Bruce Sterling - Distraction

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, deliber-ately. 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 ob-scured their tattoos with skin-colored sticks of wax. They had styled and combed their hair. They wore bright, up-tempo jackets and pat-terned leggings, presumably shoplifted from malls in some gated com-munity. 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 po-lice, galvanized with surprise, left their car at once and rushed over to give the girl aid. They fell into an invisible rat’s nest of tripwires, which lashed their booted legs together with a stink of plastic. The moment they hit the ground, two other girls coolly shot them with sprayguns, pasting them firmly to the earth.

A second platoon of girls united and turned the tiny police truck onto its roof, and web-shot its video monitors and instrument panels.

At his own insistence, Kevin personally led the assault on the police station. Kevin’s contribution consisted of fast-talking with the female desk sergeant as thirty young women walked into the building, chatting and giggling. Smiling cops who trustingly emerged to find out what was going on were webbed at point-blank range. Gagged, blinded, and unable to breathe, they were easy prey for trained squads who seized their wrists, kicked their ankles, and knocked them to the floor with stunning force. They were then swiftly cuffed.

The Moderators had seized a federal facility in forty minutes flat.

A force of fifty girls was overkill. By six-thirty the coup was a fait accompli.

Still, there had been one tactical misstep. The lab’s security di-rector was not at his work, and not at his home, where a platoon had been sent to arrest him. There was no one at home but his greatly surprised wife and two children.

It turned out that the security chief was in a beer bar with his mistress, drunk. Teenage girls couldn’t enter a bar without attracting attention. They tried luring him out; but, confused by bad lighting, they attacked and tackled the wrong man. The chief escaped appre-hension.

Two hours later the chief was rediscovered, sealed into an im-promptu riot vehicle in the basement of the Occupational Safety building. He was frantically brandishing a cellphone and a combat shotgun.

Oscar went in to negotiate with him.

Oscar stood before the rubber bumper of the squat decontamina-tion vehicle. He waved cheerfully through the armored window, showing his empty hands, and called the police chief on one of the Collaboratory’s standard phones.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the chief demanded. His name, Oscar recalled flawlessly, was Mitchell S. Karnes.

“Sorry, Chief Karnes, it was an emergency. The situation’s un-der control now. No one is going to be hurt.”

“I’m the one who handles emergencies,” said the chief.

“You and your men were the emergency. Since Director Pen-ninger was abducted yesterday, I’m afraid you and your team have forfeited her trust. However, the lab is now back in the hands of its properly constituted authorities. So you and your staff will be relieved of duty and placed under detention until we can restore the situation to normalcy.”

“What on earth are you talking about? You can’t fire me. You don’t have the authority.”

“Well, Chief, I’m very aware of that. But that doesn’t change the facts of our situation. Just look at us. I’m standing out here, trying to be reasonable, while you’re holed up in an armored vehicle with a shotgun, all by yourself. We’re both adults, let’s be sensible men here. The crisis is over. Put the gun down and come on out.”

Karnes blinked. He’d been drinking heavily earlier in the day, and the full gravity of his situation hadn’t entirely registered on him. “Look, what you’re saying is completely crazy. A labor strike is one thing. Computer viruses are one thing. Netwar is one thing, even. But this is an armed coup. You can’t get away with attacking police of-ficers. You’ll be arrested. Everybody you know will get arrested.”

“Mitch, I’m with you on this issue. In fact, I’m way ahead of you. I stand ready to surrender myself to the properly constituted authorities, just as soon as we can figure out who they are. They’ll show up sooner or later; this will all shake out in the long run. But in the meantime, Mitch, act normal, okay? All your colleagues are down in detention. We’ve got the crisis handled now. This is doable. We’re having the place catered tonight, there’s doughnuts, coffee, and free beer. We’re playing pinochle together and swapping war stories. We’re planning to set up conjugal visits.”

“Oscar, you can’t arrest me. It’s against the law.”

“Mitch, just relax. You play ball with Dr. Penninger, probably we can work something out! Sure, I guess you can stand on principle, if you want to get all stiff-necked about it. But if you sit in that truck with a loaded shotgun all night, what on earth will that get you? It’s not going to change a thing. It’s over. Come on out.”

Karnes left the truck. Oscar produced a pair of handcuffs, looked at the plastic straps, shrugged, put them back in his pocket. “We really don’t need this, do we? We’re grown-ups. Let’s just go.”

Karnes fell into step with him. They left the basement, and walked out together beneath the dome. There were winter stars be-yond the glass. “I never liked you,” Karnes said. “I never trusted you. But somehow, you always seem like such a reasonable guy.”

“I am a reasonable guy.” Oscar clapped the policeman on the back of his flak jacket. “I know things seem a little disordered now, Chief: but I still believe in the law. I just have to find out where the order is.”

After seeing the former police chief safely incarcerated, Oscar con-ferred with Kevin and Greta in the commandeered police station. The nomad girls had changed from their dainty infiltration gear into cloth-ing much more their style: webbing belts, batons, and cut-down com-bat fatigues. “So, did you get our internal publicity statemnt released?”

“Of course,” Kevin said. “I called up every phone in the lab at once, and Greta went on live. Your statement was a good pitch, Oscar. It sounded really…” He paused. “Soothing.”

“Soothing is good. We’ll have new posters up by morning, de-claring the Strike over. People need these symbolic breathers. ‘The Strike Is Over.’ A declaration like that takes a lot of the heat off” All enthusiasm, Kevin pitched from the chief’s leather chair and crawled on his hands and knees to a floor-level cabinet. It was crammed with telecom equipment, a dust-clotted forest of colored fiber optics. “Really neat old phone system here! It’s riddled with taps, but it’s one of a kind; it has a zillion cool old-fashioned features that nobody ever used.”