It wasn’t just Mr.Gonzales. Despite the gifts, a pall had fallen over the ranch. Miguel Mustache was awake but in pain, so he was being kept drugged up. His grandmother hadn’t left his side. Neither had Miguel 1.
I’d visited him for only a few minutes. It was hard to look at his face, and the smell of burned skin—which I hadn’t even noticed last night—made me ill to my stomach. Rosita had come with me and held my hand while we visited. She didnothave her ever-present camera out when we did.
Even if everything else turned out okay, Miguel would forever have scars. None of this was my fault, yet I somehow felt as if it was.
The four fabricators and each of the guns contained a switch that would allow them to be shut down remotely. With the help of Roger and Harriet—who seemed to have a surprising affinity for electronics—we were able to disable the receiver on the rifles, meaning that the kill signal would no longer work. However, Roger warned, there appeared to be a timer built into the board that would cause the guns to stop working no matter what we did after ninety hours, meaning the guns would basically become useless onceOperation Bounce Housewas done.
The fabricators likely had something similar built deep inside, but we didn’t have the time to tear them apart to go searching for them. We did pull them apart enough to make certain there were no explosives or anything like that within. Roger suspected there would be something like a hidden listening device in each of the units, so the first thing he did once we got them all set up was build for the fabricators a proper Faraday cage, which would keep any remote signals, passive or active, that would cause the units to work strangely from reaching them. And it would keep them from communicating with the satellites over our heads.
We could have used the fabricators to build another fabricator that didn’t have any limitations, but we simply didn’t have the time.
“We would have been better off hiding,” Mr.Gonzales said after a minute of watching.
“Maybe,” I said. “But most of the people here wouldn’t have run or been able to. If we hadn’t stopped those RMI soldiers last night, they would’ve come right into our camp and dragged all of the mechs off with them. And we’d all be dead right now.”
“They’ll come tonight,” Mr.Gonzales said.
A few hours back, we’d gotten word that ten deployment units had dropped in the area just north of Burnt Ends. There was a line of villages there along the Pantano and the train line all the way up the hills. It would be up to sixty mechs. Several of our honeybees and UAVs were already nearby keeping an eye on them, making certain they weren’t turning in our direction.
I exchanged a glance with Sam. “Hopefully they’ll stay away,” I said.
“They won’t. They’ll come tonight,” Mr.Gonzales repeated.
—
“Do you believe this?” Lulucalled from her chair. There were several of us in her room watching the news program on herscreen. We’d been called in at Roger’s insistence. I looked around, and none of the older people were in here, thank goodness.
The program showed aerial footage of Fat Landing. The camera swept over the planet’s largest city, revealing kilometers and kilometers of burning destruction. The caption read, “Terrorists Take New Sonoran Capital City. Citizen Soldiers Move to Defend the Populace.”
The scene changed to a man in the middle of the street screaming. He held one of the newer pulse rifles, and he used it to take out the knee of a colorfully painted Drop Dragoon scout. A Heavy turned the corner of the street behind the man and fired, taking out both the man and the large five-story building beyond him.
“They’re calling it the Battle of Fat Landing,” the faceless newscaster said as more images of flattened buildings appeared. “Mere hours after Apex Command discovered that the leaders of the RMI terrorist group had fled to the New Sonoran capital city of Fat Landing, several terrorist attacks rocked the city. These attacks included multiple explosions in the refugee camps and the bombing of a school housing hundreds of children.”
“Children?” Lulu asked as the newscaster continued.
“No word yet on casualties. Up until this point, Fat Landing has been considered a ‘safe zone’ and off limits to the planetwide hostilities. Meanwhile Persimmon Intergalactic, a human rights activist group, is blaming the widespread humanitarian crisis on Apex Industries, the company behind theOperation Bounce Housegame, claiming there is no terrorist activity at all on New Sonora and that the attacks are an ‘act of senseless genocide.’ A spokesman for Apex Industries denied the allegations and suggested that Persimmon was in league with the RMI. Persimmon previously sued to stop the game from ever getting released, but that lawsuit was dismissed.”
The scene changed to show a wall with spray paint on it. It read, “Alliance with Earth = Death.” Then the scene changed to show the familiar shot of the smoldering school here in Burnt Ends, implyingthat this was still Fat Landing. When we’d seen it on the Cannon Fodder stream earlier, they’d stripped the school’s sign away and changed the skin of the building to make it look more industrial. But this shot was almost exactly how the school really was, though they added some playground equipment to the field beyond it that wasn’t really there.
They were saying that this school had been filled with children and that it had been blown up by the RMI.
“What the shit?” Sam exclaimed as both Rosita and Lulu both called out in protest. They were showing somethingtheyhad done before the fighting had even started.
This was followed by a quick, blurred shot of all the dead people piled up on the street. It was the shot Lulu had taken with her bracelet.
“I guess they know we have an internet connection,” I grumbled.
“They know somebody does, probably not how yet,” Lulu said.
The newscaster continued. “Still, the sheer amount of destruction does not bode well for Apex’s bid to expand the controversialOperation Bounce Houseprogram, despite the overwhelming support the game has received from the public. A representative from Apex has been called to testify before a Republic hearing next week to answer the allegations.”
“Next week?” Lulu retorted. “It’ll all be over next week.”
“Lulu, have you tried messaging these Persimmon people?” I asked.
“I did yesterday. They didn’t respond. I’ll try again.”
Sam was still staring at the screen, which had moved on to a different story. “They blew their wad too early,” he said. My friend’s voice had taken on a tired tone I hadn’t ever heard.
