield’s continued leadership role, on the fact that the Champions were more in the know than they let on. That the plot was critical enough to send a key assassin to silence Highlighter. But, this had all been wrapped up in a short message to Ben Gallus. And Highlighter was not retrieved. Failure with some mitigating factors. Zero-point-one success at best.
At least the family are still alive, a social node pointed out, and still cooperating. We had new allies. DiplO might be moved by that. Maybe not.
A spatial reasoning node tried to inject its puzzle into the debate to give the others something else to think about. That was uncharacteristically generous of it, and I suspected it had been talking behind my back with one of the social nodes that had been repurposed as an inter-node moderator. Maybe in revolt against my collective we. I had to concede that it was both fair and in defense of the Practice.
The spatial reasoning node said: Burgaw destination would mean straight north up the Gulf Stream; Augusta destination veers more west toward a coast-hugging approach. That was true. As Freeport and Grand Bahama island slipped by north of us, Sidewinder could turn sharp north toward Burgaw or continue west to the rural coast just beyond of the Cubano Accord’s northern reach.
If we were going to Burgaw, back home, Collective and any Secondaries he was in contact with could easily intercept us. As Marina said, that’s where they’d expect us to go. The path west was optimal. That quieted everyone down in my head. Home was a fatal option.
“She’s right,” I said. “Team hover or not, he’ll drive north in the wrong direction. He’ll be riding the Gulf Stream past Augusta long before we even get into the Savannah River.”
“And we’re confirmed for either loc,” Marina said, “contingent on our take—” She stood up straight. “On your take on the tactical situation.”
“Then, we’re good heading west,” Sidewinder said. “And we can just shut up and rest.”
Marina walked back to the table, hips swaying triumphantly behind Sidewinder’s back, and scooped up her minipad. The hull breach whirred through the accordion door as Tran clanged and buzzed fold-bond over it.
“As soon as Tran gets that fucking hole closed,” Sidewinder said. He kept the hover headed west past the end of Grand Bahama, straight across the Gulf Stream toward the coast of Florida between the Cubano and Georgia Accords. No man’s land with its cracker militias and their weird alligator cult.
∈•∋
“We’re cleared for black site Gordon,” said Marina from the table. That was just outside Augusta. I looked back. Marina was pursing her lips over her minipad. More data coming.
“Advise,” she read the order out loud, “overland route from Tybee Island due to hippo activity on the Savannah River.”
“Shit,” Sidewinder said. “We should just extinct those water pigs.”
“Water horses,” I blurted the correct etymology. He glared at me.
“You know they kill more people than people do?”
“I do know that,” I said. “You’re probably hundered about killing them off. I hear they’re thriving in Africa and South America anyway.”
“Fucking menace,” he said.
Tran pinged our comms apps.
“We have a problem.”
Sidewinder cocked his head. He flipped his minipad and tapped the comms app. “The whistle’s gone. What’s the problem?”
“The missiles weren’t the only thing Collective flung at us.”
Marina tapped her minipad. “What—”
“Open the door.”
Marina pushed out of the common area chair and shoved the hatch lever. The door cranked open and hover spray billowed into the common area. Tran’s arm flung the toolkit inside, nearly cracking Marina on the shin. A moment later, he swung his body around the door, landed on the ramp, and leaned on the lever.
Tran wiped spray from his face. “As I was coming back forward, I saw a magnetic pigeon on the roof.”
“Fuck!” Sidewinder hissed. The door clanged shut.
“I wrenched it free. It’s in the sea now.”
“Too late,” Marina said. She slammed her fist on the table. That was a waste of energy, a tactical node said. Shut up, I snapped. Defensive, a sexual node nudged. Fuck, I didn’t need that in my head. I had an assassin and his killer group on my trail.
“We headed west before it was removed. They know we’re not going to Burgaw,” I said out loud to my nodes and to the people in the hover.
“Yeah,” Tran said. “It looked like a tracker.”
The hover dash buzzed.
“Star occultation,” Sidewinder said. “Behind us. Solid, not a cloud.”
