I looked at the video monitor to the side of the platform, and it showed both the yard below the stage and the top of the wall, facing north. The brave volunteers at the gunner and missile stations stood at their posts along the large, wide wall. They, too, appeared to have cinnamon rolls. Below, the mortar teams in the yard also had them.
A small crowd had formed in the yard around the mortar teams, all craning their necks to look up at the stage. They couldn’t see anything from there. Not yet. We’d asked them not to stay outside if they weren’t fighting, but they had come to watch us play our show. Of all of us, the only ones with a living grandparent were the Serrano twins, and their grandmother stood down there, proud. She had a Rhythm Mafia shirt on, and it was hysterically ridiculous on her.
Rosita’s cousin and nieces were not down there. They were down below, or they had already been evacuated to the new hidden bunker at the end of the escape tunnel. We had a tight schedule for the hidden retreat of the noncombatants, and Roger was making certain it went off as smoothly as possible. Those who couldn’t walk well had already been evacuated. The rest would start moving off in organized groups.
I picked my cinnamon roll, and I felt the warmth in my hand. It was fully dark outside. Above, I knew dozens and dozens of lights now streamed across the sky as the drop ships came. But I ignored it all for just a moment. I cupped my hands around the warm roll, and I thought of that day we’d knocked on the front door of the Gonzales house and then run. And she’d come out anyway, all smiles. Mrs.Gonzales, one of the kindest women I’d ever known. I pulled the warm roll to me, getting the melted sugar and goo everywhere, and I took a slow, deliberate sniff. I closed my eyes, and I bit into it.
Roger’s voice crackled in my ear, prematurely pulling me from the dream. “I am giving priority to the ones with the capabilities of the Snipers and the Heavies, but it is difficult to triage the mostdangerous mechs. With the user-made designs, I am unable to analyze their possible effectiveness until I see them. I fear there will be some enemies that will catch us by surprise. Oliver, you are in the second deployment, T-minus fifteen minutes.”
“Just do your best,” I said. “Still no sign of your body?”
“No, not since the RMI soldiers grabbed it. My original body would be attempting to breach the Faraday cage if able, but since I have not yet done so, I suspect I am incapacitated. If I was brought to the ship, it is likely I have been disassembled already.”
As the drop ships continued to fall, pulse blasts started to rise into the air from all the hidden pockets of RMI soldiers mostly spread out to the north of the base. Their goal would be to delay the invaders a little before they got to us so the “customers” all felt as if they were getting their money’s worth. I suspected that the pulse blasts that were filling the night sky were nothing but show to give the falling mechs a sense of danger as they dropped onto the surface. Apex wouldn’t want to risk their actual drop ships with real blasts.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be ready. Talk soon.”
Roger was still controlling the defense via his scout units. One of them—one of the new, black-painted ones—walked up and stopped by my drum kit. It just sat there, waiting.
All around me, my friends continued to eat their cinnamon rolls.
The next two hours would decide the fate of New Sonora, possibly the fate of all humanity, but the only people who knew that were me and Lulu. And Roger, of course.
But for the next two minutes, it was all about this cinnamon roll made with love by a woman who’d given everything she’d ever had.
“This is fucking delicious,” Tito said after a minute.
Chapter 43
For the final assault, we had multiple plates spinning at once.
There was no way we’d be able to hold off more than seven thousand mechs, but there were some things we could do to delay the inevitable. And that was all we needed. A delay. We had plans in place here, and we had plans in place there, on Earth.
My bracelet buzzed. Ten minutes.
“It looks like they’ll be mostly hitting the farm from the north,” I said over the band. It seemed none of the invaders wanted to waste time getting in position to flank. They were all getting dropped in the fields just north of the Gonzales farm, and they were now tearing their way toward us, clambering over one another to get here first. They were supposed to wait for the second and third drops so the army could surge in a single wave, but they weren’t waiting.
Unlike on the previous night, they were no longer organized.
Still, the remaining UAVs caught sight of a few Snipers veering off to try to make it to the hills behind the stronghold, which gave us a perfect excuse to start firing missiles south, which we did now. The missiles streaked off, some of them hitting the burn barrels we’d placed earlier in the day to spread thick smoke throughout the hills. The barrels would burn for hours, obscuring the area further fromthe satellites. One by one, the last of the smudge barrels we’d seeded in the fields outside the farm were catching fire, surrounding the farm in even more smoke, all except in a tight cone to the north.
We hoped to funnel the enemies into this area, the kill zone.
Roger spoke in my ear. “I have targets in each of the 762 Republic districts, plus ten on the moon. I gave priority to apartment buildings containing multiple players and secondary priority to mechs I deem especially powerful. I am now routing the phone calls to the local authorities.”
At this moment all across Earth, individual police stations were getting panicked telephone calls and messages. In some cases, some police stations were receiving multiple calls about the same incident. Each of the calls was saying a variant of the same thing:There is a man, or a woman, with a gun, and they just shot someone. They claim they will shoot any police officers who come near them.The callers knew the name and address of the shooter, and if necessary, they would point to recent online postings where these posters threatened authorities. And if Roger felt the emergency dispatcher doubted the story, he would embellish it with background shooting noises and screaming.
Apparently in the old days on Earth, they used to call this swatting. More than once, it had resulted in someone getting shot for real. There were supposedly protections in place to keep such things from happening again, but they were woefully inadequate, especially for Roger.
And this was just the beginning. Roger was very good at multitasking, especially now that he’d propagated to multiple servers across the Earth net. All of his instances were working in concert, like a fleet of honeybees cultivating a field.
People who didn’t really exist were calling, texting, and sending video mail to the boyfriends and girlfriends and spouses of players, showing AI-generated video evidence of their partners cheating. Schools were getting bomb threats. Jobs were calling, telling playersthey needed to come in or telling them that they had been reported for fraud and were being fired.
Children were calling their parents, begging for help because they were in trouble, they were hurt. Parents of minor players were getting calls that their kids were being accused of all sorts of horrific crimes.
Hospitals were calling, telling them their loved ones were dead.
All of this was really Roger, and all of it was an attempt to get players to remove their immersion rigs. If a player did remove their helmet suddenly and without preparation, the mechs would freeze in place for a time-out period, usually five minutes but it was self-adjustable. If the player didn’t come back to the mech in those five minutes, what happened next was up to their settings. The default setting was for the mech to walk back to the deployment zone and wait for an available drop ship to come and bring them back to thePinnacle.
