Distraction - Bruce Sterling [8]
“Could you temporarily relocate those barricades for us?” Fontenot asked gently.
“I’ll let you fellas in on something,” the man said. His screens were still churning away, but the three of them were all cozy now. They were swapping net-gossip, trading little confidences. You didn’t shoot someone when you knew that his dad was a movie star. “We’re almost done with this deployment anyhow.”
Oscar lifted his brows. “Really. That’s good news.”
“I’m just running a few battlespace awareness scans.… Y’know, the problem with infowar isn’t getting into the systems. It’s getting out of them without collateral damage. So if you’ll just be patient, we’ll be packing up and lifting off before you know it.”
The commander groaned in drunken nausea, and thrashed on his cot. The public relations officer hurried to his superior’s side, tenderly adjusting his rough blanket and inflatable pillow. He then returned, having snagged a bottle of the commander’s bourbon from beneath the cot. He absently decanted an inch or so into a paper cup, studying his nearest screen.
“You were saying?” Oscar prompted.
“Battlespace awareness. That’s the key to rapid deployment. We have surveillance drones over the highway, checking car licenses. We input the licenses into this database here, run credit scans and marketing profiles, pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss.…” The officer looked up. “So you might call this an alternative, decentralized, tax-base scheme.”
Oscar glanced at Fontenot. “Can they do that?”
“Sure, it’s doable,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was ex-Secret Service. The USSS had always been very up to speed on these issues.
The PR man laughed bitterly. “That’s what the Governor likes to call it.… Look, this is just a standard infowar operation, the stuff we used to do overseas all the time. Fly in, disrupt vital systems, low or zero casualties, achieve the mission objective. Then we just vanish, all gone, forget about it. Turn the page.”
“Right,” said Fontenot. “Just like Second Panama.”
“Hey,” the officer said proudly, “I was in Second Panama! That was classic netwar! We took down the local regime just by screwing with their bitstreams. No fatalities! Never a shot fired!”
“It’s really good when there are no fatalities.” Fontenot flexed his false leg with a squeak.
“Had to quit my TV news work after that, though. Blew my cover. Very long story really.” Their host slurped at his paper cup and looked extremely sad. “You guys need a bourbon?”
“You bet we do!” Oscar said. “Thanks a lot!” He accepted a paper cup brimming with yellow booze, and pretended to sip at it. Oscar never drank alcohol. He had seen it kill people in slow and terrible ways.
“When exactly do you plan to relocate?” Fontenot said, accepting his cup with a ready Eisenhower grin.
“Oh, nineteen hundred hours. Maybe. That’s what the commander had in mind this morning.”
“Your commander looks a bit tired,” Oscar said.
That remark made the PR man angry. He put down his bourbon and looked at Oscar with eyes like two shucked oysters. “Yeah. That’s right. My commander is tired. He broke his sworn oath of allegiance, and he’s robbing U.S. citizens, the people he swore to protect. That tends to tire you out.”
Oscar listened attentively.
“Y’know, the commander here was given no choice. No choice at all. It was pull this stunt, or watch his people starving in their barracks. There’s no funding now. There’s no fuel, no pay for the troops, no equipment, there is nothing. All because you silk-suit sons of bitches in Washington can’t get it together to pass a budget.”
“My man just got to Washington,” Oscar said. “We need a chance.”
“My man here is a decorated officer! He was in Panama Three, Iraq Two, he was in Rwanda! He’s no politician—he’s a goddamn national hero! Now the feds are cracking up, and the Governor’s gone crazy, but the commander, he’ll be the fall guy for this. When it’s all over,