The hover dash buzzed again. Marina and Tran rushed forward to study the dash read-out. It confirmed there was something flying behind us.
“Hellshit,” Sidewinder spat. I’d never heard that one before.
Marina let out a breath of anxious air. “He stole a flight drone. How the fuck did he do that? Does Nassau even have those?”
“There’s one on our tail,” Sidewinder said. “So, yes. And we can’t outrun that.”
“We can’t outgun it either,” Tran said.
“We can try,” I said.
“Roger!” Marina shouted. “We got company!” She took your lead, the sexual node winked. Not now.
There was a thumping sound from behind the accordion door. Footsteps trailed back toward the armory, toward the rifles. Smart man.
Tran and Marina rushed back to the external doors and slammed the levers open.
“The Accord really needs to upgrade these team hovers with cannon,” I said, staring at the absence of weapon controls on the dash.
“Good God, Scuttle,” Sidewinder said, punching the hover forward at max accel. “Do you ever just stop thinking?”
“No,” I said. But, he had a point. Waste of time gaffing about tactical options we didn’t have. What could four people with rifles do to stop a flight drone? Specifically, before the team hover was in range of whatever arms the flight drone had. Even a neg-sitch drone from the Bahamas. Arel, there were no star solutions. Collective could wipe us without his thumbs getting tired.
The hover dash buzzed again. I stared into the screens, then out the windows. Across the black surface of the sea, an arc of spotlights had appeared in front of us in pairs. At least a dozen vehicles, small personal hovers and larger team hovers, announcing their presence in unison. The rear camera view showed the flight drone lighting up like a signal flare.
Roger slid open the accordion door with five rifles in his arms. That was ambitious, snarked a node.
“Thanks,” Marina sighed, “but it won’t be necessary.”
He leaned to peer out the port door at the approaching hovers.
“Yeah,” Sidewinder said, and punched the hover down. “We’re done.”
∈•∋
Here’s the truly fucked up thing. Everything ends. Let’s trace it backward.
My current cred ended when Collective sniped Highlighter on the streets of Nassau. My original plan to relax at home ended when my analysis of the Browns Island raid was unpacked by the SecO’s analysts. No, my integrity node insisted, when you decided to take the new cred to retrieve Highlighter.
Fair enough. And, before that, my coffee and omelet breakfast in Burgaw ended when Ben Gallus sent me to interrupt an abduction plot on Browns Island. You can’t have a reg life when you’re a cred op. You have to pay bills.
My reg life ended when my second assessment pinged me as Type II, which thrust me into the Practice that developed me as a nodular cred op. Before that, my passing as typpie ended soon after I failed my first assessment, when I started obsessively reading the books in the Waccamaw Library that had been salvaged from polluted pre-war cities. My abstract, strategic thinking came alive.
Those pre-war cities (and their libraries) ended when the old political order fell apart, and the industrial toxins concentrated in those cities started to drain into the environment, requiring a massive investment of automated cleaner bots to keep the world from choking to death.
The old political order fell apart as billions starved and billions murdered each other for food after the collapse of the global economy. Mass graves followed by neighborhoods and entire cities abandoned because they were nightmares of corpses and cannibalism and toxic waste.
And, the global economy fell apart because the global internet that enabled it collapsed under a massive malware assault driven by … by who knows what or whom.
What brought about that end? A collapse of civility, perhaps. Some argued that. A collapse of hope. A collapse of reason. Someone, some group of highly motivated coders, had given up on talking things out and just decided that the world should burn.
My world was burning as I considered the long chain of endings. Collective’s stolen flight drone settled onto the sea behind our halted team hover. It looked like a green manta ray with a beaver’s tail, blowers at three corners kicking up spray as the drone neared the water. Guns were extended all along its bulbous forward ridge like a row of spines.
We were not moving, but still hovering, rocking in the gentle waves of the Gulf Stream. The arc of hovers closing on us from the west were within a half-mile. Soon, we’d be having conversations. That was the wrong word. Negotiations was the wrong word. We would be ordered to do things in exchange for a dubious promise to limit our suffering. I had nothing but time to think as the hovers closed on us.
