Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“It’s a big stinkin’ issue all right,” Fontenot agreed.

“This local Governor is a real character, isn’t he? A stunt like this… There must be better ways for a state politician to provoke the feds.”

“Green Huey is crazy. But he’s the people’s kind of crazy, these days. The State of Emergency, the budget crisis — it’s no joke down here. People really resent it.”

They stopped near the searing glare of the copter lights. An Air Force lieutenant was addressing a pair of day tripping Texan civilians through the open window of the couple’s car. The lieutenant was a young woman: she wore a padded blue flight suit, a body-armor vest, and an elaborate flight helmet. The helmet’s screen-crowded interior was busily ticking and flashing as it hung from her webbing belt.

The Texan man looked up at her cautiously, through the driver’s window. “It’s what?” he said.

“An Air Force bake sale, sir. Louisiana bake sale. We got your corn bread, your muffuleta bread, croissants, beignets… Maybe some chicory coffee? Ted, we got any of that chicory coffee left?”

“Just made us a fresh carafe,” Ted announced loudly, opening the steaming lid of his rickshaw. Ted was heavily armed.

“What do you think?” said the driver to his wife.

“Beignets always get powdered sugar over everything,” the Texan woman said indistinctly.

“How much for, uhm, four croissants and two coffees? With cream?”

The lieutenant muttered a canned spiel about “voluntary contributions.” The driver retrieved his wallet and silently passed over a debit card. The lieutenant swiftly slotted the card through a cellular reader, relieving the couple of a hefty sum. Then she passed the food through their window. “Y’all take care now,” she said, waving them on.

The couple drove away, accelerating rapidly once their car had cleared the line of fire. The lieutenant consulted a handheld readout, and waved through the next three cars, which all bore Louisiana plates. Then she pounced on another tourist.

Fontenot and Oscar edged past the blazing glare of the chopper and made their way toward the commandeered hospitality post. Chest-high tanglewire surrounded the building in a mesh of bright feather-weight razors. Sheets of foil and duct tape blacked the building’s windows. Military satellite antennas the size of monster birdbaths had been punched through the roof An armed guard stood at the door.

The guard stopped them. The kid’s military-police uniform was oddly rumpled — apparendy dug from the bottom of a mildewed duffel bag. The kid looked them over: a well-dressed politico accompanied by his krewe bodyguard. Certainly nothing unusual there. The young soldier scanned them with a detector wand, failing to notice Oscar’s all-plastic spraygun, and then addressed himself to Oscar. “ID, Sir?”

Oscar passed over a gleaming dossier chip embossed with a federal Senate seal.

Four minutes later, they were ushered inside the building. There were two dozen armed men and women inside the hospitality suite. The intruders had shoved the furniture against the walls, and staked out the doors and windows. Muffled thuds, scrapes, and crunches emanated from the ceiling, as if the attic were infested with giant, armed raccoons.

The original staffers from the Louisiana tourist office were still inside the building. The hospitality krewe were well-dressed middle-aged Southern ladies, with done hair and ribbons, and nice skirts and fiats. The ladies had not been arrested or formally detained, but they had been crowded together into a dismal corner of their foil-darkened office, and they looked understandably distressed.

The commanding Air Force officer was dead drunk. Oscar and Fontenot were greeted by the public relations officer. The PR man was also plastered.

The central office was crammed with portable military command-post gear, an overjammed closet full of stencils, khaki, and flickering screens. The place reeked of spilled whiskey; the commanding officer, still in full dress uniform including his spit-polished shoes, was sprawled on a khaki cot. His visored and braided hat half concealed his face.

The PR officer, a chunky, uniformed veteran with graying hair and seamed cheeks, was busy at a set of consoles. The pegboard counters trailed fat tangles of military fiber-optic cable.

“How may I help you gentlemen?” the PR officer said.

“I need to move a bus through,” said Oscar. “A campaign bus.”

The officer blinked, his eyelids rising at two different instants. His voice was steady, but he was very drunk. “Can’t you fellas just buy a little something from our nice little Air Force bake sale?”

“I’d like to oblige you there, but under the circumstances, it would look…” Oscar mulled it over. “Insensitive.”

The PR officer lightly tapped Oscar’s gleaming dossier card on the edge of his console bench. “Well, maybe you should think that over, mister. It’s a long way back to Boston.”

Fontenot spoke up. Fontenot was good-copping it, being very sane and reasonable. “If you just suspended your operations for half an hour or so, the traffic backlog would clear right up. Our vehicle would slip right through.”

“I suppose that’s an option,” the officer said. One of his screens stopped churning, and uttered a little triumphant burst of martial brass. The PR man examined the results. “Whoa… You’re the son of Logan Valparaiso!”

Oscar nodded, restraining a sigh. A good netsearch program was guaranteed to puncture your privacy, but you could never predict its angle of attack beforehand.

“I knew your dad!” the PR officer declared. “I interviewed him when he starred in the remake of El Mariachi .”

“You don’t say.” The computer had spewed up a bit of common ground for them. It was a cheap stunt, a party trick, but like a lot of psychological operations techniques, it worked pretty well. The three of them were no longer strangers.

“How is your ol’ dad these days?”

“Unfortunately, Logan Valparaiso died back in ’42. A heart attack.”

“That’s a shame.” The officer snapped his pudgy fmgers in regret. “He sure made some great action films.”

“Dad took a lower profile in his later life,” Oscar said. “He went into real estate.” They were both lying. The films, though hugely popular, had been very bad. The later real-estate deals had been money-laundering cover for his father’s Hollywood backers: йmigrй Colombian mafiosi.

“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.”