Distraction - Bruce Sterling [3]
Oscar set his laptop aside and stood up to confront his entourage. “People, listen to me, here’s the deal! We have another little roadblock problem ahead.” Dismal groans. “Fontenot is on the situation for us. Jimmy, turn on the alarms.”
The driver pulled off the road and activated the bus’s inbuilt defenses. Oscar gazed briefly at the window. Actually, the campaign bus had no windows. Seen from outside, the bus was a solid shell. Its large internal “windows” were panel screen displays, hooked to external cameras that scoped out their surroundings with pitiless intensity. The Bambakias campaign bus habitually videotaped everything that it perceived. When pressed, the bus also recorded and cataloged everything that it saw, exporting the data by satellite relay to an archival safe house deep in the Rocky Mountains. Alcott Bambakias’s campaign bus had been designed and built to be that kind of vehicle.
At the moment, their bus was passively observing two tall green walls of murky pines, and a line of slumping fence posts with corroded barbed wire. They were parked on Interstate Highway 10, ten miles beyond the eldritch postindustrial settlement of Sulphur, Louisiana. Sulphur had attracted a lot of bemused attention from the krewe of staffers as their campaign bus flitted through town. In the curdled fog of winter, the Cajun town seemed to be one giant oil refinery, measled all over with tattered grass shacks and dented trailer homes.
Now the fog had lifted, and on the far side of Sulphur the passing traffic was light.
“I’m going out,” Oscar announced, “to assess the local situation.”
Donna, his image consultant, brought Oscar a dress shirt. Oscar accepted silk braces, his dress hat, and his Milanese trench coat.
As the stylist ministered to his shoes, Oscar gazed meditatively upon his krewe. Action and fresh air might improve their morale. “Who wants to do some face-time with the U.S. Air Force?”
Jimmy de Paulo leaped from the driver’s seat. “Hey, man, I’ll go!”
“Jimmy,” Oscar said gently, “you can’t. We need you to drive this bus.”
“Oh yeah,” said Jimmy, collapsing crestfallen back into his seat.
Moira Matarazzo sat up reluctantly in her bunk. “Is there some reason I should go?” This was Moira’s first extensive period off-camera, after months as the campaign’s media spokeswoman. The normally meticulous Moira now sported a ratted mess of hair, chapped lips, furry eyebrows, wrinkled cotton pajamas. The evil glitter under her champagne-puffed eyelids could have scared a water moccasin. “Because I will go if it’s required, but I don’t really see why I should,” Moira whined. “Roadblocks can be dangerous.”
“Then you should definitely go.” This was Bob Argow, the campaign’s systems administrator. Bob’s level tone made it icily clear that he was nearing the point of emotional detonation. Bob had been drinking steadily ever since the Boston victory celebration. He’d begun his drinking in joyous relief, and as the miles rolled on and the bottles methodically emptied, Bob had plunged into classic post-traumatic depression.
“I’ll go with you, Mr. Valparaiso,” Norman-the-Intern piped up. As usual, everyone ignored Norman.
The twelve staffers were still officially on salary, mopping up the last of Bambakias’s soft campaign money. Officially, they were all taking a richly deserved “vacation.” This was a typically generous gesture by Alcott Bambakias, but it was also a situation specifically arranged to gently part the campaign krewe from the vicinity of the new Senator-elect. Back in his ultramodern Cambridge HQ, the charismatic billionaire was busily assembling an entirely new krewe, the Washington staff that would help him to govern. After months of frenzied team labor and daunting personal sacrifice, the campaigners had been blown off with a check and a hearty handshake.
Oscar Valparaiso had been Bambakias’s chief