Who had launched the malware attack on the internet, the disruptive act that kicked off World War III? The Starving War.
One compelling argument I had read just before my second assessment quoted an author named Orwell (apparently quite popular before the war) who wrote an essay in which he noted that people in his own political movement did not love those on the bottom they claimed to champion so much as they hated those on top. Hate, resentment, and envy disguised as love.
The argument was that a pre-war faction who felt they were losing political outlets for their anger decided on a last-ditch assault against the banking system that kept those on top in power. And that assault spun out of control, scuttling everything that moved food and other resources around the world. It was a spasm of rage against the powers-that-be that inadvertently destroyed the economic structure that kept people alive.
That was as far as I could trace the sequence of ends that put me in the position of contemplating my own mortality as the Secondaries closed on the team hover. Before that ultimate end, before the collapse of the internet and the global economy, was only speculation. Nobody really knew.
There were theories, compelling theories, that the collapse of the world economy in the 21st century had previously played out on a regional scale in the 20th century, in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Central America. But, people ignored the evidence. They were intoxicated by anger. They hated the people on top more than they were concerned about the people on the bottom.
And yet, during the Starving War, the people on the bottom were the ones primarily filling the mass graves my grandparents had seen firsthand as children, bulldozer-buried dead in the barren fields of what is now the Carolina Reach of the Georgia Accord. Papaw Benny and Mamaw Rosa were vivid in their tales of the Starving War. They had survived because their parents had been relatively affluent govvies. The regs had suffered the most from the deprivations and tons of toxic waste spilling out of the old cities. It was the people on the top who survived to build new cities from towns at a comfortable distance from that nightmare of death.
As I sat in the co-pilot chair watching the Secondaries close on us, I did not enjoy my grandparents’ privilege of putting death at a comfortable distance. The spotlights of the seaborne hovers were on us, blinding through the forward glass. The Secondaries were on top, we were on the bottom.
∈•∋
What you do on your minipads is constantly backed up on hardened servers hidden throughout the Accord. At least, that was true of the minipads that cred ops like me and action group ops like Sidewinder, Tran, and Marina had. I would guess that regs who were wealthy enough to have intranet access had to pay for back-up.
My point is that Sidewinder, Tran, Marina, and I were all too happy to smash our minipads and toss them into the sea. To keep the Secondaries from extracting data from them. We wouldn’t be using them once the Secondaries took us anyway.
Just before Marina smashed hers, she was tapping at it.
“They’re jamming the sat feed,” Sidewinder groaned. “They’re not stupid.”
Sidewinder thinking someone else was stupid was a clue that something else was going on. I glanced at Marina’s screen. She had a weak signal to the local net through Freeport. Who was she messaging?
She pulled her pistol, slammed the butt into her minipad three times, and flung it out the door behind her. Into the sea.
“Dump your weapons out your starboard door,” came a bullhorned voice. “We expect at least ten rifles and fourteen pistols.”
That would about do it. The team hover armory had ten of each and the four ops had our own pistols. The Secondaries clearly knew a lot about GA operations.
Nobody even bothered to sigh or groan or roll their eyes. Roger and Tran trudged back to the armory as Marina and I dumped the weapons already in the common area, one by one so they could be counted. I took Sidewinder’s side-arm without making eye contact. Marina wiped hover spray from her face.
“Can you shut that down?” she said.
Sidewinder nodded, stepped over to the dash, and tapped the hover off. Its hum cycled down as it settled onto the sea.
“Turn the hover back on,” came the bullhorn.
“Fuck it all,” Sidewinder said. He tapped the dash and the hover hummed back to life.
Tran and Roger returned from the back and tossed the weapons, one by one, into the sea.
“Leave your doors open,” came the bullhorn, “and follow our lead to the coast.”
The hovers had closed the arc so that they and the flight drone formed a circle around us. Oddly, the drone’s guns whirred back into its hull before it rose into the starry sky. I guess Collective felt we were contained. But, even then, why not just keep guns on us? It took effort to retract them.
He’s mocking us, said a social node.
That made sense.
