Distraction - Bruce Sterling [144]
Sensing weakness, Oscar pounced. “General, I’m not asking you to attack the Regulators. I’m only asking you to do what the Regulators themselves have done, except for much better motives, and under much better circumstances.”
General Burningboy arranged his chopped powder into straight lines, and dumped them, one by one, into a small jar of yellow grease. He stirred the grease with his forefinger, and rubbed it carefully behind his ears.
Then he waited, blinking. “Okay,” he said at last. “I’m putting my personal honor on the line here, on the say-so of total strangers, but what the hell. They call me ‘General’ because of my many hard-won years of cumulative trust ratings, but the cares of office hang kinda heavy on my hands right now, quite frankly. I might as well destroy everything I’ve built in one fell swoop. So, I’m gonna do you three rich creep palookas a very, very big favor. I’m going to loan you five platoons.”
“Fifty Moderator toughs?” Kevin said eagerly.
“Yep. Five platoons, fifty people. Of course, I’m not sayin’ our troops can hold that lab against a federal counterassault, but there’s no question they can take it.”
“Do these men have the discipline that it takes to maintain civil order in that facility?” Oscar said.
“They’re not men, pal. They’re teenage girls. We used to send in our young men when we wanted to get tough, but hey, young men are extremely tough guys. Young men kill people. We’re a well-established alternative society, we can’t afford to be perceived as murdering marauders. These girls keep a cooler head about urban sabotage. Plus, underage women tend to get a much lighter criminal sentencing when they get caught.”
“I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, General, but I’m not sure you grasp the seriousness of our situation.”
“No,” Greta said. “Teenage girls are perfect.”
“Then I reckon I’ll be introducing you to some of our chaperone field commanders. And you can talk about tactics and armament.”
Oscar rode back to Buna in a phony church bus, crammed with three platoons of Moderator nomad soldiers. He might have ridden with Kevin, but he was anxious to study the troops.
It was almost impossible to look at girls between fourteen and seventeen and envision them as a paramilitary task force that could physically defeat police. But in a society infested with surveillance, militias had to take strange forms. These girls were almost invisible because they were so improbable.
The girls were very fit and quiet, with the posture of gymnasts, and they traveled in packs. Their platoons were split into operational groups of five, coordinated by elderly women. These little-old-lady platoon sergeants looked about as harmless and inoffensive as it was possible for human beings to look.
They all looked harmless because they dressed the part, deliberately. The nomad crones had given up their usual eldritch leather-and-plastic road gear. They now wore little hats, orthopedic shoes, and badly fitting floral prints. The young soldiers painstakingly obscured their tattoos with skin-colored sticks of wax. They had styled and combed their hair. They wore bright, up-tempo jackets and patterned leggings, presumably shoplifted from malls in some gated community. The Moderator army resembled a girl’s hockey team on a hunt for chocolate milk shakes.
Once the buses and their soldiery had successfully made it through the eastern airlock gate, the assault on the Collaboratory was a foregone conclusion. Oscar watched in numb astonishment as the first platoon ambushed and destroyed a police car.
Two cops in a car were guarding one of the airlocks into the Hot Zone, where Greta’s Strike Committee was sullenly awaiting eviction. Without warning, the youngest of the five girls clapped her hands to the sides of her head, and emitted an ear-shattering scream. The police, galvanized with surprise,