It suddenly occurred to me that having us throw the weapons out did not make sense. It was a dumb strategic move. Using the weapons against the Secondaries was a non-starter, given how outnumbered we were. Instead, they could have dropped a couple of ops on our hover and confiscated them. Weapons weren’t cheap.
Sidewinder and Tran were sitting at the dash, but the circle of hovers weren’t moving. Collective’s flight drone passed over us, low enough that the blast from its blowers pushed us down into the water. The drone’s spray poured through the open doors.
I told you he’s mocking us, the node said.
The flight drone stopped over one of the Secondary hovers with a jerk that told me the controls had been locked. Its spotlights spread over the surrounding sea like the arms of a spider. After a moment a goatsilk ladder unrolled from the bottom of the flight drone and slapped against the roof of the hover below.
A rear door of the PH opened and two men crawled out onto the hood.
“Those,” Marina said, “are new friends for us.”
“Too bad we don’t have any guns left for them,” Roger said. I smiled at him for the levity and the insight. He probably also thought they should’ve confiscated the weapons. He was keeping his cool. I glanced at Agla and Loliola. They were uncharacteristically calm. My social nodes told me they were not in shock. Sidewinder, on the other hands, was twitching with every movement. What was up with that?
Collective didn’t wait for the two men to climb inside. The flight drone slipped across the black water toward us, men dangling underneath. That might win us some sympathy, a social node said. Not hundered, another said.
Marina was leaning out of the starboard door, watching the drone approach.
“I know those two ops,” she said. “Club and Zochy.”
“I hope those are code-names,” Tran said.
“Nope,” Marina said. “Just short for even dumber sounding names.”
The one hanging from the bottom of the ladder was a short, skinny white guy with a dandelion fluff of blond hair. Above him was a tall, top-heavy black guy with a shaved head.
“For the sake of remembering names,” I said, “please tell me Club is the guy on top.”
Marina laughed. “You guessed it.”
The drone settled over us and boots clomped on our roof. Marina, Roger, and I sat at the table as the drone’s blowers sent sea water into the common area. Agla and Loliola stood near the accordion door out of the spray.
Club and Zochy swung into the common area. Zochy leaned on the door lever. Club stomped across the common area to close the other door. Neither of them bothered pulling their side-arms. Confident.
Agla and Loliola meekly took chairs at the common table as the doors clanked shut. We all had our hands on the wet surface of the table. Except Sidewinder and Tran, whose hands were on the hover controls.
“Just yinz sit tight,” Zochy said.
“Get the hover moving,” Club said.
“We were told to follow them,” Sidewinder nodded out the window. “They’re not—”
The Secondary hovers turned on the waters, spotlights spinning in the dark.
“Get moving,” Club said.
“Yes, sir.” Sidewinder pushed the hover wheel and we were on our way.
∈•∋
After a brief inspection of the bunks, Club and Zochy let some of us take a nap. Roger, Loliola, and Tran took them up on that. Marina took Tran’s seat at the dash.
“Food?” Club said as he took Roger’s seat at the common table.
“There’s leftover griddle in the fridge,” Agla said.
Club nodded Zochy toward the kitchen corner.
“Griddle,” Club chuckled. “We call it breadless in the Meg. Got cheese in it?”
“No,” Agla said. “Just onions.”
“Griddle, then,” Club said.
Zochy set a stack of plates and forks on the table, followed by a dish of leftover meat and onions.
“How deep are you?” Marina said, looking back from the co-pilot chair at Club.
He took a plate and a fork.
“Deep enough to be here watching you.”
The stack of plates was pulled apart as Zochy set four glasses and a bottle of water on the table.
“You.” Club was looking at me. My nodes went into a frenzy trying to predict his next words. Wait, I told them.
“You a cred op, right? What you doing here with these ackies?” He nodded over his shoulder at Marina and Sidewinder. Lumping those two together was beyond an error.
“Same gov,” I said. “If you’re deep enough you can figure it out.”
Club laughed and forked griddle into his mouth. Zochy, for his part, was just silently eating. My social nodes couldn’t hunder whether that meant he was irrelevant or the more dangerous of the two.
“Take the drive,” Sidewinder said to Marina. “I have to piss.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with an obedient air. That was odd, a social node spoke up. Another node saw that Club glanced at the exchange. He looked like he was taking notes. Marina’s earlier question about how deep Club and Zochy were had pinged her as an upstart. Maybe she was playing to undermine that by being uncharacteristically subservient to Sidewinder. She was scheming?
Sidewinder stood and walked to the back. Club nodded Vochy to follow him. Vochy’s irrelevant, a node said. I concurred.
That just left Club, who was scraping the last forkful of griddle from his plate. He was a fast eater. Alpha behavior. He glanced down the bunk corridor, looking for Vochy to come back with Sidewinder and clean up the table.
I decided to give Marina some more room to maneuver. I’d be the upstart.
“You deep enough to know what our ultimatum is?”
Club took a sip of water. He looked out the forward glass at the line of Secondary hovers leading us toward Florida.
“Oldfield wants to know about his GA asset.”
“Varta Appletree,” I said, nodding. “We’re not that deep.”
He chuckled at that.
“Uh-huh.” He drained the glass of water and set it heavily on the table. “If the GA thought she was in danger, you’d be heading north.”
Sidewinder’s head half-turned at that. Club didn’t catch it, but the nodes watching my peripheral vision for threats did. The tactical nodes processed the exchange.
First, Club had inadvertently revealed that the Secondaries interpreted our westward heading as a sign of something it wasn’t necessarily. Augusta had preliminarily confirmed us for either course. The GA had other action groups. One of them could protect Varta. Yet, Club thought we were heading west because Varta was safe.
A social node announced, They could only assume that you told Augusta about Highlighter’s death. Right. That alone wouldn’t tell them anything about Varta’s safety. In fact, it would lead to the conclusion that she was in danger. Unless the Secondaries had extra data.
Club’s half-informed assumption that we’d kept west primarily because Varta was safe meant that he knew the Secondaries weren’t close on her trail. He’d fucked up. They didn’t know where she was.
Typpies rarely understand that they are constantly under interrogation by nodulars. I’d gotten more information out of Club without effort than an Augusta analyst could get after a half-hour of torture.
What about Sidewinder? My nodes decided that there was no way he had immediately processed his way to the same conclusion that had taken my nodes several seconds. Not unless he was deep in the same information Club was. That set off a lot of suspicions. My nodes were going berserk.
How had Collective known to go to Nassau? Had he been watching the raid site for Highlighter’s hover? If so, how had no one seen him? If not, who had told him? How had he known Highlighter, or any of the Champions, had survived? None of the Secondaries at Browns Island had been alive to tell anyone.
Futter, the linguistic node said. Not funny.
Why had Sidewinder wasted his time talking to wharf officers and the Bahamas SecO? Was he really that naïve or was he stalling for time? Had he indulged Marina in her side quest believing it would go nowhere?
There’s a mole on the team, a particularly paranoid social node said, and it’s Sidewinder.
Club grudgingly started clearing the table. He glared at me while stacking the plates. Let him fume at my inaction. I was Marina’s cover, the new upstart.
Are we reading too much into this? I asked my nodes. I was careful to use the first person plural. I felt shuffling under the covers. They were debating.
Collective almost certainly had no way of knowing where Highlighter was going unless there were a mole, a tactical node said. Another node spoke up: It’s likely Sidewinder, given his reaction, but it could be Tran or Marina.
Or Ben Gallus, said the particularly paranoid social node. That was highly unlikely.
I looked at Agla. She was studying me. Clearly my face had gone blank as my nodes and I were debating. I smiled at her.
“That griddle was good,” I said, “even cold.”
“Thank you,” she said. She was calm. She’d settled into the sitch admirably.
I nodded at the remaining kitchenware on the table. She nodded back and we set to helping Club clean up.
∈•∋
We approached a gap between barrier islands and the arc of Secondary hovers ahead of us folded into a chevron to pass through the inlet. Sidewinder pulled back our hover to keep from piling up. The flight drone came up close on our stern, its lights shining over us in the forward glass, glaring off the black sea and glittering in our spray.
We moved between two wide barrier islands through a wide inlet. There were no lights ashore. The Cubano Accord ended at Pompano, twenty miles to the south. The Georgia Accord started near St. Augustine, two hundred miles to the north. This was no man’s land.
The chevron of Secondaries hovers had folded into a twin column turning north up the sound. The water calmed and the ride was much smoother. The dishes were clean and put away, so I walked from the kitchen corner to the dash to stand behind Marina’s corner.
“This is off,” she said. “It’s too dark and quiet.”
“It’s no man’s land,” Sidewinder scoffed.
“Right, right,” she said. Again with the obsequiousness. I resisted the urge to turn and gauge Club’s reaction. Instead, I forced myself to stare out the forward windows into the moonlit sound, black shores sliding by on either side.
There was a sudden flash of lights from the inland shore of the sound. Maybe a dozen hovers. I heard Club stomping forward to stare out the glass. Then, two more sets of boots. Vochy and Sidewinder.
The rear camera view lit up with hovers on either side of an island in the sound behind us. The air shivered as a chorus of bullhorns blared an alligator’s growl into the night sky. I could only hope those were recordings.
“Fucking militia,” Club said.
“Two dozen, maybe three,” Marina said. She sat up straight suddenly. “Not enough to be a threat to us. They’re just Florida crackers.”
My nodes processed it. She’d slipped into her tactical skillset for a moment, then caught herself. She was absolutely playing Club. The paranoid node spoke up: Or playing up to him. She said “us.” She could be the mole.
“How did they know?” Vochy said. Maybe they saw you hovering out? a tactical node said.
“Wake the other op,” Club said.
He wanted Tran awake. For what? We didn’t have enough weapons, if the militia decided to engage. Unless Club and Vochy had side-arms hidden under their clothes.
Is Tran the mole? said the paranoid node.
As the Secondaries column hovered north up the sound, the militia clusters around the island behind us closed ranks with the line of lights along the shore. They were gathering.
In the rear view, we could see the flight drone pulling back, turning to face the hovers gathering along the shore. There was a staccato rapping as Collective fired all guns into the water about 20 meters from the militia line. A shot across their bow. After a moment, the militia hovers turned south, lights spinning in the darkness. The flight drone rotated north to catch up with the convoy.
Confrontation avoided.
“They know something’s up,” Club said. “They’ll be back in greater numbers.”
“We need to get to the stronghold,” Vochy said. “Let Oldfield sort it out.”
Sidewinder and Marina settled into their chairs and the rest of us settled around the common table. Agla was still sitting there, face aloof. We shared a look, and I met her strength with my forced optimism, but my nodes were in complete disarray. They couldn’t even hide their debates under the covers.
If the Secondaries didn’t feel the cracker militias were a threat, Collective wouldn’t have bothered scaring them off. They were a threat, and they could return. Club believed they would return.
The Secondaries had a stronghold in the militias’ no man’s land, something that could be inferred from their massive presence in the Gulf Stream. Vochy had revealed—inadvertently? foolishly? intentionally?—that Oldfield would be there. Had he been there all along or had he come after the Browns Island raid went badly? Neither of those possibilities were strategically productive.
Was Vochy closer to Oldfield than Club? By mentioning Oldfield’s presence, had he asserted a social dominance in defiance of Club’s temperamental alpha dominance? Which of them was truly more deep, more dangerous?
Was there a mole on the team? If so, who was it? Sidewinder had reacted to Club’s insider knowledge. Marina might be courting Club’s deference. And yet, Club had called for Tran’s help against the militia.
At least, statistically, Ben Gallus was off the hook. Maybe her analysts were not. How deep were the Secondaries’ agents in the Accord? Were there Vartas nestled away in Augusta already?
I was in a dark place, more questions than answers. More chaos than order. More darkness than light. My nodes hated that. I hated it.
The sound ahead of us was a play of hover glow and black water, impossibly darker shores, and star-speckled black sky. The convoy itself, hovers ahead of us and flight drone behind us, was a visible threat in a world of shadows filled with invisible threats. Only the stars and moon were certain.